Venture Capital’s Crown of Psychopaths
Silicon Valley was pretty weird to work in sometimes. Especially because the place was absolutely crawling with sociopaths and psychopaths. Steve Jobs is widely acknowledged to be a sociopath, so it’s not even that the industry knows and doesn’t care. No, this is welcomed openly.
In fact, when Steve Jobs died in the last bubble, people were crying in the streets.
Myself, I would cry over any other thing before Steve.
When I talk about psychopaths and sociopaths I am talking about real psychopaths and sociopaths. People tend to think of psychopaths and sociopaths as the stuff of true detective shows, horror movies, and extreme outliers in general, and not as a material concern. What I am asserting is that the tech industry and particularly the venture capital class, has been captured by sociopaths and psychopaths, and that is a very real, very material concern.
Before you bitch to me about “ableism”, the thing about these people, is they do not give a FUCK what you think of them, so don’t worry, none of their non-feelings will be hurt.
Anywhere between 1 and 3 percent of the population is sociopaths or psychopaths, so again, this is a material issue even though we are brainwashed into thinking that these are fantastic edge cases rather than very common in our environments. There are a number of people, books, research studies, etc. that make very serious endeavors to wake people up about these people and how they operate, and even to address specifically how sociopaths and psychopaths operate within the corporate environment. These are predators, cold-blood predators, and they are just freely feeding and hunting on all kinds of grounds, including within the technology ecosystem. I join a host of other analysts in begging us to take this seriously.
Several people have identified a sociopath crisis in technology specifically and in corporate culture more broadly. Maëlle Gavet wrote a book called Trampled by Unicorns that addresses the topics on these terms; there’s a book from Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare called “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.” I’ve read the latter but not the former. This post is very much in the direction of these and other works which have attempted to describe on material terms how this grouping of individuals impacts the world we live in, and how they cause at-scale damage in this areas and particularly around concentrations of wealth and power. Here we contextualize that in the sense of our broader analyses of the tech organism.
Discussing this has merit in and of itself, because this is what is actually happening. REALITY is always something we are seeking and striving to describe. Sociopaths and psychopaths as active players on the board is reality. Talk about the VC industry of late is extremely remote, we use “tech billionaires” when we should be saying “fascists”, and where they are sociopaths, we should be calling them that. Their qualities, specifically as fascists, specifically as sociopaths, affect what they do and why. It is far from the only point of interest but, it is one to consider.
They’ve shown that sociopaths are overrepresented in the CEO position. We all know and agree it makes sense!! Yet people are very comfortable with this in the abstract, yet find it improbable that we, therefore, have a very serious problem on our hands where they are *check notes* leading massive fascist economic powerhouses through the rubble of capitalism. I feel like I’m risking my credibility everytime I try to talk about this, lol. I got yelled at in 2014 for calling venture capitalists sociopaths, someone felt it was ableist, so to avoid a dust-up, I deleted. Nonetheless, my line was “Many founders are incompetent, sociopaths or both." I stand. Why do we just politely… never mention the fact that our entire industry has been captured by them? Of course they have captured it!!! These are sociopaths and psychopaths!!!
Doing anti-pedophilia work, we find that just looking at a singular pedophile alone doesn’t make sense; and that far from being solitary, opportunistic predators, they are highly networked and work with each other to hunt, groom, abduct and sexually abuse children and teens. They recognize each other with ease and often co-offend.
I propose we use a similar model of thinking about the technology ecosystem, where we recognize that we are dealing with people who are not just singularly acting on the ecosystem, but are actually getting together to drive agendas across the industry, that the industry culture itself supports and even nurtures this. I contend that one of the reasons we are ending up with tech “supervillains” characters, is because at the higher ends of the industry, we are looking at extreme concentrations of sociopaths and psychopaths and a high level of cooperation between them. It’s not an accident that Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg are working and have worked extremely closely together. You would be extremely hard pressed to argue that these are not sociopaths.
We have to ask ourselves questions, like, how did venture capital get to the place it is today, an openly-fascist and highly organized hostile economic and even military force? Well, we get this in large part from the fact that sociopaths and psychopaths in the environment are finding each other and organizing together across multiple generations of technology and that is happen with no disruption whatsoever. And their union is extremely fruitful to all of them. Without empathy and without morality, they are able to achieve these extreme speeds of development and the revolutionizing of the instruments of production. It frees up a lot of possibility when you are able to operate as an open sociopath among other sociopaths and simply elect to keep it all in the Family, if you will.
Something that is pretty common in the Valley is to get your start at a major company, we’ll take Sun Microsystems as an example, and then you have a crew of the top players from within that company who repeatedly work with each other in other companies; when one gets in, he hires up the rest, and so on. I’ve seen these configurations that have come out of Akamai, Microsoft, Sun and VMWare, and there are many more companies that have given birth to this type of pattern. The PayPal Mafia concept simply illuminates the most high-profile example we have of multigenerational collaborations with the same actors and same technological lineage. But there are others like it, most recently there’s been talk of the Coinbase Mafia, but as it turns out, that is only the latest incarnation of the PayPal Mafia as it moves through multiple generations and bubbles of development.
And of course, there wouldn’t necessarily be anything wrong with this outside of cronyism, if you were seeing people who are empathetic, cared about humanity, had personal feelings, had some sense of moral good that was subscribed to (ie not a fascist morality), and so on, that were working together over time as a positive force. Instead what we are seeing is multiple sociopaths and psychopaths who are emerging at really high positions of financial power and influence, the cream rising to the top if you will, and that they are sticking together and adding new generations; Palmer Luckey and Balaji Srinivasan are some of the latest sociopaths that have been picked up and elevated to top brass by a16z, which hosts a stable of these exercises in abnormal psychology.
There is no mechanism in tech to defend against hostile actors; indeed, there is no concept within the industry that there ARE bad actors of this magnitude, operating on THIS level of chaos and destruction. While people agree with the theory that Silicon Valley is full of sociopaths, when it comes down to engaging this issue on a material level, suddenly it is viewed as hyperbolic or conspiratorial to suggest that we are dealing with an organized threat of some extremely dangerous people, with access to a massive amount of money, technological power, media influence, with a large and dynamic workforce. Who are sociopaths.
In short, a sociopath or psychopath is incredibly dangerous holding a pencil, and these folk are helming autonomous drone swarms and entire financial systems.
We all should have been pretty alarmed when Steve Jobs came around — but rather than working together to foist him from the industry, it was commonly believed in the Valley that operating an openly hostile work environment, like Steve Jobs had done, was the best way to produce products, like the addictive, soul sucking succession of boxes that Jobs wouldn’t allow his own child to use.
Steve Jobs is someone that falls almost on the cult side of the spectrum of psychopathy, and that is who was CREATING the culture on an ongoing basis. The fact that he was revered within the industry as an icon, and specifically, as a guru, both in death and in life, was not an accident. Steve Jobs was fanatical about image and fanatical about how Apple was packaged and presented; his public persona was equally calculated. This is how he wished to be portrayed and how he wished to present himself as the face of Apple. The iconic black turtleneck alone became a kind of transcendent comment on engineering management — specifically, the importance of severely docking any and all personal expression to maintain “efficiency” and to free the mind for more important matters, such as world domination. Constant theme with these psychos.
The industry’s unilateral adoption of the hoodie was a blend of sorts between the Zuckerberg archetype and the idea of wearing the same thing every day, which huge numbers of startup workers were doing at the time. I looked particularly sporting myself I don’t mind saying. In the mobile bubble the entire industry was wildly trying to figure out how to do things in “the Apple way”. This concept spreads across the industry and many, many executive meetings were had across the Valley where each startup tried to determine its own Way.
So that is steeping into the entire culture and making it very easy for other people like Steve to gain traction in this environment and be openly abusive as well. We see this in the dehumanizing, brutal treatment of Zuckerberg towards his workers now. This worship of the sociopath and the psychopath is endemic within the industry; sociopaths freely build up fiefdoms of various sizes and are feted by the adoring fans / potential cult members. In fact, we see some pretty disturbing inversions of reality as the industry envisions itself as being radical and “counter-cultural” for disrupting what leadership is and is permitted to be — specifically, psychopathic leadership is welcomed. In fact, psychopathic leadership is considered almost left-wing, due to the permissiveness and open mind that was required to embrace it. The industry re-visits the timeless question: should we run startups like ruthless dictatorships helmed by psychopaths hell-bent on destroying the world, stealing unprecedented levels of wealth and forcing damaging technology down the throats of everyone in the world?
The answer each time is: Yes.
Our most recent example is Adam Neumann, who recently was funded by a16z for a new real estate startup. Here we again have a case where a known sociopath/psychopath, as widely acknowledged, is living freely under all of the lights and the glitz and glamour and even gets a movie made about him which, strange, in fact adds to his embrace within the technology ecosystem. The man is fucking dripping with charisma, as widely acknowledge, he is: sociopath. Subtype: cult leader. Yet he belongs no where near SOCIETY, much less a fucking “community” that he himself invented.
Surely, sociopaths and psychopaths ARE detected and known within the industry and yet, nothing is done again and again and again. Steve Jobs was thought by most people to be somewhere in that landscape of sociopathy. Did that particularly bother anyone? No.
There’s a few factors at play when we look at these super-villians and what functions the culture is playing in allowing these people to develop, incubate, grow, and maintain larger and larger positions of power. For one, let’s just get it off the bat. What kind of people does tech attract? Sure, there are positive attributes that was see: curiosity, a technical inclination, people who think outside of the box. Very well and good. But what about other attributes, such as narcissism, obsession with money and power, a deep need for control, and the desire to torture, fuck with, experiment on, and degrade, and so on? Of which tech provides opportunity aplenty.
If you’re a sociopath or a psychopath with an interest in using a company or an industry as your personal sadistic experiment lab, the first place you are gonna wanna go is tech. Why? Money. Lots and lots of money. Why? Power, tons of power. Why? Leverage. There is a massive market for technology products and services. Other reasons: Permissive culture that supports and protects abusers. Fast-paced, low-regulation environment. Ability to be around like minds. (Other sociopaths). New friends!
Because indeed they are selecting people who are sociopaths and psychopaths. Why would these people be surrounding themselves with people who care about humanity, and believe in fundamental human rights, when what they are trying to do is 100x their sadism, going ALL IN on AI specifically built to cause financial chaos, build out really holistic weapons portfolios, establish their own fucking state where they can do any kind of medical experiment they want, something they are openly trying to establish?
As I’ve noted earlier, I wouldn’t be surprised if the top 5-10% of the industry is dominated by sociopaths and psychopaths. That is a major reason why you see a tech culture that is so deeply broken, down to the finest details, because what it at the top is a veritable vipers den.
I think what we are seeing with the emergence of these “super villains” like Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, would not come from an industry that wasn’t constantly incubating these people, giving them money and power, and outright worshipping them. All of these figures I just mentioned are widely beloved within the tech industry.
So for one THAT needs to fucking change. The tech ecosystem is wayyyyy too comfortable with these predators going around causing chaos and sucking up resources for their own narcissism and power trips. Familiarity has not bred contempt but rather ongoing worship of the “X factor” that these leaders embody. The X factor is literally just malignant narcissism and unquenchable lust for power. That special something that cannot be taught!
One thing about sociopaths and psychopaths is that you cannot talk them into being different and better people. They do not respond to treatment, they will not change, and efforts to “reform” a psychopath-dominated infrastructure are not going to work. The psychopath is a sadistic, cunning enemy and is not going to see the error of his ways. So, this is something that we cannot address with “workshops” or “sensitivity training” or the like. This goes way deeper than that. If you would like to propose your own model of how to “treat” this, that’s fine, but the tablestakes demand I make is that we need to get these people the fuck out of our industry.
What I propose is not to think about this through a lens of pathology exclusively. What I think is more salient is to recognize the existence of these actors, and recognize how they are operating within the environment. A lens of sociopath or psychopathy allows the introduction of factors like sadism that need to be considered when evaluating and predicting developments in this space. Even outside of the material reasons they behave so violently, they are seeking to cause pain. The reason why our technology products produce so much pain is because the people driving it are in fact sadists; this is a mission that, while intertwined with their power and money, has its own consistently productive purpulsion throughout the psychopath’s life.
We have this idea in tech called Conways Law, which essentially dictates that the products produced by startups and other applicable units, emerge directly from how the startup communicates within itself and in the larger ecosystem. It might be a big esoteric, but if you take for a moment and truly assume that huge numbers of the people at the very head of tech are, literally, sadistic psychopaths, it does begin to cast the products of the industry in a new light. There is a relationship between how the industry runs and what it produces.
It is difficult to understand what is happening in this industry if you don’t consider sadism as a driving factor. Evidence of this playing out on a longer time horizon is in products like Facebook and Instagram, which we know from repeated studies, cause very serious mental health problems in children and teens. The emphasis on hurting these vulnerable populations is absolutely profit driven but there is also sadism in it to cause large scale harm. There is suffering everywhere they go and that is absolutely the expected result of this trajectory. The first version of Facebook, an internet “Hot or Not”, was intended to drive hurt and objectification and sexism. That core impulse remains and is spread across the product suite.
Because the environment is so dominated by these people, I think we see a radicalizing factor where even over time a sociopath or psychopath becomes worse and worse and worse, and is carried along that path through consort with their fellow sociopaths. For example, Marc Andreessen, through his own admission, is a totally different person now than he was in the last bubble. One of the major things that changed in his environment as he began to build what we now know to be Andreessen Horowitz, is he starts having more and more dangerous people around him, he is in a position that he has a lot of people that he is in control of, a lot of money, that he has total freedom in what to give money to and how to exercise his power, and so on. All of this is reinforcing the sociopath’s behaviors and escalating the behaviors and they are getting more and more severe and the fall-out also gets larger and larger.
The adoration that they receive is very much an accelerant on the ambitions of Silicon Valley sociopaths. The people at the top of major startups and venture capital firms, as well as the upper executives of larger tech companies, are absolutely worshipped by the entire industry and this has always been the case. The ORIGINAL reply guy was the hoards of men in their 20s and 30s who meet ever tweet and every blog from a VC with the most obnoxious, uncomfortable displays of crawling, pleading, kissing ass, and overall noxious simping. Ugh. This is one of the first things that REALLY got under my skin: the fawning hero worship is a deep part of the culture and while surely some of this is normal and the human inclination, why is it pouring into some of the worse people on the planet?
But when you think about it it seems highly likely that that that culture is itself installed by sociopaths and psychopaths with a high narcissistic drive for power over others. This is an environment that deeply values authoritarianism, where the individual is subsumed into a larger goal, and it is incredibly hierarchal.
There is this very deep belief in innate ability — I know, not something you like to see, big red flag — so there is a sense that these men are in fact just innately superior and one must strive to be like them while also knowing at some level that they can never truly compete. Most of the people in the field are easily accepting that this is essentially science. And in a way it is — in the sense that sociopaths and psychopaths are a phenomenon we can establish through science, but not in the way that demonstrates any existence of an innate technical mind, which is how they try to present themselves.
In VC you see where the sociopath is essentially tunneled into a deep network of sociopaths and psychopaths and is becoming more and more insular within their own nest of snakes. These folk only become more nakedly ambitious, greedy, narcissistic, and self-referential. I strongly doubt that Marc Andreessen has spoken to anyone that wasn’t a sociopath or psychopath in the last 10 years. And again, while this “sounds” at first touch, like a very ridiculous notion, take another look because this is exactly what we are seeing play out. At some point, there is no reason to let a non-sociopath in to the inner circle. Too risky. These people are playing an extremely high stakes game and every detail of this is being carried out to order.
Sociopaths and psychopaths have effectively hijacked the entire technology field and now have complete control over its most important mechanisms — for our interests, determining the future of what gets built via venture capital, which itself has established a monopoly on these instruments of production and their shape, size, dimension and trajectory.
The fact that they are fucking sociopaths, means we should stop trying to rehabilitate them and start trying to fucking remove them.