Poverty-vow tech giants should really lighten up

HE shuns material pleasures, eking out a living on the equivalent of one euro a week. He dedicates his life to contemplation and self-denial, fasting at weekends and restricting himself to just one meal a day during the week.

His starvation diet helps him attain a higher state of consciousness and a sharper intellect, he claims. He meditates for one hour twice a day and while he draws the line at self-flagellation, he mortifies his flesh with an ice bath, followed by a barrel sauna every morning and night.

If this all sounds a bit like Jesus in the desert for 40 days of sacrifice, it’s because like other tech Gods, Jack Dorsey, pictured, the founder and brains behind Twitter, signals his greatness through modelling the ascetic existence of a prophet, rather than by flashing the cash.

For his part, Mark Zuckerberg appealed to classical antiquity naming his daughters, Max (short for Maxima) and August, while marking his first-born’s arrival by pledging to give away 99% of his Facebook shares in order to advance his twin aims of enhancing human potential and equality.

Dorsey takes this messianic image up a notch, establishing himself in Silicon Valley with a vow of poverty that would put a Franciscan monk to shame. What a waste of a massive fortune.

If starving oneself to death while sounding like humourless, selfinvolved and pretentious jackass becomes the stamp of success, then the road ahead will be marked by human disaster above all else.