How Emily Sundberg’s ‘Feed Me’ Newsletter Made Her Into a Rising Substack Star

It took about three minutes for Emily Sundberg to secure an invitation to her first inauguration party in Washington this January.

She had asked for invites on X, adding, as a selling point: “I am so funny.”

Bari Weiss answered the call. The founder of The Free Press, Ms. Weiss was co-hosting a party at a five-star hotel with Uber and Elon Musk’s social media network. Her guest list included the former British prime minister Liz Truss, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Ms. Weiss and Ms. Sundberg, 30, are both stars of Substack, their shared publishing platform, though on considerably different scales. The Free Press, a center-right publication, recently reached one million subscribers. Feed Me, Ms. Sundberg’s daily business newsletter combining zeitgeist analysis with link aggregation, has only about 60,000 readers.

But over the last two years, Ms. Sundberg has become an object of fascination in media and finance circles.

Though many readers are young (or youngish) worker bees, Feed Me’s subscribers include high-profile venture capitalists like Kirsten Green, well-connected rising editors like Willa Bennett, and Bloomberg personalities like Matt Levine and Joe Weisenthal.

In November, Ms. Sundberg was a co-host of an off-the-record dinner along with Paul Needham, chief executive of The Infatuation, a restaurant recommendation website owned by Chase and favored among upwardly mobile city-dwellers hunting for spots for a first date. It was attended by a mix of scene-y creators and power brokers: Kareem Rahma of the web series “Subway Takes,” Chris Black of the podcast “How Long Gone,” Peter Lattman of Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective and Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times’s DealBook.