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The Wages of Hubris Are … ?

Tech information hasn’t had per week like final week since—possibly?—the 2000 dotcom crash. FTX, the world’s second-biggest crypto change, went from $32 billion to bankrupt in about three days, and hackers took benefit of the chaos to steal hundreds of millions of dollars. Meta laid off 11,000 folks, 13 p.c of its workforce, and that was only a tenth of all the opposite tech industry layoffs this yr. And, Twitter, properly, I don’t need to tell you about Twitter.

This is historical past repeating itself as tragedy and farce unexpectedly. We already know which scenes can be within the motion pictures and TV sequence: Elon Musk carrying that sink into Twitter HQ, a Twitter supervisor vomiting into a trash can after being advised to fireplace a whole bunch of individuals, polyamorous FTX founders cavorting of their penthouse within the Bahamas. There can be books: Michael Lewis has been shadowing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for months, and Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Musk.

OK, however as soon as everybody has put away the 🍿, what is going to we now have realized? Just a few issues have stood out to me within the torrent of incredulity:

• Isaacson in a TV interview in September speaking about one secret of Musk’s success: his means to set aside empathy for his employees when it might intrude along with his imaginative and prescient.
• Investor and longtime acquaintance of Musk’s, Chris Sacca, in a revealing thread on how Musk’s interior circle has “become increasingly sycophantic and opportunistic,” on account of which “the hard truth is that he is straight-up alone right now and winging this.”
• Plus, those text messages launched a couple of weeks in the past between Musk and numerous highly effective mates revealing precisely that stage of sycophancy.
• William MacAskill, the thinker (or, in the event you favor, cult chief) of the Effective Altruism motion, into which he recruited Bankman-Fried, implicitly acknowledging in a mournful thread that in the event you inform those who the easiest way to do outsized good is to first amass outsized wealth, they could, idk, abuse that wealth?
• A fawning (and very lengthy) profile of Bankman-Fried posted in September by Sequoia Capital after which swiftly taken down—however fortunately preserved for ignominious posterity by the Internet Archive—that exhibits off his huge charisma: “After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too.”
• See additionally the mea culpa by the author who revealed an equally fawning profile in Fortune.
• Finally, Mark Zuckerberg’s iron grip on Meta, through which he controls the vast majority of voting shares, is well-documented and is why no one challenged his selections, over years, to continue to grow the ranks of the corporate in pursuit of a succession of failed initiatives.

Ah, the worth of energy and hubris! It’s one of many oldest tales within the e-book. But coming on the finish of a yr through which tech shares have taken a beating, not less than one op-ed author hopes this moment will “mark the end of the era of visionary, autocratic tech founders who ‘grow too quickly.’”