Jay Gatsby Was the First Influencer

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Picture the profile. A mansion on the water. A yellow Rolls-Royce. A closet full of imported shirts. A party every weekend with a full orchestra, a champagne tower and hundreds of guests, none of whom are entirely sure who’s paying.

The bio is mysterious: Oxford man. War hero. Self-made. The comments are on fire: Is he a bootlegger? A spy? Did he kill a man?

Nobody in West Egg called Jay Gatsby an influencer in 1922. They didn’t have the word. But read The Great Gatsby (buy) today and it’s hard to miss: F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the whole playbook a century before anyone had a ring light. The rebrand, the aesthetic, the viral events, the curated mystery, the brand deal nobody discloses. He even wrote the ending most of the playbook leaves out.

Here’s how Gatsby built the original personal brand, and why it collapsed.

Step 1: The Rebrand

Every influencer origin story starts with a pivot, and Gatsby’s is the biggest one in American literature.

He was born James Gatz, the son of poor North Dakota farmers. At seventeen, he rowed out to a millionaire’s yacht on Lake Superior and introduced himself under a new name. Fitzgerald’s phrasing is perfect: Jay Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”

That’s not a name change. That’s a brand launch.

And like every good brand, it came with a morning routine. After Gatsby’s death, his father shows Nick a battered copy of Hopalong Cassidy with a schedule young Jimmy wrote inside the back cover: rise at 6:00, dumbbell exercise and “wall-scaling,” study electricity, practice “elocution, poise and how to attain it.” His resolutions include “Bath every other day” and “Read one improving book or magazine per week.”

Post that today with a soft-focus photo of a sunrise and it would do numbers. My 6 a.m. routine that changed my life (#7 will surprise you).

It’s also the most heartbreaking document in the novel. Here is a kid who believed, completely, that he could build himself from scratch. The internet is full of people who believe the same thing. Some of them are right. Most are still scaling the wall.

Step 2: The Content Strategy

Gatsby’s parties were content. They were the viral posts of the Jazz Age, and Fitzgerald describes them like a man reviewing analytics.

Every Friday, five crates of oranges and lemons arrive from a New York fruiterer. Every Monday, the same oranges leave the back door as a pyramid of pulpless halves. The kitchen has a machine that can juice two hundred oranges in half an hour, provided the butler presses a button two hundred times. That’s a production budget.

The guests arrive by the carload, and here’s the detail that makes it so modern: almost none of them were invited. Nick, who actually received an invitation, notes that he was one of the few. People were not invited, he says. They went there.

That’s an algorithm, not a guest list. Gatsby didn’t build a community. He built a feed. Strangers showed up, consumed the content (and the champagne), gossiped about the creator and left. Fitzgerald’s description of them is one of the most beautiful sentences ever written about an audience:

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

Moths. Drawn to the light, not to the person holding it.

And the host? He’s barely in the content. Nick spends most of his first party chatting with a stranger about the war before the man says, “I’m Gatsby.” Hundreds of people are dancing in his garden, and almost none of them would recognize him. Every creator with a million followers and nobody to call on a Tuesday knows that feeling.

Step 3: The Aesthetic

Every influencer needs a look, and Gatsby’s is curated down to the closet.

The novel’s most famous unboxing happens in Gatsby’s bedroom. To impress Daisy, he pulls out his shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel. He throws them, one by one, onto the table until they’re piled in a soft, many-colored heap. Daisy bends her head into them and starts to cry: “They’re such beautiful shirts.”

That’s a haul video. It even has the emotional breakdown at the end.

The car does its own work: a gleaming, cream-colored Rolls-Royce that witnesses will later describe as yellow. The mansion is “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy.” Even the books are props. At the first party, a tipsy guest Nick calls Owl Eyes is stunned to find that the volumes in Gatsby’s library are real. His verdict could describe every perfectly styled shelf on Instagram: the host “knew when to stop, too — didn’t cut the pages.”

The books were bought. They just weren’t read.

Then there’s the credential. Gatsby tells Nick he was “educated at Oxford,” and swallows the words as he says them, which is how Nick knows to doubt them. It turns out to be technically true. He spent a few months there after the war as an officer and wildly oversold. Every inflated LinkedIn headline owes him royalties.

Step 4: The Undisclosed Brand Deal

So who paid for the oranges?

The answer arrives in the shape of Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler Gatsby introduces with the casual pride of a creator name-dropping a sponsor. Wolfsheim, Gatsby explains, is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Later, Tom Buchanan lays out the rest: Gatsby and Wolfsheim bought up side-street drugstores and sold grain alcohol over the counter.

In 2026 terms, the lifestyle was sponsored, and the sponsor was a bootlegging operation. No #ad in sight.

This is the part of the playbook nobody posts. The aesthetic is real. The money behind it is something else entirely. Fitzgerald understood that the glamour and the grift were the same product.

Step 5: An Audience of One

Here’s the twist that makes Gatsby different from every hustle-culture guru: he didn’t want followers. He wanted one follower.

The mansion wasn’t a status symbol. It was a location choice. Jordan Baker explains to Nick that Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay. The parties weren’t for the crowds. He threw them hoping Daisy would wander in one night. Hundreds of people came. The one person he was posting for never showed up.

And every night, he stood on his lawn and stared at a green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

If you’ve ever posted a story and checked, over and over, whether one specific person had viewed it, congratulations: you have stood on Gatsby’s lawn. The green light is the read receipt that never turns blue.

Step 6: The Comment Section

No influencer is complete without the rumors, and West Egg’s comment section is savage.

At Gatsby’s own parties, guests speculate between sips of his champagne. He killed a man once. He was a German spy during the war. He’s a nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm. Nobody asks him directly. Why would they? The mystery is the content.

Gatsby never corrects the record. He cultivates it. A blank space where a biography should be is a powerful thing, and he knew exactly how far people’s imaginations would carry him. It worked right up until the night someone decided to fact-check.

Step 7: The Collab From Hell

Eventually the one follower finally shows up. Nick hosts the reunion over tea, Daisy and Gatsby reconnect, and for a few weeks the content stops entirely. One Saturday night, the lights in Gatsby’s mansion simply don’t come on. He fires his servants and replaces them with people who won’t gossip. The account goes private.

Then comes the collab. On the hottest day of the summer, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Jordan and Nick cram into a suite at the Plaza Hotel, and Tom does what every rival creator dreams of doing: he exposes the whole operation in front of the one audience member who matters. The drugstores. Wolfsheim. The money.

Gatsby’s response is the purest influencer move in the book. He doesn’t defend the past. He tries to edit it. He wants Daisy to say she never loved Tom at all, to delete five years of history so the story matches the brand. He had already told Nick his philosophy weeks earlier:

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

You can’t. Daisy can’t give him that edit, and the collab ends in the worst way possible: a car accident, a death, a man who blames the wrong person, and a gunshot in an empty swimming pool.

Step 8: The Unfollow

Here’s the part of the influencer story that nobody puts in the highlight reel.

After Gatsby dies, Nick tries to organize a funeral. He calls everyone. Hundreds of people drank Gatsby’s champagne all summer. Almost none of them come. Wolfsheim sends regrets. Daisy and Tom have left town without a forwarding address. The audience that filled his garden every weekend simply scrolls on.

At the cemetery, in the rain, one of the only guests is Owl Eyes, the man from the library who admired the real books. His eulogy is three words long: “The poor son-of-a-bitch.”

The only person who stuck around was Nick, the one guest who’d actually been invited, and the only one who ever told Gatsby the truth to his face. Their last conversation includes the line every creator deserves to hear once from someone who means it: “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Followers aren’t friends. Fitzgerald knew it in 1925. It took the rest of us a hundred years and a few billion phones to catch up.

The Gatsby Playbook: What Not to Do

• Rebrand all you like, but don’t burn the bridge back. James Gatz never went home. His father came to the funeral anyway.
• The sponsor always shows up in the end. Disclose it before someone else does, ideally not in a hotel suite in front of your crush.
• Don’t post for an audience of one. If you need a single person to see it, text them.
• Read the books on your shelf. Owl Eyes is watching.
• Count your Nicks, not your guests. The people who’d come to the funeral are the real metric.

The Twist: The Book Flopped Too

Here’s the irony Fitzgerald never got to enjoy. The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925 to mixed reviews and disappointing sales — far fewer copies than his earlier novels. Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing it had failed.

Its comeback was posthumous. During World War II, about 150,000 free copies went out to American servicemen in the pocket-sized Armed Services Editions, and a new generation found it. Today it’s one of the most widely read novels in American schools, and it entered the public domain in 2021.

So Gatsby’s creator went viral after all. It just took him a war, a decade and his own death to do it, which is about as Gatsby an ending as there is.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Is Gatsby a tragic dreamer or literature’s first cautionary tale about clout? Tell me in the comments. And if you’d have shown up to the funeral, you’re already the kind of reader who belongs on our newsletter list.