Why the ‘wallet inspector,’ a 32-year old ‘Simpsons’ gag, may be the defining meme of 2025

Last month, Elon Musk’s social media platform X announced it was launching a “digital wallet” service. Users would be able to transfer money from their bank accounts to a wallet on X, bringing the platform one step closer to its much-promised Everything App destiny. The announcement was met on Bluesky and X with a torrent of jokes on a similar theme: the wallet inspector. “Congrats to Elon on his long-awaited move into the wallet inspector business,” wrote Edward Niedermeyer, author of a book on Tesla. And that was before Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency started poking around inside the national treasury.

It’s early still, but the wallet inspector is already the frontrunner for the defining meme of 2025.

It comes from a 1993 Simpsons episode called “Homer Goes to College,” written by Conan O’Brien. In the pivotal scene, Homer has just gotten a trio of nerds expelled from their university, and he feels remorseful about it. No sooner does one of the geeks assure him they can take care of themselves, though, then they are confronted by the town thief, who introduces himself as the wallet inspector, and holds out his hand in solicitation. The group doesn’t hesitate for a second, leaving the thief stunned that his dumb plan succeeded.

It’s funny to contemplate a thief lazy enough to give the wallet inspector gambit a go. It’s also funny to imagine a squad of marks so sheltered and credulous, they believe this is standard procedure. And it may be funniest of all to think about a third party like Homer observing this exchange and, in the scene’s final beat, despairing: “That’s not the wallet inspector.”

That the same versatile term can be deployed to evoke three separate sets of behaviors may be why it already seeped into cultural vernacular years ago. But the convergence of so much openly shady behavior and corresponding gullibility in recent months have made the wallet inspector especially relevant in 2025. It’s an ideal flourish for a moment when the mere suggestion of legitimacy, and a lack of shame, can take you seemingly anywhere.

The day-to-day experience of life in 2025—when our institutions are crumbling, the barbarians are no longer even at the gates but within them, and no wretched outcome seems off the table—is pushing those with the capacity to take it all in toward a mindset of total distrust. Anyone steeped in that worldview can only look upon their neighbors who still have faith in anything—laws, public safety, basic decency—as grade-A suckers.

When a legal scholar thinks the constitution is inherently inviolable, even after daily evidence of Musk and his minions openly flouting it, they are ready for the wallet inspector.

When a Republican Senator who lived through the last decade is still surprised Donald Trump did not stick to his word, it’s inspection time.

And when DraftKings offers its gambling-addled user base a premium subscription tier with “increased odds,” that wallet is gone.

People lob plenty of inspection allegations at the saps of the tech realm—those lured into recent memecoin rug-pulls by the Hawk Tuah Girl or the president, for instance, along with anyone who ever invested in NFTs. They use the meme to describe the U.S. government handing over untold billions to AI companies, based on the adorable belief that a Chinese company could never in a million years undercut them—and they deploy it to shrug at everyone fooled by all the visual slop coming down the pike in the AI boom. And there was only one way to frame it when one of X’s lesser-known advertisers turned out to be, fittingly enough, a literal wallet inspection operation.

All the wallet inspector talk seemed to hit a crescendo when X announced its digital wallet service; then, Musk’s team obtained access to the U.S. Treasury. The DOGE crew reportedly now has at their inexperienced fingertips data about Social Security numbers and banking information. They are effectively inspecting America’s wallet–and America’s top officials are just handing it over.

The wallet inspector meme makes for a devastating way to describe anyone too trusting of plainly false assurances, the people making those assurances, and the Homer-like observers who don’t quite seem to understand what is happening, much less mount any meaningful opposition. It’s the rhetorical embodiment of a freefall era where so many people in positions of authority seem to be openly running scams, and the people meant to protect everyone else are either also running scams, or are getting scammed themselves.

It’s wallet inspectors all the way down.