We need to talk about Becca Bloom.
Everyone else is, anyway. In Hong Kong newspapers, fashion magazines, Graydon Carter’s Airmail, and whatever the hell the Free Press is, the ludicrously wealthy 25-year-old San Francisco-slash-Atherton influencer has been the subject of thinkpieces and listicles attempting to decipher her whole deal. Bloom was listed alongside Joe Rogan and Charli D’Amelio as one of Time’s 100 most influential internet “creators.”
Curiously, there’s been little written in the local press about our local embodiment of the phenomenon known as — shudder — #RichTok.
#RichTok is exactly what you imagine it is: A celebration of the rich and not really famous and their fabulous lives set against the global economic collapse coming soon thanks to Trump’s tariffs. #RichTok is a loud performance of quiet luxury, McBling if the bling in question was Bvlgari.
Bloom is the perfect avatar of #RichTok: She is thin, beautiful, and decked out in all designer everything. The locations where she records her TikToks scream generational wealth. Apparently she’s “riching right,” as one fan put it in a pro-Becca TikTok.
And while all of this might make you think Bloom is making herself a target for hatred, many people love her. Like, really, really love her.
To understand why, I consulted with the Reddit user copperfeild, who runs the San Francisco influencer “snark” forum r/sfbayinfluencersnark, where fellow Redditors gossip and shit-talk the San Francisco influencer class. While copperfeild declined to provide her real name, citing the risks (reputational and personal) of presiding over such a community, she was willing to share that she is a late-20s San Franciscan who doesn’t work in tech. That narrows her down to one of about 25 people in town.
The subreddit, she told me, has grown massively because of Becca Bloom, the biggest San Francisco-based influencer by a country mile.
“I’m Becca Bloom’s number one fan,” copperfeild said, in total deadpan. Maybe you could be her number two.
Who exactly is Becca Bloom?
Becca Bloom is the nom de Tok of Rebecca Ma. As far as Ma’s biography goes, here is what little we know: She grew up in Atherton and went to USC, where she studied business and economics. According to LinkedIn, she works at Bloomberg as an account manager, and her fiancé David Pownall works at Amazon Web Services. None of this is especially exciting.
Perhaps the most curious part of this is how her family got wealthy. Bloom’s parents, Simon Ma and Heidi Chou, co-founded a Chinese IT services company called Camelot Information Systems, a firm that went public in 2010 and was, at one point, valued at over $1 billion. The company was charged with securities fraud in 2011, in a case that was eventually settled. Despite the scandal, Camelot is still around. (Here is a photo of her parents at an Asian Art Museum gala in 2018.)
Why is she suddenly so famous?
For flaunting her wealth, of course. Bloom is phenomenally rich — or, at the very least, is putting on a good show of phenomenal richness. Videos show her vacationing in Paris and Capri, plating obscenely expensive breakfasts supposedly made by her family’s chef, feeding her cat Oscar sushi-grade sashimi and tuna bone broth (also made by the family chef), dripping in Bvlgari and Cartier jewelry and Hermes purses. She has repeatedly described caviar as seasoning, and is obsessed with hand-painted silk wallpaper.
“It's obviously extremely boastful, everything that she's doing, but the way that she goes about it is so casual,” copperfeild said. “She's casually feeding her dog fucking quail eggs.”
Bloom lives an incredibly glamorous lifestyle — and more than Reddit and Graydon Carter have noticed. In April, she signed a deal with UTA to … do something. Three months later, she secured the placement in the Time 100 list.
But how famous is she exactly?
Alas, she is hugely famous online. Since posting her first video in January, she has amassed 3.8 million followers on TikTok, another 1.5 million on Instagram. Most of her videos get millions of views apiece — it is fair to say that she is approaching a billion views cumulatively.
How that fame translates to the non-social media world is … still to be determined. She’s signed to one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood, but has inspired protest signs at No Kings rallies. Influencers have made way more with way less.
What is her appeal?
Everyone wants to peek behind the curtain of wealth. Nowhere is that more true than in the Bay Area, where wealth inequality yawns wider every year.
“I want to see the lives of those people who are able to afford these beautiful Victorians and penthouses around our city,” copperfeild said. Bloom offers a view — however curated and ridiculous — into a world we only get to see from the weddings (followed quickly by divorces) of local socialites-turned-middling pop stars or old pictures of the Governor and his then-girlfriend.
Key to her charm is that she isn’t just a rich girl. She presents as a quirky-cool girlboss who’s deigning to give the rest of us her tips to success. There’s also a sense of whimsy to her, to the point where copperfeild likens her to a Bridget Jones type. She takes pottery classes. She spills wine on her fiancé. Once, she threw a funeral for her goldfish. And most importantly, she is employed. She seemingly has a day job, which in the world of influencerdom, is rare. In the world of nepo babies, that’s even rarer.
Bloom is an artist at showing how the Bay Area’s 1% live. You could call her a modern-day Marie Antoinette — except, of course, the masses don’t want her head.
They seem to want her happiness to judge from the gushing comments she receives. “She gives grateful not bragging,” one commenter wrote. Bloom is “The first ACTUAL rich person on this app that gives off a calming and safe vibe,” another wrote.
But is she really that rich?
Only her family office knows. You can project status without being rich — ask every influencer who ever posed in front of someone else’s car or booked a shoot in a fake private jet set — but it’s hard to fake the particulars of Bloom’s level of wealth.
Sure, some eagle-eyed TikTokers suspect that she might be in possession of some knockoffs, namely, a handful of fake Hermes bags. I’m not a luxury product authenticator, so what do I know? Besides, rich people wear knockoffs all the time.
And you’re telling me she lives in San Francisco?
Yep. At the very least, she splits her time between San Francisco and Atherton. Most of her videos are shot in her family’s extravagant Atherton home, which is estimated to be worth around $20 million. But in some of her videos, you can see a residence with a view of the Bay Bridge in the background.
The Atherton house is real, too. Footage from her pre-influencer days shows her inside the same interior.
As further proof of her Bay Area origins, she recently posted a video of a date night in San Francisco: The Van Cleef store in Union Square, Atelier Crenn, the Symphony, and then back to the South Bay for ice cream at Scoop Microcreamery.
In San Francisco, where the influencer industry is relatively boutique compared to the big box-levels in Los Angeles and New York, Bloom is getting more eyes on her than anyone else.
OK, I’m sold. I think. What’s next for her?
The big show: marrying Pownall in Lake Como in late August. From the looks of it, it’ll be covered with some of the same breathlessness as the other high-profile Italian wedding earlier this summer. After that, the sky’s the limit, really.
Like Paris Hilton or Lee Radziwill before her, Bloom is the latest incarnation of the rich It Girl everyone loves to gawk at — except, instead of starring in a reality TV show or the society pages, Bloom’s life is posted in 90-second snippets and algorithmically served up to her adoring audience.
Then there's copperfeild, who has a darker read on her. “She's just trying to become famous from being ultra wealthy, which is the best way to become even more fucking wealthy,” she told me. “She’s the Donald Trump of our generation.”
