UnitedHealthcare Shooting Memes Speak to Anger at the Health Care System and CEO Pay

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It took barely hours for the UnitedHealthcare shooting to become a meme. Last Wednesday morning, Brian Thompson — the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, whose parent company, UnitedHealth Group, Inc., is valued at $566 billion — was fatally shot while preparing to enter the company’s annual investors’ conference in midtown Manhattan. By the end of the morning's rush hour, the internet was ablaze with comments criticizing Thompson and a health care system that can net a CEO like him $10.2 million in a year for running a company that, according to Forbes, denies a third of patients’ insurance claims. Social media feeds were also full of memes, jokes, and speculation about whether the shooter was hot.

Some digital culture experts say they’ve been struck by the internet responses to Thompson’s death — and to suspect Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with murder. Whitney Phillips, PhD, an assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics at the University of Oregon and author of The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, is one of those scholars. She tells Teen Vogue that what makes this moment “unique among otherwise similar cases is the political message accompanying so much of the meme-making.”

“Whether or not the posters ‘really’ support, or otherwise aren't upset about, Brian Thompson's murder, they are using memes to make a broader point about predatory insurance practices,” explains Dr. Phillips, who plans to teach about the UnitedHealthcare shooting memes and the broader situation in an upcoming media ethics class. “In 15 years of research, I've seen many, many cases where violent crime inspires jokey memes, but I don't think I've ever encountered such a consistent political takeaway coming from those memes.”

If you’ve seen memes about the shooting but are feeling murky on the details of what happened, we’ve put together a summary, including what we know so far about Mangione and how the situation has been treated in the theater of internet opinion. We also spoke to internet culture experts to help us understand what this distinctively end-of-2024 online moment has to tell us.

The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting: What happened?

On Wednesday, a masked person was caught on a surveillance camera fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel. As the New York Times reported, a multi-day hunt ensued, with New York Police Department officers combing through surveillance footage trying to drum up more traces of the suspect.

Police announced that the bullets found at the crime scene were inscribed with the words “deny,” “delay,” and “depose,” referencing a phrase that describes common insurer tactics to avoid paying claims. The NYPD also claimed to have found the shooter's Monopoly money-stuffed backpack stashed in Central Park, as CNN reported.

On Monday, police arrested “strong person of interest” Luigi Mangione, who the Times reported was recognized by a McDonald’s employee and patron in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Police claim that a gun, silencer, fake IDs, and a handwritten manifesto condemning health care companies for putting profits over patients’ lives were found on his person, as CBS reported.

Mangione was arrested without bail and is facing five criminal charges in Pennsylvania, where he’s being held and is awaiting extradition, per CNN. On Tuesday morning, he was charged with second-degree murder for Thompson’s killing, among other charges, in New York. USA Today reports that Mangione’s attorney, Thomas Dickey, expects his client to plead not guilty to all of the charges he faces to date. "I haven't seen any evidence that says that he's the shooter," Dickey said, according to the newspaper.

Who is Luigi Mangione?

The Times reported that Mangione, 26, grew up in Maryland in a prominent real estate family. After graduating as valedictorian from an elite Baltimore high school in 2016, his interest in games development and engineering led him to the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded a games development club and was a member of the school’s academic honor society. Mangione graduated in 2020 with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science, according to his LinkedIn.

Mangione has since worked as a software engineer, and recently lived in Hawaii, where he surfed and was a member of a co-living space for digital nomads — until a painful back injury required him to get spinal surgery, according to reporting by the Times, which spoke to friends of Mangione. Following his surgery, over the past six months, friends and family have said that Mangione fell out of contact with them, which caused concern. (The Mangione family put out a statement saying they were “shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” according to ABC News).

The three-page manifesto that Mangione reportedlt carried at the time of his arrest called out UnitedHealthcare by name and condemned the US health care industry as a whole for putting profits over people, according to officials familiar with the document.

One law enforcement officer told the Associated Press that the manifesto, which hasn’t yet been publicly released, includes the lines: “To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone” and “I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

An internal NYPD report obtained by the Times says Mangione, when describing the greed of health insurers, referred to himself as the “first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

How did the internet respond to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting?

In the hours and days following Thompson’s death, a pattern in online opinion seemed to emerge evident, with many reactions falling into one of three categories:

Initially, something of a majority consensus in internet attitudes about the shooting and shooter developed. The responses included memes that play on inhumane practices in the health care industry — the first one documented by Know Your Meme, in which an X user shares news of the shooting with the quip, “he was already CEO when he was shot, pre existing condition. claim denied” — and celebrations of Mangione’s hotness, jabs at the NYPD’s response, and refusals to help find the shooter from true crime TikTokers. On Reddit, users shared links and promo codes with one another in a bid to help buy the shooter’s alleged jacket; screenshots in the thread show that hundreds of purchases had been made within the past 48 hours.

The apparent attitude behind much of this internet frenzy? The shooter is an “anti-hero for our times,” and that the health care industry had it coming. A review of online reactions released last week by the Network Contagion Research Institute, a social media-focused nonprofit, found that of the top 10 most-engaged X posts about the shooting on Wednesday, more than half “either expressed explicit or implicit support” for the shooting.

In response to the growing pile of jokes and the shooter’s treatment as “low-key hot” and an “internet sensation,” legacy media pundits weighed in. Take after take referred to the positive reception to the shooting as “disturbing,” “ugly,” and “un-American.” The underlying theme in opinion throughout these takes has been that the public response to Thompson’s death was “unexpected.”

“No matter which way you're picking this apart, it's very serious,” says Jamie Cohen, PhD, an assistant professor in media studies at CUNY Queens College and author of the forthcoming book, Critical Internet Literacies: Reconsidering Creativity, Content, and Safety Online. “Murder is bad. Health care appropriation is bad. It's all bad. But what I don't think people anticipated this time around was the way in which the public would side with somebody [like Mangione].”

It has been made abundantly clear over the past week that Americans are angry about the life-changing pain, costs, and losses they’ve experienced under the country’s current health care insurance system.

Since the shooting, people have taken to social media to share their stories of being forced to go without medically necessary health care due to insurer costs and claim denials, even losing loved ones as a result. Many of these posts deal with the health care industry at large, but an especially critical eye has been pointed at United Healthcare, which The New Yorker reported has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: 32%, double the industry average. The Healthcare Uncovered newsletter reported that the insurer's parent company, UnitedHealth Group, saw total revenues of just under $100 billion in the first quarter of 2024. (Teen Vogue has reached out to UnitedHealthcare for comment.)

In response to this fresh wave of anger directed at insurers after the shooting, UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty instructed employees to ignore any “critical noise” via a video that Vanity Fair reported was shared internally.

What does the internet’s response to the shooting tell us?

The shock among some in the media at the online support for Mangione shows a “misunderstanding of people's true feelings towards a very serious issue,” Dr. Cohen, who specializes in memes and digital culture, tells Teen Vogue.

In today’s “post-vibe shift, post-2020” society where “internet culture is culture,” Dr. Cohen says, these political, schadenfreude-filled responses are “the sentiment of the people coming through.” Labeling that sentiment as unexpected or surprising reveals a disconnect in the media’s apparent understanding of the extent to which people are frustrated with contemporary American society.

Dr. Cohen continues, posts that “valorize” the alleged shooter, which have come from both the right and left, speak to “how much the class system or class issues override a cultural war issue that’s been going on."

“In a very unfortunate way, this incident reveals some of the things most people don't understand with the health care system," Dr. Cohen notes, "and it's a very odd way of learning.”

The past week’s posts have also spoken to a “relatively new form of gallows humor,” says Lucy March, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center on Digital Culture and Society. As examples, Dr. March points to the at-times gleeful online responses to the deaths of Queen Elizabeth II and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The intersection of sincerity and satire allows social media users to, as she describes it, “employ the language of meme cultures to process the deaths of individuals who they perceive as oppressive figures.”

It’s a way to “express political solidarity,” Dr. March says. And it’s a method she expects to see more of, as people keep turning to humor online to “process these kinds of complex events.”