Wyatt Koch's Shirt Video

Submission 15,867

About

Wyatt Koch's Shirt Video refers to a video of Wyatt Koch, heir to the Koch Brothers' fortune, talking about his line of shirts. Though posted in the summer of 2017, video went viral in December of 2017 when it was linked to in a story by the New York Post. The video spread as social media users commented the video was emblematic of wealth inequality and joked about the style of the shirts, some of which had literal money bags emblazoned on them, which many found ugly and unattractive.

Origin

The video was originally posted to Instagram by Koch, though the post has since been deleted. A copy was posted to YouTube^[1] on June 6th, 2017 (shown below). In the video Wyatt talks about the value of being "bold" and an "individual" as it pertained to his line of shirts.

[This video has been removed]

Spread

On December 19th, 2017, the video was linked to in a story by the New York Post's gossip section, Page Six.^[2] Once the article was posted, Twitter users began to discover the video and joke about it. Twitter user @david_j_roth^[3] posted a link to the video and sarcastically congratulated Koch, as he stood to benefit from the recently-passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The tweet gained over 1,300 retweets and 2,900 likes. (shown below, left). User @AdamJohnsonNYC^[4] tweeted the video itself, simply stating "can't look away," gaining over 1,700 retweets and 5,300 likes (shown below, right).

Media coverage of the video tended to focus on the ugliness of the shirts while tying Koch to the recently-passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Vanity Fair^[5] wrote that Koch had "inadverdently emerged as the face of Trump's tax plan." Esquire^[6] wrote "A Koch Heir Has Created the Ugliest Shirts on the Planet." Spin,^[7] GQ,^[8] and Mashable^[9] also covered the video.