June 18, 2011
With a few notable exceptions, Silicon Valley’s rising young stars are rejecting the traditional symbols of status: fast cars, yachts, luxury homes. To make their mark, they’re putting their wealth into social causes and start-up ventures. At 27, Dustin Moskovitz is the world’s youngest billionaire, according to Forbes. He was born eight days after his Harvard College roommate Mark Zuckerberg, with whom he founded Facebook. Moskovitz could afford any home he wanted, but he chose a condo in San Francisco. He bikes to work at his tiny start-up, Asana, which is making project management software for businesses. He leaves his Volkswagen R32 hatchback in the garage. He says he flies coach, and he’s socking away money to fund his philanthropic foundation. Like Zuckerberg, he has pledged to give away his wealth during his lifetime. Zuckerberg is another billionaire living below his means. For years, he crashed in a tiny apartment with a mattress on the floor and dial-up Internet access. He recently bought his first house in Palo Alto for $7 million, a fraction of what he could afford. Zuckerberg, who has listed “minimalism” and “eliminating desire” as interests on his Facebook profile, drives an Acura. His one major outlay: Last year he donated $100 million to help improve public schools in Newark, N.J., among the country’s worst-performing school systems. Skeptics may wonder whether all this conspicuous self-denial is scripted. Tech titans know they score public relations points by showing a common touch — particularly in austere times. But the evidence suggests that it’s not an act, according to Alice Marwick, a researcher with Microsoft Corp. whose New York University doctoral dissertation in media studies was about social status among the Internet set. It’s not that this new generation of tech entrepreneurs doesn’t seek status, Marwick said. They just seek it in different ways. “This is not a community that values good looks, visible wealth or having a hot body. Those are not the ways that they distinguish high status from low status,” Marwick said. “Technology millionaires don’t hobnob with celebrities or buy a fancy car. They travel to Thailand or they fund an incubator. These things are just as expensive, but that’s the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind, not materials.” The hacker ethos is also classically male. “Being concerned with appearance, shopping for clothes and decorating your house are feminine values. Tech millionaires see that type of spending as silly and frivolous,” Marwick said. Silicon Valley measures achievement by what entrepreneurs build, not what they buy, but wealth does have its privileges. Patzer may have a television that is so old it can’t stream Apple TV, a Christmas gift that sits unopened on the floor. But he did shell out $25,000 to spend a week celebrating his 30th birthday with friends aboard a catamaran yacht in the British Virgin Islands, and he’s paying for his younger brother to get a degree in computer science. That was not the prevailing sentiment during the tech boom of the ’90s, which ushered in a period of conspicuous indulgence. Instant millionaires bought Lamborghini sports cars and tore down small houses to build mansions. Today’s entrepreneurs who grew up in the shadow of that boom’s collapse say they learned from it. Kevin Hartz, 41, founder and CEO of the online ticketing company Eventbrite, says this time around, entrepreneurs are taking a more sensible approach to managing their businesses and their lives. “It would be a contradiction for me to watch every penny at my company and then turn around and buy a $5,000 bottle of wine,” Hartz said. One reason many tech prodigies avoid living large is that it takes time to adjust to a sudden increase in wealth, said Edward Wolff, an economics professor at New York University who studies income and wealth. The newly rich don’t know how long their good fortune will last, so they’re cautious, he said. Kevin Rose, the 34-year-old founder of Digg, said he never bought into the hype, though he did buy a sports car (he won’t say what kind) before realizing that extravagant spending “leads nowhere.” He’s now working on a start-up called Milk and investing in what he hopes will be the next generation of hot companies. He spends weekends watching sports and eating home-cooked meals in his San Francisco condo with his girlfriend and their dog, a Labradoodle named Toaster. Rose is selling the sports car and now gets around in a Mini Cooper. “I know guys who have crazy boats and planes, and that’s maybe something you do when you retire. But I don’t want to retire,” Rose said. “I don’t feel like I have made it. Internally, I feel I have much to prove.” ____________________________________________ Yeah, this is all bullshit. The title of the article clues us in to the underlying truth of the matter, that all these supposedly philanthropic works are at best status symbols and really just gigantic ego trips by the young, wealthy, and socially awkward. Just because they’re withdrawn and not physically threatening doesn’t mean they’re any more enlightened than the general public. As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley, I’m familiar with the reverse snobbery of the region’s nerds. They profess to value more elevated intellectual pursuits, shunning the conventionally good-looking and prestigious as frivolous, while splashing out on their own forms of luxury as outlined here. While they’ve traded in the BMWs and Audis that used to be the thing that some engineer would spend his first paycheck on, I fail to see this as a sign of virtue. Just look at the dysfunctional nature of the region: the lousy public transit, the antisocial urban environment with so few public places to build community, the omnipresent NIMBYism and lack of neighborliness that this selfish culture breeds. So they reinvest in new startups to do what? To make even more money: a perfectly worthy goal, but let’s not pretend that it’s a public service. So they put huge sums of money aside for their own philanthropic foundations; these are still going to be entities under their control, moving resources and people around at their command. So a notorious douche like Zuckerberg throws millions of dollars at a problem hoping to get quick recognition for his generosity without addressing the real problems, structural and cultural, that face our educational system; how much good is that going to do, and how much publicity and goodwill is he getting out of that? In the end, these people are still as venal and viciously competitive as anyone else while being much less good looking on average.
