The Man Behind GSElevator Has Been Exposed - And He Never Worked At Goldman Sachs
Feb 25, 2014, 09:08 IST
The man behind the popular @GSElevator parody Twitter account has been exposed in a new report from Dealbook's Andrew Ross Sorkin.
He said his intent was neither to mock nor glamorize Wall Street. "I do not have an agenda to paint the people or this culture one way or the other," he said, adding that he was "always a cynical banker" when he worked on Wall Street but "I loved it. We did a lot of crazy stuff. It's not like I had a great epiphany along the way."
Still, he said that working on Wall Street was an eye-opener. "I went into investment banking and I saw a group of people that aren't as impressive as I thought they were - or as impressive as they thought they were. They defined themselves as human beings by their jobs."
A Goldman spokesman joked to Dealbook that the "official ban on talking in elevators will be lifted effective immediately."
Read the full report at Dealbook »
Advertisement
John Lefevre - the 34-year-old former bond executive behind the account - never worked at Goldman, but his tweets hit home with his 600,000 followers, and even provoked an internal inquiry from the bank to find the employee behind the account.
Lefevre, who recently landed a book deal, told Sorkin that "knew this day would come."
Lefevre had worked at Citigroup for seven years in the bank's New York, London, and Hong Kong offices (and at one point had an offer revoked from Goldman). He now lives in Texas.
Lefevre began the account as "a joke to entertain myself," he told Dealbook. And he maintained that many of the stories he put on Twitter were true banking anecdotes, albeit not from Goldman's hallowed elevators. From Dealbook:
Advertisement