The Epstein files reveal beliefs about race, eugenics, and engineering humans that run to the heart of Silicon Valley.
Having worked Silicon Valley through two boom-and-bust cycles, my impression is that these people hurt because they don’t understand their success. What I mean is that the Internet is a random multiplier: if you have the right idea at the right time and the right structure, you become almost infinitely rich. If you lack anything in the combination, you get nothing.
Take Facebook: the idea had been floating around for a while, but successive implementations suffered from technical, then legal issues. Then Zuck comes along, steals the idea, implements it successfully and boom, you have an infinillionaire. But when the same guy comes up with the next idea, it fails. Then the next one fails. Then the Metaverse happens and the failure is astounding.
It’s basically a lottery, where your startup is the ticket. One person wins, a million plays for nothing. The winner is selected at random.
But people hate that idea, so they come up with stupid “logic” justifying why Zuck won and Yang (Yahoo!) failed. You can’t imagine how many people in Silicon Valley devour Ayn Rand’s ideology, how many believe in genetic racial superiority, and other fairy tales. I was always surprised they didn’t go for divine intervention, but they are largely agnostic.
Having worked Silicon Valley through two boom-and-bust cycles, my impression is that these people hurt because they don’t understand their success.
I this isn’t necessarily wrong this hints that you didn’t read the article.
A lot of the techno-oligarchs have been revealed to be Nazi-level eugenicists that literally want to build a race of übermensch, and have already started by trafficking women onto ranches to have their kids. This includes Elon Musk, who was a friend of Epstein and currently has over 20 kids with several women
This is an incredibly frustrating part of my work with startups. I do economic assessments for climate tech, and if it doesn’t work on paper then you can be damn sure it won’t magically start working in the real world. There are millions of reasons a startup might fail and very few that even give a chance for success (big VC success, not just normal profitablity or survival).
In summary I agree it’s a massive lottery, but it drives me crazy how much investment goes to lottery tickets that don’t even have a legitimate chance of success.
It’s almost as if investors themselves often aren’t that smart and they, themselves, won the lottery that gave them money to invest.
Yeah it is insane how many of them have no higher education, or conversely simply got a PhD and have never worked in industry before