Meet the asshole who tweeted false warnings about hurricane

[Update: Jordan Terry of Stone Street Advisors tweeted that Tripathi has never worked at Stone Street. He was a financial blogger for Stone Street.]

Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and a former financial blogger for Stone Street Partners and a campaign manager for a Republican congressional candidate, tweeted a bunch of phony warnings about the city losing power due to the storm. Classic sociopath humor.

It turns out that @ComfortablySnug is one Shashank Tripathi, not some bored student or some troublemaker from the Occupy camp. In fact, he’s the opposite: he’s a hedge fund analyst with Stone Street Advisors [Update: he was a financial blogger for Stone Street Advisors, not an employee]. He was also — and really, should we be surprised? — the campaign manager for Christopher R. Wight, this year’s Republican candidate for the U.S. House from New York’s 12th Congressional District. According to BuzzFeed, FEC documents show Wight has paid Tripathi thousands of dollars this election cycle as a “consultant”, and this Meetup page names him as the go-to guy for a Republican “Super Monday” event. He resigned from the position as soon as word got out that he was falsely crying “power outage”, and I’m sure the Repubs will work hard to distance themselves from this feeder on misery.

Joey deVilla has an update: It turns out that Tripathi's already internet famous from this 2008 story: The Self-Obsessed, Emotionally Detached Hedge-Funder, in which he brags about “hate sex” with a woman with low-self esteem that left her bruised.

However, Tripathi has since offered a sincere unsigned apology for his alarming tweets.

@ComfortablySmug -- Doesn't This Guy Have Better Things to Do? | GigaOm: Tweeting fake news in a crisis — illegal or just immoral? | Buzzfeed: Shashank Tripathi, Last Night’s Twitter Villain @ComfortablySmug | NYMag: Sandy’s Biggest Twitter Troll Apologizes, But Won’t Find Redemption

• [royaltrux]

  CWaAH.

• [Matthew Urso]

  who is getting their breaking news from some jackass on twitter?

  • [joeposts]

    CNN, Weather Channel…

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      You can’t make this shit up.

      Myers: Oh is that right? You know, I got that from the National Weather Service Chat bulletin board. It was right on there, it said three feet of water on the floor.

  • [Navin_Johnson]

    I saw the pics of the city underwater, video of the explosion and so on, all on twitter first. Network tv was showing sitcoms and X-Factor (rerun)…. Naturally you have to use your head when sorting through all that info.

  • [random]

    Everybody? I’m going to go with everybody.

• [GawainLavers]

  This post is missing some scare quotes in the last paragraph.

• [jetfx]

  “…asshole hedge fund analyst…”

  I think it’s redundant to call him an asshole too.

• [Cteeme]

  15 likes and 39 tweets…. LOL   There’s nothing to this story.. moving on. :-D

  • [Jim Saul]

    I think you meant to say “thousands of retweets, picked up by major news outlets, intended to influence stock market for profit… time for a sock puppet to ‘meh’ it.”

    • [Snig]

      That’s the point that I wondered about.  Did he make investments prior to the storm that he would profit from if this sort of misinformation happened?  If he did, wouldn’t that be fraud or similar charges? 

      • [tomrigid]

        I am not a prosecutor but yes, yes it would.

        Lyin’ about folks paddlin’ in lower Manhattan? You better believe that’s a paddlin!

        • [Jim Saul]

          I’d think the extreme and seemingly intentional nature of his disinformation campaign would move past normal 1st amendment protection, especially in the context of a deadly serious disaster.

          At the very least, any licensing authority that enables him to act as a financial broker should be looking at revocation.

• [johndavidstutts]

  CNN ran amok with rumors of gang rapes at the Superdome during Katrina

  Reporting requires research sometimes

  • [Marc Mielke]

    GOOD reporting requires research sometimes. Apparently what passes for professional standards does not. 

  • [C W]

    “Reporting requires research sometimes”

    You wouldn’t get far in the media, apparently.

• [Brent Ashley]

  Haha fooled you that ‘sincere apology’ was just me, I know I’m a card I just can’t help myself.  I sincerely apologize.

• [BarBarSeven]

  Has he considering donating blood & organs? Like 100% all of them. 

• [Comrade7]

  I guess there will be no Shashank redemption… or will there?

  FWIW, I think that ConEd did shut down the lower Manhattan system.

• [Matt]

  Big deal. The bigger story here should be that modern news organizations are so inept at fact checking, they print stories off of Twitter. 

• [Jordan S. Terry]

  Smug NEVER worked for Stone Street Advisors LLC and wrote 1 (and shared a second) blog post before the company was even formed back in 2010.  Talk about irresponsible “journalism,” shameful.

  Jordan S. Terry
  Managing Director
  Stone Street Advisors LLC

• [Jen]

  And meet the asshole candidate who waited more than a day to respond. Seriously, more than a day. During which time, a separate statement was issued appointing a new campaign manager while pretending why the last one resigned. But now that this is still in the news, he is mad: http://wight2012.com/wight-condemns-actions-of-former-campaign-manager/