Simon & Schuster has canceled the six-figure book deal it gave John LeFevre, the man behind GSElevator tweets who pretended to be an insider tweeting conversations he had overheard in the elevator of the financial titan.
He had 600,000 followers, and the book was said to be heading toward October publication.
But a report last month outed the 37-year-old ex-Citibank employee as living in Texas and having never worked at Goldman.
After the report, LeFevre’s editor, Matthew Benjamin, at the Touchstone imprint of S&S, insisted the company was sticking with LeFevre and implied they knew about his past — even though Benjamin conceded they had never met.
“He’s always been pretty straight with us,” Benjamin said after the report by Andrew Ross Sorkin in Dealbook. “So this is not a surprise to us.” Apparently it was.
Early Thursday, LeFevre’s deal to write “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance and Excess in the World of Investment Banking” was suddenly pulled.
Goldman Sachs, having a bit of fun, tweeted after the news: “Guess elevators go up and down.”
Neither Benjamin nor his agent, Byrd Leavell at Waxman & Leavell, returned our call.