You know that ridiculous saying you sometimes hear from Hustle Guys: your network is your net worth? Well one man named Tom Cruz seems to have taken that principle to heart.
A TikTok post from Cruz migrated to Twitter, where it went viral. In the TikTok, Cruz explained that he had organized all his friends onto a spreadsheet that could sort them by their incomes, bonuses, relationship statuses, and other details — like whether or not they refuse to set foot in the Global South — in order to help plan trips. It’s called the “Forbes Friend list.” And well, just watch:
There’s a lot to take in here. First: “Broke Bobby” makes $125,000 per year, which is roughly twice the median U.S. household income. Lots of people reacted to that. In fact, “Broke Bobby” was trending Thursday afternoon.
Like most viral videos, however, there was lots more to parse in Cruz’s TikTok. For instance, one unsettling column evaluated each friend’s “willingness to travel to third world destinations.”
In a follow-up video, Cruz offered the following as an explanation: “Some of these people have had bad experiences in the third world. They don’t want to go, so we automatically disqualify them. That’s one of our first criteria that we look for.”
And after an even closer look at the spreadsheet, more details about Tom Cruz’s friends emerged and told weird little mini-stories, like one person who is described as 70 percent single. The other 30 percent of his relationship status remains a mystery, apparently.
Much of Cruz’s social media activity is dedicated to real estate investing, with a particular bent on getting subsidies for Section 8, which is government-backed, low-income housing. Cruz’s accounts indicate he operates in North Carolina, buying up rental houses.
Since the “Broke Bobby” TikTok went viral, Cruz has claimed that the friends volunteered this information, and that it’s intended only to help plan vacations. He also shared another spreadsheet featuring lower-income friends that has been dubbed “The Welfare 10″—a name Cruz claims these ten people chose for themselves.
Of course there is no way to confirm if these are real lists of real friends, but Cruz has insisted over social media that this is really something his group of pals does. So I like to imagine a dude named Bobby, perhaps a moderately successful accountant, somewhere out in North Carolina, scrolling through thousands and thousands of tweets about his income, all thanks to his pal.
