Tyra Banks Launches Substack After Wiping Social Media
Tyra Banks has deleted her Instagram and TikTok posts and launched a Substack newsletter called «The World of Too Much,» which she announced live at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. The model-turned-business mogul says she felt constrained by social media algorithms and wanted a space to write freely.
Tyra Banks has wiped her Instagram and TikTok accounts and launched a Substack newsletter called «The World of Too Much,» which she unveiled live onstage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. The move marks the model-turned-business mogul's return to the internet after she deleted all of her posts on the two platforms.
Banks told the festival crowd that social media had become creatively stifling. «I felt constrained,» she said. «I felt like I needed to post what was gonna hit the algorithm.» That pressure, she explained, left little room for the kind of freewheeling imagination she wanted to exercise. Her newsletter, which she describes as «the amusement park of my mind,» will reveal «one land at a time» with each new edition.
The pop culture icon said she will write every word herself, with no ghostwriters involved. According to Banks, the process brings her the same joy as a trip to Disney World. «I write real crazy,» she said. She recalled running her writing through an AI detection tool, which concluded that roughly 60 percent of it looked machine-generated. Banks scoffed at the result, saying she knows how to write «just like a goddamn robot, if not better.»
Writing and world-building are not new pursuits for Banks. Since her modeling days, she has founded Bankable Productions, published a young adult novel, attended Harvard Business School, and opened Smize and Dream, a boutique ice cream shop in Australia. Those ventures served as creative sandboxes. For her ice cream brand, she invented an alter ego named Santa Smize, complete with an elaborate backstory involving the South Pole, a friendship with Santa Claus, a cookie dough recipe, an avalanche, a hijacked sleigh, and a mission to spread propaganda to children and steal spoons from their houses. «I love to create worlds,» Banks explained.
That impulse also drove her to write a dystopian novel, «Modelland,» loosely based on her own history and published in 2010. The 576-page book was described as «Harry Potter meets Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, set in the modeling industry.» Her original draft ran 1,000 pages. «I was creating IP,» she joked. But the book flopped. «The book was too damn long,» Banks admitted. «I was depressed about that. I thought it would be my next chapter.»
Fifteen years later, the novel found an unexpected second life. Banks had released a promotional music track for the book, and years afterward a TikTok user reposted it with the caption, «Tyra Banks just wrote the worst song in the history of the universe.» The post went viral, and fans soon discovered she had written a book as well. With the novel no longer in print, old copies began selling for $2,000 on eBay. Cosplayers, themed escape rooms, and a stage play followed.
Banks said the saga taught her a few lessons. «Looking at the book now, I should have listened to my editor, because my book should have been 300 pages,» she said. «Listen to the experts. If you're in Y Combinator or something, listen to them, child.» Still, she argued for a hybrid approach that leaves room for an entrepreneur's gut feeling. Perhaps the book did not take off at first because «a lot of the things that I do are too early,» she said. «I don't know how to not be too early. And I often feel like people try to squash me to be like everyone else.»
She does not want that spark extinguished. «I do think that if I listen to them, I would have a higher net worth,» Banks said. «But then, I would be worth less.»
