Unlike a lot of people his age, 30-year-old Tommy Gilbert Jr. hasn’t left much of a digital footprint. The Princeton alum, who allegedly murdered his hedge-funder father at the family’s Beekman Place apartment this weekend, doesn’t appear to have Instagram or Twitter, and his Facebook page doesn’t seem to have gotten much use. And, despite reports that Gilbert was a regular on the Manhattan party circuit, he appears only a handful of times on the websites of Manhattan party-chroniclers Billy Farrell and Patrick McMullan.
Here he is at the School of American Ballet’s 2014 Winter Ball:
And here he is two years earlier, at a party for the New York Philoharmonic:
Of course, almost no one — not even a reported “loner” like Gilbert — entirely lacks an online presence. In addition to the event pictures, Gilbert made it into a photo of the Deerfield class of 2003’s ten-year-reunion photo (he’s second from the right in the last row).
Gilbert also appeared in a 2010 New York Times piece about a storm’s effect on Labor Day in the Hamptons (where, not coincidentally, he may have set someone’s house on fire earlier this year):
The approach of a hurricane seems to bring out a touch of recklessness in some people. On Long Island, more than few surfers and fishermen flocked to the heaving waves near Montauk at sunrise. Tommy Gilbert, 26, a Manhattan stock trader who spends weekends at his parent’s home in East Hampton, said he had not seen waves 12 feet high since Hurricane Bill last year.
“You rarely get surf this good on the East Coast, especially with these long waves that come from a ways away,” he said, zipping his wet suit.
Gilbert’s beachside observation is in line with a former girlfriend’s description of him as someone who spent much of his time at his parents’ summer home, where he “surfed and went to the gym and went to yoga” and generally stayed “very fit.”
Other tidbits are found in remnants of his online history at Princeton, where he studied economics and graduated in 2009. Gilbert wrote a senior thesis, entitled “The Word Effect: Effects of the Word Content in the Financial Times on Firms’ Earnings in the U.K.” It talked about robo-trading — that is, automated trades based algorithms — and, predictably, how media coverage affected firms’ earnings. His adviser, finance professor Wei Xiong, told Daily Intelligencer that he didn’t recall much about the former student, who was one of about ten advisees that year.
On his alumni information page, Gilbert’s employment history is listed as Bayberry Capital Group, LLC, a real-estate-focused investment group. The company has not returned a request for confirmation.
Imani Ford contributed reporting from Princeton, New Jersey.
