Wait, Who Is Chase From Inventing Anna IRL?
According to the NY Mag profile of Anna Delvey, she did indeed date someone who gave a TED Talk.
There’s one character in Inventing Anna who’s perhaps even more mysterious than Anna Delvey: her boyfriend, Chase. In the Netflix series, Chase is seemingly Anna’s perfect match, someone able to con and manipulate his way through the elitist tech world in the same way Anna scammed her way to the top of New York society. But in reality, Chase doesn’t exist. Well... the character is inspired Anna’s ex, but very little is known about the man Chase is based on — not even his name. Like many parts of the show, Chase from Inventing Anna is partially real, but mostly dreamed up by the writers.
Chase plays a pivotal role in Inventing Anna: Soon after hitting it off, Chase and Anna became a volatile power couple, hobnobbing with billionaire CEOs and crashing at the mansion of a wealthy New York socialite. While Anna was cooking up schemes to try to get the funds for her lofty social club, Chase was at her side, sweet-talking investors out of their money for his dream app. While Chase’s app turned out to be too good to be true, the character himself actually has some basis in reality.
Anna Delvey’s unnamed tech-bro ex was only briefly mentioned in Inventing Anna’s source material. Jessica Pressler’s 2018 New York Magazine profile described this mysterious figure as “a futurist on the TED-Talks circuit who’d been profiled in The New Yorker.” The article goes on to reveal Delvey was with this futurist for about two years, during which time they lived a lavish lifestyle while he talked up his app at fancy dinner parties. But then he disappeared to the Emirates in 2016 without ever launching this app. Those are truly all the details publicly known on this person, so the show had to add a bit of fluff to make Chase a fully formed character.
At the time the New York Magazine profile was published, people in the tech world speculated about the identity of this futurist. Some of the names thrown around included David Shing, Ray Kurzweil, and Paul Epping, but none of them seemed to perfectly fit each detail about the mystery man. To this day, Delvey’s boyfriend is still a mystery, but at least fans now have Chase on Inventing Anna to provide an imagined version of what their relationship might have looked like.
