Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong finished dead last in a viral ranking of how much beer the biggest names in tech drank on John Collison's podcast. He says that makes him the real winner. The ran
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong finished dead last in a viral ranking of how much beer the biggest names in tech drank on John Collison's podcast. He says that makes him the real winner.
The ranking, dubbed the Cheeky Pint Benchmark, was posted on Tuesday by ETN, a London tech show, and has since drawn millions of views and replies from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
The benchmark is exactly what it sounds like: a scoreboard for beer. An ETN intern named Monty watched every episode of Cheeky Pint, the pub-style interview podcast the Stripe cofounder has hosted since June 2025, and scored 38 guests by how many pints of Guinness they finished, down to the nearest sixth of a pint.
ETN, short for European Technology Network, is a daily live show hosted by Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers covering AI, startups and venture capital. It launched in July.
The chart pulled in more than 2.8 million views and close to 400 replies within a day, according to Dealroom. Collison co-founded Stripe with his brother Patrick in 2009; the payments firm was valued at $159 billion in a February tender offer, making it one of the world's most valuable private companies.
Musk topped the original chart with three full pints, ahead of Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley at two. D1 Capital founder Dan Sundheim and Intercom cofounder Des Traynor tied at one and five-sixths each.
Cheeky Pint Benchmark shared by O'Brien on X
Zuckerberg landed in tenth with more than a pint finished. Eleven guests, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, drank exactly one.
At the very bottom, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen and OpenAI president Greg Brockman managed a third of a pint. Armstrong, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and entrepreneur Pieter Levels each finished a sixth.
The Meta CEO's appearance on the Oct. 13 episode had already gone viral after viewers noticed his visible struggle while sipping a Guinness he had brought in from Dublin. "That's just my face," Zuckerberg wrote, his first comment on the clip.
Under the ranking itself, he was more playful. "I'm confident we can reach the frontier here too," he replied, a nod to Meta's AI ambitions.
Others leaned into the joke. Musk replied that he rarely drinks alcohol. Lütke argued the intern had missed his second pint, which "would have insulted my german heritage," and Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks called his own five-sixths a poor showing for "the only industry here that actually does fermentation," according to ETN's newsletter.
Readers kept asking for the numbers to be weighted for body weight and episode length. ETN then re-scored the chart for alcohol content and episode length, and the new table flipped everything.
Musk slid to ninth. The new leader is Will O'Brien, cofounder of Ulysses, a San Francisco startup building autonomous robots for ocean work. He averaged 3.31 pints an hour during his appearance on the Oct. 15 episode, roughly 25 times Armstrong's 0.13.
"I have been training to competitively drink," O'Brien joked in a post sharing his score. "I was born for this."
Intercom's Traynor took second place at 1.40 pints an hour.
Armstrong, at the very bottom of the table, read the same data differently.
"All warfare is based on deception," the Coinbase CEO wrote in reply. "I actually got first place on the healthmaxxing benchmark."
All warfare is based on deception. I actually got first place on the healthmaxxing benchmark. Don't worry though Will, the other company I co-founded is developing drugs to rejuvenate your liver, so I got you. https://t.co/j6pjWOBWL4
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) October 16, 2026
He then used the exchange to plug NewLimit, the anti-aging startup he cofounded with Blake Byers. "Don't worry though Will, the other company I co-founded is developing drugs to rejuvenate your liver, so I got you."
NewLimit says its mission is to radically extend human healthspan, adding healthy years rather than simply extending life, according to the company's announcement post. Armstrong also runs Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (R) as U.S. President Donald Trump looks on speaks during a summit of crypto and technology leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on August 19, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Getty Images
Coinbase's D'Agostino reveals the plan to put all of finance on one app (5:27)Armstrong is not the only crypto billionaire spending on longevity.
Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin donated $2.4 million worth of Ether to the SENS Research Foundation, a nonprofit funding research into rejuvenation therapies, in 2018.
Three years later, he sent the Methuselah Foundation a gift of Dogelon Mars tokens that left the charity controlling 43% of the memecoin's supply.
Then there is Bryan Johnson, the entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen. "Last bitcoin halving is in 2140," he posted in May 2025. "I'm gonna be here for that and make sure you are too."
Bryan Johnson, founder and chief executive officer of Kernel Holding SA, during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021.Getty Images
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. TheStreet Roundtable do not promote or endorse alcohol consumption.
