The Girlboss Is Dead
The Atlantic · LC · trust 50/100
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Kevin Mazur / Getty; Stephanie Augello / Variety / Getty. July 28, 2026, 11:03 AM ET Share Save W hose side are you on ? You have to choose—Alex or Alix—even though you don’t know what the fight is about. Even if you don’t even know who these women are.
If the words “What is up, daddy gang?” mean nothing to you, a brief primer: Alex Cooper is the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy ; Alix Earle is a TikToker and the founder of a skin-care line. They may be the two most talked-about women on the internet right now, and they’re in an argument, and no one knows why. That has offered people the fun opportunity to compare two women and pick a favorite without having to consider any relevant facts. But watching this admittedly absurd conflict play out provides something even more interesting than that: a view into exactly how people react to female ambition. Only a few years ago, in the girlboss era, women were encouraged to openly seek power. Now a major segment of the internet seems to think that female hustle is embarrassing, if not offensive.
Cooper is six years older than Earle, but the two women with long, blond hair look so similar that many people get them confused. In 2023, Cooper started a podcast network, Unwell, and one of her first talent grabs was Earle, her then-friend and protégé, who was going to start her own podcast, called Hot Mess . Eighteen months later, Earle was out, and people started speculating about what had gone wrong. In April, Cooper posted a video to her TikTok: “Alix Earle, hey girl, the passive aggressive reposts and the likes and the commenting on things—I gotta call you out here. You’re gonna need to get specific and just say what you’ve got to say about me. There’s no NDA. No one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”
Earle promptly commented, “Okay on it!!”
Months later, we still have no clue what happened— Saturday Night Live even spoofed the exchange in a “Weekend Update” sketch in which the women talk utter nonsense at each other. But one thing is clear: The internet is Team Earle, and it’s all because of the women’s differing approaches to fame and success.
Cooper has been an unapologetic girlboss from the beginning. She got her start at Barstool Sports in 2018 and climbed the podcast ranks to sign a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with SiriusXM, making her the highest-earning female podcaster by far. She has been described as “this generation’s Oprah Winfrey,” in part because she is blunt and open about her drive: “I can walk into any single room in business, and I can get the deal done,” she told Forbes . Cooper also speaks regularly about reproductive rights and abortion access, and in 2024, she had Kamala Harris on her podcast.
Earle, meanwhile, treats her success as a happy accident. She describes herself as a “hot mess” and acts like the girl’s girl next door. “I don’t get very political online and that’s my choice,” she told Time for its recent issue devoted to the world’s top-100 “creators”; Earle was on the cover. “A lot of my reasoning for that is when I’ve been younger I think I’ve gone online and spoken before I actually knew what I was speaking about, and I think it’s really important for me to be educated on what I’m speaking on.” She makes $450,000 for each sponsored Instagram story she posts, and her skin-care company sold $1 million worth of products within its first five minutes.
“All the girlies love Alix Earle,” Dave Portnoy, Cooper’s old boss and the founder of Barstool Sports, said in a TikTok video summarizing the dispute. “She’s a girly girl. They love her. Alex Cooper’s this ruthless businesswoman.”
That does seem to be an accurate synopsis of how many people see Cooper. “I think she is a mean girl and she embraces being a mean girl,” the internet personality Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia said on her podcast.
“Alex-with-an- e Cooper took Alix-with-an- i Earle under her wing,” one TikTok creator said. “Alix-with-an- i Earle’s doing better in all aspects now. And Alex-with-an- e Cooper feels threatened and don’t like that.” Another said that Cooper has “had her time when we were way younger. The new generation is taking over and Alix Earle’s at the head of it.” Young people, she said, aren’t interested in yet another interview of “a middle-aged woman who went through a traumatic experience.” They want to “hear about what Alix Earle was partying on at Coachella.”
Team Cooper exists, but its numbers are more limited: “I’m Team Alex Cooper. She is a self-made businesswoman,” oneTikTok user said . “And Alix Earle gives me MAGA vibes.”
For a moment, a decade ago, women could be praised for being cutthroat in pursuit of success. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In . Sophia Amoruso, the then-CEO of the fast-fashion brand Nasty Gal, published the business memoir #Girlboss in 2014. The girlboss’s days were already numbered by the time Taylor Swift released the feminist anthem “The Man”: “If I was a man, then I’d be the man.” (Admittedly, I have played this song before every job interview I have ever had.) It was an era of She believed she could, so she did tote bags, Boss Babe mugs, and “sheroes” in pink power suits, and in hindsight, it was deeply embarrassing.
The girlboss era took a few blows—the big one being Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016—and was ultimately brought down by reality. The promise that women could work harder and harder and eventually have it all proved to be a lie. The fact that Sandberg was a successful woman didn’t make anyone feel better about the destruction her company had wrought on American democracy and society. When the coronavirus pandemic left many women out of work, they felt even more cynical about the redemptive possibilities of corporate power. Even Swift changed her tune: In her 2022 confessional song “Sweet Nothing,” she complains about the exhausting “voices that…
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