Eventually, Lee reportedly dropped out of high school and was homeschooled.
A marketing company, Breakr, said it was responsible for engineering Lee’s viral moment, but everyone involved denied knowing the company (which had around 1,200 Twitter followers at the time) existed. , and BuzzFeed reported a glaring lack of evidence.
Two weeks after the tweet aired, Lee told USA Today that “the whole #AlexFromTarget thing is getting a little old.” He reportedly tried to use his platform to direct donations to “JustLove International”, a children’s nonprofit that his mother and psychologist Marci Fooks helped found. The organization no longer seems to be operational.
“I’ve been in the house the whole time,” Lee told the NYT after appearing on “Ellen.” “I’m a little scared to go out in public.”
The opportunities presented to Lee eventually led him to quit school. “I had to drop out of high school after going on the ‘Ellen Show,'” he reportedly told D-14, according to a 2021 Medium post by writer Will Leitch. “In Texas you can only miss ten days of school before you skip school and you have to go to court. So I had to go to court because I was missing school so much because of the plane to Los Angeles and all that.”
“Once I started homeschooling I had the freedom to go anywhere, so after that it all started to go crazy.”