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The Wages of Hubris Are … ?
Tech information hasn’t had per week like final week since—perhaps?—the 2000 dotcom crash. FTX, the world’s second-biggest crypto alternate, went from $32 billion to bankrupt in about three days, and hackers took benefit of the chaos to steal lots of of tens of millions of {dollars}. Meta laid off 11,000 individuals, 13 p.c of its workforce, and that was only a tenth of all the opposite tech business layoffs this 12 months. And, Twitter, properly, I don’t must let you know about Twitter.
That is historical past repeating itself as tragedy and farce unexpectedly. We already know which scenes shall be within the films and TV sequence: Elon Musk carrying that sink into Twitter HQ, a Twitter supervisor vomiting into a trash can after being advised to fireplace lots of of individuals, polyamorous FTX founders cavorting of their penthouse within the Bahamas. There shall be books: Michael Lewis has been shadowing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for months, and Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Musk.
OK, however as soon as everybody has put away the 🍿, what is going to we’ve realized? Just a few issues have stood out to me within the torrent of incredulity:
- Isaacson in a TV interview in September speaking about one secret of Musk’s success: his capability to put aside empathy for his staff when it might intrude along with his imaginative and prescient.
- Investor and longtime acquaintance of Musk’s, Chris Sacca, in a revealing thread on how Musk’s inside circle has “change into more and more sycophantic and opportunistic,” because of which “the onerous reality is that he’s straight-up alone proper now and winging this.”
- Plus, those text messages launched just a few weeks in the past between Musk and numerous highly effective mates revealing precisely that stage of sycophancy.
- William MacAskill, the thinker (or, if you happen to favor, cult chief) of the Efficient Altruism motion, into which he recruited Bankman-Fried, implicitly acknowledging in a mournful thread that if you happen to inform people who the easiest way to do outsized good is to first amass outsized wealth, they could, idk, abuse that wealth?
- A fawning (and very lengthy) profile of Bankman-Fried posted in September by Sequoia Capital after which rapidly taken down—however fortunately preserved for ignominious posterity by the Web Archive—that exhibits off his huge charisma: “After my interview with SBF, I used to be satisfied: I used to be speaking to a future trillionaire. No matter mojo he labored on the companions at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had labored on me, too.”
- See additionally the mea culpa by the author who revealed an equally fawning profile in Fortune.
- Lastly, Mark Zuckerberg’s iron grip on Meta, through which he controls the vast majority of voting shares, is well-documented and is why no one challenged his choices, over years, to continue to grow the ranks of the corporate in pursuit of a succession of failed initiatives.
Ah, the value of energy and hubris! It’s one of many oldest tales within the ebook. However coming on the finish of a 12 months through which tech shares have taken a beating, a minimum of one op-ed author hopes this second will “mark the tip of the period of visionary, autocratic tech founders who ‘develop too shortly.’”