Hiding a cheesy plot device in plain sight

September 15, 2015 2:59 PM

[FictionFilter] In the era of doxxing and all that, is it possible for a tech person with a high-profile position to keep his personal info -- and real name and identity -- under wraps?

Let's call our hero Hugh Howard. Say he did something doofy as a teenager that *everyone* knows about -- comparable to Star Wars Kid. In the ensuing years, he became... I dunno, a very shrewd angel investor. Or, rather, his company did it because he was never there in person; Hugh Howard is a reclusive SECRET BILLIONAIRE!!!!! People know he exists, and that he was the same guy who did this horrible video, but rumors abound about everything else.

--I'm thinking he could start by using some sort of nickname/variation, so he didn't actually file traceable paperwork to change his legal name, but his neighbor and his barista know him as Fred or something.
--He doesn't attract attention; he lives as if he were a garden variety IT guy -- nothing particularly fancy -- operating out of a very nondescript office of an LLC or whatever where he's actually the boss.
--He doesn't have a lot of friends, and those he does are very, very tight-lipped.

So if a reporter gets an assignment to seek out the real Hugh Howard, would they really run into dead ends? Would enough shell companies be sufficient to hide where he is, while he just goes on showing up for work every day as Fred the IT guy?

posted by St. Hubbins to Society & Culture (15 answers total)

This Wired writer tried to disappear; it was hard.
posted by Melismata at 3:41 PM on September 15, 2015

I think the exact scenario you posit is not realistic.

However, here is a real life person who kept his financial success a secret until he died and left millions to charity: Ronald Read. He was a gas station attendant and janitor who became a millionaire by investing in stocks. If you say he's merely a millionaire, not a billionaire, that becomes more plausible.

Some folks do seem to both keep a low profile and have significant career success. I doubt it would go so far as a situation where a reporter actively hunting them down would find nothing but dead ends, but some of them certainly keep their personal information out of the public eye and (mostly?) off the Internet.

Also, high profile people -- by definition, their lives are in the public eye. So that's a problem. On the other hand, it is possible to have a very successful company without the founder being in the public eye all the time. But the founder's name probably cannot actually be a secret.

An angle to consider: Tina Turner had her first round of success as part of Ike and Tina. They got divorced, she started over. She went into rock and roll. Lots of people in her new audience had no idea she had previously been a big star, a couple of decades earlier.

So, just because Star Wars Kid went viral doesn't mean it remains common knowledge two or three decades later.
posted by Michele in California at 3:59 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

He wouldn't need to disappear, he would just need to create enough doubt. Unless he had an extremely unusual name, he could say "yes, I'm Hugh Howard, former teenage dork. I'm not Hugh Howard, secret billionaire." With that kind of money, he could probably fabricate a second childhood for his secret-billionaire alter ego that would be enough to throw a journalist off the scent, and if confronted about inexplicable coincidences, just say "I know, weird, right?"

The creator of Bitcoin is named Satoshi Nakamoto, and there's a mathematician whose birth name is Satoshi Nakamoto, but both deny being the other. Are they telling the truth? Who knows?
posted by adamrice at 4:00 PM on September 15, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think it'd work just find for a story. The Wired account and a few others on the web can be culled for plot points that will work. In RL? I forget which talk show recently but a currently famous actress pointed out that if she's not made up pretty much invisible day to day. Elton John needs a special costume but most folks blend in unless trying hard to be "seen".
posted by sammyo at 4:08 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Rich people can hire attorneys and entire legal firms to handle affairs for them in a confidential manner. Hugh Howard can live his life in semi-obscurity, occasionally visiting his attorney's office to move money around.

Think about the popular fictional (and non-fictional, for that matter) view of organized crime. The feds know exactly who's at the top of the criminal organization. The issue is proving it, which is made difficult because there are layers and layers of people shielding the boss from scrutiny and taking the fall for minor matters.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:31 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

The problem isn't the disappearing and reappearing, it's the throwing a journalist off the scent—it's hard to imagine a kind of internet notoriety that's awful and important enough to warrant an expensive array of shell companies and dead ends but not important enough that a journalist discovers it anyway.

i.e., I can imagine somebody wanting to not be remembered as the Star Wars Kid, but I can't imagine an angel investor and journalist sufficiently motivated by that story to put in (and get around) the kind of obstacles that would make it a fascinating cat-and-mouse game to discover they're the same guy. To me that sounds more like the kind of thing you do if you were, like, a displaced Soviet-era autocrat or something.

I always thought Parks & Recreation did a good job of playing this scenario out with Adam Scott's character, who ~15 years before the action of the show was nationally famous as the teenaged mayor of his small town. All we learn, as the information is fed to us from other peoples' mouths, is that he received a lot of fawning human-interest press coverage and then promptly bankrupted the city with a ridiculous idea called "IceTown"; as we see him he's just a very effective local political functionary.

Most people don't really know or care about it, so he goes through his life 90% anonymous, but it's not like it's something he can hide—and so people who are particularly interested in politics or want to humiliate him or just really remember a face can nail him with it.
posted by Polycarp at 5:13 PM on September 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure it is as hard as some of the responses suggest, given a couple of things.

First, the famous billionaire has to continue to exist, more or less like the original HH. It's just that he never seems to be in the office today.

Second, that he doesn't have any paperwork with, or draw a paycheck from the little company of which he is the nominal head. And the company is not in the same industry as the billionaire.

Third, he is able to change his appearance, if only through aging and superficial stuff like a different haircut.

Fourth, the little company is geographically totally distanced from the areas connected to the billionaire and his industry.

And he must not name his sled Rosebud.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:43 PM on September 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

I have a name that doesn't sound that common, but it actually is extremely common -- there are many people with the same first and last name just in my city, and thousands around the country. I would wager that if one of us did something nefarious, it would be awfully hard to track down which one did it. And a 2-second google search would confirm that it's hopeless.
posted by miyabo at 9:48 PM on September 15, 2015

Response by poster: Feeling this out, now... I like SemiSalt's thoughts. What if the issue is that nobody ever manages to get a photo or interview with him? It might not be as big a deal as if he were, like, Elon Musk, but even if he weren't a camera-hungry maverick, he'd still be of reasonable interest if he threw enough money around to make an impact, right?

Thanks!
posted by St. Hubbins at 10:23 PM on September 15, 2015

Wasn't this kind of the plot of The Circle? If Dave Eggers can get away with it, I don't see why you can't. Or more to the point, I think you could realistically play it either way for purposes of a story -- could the world's greatest investigative reporter find this guy? Yeah, probably. But is your story about the world's greatest investigative reporter? I think it's certainly plausible that the reporter wouldn't be able to find him, especially if the reporter in your story isn't that talented and the guy has a common name.
posted by phoenixy at 11:02 PM on September 15, 2015

Thomas Pynchon.
posted by builderofscience at 1:41 AM on September 16, 2015

Hmm...I like the Ronald Read angle...maybe it's not a matter of hiding the character, but of hiding the money. Like numbered swiss accounts and whatnot. Like, maybe that 'video or whatever' got enough hits to generate some capital, he invested it, wrote some clever scripts to automate the investing and it snowballed. Maybe he's the world's first trillionaire, but everyone thinks he's 'oh weren't you that guy?' that works as a minor player at 'angel investors llc' (that he actually owns)
posted by sexyrobot at 9:32 AM on September 16, 2015

Possible reference.
posted by sammyo at 10:07 AM on September 17, 2015

I don't know if this would help, but have you looked into the writing both of and about John Twelve Hawks? I recently read my first of his books and he is interested in some of these issues.

Goodreads seems to think he is someone else in disguise. I don't think he's a good enough writer to be Pynchon or a bad enough one to be Brown.
posted by janey47 at 6:32 PM on September 17, 2015

I ran across a comment today about an online porn site that I thought might interest you:

I researched it. There are literally zero articles or information about who owns it. No interviews with the founders. ...

Somewhere out there is a very rich person whose family and friends probably don't realize that he founded a major Internet business.

I thought it might give you a real world example or model for how something like this would happen.

Also, Janet Jackson was secretly married for a few years to the man she was living with. Everyone knew they were involved, but I think the fact that they were married only came out when they filed for divorce. So some famous people do, actually, keep significant secrets for long periods -- even in this day and age. Of course, figuring out how they do so is not easy. She was quoted in an interview as saying something like "You just tell No. One."
posted by Michele in California at 2:59 PM on September 19, 2015