The grift artist

An ode to Donald Boat, the online jester fin-domming CEOs and celebrities

Editor’s note: In the interest of documenting the most curious corners of our digital culture, we present this analysis of a man who, recently, has mastered the art of asking famous people for energy drinks.

This summer, one star in the crowded firmament of the internet has shone more brightly for me than any other: donald boat. I don’t know who he is and I don’t really want to know; I don’t know where he came from either, and it seems not only beside but perhaps detrimental to the point, if there is one. All I know about Mr. Boat is that he is extremely talented at a particular kind of posting, so good that he has posted his way to (minor) fame and (relative) fortune.

He’s summarized his own arc here, but to compress it for this report: Mr. Boat replies to famous people on X demanding that they buy him things—expensive video game equipment, books, energy drinks—and they do.

Analyzing humor is famously futile, but Donald Boat exemplifies certain aesthetic, and even moral, dynamics that any student of the present—and any future historian worth a damn—will want to understand. He is a better key to a dimension of American online culture than any longform post about a “vibe shift” would be. And he demonstrates just how close that culture is to real power: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, for example, but many, many others. To paraphrase the Stranger in The Big Lebowski: “Sometimes there’s a man—and I’m talking about [Donald Boat] here—sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.” Learning about such a man can tell you a lot about his time and place.

So what might we learn? The salient starting point is that something in his posting appeals so deeply to busy, important people that they pause their lives to indulge him. How does he post?

He is chaotic in a way reminiscent of the feed-addled lunatic, sharing wild image collages, but without any of the true lunatic’s frustrated demands to be taken seriously; that is: he’s joking around, playing, but with the elements of the fatally online.

He’s very funny, in a way that’s referential without being obviously “of a tribe.” He popped when he finally got Altman’s attention with a comment imagining the two of them on the Amalfi coast drinking together and celebrating something Altman, he proposed, should buy him; Altman was persuaded. The combination of literate wit with open grift is novel, and seems to amuse people, I think in part because he makes absolutely no moral claims beyond the obviously comic insistence on the primacy of his own self-interest. Somehow, the entire world of serious internet activity is the butt of this joke.

His asks are simple and quick. Most solicitations famous people receive are disguised bids for long-term connection, career advancement, or validation. Mr. Boat’s are Amazon links.

They are also fundamentally low-status, which is related. He does not seem to be trying to “associate with” any of these extremely famous people; he does not frame his requests as serving some greater good, or as justified by some prior injustice. It’s fairly uncommon for people to demand goods that serve no end but their own pleasure. Mr. Boat has the advantage once held by panhandlers with signs saying “I just want beer”: refreshing honesty.

When Mr. Boat turns to books, his requests are esoteric; he wants to learn about the Desert Fathers, for example, or about the Dharma. Another unexpected element of his identity: a grifting gamer who wants to get closer to God.

If there is indeed “a man for [this] particular time and place,” the Silicon Valley–adjacent anon-driven algorithmic feed of the day, he is a casually schizoid spiritualist relaxed about his autodidactic depth, totally post-status and post-achievement, a slacker demanding favors from some of the most successful people in the world. And of course, he makes it all fun. Fun to watch, fun to join in, and probably fun for benefactors, who could feel like they were underwriting a popularly pleasing internet divertissement, which they were. Fun can be a somewhat controversial thing on timelines, which makes Mr. Boat a bit of a tonal revolutionary.

I’m not alone in seeing myself in Mr. Boat. My friend David Cole remarked that we had so much overlap with this possibly prayerful, meditating, energy-drink-guzzling video game freak that he might as well be our tulpa. Or perhaps we are his: the two of us, and surely many others, only the “thought-forms” or manifestations of his spirit. If so, we are grateful to him for calling us into existence.

It’s this fusion of mysticism with celebrity that makes Donald Boat singular. He is an avatar for obscure parts of the internet, and he offered big accounts a way to engage with them while amusing a broader audience. Significant wisdom and subtlety are involved in this, and the results are undeniable: many love it all, the way they might enjoy seeing a jester get one over on the royal court while simultaneously entertaining it. And like the best jesters, Mr. Boat secures real rewards for himself in the process.

A good time was had by all, excluding anyone he texted who just couldn’t get hip to the scene. (We do not know how, for example, Kylie Jenner or Beto O’Rourke felt, but one imagines the occasional noble who just couldn’t summon the right mood in such a moment.) We should have compassion for them; they missed the Boat.