UnitedHealthcare CEO killing person of interest

The man considered a “strong person of interest” in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson is a private-school valedictorian and tech whiz, who used social media to critique society.

Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Maryland, maintains several social media accounts, including a Goodreads profile he used to give the anti-technology manifesto penned by “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski a four-out-of-five-star review.

While Kaczynski was a “violent individual” and “rightfully imprisoned,” his actions are “more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary,” Mangione wrote.

Kaczynski killed three people and injured 23 more with letter bombs during his criminal career.

Mangione’s review also shared unattributed quotes justifying violence against corporations and their leaders: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.”

When Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning, authorities said he was carrying his own manifesto, a three-page, handwritten document.

He was also found with a gun and a silencer that resembled the ones used last Wednesday to shoot the 50-year-old Thompson at point-blank range on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan.

Mangione graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor’s of Science and, in 2020, a Master’s of Science in computer and information science.

He was also valedictorian of his high school class at the Gilman School, an all-boys private school in Baltimore, Maryland, where tuition for ninth grade and up tops $37,000.

A 2016 post from Gilman quotes from Mangione’s graduation speech, in which he praised his class for possessing “incredible courage to explore the unknown and try new things.”

Gilman’s head of school Henry Smyth on Monday confirmed that Mangione was an alumnus.

“This is deeply distressing news on top of an already awful situation. Our hearts go out to everyone affected,” Smyth wrote in a letter to the school, NBC News reported.

The LinkedIn page also says Mangione lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and that he currently works as a data engineer for car-buying tech startup TrueCar.

A TrueCar spokesperson told CNBC on Monday that Mangione has not worked with the company since 2023.

The rest of Mangione’s profile lists teaching artificial intelligence to high school students through a Stanford University program, founding a “video game development club” at the University of Pennsylvania and interning at the game development team behind “Civilization VI” among his work experiences.

Over the years, Mangione has also posted periodically on X, formerly Twitter, but nothing since June.

In his X posts, Mangione has shared a variety of views about technology, politics and culture. At times, the views seemed to align with nascent forms of populist conservatism.

“Horror vacui (nature abhors a vacuum),” he wrote in an April post above a link to an article titled, “Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods.”

In another post that day, he argued, “Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.”

In a May 15 post, he wrote that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was “spot-on in recognizing that modern architecture kills the spirit.”

Mangione is the progeny of an influential Baltimore family that owned country clubs and founded the nursing home company Lorien Health Services, the Baltimore Banner reported.