At a University of Minnesota press convention in May 2022, Brian Thompson gathered with different emissaries from the state to announce that it will host the 2026 USA Special Olympics. Speaking shortly after Governor Tim Walz, the well being care CEO famous throughout his practically minute-and-a-half remarks that “helping people live healthier lives” was UnitedHealth Group’s mission.
The look, unremarkable because it was, represented one thing close to the up to date apex of Thompson’s public profile. In his capability overseeing UnitedHealthcare’s 140,000 workers—the insurer offers well being protection to greater than 50 million—his identify would hardly register past his trade. The sentiment he was expressing, insofar because it may reverberate past that day, would solely make an imprint as ceremonial grist.
In the lower than every week since his early-morning execution on a midtown Manhattan avenue, Thompson has grow to be an avatar of the failings of the American well being care system of their full scope. Online response to his killing was uncommonly uniform in its celebratory glow—prompting a spherical of press protection that located the response with respect to UnitedHealth’s monitor document of denying sufferers’ protection and claims. When a suspect, Luigi Mangione, was apprehended Monday on firearms prices, he was largely held up on social media as a curiosity at worst, if not a hero.
So who was Thompson, a CEO who was just about nameless as CEOs go, till he was very instantly not—how does one grow to be a determine whose killing is publicly cheered? Iowa’s Times-Republican newspaper described Thompson’s ascent final week as “meteoric.” The son of a grain elevator operator, he grew up in Jewell, a farming city of round 1,200. He was the valedictorian and homecoming king of his highschool class and, as one childhood pal advised me, appeared destined for management.
“We didn’t know how big he was going to be,” Taylor Hill, a turkey farmer from the neighboring city of Stanhope, stated. “But is [his rise] something that surprises anybody out of our class? No.”
Thompson graduated as valedictorian from the University of Iowa as effectively, and labored as an accountant earlier than becoming a member of UnitedHealth in 2004. He rose by means of the ranks as a consummate firm man, however Hill continued to maintain up with him in recent times. He stated he knew Thompson as a superb pal and a supply of his delight for his group.
“Brian had no chance, no way to speak up for himself, nothing,” Hill stated. “This person just took him out, and it’s sickening is what it is. And then it’s more sickening that there are people out there that think this was a good thing.”
Little about Thompson as a public persona has emerged within the days since his capturing. His spouse, Paulette, stated that he had obtained some threats lately, and there had been protests at UnitedHealth headquarters, however Thompson didn’t journey with a safety element. Reports additionally surfaced about different areas of potential intrigue or misstep, together with an insider buying and selling probe, a DWI, and his and his spouse’s separate residing quarters.
For essentially the most half, although, the sticky determine in protection of the case is Mangione, the 26-year-old man arrested on gun prices at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday. He is, based on his shortly dissected on-line footprint, a client of widespread podcasts who follows Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan on X. Like Thompson, he was his highschool valedictorian, and he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, the place he studied pc science.
In a leaked video handle on Friday, Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s mother or father firm, instructed that his workers ignore the rising public sentiment—a broad and sweeping dissatisfaction that he described as “critical noise.” The British govt was knighted within the 2012 New Year Honours for “services to the economy and to the UK pharmaceutical industry,” and in his remarks final week, he made what amounted to his best-known assertion on Thompson’s newly seen legacy. “The mission of this company is truly to make sure that we help the system improve by helping the experience for individuals get better and better,” Witty stated. “There was nobody who did more to try and advance that mission than Brian Thompson.”