Made-Up Twitter Account Totally Made-Up

#1: Don’t apologize for being late with a Starbucks latte in your hand.

— GS Elevator Gossip (@GSElevator) December 19, 2013

Last night, the author of the “parody twitter account” (*shudder*) called @GSElevator — that’s short for Goldman Sachs Elevator, you see — was escorted out of the closet by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

To anyone who’d ever met anyone who worked at Goldman Sachs, it was obviously fiction, as in, made-up, invented, concocted. So was his writing on fashion and manhood at Business Insider: It was sometimes hilarious but almost never had the ring of truth. In recent times, the account has grown quieter and less specific, although apparently it remains very popular, which is usually the way things go as the outing hammer comes lowering down.

This person’s book, Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking, doesn’t drop till October. (His name, BTW, is John Lefevre.) But already his agent and publisher are doing that classic spin:

The fact that Mr. Lefevre was not a Goldman employee did not appear to dissuade his publisher, Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which said it had not been misled…. Mr. Lefevre’s agent, Byrd Leavell, said: “What matters is that every story in the book is true. John’s material he delivered is hilarious. The book isn’t going to live or die on whether he worked at Goldman Sachs for two months or not.”

Guess what? I already don’t believe the stories in his book, particularly given the long history of rigorous fact-checking in the memoir comedy industry, and plus that this dude spent years making things up for the sake of comedy. On the brighter side, he’s kind of hot though.

Unmaskings are the opposite of news because they take something that was exciting for everyone and make it exciting to exactly one person.

— Paul Ford (@ftrain) February 25, 2014