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The Wages of Hubris Are … ?
Tech information hasn’t had per week like final week since—possibly?—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 hundreds of millions of dollars. Meta laid off 11,000 individuals, 13 % of its workforce, and that was only a tenth of all the opposite tech industry layoffs this yr. And, Twitter, nicely, I don’t need to tell you 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 fireside a whole lot 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 got 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 potential to set aside empathy for his employees 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 internal circle has “change into more and more sycophantic and opportunistic,” because of which “the onerous fact is that he’s straight-up alone proper now and winging this.”
- Plus, those text messages launched a couple of weeks in the past between Musk and numerous highly effective buddies revealing precisely that stage of sycophancy.
- William MacAskill, the thinker (or, in the event you favor, cult chief) of the Efficient Altruism motion, into which he recruited Bankman-Fried, implicitly acknowledging in a mournful thread that in the event you inform people who one of the best ways to do outsized good is to first amass outsized wealth, they could, idk, abuse that wealth?
- A fawning (and intensely lengthy) profile of Bankman-Fried posted in September by Sequoia Capital after which unexpectedly 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, during which he controls the vast majority of voting shares, is well-documented and is why no one challenged his selections, over years, to continue to grow the ranks of the corporate in pursuit of a succession of failed tasks.
Ah, the worth of energy and hubris! It’s one of many oldest tales within the e book. However coming on the finish of a yr during which tech shares have taken a beating, a minimum of one op-ed author hopes this moment will “mark the top of the period of visionary, autocratic tech founders who ‘develop too rapidly.’”
