Background and career
David Scott Portnoy (born March 22, 1977) is an American businessman and social media personality. He is the founder and owner of sports and popular culture company Barstool Sports.
David Scott Portnoy was born on March 22, 1977 in Salem, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Swampscott, the son of Michael, a lawyer, and Linda, a high school teacher. He is Jewish. He attended Swampscott High School, where he played on the school's baseball team, winning the league batting triple crown as a junior. One of his friends and classmates was ESPN's Todd McShay, who was born in the same hospital on the same day as Portnoy. Portnoy graduated from the University of Michigan in 1999 with a degree in education, though he had no plans to become a teacher. While at Michigan, Portnoy founded thegamblingman.com, a website where he published his sports betting picks.
After college, Portnoy moved to Boston and began working at Yankee Group, an IT market research firm. Portnoy, a self-described "degenerate gambler," bet heavily on sports, losing $30,000 one year of his mid-twenties. In 2004, Portnoy left the Yankee Group and founded Barstool Sports. The early iteration of Barstool was a four-page sports newspaper that Portnoy handed out on subway platforms and street corners in Boston. The paper was meant to appeal to young men and rejected political correctness. Early advertisers in the newspaper included offshore betting websites such as partypoker, which was operating in the United States illegally. The contents of the newspaper was originally solely written by Portnoy, but freelance writers, including Todd McShay, joined the paper. 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. In 2007, Barstool expanded to a blog. Portnoy gradually cultivated his persona as "El Presidente", a blunt and candid character. His writing was well-received among young men and the publication subsequently became a mainstay of bro culture. Peter Chernin's The Chernin Group purchased a majority stake of Barstool in January 2016. In 2020, Penn Entertainment purchased a 36% stake in Barstool Sports for $163 million, including $135 million in cash and $28 million in Penn non-voting convertible preferred stock. Penn acquired the remainder of the company in February 2023 for $388 million. Portnoy re-purchased Barstool in August 2023 for one dollar, non-compete agreements in the gambling space, and a clause that if Barstool were to be sold again Penn Entertainment would take 50%. The "Dave Portnoy Show with Eddie & Co." was a podcast hosted by Dave Portnoy and Eddie Farrer that aired on Barstool Sports. In October 2022, the show was placed on indefinite hiatus after Portnoy said that the show had become "terrible" and lacked fresh content. Following the failure of the revived Barstool Radio, Portnoy announced the launch of "The Unnamed Show" in January 2024, along with Ryan Whitney and Kirk Minihane. Portnoy is the founder and rules commissioner for the Internet Invitational, a YouTube golf event mainly for golf influencers, which first aired between October and November 2025 and has garnered over 25 million views on the Youtube platform.
In 2019, in response to employees of The Ringer trying to start a union, Portnoy tweeted a threat to fire any employee at his blogging company who sought advice on forming a union. The New York State Department of Labor released a statement saying, "We say no way, no how to intimidation, threats and union busting. It is illegal to take any unfavorable action—including termination—against employees for union-related activities under the National Labor Relations Act. New York is a proud union state." U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted in response to Portnoy, "If you're a boss tweeting firing threats to employees trying to unionize, you are likely breaking the law & can be sued, in your words, 'on the spot.' ALL workers in the US have the protected freedom to organize for better conditions." The National Labor Relations Board investigated Portnoy in 2019 for threatening to fire his workers if they unionized. 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. Portnoy also released a T-shirt with his face on it that read "Union Buster".
On July 17, 2025, Portnoy announced on his X account that Barstool Sports was entering into a "wide-ranging partnership" with Fox Sports. As part of the deal, Portnoy will become an analyst on Fox's Big Noon Kickoff college football pregame show.
One Bite Pizza Reviews is an internet show by Portnoy, in which he reviews pizza from restaurants around the world, ranking it on a scale of 0–10. Portnoy began his show with the goal of reviewing every pizza place in Manhattan in 2017. In addition to Portnoy, some reviews feature celebrity guests. 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." In 2019, Portnoy appeared in the documentary Pizza A Love Story where he first declared New Haven the "Pizza Capital of the United States." Two years later he tweeted "The pizza capital of the United States is New Haven, CT. Anybody who says otherwise is wrong." 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." In August 2023, Portnoy was involved in an altercation with Charlie Redd, the owner of Dragon Pizza in Somerville, Massachusetts, after criticizing the pizzeria's pizza as "a floppy mess." Portnoy and Redd then entered into an expletive-laden exchange. Portnoy and Barstool Sports hosted the first One Bite Pizza Festival in September 2023 in Brooklyn, New York. The One Bite Pizza Festival is a joint-venture with Medium Rare. For the second year of the festival, Portnoy donated all proceeds from the festival to Al Santillo, the owner of Santillo's Brick Oven Pizza, which had burned down earlier in the year. A GoFundMe campaign started by Portnoy raised more than $32,000 to help with rebuilding Santillo's.
