Why Luigi Mangione Went Dark in 2023 and Returned Transformed

Something happened to Luigi Mangione in 2023.

He had been the valedictorian of his private Maryland high school—Gilman, where annual tuition is currently $35,000—graduating in 2016. He was strong, good-looking, and smart: a golden son in a sprawling Baltimore family whose wealth had been built by his grandfather, Nicholas Mangione Sr.

The dynasty’s business interests ranged from hotels and country clubs to a radio station and a care facility for seniors that most recently declared $36 million in annual revenue. Luigi was, among dozens of Nicholas’ grandchildren—there were already 37 in 2008—the heir to his grandfather’s empire.

He went from Gilman to the University of Pennsylvania, studying computer science, starting a club where developers could build video games, working as a developer for the makers of Civilisation VI, and spending the summer of 2019 at Stanford as a teaching assistant in AI.

After Penn he won a job in late 2020 as a developer at TrueCar, a car resale site based in Santa Monica, California, where he worked for the next couple of years.

Then something changed. In 2023 he was laid off, in a year in which TrueCar cut more than 100 workers. In March that year he stopped posting on X for nine months.

Those close to him said he dealt with debilitating back pain. It required surgery that one friend described as “heinous” because of the “giant screws” it required.

That surgery came earlier this year, his former roommate in Hawaii, R.J. Martin, told CNN on Monday night. Martin said he saw the X-rays but hadn’t spoken to Mangione since; he had been “radio silent” over the summer, he told Honolulu Civil Beat.

Martin said Mangione had suffered lingering back issues for years. The issue was so bad, he recalled, that Mangione once became bedridden for a week after a basic surfing lesson—an apparent setback for a young man who was clearly proud of his toned physique and who had once told Martin he was “hoping to get stronger in Hawaii.”

“It was really traumatic and difficult,” Martin said. “You know, when you’re in your early twenties and you can’t, you know, do some basic things, it can be really, really difficult.”

Mangione had hinted at those struggles himself. His cover photo on X appears to show his post-surgery X-ray, and in 2022 he shared, on the website Goodreads, a book he had read, Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery. (He didn’t like it much, preferring Back Mechanic, a 2015 book by Stuart McGill.)

Mangione wouldn’t post again until the early hours of Jan. 24, 2024, when he resurfaced with a flurry of fresh thoughts and new convictions. He broke nine months of silence to herald a new favourite book, one he had read during his digital disappearance: Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies (Feb. 2023).

“I believe this book will go down in history as the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century,” he posted, following up with an unanswered post directly to Urban: “Do you think one day this could be taught in school curricula? What would that take?”

He had read something else during his time offline: Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future—the manifesto of the Unabomber, whose acts of terrorism injured two dozen people between 1978 and 1995, killing three. (Kaczynski has had a new life online in recent years.)

Kaczynski, he wrote on Goodreads on Jan. 31, was a “extreme political revolutionary” who was “rightfully imprisoned”—he “maimed innocent people”—but he was more than a lunatic: “It’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out,” Mangione wrote.

Mangione had, by then, briefly moved to Hawaii. He was charged with a petty misdemeanor for entering a closed area within the Nuuanu Pali Lookout, near Honolulu, on Nov. 12, 2023.

In 2024 he spent time in Japan, posting about life there in mid-April: “Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal. The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural,” he wrote on X, calling for the country—and the world—to “encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality.”

He criticized the atomization of Japanese society, bemoaning the lack of “actual human interaction with a waiter” and calling for the stigmatization of “maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them.”

He also called for the banning of “custom pornstar pocket p***ies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores.” He wanted the return of traditional Japanese culture, including karate, and an emphasis on athletics in school.

In other posts he called for porn to be regulated “no less than alcohol, cigarettes, and travel”, but he rarely sounded sour or aggrieved.

His posts were instead often infused with optimism. “I feel lucky for my 21st century education,” he wrote. “I get to simply download the knowledge of all who came before me, allowing me to stand on their shoulders and ponder new problems they never would’ve had access to. What topics does the 21st century mind explore? I’d say evolutionary psychology, primitive neuroscience, and information networks.”

On one occasion he shared a passage that captured the climactic idea in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the novel’s main character strains to have the right to be more than a pre-programmed machine.

“I don’t want comfort,” Huxley has the character say. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

By July 2024 a friend his age was posting in concern, wondering if he would attend his wedding. “I haven’t heard from you in months,” he said. The friend’s mother later posted too, sharing her “prayers” for Mangione.

Mangione’s mother even reported him missing on Nov. 18, according to the New York Post.

The “evolutionary mismatch of homo sapiens and its 21st century living environment is unfathomably immense,” Mangione said in another tweet earlier this year. “Is it surprising,” he asked, “to see so few well adjusted individuals?”

Josh Fiallo contributed to this report.