Meet the Wall Street meme-lord and former reality-TV star who's now running for Congress

• Mark Moran is leaving finance to make a run for the US Senate.
• Moran's platform opposes Wall Street's political influence.
• He also wants to ban corporate homeownership and tax AI data centers to fund education.

Over the last half-decade, perhaps no one has personified the archetype of a finance bro more than Mark Moran.

His cuff-links pop out of tailored suits. He posts on X about his preferred loafers. In 2024, he told Business Insider about his love for Zyn.

Now, he's leaving it all behind — or, rather, he's bringing it all to the world of politics.

Moran is launching a bid for Senate in Virginia, running as a Democrat against incumbent Mark Warner. He'll try to build off the online popularity he's generated in recent years as a Wall Street culture personality.

After stints at investment banking like Lazard and Centerview Partners, Moran first gained notoriety after being selected as a contestant on HBO's Fboy Island reality dating show in 2021. He then became the first employee of the popular financial meme account Litquidity before launching his own investor relations firm, Equity Animal, in 2022.

Despite being a prominent face for millennials in finance, the 33-year-old said his experience is fueling his move away from the industry and into politics.

He ended up leaving his first two jobs because of moral issues he had with some of the deals he worked on. Now, Moran, who calls himself a populist, is running on a platform that, in many ways, is a rebellion against his old line of work.

"I'm like, wait, these people are the quote-unquote titans of the universe?" he told Business Insider, reflecting on his first impressions of working on Wall Street.

One of his proposals is to ban corporations from owning single-family homes, similar to an executive order President Donald Trump recently signed to curb home ownership by institutional investors.

Another proposal is to reform campaign finance laws to keep Wall Street and corporate money out of politics.

"We have a captured legislative branch," he said. "I'm very much against the control that Wall Street has been able to have over politicians."

Moran also wants to take on a Wall Street darling right now: AI data centers, which are fueling the AI buildout that's helped drive the S&P 500 up by 94% since late 2022.

He's proposing a tax on data centers that would fund community colleges.

"Someone is gonna come in, pay for the campaign of a Republican who's quote-unquote business-friendly, and they're gonna give designation as critical infrastructure to win our war of AI against China — which I want to happen, but the people are not going to get anything in return," Moran said.

"If we were to put a compute tax on the data centers, over the next 10 years, that could be $100 billion, if not more," he continued. "That would be enough to entirely change the community college system to make it so that we could have universal community college."