John LeFevre

John LeFevre (born 1980) is a former CitiBank bond account executive known for creating the Goldman Sachs Elevator (@GSelevator) Twitter handle. The account purported to recount snippets overheard in the Goldman Sachs investment banking division, and accumulated considerable followers and press coverage before being exposed as fraudulent in 2014.

LeFevre attended Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts and joined CitiBank in 2001, serving over seven years in its New York, London, and Hong Kong offices. He later worked for Amias Berman & Co., a bond brokerage founded by two former Citi bankers. In 2010, LeFevre was offered a job by Goldman Sachs, however due to what he later termed "contractural issues," he never started there.

LeFevre created the @GSElevator Twitter in August 2011 in imitation of an earlier account called @CondeElevator, which shared supposedly overheard snippets from publisher Condé Naste. He would later describe his goal as "to illuminate Wall Street culture in an entertaining and insightful way." The account proved immediately successful and within a couple weeks, LeFevre (anonymously) was interviewed by Kevin Roose at the New York Times's Dealbook. By 2014, the account had over 600,000 followers. He chose to name the account after Goldman Sachs, despite not working there, because "It was commercial."

LeFevre later began writing articles and even banking guides for Business Insider under the name "Goldman Sachs Elevator."

In 2014, LeFevre began shopping around a book proposal based on his life as a banker, to be released under a pseudonym and marketed as by the man behind @GSElevator. The proposed title, under which it was eventually published, was Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking. LeFevre's proposal was originally picked up by major publisher Simon & Schuster, but was later dropped after he was unmasked and it was discovered that he had never actually worked at Goldman Sachs. A few weeks later, the proposal was picked up by Grove Atlantic, a newcomer publishing company, and in 2015 it was published. The Times gave it a negative review, describing it as "a tired and dated memoir of [LeFevre's] infantile high jinks as a young banker."

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