Oh, yeah, a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, and what’s shakin’ from the tree looks pretty goddamn gamy these days, starting with Elon Musk, who’s been giving an excellent impression of the world’s richest 13-year-old for some time now, but recently upped the ante by about a 1000 percent, half destroying the company he just bought for $44 billion, an enterprise that very likely started as a joke, a joke for which he was never able to supply the requisite punchline.
Mr. Musk, if he is capable of gratitude, which, OK, I strongly doubt, must be feeling more than a little of that to Sam Bankman-Fried, who gives a very good impression of looking like a goddamn hippie, for literally blowing up his $30 billion, change the world company FTX (meaning, apparently, “Futures Exchange”).
Neither man, I suspect, has time to feel much sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes, looking just a little bit scatter-brained these days (I mean, who does her hair? Amirite?), though facing more than 11 years in the slam might do that to you, all for “creating” a $9 billion change the world juggernaut than ran for more than a decade on nothing more than hot air.
One of these—Elon Musk—is not like the rest. Musk is a genuine mountain-mover, creating out of nothing both a seriously bad ass car company and a seriously bad ass rocket ship company. But, after that, it seems, he ran out of mountains. Boredom has a way of turning bad asses into assholes, and Elon, well, the man does go big.
I frankly don’t know much about either FTX or Twitter, though I certainly feel sorry for the people whose lives have been upended by the massive irresponsibility of their bosses, but I do know a fair amount about Elizabeth Holmes, thanks to both the excellent Hulu bio-series The Dropout and the book on which it was more or less based, Bad Blood, by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who broke the story of the Theranos hustle, and remain amazed that she could string along serious A list heavyweights like George Schultz, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, Henry Kissinger, and, well, a host of others, for more than a decade, pushing a machine, “Edison”, that never worked. More than that, her entirely self-created street cred allowed her to buy high end, bad ass, winning through intimidation legal representation from super lawyer David Bois to humiliate, threaten, and bankrupt any Theranos employee who might be inclined to, you know, tell the truth about Lizzie’s endless scams, paying Bois off in company stock, giving him a massive incentive to keep Theranos stock heading upwards no matter what. Conflict of interest? Hey, we’re rich people! The rules don’t apply to us!
While Elon’s antics are nothing more than an example of ego at the end of its tether, both Sam’s and Lizzie’s antics demonstrate the continuing spell cast by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg—and, yes, Elon Musk—that there “new paradigms” out there, glimpsed by a few visionaries, that can literally change the world, whether by a revolution in health care or crypto currency, which was somehow also involved in some sort of revolution in charitable giving (“Effective Altruism”), which I frankly never bothered to understand, because it didn’t seem to me to be going anywhere.1 There is a sense—if you are an established big shot—that there is, you know, a tide in the affairs of men, that, if you choose wisely, you could be part of the future, a an insanely glamorous future that no one but you could have imagined. And you might make a billion or two while you’re at it!
UPDATE: Further executive suite follies!
This just in! Disney, Inc., after replacing CEO Bob Eiger with Bob’s hand-picked successor, “Bob II”, Bob Chapek, has decided that Bob II (and, thus, I guess, Bob I) doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, so they’re replacing him with—Bob I! I’m sure this will all work out well!
1. I’m afraid that I find it hard to believe that altruism often makes a difference. See William Easterly’s The Elusive Quest for Growth. However, also see this real world refutation, supplied by Mr. Horn Rims himself, Bill Gates.
