Dave Portnoy

Origins and early life

David Scott Portnoy was born in Salem, Massachusetts on 22 March 1977, the son of Michael, a lawyer, and Linda, a schoolteacher, and grew up in Swampscott.

Work and career

In 2003 he founded Barstool Sports as a free four-page pamphlet handed out on the streets of Boston with gambling and fantasy sports tips; he built it into one of the largest sports media companies in the United States, sold it to Penn Entertainment in stages between 2020 and 2023, then bought it back in August 2023 for one dollar. His One Bite pizza reviews, filmed on a phone outside pizzerias and scored to a single decimal, turned a running joke into a national reference for small independent restaurants.

He is Jewish: the Forward profiled him in 2015 among the internet's biggest Jewish stars, and the Jewish Journal reported in 2021 on a Los Angeles rabbi teaching him to lay tefillin. In May 2025, after customers at his own Philadelphia bar ordered bottle service with a sign reading F the Jews, he made the response public, dismissed staff who had allowed it, and offered to pay for the perpetrators to visit Auschwitz as a lesson, an offer he withdrew when one of them denied any involvement.