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November 6, 2023: Tech villain update: Zuckerberg, Andreessen, Neumann, Bankman-Fried

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Today: Tech villain update

It’s time to check in with a rogue’s gallery of tech bros: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Adam Neumann, and Sam Bankman-Fried. These tech villains have all been in the news recently, and today’s show will get you up to date.

Because whenever a company acts unethically, someone had to approve the decision. For example . . .

• Uber and Lyft Agree to $328 Million Payout for New York Drivers (NYT, Nov 2, 2023): “Uber will pay $290 million and Lyft will provide $38 million into two funds that will pay out claims that roughly 100,000 current and former drivers in New York State are eligible to file. The ride-hailing companies did not admit fault in the settlement.” . . . Letitia James: “For years, Uber and Lyft systematically cheated their drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in pay and benefits while they worked long hours in challenging conditions.”

From BoingBoing (Nov 5, 2023): “Uber deducted sales taxes and other fees from drivers’ pay rather than adding it to customers’ tabs, and lied about it in its terms of service. Lyft did likewise, through the cunning device of applying an ‘administrative charge’ equal to sales tax.”

Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX founder)

• Bloomberg's Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff newsletter (Nov 6, 2023):

all that you actually need to tell a jury is:

– 1. Customers deposited billions of dollars at FTX.
– 2. Bankman-Fried spent a whole lot of it on baubles like Bahamas beachfront real estate, political donations, Tom Brady, etc.
– 3. The customers asked for their money back and it wasn’t there.

There is just no coming back from that, you know? Bankman-Fried did not: Last Thursday, after four weeks of trial and less than five hours of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict of “obviously guilty, come on.”

• Sam Bankman-Fried: guilty on all charges (Molly White, Nov 2, 2023):

It took almost as long for the judge to read the charges to the jury as it did for the jury to find Sam Bankman-Fried guilty on all seven counts.

. . . Bankman-Fried’s charges are as follows:

1. Wire fraud on FTX customers
2. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud on FTX customers
3. Wire fraud on Alameda Research lenders
4. Conspiracy to commit wire fraud on Alameda Research lenders
5. Conspiracy to commit securities fraud
6. Conspiracy to commit commodities fraud
7. Conspiracy to commit money laundering

• Sam Bankman-Fried Is Found Guilty of 7 Counts of Fraud and Conspiracy (NYT, Nov 2, 2023): “Mr. Bankman-Fried tried to dismiss FTX’s collapse as the unfortunate result of a monumental accounting error, rather than a deliberate fraud. But at his trial, prosecutors argued that he had repeatedly lied to customers, lenders and investors, using their funds to build himself up into a crypto titan.”

Adam Neumann

• WeSuck: First Came the Hype; then Came Adam Neumann’s Self-Dealing; then Came the IPO Scandal; Now Comes the Bankruptcy (Wall Street on Parade, Nov 3, 2023): “Back in 2019, venture capitalists had valued this company at $47 billion and were hoping to cash out in a hot IPO. Yesterday, the company closed with a market value of $59 million.” . . . “As of this morning, Forbes puts Neumann’s net worth at $2.2 billion. WeWork’s shareholders are sitting with an effective 3-cent stock that is likely to be wiped out in bankruptcy.”

Mark Zuckerberg

• His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-Year-Old Showed Him What the App Was Really Like. (Jeff Horwitz in WSJ, Nov 2, 2023):

A recurring survey of issues 238,000 users had experienced over the past seven days, the effort identified problems with prevalence from the start: Users were 100 times more likely to tell Instagram they’d witnessed bullying in the last week than Meta’s bullying-prevalence statistics indicated they should.

. . . Among users under the age of 16, 26% recalled having a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility against someone based on their race, religion or identity. More than a fifth felt worse about themselves after viewing others’ posts, and 13% had experienced unwanted sexual advances in the past seven days.

(A consultant at Facebook named Arturo Bejar tried to alert senior leadership about the harm, but he was advised to water down his findings so as to protect the company from any possible PR problems.)

• Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse (Lex Fridman podcast, Sep 28, 2023) – screenshot above is taken from this video.

Marc Andreessen

• The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (Marc Andreessen, Oct 16, 2023): “The techno-capital machine makes natural selection work for us in the realm of ideas. The best and most productive ideas win, and are combined and generate even better ideas. Those ideas materialize in the real world as technologically enabled goods and services that never would have emerged de novo. . . . We believe in [ensuring that] the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.”

• The Techno-Optimist Manifesto redacted by Ben Grosser (Oct 17, 2023): “Yesterday, the influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published what he titled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, an anti-regulation anti-ethics hyper-capitalist growth-obsessed screed that, sadly, highlights the thinking that’s led to so much exploitative toxic tech. Instead of writing a point-by-point critique, I instead chose to simplify Andreessen’s arguments using redaction poetry. The result leaves in place the little bits one needs to get a decent sense of Marc’s thinking.” (See also PDF link.)



• Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new? (Dave Karpf, Oct 18, 2023):

The most powerful people in the world (people like Andreessen!) are optimists. And therein lies the problem: Look around. Their optimism has not helped matters much. The sort of technological optimism that Andreessen is asking for is a shield. He is insisting that we judge the tech barons based on their lofty ambitions, instead of their track records.

. . . And this is especially galling coming from a16z, the VC firm most responsible for inflating the Web3 hype balloon. Marc Andreessen and his partners spent the past three years promoting companies like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Axie Infinity. They were early investors in both companies, so their investments likely paid off handsomely. The company is STILL trying to pump its Web3 investment portfolio.

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