A founder just filed his entire decade under 'looksmaxxing and wealthmaxxing'

At 11:07 UTC on Monday, Peer Richelsen — co-founder of Cal.com, the open-source scheduling company, 37.6K followers, bio reading “i make time” — posted a set of photos of himself with the caption “L’Oreal or Mens Health?” The replies did what replies do: a Thor joke, a Calvin Klein joke, three reaction GIFs.

Nine hours later he quote-posted himself with a different caption.

That’s the whole post. No scare quotes. No “as the kids say.” No paragraph of context explaining that he’s aware of where the word comes from. A founder used looksmaxxing the way you’d use cardio — as the ordinary name for a thing he has been doing on purpose since 2016.

The second word is the story

Here’s the part we’d flag on any other desk: the first coinage is unremarkable now. We’ve logged the ladder — the Pentagon, Elon, the Wall Street Journal. Looksmaxxing arriving in a founder’s mouth in 2026 is a data point, not a shock.

Wealthmaxxing is the interesting one, because it barely exists.

Search the bare term and the top results are scattered across months — July 5, June 12, April 20 — none of them large. There is no wealthmaxxing community, no subreddit rivalry, no chart-posting methodology. It isn’t a movement. It’s a grammatical convenience: Richelsen needed a second noun to sit beside the first one, and the suffix supplied it instantly, because the suffix now supplies anything you ask it for. He didn’t reach for a word that existed. He conjugated one.

That’s what a language looks like once it stops being a subculture marker and becomes infrastructure. You don’t have to have heard “wealthmaxxing” before to know exactly what it means.

The doctrine, stated plainly

If you want the theory that makes the pairing feel natural, it was posted three weeks earlier by Rajarshi Shome, in the flattest possible terms:

Looks → money → network, presented as a pipeline with no valve in between. That post did 14.4K views and 172 likes — modest numbers, and worth stating plainly rather than inflating, because the claim isn’t that it went viral. The claim is that it’s the load-bearing belief underneath a caption a founder wrote without needing to explain himself. The looksmaxxing vertical is where the appearance half lives; moneymaxxing is the older, more respectable half; statusmaxxing is the part nobody admits to. Richelsen’s post welds the first two into one ten-year sentence.

The honest read

Some things we won’t pretend to know. We have two photos and a caption; we don’t know what “looksmaxxing” meant in practice for him across a decade — gym and haircut, or something further along the menu. He hasn’t said, and we’re not going to reverse-engineer a stranger’s face for content. The word covers an enormous range, which is exactly why it travels so well.

What’s verifiable is smaller and more interesting: a man who runs a scheduling company summarised ten years of his life in two maxxes, one of which is not really a word yet, and 74,802 people scrolled past it without needing a footnote.

Meanwhile, in the same three-day sweep window: an architecture academic describing apartment blocks in Tehran as “arch-maxxing and brick-maxxing” to 68K views. Different field, same reflex. Nobody is announcing the suffix anymore. They’re just building with it.

The forums invented a vocabulary for the self-improvement project that has always existed — the one you can see racked up, four rows deep, in a 1904 model gymnasium exhibit. The equipment was already there. What’s new is that the people using it finally have a word for what they’re doing, and it fits on a caption.