At a University of Minnesota press conference in May 2022, Brian Thompson gathered with other emissaries from the state to announce that it would host the 2026 USA Special Olympics. Speaking shortly after Governor Tim Walz, the health care CEO noted during his nearly minute-and-a-half remarks that “helping people live healthier lives” was UnitedHealth Group’s mission.
The appearance, unremarkable as it was, represented something near the contemporary apex of Thompson’s public profile. In his capacity overseeing UnitedHealthcare’s 140,000 employees—the insurer provides health coverage to more than 50 million—his name would hardly register beyond his industry. The sentiment he was expressing, insofar as it could reverberate beyond that day, would only make an imprint as ceremonial grist.
In the less than a week since his early-morning execution on a midtown Manhattan street, Thompson has become an avatar of the failings of the American health care system in their full scope. Online reaction to his killing was uncommonly uniform in its celebratory glow—prompting a round of press coverage that situated the response with respect to UnitedHealth’s track record of denying patients’ coverage and claims. When a suspect, Luigi Mangione, was apprehended Monday on firearms charges, 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 virtually anonymous as CEOs go, until he was very suddenly not—how does one become a figure whose killing is publicly cheered? Iowa’s Times-Republican newspaper described Thompson’s ascent last week as “meteoric.” The son of a grain elevator operator, he grew up in Jewell, a farming town of around 1,200. He was the valedictorian and homecoming king of his high school class and, as one childhood friend told me, seemed destined for leadership.
“We didn’t know how big he was going to be,” Taylor Hill, a turkey farmer from the neighboring town of Stanhope, said. “But is [his rise] something that surprises anybody out of our class? No.”
Thompson graduated as valedictorian from the University of Iowa as well, and worked as an accountant before joining UnitedHealth in 2004. He rose through the ranks as a consummate company man, but Hill continued to keep up with him in recent years. He said he knew Thompson as a good friend and a source of his pride for his community.
“Brian had no chance, no way to speak up for himself, nothing,” Hill said. “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 personality has emerged in the days since his shooting. His wife, Paulette, said that he had received some threats recently, and there had been protests at UnitedHealth headquarters, but Thompson didn’t travel with a security detail. Reports also surfaced about other areas of potential intrigue or misstep, including an insider trading probe, a DWI, and his and his wife’s separate living quarters.
For the most part, though, the sticky figure in coverage of the case is Mangione, the 26-year-old man arrested on gun charges at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday. He is, according to his quickly dissected online footprint, a consumer of popular podcasts who follows Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan on X. Like Thompson, he was his high school valedictorian, and he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied computer science.
In a leaked video address on Friday, Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, suggested that his employees ignore the emerging public sentiment—a broad and sweeping dissatisfaction that he described as “critical noise.” The British executive was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for “services to the economy and to the UK pharmaceutical industry,” and in his remarks last week, he made what amounted to his best-known statement on Thompson’s newly visible 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 said. “There was nobody who did more to try and advance that mission than Brian Thompson.”
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