Gavin Belson

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The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

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In an early scene, the Thiel character—who is known in the show as Peter Gregory and who shares Thiel’s affectless demeanor, his love for seasteading, and his disdain for elite universities—is successfully manipulated by a promising engineer who threatens to go to back to college. The show’s writers had been unsparing with other tech figures, incorporating aspects of the Google founders and Oracle’s Larry Ellison into the villainous Gavin Belson—a greedy big tech executive with a persecution complex and full-time spiritual adviser—and savagely mocking the investor and NBA team owner Mark Cuban, whose fictional double is obsessed with his own net worth and a failed but financially remunerative tech product he created in the 1990s. The Thiel character, on the other hand, comes off as sweetly innocent, more out of touch than conniving.

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Thiel’s interest in parabiosis led to wild speculation—and lots of snark. Gawker heard a rumor that he had been paying $40,000 to get quarterly infusions from an eighteen-year-old. The following year, HBO’s Silicon Valley dedicated an entire episode to the subject, having the show’s evil corporate character, Gavin Belson, receive transfusions from a strapping “blood boy”—or as Belson described him, “my transfusion associate.” (The actor who’d played the Thiel character had died during the series’ first season, and some of Thiel’s quirks found their way into Belson.) In late 2018, during his last interview with a major U.S. media outlet before the pandemic hit—at The New York Times’s annual DealBook conference—Thiel addressed the issue.

The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty by Ethan Sherwood Strauss

Broken windows theory, collective bargaining, Donald Trump, Gavin Belson, hive mind, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, Larry Ellison, off-the-grid, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs

The deal has long since been done, and the Warriors’ suffering is a distant memory. “Maybe I should eat something so I can be human,” Joe Lacob says, indicating that he just might be in on the joke. The joke, of course, is that Lacob is more machine than man, that he cannot fathom the utility of social graces, that he is a parody of the already parodic Gavin Belson of HBO’s Silicon Valley. The other billionaires in the building likely aren’t in a joking mood. We are at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas, and Lacob is about to step into the NBA’s annual Board of Governors meeting, the league’s high court of petty grievances. That ballroom will contain some twenty-odd ownership groups who’ve no hope for a championship.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

He had lived a relatively normal life and had even continued to play his favorite sport of basketball—backpack, artificial heart, and all. NEW (AND OLD) IDEAS IN REGENERATION While some of these ideas for regenerative medicine are pretty “out there,” they aren’t even the strangest. If you are a fan of the HBO series Silicon Valley, you may remember a 2017 episode wherein antagonist billionaire Gavin Belson receives a blood transfusion from a strapping young man, right in the middle of a business presentation. This was a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at the practice of heterochronic parabiosis, more commonly known as “young blood” transfusions. As the theory goes, regularly receiving blood plasma transfusions from a young and healthy person can benefit an older person through reduced inflammation, proliferation of stem cells, reduction of the amyloid plaques that correspond to Alzheimer’s disease, and other preventative benefits for cancer and heart disease.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Berrent had joined the company from WilmerHale, a white-shoe law firm, and was there to allay the concerns from Case employees that WeWork intended to claim ownership of their personal projects, which Case had encouraged them to pursue freely before. Berrent referenced HBO’s Silicon Valley, which was then in its second season. The show’s villain was Gavin Belson, an unfeeling business titan running a company called Hooli, who was constantly followed around by a spiritual guru and had recently laid claim to a piece of technology that one of his former employees had built. “Look,” Berrent said. “We’re not Hooli!” * * * AT THE END OF 2015, WeWork had lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom start quietly making early preparations for an initial public offering.