Bill Pulte Was a “Degenerate” Buffoon. Now He’s Head of U.S. Intelligence.
Bulletproof vests, helicopters, and, yes, dildos.
YEARS BEFORE PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP nominated him to be the acting director of national intelligence for the government of the United States of America, Bill Pulte was spending his time circling a gullible group of investors trading shares in a dead company.
The year was 2023 and Bed Bath & Beyond, after prolonged death throes, finally stumbled into bankruptcy in April; its stock (“BBBY”) was delisted from Nasdaq in early May. But a portion of the shareholders went on believing a resurrection was possible. Over the previous year, the retail chain had become a prominent “memestock”—the subject of intense speculation and rumor—and after the company shut down they refused to accept that their investments were worthless. Many of these diehards kept trading shares “over the counter” (as “BBBYQ”).
Pulte claimed in the summer of 2023 that he was “captivated” by the “incredible BBBY community.” And he went to extraordinary, often ridiculous lengths to promote it. On a livestream in September 2023, Pulte donned a jacket with astronaut patches, implying that the bankrupt company’s stock would somehow still go “to the moon.” At some events, Pulte would wear a bulletproof vest for fear that an unnamed cabal acting against the home-goods store might try to kill him.
In the fall of 2023, the BBBYQ shares were finally eliminated—but even that didn’t convince the lingering true believers, and Pulte kept stoking their baseless excitement. He even organized a December 2023 event in a Florida hangar that was, as journalist Paris Martineau put it, “dedicated to the conspiracy that Bed Bath and Beyond never actually went bankrupt.” With Pulte sitting onstage, one promoter slapped a grateful supporter in the face with a green dildo, apparently a powerful symbol in their inscrutable online subculture.
An hour and a half later, Pulte himself would be presented with an award: a small, circular trophy base with a little blue T. Rex on top of it. He accepted the gift, saying “That looks pretty badass.”
None of this had any effect on the defunct company. Bed Bath & Beyond did not arise like Lazarus from the grave, and the shareholders did not make back their money. But Pulte himself never slowed down. Just over two years after the dildo incident, he was rocketing upward in Trump world, entrusted to be the nation’s top housing regulator and—more to the point—one of the president’s primary henchmen.
Indeed, it is Pulte’s relentless pursuit of the president’s enemies that appears now to have earned him his DNI nod. With the same shamelessness he brought to pimping BBBY, he has dug up mortgage-fraud allegations against Trump critics like Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor.
And like those earlier Bed Bath & Beyond ventures, the more recent investigations have ended in failure. So too have Pulte’s non-vengeance government endeavors. His Trump-endorsed proposal to solve the housing crisis with fifty-year mortgages flopped. It was Pulte who also reportedly provided Trump with the AI-generated picture of the president as Jesus that enraged Christians this past April.
Critics of Pulte have pointed to this record of futility—in addition to the complete absence of any experience in the intelligence community—to show why he should not be getting the acting DNI post. But it’s also worth considering Pulte’s pre-government background as a sort of internet clown in the memestock community when considering just how wild his selection truly is. Because it was there that Pulte distinguished himself through a terrible sense of judgment and a willingness to say whatever people wanted to hear.
PULTE’S RISE IN POLITICS has been fueled by his inherited wealth. He is the grandson and namesake of homebuilding magnate William J. Pulte, and was appointed to the board of construction giant Pulte Homes in 2016 as part of his grandfather’s corporate maneuvering.
In 2019, Pulte started to give away large amounts of money on Twitter to random people in what he called “Twitter Philanthropy.” The giveaways boosted his social media accounts, since people had to follow him so that he could send them money. As I write this, Pulte has a whopping 2.9 million followers on X.
Unhappy with Pulte’s rising profile and how it was deluging the company with misdirected pleas for money, the Pulte Homes board removed him in 2020, according to the New York Times. Bill Pulte didn’t take it easily. He launched a years-long lawsuit in 2022 by suing an executive at his family’s company, accusing them of creating a “Ghost of Bill Pulte” account on Twitter that posed as Pulte’s now-dead grandfather to criticize his grandson.
In the meantime, Pulte also started getting in on the memestock mania, in which investors tried to strategically reap profits off the unexpected price spikes in unlikely stocks, such as GameStop and AMC Theatres. Bed Bath & Beyond was one of his first major ventures.
In 2022, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen had bought a large stake in Bed Bath & Beyond, and his memestock reputation caused the struggling home-goods chain’s stock price to rise.
Retail investors hoping to make a quick killing followed Cohen into the stock. But when Cohen sold his shares five months later for a $60 million profit, the price collapsed. Rather than accept that they had been left holding the bag, some investors clung to the stock in the hopes that Cohen somehow had a secret plan to salvage the price.1
They coalesced into online communities, where Pulte became an object of interest. Cohen had exchanged some tweets unrelated to Bed Bath & Beyond stock with Pulte, prompting shareholders to believe Pulte knew of the supposed secret plan to salvage the company. Pulte didn’t dispel the chatter. Instead, he leaned into it. He appeared on podcasts promoting the stock, and embraced his role as a Bed Bath & Beyond sage.2
“I’m the biggest degenerate you ever met,” Pulte said on the show where he wore the astronaut jacket, using a popular term to describe a hardcore memestock investor.
Pulte began to reference the 2020 Taylor Swift track “Only the Young” in his tweets, and used it as an intro song in his public appearances. BBBYQ shareholders became convinced, QAnon-style, that the song had a hidden message about how Pulte and Cohen would rescue their fortunes.
In the exuberant, male-heavy memestock world, “Only the Young” soon came to be referred to as “Only the Hung.” At the Florida hangar event, Pulte was given a case of helicopter gunship ammo that had been inscribed with the more sexualized song title. And on the livestream where he put on the astronaut jacket, Pulte sat in front of a whiteboard with “ONLY THE HUNG!” written on it.
Despite their adoration, the shareholders clearly grated on Pulte. At one point during the livestream with the astronaut jacket, a prominent BBBYQ investor grew tearful talking about his hopes for the stock’s revival. An unimpressed Pulte listened to him while eating ice cream from a pint.
Like other failed memestock online groups, the BBBYQ subculture was filled with paranoia about shadowy forces out to keep the stock down, which is apparently why Pulte started going out in public to shareholder gatherings wearing a bulletproof vest and accompanied by a security detail.
Whether Pulte had legitimate reasons to fear for his safety is impossible fully to know. But the investors clearly were deluded.
In fact, to attend the Florida event in December 2023, they paid $500 each, believing Pulte was some sort of oracle who could recover their lost investments. But instead of answers, they were left with dildo humor and treated with cases of Coors Light and bottled water.
Even the trophy Pulte received bore a regrettable inscription, a combination of the millennial compliment “This guy fucks” and his supposedly secret-meaning slogan “Only the Young.” Put together, it read: “Bill Pulte fucks only the young.”
Pulte seemed at least entertained by it all. He was very much in on the gag. He arrived at the Florida event in a helicopter but flight data showed that it had taken off from the same airfield, circled the site, then returned for a climactic landing.
Why would Pulte subject himself to this? A clue came late in the night, as one of his associates, Kais Maalej (shown standing next to Pulte in the bulletproof-vest photo above), announced that attendees at the Florida event would each receive one share of Pulte Homes as part of the $500 ticket fee for attendance. In order to get the share, though, they had to sign an agreement to hold the stock long-term—as well as to sign their shareholder rights over to one of Pulte’s friends, according to a letter filed in the Bed Bath & Beyond bankruptcy case.
“We are in a family that I see is very very good family, it’s a great family,” Maalej told the crowd. “It’s the Pulte family.”
It appears that Pulte may have been trying to harness the restless energy of memestock investors to settle scores with the Pulte Homes executives. But if that was Pulte’s plan, it failed too. He never made it back to the company. Instead, he entered Trump’s orbit through the usual means, according to the New York Times: getting retweets from Trump and buying membership at Mar-a-Lago. It changed the course of Pulte’s life and, in turn, U.S. history. The supposed Bed Bath & Beyond oracle who watched a dildo get slapped across a man’s face is now set to have access to the country’s most sensitive intelligence matters. His old denizens in the memestock world can hardly believe it.
On Tuesday, commenters in a subreddit devoted to tracking and mocking the antics of this world reacted in disbelief to Pulte’s appointment. How, they wondered, could this man keep failing upward?
“If I was American I’d be crying,” wrote one.
"...he entered Trump’s orbit through the usual means..." Similar to the way flies are attracted to excrement. You can't believe how quickly and thickly they congregate.
I ♥️ Will. Please know you’re the Bulwark’s secret sauce.