@GSElevator Reveal Shocks Absolutely No One

How much can social media parodies really hurt a client? In the case of “Goldman Sachs Elevator“, the answer seems to be “very little.”

I have a confession: I don’t give a shit about @GSElevator

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) February 25, 2014

He’s not the only one. Top New York Times Wall Street guy/damage control expert Andrew Ross Sorkin didn’t even need to use the #ApologyWatch tag on Monday night when he outed the man behind the feed as John Lefevre, a 34-year-old trader from Texas. In fact, the biggest outrage we saw online concerned the fact that the Times used its considerable resources to get to the bottom of this mystery as opposed to reporting on something that mattered.

And it’s not like the feed really hurt Goldman Sachs’ already poor reputation.

Of course, the writer himself feels no need to apologize—he got a book deal out of tweeting SMH-worthy lines he may or may not have heard from colleagues in finance. And while the feed supposedly inspired an “internal inquiry” at Goldman to find the “rogue employee”, we’re going to go out on a sturdy limb here and guess that many of the same executives found it at least mildly amusing.

Sorkin seems to take issue with the fact that the man never actually worked at GS and implies that the story raises new concerns about the reliability of “news” in the social age. Lefevre himself, however, explains everything a bit more simply:

“I’ll be honest with you. I pander for retweets.”

Sure, there’s a “Dumb Starbucks” lesson to be learned here: if you can’t laugh at yourself then everyone else will find a way to do it for you.