In early March, as Congress bargained over an emergency coronavirus spending bill, big pharma lobbyists were on the move — and Ben Hunt was livid.
“Industry lobbyists successfully blocked attempts to include language in the $8.3b CV19 bill that would threaten IP rights for vaccines and treatments the gov’t decides were priced unfairly,” Hunt tweeted under the handle @EpsilonTheory, quoting a Politico article that had broken the news.
“I haven’t said this in a while,” he noted, repeating what has become his signature line:
“Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down.”
Hunt first used that line when the well-connected financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died suddenly in jail last summer. “Epstein’s death made me feel the same way I feel now in April 2020,” Hunt wrote in a recent post.
“When Jeffrey Epstein died in that jail cell, I realized that the people in that room of violence and power and wealth will never be defeated on a single point of failure like his testimony at trial . . . or like the election this November,” he continued.
And that’s how Hunt, former hedge fund manager, chief risk officer, tech entrepreneur, political science professor, hobby farmer, and newsletter enthusiast, became a cult hero to tens of thousands of people around the world.
These days, sometimes he’ll just write #BITFD, like when he retweets a news article about a Florida island inhabited by the uber-wealthy, where every resident managed to get a novel coronavirus test.
The 55-year-old Alabama native has become a phenomenon that perhaps only a global plague could have created. A Harvard Ph.D. in government and a financial maven, Hunt has become the hottest new thing in #FinTwit. And it’s not just short-sellers and other disgruntled investors cheering him on.
You can read the rest of my profile of Ben Hunt here:
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1ldv0l0jkj561/Burn-It-The-F-amp-Down
Michelle Celarier 