The Cowardice of the Tech Elite: A rant

In the upcoming Showtime drama Billions the lead character states, “What’s the point of having ‘fuck you’ money, if you never say ‘fuck you?’”

Unfortunately, in Silicon Valley, the tech elite have “fuck you” money but they never say “fuck you.”

Now don’t get me wrong, the tech elite can also be irascible and pissy about things.They will complain about taxes, local regulations, and bad customer service from Tesla, but they save most of their ire for the media or people who don’t comport to their TKE brother of libertarianism. This is the heart of their cowardice.

They will appropriate black culture to talk about hustle, but they won’t seek justice for Trayvon Martin. They will say they promote diversity, but they won’t even step in and help to fix the problems in their own community.

They won’t take a stand on anything, but will take credit for everything. Worldwide poverty is at all-time low? Yep, their browser did that. Too many homeless people in SF? It’s a governmental problem. Nevermind that they’ve been propping up the same lousy figurehead politicians to give their portfolio companies tax breaks.

Things are getting better they will tell you, we just need more technology and for government to get out of the way.

Things however are not getting better.

Last week a grand jury deciding not to indict two police officers in the shooting death of 12 year-old Tamir Rice. Who was playing alone in the park on cold winter day in Cleveland.

Three weeks ago it was revealed that, as the result of a callous and ineffective state government, thousands of low income and minority children had been poisoned by lead in their drinking water.

Or keeping it closer to home (for me), you might have read about the police shooting of Mario Woods who appeared in multiple videos to be zero threat to the officers involved in he shooting.

So you know that tech elites are libertarian and they love to highlight ineffectual government. So if you followed the tech elite on Twitter, what injustices were they focused on?

Yep, that’s Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford to have her parent’s friends fund her startup. Somewhere the line between startup hustle and being a fabulist became blurred and the WSJ wrote about it.

She’s not the only victim, people like these guys also are at risk. The Mast brothers (probably) lied about how their chocolate was made and people were upset the media covered it.

So why did I write this? Don’t I have a company to run? Don’t I have a book to talk? Fair enough, I’ll get back to it in a second.

I wrote this because I hate that our “role models” have heavyweight egos and bantamweight impact. I hate how they can do so much and yet they do so little. As a tech community, we need a better elite to prosper. We need an elite that can win tech battles such as CISA and net neutrality but also care about helping disadvantaged communities and economic inequality.