The lottery winners of Silicon Valley
As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos faces divorce, the lives of California’s other superstars are in the spotlight
In May 2017, a grainy photograph of a little boy with a blond fringe and toothy grin was posted on Twitter. The boy’s arm was slung lovingly around his mother. The picture, shared by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was captioned: “I won the lottery with my mom. Thanks for literally everything.”
Today, that little boy is 54; he has lost the fringe (plus the rest of his hair), and has morphed into the richest man on Earth.
The end of his marriage to MacKenzie Bezos has put him in the headlines.
But, in truth, this son of a teenage mother has rarely been out of them in recent years.
Having started his worlddominating online retailer from his garage in Seattle in 1994, the boy – who loved not only his mother but also and science – grew up to create an estimated $137bn (R1.9 trillion) fortune for himself.
If split equally during his forthcoming divorce proceedings, the sum could make his soon-to-be ex-wife the world’s richest woman.
Given that they married in 1993, a year before the birth of Amazon, you might argue that she won the marriage lottery.
However, it should be noted that MacKenzie is an awardwinning novelist in her own career, and worked with Bezos in his business, becoming one of Amazon’s earliest employees.
If the attention devoted to their split and the rumours surrounding it – Bezos had allegedly been conducting an affair with former television anchor Lauren Sanchez – is reminiscent of that given to such break-ups as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s, or Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s, it is hardly surprising.
As Silicon Valley royalty, Bezos is part of a new set of superstars. Where, in the last century, Hollywood dominated in the cultural stakes, the 21st century is all about a rather different elite: the Technorati.
As far as comparisons go, the two sets have far more in common than their California locale. In a relatively short time, the Technorati have become the demigods of modern life, rulers of a shiny new kingdom that spans the Santa Clara Valley, with the city of Palo Alto at its epicentre.
Like Hollywood, it has taken on the status of a dream factory for those aspiring to make it big, and quick. Just as the advent of the moving picture brought busloads of would-be stars and starlets flooding to Tinseltown, so the rapid transposition of the large portions of human life to the web has brought an influx of ambitious tech-heads to the area.
And for many, the rewards have been great. The rise and rise of the tech billionaire has brought us, among others, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel and Google co-founder Larry Page.
“We weren’t cool,” Bobby Murphy, Snapchat co-founder once told Forbes, “so we tried to build things to be cool.”
It’s like a high-school movie plotline writ large: the geeks shall inherit the Earth. And in doing so, they shall become desirable and revered to a degree that no one could foresee.
Suddenly, the Technorati were marrying actual celebrities (see Spiegel’s nuptials to supermodel Miranda Kerr, or Tesla co-founder Elon Musk’s to actress Talulah Riley) and revelling in their newfound wealth.
Bezos, who did not at first spend his profits lavishly, now owns a Gulfstream jet besides homes in Seattle, Washington, Beverly Hills and New York.
As Brad Stone writes in his 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon: “In the late nineties, the web evolved from the province of geeks to the stuff of frontpage newspaper stories, day traders, and regular folks who were venturing for the first time into what was then popularly called cyber space . . . In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital.”
For those who got it right, the money to be made was staggering; as life-changing as becoming a film star. Not for nothing is Silicon Valley termed the “billionaire factory”.
But whereas image is everything in movieland, the men (and they were largely men) behind the tech firms took longer to break out of the shadows and use their newfound wealth to transform themselves. Look at another photo of Bezos – a portrait taken in 1997, the year that Amazon went public – and you’ll see the kind of unassuming figure at whom no one would look twice in the street. Dressed in a blue shirt and brown trousers, he perches awkwardly between piles of books, smiling benignly.
Two decades later, his physical metamorphosis is stark. Appearing at a conference in 2017, he was pictured with biceps straining out from beneath a black polo shirt, aviator-style sunglasses clamped to his face.
Perhaps it’s too much of a stretch to say that the geeks of Silicon Valley were becoming the new pin-ups, but when Spiegel graced the cover of the men’s edition of Italian Vogue two years earlier, the proposition didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.
As in Hollywood, there is also a fixation on wellness. The latenight pizzas that sustained those behind the early start-ups have since given way to veganism and meditation pods.
This is not to say there hasn’t also been a culture of excess, and in some cases even debauchery. In her 2018 book which examined the so-called “boys’ club” of Silicon Valley, Emily Chang exposed the “drugheavy, sex-heavy” parties that take place in some of the mansions of the Technorati.
While the tech revolution has changed our lives more profoundly than anything in recent history, the dizzying success of those behind it has played out, in many ways, like that of Hollywood’s biggest names.
Unlike the stars of the big screen, the Technorati are not there to make us love them; they are there to make us love their products. But their influence is no less great.
And, as Oscar Wilde once said, “it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating”. The hard-nosed, money-making “lottery winners” of Silicon Valley, one imagines, probably know this. —
The 21st century is all about a rather different elite: the Technorati