If you are told by your boss that you are ‘too girly’ to make it in finance, how would you react? Everyone would have a dream world where they respond like Vivian Tu, the Wall Street-turned-social-media star better known as Your Rich BFF, who became a millionaire by building a huge financial education brand and putting that very insult into the acknowledgements of your bestselling first book.

Tu’s debut book, Rich AF: The Winning Money Mindset That Will Change Your Life, was published in December 2023 and went on to become a New York Times bestseller. But its most talked-about moment comes before readers even get into the financial advice. In the acknowledgements, Tu addresses the former boss who once told her she was “too girly” to succeed in finance, and gives him a brutally concise response: ‘F*ck. You.’ It is petty, and it is funny too. And, in Tu’s case, it is also very on-brand.

Tu did not begin her career as an influencer. After graduating from college, she became an equities trader at J.P. Morgan, working with stocks and risk-arbitrage situations. She later moved into sales and strategy at BuzzFeed before turning her attention to financial education online. In 2021, she began posting money advice on TikTok under the name Your Rich BFF, translating intimidating subjects such as investing, salaries, debt and saving into language that felt far less like a finance textbook and far more like advice from a brutally honest friend. That approach worked brilliantly. Tu eventually built a major online audience, turned Your Rich BFF into a media business and made her first $1 million by age 27, according to Penguin’s author biography.

The book is more than simply a victory lap about becoming wealthy. It is designed as an accessible guide to earning more, budgeting, saving, investing and making smarter financial decisions, particularly for people who may feel that traditional finance was never written with them in mind. Which makes that dedication even more amusing. The man who apparently thought Tu did not belong in finance ended up becoming a footnote in a book about helping an entire generation understand money.

Interestingly, Tu has been open about being motivated by spite. In interviews and public conversations, she has described herself as someone who can be fuelled by revenge and the desire to prove doubters wrong. In a recent podcast appearance, she reflected on the irony of her former manager potentially encountering her everywhere, from bookstores to billboards, after once telling her she was too ‘girly’ for finance. She has also explained that the criticism was not simply about her ability to do the job. Her former manager reportedly disliked things about her personality and appearance, including her mannerisms, nails and the way she presented herself.

That detail gives the story a little more bite. The problem was never just whether she could understand finance. It was whether she looked and behaved like someone’s idea of what a Wall Street trader was supposed to be.

Tu’s answer was, essentially: watch me. And perhaps the best part is that she did not spend years writing a revenge memoir about him. She wrote a financial book that became a bestseller and built a career around making money conversations accessible to millions of people. The insult became an acknowledgement. The bad boss became a line in a book. And ‘too girly for finance’ became part of the origin story of a woman who made finance her entire brand. Sometimes the most satisfying response to someone who says you will never succeed is not an argument. And now, It is a bestseller sitting on a bookshelf.