Who’s Your Daddy: Parody Account Pretending to be Kash Patel’s Father Posts Political Comments, Photos of Proud Son ‘Kashu’
- The posts began on Nov. 3, when the Indian American was nominated by president-elect Trump to head the FBI.
Everyone knows not to believe everything on social media. But when you see a post saying Kash Patel, President-elect Trump’s pick to head the FBI, and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy played together as kids, you take a double take. Upon checking the origin of the photo, you see a similarity — a common last name — Patel. And you fall for the trick — believing that Dr. Parik Patel — who posted the photo — is indeed Kash Patel’s father. But that’s far away from the fact. Dr. Parik Patel is not Kash Patel’s father, but it is a parody account on X that began posing as Patel’s father on Nov. 30, the day Trump nominated Kash Patel.
The photo of Ramaswamy and Kash Patel was posted on Dec. 1. Alongside photographs of the two men as adults, the post’s text read: “When Kashu and Vivek were small they would play together in the parking lot while I was working in the motel,” and: “Now Kashu is director of the FBI and Vivek is helping clean up the government with DOGE.” A screenshot of the X post was later shared on Facebook with the comment: “Thank you for having and raising such a fiercely intelligent & conservatively robust son. America thanks you, Father Patel.”
Two days later, on Dec. 3, Dr. Parik Patel shared another photo of his “son” Kashu — one when he was younger and one current. “My son Kashu when he was small, he grew up so quickly and now he is director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence serving President Dolan Trump and this country.”
In another post the same day, he wrote that the Democrats “hate” that his son Kashu, “a strong, smart successful Indian man is a Republican and will do everything they can to block his appointment in the Senate.”
There are some non-Kash Patel as well including comments on Canada, Taylor Swift, and the 2024 election.
Kash Patel’s father is Pramod Patel, who worked as a financial officer at an aviation firm. Pramod Patel and his wife had immigrated to the United States through Canada from East Africa.
Who is Dr. Parikh Patel
Although his real identity is under warps, Dr. Parik Patel has made a name a “Internet’s favorite meme doctor,” and has become one of the most famous meme accounts on FinTwit (Financial Twitter). Over the years, he has built himself an audience of over 600K followers through memes, shitposts, and commentary surrounding finance and tech. His X profile describes him as an investor at Samosa Capital and mentions Mohnish Pabrai’s 2007 book “The Dhando Investor,” and Aswath Damodaran, a professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. There’s also a bunch of credentials he uses apart from doctor — BA, CFA, ACCA, and Esq. He also runs a newsletter — of course a parody — which covers a lot of topics like politics, culture, entertainment and sports.
In an April 2023 interview with Shitposting Works newsletter, Dr. Patel started the account in August of 2020 during the “Covid crash,” when the memes began “about V-shaped recovery.” He found the memes at the time “very funny,” and he “wanted to interact with some of the accounts that were posting in that space.” So he started posting similar content.
Explaining the content of the parody account, Dr. Parik Patel said that as he was already working in finance, he was “just poking fun at how people were trying to predict the impact of Covid and ZIRP [zero interest rate policy] on markets. The mantra of his parody account is “taking a very serious, rigid industry and just poking fun at it,” he told the newsletter.
Despite the traction Dr. Parik Patel received on social media, he never considered running the account under his own name, because of creative freedom. “When content is not hosted under my own name, I felt like I was able to give more honest opinions about the industry,” he said. “There is less downside risk to each post and you’re more likely going to come up with funny content.” Additionally, by using a persona, “people will judge the tweet on its own merit, rather than judge it based on the perceived status of the person behind it,” he explained.
The persona of Dr. Parik Patel came naturally to him. “I’m an Indian Gujarati guy and figured it had to be something similar,” he said. So he settled on Patel, “the most common Gujarati surname.” As his parents, “like most Indian parents,” wanted him to be a doctor, so he “included that too,” he continued. “After that, i just wanted the name to roll off the tongue and thought ‘Dr. Parik Patel” was great for that,” he added. “At the end of the day, I don’t necessarily optimize for a persona, and just look for humor that I find funny.” Once he settled on the name, he “went on royalty-free image websites merged a bunch of pictures together, and came up with the final persona, who was the character I had envisioned in my head.”