It is time to directly confront the
Silicon Valley cultists and
demand FBI, Congressional and SEC investigation!
The Documented
Characteristics of Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists
and Tech CEO’s
Include The Following
Horrors -
A horrific phenomenon of cultural depravity and white-collar crime is going unchecked in Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley controls the media and the politicians that are usually supposed to check these kinds of things. Millions of pages of news reports, documentaries, interviews and legal transcripts prove the following to be true:
Elitist Cult. Silicon Valley elitists believe they are better than everyone else. Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins founder: VC Tom Perkins, said that poor people must be “Nazi’s” for not accepting the “superior intellect” of VC’s. Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins VC Vinod Khosla, took over California’s favorite public beach, bribed the White House for “green cash” and got sued for arrogance by a horde of public interest lawsuits. Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins founder Ray Lane, was indicted for tax evasion. Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins boss John Doerr was sued for sexual office abuse and running a “frat house”. Most of the VC’s and tech CEO’s in Silicon Valley are charged with ethics breaches.
Prostitutes.
Silicon Valley males hire more hookers and “rent-boys” and fly
more sex workers into the Bay Area than any other city in
America. Google’s and Tesla Investments executives were killed
in sex and drug romps with hookers. Google’s Eric Schmidt ran
a huge “sex penthouse” and promotes infidelity and
“anti-marriage”. Google’s search engine rigging boss died at
the hands of one of his hookers. The Silicon Valley VC’s had
the Rosewood Hotel built at the end of Sandhill Road as a
place to take interns and hookers to for sex. Underage sex
efforts operated by these VC’s and Tech CEO’s have created the
“Pizzagate” phenomenon. After a woman marries a Silicon Valley
Oligarch she is told that she "must" accept his prostitutes or
she will be divorced and put on the street without money.
Rapists and Sexual Coercion of Employees. Young interns are “sent up the hill” by Stanford University via "intern sharing" to the VC’s Sandhill Road offices to become sexual playthings for the VC’s at the Rosewood Hotel. Ellen Pao sued Kleiner Perkins over the sexual “rape culture” that they promoted. Thousands of women have written books and articles about the sexual intimidation they are subjected to by Silicon Valley VC’s and their tech CEO’s. VC’s Joe Lonsdale, Micheal Goguen and hundreds of others have been charged with rape and sex trafficking. Stanford University gets “endowments” and “gifts” for hushing rape culture and intern-fluffing up.
Assholes. Fraternity House Take-What-You-Want culture is re-percussively promoted in the bars, clubs, meetings, conferences and emails of the VC’s and CEO’s. The TV Show: Silicon Valley, underscores the point of the dangers of infectious asshole-ism in Silicon Valley.
Clones. They
assemble those around them that have the same stereotypical
facial structure. In a room full of ordinary people and Tech
VC’s, the VC’s faces stand out as Hollywood-type
character-cartoon duplicates of each other. All VC/Tech CEO's
are chosen for their facial symmetrical bone structure. All
VC/Tech CEO wives are chosen for their "harsh-eyebrow/nice
stripper" looks in order to impress other Silicon Valley
VC/Tech CEO's (unless they are "beards")
Sexual Deviance and Extremism. Google’s founders have all had extreme sex scandals involving cheating, 3-way sex, divorces over abuse, forced anal sex and other outrages. Their teachers at Stanford have had to quit over their sex scandals. Their willingness and infatuation with sexual extremes defines them as moral degenerates who care little about laws and ethics.
Insider Dysfunctional Parents. The majority of the VC’s and Tech CEO’s come from dysfunctional rich dynastic families who are cultism-like devoted to “the family bloodline” and run by male oligarchs who believe in a rape culture/oligarch ethos. This belief system is passed on to their children. The oligarch parents threaten to cut endowments to Stanford University if Stanford punishes their son’s Frat Houses for date rapes.
Tone Deaf.
Silicon Valley Tech people exist in a conceptual ideology
reinforcement bubble by never interacting with, or reading
information or news from, anyone outside of their group. VC
Tim Draper spent vast amounts of money trying to make Silicon
Valley it’s own country in order to systemize the Silicon
Valley tunnel-vision bubble. They want to secede from America
because they are offended by normal people who they consider
to be low-class and unworthy. They destroyed Hillary Clinton's
campaign by thinking that everyone in the U.S. used Facebook
when only California and New York do.
Murders. Rajeev Motwani taught the Google founders how to build Google and was found, mysteriously, floating, dead, in his Silicon Valley swimming pool. Silicon Valley’s Gary D. Conley reported John Doerr and Elon Musk for corruption and was found with a bullet in his head behind Beale Air Force base. Three top Tesla engineers reported corruption at Tesla Motors and then suddenly died in a plane crash next to Tesla’s factory in San Carlos. There are over 100 mysterious deaths associated with people who had conflicts with Google, Kleiner Perkins and other Silicon Valley oligarchs.
Extremist Arrogance. Self-Centered Narcissists. Elon Musk has spent over a billion dollars buying exclusive Google, Twitter, MSM and Facebook hype about himself. Every Tech CEO has a multi-million dollar PR agent assigned to make them look like “Gods of Industry”. They regularly hold “Babes and Ball’s” parties and sex parties in Woodside, California that require women to beg for their money. They were trained to be “assholes” and “abusive dominants” via the Stanford Rape/Frat Culture.
Insane Revenge/Reprisal
Syndromes: These billionaires spend their billions
having anybody who slights them "killed". They hire Gawker
Media, Media Matters, Google, Think Progress and other
publishing cartels to operate character assassination
campaigns around the world, in front of 7.5B people, for the
rest of the person's lives, with server systems that refresh
the attacks daily. They, literally, have a digital armoury
that has been weaponized to take away people's lives using
computers.
Misogynists. All White-Male-Controlled with frat house pasts. Women are used As Sex Objects and Window Dressing. The largest number of anti-women news stories, jock/bro blog reports and charges for abuse come from Silicon Valley. VC Steve Westly’s CEO friend is notorious for kicking his girlfriend hundreds of times because she “sassed” him. Almost of of their Divorce filings include abuse charges against the man in a Silicon Valley divorce.
Manipulation of Naive Young Employees. Silicon Valley cartel companies practice Scientology-like indoctrination and “cultural programming” of employees. These highly impressionable naive young employees are kept in “controlled environments”, sent to “mindfulness programming workshops” and told what kind of political opinions they should have. Tight-knit groups of females experience synchronized menstrual periods over time, cohesive Google and Facebook employee groups engaged in decision-making discount dissenting viewpoints in the interests of consensus, and that couples who stay together long enough begin to look alike. A new study has captured another group phenomenon in Silicon Valley and chronicled in humans’ natural habitat called: “Group brain synchrony”. This is a CIA-like brainwashing technique exploited to get all Google/Facebook/Twitter employees to rapidly adopt the same political views.
Racists. Silicon Valley companies have the lowest rates of hiring, or promoting blacks, in America, even though they have a high population of blacks at the edge of their community.
Hubris. They use
TED-Talks, SXSW and Syncronicity Events as
self-promoting hype in which to act like an apostle of a tech
religion. They buy Tesla cars as a badge of arrogance and mock
any male who does not own what they own or who who did not go
to Stanford or Yale. These pretentious and ostentatious boys
are more inclined to brag about penis-size than family size.
Blacklisting. In
the AngelGate Investigation and Silicon Valley No
Poaching Class Action Lawsuit, Silicon Valley was
exposed as an insider club that black-lists those who look
different or are not part of the boys club. The best
technologies never see the light of day because Silicon Valley
VC's fear they will be better than the older technologies they
own.
Politically Corruption.
Silicon Valley has bribed more politicians than any other
domestic region in history. They promote more immigration in
order to get cheap labor for their tech companies. They steal
their technology and bribe politicians to eliminate patent
protections for small inventors that they steal from.
Political Corruption and Bribery Is The Norm for these
boys. Silicon Valley created a CIA knock-off called “In-Q-Tel”
in order to use CIA technology to manipulate Presidential and
Senate elections via Google, Facebook and Twitter. The 60
Minutes Episode called: “The Cleantech Crash” is about their
multi-billion dollar scam using the Dept. of Energy as a
slush-fund. They refuse to allow their MSM to report on their
corruption and crony kickbacks, ie: Tesla Motors Funding,
Off-shore tax evasion, Hooker networks, etc. They got their
trillions of dollars by bribing politicians to hand them
monopolies on access to 7.5 billion people and never let
anyone else exist in the internet markets. They are,
essentially, using consumers money against consumers
interests.
Illegal Collusion.
In the AngelGate Investigation, the Silicon Valley
No Poaching Class Action Lawsuit, and hundreds of other
cases, Silicon Valley was exposed as an insider club that
colludes to rig valuations, stock markets and employee
poaching. They operate in herds within their peer group. They
are not inclined to independent thinking. Kleiner Perkins has
been caught placing moles and saboteurs inside competitors
start-ups.
Stock Market
Criminals. Stock Market Pump-and-Dump, Flash Boy
Algorithm Manipulation, Insider Trading, Market Rigging. The
Securities and Exchange law violations and FTC monopoly law
violations are vast in number. They manipulate stock spikes
with covert bulk buys and buybacks, skim the profits and
repeat the scam.
Burning Man Sex-and-Drugs Devotees. Silicon Valley frat boys have a huge participation in the date-rape goings-on at Burning Man and buy extensive pheromone and skin contact delivery animal-tranquillizer drugs to use on naive young Burning Man girls.
Minimal Regard For Consequences. Although their PR agents promote them as “green” and “socially positive”, it is all hype to get tax waivers and government hand-outs. Mark Zuckerberg’s take-over of San Francisco General Hospital’s brand was entirely a scam to get him a $1 billion dollar tax evasion deployment. The Silicon Frat Boys act on impulse and try to buy off the collateral damage later.
These Closeted Homosexuals
Hide Too Many Secrets. Using the tremendous funds they
have at hand from their exclusive monopolies in public media,
they push their trans-gender agendas through their
bought-and-paid for politicians. This has resulted in a
generation of sexually confused children who believe that they
should cut their penises off. The top bosses at Facebook,
Google, Twitter, Tesla and other companies are lying to the
public about their sexuality and using hired wives, known as
“beards”. If they lie about something so basic, one has to
wonder what else they lie about. Every major child psychology
organization has said that the current generation of children
are the most "maladjusted in history" because of Silicon
Valley's use of "social media" as a drug without respect for
the naivete of children.
News and Information
Manipulation. Silicon Valley investors control the
main-stream media (MSM) and have lists of stories that are not
allowed to be publicized. They refuse to allow their
corruptions, Tesla car fires and anything positive that an
opposing political view accomplishes, be covered in their
"fake news". Their corporation controlled "Main-Stream News"
is manipulative, misleading, inaccurate, half-truth, BS,
agenda-biased propaganda designed to rig their stock market
pumps.
Thieves. They steal most of their technology from small inventors who can’t defend themselves. They get inventions from Indian engineers and then ship them back to India before the employees can get any stock or IP rights. The tech CEO’s send their VC friends to competing start-ups to spy on competing technologies and steal it. The VC’s say they are just doing “due diligence” but they are actually sucking the competing start-up dry of IP and staff and making a clone of it under another name.
There are so many other
awful things about the people of Silicon Valley. You get the
picture. Silicon Valley is a swamp and a cesspool. Silicon
Valley no longer deserves the right to exist. It no longer
deserves any corporate or profit rights at the expense of the
public. Silicon Valley's culture of crime and corruption must
end now!
WRITE YOUR REGULATORY AGENCIES AND DEMAND
INVESTIGATIONS AND PROSECUTOR ACTION TODAY!
KILLING
GOOGLE SLOWLY: 100% Termination of Google Moves Along
Swimmingly As Each And every Google Advertiser and Employee is
contacted PERSONALLY and Shown the Facts About
Google's Crimes And Corruption
Opinion
Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt adresses the 9th Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF2015), held in Riyadh, on January 26, 2015. Saudi Arabia's new leadership will push forward efforts to diversify the growing but oil-dependent economy, while easing procedures for investors, senior officials said. The annual event, organised by Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA, brings together high-ranking Saudi officials with world business leaders. AFP PHOTO / FAYEZ NURELDINE (Photo credit should read FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images) ∧
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Now, after years of fighting stubbornly for free speech and free access to information for every internet user, Google has reversed course and apparently decided it wants to be every internet user’s uncool, hectoring, preachy, Leftist mom. The most recent example of this turn toward HR Department-style busybody behavior by the search giant would be their introduction of the cringeworthy “Internet Citizens” project.
According to Ars Technica, “Internet Citizens” appears to be a series of workshops on such trendy topics of Left-wing moral panic as “fake news” (read: news that points out inconvenient facts for the Left), “hate speech” (read: arguments the Left is too scared to refute), and any number of other things. As described on the project’s own website, it aims to teach teens how to “get creative with our hosts and guest YouTuber,” “stay resilient and confident online and make negativity bounce,” “use video to find your voice and bring people together,” “navigate social media, check facts and (sic) escape social bubbles,” “discover how to use online tools responsibly,” and “not do drugs because drugs are NOT totally radical, dudes!”
Okay, I made that last one up, but given the insufferably cheery, faux-cool corporate-speak that dominates the rest of the project’s “goals,” would you be surprised? Even more hilariously, the founder of the project is named (get this) Nadir. Which is fitting because this project might well be the… well, nadir of Google’s attempts to turn itself into a social policeman through YouTube.
And while the “Internet Citizens” project is just the most easily mockable incarnation of that tendency, make no mistake, it’s been going for ages. Ever since Google debuted its “YouTube Heroes” project last year, which effectively turned moderation of the video streaming service over to totally unvetted keyboard warriors, and then began stripping ad revenue from videos which criticized the Left, the company has been backsliding on its previous commitment to free speech and an unfettered internet. In fact, just last month, YouTube debuted a “Restricted Mode” designed to filter out family-unfriendly content, which somehow managed to offend literally everyone with any political opinion with what it excluded.
And it’s not just YouTube. Google is now in the process of trying to purge ads on its homepage of “hate speech,” a category so subjective and intrinsically useless that only your irritating little cousin with a gender studies degree could love it. Among the categories covered by this new “hate speech” policy is “disparaging speech against groups like immigrants and refugees.” You know, because that isn’t shutting out serious debate or anything.
Fortunately, conservatives have started noticing this blatant attempt to weaponize one of the internet’s biggest giants against them. And given the overwhelmingly Leftist tilt of modern Silicon Valley companies, perhaps it was inevitable. But to see Google, once thought to be the pinnacle of cool, the ultimate anti-censor, the voice of the young and the internet savvy, turn into an enforcer for everything humorless, smug, hysterical, and basic in society is a special sort of tragedy. One only hopes that future generations of internet pioneers will take a lesson from their behavior – that is, if the criticism Google rightly endures for enlisting in the thought police isn’t scrubbed from the internet by Google itself.
Killing Google
Slowly: Shamed Google Boss Quits
Rather Than Watch
Google Engage in More Crony
Politics
David Foster, a marquee hire working on Pixel and other devices, has left after six months.
by Mark BergenDavid Foster, a key executive Google recruited from
Amazon.com Inc. in October as part of its aggressive
hardware effort, has left the company.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed Foster's departure, but
declined to comment further. At Amazon, he led
development of Kindle tablets, the Echo voice-activated
speaker and other devices. He was a marquee hire for
Alphabet Inc.'s Google, made just as the internet search
giant unfurled the first wave of its own branded devices.
Foster didn't immediately respond to a LinkedIn message
seeking comment.
At Google, Foster stepped into a new role, vice president of
hardware product development, working on the
company's Pixel smartphone and Home speaker, an Echo
competitor. His sudden exit marks a setback for
Google's gadget ambitions -- the company is planning to
release at least two new Pixel smartphone models this fall,
according to a person familiar with the company's plans, who
asked not to be identified discussing private matters.
The hardware division also competes with Apple Inc., Amazon
and other companies building devices tied to intelligent
software, like digital assistants, that could upend
existing models for media and advertising -- markets that
Google now leads.
A Jefferies LLC report this week said hardware "should be a meaningful revenue driver" for Alphabet. The company, which reports first-quarter earnings Thursday, doesn't break out device sales.
Foster had reported to Rick Osterloh, the former Motorola
executive Google hired last year. Google isn't planning to
replace Foster, a person familiar with the company's plans
said. Before Amazon, Foster worked at hardware groups
at Microsoft Corp. and Apple.
Earlier this week, German
publication WinFuture reported that it uncovered
evidence of three planned Google devices in Android code
information online.
--With assistance from Ian King.
Tags: Censorship,
Google, Mytheos
Holt, SOPA,
YouTube
By JONATHAN TAPLIN
Photo
Credit Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty Images
In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.
They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the industry: Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market. In classic economic terms, all three are monopolies.
We have been transported back to the early 20th century, when arguments about “the curse of bigness” were advanced by President Woodrow Wilson’s counselor, Louis Brandeis, before Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.” We need look no further than the conduct of the largest banks in the 2008 financial crisis or the role that Facebook and Google play in the “fake news” business to know that Brandeis was right.
While Brandeis generally opposed regulation — which, he worried, inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator — and instead advocated breaking up “bigness,” he made an exception for “natural” monopolies, like telephone, water and power companies and railroads, where it made sense to have one or a few companies in control of an industry.
Could it be that these companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities?Consider a historical analogy: the early days of telecommunications.
In 1895 a photograph of the business district of a large city might have shown 20 phone wires attached to most buildings. Each wire was owned by a different phone company, and none of them worked with the others. Without network effects, the networks themselves were almost useless.
The solution was for a single company, American Telephone and Telegraph, to consolidate the industry by buying up all the small operators and creating a single network — a natural monopoly. The government permitted it, but then regulated this monopoly through the Federal Communications Commission.
AT&T (also known as the Bell System) had its rates regulated, and was required to spend a fixed percentage of its profits on research and development. In 1925 AT&T set up Bell Labs as a separate subsidiary with the mandate to develop the next generation of communications technology, but also to do basic research in physics and other sciences. Over the next 50 years, the basics of the digital age — the transistor, the microchip, the solar cell, the microwave, the laser, cellular telephony — all came out of Bell Labs, along with eight Nobel Prizes.
In a 1956 consent decree in which the Justice Department allowed AT&T to maintain its phone monopoly, the government extracted a huge concession: All past patents were licensed (to any American company) royalty-free, and all future patents were to be licensed for a small fee. These licenses led to the creation of Texas Instruments, Motorola, Fairchild Semiconductor and many other start-ups.
The five largest companies in 2006 …
Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices
By The New York Times
True, the internet never had the same problems of interoperability. And Google’s route to dominance is different from the Bell System’s. Nevertheless it still has all of the characteristics of a public utility.
We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy.
It is impossible to deny that Facebook, Google and Amazon have stymied innovation on a broad scale. To begin with, the platforms of Google and Facebook are the point of access to all media for the majority of Americans. While profits at Google, Facebook and Amazon have soared, revenues in media businesses like newspaper publishing or the music business have, since 2001, fallen by 70 percent.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspaper publishers lost over half their employees between 2001 and 2016. Billions of dollars have been reallocated from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms. All content creators dependent on advertising must negotiate with Google or Facebook as aggregator, the sole lifeline between themselves and the vast internet cloud.
It’s not just newspapers that are hurting. In 2015 two Obama economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman, published a paper arguing that the rise in “supernormal returns on capital” at firms with limited competition is leading to a rise in economic inequality. The M.I.T. economists Scott Stern and Jorge Guzman explained that in the presence of these giant firms, “it has become increasingly advantageous to be an incumbent, and less advantageous to be a new entrant.”
There are a few obvious regulations to start with. Monopoly is made by acquisition — Google buying AdMob and DoubleClick, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon buying, to name just a few, Audible, Twitch, Zappos and Alexa. At a minimum, these companies should not be allowed to acquire other major firms, like Spotify or Snapchat.
The second alternative is to regulate a company like Google as a public utility, requiring it to license out patents, for a nominal fee, for its search algorithms, advertising exchanges and other key innovations.
The third alternative is to remove the “safe harbor” clause in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows companies like Facebook and Google’s YouTube to free ride on the content produced by others. The reason there are 40,000 Islamic State videos on YouTube, many with ads that yield revenue for those who posted them, is that YouTube does not have to take responsibility for the content on its network. Facebook, Google and Twitter claim that policing their networks would be too onerous. But that’s preposterous: They already police their networks for pornography, and quite well.
Removing the safe harbor provision would also force social networks to pay for the content posted on their sites. A simple example: One million downloads of a song on iTunes would yield the performer and his record label about $900,000. One million streams of that same song on YouTube would earn them about $900.
I’m under no delusion that, with libertarian tech moguls like Peter Thiel in President Trump’s inner circle, antitrust regulation of the internet monopolies will be a priority. Ultimately we may have to wait four years, at which time the monopolies will be so dominant that the only remedy will be to break them up. Force Google to sell DoubleClick. Force Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram.
Woodrow Wilson was right when he said in 1913, “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government.” We ignore his words at our peril.
---
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
=============
It has been said that Silicon Valley, or the 50 or so square-mile area extending from San Francisco to the base of the peninsula, has overseen the creation of more wealth than any place in the history of mankind. It’s made people richer than the oil industry; it has created more money than the Gold Rush. Silicon chips, lines of code, and rectangular screens have even minted more wealth than religious wars.
Wealthy societies, indeed, have their own complicated incentive structures and mores. But they do often tend, as any technological entrepreneur will be quick to remind you, to distribute value across numerous income levels, in a scaled capacity. The Ford line, for instance, may have eventually minted some serious millionaires in Detroit, but it also made transportation cheaper, helped drive down prices on countless consumer goods, and facilitated new trade routes and commercial opportunities. Smartphones, or any number of inventive modern apps or other software products, are no different. Sure, they throw off a lot of money to the geniuses who came up with them, and the people who got in at the ground floor. But they also make possible innumerable other opportunities, financial and otherwise, for their millions of consumers.
Silicon Valley is, in its own right, a dynasty. Instead of warriors or military heroes, it has nerds and people in half-zip sweaters. But it is becoming increasingly likely that the Valley might go down in history not only for its wealth, but also for creating more tone deaf people than any other ecosystem in the history of the world.
In just the past month, the Valley has seemed like it’s happily living in some sort of sadomasochistic bubble worthy of a bad Hollywood satire. Uber has endured a slate of scandals that would have seriously wounded a less culturally popular company (or a public one, for that matter). There was one former employee’s allegation of sexual harassment (which the company reportedly investigated); a report of driver manipulation; an unpleasant video depicting C.E.O. Travis Kalanick [furiously berating] an Uber driver; a story about secret software that could subvert regulators; a report of cocaine use and groping at holiday parties (an offending manager was fired within hours of the scandal); a lawsuit for potentially buying stolen software from a competitor; more groping; a slew of corporate exits; and a driverless car crash. (The shit will really hit the fan if it turns out that Uber's self-driving technology was misappropriated from Alphabet's Waymo; Uber has called the lawsuit “baseless.”)
Then there was Facebook, which held its developer conference while the Facebook Killer was on the loose. As Mat Honan of BuzzFeed put it so eloquently: “People used to talk about Steve Jobs and Apple’s reality distortion field. But Facebook, it sometimes feels, exists in a reality hole. The company doesn’t distort reality—but it often seems to lack the ability to recognize it.”
And we ended the week with the ultimate tone-deaf statement from the C.E.O. of Juicero, the maker of a $700 dollar-soon-reduced-to-$400 dollar juicer that has $120 million in venture backing. After Bloomberg News discovered that you didn’t even need the $700 $400 juicer to make juice (there are, apparently, these things called hands) the company’s chief executive, Jeff Dunn, offered a response on Medium insinuating that he gets up every day to make the world a better place.
Of course, not everyone who makes the pilgrimage out West is, or becomes, a jerk. Some people arrive in the Valley with a philosophy of how to act as an adult. But here’s the problem with that group: most of them don’t vociferously articulate how unsettled they are by the bad actors. Even when journalists manage to cover these atrocious activities, the powers of Silicon Valley try to ridicule them, often in public. Take, for example, the 2015 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, when a reporter asked billionaire investor Vinod Kholsa—who evidently believes that public beaches should belong to rich people—about some of the ethical controversy surrounding the mayonnaise-disruption startup Hampton Creek (I can’t believe I just wrote the words “mayonnaise-disruption”). Khosla responded with a trite and rude retort that the company was fine. When the reporter pressed Khosla, he shut him down by saying, “I know a lot more about how they're doing, excuse me, than you do.” A year later and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether the company defrauded investors when employees secretly purchased the company's own mayonnaise from grocery stores. (The Justice Department has since dropped its investigation.)
When you zoom out of that 50-square-mile area of Silicon Valley, it becomes obvious that big businesses can get shamed into doing the right thing. When it was discovered that Volkswagen lied about emissions outputs, the company’s C.E.O. was forced to resign. The same was true for the chief of Wells Fargo, who was embroiled in a financial scandal. In the wake of it's recent public scandal, United recently knocked its C.E.O. down a peg. Even Fox News, one of the most bizarrely unrepentant media outlet in America, pushed out two of the most important people at the network over allegations of sexual harassment. (Bill O'Reilly has said that claims against him are “unfounded”; Roger Ailes has vociferously denied allegations of sexual harassment.) Even Wall Street can (sometimes) be forced to be more ethical. Yet Elizabeth Holmes is still C.E.O. of Theranos. Travis Kalanick is still going to make billions of dollars as the chief of Uber when the company eventually goes public. The list goes on and on.
In many respects, this is simply the D.N.A. of Silicon Valley. The tech bubble of the mid-90s was inflated by lies that sent the NASDAQ on a vertiginous downward spike that eviscerated the life savings of thousands of retirees and Americans who believed in the hype. This time around, it seems that some of these business may be real, but the people running them are still as tone deaf regarding how their actions affect other people. Silicon Valley has indeed created some amazing things. One can only hope these people don't erase it with their hubris.
Silicon Valley’s 14 Most Spectacular Failures
Scorned as the “worst C.E.O. of 2012” by CNBC’s Herb Greenberg, Andrew Mason was at the helm of Groupon when the company went public, an I.P.O. Greenberg wrote off as the “most over-hyped . . . of recent years.” Years after going public, Groupon still has trouble turning a profit.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg (Mason), Robert Kirk/Photodisc (Ticket), both from Getty Images.
Elizabeth Holmes became emblematic of Silicon Valley excess when her $9 billion blood-testing start-up, Theranos, became the subject of a series of Wall Street Journal investigations that reported that the company’s technology didn’t actually work. Theranos is currently under federal criminal investigation.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Adrianna Williams/The Image Bank (Needle), Andrew Burton (Holmes), both from Getty Images.
Zenefits C.E.O. and co-founder Parker Conrad resigned in 2016 amid concerns over questions about his $4.5 billion start-up’s regulatory compliance. Further reports insinuated Zenefits’ company culture under Conrad was more frat house than hackathon, complete with allegations of sex in the stairwells and plenty of drinking.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Steve Jennings (Conrad), Jack Andersen/DigitalVision (Beer), both from Getty Images.
Hailed as the turnaround boss Yahoo so desperately needed when she was hired for the job in 2012, Marissa Mayer has come under fire as investors have lost their patience waiting for a miracle that never came. (The millions she reportedly spent on lavish parties and perks, while the ailing Internet giant circled the drain, didn’t help.) Yahoo is now up for sale.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images (Mayer).
David Byttow, the founder of anonymous-posting app Secret, pivoted his year-old start-up to an incubator in 2015 after allegedly pocketing millions and buying a flashy Ferrari. Google Ventures investor Bill Maris later compared the start-up shutting down to a “bank heist.”
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Car Culture (Ferrari), Heather Kennedy (Byttow), both from Getty Images.
Gilt Groupe, the once hot flash-sales start-up, was valued at $1 billion in 2011, having raised more than $286 million in funding since its founding. Five years later, Hudson’s Bay, the parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, purchased it for $250 million in what CNN dubbed the “ultimate flash sale.”
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg Finance LP (Peluso), Rastem Grler (Sign), both from Getty Images.
Rdio filed for bankruptcy in 2015, showing just how hard it can be to make a viable streaming service. Rdio had raised $125 million in funding at a $500 million valuation. Pandora scooped up “many employees” from the failed start-up afterward, though its C.E.O. Anthony Bay did not join them.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg Finance LP/Getty Images (Bay); From Alamy (Headphones).
C.E.O. Dan Wagner said that his company’s product, a glorified Q.R. scanner called PowaTag, was going to help Powa become “the greatest technology company of all time.” In February, $2.7 billion Powa shut down after struggling with its flagship product and, according to former employees, Wagner’s own hubris.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; From Bloomberg/Getty Images (Wagner).
On-demand cleaning start-up Homejoy shut down in 2015 after failing to hold onto its customers. C.E.O. Adora Cheung reportedly didn’t work to fix its retention rates, which flopped as a result of offering $19 flat-fee introductory deals. The “deciding factors” in Homejoy closing its doors, however, were the four lawsuits it faced from workers who claimed they’d been misclassified as contractors. The lawsuits were still pending as of last summer.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Anthony Harvey (Cheung), Tim Macpherson/Cultura (House), both from Getty Images.
Quirky, a start-up that sought to crowdsource inventions to the masses, filed for bankruptcy in September 2015. Quirky struggled to raise funding and C.E.O. Ben Kaufman stepped down a month before his company folded. Quirky sold Wink, its software business, to Flextronics for $15 million.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Larry Busacca/Getty images (Kaufman).
Scott Thompson served as C.E.O. of Yahoo before the company hired Marissa Mayer. Months after Thompson was hired to the job, vocal activist investor Dan Loeb sent Yahoo’s board a letter questioning Thompson’s credentials and wondering if perhaps Thompson had “embellished his academic credentials.” Thompson was immediately replaced with Ross Levinsohn, after the board discovered Thompson had falsely added a computer-science degree to his résumé.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Jo Foord (Kindersley), from Bloomberg (Thompson), both from Getty Images.
When Carly Fiorina was let go from her six-year tenure as C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard, the company’s stock jumped 10 percent upon the news of her firing. While she was C.E.O., Fiorina didn’t increase the company’s profits, and she actually decreased H.P.’s shareholders’ wealth by 52 percent. A disastrous merger with Compaq, which led her to fire some 30,000 employees, haunted Fiorina throughout her failed senate and presidential campaigns, too.
Photo: Digital Colorization by Ben Park; By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. (Fiorina).
E-commerce start-up Fab was once valued at $900 million, a near unicorn in Silicon Valley terms. But after allegedly burning through $200 million of its $336 million in venture capital, C.E.O. Jason Goldberg was forced to shutter its European arm and lay off two-thirds of its staff.
Photo: Photo-Illustration by Ben Park; By Anthony Harvey (Goldberg), Oli Scarff (Frame), both from Getty Images.
Fired in 2014 from his ad-tech firm RadiumOne following a domestic-violence conviction, Gurbaksh Chahal founded a new company to compete with the one he was kicked out of. But Gravity4, his new firm, was sued for gender discrimination in 2015, though that case is still pending, and former employees have contemplated legal action against him.
Photo: Photo-Illustration By Ben Park; By Charley Gallay/Getty Images (Chahal).
Nick Bilton - Nick Bilton is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.
FOR DETAILS, READ THE ATTACHED
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Nothing
Less Than Eradication For Silicon Valley's Corruption