Andy Elliott is short and muscular, with steely blue-green eyes and a rock-hard head shaved clean and bald. According to his profile, Elliott is the “World’s Fastest Growing Sales Trainer,” and his 2.4 million followers are there to “GET IT ALL!” as his bio says. “FIT AF, BEST MARRIAGE, BAD ASS DAD, LOVE GOD, $ 100 MIL + BIZ.” He posts everything from his trips to the charcoal-gray depths of the gym to sunny days spent with his family by the pool of his all-white modernist home. I noticed that I know two people who follow him: One is an artist and educator who likely follows for “anthropological” purposes. The other is a cousin who also follows Florida members of the Republican Party and dozens of former Marines who now apply their tactical expertise to personal finance and exercise.
Andy Elliott is the kind of #entrepreneur that says things like “KILL YOUR WEAKNESS” and “SCREW BEING AVERAGE” with a passion that sparks from his compact body. Similar sales influencers like Grant Cardone and Jeremy Miners deal in the same kind of high-achieving masculinity, driven by an intensity that pushes their veins to the surface of their skin and their muscles to the bulging seams of their tightly fitted blazers. On the surface, these influencers offer their followers a version of the world in which sheer will occupies the space between what we have and the million dollars in sales we want. It begins and ends with individual drive. All you have to do is hire them to talk to your company, subscribe to their training modules, and purchase their seminars. That is how you Make Deals, Become Your Own Boss, and Rake in the Millions as an Entrepreneur.
Holding the American dream together with scotch tape and aggression
Andy Elliott and other influencers focused on teaching men to get rich through sales are on the fringes of the Manosphere — an ever-changing set of blogs, forums, and social media pages where boys and men gather to resent feminism and discuss their other interests. As an online subculture, the Manosphere encompasses a wide range of man-centric cultural communities and figures like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, incels, pickup artists, personal finance influencers, veterans, the tactical community, and, at its most extreme, QAnon and the alt-right.
The men’s insistence on aligning appearance, career, and lifestyle traces its roots back to incel culture’s looksmaxxing communities, whose members sought to maximize their looks in order to game normative beauty standards and climb the social and financial hierarchy. Among the courses and training modules Elliott offers, there is one completely dedicated to fitness. Its web page features an ultra-shredded picture of the man himself, captioned: “My Success Wouldn’t Be The Same Without Fitness.” Real estate investor and equity fund manager Grant Cardone seems to agree. His cheapest course, 100 Ways to Stay Motivated, includes 10 modules and 100 videos and places great emphasis on the importance of appearances and physique with sections titled “Magnetism” and subsections on diet and exercise (“Stay Hungry and Act Hungry”). Like all the best influencers, Cardone just launched a wellness brand that includes hydration and energy boosters as well as protein supplements. When it comes to Elliott and Cardone’s work as social media influencers, looking the part matters most. According to Elliott, getting the look is more than half the battle: In 2023, he made minor headlines for saying that “if you don’t have a six-pack, you don’t work for us,” equating washboard abs with a sign of commitment, discipline, and work ethic. These influencers have given a very common line of work a complete Chad-ified chin makeover: that of a Guy Who Works In Sales.
Like former President Donald J. Trump, patron saint of the Manosphere, Elliott and his peers are less about selling anything in particular or, god forbid, building anything. Instead, they work really hard to inhabit the role of a successful businessman and trade on their skills of performance by showing off new cars and rattling off self-important lingo. As sales influencer Jeremy Miner instructs in his Q&A-style Instagram Reels, sales is about using psychology to your advantage; it’s about gamifying interactions to boost your closing percentage. Just follow his lead, study, and execute his protocols, and you can leverage the appearance of listening and understanding to lock down a sale. Any sale.
What they are selling is the fantasy of a lifestyle that is the envy of all your male peers
For now, what these influencers appear to be selling is themselves. For $297 a month, you can join Andy Elliott’s training program, where you can access materials on “closing, leadership, phone skills, public speaking, social media marketing, and how to build your own business.” If you want to add monthly two-hour group calls to help you earn “7, 8 & 9+ figures a year,” you’ll want to join Elliott’s “inner-circle” mentorship program, which only costs $499 a month after a $1,500 initiation fee. If you want to be “Andy’s New Best Friend,” join the Brotherhood for a one-time membership fee of $100,000 and an additional $1,997 a month after that.
These influencers tempt their followers with the fantasy of a work life that lets them play the role of the hotshot mogul or boss and is ambiguous enough to be summed up by sexy tags like “#ceolife” or “#entrepreneurship.” Imagine: a new car every year, as an easy tax write-off. What they are selling is the fantasy of a lifestyle that is the envy of all your male peers, that can be built on the advantages of an exemplary physique, irresistible charm, and a near-magical ability to Make Sales and Close Deals.
Elliott trades on the kind of exaggeration easily recognized from Trump’s unfortunate 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal. “The final key to the way I promote is bravado,” it reads, “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.” Trump calls “truthful hyperbole” “a very effective form of promotion.” (Elliott’s own bestselling hopeful is titled Total Recreation: Kill the Old You, currently on presale). Elliott is in the business of selling a career in sales. A career he claims brings in as much as nine figures a year and can help men feel manlier. But his job is not to deliver on any promises; it’s to make promises exciting enough to buy into.
To be clear, Elliott is a sales trainer. He sells online classes and the occasional speaking engagement about how to sell cars, real estate, solar panels, HVAC services, and RVs. In another time, he would’ve worn pleated khaki slacks and a beeper on his hip. He would’ve sold his courses in boxes of awkwardly branded VHS tapes through late-night ad placements. The kind of sales he claims to earn millions from is no different from the kind of sales conducted at your local car dealership.
The exciting rewards promised by Sales Influencing are also pretty pedestrian: a big suburban house, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances, a gym membership (or a home gym), cars, vacations, and an aquamarine pool. In other words, what a middle-class family with two incomes might have afforded in 2006. On Elliott’s feed, however, this clear blue pool is today’s version of the green lawn with the white picket fence — a once sickeningly common sign of middle-class comforts, now rarefied by economic collapse and elevated to luxury status.
The closest Sales Guys get to a community is followers.
Trying to overcome real-world scarcity with a six-pack and No Weakness has a specifically “Make America Great” desperation — a feeling of holding the American dream together with scotch tape and aggression. “This is the United States of F***king America, and you’re going to be average in this country?” Elliott says during a speaking engagement he posted to his Instagram. “There’s people fucking dying to get in this country, lined up at our fucking borders to get some of the opportunity we have.”
What plagues Americans who dream of financial security cannot be faced alone. Bleeding through the machismo is a badly warped attempt to connect: Men building each other up to make money (while making money off of each other), encouraging one another to do heavier lifts and bigger deals, and finding ways to feel less helpless. At their softest, the Sales Influencers are, to a man, a genre of Wife Guys — bragging about their wives’ hotness, spirituality, and, especially, loyalty. Elliott dedicates posts to lauding his wife’s virtues as a partner in life and business (she’s the CEO of his company), often featuring a shot of her staring into the lens with the text, “POV: you believed in him when no one did.” Sales Guys crave some sort of support, but they’ve gotten too rock hard to let anyone in except maybe their hot wife. The closest Sales Guys get to a community is followers.
If Elliott is any measure, the pressure to go it alone is too much. He’s inflated in every sense — full of hot air and just a pinprick from blowing to bits. One change in the Instagram algorithm and he takes a massive hit to his main line of business. He’ll be back to teaching sales courses on commission, once again vulnerable to the vagaries of the economy that plague his disciples. If what he’s really selling is himself as a seller, his product only has value in a world where people believe the hype, a fragile sort of dependency on millions of equally isolated men. So, please — follow and subscribe. Be Andy’s New Best Friend.
Michelle Santiago Cortés is a writer living in Puerto Rico. She writes essays about technology, digital cultures, and life online.
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