Everyone & no one can be a Finance Bro
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.7 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
The ‘finance bro’ has become a pretty ubiquitous figure in the American zeitgeist. From American Psycho and Mad Men to the tech bros of Silicon Valley, he’s taken many forms. And these days he has flipped genders in the hit HBO series Industry. But what makes the finance bro mythology so compelling? And why do we sign up to watch him again and again?
To find out, Brittany is joined by chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of Channels, Peter Kafka and Roxana Hadadi, TV critic for Vulture and New York Magazine.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you hear the phrase, finance bro, what or who comes to mind? |
| 0:06.5 | For me, it is a white guy of a certain age. |
| 0:11.3 | He's probably like 5'9. |
| 0:13.0 | He tells women he's six feet tall. |
| 0:15.1 | There is a little bit of like performance of success. |
| 0:20.8 | First of all, I want to stand up for five nine men everywhere. |
| 0:24.7 | I've often asked, is that a real five nine? |
| 0:27.5 | I'm like, yes, who exaggerates about that? |
| 0:30.7 | Pretty similar to Roxanna, except I believe the current finance brogue outfit is a puffer vest |
| 0:36.4 | that you wear with your company logo, |
| 0:39.3 | you walk in packs out of your office to get your slop bowl. It is not quite as cool as being a |
| 0:46.8 | finance bro in the Gordon and get-go days. That said, people may dislike you, but many of them |
| 0:53.7 | want to be you or maybe date you because they assume you are. |
| 0:58.5 | They're making a lot of money now or are on your way to being a money-making person. |
| 1:04.7 | Over the years, I've been noticing one particular archetype that has endured the test of time. The finance bro. You know, there's the big |
| 1:14.4 | short, Wolf of Wall Street and iconic characters like Wall Street's Gordon Gecko, American Psychos, |
| 1:20.4 | Patrick Bateman, high paying, high-powered jobs, skyscraper corner offices, capitalism personified on the big screen or even the |
| 1:29.9 | small screen. |
| 1:31.1 | Finance pro aesthetics have even permeated our social media trends. |
| 1:34.7 | I even think about the quarter zip movement, a trend that became popular in 2025 for |
| 1:38.9 | young black men on TikTok looking to quote, upgrade their look as they joined the job market. |
| 1:44.5 | And then, of course, there's our prestige, TV, diet, madmen, billions, succession, |
... |
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