How Hunter Biden Won the Internet

About a decade ago, two dancers in a Midtown strip club met Hunter Biden for a lap dance in a private room, where he proceeded to play Fleet Foxes on his phone and smoke drugs.

You may already know this if you’re deep into QAnon. Or if you’re one of the nearly 50,000 followers of a new “hunter bidens is hot” [sic] stan account, which recently resurfaced this piece of lore from court documents—not to humiliate Biden, but to ogle him. In a TikTok slideshow, the folksy “White Winter Hymnal” plays over pictures of Biden that were famously leaked in 2020: topless Hunter in a bathtub, topless Hunter blasting cigs, topless Hunter inexplicably wearing a scarf or sunglasses inside.

The man in these grainy images—which are currently re-flooding certain corners of the internet—barely resembles the clear-eyed son of a former president proudly showing me his collection of oil-based paint markers on a balmy evening this May. Biden, now 56 and wearing a button-down, has spent much of the past three years in this modest garage in Malibu, which he’s transformed into a makeshift studio. It’s here, with the door wide open to let in light and a view of the Pacific, that he’s tried to shut out the world, spending 10 hours a day painting maximalist compositions of animals, nature, and symbols. He’s made at least 100 paintings while listening to audiobooks. Today, his 6-year-old son, a bright-blond surfer boy named Beau, after Biden’s late brother, sits on the ground beside him and fashions his own creation out of shells.

Meeting any public figure is alarming, as your whole nervous system strains to remember that you don’t actually know them. With Biden, it’s a little different: His celebrity is built largely on terms that denied him the luxury of scripting and editing any kind of persona. “There is no moat between me and anyone,” he says, “because they know all my shit is out there.”

Several months ago, WIRED began a series of wide-ranging interviews with Biden, his first for a mainstream publication in seven years. Those conversations ultimately became a real-time analysis of his return to public life: On May 19th, whatever moat there was between Biden and the rest of us seemed to evaporate suddenly, when he posted on X for the first time in almost a decade. “I’m Hunter Biden,” he tweeted. “You’ve never actually heard from me.”

The shock waves from this self-reveal were bracing. Before late May, @popcultureiscool, the horny proprietor of the aforementioned Biden fan account, barely posted about the former president’s son. They preferred instead to thirst for the likes of Ariana Grande and Zendaya. Since then, they’ve posted over 150 fan edits of Biden with captions like “give me five minutes and a hair tie,” “my dream date,” and “need that old man realllll bad 😩.”

“I’m a social media star!” Biden tells WIRED, with a smile of disbelief. For decades, Biden was the black sheep of the Democratic party, a wayward son in need of rehabilitation. Most online content about him was either revenge porn or nigh-incomprehensible conspiracy theorizing about his board seat on one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas concerns while his father was vice president. Now, girlies match his tweets with astrological signs, and he gets to enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures: tweeting “Stephen Miller is an ugly fuck” just for the thrill of it.

The new public fascination with Biden has been suffused with a constant "will-he-or-won't-he" energy—an obvious suspense around his dynastic political prospects. In late May, Biden told WIRED that his return to public life has nothing to do with political ambition. “I hate to talk about myself, I'm not running for office, I'm not running for school president,” he says, “and I'm not running to be the most popular person on Twitter.” His primary goal? He says it’s to help other addicts—a community that “doesn't have any political boundaries or economic boundaries”— who seem to find Biden’s frequent posts about recovery genuinely inspiring: “If I made it back from that global public humiliation, then you know what? They can too.”

Along the way, he gets to dunk on haters: “Do I look like I’m a part of the elite oligarch class,” he responded to one critic on X, attaching a selfie, long since exposed to the world, showing him heavy-lidded and smoking in bed. “This was taken at a Super 8 motel off I95 by the way.”

Biden at least deserves respect for finding poetry in his nightmare: Some of the world’s most powerful people reveled in the near-total violation of his digital privacy, and all they found was a case of illegal gun possession and some unpaid taxes—for which his father pardoned him, oligarch-style—and pictures of a middle-aged man in bathrobes with various women. “I think I benefit more from low expectations than anyone I've ever known,” Biden says. “The vast majority of people on both sides, their entire image of me was a ne'er-do-well, failson, drug addict, degenerate that couldn't string two words together. And so just by being able to sit upright and not drool, I think people are like, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’”

In a little over a month, Biden has amassed over 800,000 followers and materially changed his image—in part by giving hours-long, shockingly intimate interviews to independent media outlets like Channel 5, Armchair Expert, and Soft White Underbelly. He’s even talked to former foes like Candace Owens, who once called him a “degenerate that should be in prison.”

It’s been almost a year and a half since the Palisades fire, and Los Angeles is still littered with buildings in various states of decay, piled up sandbags, and seemingly abandoned construction materials. Among the detritus is one house that somehow withstood the blaze: Hunter Biden’s hiding spot.

After the inferno took out 23,000 acres on the West Side of Los Angeles, Biden decamped to the East Coast and to Cape Town, South Africa, where his wife, Melissa, has family. He’s only recently come back to Southern California.

Before the laptop, Biden was the kind of person who could only be politely described in euphemisms—someone whose messy personal life had always been a political liability. There were multiple rehab stints, a discharge from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine, and the revelations that he’d cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow, insisted on a paternity test after he had a child with a woman who worked at a strip club, and gotten married to his current wife after only knowing her for about a week. We could go on.

All of it was traceable, to anyone psychologizing from afar, to serious trauma: When Biden was 2 years old, he and his older brother Beau survived a car accident that killed their mother and their younger sister. Hunter says his first memory is waking up in the hospital to Beau holding his hand, saying “I love you” over and over. Naturally, the brothers were inseparable. When Beau, a decorated veteran with political aspirations, died at age 46 of brain cancer, Hunter unraveled.

In April 2019, a new catastrophe forced him into a kind of exile in Los Angeles, moving between hotels and motels. According to the right, Biden took his laptop to a repair shop in Delaware and never picked it up. (Biden has consistently disputed this claim and says he has never been to the store.) Just before Christmas that year, The New York Post revealed the Hollywood Hills neighborhood where Biden lived, complete with real estate images of the grounds, which he says prompted zealots in MAGA hats to show up at his door. His wife was home alone. When she tried to leave, they tailed her in cars and almost “ran her off the road,” he says. Out of fear, the couple eventually moved to Venice, California, with their young son.

In October 2020, the Post struck again, publishing a front-page story on the contents of Biden’s supposed laptop. Before long, any reporter—and, inevitably, anyone who wanted it—had access to 22 years of Biden’s most intimate communications. The next year, a conservative journalist sat in the Venice canals, in a canoe, yelling questions for Biden through a bullhorn. At one point he even parked a truck in front of Biden's Venice rental with a digital billboard that projected some of the pictures from the leak.

What Biden’s electronic data showed—beyond the aforementioned nudes and crack pipes, beyond the texts with his dad where he calls himself a "fucked up addict who can't be … trusted”—was never quite clear. But to those who wanted to believe, it was evidence of something. To be fair, it’s hard to read a 2017 email about an equity split in a venture with a Chinese energy company—in which one Biden associate writes “10 held by H for the big guy”—without having some questions.

The leak, mostly ignored by the mainstream press for ethical reasons (their claim) or squeamishness about an alleged ratfucking campaign (the more likely story), exacerbated a witch hunt that had already been underway for years. For a time in the mid-to-late 2010s, Biden, a lawyer and businessman, held a non-executive seat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company; this entailed being paid $65,000 a month for five years, seemingly just to be Hunter Biden. During that period, his father and other Obama administration allies strong-armed the Ukrainian government into dismissing an allegedly ineffective prosecutor who was said to be looking into the company. Since 2019, President Donald Trump had held up Hunter’s personal woes and business relationships as evidence of Joe Biden’s squalid ties to a diabolical elite. During the tough early days of Biden’s sobriety, the Trump campaign turned “Where’s Hunter?” into a rallying cry printed on T-shirts. “I couldn't afford to pay the rent, let alone for security,” Biden says of that time. “It was awful.”

These days, Biden is mostly buffered from the chaos that defined the previous decade. He wakes up at 5:30 am to paint. When “Beau-y” (his parents’ pet name for him, pronounced Bowie) gets up at around 7 am, Biden makes him an egg, Takoyaki-style. Then they take a walk or go for a swim. In the afternoon, he writes. He’s in bed by 8:30 pm.

Biden’s first book, Beautiful Things, a memoir published in 2021, “ties up in a really super neat bow” with him getting married and sober. In some ways, that’s when the story began: Biden says he’s finished a draft of a new book about the laptop scandal and everything that came after. He says he’ll start publishing it in serial form on his Substack in July. “It’s about the plot against me, the conspiracy that was led by figures like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. They called it the ‘Manhattan Project,’ assembling all of my digital life through phones and laptops and iCloud hacks,” he claims. (Biden also made this allegation in a lawsuit he filed against Giuliani in 2023, which was dismissed the following year.)

Even when he’s tried to stay out of the spotlight, Biden says, his every move—from the innocuous to the questionable—has been exploited by the right regardless. “No matter what I do, there's no privacy. I've been told for seven years, eight years now, that ‘this will go away. They'll stop focusing on you.’ That hasn't happened.” In 2024, while Biden’s father was president, 10 buyers were reported to have spent more than $1.5 million total on his paintings, prompting House Republicans to probe for possible ethics concerns. (One of the buyers was a family friend, another a Democratic donor, but the majority were anonymous.) The drama led to him being dropped by his gallerist, Georges Bergès, who coincidentally has a history of donating small amounts to Trump and affiliated PACs.

The circus around Biden was becoming a “distraction,” Berges tells WIRED. He says he received torrents of death threats, required 24/7 security, and spent hundreds of thousands on legal fees. “I didn't know about the political world. It was naivete on my part.”

The goal of painting was never to make money, Biden claims. As his friends see it, he just needed something to occupy his brain, keep him off the internet and on the wagon. “When the entire world is seemingly attacking you, where do you place your attention? Do you just obsessively read article after article about all these MAGA people calling you the Antichrist, or do you go into your studio and make paintings and hang out with your smart, beautiful wife, and your delightful son, and get on the phone with some friends, and get coffee?” asks the musical artist Moby, who helped Biden with his sobriety seven years ago and has since become a close friend. “I think that’s it for him—that challenge of saying, ‘Your quotidian existence is actually fine.’”

The simple life may be enough for Biden, but is it enough for everyone watching? “Someone once told me I was, like, the dirtiest, most well known public figure in the world,” Biden admits. “And I never spoke. I literally didn't do an interview.” In that silence, he’s become an American Rorschach test. Depending on who you ask, he’s the ultimate privileged failson; a “crackhead” who is somehow capable of manipulating foreign policy; the empathetic embodiment of his father’s best qualities; or an ordinary addict—your brother, or friend, or even you.

When you're a human container for everyone’s projection, maybe the only way to avoid becoming a black hole is to start speaking for yourself. “I don’t give a fuck what they think, because everything that you could have possibly said about me has already been said,” Biden says. “If I was going to continue to play a role in public life, I felt I should do it on my terms rather than the terms of other people.”

On April 24, Hunter Biden takes the stage in Phoenix. He has the swagger of his father, but he’s wearing a Canadian tuxedo. Head to toe in denim, he looks out into a crowd of drunk, nicotine-addled young people, making eye contact as if he’s about to deliver a stump speech. Just before he came onstage, the audience watched an eight-minute documentary about men who get off on dressing up as babies for lactating “mommies.”

Biden is headlining the Channel 5 Carnival, a series of live events for thousands of superfans of Andrew Callaghan’s wildly popular antiestablishment journalistic operation. He’s traveled straight into the belly of the MAGA beast, appearing in Phoenix, then San Diego, and ending in Albuquerque. For three hours, the carnival showcases documentary screenings, rap sets, and a cringe talent show won by a kid performing yo-yo tricks.

The audience is bewildered but amused by Biden. “I was at the bar and the bartender said, ‘Hunter Biden’s coming over,’ and I really thought he was fucking with me,” one attendee says. “I was like, so he’s gonna come get high with us? I don’t think I’m gonna make it home.”

Biden’s relationship with Channel 5 began nine months earlier, when his former lawyer, who now helps to represent Callaghan, suggested they connect. Biden, a fan of countercultural writers like Charles Bukowski and Aldous Huxley, says he watched a few of Callaghan’s interviews and took a liking to the 28-year-old’s gonzo interview style. Despite his reticence to do press, Biden trusted Callaghan because he “respects the humanity of everybody that he's talking to.” He also thought: “It would be interesting … I'm going to learn something.” So Biden sat down for a three-hour interview published on Callaghan’s channel in July 2025. He claims no PR person or manager was involved.

The interview exploded, amassing more than 4 million views on YouTube alone and millions more on platforms like X, where clips of him detailing the particular allure of crack cocaine and viciously calling out Democrats like David Axelrod, the Pod Save America guys, and George Clooney, went viral. (When I tell Biden, before his recent debut on X, that some commenters on the video want him to run for president, he seems flattered, but then retorts: “That’s how you’ll know I am back on crack.”)

Buoyed by the success, Hunter agreed to join Callaghan at some of his live events. Spending time on stage at the end of each night was technically the gig, but Biden seems to get more out of it than whatever’s in his contract. In Phoenix, he’s late to chat because he went to the mall beforehand with Callaghan, who needed help picking an outfit. Throughout the night, he’s often pulled away by fans who want to talk to him about addiction; a Native American silversmith named Lionel Thundercloud Gomez gives him a necklace with a feather on it that he now wears every day. At one point, he Facetimes someone’s mom and gives another the Dodgers’ hat on his head. “Man, oh man,” he says. “Did I feel the love of the fact that I was just like them.”

After the Callaghan interview was published, producers for two other shows—the South-Africa focused “Wide Awake” show and Shawn Ryan’s podcast—reached out. Biden said yes. Other than helping other addicts, he says he didn’t necessarily have a plan or understand exactly who he was speaking to, but he felt ready to talk. Shawn Ryan, a podcaster, former Navy Seal, and former CIA security official, had spent many hours over the years attacking Biden’s father and boosting allegations from the laptop. “People told me that before I went on. I was like, look. Let him ask me anything that he wants, anything, and I’ll give my best answer,” Biden says. “Thank goodness I didn’t watch everything that he did.”

By January of this year, Biden says he began to see these appearances as an avenue for reinvention and purpose. Doing so via independent media with gigantic audiences is an obvious strategy to anyone paying attention. (“No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he says.) It is also an unmistakably Trumpian turn.

“People have confused audacity with authenticity. I don't think that Trump has ever had an authentic day in his life,” Biden says of the comparison between them. “I think everything that he does is calculated and it's audacious. It's audacious the way that a malignant narcissist is audacious. He will lie about anything.”

Biden, meanwhile, knows the entire world has seen him at rock bottom, meaning authenticity isn’t really a choice. He sees value in an audience like Channel 5’s, which attracts more than 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube and appeals to the kind of people who don’t trust anything. An even more powerful figure for Biden, whom he mentions early in our conversations, is Candace Owens. Her reach is even bigger—with 35 million followers across social media platforms.

“I’ve been trying to think through it and figure out maybe where the opportunity is to get people that are, you know, MAGA-adjacent or even MAGA to open their hearts a little bit,” he says. “I don't believe that this country is actually nearly as divided as we are constantly told that we are. I think that we've all been manipulated by algorithms in which a handful of oligarchs make trillions of dollars and we have to start to address that before we can get back to Thanksgiving dinner together.”

Biden created an X account just two days before his Owens interview dropped on May 21, and he’s since been tweeting with the fervor of a former drug addict, sometimes more than 100 posts a day. “Despite my feelings about X,” he says, “I think X was the best place and the most dangerous and frightening, the same way that going on Candace was not a comfortable space to be in. But I feel like I have the opportunity to really take everything head-on now.”

By the time his interview with Owens ran, he’d already racked up tens of thousands of followers (and eventually hired a PR person). During the interview, Owens apologizes to Biden, calls her previous behavior “gross” and her former viewpoint “warped.” He had won over not only Owens but also many of her deranged sycophants, who just a year ago swore he was the liberal Antichrist. In an email to WIRED, the podcast host says she isn’t surprised: “In the midst of a political cycle where we are being perpetually gaslit, Hunter admitting to his faults and past addictions arrived as a breath of fresh air,” Owens says. “I felt confident that interview would land as it did, because you can’t fool the public; Hunter was honest, so the public was receptive.”

But the decision to go on shows like Owens’ hasn’t been uncontroversial. “What Is Hunter Biden Doing?” asked The Atlantic in May. Moby, too, has gotten some questions. “I’ve had some shared friends of ours who've reached out to me and said, like, ‘What's he doing? Why is he talking to Candace Owens?’” Moby says. “He's very savvy, very sharp, but also has a sort of naive innocence to him as well, which is so odd, considering he's a recovering crack addict and the son of the former president of the United States.”

On X, where he’s been deemed a “MAGA whisperer,” Biden continues to present as less naive and more tactical. When asked about the first thing he’d do as president, Biden didn’t shy away from detailing an imaginary, housing-centric platform: “Cap the algorithmic price-fixing the landlord cartels have been running in plain sight. End the corporate purchase of single-family homes. Tax the institutional ownership of residential property at a rate that makes it unprofitable. Use the revenue to build. Not vouchers. Build.” He shares a wide range of cultural opinions, like his belief that cryptocurrency is the “inevitable future.” (He accepts payment for his paintings in bitcoin, but says "No one has taken the bait yet.")

On June 4, Trump was asked at a press conference about Hunter Biden possibly running for president in 2028. "You would think that the past has something to do with winning an election,” Trump replied. “And I would say his past is not the greatest.” This pissed Biden off. When a user on X questioned if Biden was “at least considering” a run, he replied, “I am now.”

In another Tweet, Biden fired back at Trump: “Wait … Did he just say checkered past ? I’m 28 felonies, 6 bankruptcies, and an Epstein bromance short of his checkered past.”

Of all people, Trump has proven that a shady backstory isn’t a disqualifier. For many Americans, it might even be something of an asset. Whoever leaked Biden’s data online did so under the premise that one’s digital footprint matters. Young people who’ve lived their entire lives online know that privacy is increasingly a myth; witness the ease at which Maine Democratic voters got over Graham Platner’s old Reddit posts, let alone his tattoo of a Nazi symbol. (Biden himself recently spoke out in defense of Platner, saying most Americans couldn’t pass the “show me your phone” test). Our relationship to kompromat, and figures like Hunter Biden, has changed—for better or worse.

Biden still says his new accounts on X, Instagram, and Substack—where he posts about addiction and recovery, and dunks on Don Jr.—are simply vehicles for telling his own story and helping addicts. (“I don't have to do this to get a book deal.”) He’s also advising a forthcoming foundation aligned with Peak Path Health, a rehab facility in Los Angeles, where he’ll raise money to provide aftercare services for the community; he plans to join the board once the organization is up and running.

But what about the family business? Online popularity is power, the coin of the realm; it’s why Democrats are furious that the Bidens won’t just go away.

On Gavin Newsom’s podcast recently, the California governor and likely 2028 contender opened by jokingly referring to Biden as a “presidential candidate.” Biden’s response, a quip about running as Newsom’s VP because it’s “a lot easier,” became yet another news event.

“Do I have any plans to run for office or to calculate my way into an ambassadorship? No, I have absolutely zero interest in that,” Biden says. But what if, say, a future President Gavin Newsom offered him some kind of role in his administration? “Of course I would, 100 percent,” he concedes, again turning to the language of 12-step recovery: “I would be so honored to be of service in that way.”

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