Kyle Cooke has spent his entire adult life building things, some that worked, some that nearly sank him. He is best known as one of the original cast members of Bravo’s Summer House, but the show has always been a backdrop to his actual ambition: turning himself into a beverage entrepreneur. His run on The Traitors Season 1 was a brief, sharp detour, one where his read on another player’s lie became one of the game’s more consequential moments, even though it cost him his own spot in the process.
Before any of that, Cooke was a business-school kid with a string of ventures behind him, most of which never made it onto television.
Building a Résumé Before Reality TV
Cooke was born on August 4, 1982, in Baltimore, Maryland, and earned an MBA from Babson College in 2011. Before Summer House, he founded Nightjockey, a New York City company built around nightlife and restaurant management technology. He later worked at ZocDoc pursuing sales targets for the healthcare scheduling company, then moved to Dallas in 2014 to co-found and advise a business called Blown Away. None of it made him famous. Summer House did that, and he met co-star Amanda Batula around the time the show began filming.
Founding Loverboy
In 2018, Cooke put $100,000 of his own money into launching Loverboy, a canned hard tea and cocktail brand, while he was still filming Summer House full time. The brand grew fast by beverage-startup standards, expanding beyond hard tea into spritzes and canned cocktails, and at one point reached an estimated $16 million in annual sales working with more than 150 distributors across 44 states. Its valuation was pegged at roughly $38 million during that stretch, turning Cooke from a cable-TV personality with a side hustle into a genuine beverage-industry founder.
That growth came with debt attached to it. Cooke personally guaranteed a $4.2 million SBA loan to keep the company funded, and by 2025 and into 2026 he was speaking publicly about how precarious things had become: a single month where Loverboy lost $175,000, roughly $50,000 in monthly loan payments to cover, and more than $500,000 of his own money poured back in just to make payroll. He has said he stopped taking a salary to stretch the company’s cash reserves and has been in talks with potential partners about selling a stake in the business.
Catching a Lie on The Traitors
On The Traitors, Cooke was cast as a Faithful and quickly earned a reputation as one of the sharpest social read players in the house. After Ryan Lochte was murdered in Episode 5, Cooke picked apart a story Cody Calafiore told him, a lie that didn’t hold up and helped expose Calafiore as a Traitor. It was one of the game’s better pieces of detective work. It didn’t save him, though: Cooke was banished that same episode, finishing 13th of 20.
Marriage and Life Now
Cooke married Batula in 2022 after the two became one of Summer House’s longest-running couples on camera. Reports in 2025 pointed to strain in the marriage, coinciding with the same period Cooke was publicly airing Loverboy’s financial troubles. Between the brand’s cash crunch and his personal life under a magnifying glass, Cooke has kept talking about both rather than going quiet, treating the mess as material the same way Summer House always has.