Transcript of What a CEO's Murder Tells Us About America

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We now know the name and we have a clear look at the face of the man whose search has captivated the nation over the last week.

The arrest of Luigi Mangione, let's say, escalated the discourse to celebratory rage coming from just about every corner of the Internet over the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson.

You cannot celebrate the killing of an innocent man. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. No, the it isn't. This is a dude whose job it is is to commit murder behind a corporate veil.

As a normal sane human being, what happened to the UnitedHealthcare CEO is awful. But as someone who has had UnitedHealthcare

There were sarcastic thoughts and deductibles tweets, comments on news articles detesting the evils of capitalism and greed of corporations, the Johnny Cash style acoustic ballads turning the accused killer into something of a folk hero. Now some are calling the reactions gross, even dangerous.

This killer is being hailed as a hero. Hear me on this. He is no hero.

Do not lionize murderers or elevate psychotic screeds into a manifesto. This is insane.

But the tsunami of content reveals widespread anger at this country's health care industry, and it seems to be coming from people across the political spectrum. And that's a rare thing in today's world that suggests that there might be something deeper at play in the response. So how does the Internet's reaction to this brazen murder reflect a wider cultural phenomenon? Where else can we see this fury? And what does the online response mean for our lives offline?

I'm Adi Cornish, and this is the assignment. So we're gonna start with this. Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was 50 years old when he was killed. He grew up in Iowa, lived in Minnesota. He was a husband and a father of 2.

People who knew him say he never missed his son's lacrosse games. These are the details missing in a lot of the online discourse. I mean, they're not too interested in it. My guest today, Samantha Cole, is the cofounder of 404 Media and a journalist who writes about all things Internet culture from, quote, the farthest reaches of the Internet. She's been covering this closely.

We've talked to her in the past about all kinds of things. And Samantha Cole, welcome back to the assignment.

Thank you so much for having me back. It's so good to talk to you again.

So, I'm gonna start with a quote

from someone, Tina Brown, kind of, you know, legacy media journalist. And she says, what does it say about a

moment in time when the most bonding topic of national discourse is the latest murder? And everyone retreats to their news silos and trust nothing outside them. True crime gurgling forth from every streamer, podcast, and news platform is the last safe refuge of community. The reason why I'm bringing this quote to you is because you actually dig around in the corners of the Internet. And is there something to what she's saying about the fact that we're all in our silos?

We've been this we're in this fractured media landscape and true crime oddly is something that becomes a monoculture moment.

Yeah. I mean, I think just based on that, I think it's probably a bit of an oversimplification. I just from what I've seen, first of all, this is something that is not just, like, people enjoy true crime and want to see true crime stories being told and making up conspiracies and things like that. I think people were responding to frustration with the system and not morbid curiosity about a murder that happened to someone else, you know, far away. And, also, it's it's something that lots of people had a very similar opinion.

1 of the things I've thought about is the fact that the Internet, it's a gathering place for so many communities, but health care issues are very isolating.

Mhmm.

And a lot of people share their thoughts and experiences online. Right? That's where they find their communities connected to their illnesses. Yeah. And in a way, like, it makes sense that the Internet would be where you would see this sort of disproportionately visceral reaction.

Mhmm. Yeah. That's such a good point. That's something I've been thinking about too is just the way that the Internet in general brings people together to kinda get support or even just commiserate about what's going on with their lives. Like, I have migraines.

So I'm in, like, migraine subreddits trying to, like, talk to people about answers to that. But I don't cross over to other kind of disabilities or illnesses or anything like that. But this is something that unites a lot of people. It's like whether you have migraines or, you know, any other kind of, like, illness and you've dealt with or interacted with the health insurance industry, you kind of have the shared frustration of banging your head against a wall and saying, I need this to live. I need this for my quality of life, and you're not giving it to me for arbitrary reasons.

I think that's something that people share, and that's that's why it's crossing a lot of these lines.

Yeah. Like the algorithm then can pick it up. Right? Because you've got these many audiences, and it's it's kind of like a wave. Yeah.

Are there other corners of online dialog that maybe the rest of us don't know about or kind of unseen that you think are worth pointing out here?

I mean, something that I wrote about recently is the phenomenon of deleted threads on Reddit.

So let me just, slow that down for a second. So on Reddit where there's in the past, you know, big giant the front page of the Internet it calls itself. Mhmm. There's been in in the past a lot of conversations around moderation. How do you moderate discussions so they they don't get wildly off track or wildly down?

Racism, classism, whatever is some kind of rabbit hole. How how does the idea of a deleted thread, become significant in that world?

Because this is an issue that so many people are talking about and so many people, like you said, are finally breaking out of this isolation that they felt saying, oh, 0 my god. Everyone has the same problem. It's just this huge kind of swell of people telling stories and, you know, horror stories, honestly. Everyone from people in the in the medical community and also outside of it as patients. So moderators are having to work within platform terms of use, which often say no celebrating or glorifying violence.

So they have to kinda do do this weird, like, is this post about this shooting glorifying what happened, or is it commentating on what happened? And they're put in a weird position where they have to either, like, delete the post or let it stay up and let people kind of riff off each other endlessly, and maybe it does become a celebration.

Yeah. No. But also, it means fellow Redditors are doing the deleting or the moderating.

Yeah.

This leads me to another question, which is, so what's going on with the big media companies? Like, your metas, your your exes, like, this this must be a challenge to free speech in a lot of ways.

Yeah. It's become this kind of meta moment where we're talking about the response to the response and not the what sets up the response. You know, does that make sense? It's like this weird Russian doll of, like, what are we actually talking about here? This thing that can't be contained almost.

I mean, I saw on Facebook and LinkedIn that UnitedHealthcare closed comments on their posts about the shooting. They had posted, like, a grieving or mourning kind of post about Brian Thompson, a very standard thing. And they closed the comments on that because I assume people were giving their opinions about health care. But you can see still there's tens of 100 of thousands of likes of laughing emojis. People are still finding ways to break through even though they're getting kind of tamped down and shut down by either social media managers that are trying to keep this under wraps or moderators or the platforms themselves.

I love that you said Russian doll because I think that's 1 of the things the Internet is better at than traditional media

Mhmm.

Which is unpacking, tangled threads. Like, everyone can look at the story and pull on a thread. Yeah. And together, the collective decides what the narrative is.

Yeah.

All of a sudden you're talking about like big systemic societal questions about how we take care of each other. An issue that is so thorny that, like, you know, Republicans were trying for almost, what, 15 years now to get rid of Obamacare. Mhmm. It's, like, 1 of the rare times where the Venn diagram is just a circle, but for, like, 10 different communities.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, how do we take care of each other? And how have we collectively been failed by these industries and systems that should have been taking care of us, that promised to take care of us and didn't? I think that is a really powerful thing to come together and say, we're not just here to, like, bitch about our coverage.

You know, we're here to say, you're not alone in that, and it's not your fault. And we're all experiencing it at the same time all the time, I think is really powerful for a lot of people.

You mentioned this thing about taking down comments. What other kind of actions have, like, health insurance companies had to take? Or, like, do you see any other ways that they're feeling the impacts of this attention?

Yeah. So a couple days after the shooting, I noticed that the UnitedHealthcare leadership page, which would list, you know, like, the CEO, everyone in executive leadership was taken down. And I was like, well, that's weird that that's probably they're probably trying to figure out what to do with it because their CEO is now dead. And then I saw someone else had noticed on Twitter that a couple others had also taken on their leadership pages. And I was like, well, that's weird.

It turns out that I've counted 9 so far, have completely removed their leadership and executive board, you know, pages that would lead to, anyone at that level and their names or pictures, things like that from their own websites. Like, they're they're taken down. They're redirecting to the home page. They either return her error or they just say, you're not authorized to see this page, which I think is very interesting and very telling both, you know, of a corporation's reaction to something like this being immediately we have to kinda remove publicly accessible information from our own control, from our own what is within our own control, which would be their own website. But, also, just, like, the idea that maybe no 1 would notice that they did that or that it wouldn't become its own story, and kinda amplify it more.

Because now lots of people are aware that you can look at, like, SEC filings of some of these companies and see who the executive leadership is. It's not hidden information. It's on the Wayback Machine. It's on archives. But that immediate reaction, that kind of Band Aid over, safety for executives and leadership at these places, I think, is really telling of where their heads are at, that they're just kind of scrambling to figure out what to do.

And fearful. Yeah. Fearful, placating executives probably. I mean, I'm assuming.

But, like, not a wild thing to be fearful. Yeah. I don't mean I don't wanna laugh about it just because, like, yeah, you you things can happen in real life.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely it's understandable that they would do that. It's also it's, like, not really thinking ahead in any sort of way about what would happen if someone actually wanted to hurt someone on your leadership team.

So, yeah, it's it's kind of a it's a move from their end that's very visible whether they realized it or not.

I'm talking with Samantha Cole of 404 Media. We're gonna take a quick break. Stay with us.

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There was a report that came out last week from the Network Contagion Research Institute, which I had not heard of. Mhmm. But they were talking about this phenomenon of online accounts glorifying the shooter as a cause for concern. But the reason why I'm

noting this is because

they said it it they believe it mimics the type of response typically seen on fringe platforms like 4chan and 8chan in the wake of mass shootings. And, like, after a mass shooting, those extremist spaces light up Yeah. Because people cite the manifestos, see people like, it does follow certain beats

Mhmm.

Of performance when it comes to violence.

Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think, generally, it's like you said, it's like the whenever there's a a clear motivation that people can get behind, they do get behind it. And they say, you know, we're with it. We stand with the shooter.

I think those kind of posts are definitely I've seen a lot of those. But, again, it's like we're talking about something deeper and more systematic than just I love to see people get shot. You know? It's I think most people can agree that that's not really what they want to see happen on the streets of New York all the time. I think

I mean, the Unabomber was talking about ecoterrorism. Right? Like, he was talking about industrialization and the future of the American worker, but he also killed 3 people and injured 2 dozen doing it. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know if I'm ready to draw a Unabomber comparison yet.

Well, I'm bringing it up because he drew a comparison. Yeah. Right? Like, he cited he, like, left a review on Goodreads. Yeah.

So, obviously, it came up in his brain. Yeah. I mean, this is also part of the Internet story is mining everywhere online for what that person thought about and participated in and that that's supposed to reveal a profile about them. I don't think that's always true, but, like, I think that's something the Internet does Yeah. And has applied it in this case.

Yeah. And, I mean, that does that kinda goes back to what you're saying about, you know, people getting behind it. It's like people are looking for themselves a lot of the times in these stories. So I think people are kind of looking for a mirror to their own experience a lot of the time when this happens and saying, you know, does this align with what I feel or does it not? And I don't know if that's necessarily a useful exercise in general.

I've seen a lot of other journalists try to do that, and it's strange to me to try to do that. But Say say more. I mean, it's like, you know, I I think people are doing some weird, like, borderline numerology with, like, proverbs and Pokemon based on his Twitter header. People are drawing, like, a lot of strange conclusions from his various social media accounts, digging up his yearbooks, digging up Tinder accounts, things like that. It's like, sure, like, we can kind of, try to, like, group solve a murder over the Internet.

But at the end of the day, we don't really know this person.

There are ways that it feels like the Internet is very suited to this story and that it can amplify a ton of voices all at once. You can have reporters who aren't bound to old ideas about propriety. And I'm just gonna say it that way. Like these weird kind of unwritten ideas about how you report on certain stories, and the freedom in that and the ways that it's not as helpful as well. Right?

Which is to, like, foment, this kind of, like, frothy fury that dissipates and never actually deals with the issue at hand. Mhmm. You know what I mean? Like, is this gonna be yet another micro trend? Is this coconuts from the summer just around big naughty issues?

Yeah. Don't trigger me with coconuts. But right? Like, something that

like the fury or even the way people were talking about Gaza, you know, a year and a half ago. Like, the energy does not sustain. And I guess I'm kind of coming to you as an Internet person to understand of, like, is this how it is now? You know what I mean? Like, is it a tsunami?

Which means it comes, it it takes things down. We think about it, but then it, like, recedes.

Yeah. It goes back to sea. Yeah. I mean, I think just in general, posting feels good, but it's not enough to actually change anything most of the time. I think you actually do have to talk to your elected officials, unfortunately, and speak to them about the things that you care about.

And even then, it's that doesn't feel like enough sometimes, which I think is where you get a lot of this kind of this upselling of frustration is it feels like nothing that we do is enough. But posting definitely isn't enough when it comes to these really big issues, these big systematic issues. But I will say, I'm sure you saw the Blue Cross Blue Shield had introduced this new policy that they were gonna cut short coverage of anesthesia if it went over time. And people freaked out because they timed that announcement very poorly, around this this big news story about health care. And people lost it online and understandably so.

And that got the attention of lawmakers who said, oh, our constituency is really mad about this thing. Let me get a win. And made it happen that, I think New York and Connecticut no longer that's no longer the case. Blue Cross walked it back, which I think does feel a little bit like getting loud and mad works. I think that is a little bit of a, like, oh, maybe it does work.

But, ultimately, it's up to lawmakers and and electives to to figure this stuff out, and that's who we need to be loud and mad about. And if we don't like the way things are going and the way things are being run, an an Instagram story is not actually going to it might make you feel good, but it doesn't actually do anything on the larger scheme of

things. Well, Samantha Cole, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Samantha Cole is a journalist and cofounder of 404 Media. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Jesse Remedios. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan DeZula is our technical director.

And the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Liqtay. We had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lenny Steinhart, Jamis Andress, Nicole Pesareux, and Lisa Namoral. Special thanks to Katie Hinman, and I wanna thank you for listening.

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