David Scott Portnoy (born March 22, 1977)[1][2][3] is an American businessman and social media personality.

[4] Portnoy was born and raised in Swampscott, Massachusetts,[5][2] the son of Michael, a lawyer, and Linda, a high school teacher.

[2][7][8] After attending Swampscott High School, where one of his classmates was ESPN's Todd McShay,[9] Portnoy graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in education.

[11] After college, Portnoy moved to Boston and began working at Yankee Group, an IT market research firm.

[4] The early iteration of Barstool was a four-page sports newspaper that Portnoy handed out on subway platforms and street corners in Boston.

[11] Early advertisers in the newspaper included offshore betting websites such as partypoker, which was operating in the United States illegally.

[11] The contents of the newspaper was originally solely written by Portnoy, but freelance writers, including Todd McShay, joined the paper.

[12] At first, the paper struggled, but gained traction in 2004 when Portnoy began placing photos of women in bikinis on the front page of the newspaper.

[19] Portnoy rarely ranks a pizza above 9.0, but some of those he praised have experienced a transformative growth in popularity, going "viral, becoming a can't-miss attraction for legions of young, loud, and often inebriated Barstool diehards.

"[20] In October 2023, The New York Times called Portnoy "one of the most influential people in the world of food social media," with the ability to "change the fate of a pizzeria with a single utterance.

[22] Portnoy and Barstool Sports hosted the first One Bite Pizza Festival in September 2023 in Brooklyn, New York.

The money was generated from t-shirt, hoodie, and hat sales on the Barstool Sports website themed after Miss Peaches, a dog Portnoy adopted from the shelter.

[37] In 2019, Portnoy tweeted a threat to fire "on the spot" any employee at his blogging company who sought advice on forming a union.

"[38] Portnoy later agreed to an informal settlement with the National Labor Relations Board where he did not admit guilt but deleted his anti-union tweets.

[43] Business Insider reported that Portnoy had made multiple "unprovoked, personal attacks online", including frequent "sexually harassing comments" toward Deadspin's Laura Wagner.

[7][45] He was arrested again in 2019 when he was placed in a holding cell at Mercedes-Benz Stadium for a portion of Super Bowl LIII after creating fake passes to attend a press event the day before.

[48] That December, Portnoy reached an informal settlement with the Board, which required him to delete his threatening tweets and remove any potential anti-union material created by Barstool Sports.

The settlement also noted that the Twitter account originally encouraging employees to unionize was actually owned by Barstool in an attempt to out labor organizers.

[52] Portnoy called the article a "hit piece", claiming that Business Insider tried to find evidence of wrongdoing by him for approximately eight months.

[53] In February 2022, more sexual assault and harassment claims by young women were published in a second Business Insider article.