Everyone & no one can be a Finance Bro
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When you hear the phrase finance bro, what or who comes to mind?
For me, it is a white guy of a certain age. He's probably like 5'9". He tells women he's six feet tall. There is a little bit of like performance of success.
First of all, I want to stand up for 5'9 men everywhere. I've often asked, is that a real 5'9? I'm like, yes. Who exaggerates about that? But Pretty similar to Roxanna, except I believe the current finance bro outfit is a puffer vest. that you wear with your company logo. You walk in packs out of your office to get your slop bowl. It is not quite as cool as being a finance bro in the Gordon and Gecko days. That said, people may dislike you, but many of them want to be you or maybe date you because they assume you are either making a lot of money now or are on your way to being a money-making person.
Over the years, I've been noticing one particular archetype that has endured the test of time. The finance bro. You know, there's the big short, Wolf of Wall Street, and iconic characters like Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. High paying, high powered jobs, skyscraper corner offices, capitalism personified on the big screen or even the small screen. Finance pro aesthetics have even permeated our social media trends.
What is the finance bro archetype and who embodies it?
I even think about the quarter zip movement, a trend that became popular in 2025 for young black men on TikTok looking to quote, upgrade their look as they joined the job market. And then of course, there's our prestige TV diet, Mad Men, Billions, Succession, Mountainhead, and of course, my absolute personal favorite, Industry on HBO. What's at the root of our love affair with the finance bro? And how does he keep reinventing himself? To help me answer this question, I'm joined by chief correspondent and business insider and host of channels, Peter Kafka.
Hello.
And Roxanna Haddadi, TV critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. Thank you. Very often when people, I think, talk... you know, an everyday, you know, conversation about why they think our economy is so messed up in their opinion or why they feel like it's impossible to get a job or why groceries are so expensive. I mean, increasingly people are looking at finance boroughs like, okay, is this your fault? I mean, how many times have you seen on social media outlining the ways in which private equity have kind of broken a lot of like American institutions that people really lean on? It seems that the finance bro might be hurting us. Why are we still holding on to him?
Because they look great and they seem to be having fun. And even if they're not the richest people on the show, they still get to go to a fancy restaurant, a quarter client. It is foreign, right?
It's exotic.
Yeah. I also think like so much of our pop culture appetite is voyeurism and spectacle and And I think that that will always endure. I mean, Brittany, like even the way that you've been talking about this, it's like we sort of used finance bro and tech bro interchangeably. But like you could arguably call Mad Men a show about ad bros.
Ad bros. That was like the hot job at the time. They're like the same way that these are kind of hot jobs of today. Yeah.
Exactly. That was the hot job at the time. And it's a job that people don't understand. And I think so much of like television is really interesting to people when you're getting like these episodic chunks of time that are a look into like another world that you're never going to access. I'm never going to really understand what a margin call is, but I'm really going to enjoy watching industry every week.
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
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