By Will Heasman
3 min read
Update: It has been pointed out that Meade's bio may be interpreted to say that he was a former portfolio manager at a hedge fund that was founded by an alumni of Goldman Sachs—not that he worked at Goldman Sachs itself. We have updated the story to reflect this.
Twitter personality Will Meade hit crypto media headlines earlier this month after announcing that he was buying XRP, the fourth most popular cryptocurrency by market cap.
"I made my first crypto purchase ever this week $XRP Ripple." Meade tweeted July 8, "I know very little about crypto but I believe a rising tide lifts all boats, so if Bitcoin goes back to its all time highs then XRP should as well and that would be a 15 bagger 1500%."
This endorsement, sent by Meade to his 86,000 Twitter followers, led to headlines like, "Former Goldman Sachs employee predicts 1500% XRP rally."
However, while many news reports, including the aforementioned one, claim that Meade was a former analyst at Goldman Sachs, the company had no record of him ever working there, according to a source at Goldman Sachs who asked not to be named, but who had knowledge of the situation.
It seems that the confusion was caused by Meade's Twitter bio, which states, "Former PM at Goldman Sachs founded $1.4 billion hedge fund." Many news outlets read this as two separate statements, claiming he was a former portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs and that he had founded a $1.4 billion hedge fund.
However, an alternative reading (if you throw a hyphen in there) is that his bio claims that he worked for a Goldman Sachs-founded hedge fund, or a hedge fund founded by Goldman Sachs. On this reading, it's probable that he was referring to when he worked at Wood Asset Management, a hedge fund founded by Gary Wood—a former Goldman Sachs partner.
Meade also claims that he was an editor at Forbes, which he has partnered with on a newsletter. He has also had an extract of his book “The Little Black Book Of Billionaire Secrets”—which claims to offer stock picks that turn people into millionaires overnight—published on the site. But it was published under Forbes’s subscription marketing, a paid program.
A Forbes spokesperson told Decrypt, “We can confirm that William Meade was not a staff member, but we are looking into his previous association with us.”
Decrypt has reached out to Meade for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
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