Who is Luigi Mangione, the ex-Penn student charged in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting?

He was raised in privilege, graduating as valedictorian from an exclusive all-boys private school in Maryland and later attending the University of Pennsylvania. Yet, he railed against class inequality and corporate America on social media, lauding Unabomber Ted Kazcynski earlier this year as a visionary with “prescient … predictions about modern society.”

As New York authorities on Monday identified Luigi Nicholas Mangione, 26, as their suspect in the brazen slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, investigators sought to reconcile that apparent contradiction in his background while working to discern a possible motive.

Mangione was detained Monday morning while eating at a McDonald’s in Altoona, after an employee recognized him from widely circulated surveillance stills and contacted police. They found him there with a gun believed to be the one used in last Wednesday’s shooting, a fraudulent New Jersey ID in the name “Mark Rosario,” and a three-page manifesto that New York City Police said spoke to his “motivation and mindset.”

Because Mangione had not been previously identified as a suspect in the attack, police spent much of the day scouring his background. And perhaps fittingly for an investigation and nationwide manhunt that had become a social media obsession in recent days, they were aided in part by Mangione’s extensive digital footprint.

» READ MORE: Luigi Mangione, a Penn grad, is a person of interest in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting investigation

He appeared to maintain accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram, and the social book review site Goodreads. He regularly posted photos of his travels, including recent trips to California, Hawaii, and Japan and reviews of his extensive readings including Kaczcynski’s 1995 manifesto explaining the motivations behind the Unabomber attacks.

“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” Mangione wrote in January. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”

Attempts to reach Mangione’s relatives Monday were not successful. They later declined to comment in a statement posted on X, saying they only knew what they’d read in news reports.

“Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest,” it read. “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved.”

Still, from public records and Mangione’s own online postings an early profile began to emerge.

A native of Towson, Md., Mangione graduated in 2016 as valedictorian of the Gilman School, a prestigious boys’ academy in Baltimore where annual tuition runs near $40,000-a-year, and his high school yearbook said he’d participated in wrestling, robotics club, and model U.N.

His extended family had deep civic ties to the area dating back generations. A 2008 obituary described his grandfather, the late Nicholas Mangione, as a “self-made real estate developer who owned country clubs, nursing homes and a radio station.” He was also a longtime trustee of Loyola University Maryland, and the university’s swimming pool is named after him and his wife.

The elder Mangione’s golf clubs — Hayfields Country Club, in Cockeysville, Md., and Turf Valley Resort, in Ellicott City, Md. — became family-run businesses, as he groomed his five sons and five daughters to take over as executives.

And the wider Mangione family includes dozens of relatives, many of whom retain ties to the Baltimore area. One of Luigi Mangione’s cousins, for example, is Nino Mangione, a Maryland state delegate who has described himself in campaign materials as one of 60 grandchildren in his family. He’s currently running for Baltimore County Council.

At Penn, Luigi Mangione studied computer science and mathematics, formed his own gaming club, and professed an interest in pursuing video game design as a career.

“In high school, I started playing a lot of independent games and stuff like that, but I wanted to make my own game, and so I learned how to code,” he told the Penn’s public relations department in a 2018 profile of his club, which the university deleted Monday. “I just really wanted to make games.”

He spent at least part of his time there living in Lauder House, a large student dormitory on Walnut Street, according to voter registration records, and posted photos to his social media taken at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

His whereabouts after graduating from the University in 2020 with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science remain less clear.

Mangione’s profile on X listed his current location as Honolulu, as of Monday evening. The New York Times reported that he spent more than a year there as a member of a coworking space for digital nomads.

“Nothing strange,” Nam Vu, the cofounder of the space told the news outlet. “He was a nice guy.”

It was in Hawaii, police said, that Mangione had his only known previous run-in with the law — a misdemeanor trespassing offense last year for ignoring posted signs closing off a lookout point at a state park outside the city.

More recently, Mangione had worked as a data engineer at TrueCar, Inc., a company that matches prospective car buyers with certified dealers, according to his profile on LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, he posted prodigiously on his social media accounts, expressing interests on everything from self-improvement, pop science, and critiques of corporate America and modern technology. Though his posts at times indicate a preoccupation with class inequality and the growing use of artificial intelligence and social media, the beliefs he expressed do not appear to cleanly fall along partisan lines.

He shared content from popular online luminaries like Andrew Huberman, a popular neuroscientist who promotes mind-expanding — although sometimes questionably scientific — beliefs through a podcast called Huberman Lab, and Tim Urban, a Silicon Valley writer and illustrator who sought Monday to distance himself from his suddenly famous fan.

“Very much not the point of the book,” Urban wrote on X as one of Mangione’s posts about his work gained attention after his arrest.

On Goodreads, the book review website, Mangione logged a prodigious list of reviews of everything from Harry Potter and the Hunger Games books to Kaczynski’s manifesto.

Still, those social media posts offered few direct clues as to what could have motivated last week’s attack or how he ended up in Altoona nearly a week later.

Mangione’s last post to X, for example, appears to have been in June — roughly six months before Thompson’s slaying in a dawn ambush while he was leaving the UnitedHealthcare’s annual investor conference in Midtown Manhattan.

Ammunition found near Thompson’s body bore the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose,” apparent references to a phrase adopted by insurance industry critics to pan what they describe as the industry’s common tactics to avoid paying for care.

CNN reported that the manifesto investigators found in Mangione’s possession said, “these parasites had it coming” and asserted “it had to be done.”

At a news conference Monday evening, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Mangione had stopped off in Altoona while traveling from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh via a Greyhound bus.

Mangione remained in the custody of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, held on state weapons, forgery and other charges. He is expected to remain there awaiting extradition to New York, where authorities charged him with Thompson’s murder and other offenses late Monday night.

Meanwhile, as the dragnet continued to widen, Mangione’s friends and family members in Pennsylvania and Maryland hunkered down amid the scrutiny from law enforcement and news media.

Television news trucks lined up outside the dormitory where he stayed while attending Penn and surrounded the country club owned by his family in Cockeysville, Md, as a Baltimore County police vehicle blocked the narrow asphalt road leading inside.

In nearby Towson, the brick colonial house on a cul-de-sac where Mangione had once lived with his family sat dark, while those who lived nearby did not answer their doors. One resident could be seen through a window watching TV news reports of their former neighbor’s arrest.

Several former Penn students with whom Mangione had interacted online quickly untagged themselves from shared photos and set their own social media profiles to private.

And as the day wore on, one of Mangione’s friends on Instagram changed his profile to send a message to those taking a sudden interest in his relationship with the suspected gunman.

He wrote: “Please stop requesting to follow me you freaks.”

Staff writers Maddie Hanna and Julia Terruso contributed to this article.