There’s no fool like The Motley Fool
What began as an internet prank has become a successful identity for financial adviser David Gardner ’88.
It all started April 1, 1994, with an internet message board post about a toilet company that was too good to be true. “Joey Roman” bragged that stock in this company was “hotter than an egg on the roof of my new Porsche in mid-August.”
David Gardner ’88 created this textbook example of fraud on April Fools’ Day, capitalizing on his writerly flair, sense of humor, financial acumen and the new frontier of the internet.
Three decades later, Gardner is best known for being one of the three co-founders of The Motley Fool financial advice company, popularizing long-term stock investing through articles, newsletters, books and podcasts.
Taking stock
Gardner was lured to Carolina in the mid-1980s by the Morehead Scholarship, a merit-based full scholarship that includes leadership development and mentorship. He majored in English and creative writing and learned from renowned professors Doris Betts ’54, Darryl J. Gless and Ken Reckford, to name a few. Gardner learned to combine his acquired love for writing with a long-held curiosity about the stock market, a trait borrowed from his father, a banking lawyer.
“I think one of the benefits of a humanities education is that you end up going, ‘OK, I know a little bit about a lot of different things,’” Gardner said. “That is what enabled me and inspired me to pick up something that seemingly was not part of my background.”
Before that fateful April Fools’ Day in 1994, Gardner had left his job writing for Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street newsletter to found The Motley Fool print newsletter, working full time with his brother Tom, an entrepreneur and financial writer, and Erik Rydholm, later an influential producer at ESPN.
Thanks to a write-up about Gardner’s prank in The Wall Street Journal, The Motley Fool soon hit mainstream media.
“This newsletter with our funny name that I pulled from Shakespeare, inspired in part by my Carolina class with Dr. Gless, would now be printed in The Wall Street Journal,” Gardner cackled. “It’s hilarious.”
Less than a year later, The Motley Fool hired full-time employees and opened offices in Alexandria, Virginia. The Gardners published the first of several New York Times bestsellers, “The Motley Fool Investment Guide,” in 1996.
Gardner continued writing investment guides and books while recommending stocks years before they were popular, such as Amazon in 1997, Netflix in 2004 and Nvidia in 2005. He’s hosted a weekly edition of the “Rule Breaker Investing” podcast since 2015 –– “no skips, no repeats” — and released what he said is his final stock-picking book, “Rule Breaker Investing,” in 2025.
The varied nature of Gardner’s business speaks not to a lack of focus but to his overall ethos: “In a largely goal-driven world, I realized I’m a purpose-driven person,” said Gardner.
