Where the Dealmakers and Strivers Get Their Gossip
She had asked for invites on X, adding, as a selling point: 'I am so funny.'
Bari Weiss answered the call. The founder of The Free Press, Ms. Weiss was co-hosting a party at a five-star hotel with Uber and Elon Musk's social media network. Her guest list included the former British prime minister Liz Truss, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Ms. Weiss and Ms. Sundberg, 30, are both stars of Substack, their shared publishing platform, though on considerably different scales. The Free Press, a center-right publication, recently reached one million subscribers. Feed Me, Ms. Sundberg's daily business newsletter combining zeitgeist analysis with link aggregation, has only about 60,000 readers.
But over the last two years, Ms. Sundberg has become an object of fascination in media and finance circles.
Though many readers are young (or youngish) worker bees, Feed Me's subscribers include high-profile venture capitalists like Kirsten Green, well-connected rising editors like Willa Bennett, and Bloomberg personalities like Matt Levine and Joe Weisenthal.
In November, Ms. Sundberg was a co-host of an off-the-record dinner along with Paul Needham, chief executive of The Infatuation, a restaurant recommendation website owned by Chase and favored among upwardly mobile city-dwellers hunting for spots for a first date. It was attended by a mix of scene-y creators and power brokers: Kareem Rahma of the web series 'Subway Takes,' Chris Black of the podcast 'How Long Gone,' Peter Lattman of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective and Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times's DealBook.
While that gathering was invitation-only, an upcoming party for Feed Me readers around Valentine's Day ('a really chic, cool singles party,' as Ms. Sundberg wrote on X) currently has a waiting list of 500.
Feed Me bills itself as being about the 'spirit of enterprise,' but its true subject is consumption: How do people make their money and spend it? In her writing, Ms. Sundberg has assumed the identity of an insider — sometimes with the bite and braggadocio of a 'Succession' character. Her bio reads: 'I write the hottest daily business newsletter.' Her newsletter reads: 'Dior's golf collection will be a flop.'
'It was first described to me as a finance newsletter,' said Janice Min, the former longtime editor of Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter who now runs Ankler Media. 'It is definitely not a finance newsletter.'
Until recently, almost every edition included a pouting selfie of Ms. Sundberg, even if the headline was about Goldman Sachs interns. ('There's a lot of guys,' she said of her subscriber base.) Feed Me is preoccupied with a certain slice of millennial culture in New York City. The restaurants they patronize, the media they consume, their picturesque vacations, their online shopping habits, their obsession with Gen Z.
'She's almost like a Carrie Bradshaw of her generation,' said Ms. Min, whose company also publishes its flagship newsletter, The Ankler, on Substack. On the platform's leaderboard of popular business publications, Feed Me is now at No. 4, one spot below The Ankler.
Like the divisive heroine of 'Sex and the City,' Ms. Sundberg writes in the first person, usually to place herself in a scene ('I went to dinner at The Odeon last night …') or to emphasize her connections to one ('I texted a few friends who work on Wall Street this morning …').
She is not, however, a confessional sex columnist. But that was not the point of Ms. Min's comparison: 'If 'Sex and the City' was about the search for romantic fulfillment, Emily's voyeurism is about money — and that same sense of it being possibly unattainable, frustrating and, for some, something that comes easy,' Ms. Min said.
Because of its gossipy core, Feed Me also sometimes reminds people of Gawker — written by young people in New York, self-assured in its own taste and authority. Max Read, a former editor of Gawker, said that he might not understand or occupy the 'parallel New York City' that Ms. Sundberg had built, but that he still loved to read about it.
'The exercise of creating a 'scene' like that is way more difficult than people credit,' he said, adding, 'I suspect if it were 20 years ago she could equally have been a Gawker writer or a Gawker character.'
On the Colostrum Beat
Ms. Sundberg began publishing Feed Me on a dailyish basis in November 2022, around the time she was laid off from Meta. Until then, her career was in 9-to-5 digital marketing. She worked at The Cut, Condé Nast and Great Jones — a cookware company where she saw venture capital and consumer goods collide close up for the first time.
Now, for Feed Me, she trawls job board openings to speculate about the direction of companies. She tracks trends with CNBC vernacular; in 2023, she was 'bullish' on both Ozempic and vaping. Real estate tycoons and Instagram chefs interest Ms. Sundberg equally, especially if she can reveal which spas they frequent. No observation or rumor is too minute to itemize, like a prebiotic soda brand flooding Manhattan bodegas, or Jeff Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dining at a private club, or 'I can't open Instagram without hearing about colostrum.'
She often includes a bulleted list of external links. Recent subjects include protein bars; return to office; plastic surgery; and Rhode, the skin care company founded by the model Hailey Bieber.
David Ulevitch, general partner at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, said the newsletter enriched his professional understanding of cultural shifts. 'Plus, I'm a sucker for news that is just a degree above gossip,' he said.
Sophia Amoruso, a venture capitalist whose best-selling book, 'Girlboss,' made her a target of journalists, said that 'Emily's voice feels insidery without the overwhelming, self-important snark that so many 'in-the-know' journalists have.'
High-profile readers sometimes join what Ms. Sundberg has called her 'really fat Rolodex.' She notices when a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter begins following her on Instagram. She notices when Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News emails to say Feed Me introduced him to Ghia, a stylish nonalcoholic aperitif. When the fashion writer Derek Blasberg upgraded from a free to a paid subscription, Ms. Sundberg offered to take him out for a martini.
'Listen, I'm basically a middle-aged uptown gay dad at this point,' said Mr. Blasberg, a celebrity 'partner in crime' who attended Ms. Sundberg's dinner in November. 'I can't be in the East Village bumming Zyns from out-of-work actors at Lucien anymore.'
Outsider to Insider
Ms. Sundberg was an observer of money from a young age. She grew up in Huntington, a town on Long Island, where her parents, an artist and a public school administrator, had also been raised.
'I had neighbors who were lobster fishermen, and I had neighbors who were cleaning up on Wall Street in the '90s,' said Ms. Sundberg, who later studied advertising and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
She also liked to write. In 2021, Ms. Sundberg used her newsletter to occasionally publish short fiction, including a horror story about a female founder whose employees toiled in the basement of her brownstone. (Ms. Sundberg has, incidentally, consulted for various female founders, such as The Wing's Audrey Gelman and Outdoor Voices' Ty Haney.) After seeing 'The Nutcracker' while high on mushrooms, she wrote of the well-dressed audience, 'I wanted to suck the pearls off of all these women's ears and roll them around in my mouth like gum balls.'
In New York, her social circle had the same mix of well-off and less so that she'd grown up with in Huntington. And yet the money managers and bartenders in her group texts were equally enthusiastic about one thing, Ms. Sundberg said: business news. Not the minutiae of the market, but information about apps they used routinely, like the restaurant reservation app Resy. That sensibility formed the core of Feed Me.
'A menu change at Balthazar would get as much traction as a credit-restructuring deal at Rent the Runway,' she said. 'People wanted really fun, juicy takes.'
Feed Me's early dispatches read more as Ms. Sundberg pressing her face against the glass of an unmapped world — this moneyed junction of tech, culture and hospitality — than as her being ensconced in it. Just because you're at the party doesn't mean you're at the party. Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, described her voice as an outsider 'looking in, with one foot but not wanting to totally be in, not wanting to take it too seriously.'
Soon her writing began appearing in major outlets. A Grub Street article about 'shoppy shops' drove a surge of new subscribers to Feed Me; an article for GQ about members-only clubs landed her talent representation from WME. But as the newsletter grew, Ms. Sundberg lost her anonymity. She did not enjoy being recognized in public or the speculation on Reddit forums about matters like the size of her lips, which are not cosmetically enhanced, she said.
She cut back on selfies, which she said earned her the nickname 'thot Jim Cramer.' ('Being hot on LinkedIn and saying 'slut' on LinkedIn has been a funny experiment,' she explained to the hosts of the shock-jock fashion podcast 'Throwing Fits.') She now works from both her apartment in Brooklyn's South Slope neighborhood and the affluent private club Casa Cipriani.
While Ms. Sundberg declined to disclose her finances, she is most likely earning a minimum of $400,000 in annualized subscription revenue. (In 2024, she charged $50 for paid yearly subscriptions, of which there are nearly 10,000. Ten percent of these earnings go to Substack, along with payment processing fees to Stripe.) That estimate does not include revenue from Feed Me's advertising, sponsored posts or merchandise. She made 10 advertising deals last year, she said, which represented 'maybe a quarter' of her subscriber revenue. Those deals included various sponsored newsletters, as well as a dinner co-hosted with the wealth management app Titan and a book-club discussion of Miranda July's novel 'All Fours' at a Warby Parker glasses store.
Ms. Sundberg has since raised the price for new annual subscribers to $80. This falls somewhere between a New York magazine digital subscription ($60) and access to Puck's industry newsletters ($150).
She currently has no paid employees, although Feed Me has three paid columnists who write monthly about transit, restaurants and entertainment. The downtown publicist Kaitlin Phillips also assists Ms. Sundberg, though she works for free.
'I just believe in the cause,' said Ms. Phillips, who was recently persuaded by Ms. Sundberg to start her own newsletter on Substack. She now earns around $99,000 in annualized revenue from it.
Scoops as Currency
Why did Ms. Sundberg go to Washington? Feed Me does not cover politics.
She is, however, interested in vibe shifts. After she received The Free Press's invitation to the inauguration party, Ms. Sundberg booked a room at the Riggs, the luxury hotel where it was held. (She also tried, unsuccessfully, to score an invite to Mark Zuckerberg's black-tie reception.)
'I had a prediction that nobody else was going to cover the party in the same way, and I was right,' Ms. Sundberg said. Her report included details like 'a lot of incredible tans going on,' and a video showing Linda Yaccarino, chief executive of X, singing to Dierks Bentley.
The coverage earned her new subscribers, she said, but also new scrutiny. Days after the inauguration, Ms. Sundberg wrote in Feed Me about having a 'phone call with Tucker Carlson.' She was promoting her new feature for GQ about Zyn. The article included interviews with Feed Me readers, as well as Mr. Carlson, who owns a rival nicotine pouch company. (Ms. Sundberg, a social smoker, said she was 'trying to use Zyn less.')
On Substack, Caro Claire Burke, a writer and co-host of the podcast Diabolical Lies, called it a 'little puff piece push for Tucker Carlson and big nicotine.'
In an email, Ms. Burke said she thought Feed Me reflected a worldview of 'how a certain group' had 'become empowered to stop caring about politics altogether.' There is a centrist desire 'to enjoy wealth aspiration and conspicuous consumption again.'
To her, Feed Me was 'much less a newsletter about building and maintaining businesses, and much more about the business of sounding rich, which is probably why it's found such success,' Ms. Burke said. 'It's hard to start a company. It's much easier to learn how to speak like someone who has.'
In D.C., back at her hotel, Ms. Sundberg semi-clarified her personal politics: 'I wouldn't say I'm like a social-justice-warrior super progressive, but definitely care about people,' she said. 'There's still a Bernie poster in my apartment.' She knew her readers were more politically mixed: 'People on the right are inherently pro-business.'
Sometimes Ms. Sundberg said, she longs for the camaraderie and resources of a newsroom. She gets lonely. Yet she has decided not to work for a media company or let one acquire Feed Me.
'I don't know if any traditional media company would be able to afford it, and it's growing too fast for me to even consider,' said Ms. Sundberg, who also prefers to sell her own ads. She ended her business relationship with WME, the talent agency, last month. Her team there had recently asked if she wanted to pursue sponsorship around her wedding, and she declined. (Ms. Sundberg is engaged to a man who works in tech.)
When she first moved to this city, Ms. Sundberg learned that money bought access to the world she wanted to inhabit. But when she started building Feed Me, she learned that scoops were currency, too.
'The networks that I've developed definitely give me an edge,' Ms. Sundberg said. She referred to Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who also financed lawsuits against Gawker: 'He really believes that secrets give people edge.'
In January, Ms. Sundberg had been the first to report on a West Village resident's application to install a tourist-deterring stoop gate; the landmark building had been used for exterior shots of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment. The story, which came from a reader tip, was picked up by dozens of news outlets, many of which credited Feed Me.
'If I don't get something, then Puck will,' she said, referring to the power-obsessed digital media site. 'And if Puck doesn't get it, Semafor does. And if Semafor doesn't, The New York Times will — eventually.'
Though she often writes about unsourced gossip in her newsletter, she said she had not yet encountered any legal challenges. Ms. Sundberg has been trying to raise her standards as the newsletter grows, such as reaching out for comment when she publishes a rumor about a company.
'A habit that I've been getting better at: Act like you might be working at real place,' she said.
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Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights and strategy at software company Salesforce, noted that July sales in general have lost some momentum in recent years. Amazon is not a Salesforce customer, so the business software company is not privy to Prime Day figures. 'What we saw last year was that (shoppers) bought and then they were done, ' Schwartz said. 'We know that the consumer is still really cautious. So it's likely we could see a similar pattern where they come out early, they're ready to buy and then they take a step back.' How will rising costs from tariffs affect discounts? Amazon executives reported in May that the company and many of its third-party sellers tried to beat big import tax bills by stocking up on foreign goods before President Donald Trump's tariffs took effect. And because of that move, a fair number of third-party sellers hadn't changed their pricing at that time, Amazon said. Adobe Digital Insights' Pandya expects discounts to remain on par with last year and for other U.S. retail companies to mark 10% to 24% off the manufacturers' suggested retail price between Tuesday and Friday. Salesforce's Schwartz said she's noticed retailers becoming more precise with their discounts, such as offering promotion codes that apply to selected products instead of their entire websites. Will shoppers stick to necessities or splurge? Amazon Prime and other July sales have historically helped jump-start back-to-school spending and encouraged advance planners to buy other seasonal merchandise earlier. Analysts said they expected U.S. consumers to make purchases this week out of fear that tariffs will make items more expensive later. Brett Rose, CEO of United National Consumer Supplies, a wholesale distributor of overstocked goods like toys and beauty products, thinks shoppers will go for items like beauty essentials. 'They're going to buy more everyday items,' he said. What are some of the deals? As in past years, Amazon offered early deals leading up to Prime Day. For the big event, Amazon said it would have special discounts on Alexa-enabled products like Echo, Fire TV and Fire tablets. Walmart said its July sale would include a 32-inch Samsung smart monitor priced at $199 instead of $299.99; and $50 off a 50-Inch Vizio Smart TV with a standard retail price of $298.00. Target said it was maintaining its 2024 prices on key back-to-school items, including a $5 backpack and a selection of 20 school supplies totaling less than $20. How will Amazon's third-party sellers fare? Independent businesses that sell goods through Amazon account for more than 60% of the company's retail sales. Some third-party sellers are expected to sit out Prime Day and not offer discounts to preserve their profit margins during the ongoing tariff uncertainty, analysts said. Rose, of United National Consumer Supplies, said he spoke with third-party sellers who said they would rather take a sales hit this week than use up a lot of their pre-tariffs inventory now and risk seeing their profit margins suffer later. However, some independent businesses that market their products on Amazon are looking to Prime Day to make a dent in the inventory they built up earlier in the year to avoid tariffs. Home fragrance company Outdoor Fellow, which makes about 30% of its sales through Amazon's marketplace, gets most of its candle lids, labels, jars, reed diffusers and other items from China, founder Patrick Jones said. Fearing high costs from tariffs, Jones stocked up at the beginning of the year, roughly doubling his inventory. For Prime Day, he plans to offer bigger discounts, such as 32% off the price of a candle normally priced at $34, Jones said. 'All the product that we have on Amazon right now is still from the inventory that we got before the tariffs went into effect,' he said. 'So we're still able to offer the discount that we're planning on doing.' Jones said he was waiting to find out if the order he placed in June will incur large customs duties when the goods arrive from China in a few weeks. ___ AP Business Writer Mae Anderson contributed to this report. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
