John LeFevre


John LeFevre is a former Salomon Brothers and Citigroup investment banker and bond syndicate executive. In 2010, LeFevre was hired by Goldman Sachs to run its Asian Bond Syndicate team. LeFevre is known for creating the anonymous Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter handle. The account purported to reflect and satirize banking culture, and accumulated considerable followers and press coverage. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup launched internal investigations in an attempt to identify the source of the tweets.

Life

LeFevre attended Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut and Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and joined Salomon Brothers in 2001, serving in its New York, London, and Hong Kong offices. The Asset magazine referred to LeFevre as "one of the most prolific syndicate managers in Asia." He later worked for Amias Berman & Co., a capital markets and private equity boutique founded by two former Citi bankers. In 2010, LeFevre was hired by Goldman Sachs to run its Asian bond syndicate desk, but was prevented from joining over a non-compete clause. LeFevre left the industry in 2012 to write his memoir, published in 2015, which became a New York Times Bestseller, and was option by Paramount as a movie with Zac Efron attached to the project.

GSElevator

LeFevre created the @GSElevator Twitter in August 2011 as an "homage" to an earlier account called @CondeElevator, which shared supposedly overheard snippets from publisher Condé Nast. He would later describe his goal as "to illuminate Wall Street culture in an entertaining and insightful way". The account proved immediately successful and within a couple weeks, LeFevre was interviewed by Kevin Roose at The New York Times. By 2014, the account had over 600,000 followers.
LeFevre later began writing articles and banking guides for Business Insider under the name "Goldman Sachs Elevator". He would later form "GSE Media" as a digital media entity to control the business interests of @GSElevator and expand by creating websites such as "The Whim" to house his content.

''Straight to Hell''

In 2014, LeFevre began shopping around a book proposal based on his life as a banker, to be released under a pseudonym and marketed as by the man behind @GSElevator. The proposed title, under which it was eventually published, was Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery and Billion Dollar Deals.
Barron's called the book "a classic of the genre."

Citations