As news broke that Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, had died in a fire the day after Thanksgiving, it was almost incomprehensible. Near-billionaires don’t die in fires, and they particularly don’t die alone in a 300-square-foot shed, surrounded by some old gym equipment, a pink-and-white-striped beach chair, bottles of Fernet Branca liqueur, and nitrous oxide chargers.
Over the past decade, the Silicon Valley tech rich have come to be seen almost as deities. They make up almost half of the 20 richest people on the planet, according to Forbes, and are quoted, lauded, and defended by legions of fans as if they were some sort of doctrinal beings: saints with iPhones. When they go on silent retreats and meditate for days on end, it’s seen as proof they are close to some sort of transcendental plane, and when they return to normal life, they will explain how we—they!—can fix civilization. Those who push themselves to extremes—by hacking their bodies, drinking Soylent instead of consuming real food, or forgoing sustenance altogether—are not seen as odd, but considered on the bleeding edge, as if they were just doing this to show us mere mortals how in control they are of their own lives.
Hsieh, like many tech titans, found success young—he sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million when he was 24 years old and later cofounded Zappos, which he sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009. Hsieh adopted a new work ethic—known as holacracy—where employees have no job titles and self-organize to fulfill the tasks of the company. He came to be known as someone who shunned the money he had made (he lived in a tiny Airstream in a parking lot) and just wanted to make the world (or at least Las Vegas) a better place. But Hsieh was haunted by his success, and had also ventured somewhere dark, to the extremes of biohacking and food deprivation. In the months before he died, Hsieh’s body had deteriorated to just 100 pounds and was suffering from lack of nourishment. At one time he had put himself on an extreme 26-day “alphabet diet,” during which he only ate foods starting with the same single letter each day. He was anxious, depressed, and self-destructive, as his longtime friend the singer Jewel said, and in addition to becoming addicted to oxygen deprivation and whippets, he was also paying “friends” to be around him in Park City, Utah, showing that this public presentation of a transcendental life is really, at the end of the day, mostly just bullshit.
“A few founders will create this made-up person and then everyone else in tech wants to emulate it,” a Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me. “It was the same with Steve Jobs, where people wanted to wear a black turtleneck and become vegan; now these tech bros want to be a part of this spiritual group of drug users, partying on private islands, but in reality, it’s more like a cult.”
Polls, research, and those screens we all stare at incessantly show how important wealth and fame have become in modern American life. At the top are people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, who have gone from being like you and me to being the richest and most powerful people on earth. But no matter how much money they make, how many people use their platforms or buy their products, or how high they are on any given list, it’s never enough. “Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t wake up every morning and say to himself, ‘Holy shit!—2.8 billion people use Facebook!’ Instead, he wakes up every morning and says, ‘Why isn’t the other half of planet Earth using Facebook?!’ ” one tech founder told me. Jeff Bezos is no different. He recently stepped down as the CEO of Amazon not to retire as the richest man on earth or spend more time with his family, but to focus on other pursuits: the Washington Post, trying to beat Musk in the new space race, helping push Amazon to be even more innovative. The next tier of tech leaders—billionaires (or decamillionaires) like Hsieh, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek—are also constantly at war with their own demons about how they got to this rare place, terrified that they might lose their standing, and riddled with the angst of impostor syndrome or worse. According to people close to Hsieh, some believe the pressures of having made it, both financially and to a certain level of tech stardom, were simply too much.
No wonder we’ve entered a new era in Silicon Valley, with the tech elite having their own period of sex, drugs, and rock and roll—often without the rock, the roll, or even the sex. Last year, a number of rich founders began experimenting with microdosing drugs to make it through the day, as two people with knowledge of these habits have told me, by taking tiny amounts of MDMA and LSD, and a long list of psilocybin mushrooms to help take the edge off, but not so much that you’re seeing tie-dyed dolphins or 3D cartoon characters chasing you down Market Street. For Musk, the pressures of being at the top led the board of Tesla to worry about the founder’s use of Ambien to get to sleep each night after the “excruciating” toll running Tesla had taken on him.
Some have even begun building their own microdosing labs, hiring chemists and pharmaceutical scientists to make bespoke batches of hallucinogens to pop like Skittles when reality gets a little too real. During the pandemic, I’ve heard of founders going to far-off places to experiment with ayahuasca, peyote, and the new drug of choice, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a synthetic drug that one person told me was “like doing 10 years of psychotherapy in five minutes.”
Then there’s the body hacking, which first made its way into the mainstream in 1984 by way of the sci-fi subculture novel Neuromancer but has since leapt off the page and into Palo Alto, where everyone seems to want to outdo their cohorts by pushing their bodies to extremes. You’ve got the Dorseys of the world bragging about how little they eat each day, the Zuckerbergs boasting of killing their own food, and an army of nerds now wearing every tracking device imaginable—from rings that follow your sleep to real-time sugar monitoring devices you inject into your arm—and then experimenting with all forms of starvation and sleep habits to show how in control they are of their bodies. There’s intermittent fasting, working under infrared heat lamps, calculating ketones, and working with “DIY surgeons” to implant magnets and microchips.
“I think this is all a result of a complete detachment from authenticity by these tech founders. They present a version of themselves that isn’t real, and then, when they look in the mirror, they see how inauthentic they really are, and the only way they can handle the illusion they’ve created is through drugs,” said one Silicon Valley insider who often spends time with the biohacking-obsessed ultrarich. “It’s all synthetic and it’s all an illusion.” The pandemic only heightened this, with people slipping into more extreme activities in their quest for control.
One Silicon Valley founder who sold his company to Google years ago told me that the year that followed the sale—when he had gone from an average American worrying about paying rent each month to seeing seven zeros at the end of his bank account—was one of the most miserable times of his life. “You think it’s going to solve all these problems,” the founder told me, “but it just creates so many more issues, both psychologically and existentially. You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.” For Hsieh, the only thing he could do was run away from his demons and the reality in which he found himself imprisoned.
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