Chapter 6
enough, but did Zuckerberg need to resort to gory avian encounters or indulge Americas peculiar fascination with guns?
Strange behavior, but there's always the Elon Musk defense. "I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?" asks Elon. As the founder of a business with a value that would approach the GDP of Scandinavia, Zuckerberg might reasonably have the same query. But it's an oily slope when we readily ac-cept, in our "idolatry of innovators,* that erratic behavior is a necessary trait of outliers. Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, is a muscular counterexample. Later I would spend several hours one-on-one with Brian, and I found him chill and-other than intimidating biceps-refreshingly normal.
Money was tight when my father was an academic. Eating animal protein-usually mutton; chicken was more expensive— was a luxury rarely enjoyed more than once a week. Things changed after he became a thriving private physician, but I still remember those early days. It affected my parents more than it did me, that devastating helplessness of denying your children, but their frustration made me determined to never put myself in that position.
Chapter 16
My driver was piloting a black gull-winged Tesla on the sun-splashed and gridlocked US 101. Billboards for C3.ai and CrowdStrike reminded me I was in Silicon Valley. As always on the 101, I wondered about autonomous flying taxis and levita-tional hyperloop tunnels. The smartest people in the world live here, why the fuck don't they solve real problems instead of building silly social networks?
That doesn't make us evil or even semi-evil. Just greedy, which many believe is good. I know the senior management team at Google; they are fine people, and they help us find information and buy stuff. As a teenager, I once cycled five miles on an infernal Delhi summer afternoon to the US Educational Foundation to research American colleges. The asset plunderers of the eighties, on the other hand, never did anything for me. Moreover, that iconic Wall Street villain Gordon Gekko wore two-toned horizontal-stripe monogrammed shirts with French cuffs while Zuckerberg wears T-shirts and hoodies. I get it, but just as the fictional Gekko came to symbolize Wall Street gone rogue, the Zuck caricatured in The Social Network epitomizes Silicon Valley excess. And while not as flash, Zuck's wardrobe sends me the same message as Gekkos-fuck you, I'm too busy changing the world, and I'm richer than you besides.
Over a thousand people would see me on stage, and I had wondered what to wear that morning. I tried on my hoodie—navy, baby cashmere, twelve hundred dollars— but decided against it, settling for a vaguely presidential look offered by a fitted navy sport coat. That hoodie always felt like I was trying too hard.
It was an uncomfortably familiar feeling.
The caricature of smart money and dumb money is clas-sist, reductionist, and false. In bull markets all money is smart money, but every decade or so we are reminded that speculative markets are mostly a case of dumb and dumber.