Pet projects of the new billionaires

Books Review: <i>Valley of The Gods</i> and <i>The Kingdom of Happiness</i>

VALLEY OF THE GODS

A Silicon Valley Story

Alexandra Wolfe

Simon & Schuster

261 pages; $27

THE KINGDOM OF HAPPINESS

Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia

Aimee Groth

Touchstone

318 pages; $27

As I sat down for lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles, I placed a copy of Valley of the Gods, by Alexandra Wolfe, on the table, and a waitress walking by stopped to peer at the cover. “Oh, that looks like an interesting book,” she said. “What’s it about?” 

“It’s about Silicon Valley,” I began. “It follows this young kid, John Burnham, who gets paid $100,000 by this weird billionaire guy, Peter Thiel, whom you’ve probably heard of; he’s a big Trump supporter and spoke at the Republican National Convention?” — a blank stare from the waitress. “Anyway, Thiel pays him (and a bunch of other kids) to forego college so Burnham can mine asteroids, but he doesn’t actually end up mining the asteroids and..?.?” 

“Oh, I thought it was a nonfiction book,” the waitress interrupted with a perplexed and awkward look on her face. 

“Oh,” I replied. “Believe it or not, it is.” 

She scampered away, unsure she wanted to hear more. At times while reading the book, I wish I could have done the same thing. 

Over the last couple of decades there has been a lot of ink spilled about Silicon Valley, which ironically has helped disembowel most ink-spilling businesses. Now, we have two more to add to the collection: The aforementioned book by Ms Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and The Kingdom of Happiness, by Aimee Groth, a contributor to Quartz — both of which are about tech culture. 

Ms Wolfe’s writing doesn’t differ much from those who came before her in this regard. She’s informative and has spoken with lots and lots of people up and down the peninsula. The book begins with the protagonist, Mr Burnham (or antagonist, depending whose side you’re on), who isn’t old enough to drink yet but is debating dropping out of college to follow the Pied Piper of libertarian and contrarian thinking, Peter Thiel, to Silicon Valley. As Ms Wolfe chronicles, Mr Thiel, who has a degree from Stanford University and largely credits where he is today (a billionaire) to his time at that school, started the Thiel Fellowship, in 2011, which awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old to say no to MIT, Stanford or, in Burnham’s case, the University of Massachusetts, to pursue an Ayn Randian dream of disrupting archetypal norms. 

It won’t be giving away the ending by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Mr Burnham. 

Ms Wolfe’s writing can oscillate between graciously beautiful and being almost too explicative. Where I found myself getting frustrated was with Ms Wolfe’s decision to omit facts that don’t fit that particular part of the story. For example, when we first meet Mr Thiel, he is lauded as a genius who made billions on companies like Spotify and Lyft and started his own hedge fund, Clarium Capital. Yes. This is all true. But Ms Wolfe fails to note that Clarium faltered badly with misplaced bets during the Great Recession, or that his support for Donald Trump has made him largely persona non grata in Silicon Valley. 

While Ms Wolfe is a fly on the wall in her book, writing as if she is documenting history, Ms Groth places herself smack in the centre of her book and, while there, is often blissfully inebriated. 

The Kingdom of Happiness doesn’t take place in Silicon Valley per se, but it is definitively about tech culture. Ms Groth follows Tony Hsieh, the creator of Zappos, as he pours $350 million of his personal wealth into downtown Las Vegas with the goal of reinventing the area as a blissful business utopia. I won’t be giving away the story by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Mr Hsieh, either. 

Where Ms Groth succeeds is by bringing you along on her journey to understand the world she’s documenting. Where she fails is that she brings you along on every single painful, tedious moment of that journey. 

One evening while partying with Mr Hsieh she gets blackout drunk on vodka and ends up being dropped off at a hospital (rather than home) by an altruistic cabdriver who is concerned she has alcohol poisoning. Ms Groth rides bikes around Burning Man with Mr Hsieh, sits across from him on a private plane to Los Angeles, hangs out in his tony Airstream trailer, where he lives, in Las Vegas, goes to Zappos meetings, pool parties, more meetings, and over the course of the book, drinks enough fernet (nicknamed “Kool-Aid” in downtown Vegas) with Mr Hsieh and the Zapponians (the term given to Zappos employees) to make me want to sign all of them up for a few weeks in rehab. 

It isn’t so much that I didn’t like both of these books as much as I didn’t like the people in them. They, frankly, come across as self-centred lunatics who are intent on making a dent in the universe, without an ounce of self-awareness for the repercussions of how those actions could harm others. While the books do have some scepticism, more often than not, they read as though the authors consider their subjects to be gods, not mere mortals who just happened to be good on computers. 

For me, I was left wondering how many more dents our universe can take.
 

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