The vanities of Silicon Valley billionaires

Tyler Cowen has an interview of Reid Hoffmann, founder of LinkedIn, which has some interesting Freudian slips. It reveals the insecurities and vanities of the Silicon Valley billionaires and the hypocrisies among the liberal elites. Some thoughts.

1. It is no good merely being the founder of PayPal or Tesla or LinkedIn. There are now a good number of these founder billionaires, just in Silicon Valley itself. The megalothymos of these individuals is now driving the urge to differentiate themselves within even this rarefied group.

Being perceived as "weird" has become an aspirational imprimatur, a signature worn with great pride.

2. Then there is another urge. Founding a company, howsoever big, only makes you a successful businessman. There is the lurking realisation that they were blessed with extraordinary good fortune in their business success. After all several entrepreneurs were pursuing the same idea at exactly the same time as them in the Valley itself, and any one among them could have emerged successful. Then there is the inherent winner-takes-all feature of an industry characterised by network effects.

This subliminal realisation that they won a lottery can be intolerable for big egos. So the need to construct a new image, to weigh in on and be heard on public issues at a global stage, become opinion makers who are taken seriously, be seen as thought leaders, and some even as philosophers. Re-invent themselves as public intellectuals.

So they have enlisted the services of the so-called serious people (the likes of researchers and public figures) to re-construct their public images. In the name of endowments, some such have even been purchased. One list even names Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg as "public intellectuals"! How does founding a digital payments company make a person a public intellectual on religion and epistemology?

True, there are exceptions. But we are talking about the norm.

3. The gobbledygook that drains out from publicity providing conversations like the above is symptomatic of the world in which we live. One where substance takes backstage.

Funnily, the more interesting readings are in the comments section, where wisdom, conspicuously missing in the conversation itself, often surfaces. This comment sums it all,

Wittgenstein's reputation has endured many slights but to blame him for the design of LinkedIn is surely the deepest cut of all.

4. The interview questions are so fawning as to make the whole thing very awkward for a reader/listener. Sample this,

COWEN: If we think of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, they could arguably, by the standards of many people, be called weird. I’ve reviewed all the books you’ve written and a lot of your public talks. I can’t recall you saying a single thing that’s outrageous in any way whatsoever. Why aren’t you weirder?

And this,

COWEN: What is the early influence on your thought that you feel you have and other major figures in Silicon Valley maybe don’t? Because a lot of people have played board games growing up, right? A lot have read early science fiction. But you’re different. Is there more New England in you? Or what’s the missing variable? 

HOFFMAN: Well, it might be that the missing variable is that I deeply value intellectual work and public intellectual work, that I found —