I’m searching for the word that means sellout, or maybe it means the action of selling out. I couldn’t find it on a thesaurus. It’s a bit of an urbandictionary type of word, commonly used to describe disingenuous grifters.
example sentence usage (although I can’t remember if it’s a verb, noun, or adjective):
That guy really panders to his audience for money. He is a sellout. Yeah, he’s a _____.
synonyms: grifter, sellout, panderer
Best Answer
Such a disingenuous fame chaser might be referred to as either a social climber or a clout chaser. The former is probably a more widely accepted term; the latter is more of a slang term, but also more specifically disingenuous.
Merriam Webster defines "social climber" as:
with an example of "At first glance, this version of Marion echoes the talentless social climber Susan Alexander, Charles Foster Kane’s mistress and second wife in Citizen Kane, widely believed to have been based on her."
Oxford (via Lexico) defines it as:
"Clout chaser" doesn't show up in any standard dictionaries, but it's fairly commonly used (especially in the American rap music industry), with over 250k hits on Google Search.
It's defined by Slangit as:
and by Urban Dictionary (whose definitions one should generally take with a grain of salt, hence mentioning it second) as: