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Donor-advised funds are categorized by law as public charities, rather than private foundations, so they have no payout requirements and few disclosure requirements.

And wealthy residents of Silicon Valley are donating large sums to such funds

critics say that in part because of its structure as a warehouse of donor-advised funds, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has not had a positive impact on the community it is meant to serve. Some people I talked to say the foundation has had little interest in spending money, because its chief executive, Emmett Carson, who was placed on paid administrative leave after the Chronicle’s report, wanted it to be known that he had created one of the biggest foundations in the country. Carson was “aggressive” about trying to raise money, but “unaggressive about suggesting what clients would do with it,”

“Most of us in the local area have seen our support from the foundation go down and not up,” he said.

The amount of money going from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the nine-county Bay Area actually dropped in 2017 by 46 percent, even as the amount of money under management grew by 64 percent, to $13.5 billion

“They got so drunk on the idea of growth that they lost track of anything smacking of mission,” he said. It did not help perceptions that the foundation opened offices in New York and San Francisco at the same time local organizations were seeing donations drop.

The foundation now gives her organization some grants, but they don’t come from the donor-advised funds, she told me. “I haven’t really cracked the code of how to access those donor-advised funds,” she said. Her organization had been getting between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from United Way that it no longer gets, she said,

Rob Reich, the co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, set up a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as an experiment. He spent $5,000—the minimum amount accepted—and waited. He received almost no communication from the foundation, he told me. No emails or calls about potential nonprofits to give to, no information about whether the staff was out looking for good opportunities in the community, no data about how his money was being managed.

One year later, despite a booming stock market, his account was worth less than the $5,000 he had put in, and had not been used in any way in the community. His balance was lower because the foundation charges hefty fees to donors who keep their money there. “I was flabbergasted,” he told me. “I didn’t understand what I, as a donor, was getting for my fees.”

Though donors receive a big tax break for donating to donor-advised funds, the funds have no payout requirements, unlike private foundations, which are required to disperse 5 percent of their assets each year. With donor-advised funds, “there’s no urgency and no forced payout,”

he had met wealthy individuals who said they were setting up donor-advised funds so that their children could disperse the funds and learn about philanthropy—they had no intent to spend the money in their own lifetimes.

Fund managers also receive fees for the amount of money they have under management, which means they have little incentive to encourage people to spend the money in their accounts,

Transparency is also an issue. While foundations have to provide detailed information about where they give their money, donor-advised funds distributions are listed as gifts made from the entire charitable fund—like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation—rather than from individuals.

Donor-advised funds can also be set up anonymously, which makes it hard for nonprofits to engage with potential givers. They also don’t have websites or mission statements like private foundations do, which can make it hard for nonprofits to know what causes donors support.

Public charities—defined as organizations that receive a significant amount of their revenue from small donations—were saddled with less oversight, in part because Congress figured that their large number of donors would make sure they were spending their money well, Madoff said. But an attorney named Norman Sugarman, who represented the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, convinced the IRS to categorize a certain type of asset—charitable dollars placed in individually named accounts managed by a public charity—as donations to public, not private, foundations.

Donor-advised funds have been growing nationally as the amount of money made by the top 1 percent has grown: Contributions to donor-advised funds grew 15.1 percent in fiscal year 2016, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while overall charitable contributions grew only 1.4 percent that year

Six of the top 10 philanthropies in the country last year, in terms of the amount of nongovernmental money raised, were donor-advised funds,

In addition, those funds with high payout rates could just be giving to another donor-advised fund, rather than to a public charity, Madoff says. One-quarter of donor-advised fund sponsors distribute less than 1 percent of their assets in a year,

Groups that administer donor-advised funds defend their payout rate, saying distributions from donor-advised funds are around 14 percent of assets a year. But that number can be misleading, because one donor-advised fund could give out all its money, while many more could give out none, skewing the data.

Donor-advised funds are especially popular in places like Silicon Valley because they provide tax advantages for donating appreciated stock, which many start-up founders have but don’t necessarily want to pay huge taxes on

Donors get a tax break for the value of the appreciated stock at the time they donate it, which can also spare them hefty capital-gains taxes. “Anybody with a business interest can give their business interest before it goes public and save huge amounts of taxes,”

Often, people give to donor-advised funds right before a public event like an initial public offering, so they can avoid the capital-gains taxes they’d otherwise have to pay, and instead receive a tax deduction. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave $500 million in stock to the foundation in 2012, when Facebook held its initial public offering, and also donated $1 billion in stock in 2013

Wealthy donors can also donate real estate and deduct the value of real estate at the time of the donation—if they’d given to a private foundation, they’d only be able to deduct the donor’s basis value (typically the purchase price) of the real estate at the time they acquired it. The difference can be a huge amount of money in the hot market of California.

Intel, founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both physicists, began by building memory chips that were twice as fast as old ones. Sun Microsystems introduced a new kind of modular computer system, built by one of its founders, Andy Bechtolsheim. Their “big ideas” were expressed in physical products and grew out of their own technical expertise. In that light, Meraki, which came from Biswas’s work at M.I.T., can be seen as having its origins in the old guard. And it followed what was for decades the highway that connected academia to industry: Grad students researched technology, powerful advisers brokered deals, students dropped out to parlay their technologies into proprietary solutions, everyone reaped the profits. That implicit guarantee of academia’s place in entrepreneurship has since disappeared. Graduate students still drop out, but to start bike-sharing apps and become data scientists. That is, if they even make it to graduate school. The success of self-educated savants like Sean Parker, who founded Napster and became Facebook’s first president with no college education to speak of, set the template. Enstitute, a two-year apprenticeship, embeds high-school graduates in plum tech positions. Thiel Fellowships, financed by the PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, give $100,000 to people under 20 to forgo college and work on projects of their choosing.

Much of this precocity — or dilettantism, depending on your point of view — has been enabled by web technologies, by easy-to-use programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Node.js and by the explosion of application programming interfaces (A.P.I.s) that supply off-the-shelf solutions to entrepreneurs who used to have to write all their own code for features like a login system or an embedded map. Now anyone can do it, thanks to the Facebook login A.P.I. or the Google Maps A.P.I.

One of the more enterprising examples of these kinds of interfaces is the start-up Stripe, which sells A.P.I.s that enable businesses to process online payments. When Meraki first looked into taking credit cards online, according to Biswas, it was a monthslong project fraught with decisions about security and cryptography. “Now, with Stripe, it takes five minutes,” he said. “When you combine that with the ability to get a server in five minutes, with Rails and Twitter Bootstrap, you see that it has become infinitely easier for four people to get a start-up off the ground.”

The sense that it is no longer necessary to have particularly deep domain knowledge before founding your own start-up is real; that and the willingness of venture capitalists to finance Mark Zuckerberg look-alikes are changing the landscape of tech products. There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems

There’s a glass-half-full way of looking at this, of course: Tech hasn’t been pedestrianized — it’s been democratized. The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared

many of the hottest web start-ups are not novel, at least not in the sense that Apple’s Macintosh or Intel’s 4004 microprocessor were. The arc of tech parallels the arc from manufacturing to services. The Macintosh and the microprocessor were manufactured products. Some of the most celebrated innovations in technology have been manufactured products — the router, the graphics card, the floppy disk

One of Stripe’s founders rowed five seat in the boat I coxed freshman year in college; the other is his older brother. Among the employee profiles posted on its website, I count three of my former teaching fellows, a hiking leader, two crushes. Silicon Valley is an order of magnitude bigger than it was 30 years ago, but still, the start-up world is intimate and clubby, with top talent marshaled at elite universities and behemoths like Facebook and Google.

A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.

The latter source of frustration is the phenomenon of “the 10X engineer,” an engineer who is 10 times more productive than average. It’s a term that in its cockiness captures much of what’s good, bad and impossible about the valley. At the start-ups I visit, Friday afternoons devolve into bouts of boozing and Nerf-gun wars. Signing bonuses at Facebook are rumored to reach the six digits. In a landscape where a product may morph several times over the course of a funding round, talent — and the ability to attract it — has become one of the few stable metrics.

there is a surprising amount of angst in Silicon Valley. Which is probably inevitable when you put thousands of ambitious, talented young people together and tell them they’re god’s gift to technology. It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

San Francisco, which is steadily stealing the South Bay’s thunder. (“Sometime in the last two years, the epicenter of consumer technology in Silicon Valley has moved from University Ave. to SoMa,” Terrence Rohan, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures, told me

Both the geographic shift north and the increasingly short product cycles are things Jim attributes to the rise of Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.), a collection of servers owned and managed by Amazon that hosts data for nearly every start-up in the latest web ecosystem.Continue reading the main story

now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.”

This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures. There are no longer hectic six-week stretches that culminate in a release day followed by a lull. Every day is release day. You roll out new code continuously, and it’s this cycle that enables companies like Facebook, as its motto goes, to “move fast and break things.”

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the excitement I’ve been hinting at. Another part is prestige. Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app. “Highly concentrated pools of top talent are one of the rarest things you can find,” Biswas told me, “and I think people are really attracted to those environments.

These days, a new college graduate arriving in the valley is merely stepping into his existing network. He will have friends from summer internships, friends from school, friends from the ever-increasing collection of incubators and fellowships.

As tech valuations rise to truly crazy levels, the ramifications, financial and otherwise, of a job at a pre-I.P.O. company like Dropbox or even post-I.P.O. companies like Twitter are frequently life-changing. Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code.

Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks, which older engineers may have not laid eyes on for years.

He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”

If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so

When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.

it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,

Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else

he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”

The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over.

He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.

Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”

At the Alphabet talk, Mr. Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said that the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive

Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Mr. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.

It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”

this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”

He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”

Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Mr. Harari said

as he spoke about meditation — Mr. Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Mr. Harari’s devotion confers hero status.

He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.

Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Mr. Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”

The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.

Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.

This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”

On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”

“If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize … that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”

Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Mr. Harari’s projects. The director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Mr. Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.

Being gay, Mr. Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said

“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Mr. Harari added. “O.K., so maybe humankind is going to disappear — O.K., let’s just observe.”

They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”

By early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a “horizontal review,” an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies — but at that point, the bank’s days were numbered

The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed — but ignored the concerns.

Still, the extent of known issues at the bank raises questions about whether Fed bank examiners or the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington could have done more to force the institution to address weaknesses

“It’s a failure of supervision,” said Peter Conti-Brown, an expert in financial regulation and a Fed historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “The thing we don’t know is if it was a failure of supervisors.”

Typically, banks with fewer than $250 billion in assets are excluded from the most onerous parts of bank oversight — and that has been even more true since a “tailoring” law that passed in 2018 during the Trump administration and was put in place by the Fed in 2019. Those changes left smaller banks with less stringent rules.

Silicon Valley Bank was still below that threshold, and its collapse underlined that even banks that are not large enough to be deemed globally systemic can cause sweeping problems in the American banking system.

Some of the concerns center on the fact that the bank’s chief executive, Greg Becker, sat on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s board of directors until March 10. While board members do not play a role in bank supervision, the optics of the situation are bad.

“One of the most absurd aspects of the Silicon Valley bank failure is that its CEO was a director of the same body in charge of regulating it,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, wrote on Twitter on Saturday, announcing that he would be “introducing a bill to end this conflict of interest by banning big bank CEOs from serving on Fed boards.

Other worries center on whether Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, allowed too much deregulation during the Trump administration. Randal K. Quarles, who was the Fed’s vice chair for supervision from 2017 to 2021, carried out a 2018 regulatory rollback law in an expansive way that some onlookers at the time warned would weaken the banking system.

Mr. Powell typically defers to the Fed’s supervisory vice chair on regulatory matters, and he did not vote against those changes. Lael Brainard, then a Fed governor and now a top White House economic adviser, did vote against some of the tweaks — and flagged them as potentially dangerous in dissenting statements.

Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” said the speech was part of “a resurgence of millenarian thinking in Silicon Valley.” The dream of an extra-societal utopia grows in part out of a “naïve libertarianism” ascendant in the Valley, and in part out of older American cultist traditions dating as far back as the Pilgrims, he said.

Mr. Srinivasan cast entrepreneurs as a persecuted people who must flee to survive. The Valley, he argued, is taking over the rest of America’s traditional raisons d’être. Netflix and iTunes challenge Hollywood. Twitter and blogs challenge New York media. The Khan Academy and Coursera challenge Boston’s universities. Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory state personified by Washington.

His proposed solution is seceding from the society before the “backlash” against the Valley grows.

Some of the biggest names in the Valley have variously proposed building a Mars colony, an unregulated zone of experimentation on Earth or floating libertarian islands at sea.

“The best part is this,” he said. “The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out there.”

No Exit makes it very clear that the life of a startup founder is a miserable one, and that engineers are invariably happier when they’re working for a big company.

Financially, starting up a company in Silicon Valley makes very little sense. You have a very high chance (indeed, a certainty) of having to scrape by on a very low income in a very expensive city. At a time of your life when you should be out enjoying life and meeting friends and generally having lots of fun, you will instead be unhappily tethered to your laptop at all times. In return for sacrificing a six-figure salary elsewhere and general enjoyment of life, you’re given a lottery ticket: you get a minuscule chance of making untold millions of dollars.

So where does it come from, this intense Silicon Valley desire to buy the most expensive lottery ticket in the world?

The Silicon Valley trade is also pretty close to being zero-sum. Even on a purely financial basis, if you add up all the profits from successful investments, they barely cover the losses on all the unsuccessful ones. A few big-name angels and VCs can do OK for themselves, but in aggregate the industry of investing in startups does not make money.

Essentially the way that the startup ecosystem works is by taking the valuable labor of thousands of hopeful founders, and converting it into large amounts of capital for a tiny number of successes

On its face, the winners, here, are the people with the big successful exits. But after reading No Exit, a different conclusion presents itself. The real winners are the happy and well-paid engineers, enjoying their lives and their youth while working for great companies like Google. In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play.

Everything in American culture would lead one to think that it is easy to launch a new restaurant, hair salon, company, or fill in the blank. I wouldn’t go so far to say that those who do it have a false sense of entitlement – but there’s seemingly no sense of contentment in being a no. 2 or lower in a company.

most of the website or mobile app start-ups that you guys in the general media (I will lazily generalize like you all do and lump you all together) lazily or ignorantly refer to as “tech” or “silicon valley” are not founded by computer engineers. They are started by coders, which are a couple notches below computer engineers on the knowledge and experience scale. They are willing to forego a big steady paycheck because they are short on knowledge and experience, and are not usually “incredibly qualified engineers – in fact, they are mostly just qualified to work on mobile apps and economically unsustainable web start-ups. Their value to established companies that need to develop products that generate revenue and profits is questionable, at best.

I don’t know if you have ever worked for a very large multi-national company that compartmentalizes your job into little tasks so that your skills can be exploited for a few years, and then discarded when they are obsolete. Many big companies are poorly managed, and while they may offer stable employment in the short term, when the errors of their executives impose their costs on the company, the employees usually pay the price. And then what do they do? People who avoid working for large companies and seek the excitement of start-ups have a different value system than you and all those who would choose the illusion of job security.

after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats,

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

Some tech investors are also fuming over how Mr. Biden has handled foreign affairs and other issues.

Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.

Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.

“Tech, venture capital and Silicon Valley are looking at the current state of affairs and saying, ‘I’m not happy with either of those options,’” he said. “‘I can no longer count on Democrats to support tech issues, and I can no longer count on Republicans to support business issues.’”

Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would back any politician who supported “an optimistic technology-enabled future” and oppose any who did not. Andreessen Horowitz has donated $22 million to Fairshake, a political action group focused on supporting crypto-friendly lawmakers.

Venture investors are also networking with lawmakers in Washington at events like the Hill & Valley conference in March, organized by Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir, a tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel. At that event, tech executives and investors lobbied lawmakers against A.I. regulations and asked for more government spending to support the technology’s development in the United States.

This month, Mr. Helberg, who is married to Mr. Rabois, donated $1 million to the Trump campaign

Already, he says, elites in Silicon Valley are more connected to one another and to their counterparts around the globe than to non-techies in their midst or nearby. “My Stanford network connects to Harvard and Beijing more than [California’s] Central Valley,” says Mr. Srinivasan. Eventually, he argues, “there will be a recognition that if we don’t have control of the nation state, we should reduce the nation state’s power over us.”

“It’s crazy to me that people in Silicon Valley have no idea how half the country lives and is voting,” said Ben Ling, an investment partner at venture firm Khosla Ventures. Many “coastal elites” attribute the results “to just sexism or racism, without even trying to figure out why [people] wanted to vote for Trump.”

And yet, an all-out commitment to American-based manufacturing has not been on the business agenda of Silicon Valley or the political agenda of the United States. That omission, according to Mr. Grove, is a result of another “unquestioned truism”: “that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better.” To Mr. Grove, that belief was flawed.

The triumph of free-market principles over planned economies in the 20th century, he said, did not make those principles infallible or immutable.

There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”

Conditions have worsened in other ways. In 2010, one of the arguments against Mr. Grove’s critique was that exporting jobs did not matter as long as much of the corporate profits stayed in the United States. But just as American companies have bolstered their profits by exporting jobs, many now do so by shifting profits overseas through tax-avoidance maneuvers.

The result is a high-profit, low-prosperity nation. “All of us in business,” Mr. Grove wrote, “have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.”

There is no longer any room for teachers, medical technicians, firefighters or construction workers, who may drive two or more hours and sleep in their cars for an hour before work to avoid longer commutes.

Gardeners, cleaning people, babysitters and dog walkers cram into small apartments, sometimes 12 in two bedrooms, according to Marroquin.

In East Palo Alto, once a low-income community where many people of color lived, the median price of homes is $953,000. The school district has reported that more than half of its students are homeless, and some teachers commute more than two hours each way because they cannot find affordable local housing.

illionaires of Silicon Valley play real-life monopoly, buying up houses on their blocks and down the street for family, staff, art collections, or to hold political and philanthropic events.

Zuckerberg’s people, for instance, knocked on doors in his neighborhood and offered “well over the fair market value of the house, some would argue at double the value”, said Repka of DeLeon Reality, which did over $800m in sales last year. “He did it as a privacy buffer around his house.”

When the former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer throws a party at her Palo Alto house for hundreds of guests, residents brace for the delivery trucks, caterers, decorators, electricians, and valets. At Mayer’s annual Christmas party, a generator the size of a shipping container buzzes for days to maintain her ice skating rink.

For the vast majority of the workforce, “single-family homes have become untouchable”, said the prominent urban planner Peter Calthorpe, who grew up in Palo Alto.

“What’s this going to mean for future communities, if only totally affluent, young people can afford to move in?”

Nothing in his background seems to have brought him to this troubling point. Mr. Bechtolsheim was one of those who gave Silicon Valley its reputation as an engineer’s paradise, a place where getting rich was just something that happened by accident.

“He cared so much about making great technology that he would buy a house, not furnish it and sleep on a futon,” said Scott McNealy, who joined with Mr. Bechtolsheim four decades ago to create Sun Microsystems, a maker of computer workstations and servers that was a longtime tech powerhouse. “Money was not how he measured himself.”

researchers who analyze trading data say corporate executives broadly profit from confidential information. These executives try to avoid traditional insider trading restrictions by buying shares in economically linked firms, a phenomenon called “shadow trading.”

“There appears to be significant profits being made from shadow trading,” said Mihir N. Mehta, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Michigan and an author of a 2021 study in The Accounting Review that found “robust evidence” of the behavior. “The people doing it have a sense of entitlement or maybe just think, ‘I’m invincible.’”

He went to Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the mid-1970s and got to know the then-small programming community around the university. In the early 1980s, he, along with Mr. McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy, started Sun Microsystems as an outgrowth of a Stanford project. When Sun initially raised money, Mr. Bechtolsheim put his entire life savings — about $100,000 — into the company.

“You could end up losing all your money,” he was warned by the venture capitalists financing Sun. His response: “I see zero risk here.”

An impromptu demonstration was hastily arranged for 8 a.m., which Mr. Bechtolsheim cut short. He had seen enough, and besides, he had to get to the office. He gave them a check, and the deal was sealed, Mr. Levy wrote, “with as little fanfare as if he were grabbing a latte on the way to work.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin couldn’t deposit Mr. Bechtolsheim’s check for a month because Google did not have a bank account. When Google went public in 2004, that $100,000 investment was worth at least $1 billion.

It wasn’t the money that made the story famous, however. It was the way it confirmed one of Silicon Valley’s most cherished beliefs about itself: that its genius is so blindingly obvious, questions are superfluous.

The dot-com boom was a disorienting period for longtime Valley leaders whose interest in money was muted. Mr. Bechtolsheim’s Sun colleague Mr. Joy left Silicon Valley.

“There’s so much money around, it’s clouding a lot of people’s ethics,” Mr. Joy said in a 1999 oral history

Mr. Bechtolsheim didn’t leave. In 2008, he co-founded Arista, a Silicon Valley computer networking company that went public and now has 4,000 employees and a stock market value of $100 billion.

Mr. Bechtolsheim was chair of Arista’s board when an executive from another company called in 2019, according to the S.E.C. Arista and the other company, which was not named in court documents, had a history of sharing confidential information under nondisclosure agreements.

immediately after hanging up, the government said, he bought Acacia option contracts in the accounts of a close relative and a colleague. The next day, the deal was announced. Acacia shares jumped 35 percent.

Arista’s code of conduct states that “employees who possess material, nonpublic information gained through their work at Arista may not trade in Arista securities or the securities of another company to which the information pertains.”

Mr. Levy, the “In the Plex” author, said there were plenty of legal ways to make money in Silicon Valley. “Someone who is regarded as an influential funder and is very well connected gets nearly unlimited opportunities to make very desirable early investments,”

More broadly, some economists say, the lack of family-focused policies reflects the power imbalance between companies and workers in the American economy today. The share of economic output flowing to corporate profits has surged, while employee compensation has stagnated.

The technology industry is a striking example because it attracts some of the country’s smartest people, many of whom have far more bargaining power than most workers. Silicon Valley also has outsize cultural significance, as the face of American ingenuity and a magnet for global talent.

But it is also a place that often expects total commitment to work. That grows from the notion that in tech, unlike in other industries, companies become overnight successes, and believe their work is changing the world.

“People who give you millions of dollars for nothing but an idea at the very least expect your complete commitment to that idea,”

Start-ups are unlikely to have parental policies because they are more focused on growing as quickly as possible.

Though it’s off limits for interviewers to ask candidates whether they have children, tech companies use euphemisms to indicate that parents or older employees are not welcome, said a tech executive who would speak only anonymously. They say people are not a good “culture fit” and cannot “align on priorities” or make it in a “rapidly moving company.” The translation, he said: “People who are not exactly like us.”

“When people have kids, they have other priorities — and start-ups can be pretty brutal about not having other priorities,”

“Young people just have simpler lives,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a talk to would-be entrepreneurs in 2007, when he was 23. “We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”

In some ways, an aging Silicon Valley is beginning to look more like the rest of corporate America, where most workers have families. The challenge is retaining the youthful optimism that they can do the impossible — while also showing their employees that working and having families is realistic.

Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy.

Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.

For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.

Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”

Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise—to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election.

His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.

“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told me. He fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning. He believed somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.

He admits now that it was a bad bet.

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

eid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment

Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker.

“Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.

he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks.

He met Mark Zuckerberg, liked what he heard, and became Facebook’s first outside investor. Half a million dollars bought him 10 percent of the company, most of which he cashed out for about $1 billion in 2012.

Thiel made some poor investments, losing enormous sums by going long on the stock market in 2008, when it nose-dived, and then shorting the market in 2009, when it rallied

on the whole, he has done exceptionally well. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder, who agrees with Thiel on very little other than business, calls him “the world’s best venture investor.”

Thiel told me this is indeed his ambition, and he hinted that he may have achieved it.

He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine

He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity

Did his dream of eternal life trace to The Lord of the Rings?

He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.

More than anything, he longs to live forever.

Calling death a law of nature is, in his view, just an excuse for giving up. “It’s something we are told that demotivates us from trying harder,”

Thiel grew up reading a great deal of science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. But especially Tolkien; he has said that he read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least 10 times. Tolkien’s influence on his worldview is obvious: Middle-earth is an arena of struggle for ultimate power, largely without government, where extraordinary individuals rise to fulfill their destinies. Also, there are immortal elves who live apart from men in a magical sheltered valley.

But his dreams have always been much, much bigger than that.

Yes, Thiel said, perking up. “There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire” in Tolkien’s works. But you also have the elves.

How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”

During college, he co-founded The Stanford Review, gleefully throwing bombs at identity politics and the university’s diversity-minded reform of the curriculum. He co-wrote The Diversity Myth in 1995, a treatise against what he recently called the “craziness and silliness and stupidity and wickedness” of the left.

Thiel laid out a plan, for himself and others, “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” He wanted to create new spaces for personal freedom that governments could not reach

But something changed for Thiel in 2009

he people, he concluded, could not be trusted with important decisions. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote.

ven more notable one followed: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

By 2015, six years after declaring his intent to change the world from the private sector, Thiel began having second thoughts. He cut off funding for the Seasteading Institute—years of talk had yielded no practical progress–and turned to other forms of escape

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” he wrote. His manifesto has since become legendary in Silicon Valley, where his worldview is shared by other powerful men (and men hoping to be Peter Thiel).

Thiel’s investment in cryptocurrencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money “free from all government control and dilution

His decision to rescue Elon Musk’s struggling SpaceX in 2008—with a $20 million infusion that kept the company alive after three botched rocket launches—came with aspirations to promote space as an open frontier with “limitless possibility for escape from world politics

It was seasteading that became Thiel’s great philanthropic cause in the late aughts and early 2010s. The idea was to create autonomous microstates on platforms in international waters.

“There’s zero chance Peter Thiel would live on Sealand,” he said, noting that Thiel likes his comforts too much. (Thiel has mansions around the world and a private jet. Seal performed at his 2017 wedding, at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.)

As he built his companies and grew rich, he began pouring money into political causes and candidates—libertarian groups such as the Endorse Liberty super PAC, in addition to a wide range of conservative Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Cruz

Sam Altman, the former venture capitalist and now CEO of OpenAI, revealed in 2016 that in the event of global catastrophe, he and Thiel planned to wait it out in Thiel’s New Zealand hideaway.

When I asked Thiel about that scenario, he seemed embarrassed and deflected the question. He did not remember the arrangement as Altman did, he said. “Even framing it that way, though, makes it sound so ridiculous,” he told me. “If there is a real end of the world, there is no place to go.”

You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias

He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits.

Founders Fund, the venture-capital firm he established in 200

The fund, therefore, would invest in smart people solving hard problems “that really have the potential to change the world.”

This was not what Thiel wanted to be doing with his time. Bodegas and dog food were making him money, apparently, but he had set out to invest in transformational technology that would advance the state of human civilization.

He told me that he no longer dwells on democracy’s flaws, because he believes we Americans don’t have one. “We are not a democracy; we’re a republic,” he said. “We’re not even a republic; we’re a constitutional republic.”

“It was harder than it looked,” Thiel said. “I’m not actually involved in enough companies that are growing a lot, that are taking our civilization to the next level.”

Founders Fund has holdings in artificial intelligence, biotech, space exploration, and other cutting-edge fields. What bothers Thiel is that his companies are not taking enough big swings at big problems, or that they are striking out.

In at least 20 hours of logged face-to-face meetings with Buma, Thiel reported on what he believed to be a Chinese effort to take over a large venture-capital firm, discussed Russian involvement in Silicon Valley, and suggested that Jeffrey Epstein—a man he had met several times—was an Israeli intelligence operative. (Thiel told me he thinks Epstein “was probably entangled with Israeli military intelligence” but was more involved with “the U.S. deep state.”)

Buma, according to a source who has seen his reports, once asked Thiel why some of the extremely rich seemed so open to contacts with foreign governments. “And he said that they’re bored,” this source said. “‘They’re bored.’ And I actually believe it. I think it’s that simple. I think they’re just bored billionaires.”

he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

When I asked Thiel to explain his views on democracy, he dodged the question. “I always wonder whether people like you … use the word democracy when you like the results people have and use the word populism when you don’t like the results,” he told me. “If I’m characterized as more pro-populist than the elitist Atlantic is, then, in that sense, I’m more pro-democratic.”

“I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough of them to work.

He said he has no wish to change the American form of government, and then amended himself: “Or, you know, I don’t think it’s realistic for it to be radically changed.” Which is not at all the same thing.

When I asked what he thinks of Yarvin’s autocratic agenda, Thiel offered objections that sounded not so much principled as practical.

“I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it will look like Xi in China or Putin in Russia,” Thiel said, meaning a malign dictatorship. “It ultimately I don’t think will even be accelerationist on the science and technology side, to say nothing of what it will do for individual rights, civil liberties, things of that sort.”

Still, Thiel considers Yarvin an “interesting and powerful” historian

he always talks about is the New Deal and FDR in the 1930s and 1940s,” Thiel said. “And the heterodox take is that it was sort of a light form of fascism in the United States.”

Yarvin, Thiel said, argues that “you should embrace this sort of light form of fascism, and we should have a president who’s like FDR again.”

Did Thiel agree with Yarvin’s vision of fascism as a desirable governing model? Again, he dodged the question.

“That’s not a realistic political program,” he said, refusing to be drawn any further.

ooking back on Trump’s years in office, Thiel walked a careful line.

A number of things were said and done that Thiel did not approve of. Mistakes were made. But Thiel was not going to refashion himself a Never Trumper in retrospect.

“I have to somehow give the exact right answer, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m somewhat disenchanted,’” he told me. “But throwing him totally under the bus? That’s like, you know—I’ll get yelled at by Mr. Trump. And if I don’t throw him under the bus, that’s—but—somehow, I have to get the tone exactly right.”

Thiel knew, because he had read some of my previous work, that I think Trump’s gravest offense against the republic was his attempt to overthrow the election. I asked how he thought about it.

“Look, I don’t think the election was stolen,” he said. But then he tried to turn the discussion to past elections that might have been wrongly decided. Bush-Gore in 2000, for instanc

He came back to Trump’s attempt to prevent the transfer of power. “I’ll agree with you that it was not helpful,” he said.

there is another piece of the story, which Thiel reluctantly agreed to discuss

Puck reported that Democratic operatives had been digging for dirt on Thiel since before the 2022 midterm elections, conducting opposition research into his personal life with the express purpose of driving him out of politic

Among other things, the operatives are said to have interviewed a young model named Jeff Thomas, who told them he was having an affair with Thiel, and encouraged Thomas to talk to Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept. Grim did not publish a story during election season, as the opposition researchers hoped he would, but he wrote about Thiel’s affair in March, after Thomas died by suicide.

He deplored the dirt-digging operation, telling me in an email that “the nihilism afflicting American politics is even deeper than I knew.”

He also seemed bewildered by the passions he arouses on the left. “I don’t think they should hate me this much,”

he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

Nor did Thiel say what genuine diversity would mean. The quest for it, he said, is “very evil and it’s very silly.”

“the silliness is distracting us from very important things,” such as the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Whenever someone says ‘DEI,’” he exhorted the crowd, “just think ‘CCP.’”

Somebody asked, in the Q&A portion of the evening, whether Thiel thought the woke left was deliberately advancing Chinese Communist interests

“It’s always the difference between an agent and asset,” he said. “And an agent is someone who is working for the enemy in full mens rea. An asset is a useful idiot. So even if you ask the question ‘Is Bill Gates China’s top agent, or top asset, in the U.S.?’”—here the crowd started roaring—“does it really make a difference?”

About 10 years ago, Thiel told me, a fellow venture capitalist called to broach the question. Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, had made the Giving Pledge a couple of years before. Would Thiel be willing to talk with Gates about doing the same?

Thiel feels that giving his billions away would be too much like admitting he had done something wrong to acquire them

He also lacked sympathy for the impulse to spread resources from the privileged to those in need. When I mentioned the terrible poverty and inequality around the world, he said, “I think there are enough people working on that.”

besides, a different cause moves him far more.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by.

Then his body will be cooled to –196 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. After slipping into a double-walled, vacuum-insulated metal coffin, alongside (so far) 222 other corpsicles, “the patient is now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years,” Alcor literature explains.

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

I wondered how much Thiel had thought through the implications for society of extreme longevity. The population would grow exponentially. Resources would not. Where would everyone live? What would they do for work? What would they eat and drink? Or—let’s face it—would a thousand-year life span be limited to men and women of extreme wealth?

“Well, I maybe self-serve,” he said, perhaps understating the point, “but I worry more about stagnation than about inequality.”

Thiel is not alone among his Silicon Valley peers in his obsession with immortality. Oracle’s Larry Ellison has described mortality as “incomprehensible.” Google’s Sergey Brin aspires to “cure death.” Dmitry Itskov, a leading tech entrepreneur in Russia, has said he hopes to live to 10,000.

. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”

You haven’t told your husband? Wouldn’t you want him to sign up alongside you?“I mean, I will think about that,” he said, sounding rattled. “I will think—I have not thought about that.”

No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

Facebook's success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon Valley is over

But with the web, “all of the sudden we began moving to a market where first mover advantage became enormous,” he said. Connection speeds were growing faster, Americans were starting to shop online, and multiplying e-commerce sites fought gladiatorial battles to control most every area of spending.

If the dawn of the start-up era meant that consumer-oriented ideas were becoming more important than proprietary technology, he asked himself aloud, shouldn’t more women have flooded in?

“The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.”

David Sacks, on the other hand, was unmarried and unencumbered, and in 1999 he left politics, his law degree and a job at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to join his Stanford Review friends at a technology start-up, because of “the desire to live on the edge, to fight an epic battle, to experience in a very diluted way what previous generations must have felt as they prepared to go to war,” he wrote at the time. For his generation, he wrote, “instead of violence, unbridled capitalism has become the preferred vehicle for channeling their energy, intellect and aggression.”

his lack of social grace became an asset, according to Mr. Thiel and other former colleagues. He did not waste time on meetings that seemed pointless, and he bluntly insisted that the engineers whittle an eight-page PayPal registration process down to one.

But those debates did a great deal for Mr. Sacks. After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published “The Diversity Myth,” a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review.

he and Mr. Thiel now had a setting in which to try out their ideas about diversity and meritocracy. “In the start-up crucible, performing is all that matters,” Mr. Sacks wrote about that time. He wanted to give all job applicants tests of cognitive ability, according to his colleague Keith Rabois, and when the company searched for a new chief executive, one of the requirements was an I.Q. of 160 — genius level.

intentionally or not, he stated something many people quietly believed: The same thing that made Silicon Valley phenomenally successful also kept it homogeneous, and start-ups had an almost inevitable like-with-like quality.

The kind of common ground shared by the early PayPal leaders “is always the critical ingredient on the founding teams,” Mr. Thiel said in an interview. “You have these great friendships that were built over some period of time. Silicon Valley flows out of deep relationships that people have built. That’s the structural reality.”

Another woman from the class of 1994 was quoted in the Fortune article: Trae Vassallo, who was Traci Neist when she built the taco-eating machine all those years ago, attended Stanford Business School with Ms. Herrin and Ms. Bianchini, co-founded a mobile device company, and then joined Kleiner Perkins, a premier venture capital firm.

The success of the struggle to create PayPal, and its eventual sale price, gave the men a new power: the knowledge to create new companies and the ability to fund their own and one another’s. Billion-dollar start-ups had been rare. But in the next few years, the so-called PayPal Mafia went on to found seven companies that reached blockbuster scale, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp and a business-messaging service called Yammer, founded by Mr. Sacks and sold a few years later to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

Since 1999, the number of female partners in venture capital has declined by nearly half, from 10 percent to 6 percent, according to a recent Babson College study.

in early 2014, Ms. Vassallo was quietly let go. The firm was downsizing over all, especially in green technology, one of Ms. Vassallo’s specialties, and men were shown the exit as well. But in interviews, several former colleagues said it was far from an easy environment for women, with all-male outings and fierce internal competition for who got which board seat — meaning internal credit — for each company, not to mention a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a female junior partner, scheduled for trial in early 2015.

They also said that Ms. Vassallo, earnest and so technical that she started a robotics program at a local girls’ school, had not been as forceful, or as adept a politician, as some of her male peers.

Less than 10 years after graduation, he and Mr. Thiel had been transformed from outcasts into favorites with a reputation for seeing the future. Far from the only libertarians in Silicon Valley, they had finally found an environment that meshed perfectly with their desire for unfettered competition and freedom from constraints. The money they made seemed like vindication of their ideas.

As classmates started conversations with greetings like “How’s your fund?” some of those who did not work in technology joked that they felt like chumps. The Stanford campus had gone computer science crazy, with the majority of students taking programming courses. A career in technology didn’t feel like a risk anymore — it felt like a wise bet, said Jennifer Widom, a programming professor turned engineering dean. Computer science “is a degree that guarantees you a future, regardless of what form you decide to take it in,” she said.

The nature of start-ups was shifting again, too, this time largely in women’s favor. From servers onward, many components could be inexpensively licensed instead of custom-built. Founders could turn to a multiplying array of investment sources, meaning they no longer had to be supplicants at a handful of male-run venture firms. The promise that the Internet would be a leveler was finally becoming a bit more fulfilled.

The frenzy had an unlikely effect on the some members of the Stanford Review group: They were becoming cheerleaders for women in technology, not for ideological reasons, but for market-based ones.

Like many others, he was finding that the biggest obstacle to starting new companies was a dearth of technical talent so severe they worried it would hinder innovation.

The real surprise of the reunion weekend, however, was that more of the women in the class of ’94 were finally becoming entrepreneurs, later and on a smaller scale than many of the men, but founders nonetheless.

The rhythms of their lives and the technology industry were finally clicking: Companies were becoming easier to start just as their children were becoming more self-sufficient, and they did not want to miss another chance.

His newfound interest in cars and racing, he said, was in some ways connected to his interest in tech.

“It’s a fiddly technological skill that you can always improve on,” Mr. Schachter said. “The same kind of guy who might be upgrading the video card on their computer for better performance might also be upgrading their car.” There’s also the visceral thrill. “When you make software, it’s an unreal product,” he said. “Building something physical is attractive in different ways.”

Then there’s the fact that cars are becoming much more like computers. Racecars now carry something like an automotive Fitbit, sophisticated sensors that precisely measure just about everything that’s happening on the track, from G-force to where drivers are braking and accelerating. All this data can be tracked and analyzed, turning racing into a sport of empiricism as much as of instinct.

At some point during every conversation I had with a tech guy who is interested in racing, there would come an awkward moment in which he would ask me not to paint him as an extravagant, sexist cretin. Mr. Schachter told me, “Try to tone down the rich guy hobby thing.

Mr. Bonforte said that many of his friends preferred to stay silent about racing because “the things that make us smell like the 1 percent, we’re very nervous about.” He added that while he has invited several women to come to the track, none had accepted his offer. The rise of a new boys’ club in Silicon Valley — one that was apparently leading to new deals and other business prizes — was “a totally valid concern,

Mr. Schachter pointed out that the most popular car for racing enthusiasts is a Mazda Miata, older models of which sell for less than $5,000. Renting a car for a day on the track costs a few hundred.

One reason this has recently become an issue could be that Silicon Valley is aging. There are, of course, many established companies with older employees, but many people who work at the hot companies of the web era are now also becoming parents. And start-ups stay private for longer periods now, meaning employees work at them longer before cashing out.

Tech companies also employ a disproportionately small number of women — one-third of employees at many companies, and often less than one-fifth of technical employees. Over all, parenthood affects women’s careers more substantially than men’s, and women tend to be the ones who ask for family-friendly policies at work like paid leave or flex time.

One symbol of the cultural change in tech, fair or not, is the criticism of executives who seem to prioritize work over family. That happened to Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, when she announced she would take only a very short leave after having twins.

“Bro culture is a dynamic that’s been creating men-only environments in their most toxic form by encouraging bad behaviors, from excessive drinking to heavy sexualized talk, that excludes women and any person who doesn’t support those behaviors,” Ms. Cooper says.

She adds that it isn’t just women whom bro culture excludes. It’s anyone who doesn’t want to participate in these kinds of behaviors. “Very few people enjoy those things, but they don’t want to stand up to the popular crowd making the rules,” she says. “I like beer pong as much as the next person, but I don’t want to do it at work. “

Perhaps the biggest efforts involve separating work from alcohol. Stories abound in Silicon Valley about networking events that happen late into the night at alcohol- and drug-fueled parties

“We make sure the activities we do within the company and with the founders are gender-neutral,” Ms. Hebb says. “We aren’t doing whiskey drinking and shooting. We’ll do a scavenger hunt, or a hike, which is actually a better way to get to know people than over drinks. Is a scavenger hunt less bro-ey than drinks? It’s different, and we think that relates to a broader group of people who have felt excluded from a singular way of networking

In 2017, Pipeline Angels announced an alcohol-free policy. It came about when Pipeline Angels’ founder, Natalia Oberti Noguera, attended a tech conference where the host announced an impromptu “drunk talk” on stage. It’s a fairly common tactic in Silicon Valley, with the idea being that a volunteer from the audience will drink a lot and then give a talk in the hopes that alcohol will make that person more vulnerable and more forthcoming.

“Do you know who volunteered to give the drunk talk? A white guy,” Ms. Oberti Noguera says. She didn’t see that as surprising given the potential reputational risks of getting drunk for someone other than a white man.

“We’re already vulnerable,” she says. “It’s not safe in terms of our reputation for a woman, a man of color or a nonbinary person to get drunk and give a drunk talk at a professional event. And so I thought I can take someone else’s mistake and make it a best practice. Now all our events, including meals and evening receptions, are alcohol-free.”

“Something like 90% of VC investors are men,” Ms. Nelson says. “Only 2% of VC dollars go to women. That’s the definition of bro culture—men supporting men, opening doors for one another and making those connections.”

“We’re opening doors for people that weren’t open before,” she says. “You can really have whatever kind of culture you want. It’s up to us to determine what that is.”

Juul is the logical extension of the Silicon Valley growth-hacking playbook: Design a flawless product, add a dopamine response, stir in some influencers and watch your product, game or app go viral.

Consider the outcry last week when TechCrunch reported that Facebook had been paying people (including teens) $20 a month to download an app that monitors a user’s mobile and web activity. Apple, long a privacy advocate and favored troll of Facebook, reacted swiftly by cutting off “Facebook Research” and the company’s internal apps. Tech Twitter, however, seemed largely perplexed: In the future, won’t we all sell our data rather than give it away for free?

If Silicon Valley was once converging on a moral cohesion of sorts — where progressive values and wokemanship acted as a loose ethical framework — it’s now becoming harder to avoid the varying ethical debates concerning privacy, addiction and growing geopolitical discord.

For the virtuous founders avoiding addictive products and invasive data-gathering, even they have to worry about who’s getting on their equity ownership table.

founders have to wonder whether that seemingly diverse venture capital fund is backed by regimes where women, minorities and dissidents are killed for expressing themselves.

of course, the morality of a company often depends on the morality of the people in charge

Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.

It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty

Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.

once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?

Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’

Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.

Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us

there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.

The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage

In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now;

simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality

Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground

Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one

What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.