Hours after being taken into custody as the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione is seeing a dramatic increase in followers on his social media accounts. 

What You Need To Know

  • Hours after being taken into custody as the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione is seeing a dramatic increase in followers on his social media accounts

  • On X, the 26-year-old has at least 160,000 followers and is gathering them at a rate of roughly 1,000 per minute as of 5:20 p.m. ET

  • "Free him" is also trending on X Monday, with tens of thousands of posts calling for Mangione’s release and re-posting photos from his social media accounts

  • Earlier in the day, Mangione was arrested on gun charges at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., where police said he had a handwritten manifesto criticizing health insurance company policies and a ghost gun that matched the weapon used in last week’s killing of the CEO outside a Hilton hotel in Manhattan

On X, the 26-year-old has at least 160,000 followers and is gathering them at a rate of roughly 1,000 per minute as of 5:20 p.m. ET. On Instagram, where an account appearing to belong to him has only 10 posts, his following had grown to at least 65,000 by 4:35 p.m., but the account was taken down by 5:20 p.m.

Earlier in the day, Mangione was arrested on gun charges at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., where police said he had a handwritten manifesto criticizing health insurance company policies and a ghost gun that matched the weapon used in last week’s killing of the CEO outside a Hilton hotel in Manhattan.

“Free him” was also trending on X Monday, with tens of thousands of posts calling for Mangione’s release and re-posting photos from his social media accounts.

“He’s too pretty for prison. Free him,” one user wrote with a screen-grabbed picture of a shirtless Mangione hiking in Hawaii.  “He’s hot, smart and anti capitalist, now free him right now,” another wrote.