People love to hate this fake private equity investor

In just over a year, former spin-class instructor Johnny Hilbrant Partridge has gone from obscurity to social media celebrity thanks to his online persona, a private equity banker known as the PE Guy. With his striking face and confident demeanor, he’s the prosperous financial bro you love to hate.

“We’ve all been to a wedding and talked to a guy or a girl who was insufferable,” Partridge said by phone from the home she shares with her husband in Wellesley, Massachusetts. “They have no awareness of it and want to shove their success down your throat.”

Partridge, 36, tested the character in his phone’s camera mirror before fleshing it out on social media. He now has over 500,000 followers.

“You can’t really yell in people’s faces and tell them they’re annoying,” Partridge said. “How do you silence them?”

And what better time for a PE Guy than summer, when fortune bending seems to be at its most blatant? Take the recent video of him standing against the backdrop of a pebbled beach house smugly addressing a newcomer from Nantucket.

Nostrils flared, eyes bulging (thanks to a video filter), PE Guy spouts humble braggadocio in a fake baritone. “I came here. flight“The family has a compound in Sconset,” he adds, referring to Siasconset, a laid-back Nantucket town that’s a little less infested with billionaires than other places on the island.

Peppering his speech with references to things familiar to those familiar with the island, he urges the hapless tripper to “have a Gripah” (the local beer) “at the Cisco” (the local brewery) before hitting the “Arbor” (the harborside pub).

The video is part of a series in which the PE Guy focuses on luxury resorts including Kennebunkport, Me. and Palm Beach, Florida. Posting on Watch Hill, RI, PE Guy babbles, “Well, it’s discreet here. Wifey’s family has been summering in Watch Hill for over a hundred years, so… It was really easy for us to get to Mi Andqua Taylor Swift’s club, Swift’s house.

In PE Guy’s imaginary world, every man has an MBA from Harvard, drives an Ineos Grenadier SUV and skis in Zermatt. His soliloquies often refer to the three precocious children he has with his fictitious wife, whom he calls “wife”. Children’s names? Tarantino, Montauk and Ebidta — short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Partridge grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, an affluent suburb outside Chicago, and graduated from the University of Denver in 2012 with a business degree. His attempts to get a high-paying position in finance tended to backfire.

“Have you ever had that feeling of, ‘Am I behind?'” he said. “Should I have gotten that job in finance out of college?”

After moving to Boston in 2016, he took a job as a SoulCycle instructor. He was happy at work, despite the pitying looks he occasionally attracted when he described what he did for a living. “People would ask, ‘Is that your real job?'” he said.

Social media, Partridge suggested, was largely responsible for the death of discretion among the wealthy. “My parents and my friends’ parents would say, ‘We don’t talk about money — it’s just rude,'” he said. “It’s a total rush now. People are doing things they’d never do if they couldn’t write about it. They’re flying first class just to post from a first class pod.”

In March 2025, Partridge made his first Instagram foray with PE Guy. The next morning, he saw that it had 70,000 views. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s a fluke, but let me try again,'” he recalled.

Now PE Guy is fully developed. Along with his contributions, Partridge said he earns tens of thousands of dollars for appearances at events sponsored by the very types he skewers.

If the response he receives from the targets of his humor tends to be warm, it may be because his creation mines the pathos lurking beneath the machinery of social endeavor often accompanied by absurd opulence.

“I’m married to an oral surgeon and PE Guy is doing well so we’re cool,” Partridge said. “Still, I look back at the financial interviews I’ve had and think I was one wrong ‘yes’ away from spending my whole life unhappy. Sometimes it makes me sad to see people I once loved turn into something no one can stand.”