Three years after @GSElevator began chronicling bons mots overheard in the Goldman Sachs elevator (sample tweet: “Some chick asked me what I would do with 10 million bucks. I told her I’d wonder where the rest of my money went“), the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin reports the mysterious tweeter is not a Goldman Sachs employee, and doesn’t even work on Wall Street anymore. John Lefevre, a 34-year-old former bond executive who lives in Texas, confirmed last week that he started the account “as a joke to entertain myself.” “Frankly, I’m surprised it has taken this long,” he said of his outing. “I knew this day would come.”
Lefevre worked at Citigroup for seven years and was once offered a job at Goldman Sachs, but it fell through due to an issue with his noncompete agreement. He claims he didn’t really mislead the account’s 625,000 plus followers, as he never explicitly stated that he worked at the firm. “This was never about me as a person,” he said. “It wasn’t about a firm. The stories aren’t Goldman Sachs in particular. It was about the culture in general.”
Luckily for him, the Simon & Schuster imprint Touchstone, which is publishing a book based on the tweets, agrees. “He’s been pretty straight with us the entire time, so this is not a surprise,” said the book’s editor, Matthew Benjamin.
For those who can’t accept that a parody Twitter account would lie to us, we’ll point out that this could all be an elaborate ruse to spark more Wolf of Wall Street-esque chatter in the Goldman elevator. In response to the @GSElevator revelation, a Goldman spokesman said, “We are pleased to report that the official ban on talking in elevators will be lifted effective immediately.” They’ve already taken the bait!
