Guess Who Owns These Meme Accounts

Guess who owns these meme accounts.

Yes, it’s Charlie Light.

For the normal person, getting tens of thousands of likes on X for a post about profiting from putting a vending machine in your own kitchen is almost impossible.

For Charlie, it’s just another Thursday.

Charlie is the mastermind behind some of the funniest parody accounts on the internet. Whether or not you realize it, you’ve probably seen some of his posts and memes.

Charlie is a certified memelord legend: turning his memes into millions.

Whether it’s a viral shitpost like the one above or a meme made on Memelord Technologies, Charlie is blowing up the internet and making memelord moolah.

I talked to Charlie about his journey: from making and monetizing parody accounts, to getting Codie Sanchez as his first ghostwriting client, getting acquired, and his tips for anyone who wants to start a meme page or parody account in 2025.

He also revealed which one of his parody characters he’d fuck.

Jovian: I was thinking about you the other day, that you looked like a certain comedian. You know who you remind me of?

Charlie: A comedian? No idea.

Pete Holmes. Has anyone ever said that?

Huh. [googles Pete Holmes picture].. Yeah, I could see that. No one said that before but I could see that.

Let’s talk about your internet magnum opus: your parody accounts. Remember Hard Money (a satire finance website, now inactive)? I know you used to write satire articles for them.

Oh yeah!

I don’t know if I told you this, but my very first money I made on the internet by being funny is on their sister website The Hard Times. How did you start writing for them?

Yeah, so the founder Matt Saincome followed the John W. Rich account, and he probably reached out to me sometime in the summer of 2020, when the account was first growing, when I was maybe at 20 or 30,000 followers.

I think that was before he had started Hard Money. So he run The Hard Times, which is a successful satire business, and the Hard Drive was also doing well. And he was thinking of doing a finance one. 

He reached out to me and asked what I do for work? Am I looking to make money off of satire? And I definitely was interested in that. I had been trying to make money off the account, which I hadn't been extremely successful with at that point. 

I tried all the basic online entrepreneur tactics of making money, like selling merch, doing sponsored posts, that kind of thing.

Especially back then, the market for sponsored posts was actually really bad, because no legitimate brands wanted to do that stuff, especially in finance. This was only a few years ago…

Things really changed a lot now. Now everyone wants to work with these meme accounts.

Totally. So I started writing articles for them. Everyone would pitch ideas. We had a group of writers, and every specific day of the week, we’d all pitch our ideas. You had to come to the meeting with five or ten ideas, or whatever.

Everyone would pick the best ones, and whoever wrote the headline would get first dibs on writing it.

I think it was 50 or 60 bucks per article. So I’d write two or three a week and make around $100 to $150.

The next thing was, they realized they needed more distribution. So they said, “We want John Rich to be involved in it.” At that point, I was actually somewhat working full time for them.

I think I was making something like $3,500 or $4,000 a month.

Your background is accounting and finance, but have you ever written funny stuff or satire growing up? I just want to know how are you so good at this.

Yeah, kind of. I definitely always did writing. When I was a little kid—fifth grade or something—I would make a newspaper for my neighborhood saying what was going on in the town, and pass them out to the neighbors. My neighbors would pay me, like, 50 cents for each one. 

You know the app Yik Yak?

I've heard of it. Never used it though.

It was a localized social network. For a brief moment of time, it was extremely popular, at least in the US. I think it was 2014 or 15. I was like “ohh, this is going to be the next Twitter. The next big social media”

I was in college when I started using that—everyone in our college used it, and realized I was pretty good at writing them. I would have like, half of the top posts for the  university area, like 20 mile radius of you.

Me and my friends would look through our feeds, they'd read the top posts for the day, and I’ll be like “Oh, that one's me”. I'd have like, five of the top 10 posts basically every day. 

What was terrible about the app is that it was totally anonymous. You didn’t even have a username or some sort of tags.

No one would even know who is posting. So that kind of made it, I think, not a great product.

Are these, like, funny posts?

It’s all humor, yeah. It’d be stuff like pointing out how bad the food was in the dining hall. Like: “Burger patties at the X dining hall are the official puck of the NHL.”

They were all super short—just like Twitter, before they increased the character limit. Almost every one of them was some kind of observational joke about the school.

Besides that, I was always writing. In middle school, I had a baseball blog. I’d read about baseball or write on Bleacher Report.

Fun story: I actually got to talk to Dave Nemitz, the founder of Bleacher Report, a couple of years ago. I told him, “Oh man, I used to write on your site when I was in high school.”

And he goes, “Oh man, I feel old—every young entrepreneur I meet says they wrote on Bleacher in middle school.”

I also remember doing Reddit for a while, posting on r/funny and actually getting a few solid posts in there. I don’t even remember my username... not sure I’d want it to be public anyway. There’s probably something stupid on there.

[Checks Reddit for his old username.]

Oh, okay. Ten years ago, actually—it was in the Jake and Amir subreddit. Do you know them?

Yeah! That is very 2014-coded.

That's another thing. Me and my brother love Jake and Amir. If he’s here right now we could do every single episode, probably from memory.

There's like 900 of them, and they're all like, two minutes long. 

I think that's like a big part of my humor, and you could probably see that in some of my posts. If you know Jake and Amir stuff. Amir is always in the most ridiculous, outrageous situations. 

That's kind of like how the Chase Passive Income stories are. They're so out there ridiculous, like they probably are not even possible.

[laughing uncontrollably] I'm sorry. I just remembered the Chase post you just published about passive income coming out of his ass. That’s so stupid.

Exactly yeah. It’s kind of stupid but funny because it’s so weird.

You started the John W. Rich account around during the pandemic because you said you were bored, but did you have any kind of goals when you started?

Yeah, I think I would say the goal was I wanted to make money.

Wow, so always want to make money from day one with the parody account?

I wouldn’t say from day one. Let me back up. When I first started the account, I didn’t expect it to get that big. I just thought it’d be a fun thing to do on the side—like, “Hey, it’d be cool if people actually cared to read my thoughts online.”

I didn’t even think about making money until maybe a month in. I hit 5,000 followers really quickly, and that’s when I was like, “Oh, wait... maybe there’s something here.”

That’s when I started thinking, “Okay, how can I actually make some money doing this—or even turn it into a career?” So I started exploring all the different paths from there.

Going from zero to 5,000 in a month was damn fast. Can you recall how many times you post everyday?

I was probably posting like five to ten standalone posts a day, and then maybe around twenty replies on top of that. I was doing it constantly. I mean, I definitely had a ton of free time—just because, you know, it was the pandemic. I was stuck at home with basically nothing else to do.

I think that’s how a lot of accounts really get going. You have to post a hundred times before anyone actually pays attention.

That's good advice for all other new like meme account creators out there, start a pandemic first, and then you’ll have more time. 

Or start a national national crisis.

Yes. Plan another 9/11 just so that you can grow your meme account, or hire Hamas to do that.

Exactly, and then try and build up the account right before a massive stock market event happens, so that there'll be millions of people interested in the stock market. Just time it with some crazy event. It’s that easy.

Alright, before you actually contact Hamas just to kickstart your meme account, try out Memelord Technologies first.

It’s a way safer method to make memes and get viral. Trust me.

Charlie also shares his approach on making memes or shitpost from real life situations. Keep reading to find out.

What was the very first income you made from a parody account?

It was selling some merch.

I set up a Redbubble account and just made some stupid designs. All the designs were about John’s stock picks. I made stickers that said things like “SHORT $TSLA” or “I Shorted Netflix at $11” or whatever.

Four or five people bought them within the first day, and I was like, oh man, that’s pretty cool. But it wasn’t great money, since it was all dropshipped.

It only lasted a couple days... you remember Trevor Milton and Nikola Motors?

Yeah! That’s a ZIRP era flashback right there.

It was a big thing I was making fun of at the time. It was kind of the peak of everyone clowning on him, but he was still running the company.

This was before the whole Nikola fraud controversy came out. I was selling a sticker that said “SHORT $NKLA,” and then I got a notice from Redbubble saying, “We took some of your designs down because the copyright owner filed a notice with us.”

Which was just total BS. I wasn’t using their logo or even their company name.

But anyway, I just stopped going down that path. I figured, okay, this isn’t really going to be a money maker. I promoted it a few times and made like twenty bucks. Probably time to look at something else.

What's the second source of income after merch?

It was sponsored posts.

I probably made a few hundred bucks doing some sponsored posts. But honestly, I got a ton of free merch just from people saying things like, “Hey, I’ll send you this hat if you tweet about it.”

I was like, okay, that’s pretty cool—I’ll take the hat. So now I’ve got like ten different hats, ten different shirts, and a few other random pieces of merch.

What’s your favorite merch you got from this?

A few of them. I like several of the hats or funny shirts, but I also feel weird wearing them in public because some of them are just really weird niche finance jokes.

Actually, one stands out. There was an account called Stock Market Hats. I’m still good friends with the guy, but he doesn’t run the account anymore.

Back when the Washington Redskins were changing their name, I tweeted a joke that kind of went viral: “Washington Redskins are changing their name to the Washington Fourskins.”

I forget if I made the logo or if my friend did, but he was like, “Oh, I’m gonna send you this hat.” And it was literally a hat that said Washington Fourskins on it—with a logo of four dicks.

So yeah, I have that in my closet. I don’t think I’ve ever actually worn that hat.

Maybe in a bar mitzvah. Or no, what's the Jewish circumcision ceremony? 

It’s called a bris.

At what point did you start thinking, “Okay, I want to start an agency”?

Sometime around the fall of 2020. I was like, okay, it seems like the real way to make money is doing content for other people—because they’ll actually pay good money.

It’s actually kind of wild, because my very first client was Codie Sanchez.

What? That’s a big name to have for a first client.

I mean, this was before she was really famous. She was kind of well known, and I think at that point, Twitter was still her main thing. She only had like 50,000 followers.

She didn’t have two million YouTube subscribers or whatever she has now. I think she was just barely getting started on YouTube at that point.

She was my first client, and it was totally by accident. I think someone who worked for her liked my account, kind of knew who I was, and reached out like, “Hey, would you write for her?”

So yeah—I ended up making around $2,000 a month writing for her.

Did they hire you to write funny, meme stuff, or more serious stuff?

It was kind of mixed, because some of the tweets weren’t necessarily humor—they were just meant to get people’s attention.

One of the best examples, and the first viral tweet I did for her, was the one comparing Uber to her laundromat. It wasn’t satirical, but it was kind of funny, a little informational too.

So yeah, stuff like that. I think what they were mostly looking for was someone who understood the platform. Just someone who had already grown an account on Twitter—that was valuable, whether the content was satirical or not.

The next couple of clients came through word of mouth, and this was even before I had my own personal account.

Only a few people really knew who was behind the John W. Rich account.

At the time, I felt this need to keep it secret—not be totally public about who I was. But looking back, it didn’t really matter. Back then, people were weirdly secretive about stuff like, “Oh, I run this anonymous account, don’t tell anyone.”

I think people still do that now.

I think people do worry about it—but usually it’s overblown.

Well, okay, if you actually have a job where you might get fired, then yeah, it makes sense. But I didn’t. It’s not like I worked for some bank with strict compliance rules about what content we could post.

There just wasn’t any real downside. So looking back, I probably should’ve gone public earlier. But the first few clients came kind of by accident, or through word of mouth

Then at one point your agency got acquired. Can you talk about this?

Oh yeah, sure I can.

How much revenue do you have when you got acquired?

I think it was around $44K in revenue (the month before it got acquired).

I really only ran it full-time for about eight months. Early 2022 was the absolute peak for this kind of stuff. I was getting clients left and right. I had something like 15 or 16 clients at the time of acquisition.

Some of that revenue came from sponsored posts on the John W. Rich account. That’s when those posts actually started doing really well.

I think six or seven thousand a month was just from people paying for interactions on that account.

After you got acquired, what was it like being part of the company? How does it work?

I was part of the team. They had a collection of creators, and they’d say, “Can you help write for this guy or that guy?”

Their idea was to scale the agency, but it didn’t really end up working out that way. It basically just didn’t work for anyone, for a few reasons.

Number one: my flexibility was what made it work before—and that got broken when I joined them.

The reason I was able to get so many clients so quickly was because I was flexible. If someone wanted to work with me, I’d find a way to make it happen. Like, “Okay, let’s just try a month—two or three thousand a month—and if I do well for you, we’ll scale it up.”

But when you’re part of a bigger company, they won’t do that. They want a 6- to 12-month contract. And another thing is, people wanted to work directly with me—but the sales team couldn’t really promise that. So they had a low close rate.

I don’t necessarily blame them. It was just a bad lead pipeline. People would find us because of me, but then they'd get routed to a sales rep who’d say, “Oh, you’ll work with someone else on our team.”

I think it’s just hard to scale this kind of agency. Especially back then—the productized service model was the hot thing. The idea was: set prices, set deliverables. It sounds better, and maybe it is better for selling and onboarding more clients.

But what ends up happening is the service kind of sucks for everyone. You get someone who just writes 10 posts and says, “Here you go.”

That’s just not how Twitter works. You need someone who actually cares about running the account.

Before, I could hand-pick my clients. If I knew I’d do well with someone, I’d take them on. If not, I’d pass. But I couldn’t do that now I’m part of a bigger ocmpany.

Like, they signed a web3 client—and that’s just not my thing. I get crypto a little, but this was some super technical web3 stuff. And I had to write for them because they signed the client and handed it to me.

And I’m just like, man... the content was terrible. I had no idea what I was writing.

So yeah, I was there for basically a year. Should’ve left earlier. But there were definitely a lot of good, interesting lessons about how Twitter works.

All the best accounts are run by someone who’s really creatively invested. And most ghostwriting services or large agencies just can’t replicate that.

You've made tons of dank memes for clients. How do you think about it differently when you're making memes on LinkedIn or Twitter?

I try to be way more edgy on X. I feel like you can take way more risks on x. 

For example with my Chase account. I like to do a lot of morbid posts.

Like yesterday, I posted the LinkedIn congratulations image with the caption “Pleased to announce that my elderly neighbor slipped down his driveway (I own the urgent care down the road)”

On LinkedIn, you can’t really do anything like that.

For me personally, one big difference between X and LinkedIn is that I can make those kinds of jokes from my parody account. I have no problem posting really edgy stuff from there.

People know I’m behind it, but I can’t imagine posting that kind of thing under my real name.

I don’t know—maybe that’s something you or Jason would do. But for me, I like having this alter ego that can say outrageous things I probably wouldn’t say with my own name and photo attached.

There was a post a while ago about Chase charging people an application fee for an apartment—and then just keeping it. I don’t even have an apartment to rent, but that post went super viral on Instagram.

And I ended up getting five or six death threats on my Instagram account.

When you’re working with clients, do you make one memes that work for both platforms? 

Most of the time, I’ll make something that can work on both.

Honestly, LinkedIn does seem a lot easier. On X, jokes die out way quicker. If something goes viral, you’ve got to be one of the first to make the obvious joke.

Take the Coldplay concert thing. There were tons of obvious jokes, and they worked really well—for like a day. But if you’re on X and making the obvious joke on day two, people are like, “Oh man, you’re late.”

If you miss the window, and still want to joke about it, you have to go a level deeper—make it more intricate or clever. Whereas on LinkedIn, you could post about the Coldplay thing a week or two later, make a basic joke, and it’ll probably still do well.

So yeah, I think LinkedIn is kind of easy mode. They just don’t get as much good humor over there.

Fact check: true. It is easier to pop on LinkedIn because goodness that platform is bone dry of humor. You should change that.

Want to get viral on LinkedIn? Subscribe to Memelord today.

Trust me, the bar is lower than you thought.

I 100% agree that you gotta move fast on X. Remember the whole Soham Parekh stuff?

Yeah, of course.

I’m in Asia, so it was happening when I was asleep. I woke up at 8am and was like “what the fuck just happened?” All the obvious jokes were taken, So I posted a more layered joke about Zohran Mamdani as Soham Parekh. That one went viral.

Yours is brilliant, because you're just basically taking, like, the last big news stories and combining them into a joke. Zohran was still a hot topic because that was only a few days after he made big news…

And they’re the same ethnicity. I'll just say it out loud because I’m not white so that’s okay.

I think that’s actually why Memelord is great if you want to make layered memes and jokes—because you’ve got both the trending narratives and the templates. All you have to do is find creative ways to combine them.

Oh yeah, I use it a lot. One thing that’s super helpful is if I’ve been offline for a few hours, or had a couple of days where I wasn’t super connected on X, I can still catch up on what I missed.

Like, was there a big meme that happened that I didn’t really see? I’ll scroll through the app and the newsletters, and now I know what all these things are about. I can use some of them.

Sometimes I scroll way back just to get inspiration. Maybe some random image gives me an idea—either to use that specific meme, or it sparks a different concept entirely.

Another thing I do: some of the best memes come from combining stuff—like you did with mixing two news stories. Taking fresh memes and tying them back to older ones. It’s almost like a callback, I guess.

It's really cool logging in there and seeing that I created some of the meme templates. 

Oh yeah, you do have a few meme templates on Memelord! 

Yeah, I’ve got a few.

There was this viral conference room template—there was a vending machine in the corner—but in Memelord, it’s just the room. So I remember being a little annoyed it didn’t have the full thing.

Probably my most famous one now is the AI image of the white finance bros. I originally posted it with the caption, “The last thing EBITDA sees before it’s adjusted.”

That one did really well. And then people started making their own versions, like “The last thing value sees before it gets added,” and stuff like that.

You’ve got a couple parody accounts. First off—who’s the guy in the John W. Rich profile picture?

So it’s based on this guy who was a natural gas CEO. I was searching for a picture of an old executive and found his photo. I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” I edited it a bit. I think I should figure out what his name was.

You don’t know his name?

I just can’t recall it, but I know he died recently—a couple years ago. I don’t know if he ever saw the account. I’m sure someone in his family showed it to him.

It’s so funny—sometimes people will send me a photo of some older businessman with glasses and say, “Hey Charlie, I saw John today at the airport!” I feel like it’s just a very common look: older businessman, glasses.

That’s absolutely hilarious.

Yeah, I probably won’t do that again (use someone else’s picture) unless I edit it heavily.

Wait, Chase’s picture is Grant Cardone, right?

Grant Cardone and me. I like it because some people can tell it’s me, but it’s also not obvious. It definitely doesn’t look much like Grant, but if you know what he looks like, you can kind of tell.

And the Hunter one is a combo of Elon Musk and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Man, I miss Hunter. I don’t own that account anymore—I built it when I got acquired. I’ve offered to buy it back a few times. They’ve declined.

Ah. And John W. Rich is also owned by them?

Yeah, it was part of the acquisition.

Okay. John Rich, Hunter Cold Calls, and Chase Passive Income: fuck, marry, kill.

I’d probably kill John.

He’s already on his last legs, both the account and the guy the photo’s based on. He’s in his 90s.

Isn’t he dead? Didn’t you just say he’s dead?

Well, yeah, I guess. I’m still trying to figure out his real name. For some reason I just can’t remember it—I haven’t thought about him in a while. But yeah, he’s definitely on his way out.

For fuck, you gotta go with Hunter. He’s the most handsome and the youngest.

Chase is much wealthier, so you’d marry him.

Hunter’s still early in his career. He doesn’t have any money because he puts it all back into his job. Plus, his lifestyle in Oklahoma City is expensive.

Chase would be the hardest to kill, honestly. He’s a cunning fox.

Guess who owns the hitman service.

What’s the process like for you when you’re shitposting and making memes? How do you use your knowledge to make things funny?

When I started the John W. Rich account, it really helped that I already had all that finance knowledge.

I had years of background in the stock market. It would’ve been basically impossible to make a good account in a space I wasn’t interested in or at least somewhat passionate about.

As for turning things into something funny, my usual thought process was:

Okay, how can I make this more ridiculous? How can I exaggerate the part of the story that’s already kind of funny?

It was pretty easy to do that in 2021 when the GameStop and Netflix stuff was happening. It felt like the entire stock market—really, the whole finance world—got flipped. Now these retail investors were making a ton of money, and hedge fund managers were totally screwed.

In those kinds of situation, I’d always think, How can I exaggerate this situation to make it even funnier? Because it was already kind of funny on its own.

I don’t really have a formal process. I think a lot of people expect that I have a some kind of strategy or playbook, but honestly I don’t.

If I’m thinking I need to post something, I’ll just scroll through my timeline until I find something I can either exaggerate or spin into some stupid story.

Do you use the same approach for Hunter and Chase? Because the jokes aren’t always topical.

Yeah, I’d say so. And honestly, what’s even more important than having a strategy is just letting the audience tell you what’s good and what’s not.

That’s always been my go-to approach. Especially when an account is new, I’ll just try everything. Throw a bunch of posts out there. If people don’t like them, I cut those ones out.

Another thing I do for inspiration is look back at my top-performing posts and go, okay, just make another joke like that, either more ridiculous or in a new situation.

Eventually, you land on five or six types of posts that you can keep coming back to. Even the best accounts do this. They make the same kind of jokes over and over, but switch it up just enough to keep it interesting.

Take The Three Year Letterman account, for example. He has hundreds of thousands of followers and basically makes the same few jokes, but he adapts them to whatever’s happening. It’s predictable, and people love that.

So I try to figure out what those core jokes are that’ll keep helping you grow, and then stick to them.

It’s kind of like that Rick Rubin meme, where someone asks him, “What are you good at? Instruments? No. Singing? No.” And he’s like, “I just know what does well. I just have a sense for it.”

That’s basically what you develop. And it’s hard to formalize it into a real strategy.

But I think that’s what all the best content creators do. They just know what’ll hit, but it takes years to sharpen that sense.

Do you feel like you have to be way too online to succeed in growing parody and meme accounts?

It depends on the type of account. I’ve actually tried to move away from being too online.

In 2022, I had my first kid, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t just jump online whenever something happened. So I started shifting away from the super-topical stuff.

Honestly, I’d encourage people not to rely on breaking news as much—but again, it depends on the account and persona. With the John W. Rich account, I kind of had to, because it was all about stock market news and business news, and that stuff is super time-sensitive. You have to jump on it right away.

With Chase and Hunter, it doesn’t matter as much. I intentionally set them up so that timing isn’t everything.

I can still weigh in on trending topics, but with Chase, I can be late to it, because the post becomes more about his take on it, not the breaking news itself.

I never really feel pressure to post immediately. My joke is usually specific enough to the character that I can publish it later tonight or tomorrow morning, and it still works.

Again, it all depends on who you're running the account for. If you’re running social media for, say, a prediction market, yeah, you have to be on top of breaking news. But not every account needs to run like that.

Totally, and you can still use old meme templates to combine your character’s usual jokes with the new narrative.

Exactly. I can use one of my standard Chase jokes, plug in the latest meme template or narrative, and it works just as well.

A lot of people default to doing breaking news content when they’re trying to grow a following—because yeah, it is one of the easiest ways to get followers.

But you need more than that.

If there’s nothing else behind your brand—nothing lasting—then you’re stuck. You’re basically beholden to always reacting to the next thing. And if that’s your entire brand, well… you’re gonna have to keep doing that forever.

A lot of big political commentators started that way. Just riding breaking news at first, and then once they grew a solid audience, they pivoted to more commentary-style content.

You need something a little more behind your brand. Otherwise, you’ll 100% rely on breaking news to grow, and that’s not sustainable.

Dude, this is really, really fun.  Always really nice talking to you, man, I think the second or third time we talk?

For sure man. I  think it’s the third? I don't know for sure. We should definitely chat more I'd be down to do a one of your LinkedIn Lunatics stream or something.

Let’s do it. We’ll make this happen. Next time I’m in the US I hope I can visit Minnesota.. Should I?

it's definitely worth checking out. I think I'd like, if you go to Chicago, I can definitely meet you there too. 

We should catch a baseball game together. Are you a Twins fan?

Well, no, I'm not, because I'm from Colorado, so…

Oh you’re a Rockies fan. That's even worse. Jesus Christ.

I know.

I'm so sorry.

That’s how the legendary Charlie Light made his name and wealth by being silly on the internet.

Moral of the story? You can do it too. We have the tool to help you do that.

You can follow Charlie or his better half Chase Passive Income on X.

If you like this piece, I’d love to hear from you! Follow me @jovvvian or hit me up on LinkedIn if you’re nasty.