Larry Ellison

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The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Benchmark Capital, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

Oracle Team USA sails home to victory, pulling off one of the greatest comebacks in sports history. ACEA/Balazs Gardi Celebration after winning the 34th America’s Cup. From left: David Ellison, Judge Jimmy Linn, Sandy Ellison, Meir Teper, Nikita Kahn, Larry Ellison, Kim Dubin, Pam Tilton, FBI Agent Jonathan Dubin, Jon Weis. Courtesy of Larry Ellison Jimmy Spithill, Larry Ellison, and Norbert Bajurin celebrate the remarkable victory in 2013. ACEA/Gilles Martin-Raget 18 Valencia, Spain Spring 2007 IN APRIL 2007, eleven teams began racing for the Louis Vuitton Cup in the waters off Valencia. Each team raced every other team twice in two round-robins, which ended in May.

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The refrain was becoming as familiar as the I-carried-my-shoes-to-save-the-soles story. Jozo told Norbert he’d worked too hard for too long to have his son take his business for granted. Madeleine had her own approach. She wanted to understand what her husband was up against, so she picked up the biography The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison. She peppered Norbert with pillow-talk tidbits. “The Oracle Way . . . was simply to win,” Madeleine read aloud. “How that goal was achieved was secondary.” She went on, “While Ellison demanded absolute loyalty, he did not always return it. The people he liked best were the ones who were doing something for him.

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A 1903 cartoon from Puck shows the “American Sportsman” declaring, “If we can not keep both, we would rather lose the Cup than lose you, Sir Thomas.” Larry Ellison at age two. Larry’s adoptive parents, Lillian and Louis Ellison. Larry at twenty-four years old, rock climbing in Yosemite. Larry with his children, David and Megan, in 1989. Sayonara during a relatively calm moment in the 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart race. Larry Ellison and Melanie Craft at their wedding in December, 2003. From left: Rep. Tom Lantos with his wife, Annette Tillemann, Steve Jobs, Melanie, Larry, Megan Ellison, David Ellison, Laurene Powell Jobs.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

To be sure, all those mundane calculations can take some of the romance out of a new marriage, but prenuptials also come with a huge benefit: They can help provide a shield of confidentiality, as such serial divorcés among the Forbes 400 as Larry Ellison and Ronald Perelman have discovered. * * * The marrying kind About half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce. But for the Forbes 400, only 20% to 30% do, though the percentage has been increasing over the last 25 years. Interestingly, those who divorce are, on average, richer than those who don’t. The divorce premium in 2006: about $200 million. * * * Larry Ellison was divorced three times by the time he was forty-two. Before marrying third wife, Barbara, a former Oracle employee, he presented her with a prenuptial agreement that capped her entitlement at $1 million.

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(The fortunes of Oprah Winfrey; Martha Stewart; Pleasant Rowland, founder of the American Girl doll empire; and Meg Whitman, the chief executive officer of eBay, are entirely self-made.) • The average net worth in 200610 of Forbes 400 members without a college degree was $5.96 billion; those with a degree averaged $3.14 billion. Four of the five richest Americans—Bill Gates, casino owner Sheldon Adelson, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (whose combined net worth was $110 billion in 2006)—are college dropouts. The fifth, Warren Buffett, has an undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska—and subsequently got a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University. A broader study of the Forbes 400 over the last twenty-five years indicates that in any given year about 10 percent of the members dropped out of high school, possess only a high school diploma, or never completed college

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Many of the best examples of excess and pretension during the last twenty-five years have in fact been the work of the lesser rich. Surprisingly few of the Forbes 400 regularly make headlines because of their ostentatious lifestyles. Houses and yachts remain important showpieces, of course, and the competition in both areas is intense: Larry Ellison built a boat that is ninety feet longer than a football field. Few have put on30 a more ostentatious show than list member Ira Rennert, who constructed a five-building compound in the Hamptons, the centerpiece of which is a sixty-six-thousand-square-foot, twenty-nine-bedroom, Italianate villa by the sea.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Bart Ziegler, “Industry Has Next to No Patience with Jobs’ NeXT,” AP, Aug. 19, 1990; Stross, 226–228; Gary Wolf, “The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired, Feb. 1996; Anthony Perkins, “Jobs’ Story,” Red Herring, Jan. 1, 1996. Apple Falling: Interviews with Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Larry Ellison. Sculley, 248, 273; Deutschman, 236; Steve Lohr, “Creating Jobs,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997; Amelio, 190 and preface to the hardback edition; Young and Simon, 213–214; Linzmayer, 273–279; Guy Kawasaki, “Steve Jobs to Return as Apple CEO,” Macworld, Nov. 1, 1994. Slouching toward Cupertino: Interviews with Jon Rubinstein, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Avie Tevanian, Fred Anderson, Larry Tesler, Bill Gates, John Lasseter. John Markoff, “Why Apple Sees Next as a Match Made in Heaven,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 1996; Steve Lohr, “Creating Jobs,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Steve Jobs Returning to Apple,” Washington Post, Dec. 21, 1996; Louise Kehoe, “Apple’s Prodigal Son Returns,” Financial Times, Dec. 23, 1996; Amelio, 189–201, 238; Carlton, 409; Linzmayer, 277; Deutschman, 240.

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Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct. 16, 2005; Leander Kahney, “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong,” Wired, Mar. 18, 2008. From iCEO to CEO: Interviews with Ed Woolard, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. Apple proxy statement, Mar. 12, 2001. CHAPTER 29: APPLE STORES The Customer Experience: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Ron Johnson. Jerry Useem, “America’s Best Retailer,” Fortune, Mar. 19, 2007; Gary Allen, “Apple Stores,” ifoAppleStore.com. The Prototype: Interviews with Art Levinson, Ed Woolard, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, Larry Ellison, Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson. Cliff Edwards, “Sorry, Steve . . . ,” Business Week, May 21, 2001. Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass: Interviews with Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs.

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EDDY CUE. Chief of Internet services at Apple, Jobs’s wingman in dealing with content companies. ANDREA “ANDY” CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna’s firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs. LARRY ELLISON. CEO of Oracle and personal friend of Jobs. TONY FADELL. Punky engineer brought to Apple in 2001 to develop the iPod. SCOTT FORSTALL. Chief of Apple’s mobile device software. ROBERT FRIEDLAND. Reed student, proprietor of an apple farm commune, and spiritual seeker who influenced Jobs, then went on to run a mining company.

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

And yet, in the version of events told by Lacob, Guber, and additional sources, Joe did indeed get on that plane and meet with Chris Cohan. Lacob retells, “I said in the meeting with Cohan, ‘I can’t bid against Larry Ellison. We just can’t do that. So can you name a price that you will sell it to me for. Just name the price.’ And we’re in at four hundred, which we thought was a lot, and I’m sure Larry [Ellison] did too. And Cohan said, ‘I can’t do that, we have a process, a bidding process, blah, blah, blah.’” It was time for Joe to add some pressure. “I said, ‘Well, here’s the deal—I’m not bidding anymore, so I’m out.

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It’s also a story of why ultimate success cannot sustain. 1 THE BIG DEAL EGO AND AMBITION NOT ONLY BUILT THE GREATEST TEAM OF this era, but were necessary for its purchase. On July 15, 2010, Bay Area newspapers received a curious press release from California’s richest man. Oracle founder and tycoon bon vivant Larry Ellison made a surprising non-announcement: he wasn’t acquiring the Warriors. It had long been assumed that Ellison was in line to buy the team, then a long-suffering franchise, from then owner Chris Cohan. But something had happened. “Although I was the highest bidder, Chris Cohan decided to sell to someone else,” Ellison’s email read.

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With $28 billion in a recession-ravaged economy, Ellison should have had a monopoly over the selling process. A notoriously extravagant spender, he claimed one of the most extensive real estate portfolios on earth, to go along with a similarly lavish fleet of superyachts. Even for your average billionaire, entering a bidding war with Larry Ellison was akin to fighting a tank with a bayonet. Conversely, who was Joe Lacob? A successful Kleiner Perkins partner to be sure, but not to the tune of billions. Nor did Lacob have anything resembling Ellison’s fame. On the day of the Warriors team sale, the name “Joe Lacob” had not appeared in the Chronicle since 1998, back when the paper briefly mentioned Joe’s purchase of a San Jose squad in a since defunct women’s basketball league.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

It was ruled by men: Samuel Brannan, Levi Strauss, John Studebaker, Henry Wells, and William Fargo. Women, outnumbered and overmatched, were mostly reduced to entertainers, companions, wives, or housekeepers. Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff. Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley.

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Here Arthur Rock, at first reluctantly, had provided funds and advice to a scruffy and “very unappealing” Steve Jobs to build Apple. Here venture capitalist Tom Perkins and scientist Bob Swanson had started Genentech. It was on Sand Hill Road that Dave Marquardt’s early investment in Microsoft had yielded a bonus of a new red Ferrari, and where Larry Ellison incubated a start-up called Oracle, getting a loan from VC Don Lucas to keep the relational database company going. It was here that Arthur Rock had defined venture capital as “taking adventures with capital.” The day Sonja arrived in California, in July 1994, Time magazine hit the stands with a cover story titled “The Strange New World of the Internet.”

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* * * Morby had started at TA Associates as an unpaid intern in the late 1970s, when The Mary Tyler Moore Show had caused a stir with its touching depiction of a single, independent, and empowered working woman. Morby made partner in 1982, a year before MJ Elmore. She met with the young Bill Gates and Larry Ellison and landed deals with the earliest software companies, including Digital Research, McCormack & Dodge, Capex, and many more, at a time when investing in software was considered risky. Sonja told Kim a story Morby had shared with her about meeting Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Arriving at Microsoft in Seattle for an early-morning meeting, Morby was told that Gates was on his way from the airport.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Ron Johnson: It was, “I want to make a music device and I want it to hold all your music, I want it to be digital, with great software so you could take your music everywhere.” I don’t think he had thought of “a thousand songs in your pocket” yet, but that was what he was imagining. Larry Ellison: He was obsessive about making an MP3 player easy to use, and affordable, and beautiful… all the things you’d think Sony would do. Tony Fadell: Then we flip to the next page of the checklist, and there was something about Sony. “And Sony, yes they are number one, but we are going to beat them up!” Next page… Larry Ellison: Steve had decided, rather brilliantly, “Why should I compete with Microsoft and bang my head up against the wall when I can compete with Sony instead?”

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Bono (singing Bob Dylan’s song): “I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea / Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me / I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man / Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.” Mike Slade: And then of course Larry Ellison gave this big eulogy, which was, you know, funny and charming and kind of all about Larry. Larry Ellison: I wanted to talk about my friendship with Steve, what it was like, and a little bit about what Steve was really like. Mike Slade: Bill and I were kind of eye-rolling each other about Larry because it had a lot of the pronoun I in it—shall we say—for a eulogy.

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David Boies’s quotes are from an interview in Wired in October 2000. The Dot Bomb Peter Thiel’s comments were made in the spring of 2012 in a series of lectures at Stanford and recorded in the notes of Blake Masters, who was in the audience. The Return of the King Larry Ellison’s remarks were made on a special August 2013 episode of CBS This Morning, “An Hour with Larry Ellison,” and in the commencement speech he gave at the University of Southern California in 2016. I’m Feeling Lucky Paul Buchheit’s quotes are found in the book Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. Susan Wojcicki’s quotes can be found in Jefferson Graham’s USA Today story, “The House That Helped Build Google,” in July 2007.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Schwartz, “Computer Associates Gets User Friendly,” Business Week, January 21, 1991: 86–87. 29. Ibid. 30. Steve Hamm et al., “Why Oracle Is Cool Again,” Business Week, May 8, 2000: 42–47. Notes to pp. 185–190 333 31. Wilson, The Difference between God and Larry Ellison*. (The asterisk in the title led to a footnote: “God doesn’t think He’s Larry Ellison.” This was apparently a popular joke inside and outside Oracle while Wilson was researching his book.) 32. AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1994). 33. Richard S. Rosenbloom and Clayton M.

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Peterson’s AlmostPerfect, John Walker’s The Autodesk File, Douglas Carlston’s Software People, John Imlay’s Jungle Rules, and Ben Voth’s A Piece of the Computer Pie.30 All these books contain valuable firsthand accounts of individual firms. Some of the better books by journalists (and not about Microsoft) are Mike Wilson’s account of Oracle, The Difference between God and Larry Ellison, Gerd Meissner’s SAP: Inside the Software Power, and Tristan GastonBreton’s La Saga Cap Gemini.31 There are also a few article-length reminiscences by industry pioneers, including Elmer Kubie’s recollections of the early years of the Computer Usage Company and J. Lesourne and R. Armand’s description of the first decade of the French software house SEMA.32 Most histories of individual firms focus on the largest companies—those with hundreds or thousands of employees and with revenues of $1 billion or more.

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Charles Wang has been portrayed as uncompromisingly aggressive, streetwise, and hostile to “kiss-ass MBAs.”22 In the mid 1990s, Computer Associates established a public relations department and adopted more enlightened human-resources policies, and in 1998 Fortune ranked it among the 100 best companies to work for. The older image persisted to a degree, but the turnaround was remarkable. Computer Associates shows the imprint of its founder as much as Microsoft bears the hallmark of Bill Gates or Oracle that of Larry Ellison. Yet, unlike Gates and Ellison, Charles Wang is virtually unknown outside The Corporate Software Products Industry 181 Table 6.6 Computer Associates’ principal acquisitions, 1980–1995. 1982 1983 1984 1984 1985 1986 1986 1987 1987 1988 1988 1988 Corporation acquired Activity (cost, where known) Capex Information Unlimited Sorcim Johnson Systems Top Secret Software Software International Integrated System Software Co.

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry by Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, business continuity plan, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, digital divide, iterative process, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, Nicholas Carr, platform as a service, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business

I wasn’t convinced that I wanted to dedicate myself to sales, and I didn’t want to be an 800-number operator, but I soon discovered that working with customers was much more fun than writing code, and it turned out that I was pretty good at it. Oracle had about two hundred people when I started, and the fast-growing company prized the efforts of young people and rewarded them. Founder and CEO Larry Ellison regularly xx Introduction walked the halls to chat with employees. (I usually took these opportunities to share my enthusiasm for Macs.) Soon after I sent Larry a note asking when Oracle would be on the Macintosh and included a business plan about how to make us successful in the Apple market, Larry made me the director of Oracle’s Macintosh division.

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Play #12: Hire the Best Players You Know I obliged Larry’s request to limit my use of Oracle as a recruiting fair, but I was ecstatic about the opportunity to handpick three talented and well-trained individuals to help build salesforce.com. I asked Nancy Connery to run recruiting and human resources, something we desperately needed. I tapped 15 BEHIND THE CLOUD The Larry Ellison Playbook Many of the lessons I learned from Larry still guide me today. Most of all, he taught me that accomplishments are fueled by faith. When Oracle entered its darkest days, every employee, customer, analyst, and even the people closest to him doubted the company would rebound. Even in that difficult climate, Larry’s resolve never faltered.

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The fighter jet represented our company, which was built on the most advanced technology and was a vast improvement on anything that came before it. The biplane was a metaphor for the software industry: obsolete and ill-suited for its task. The inside story is that I stole this entire concept from Larry Ellison and Oracle. Previously, Larry had commissioned an advertisement with Oracle as the fighter plane taking down its database competitors, which were depicted (you guessed it) as biplanes. I knew that an updated version would pay homage to my origins and serve as the perfect vehicle to introduce our cutting-edge End of Software campaign.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

One evening as we sat in his kitchen I reminded Clark that he had said that once he became a real after-tax billionaire he'd retire. He said, without missing a beat, "I just want to make more money than Larry Ellison. Then I'll stop." This was news. I pointed out that he'd never before mentioned this ambition. "I just want to have more money than Larry Ellison," he said again. "I don't know why. But once I have more money than Larry Ellison, I'll be satisfied." Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, the biggest Page 260 software company in the Valley, was worth about nine billion dollars; Clark was worth a bit more than three billion. On the other hand, Ellison's wealth was completely tied up in Oracle stock, which had mostly missed out on the boom.

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His temperament did not belong in a man of his size. He was as agitated as a mongoose eyeing a cobra. This agitation could be deeply unsettling to others. Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes and a longtime observer of Silicon Valley, once said that there were only three men in the Valley who were physically intimidating. Larry Ellison, who ran Oracle, Gerald Saunders who ran Advanced Micro Devices, and Clark, who ran himself. That statement was both strange and true. It was strange because though Clark had a temper he was never violent. It was true because people often were terrified of Clark, even if they didn't fear being hit.

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The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses. In one of his messages written about the time Hyperion left its dock, Steve informed his fellow programmers of a big-time CEO who might want to help create, as Steve put it, "a package which he can sell as part of a big custom installation to the Larry Ellisons of the world [i.e., rich technologists]. Ultimately I think this technology could be sold as more of a standard product, maybe via franchises. One interesting example was big vacation homes in Hawaii where the owners would like to log in to the house over the web and see if the pool's warm and the cleaners are not fucking in the master bed."

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Those who have already made it big in the technology industry have not failed to notice. Aside from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, other tech titans who are driving interest in the longevity meme include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. TECH TITANS TAKING ON BIOLOGY “Death has never made any sense to me,” Larry Ellison told investigative reporter Mike Wilson, who wrote an authorized biography of the so-called bad boy of Silicon Valley. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?. . . Death makes me very angry.

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Craig Venter and Daniel Gibson, “How We Created the First Synthetic Cell,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266460432676840.html. 61 Ibid. 62 See http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/?pli=1. 63 Mike Wilson, The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison (New York: HarperBusiness Paperback, 2003), 266. 64 www.ellisonfoundation.org/adsp.jsp?key=01misstmnt. 65 “Mr. Ellison said that he would have liked to do molecular biology as an alternative career, so Dr. Lederberg invited the software entrepreneur to work in his lab at Rockefeller in 1994.”

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Through Google, Larry Page has given over $250,000 to Singularity University and has said that if he were a student, SU is where he’d want to be.67 Interestingly, his wife, Lucy Southworth, is a biologist who has written papers on aging issues, including one titled “Effects of Aging on Mouse Transcriptional Networks,” coauthored with Stanford’s Dr. Stuart K. Kim, who is a well-known aging expert and one of Larry Ellison’s award recipients.68 Sergey Brin is spreading the meme in a more personal way. 23andMe is a genomics company that was cofounded by Brin’s biologist wife, Anne Wojcicki, and has gone a long way toward popularizing the idea of personalized medicine. “Spit parties” are one of the cute marketing techniques the company uses to get the public interested in thinking about their DNA and how it might be fixed to cure disease.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

“I made an offer”: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Larry Ellison, Navaid Farooq, Jared Birchall, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Chris Anderson. Text messages, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk; Rob Copeland, Georgia Wells, Rebecca Elliott, and Liz Hoffman, “The Shadow Crew Who Encouraged Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 29, 2022; Mike Isaac, Lauren Hirsch, and Anupreeta Das, “Inside Elon Musk’s Big Plans for Twitter,” New York Times, May 6, 2022. 74. Hot and Cold: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Kimbal Musk, Robert Steel, Leslie Berland, Jared Birchall.

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“I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode,” he told me, “which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.” It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. That April, he snuck away to the Hawaiian house of his mentor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, an occasional girlfriend. He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright.

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Musk bucked this trend, largely because he wanted to have tight control of the manufacturing process. He believed that designing the factory to build a car—“the machine that builds the machine”—was as important as designing the car itself. Tesla’s design-manufacturing feedback loop gave it a competitive advantage, allowing it to innovate on a daily basis. Oracle founder Larry Ellison joined only two corporate boards, Apple and Tesla, and he became close friends with Jobs and Musk. He said they both had beneficial cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,” he says. What set them apart is that Musk, unlike Jobs, applied that obsession not just to the design of a product but also to the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

They watched the whole thing, even though only about half of it was fully completed, with the rest filled in by line drawings or semi-complete renderings. When it was over, Steve told me that the Pixar board of directors hadn’t even seen this much of the movie. I took that with a grain of salt. (Lasseter later told me that Steve showed it to everyone: “He was impossible!” Steve’s friend Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, said he saw eleven different versions.) Steve quickly turned from me to the kids. He was busy conducting market research, Steve Jobs–style. “Whaddya think?” he asked the girls. “Is it as good as Pocahontas?” Greta and Fernanda nodded vigorously. “Well, then, is it as good as The Lion King?”

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But this time his sophistry was recognized as such by the media—and by those competitors, like Microsoft, who supposedly did not exist. Steve did not shut down the entire company. Just as he had never given up on Pixar, he never quite gave up on NeXT. And just as he had at Pixar, he decided to play out two separate end strategies. He halfheartedly pitched the company to Sun (again), Hewlett-Packard, and even Larry Ellison’s Oracle, but nothing ever came through. At the same time, he kept pushing Avie Tevanian and his software team hard. Steve genuinely believed he had the sharpest team of operating system software engineers in the business, and he still hoped that the workstation world might embrace the NeXTSTEP operating system.

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Indeed, the reason Steve had held on to one share of Apple stock for the previous decade was to be able to keep getting shareholder information materials and, if the spirit moved him, to be able to attend the annual shareholders meeting. He hadn’t cut the cord completely. In 1995, his billionaire friend Larry Ellison had suggested the idea of making a hostile bid to buy the company outright so they could take it private and run it as they saw fit. Ellison had even offered to raise the bulk of the money, so Steve wouldn’t have to risk his own resources (Pixar hadn’t yet gone public). “Steve’s the only one who can save Apple,” he told me.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

.’: A Legacy of Continued Bad Behavior at Google,” Huffington Post, May 16, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-k-clemons/google-privacy-case_b_1522874.htm. 20. Luisa Kroll and Kerry A. Dolan, eds., “The Forbes 400: The Richest People in America,” profile no. 3, “Larry Ellison,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/larry-ellison. 21. Kroll and Dolan, “The Forbes 400,” profile no. 1, “Bill Gates,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/gallery/bill-gates. 22. Romain Dillet, “Zuckerberg Now Owns 29.3 Percent of Facebook’s Class a Shares and This Stake Is worth $13.6 Billion,” TechCrunch, February 15, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/zuckerberg-now-owns-29-3-percent-of-facebook-representing-18-billion; Kroll and Dolan, “The Forbes 400,” profile no. 20, “Mark Zuckerberg, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg. 23.

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The largest automotive company, General Motors, doesn’t have a single direct shareholder with over 1 percent of the stock.18 In contrast, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google.19 Brin and Page alone are worth over $20 billion each. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company and is worth over $50 billion; in 2013 Forbes ranked him the country’s third richest man.20 Bill Gates, the country’s richest man, is worth $78 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm.21 Mark Zuckerberg’s 29.3 percent stake in Facebook is worth upwards of $25 billion.22 As a result, like their far less admired counterparts on Wall Street, America’s elite tech firms—and their owners—have become fantastically cash rich.

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Combined with the tech Oligarchy, they could well emerge as the dominant part of the twenty-first century’s economic elite, pushing aside fortunes made in energy, manufacturing, or housing.38 At the same time, the media itself, particularly in its most visible manifestations, is increasingly populated by the children of prominent politicians and by those who come from the ranks of the plutocracy. These include the offspring of the Reagans, GOP standard-bearer John McCain, various Kennedys, and Nancy Pelosi. In Hollywood, meanwhile, some of the new powerful producers come from the ranks of the ultra-rich, including heirs to the Pritzker fortune and the daughter of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s ten richest men.39 This creative community, as Daniel Bell observed over half a century ago, now serves as something of a permanent conscious “avant-garde.”40 As Thomas Frank has shown, even the term “hip,” once seen as anti-materialistic and hostile to the establishment, has devolved into an advertising technique.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

Theranos was far from his first rodeo. What had drawn Mosley to Theranos was the talent and experience gathered around Elizabeth. She might be young, but she was surrounded by an all-star cast. The chairman of her board was Donald L. Lucas, the venture capitalist who had groomed billionaire software entrepreneur Larry Ellison and helped him take Oracle Corporation public in the mid-1980s. Lucas and Ellison had both put some of their own money into Theranos. Another board member with a sterling reputation was Channing Robertson, the associate dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering. Robertson was one of the stars of the Stanford faculty.

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At the company Christmas party in a Palo Alto restaurant in late 2006, Elizabeth got too tipsy to go home on her own, so she called Sunny and asked him to come pick her up. That’s when Ed learned that they were living together in a condo a few blocks away. Sunny wasn’t the only older man giving Elizabeth advice. She had brunch with Don Lucas every Sunday at his home in Atherton, the ultrawealthy enclave north of Palo Alto. Larry Ellison, whom she’d met through Lucas, was also an influence. Lucas and Ellison had both invested in Theranos’s second funding round, which in Silicon Valley parlance was known as a “Series B” round. Ellison sometimes dropped by in his red Porsche to check on his investment. It wasn’t uncommon to hear Elizabeth start a sentence with “Larry says.”

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The old man treated her like a granddaughter. A portly gentleman with white hair who liked to wear broad-brim hats, Don was in his late seventies and was part of an older generation of venture capitalists who approached venture investing as if it were a private club. He’d mentored one famous entrepreneur in Larry Ellison. In Elizabeth, he clearly thought he’d found another. Except Avie didn’t think it was good corporate governance to do what Elizabeth wanted. Since she would control the foundation, she would also control the voting rights associated with the new stock, which would increase her overall voting stake.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

The Hustler At the time that Philippe Kahn was writing software for André Truong Trong Thi’s Micral microcomputer, Lawrence Joseph Ellison, a fast-talking programmer from Chicago, had just landed a job at Ampex, a video- and audio-equipment manufacturer in Silicon Valley. Four years earlier, Lee Felsenstein had left Ampex to write for the counterculture publication The Berkeley Barb. But Larry Ellison was no 1960s revolutionary. When Ampex got a contract to develop a tape storage system for the CIA, Ellison was thrilled to be working on the project, which the CIA code-named Oracle. Ellison was definitely Type-A entrepreneur material: aggressive, bright, fearless, arrogant, and mercenary. In June 1977, Ellison’s energy and drive led him to start his own company.

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An alternative to the usual flat-file model, in which no structure exists that governs the relationship among database entries, the relational model was largely untested. The relational database model required computing horsepower well beyond the capability of the microcomputers of the time. But microcomputers were not yet part of Larry Ellison’s world. Ellison’s company, SDL, which soon changed its name to Relational Software Inc. and then again to Oracle, was planning to market a minicomputer database program that would sell “like donuts,” Ellison said. He had been telling everyone that he was going to become a billionaire, and to get there he knew he’d have to sell software to everybody.

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Gates’s firm had a new operating system called Windows NT, which was intended to give business PCs all the power of workstations. McNealy decided to wage not only a technical war but also a public-relations war. In public talks and interviews, he ridiculed Microsoft and its products. Along with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, he tried to promote a new kind of device, called a network computer, which would get its information and instructions from servers on the Internet. This device did not immediately catch on. But Sun had a hidden advantage in the consumer market—its early, foursquare advocacy of networks. People were repeating its slogan, “the network is the computer,” and it seemed prescient as the Internet emerged.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

Many of the features that had previously been standard were now add-ons; previous add-ons became even more expensive. Going forward, the Roadster would start at $109,000, with about $20,000 worth of additional options available. That was a dramatic increase from the $80,000 starting price that had been detailed when the Roadster was first revealed in 2006. Responses were mixed. Billionaire Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, told the team he wanted to configure his car so that it was as expensive as possible to help them generate whatever revenue they needed. One customer posted the price-increase email on his personal blog along with his accommodating reply. “We complained a lot but, in the end picked a set of options and agreed to pay the price increase because we want Tesla to be successful and we want our car as soon as possible,” wrote Tom Saxton, a vocal early-reservation holder, part of the grassroots community surrounding Tesla that had taken root on internet chatrooms and blogs.

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CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful. A matchmaker was found for the two: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle. He lived near Son’s Silicon Valley home and was friendly with both men. He’d been an excited customer of the Roadster in the early days and had quietly amassed a sizable chunk of Tesla shares. In March, a conference room on the second floor of the Fremont factory overlooking the assembly line was converted into a dining room.

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Will be way smoother & less disruptive as a private company. Ends negative propaganda from shorts.” The next day the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation. * * * — Musk and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank may not have hit it off, but after the heady dinner that Musk’s friend and investor Larry Ellison had assembled at the Fremont factory in March 2017, the Saudis had kept in touch with Musk. As his war with the short sellers moved through July 2018, the fund requested a meeting. Musk met with them on Tuesday evening, July 31, a day ahead of announcing Tesla’s second-quarter results, in which he promised to continually turn a profit going forward, and a week before the tweet heard around the internet.

Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

On Maui, Kauaʻi, Hawai‘i the Big Island and Molokaʻi, infrequent public buses primarily serve commuters and residents. Bicycle Not practical for island-wide travel due to narrow highways, heavy traffic, high winds and changeable weather. What’s New Lanaʻi On this ex-pineapple-plantation island, tech billionaire Larry Ellison has been keeping construction workers busy with upgrades to everything from the luxury Four Seasons resorts to the local supermarket. Even Lanaʻi City’s historic movie theater has been transformed into a state-of-the-art media center. Pie-in-the-sky plans to spur 'green growth' include solar energy, a desalination plant and small farms.

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Locavore Heaven Grass-fed beef from Upcountry pastures, day-boat fish and bountiful organic gardens ensure Mauiʻs chef-driven restaurants always have the raw ingredients to whip up their famed Hawaii Regional Cuisine creations. Lanaʻi South Pacific Ignoring the great views of other islands, Lanaʻi feels like an isolated bit of subtropical pleasure far from the rest of the world. And given that new owner Larry Ellison wants to make the island self-sufficient, its sense of remoteness will only increase. Pineapple Town Nearly the entire island was planted with pineapples, which were exported around the world, for much of the 20th century. The crops are gone but the vintage plantation town of Lanaʻi City is timeless.

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And therein lies the charm of Lanaʻi, a small island (at its widest point only 18 miles across) that's an off-the-beaten-path destination. Hidden beaches, archaeological sites, oddball geology and a sense of isolation let you get away from it all, without going far. Of course, looming over Lana‘i is billionaire owner Larry Ellison, who is determined to transform the island, even if the details change by the week. When to Go ANov–Mar Jackets are needed at night in lofty, temperate Lanaʻi City, while the beaches stay balmy. AApr–Aug Winter rains have stopped and the entire island enjoys breezy tropical comfort. ASep–Oct Lanaʻi City stays in the sunny 70s (°F), while Hulopoʻe Beach is in the lovely low 80s.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Melrose: Caring About People: Employees and Customers,” Ethix, October 1, 2007, http://​ethix.​org; and Ken Melrose, “2005 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame,” Twin Cities Business, July 2005, http://​www.​tcbmag.​com. 54 The top echelons of business Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” research paper (Bloomington: School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, November 2010), http://​www.​indiana.​edu. 55 Larry Ellison Graef Crystal, “Larry Ellison Rides Again!” Crystal Report on Executive Compensation, July 13, 2009, http://​www.​graefcrystal.​com. 56 A Wall Street Journal compilation John S. Lublin and Scot Thurm, “Behind Soaring Executive Pay, Decades of Failed Restraints,” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2006. In his three big years, Weill was paid $230.5 million in 1997, $166.9 million in 1998, and $224.4 million in 2000. 57 The idea sprang Michael C.

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CHAPTER 8 THE WEALTH GAP THE ECONOMICS “OF THE 1%, BY THE 1%, FOR THE 1%” The fact is that income inequality is real—it’s been rising for more than 25 years. —PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year—greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy, or Canada. —ROBERT FRANK, Richistan It is absolutely excessive…. But it’s amazing what you can get used to. —LARRY ELLISON, Oracle CEO, on his 454-foot yacht IN THE FALL OF 2005, Citigroup put out a glossy investment brochure with a boldfaced heading, WELCOME TO THE PLUTONOMY MACHINE, that advised its clients: “There is no ‘average consumer’ in a plutonomy…. Economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.”

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For investments, they don’t buy mutual funds; they buy timber, land, oil rigs, and office towers. In the Billionaireville of thirty-thousand-square-foot mansions, private jets, and elite art collections, Frank reports, “luxury fever” is the norm. The hyper-rich compete with ever more expensive toys, such as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s 454-foot yacht, Rising Sun, which is loaded with sports complexes, a cinema, a speedboat, a helicopter pad and a crew of thirty. “It is absolutely excessive. No question about it,” Ellison admitted to a writer for Vanity Fair. “But it’s amazing what you can get used to.” The outlandishly conspicuous consumption of the super-rich might seem merely a shocking gossip tidbit—except that as economist Robert H.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

It was widely reported, for example, that the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud was deeply upset by Forbes’ ranking of his wealth in the 2013 billionaires list.7 He believed he should have been listed among the ten richest people in the world but Forbes disagreed.8 A quick glance at that list for 2016 shows the following: Figure 44: The ten richest people in the world in 2016 Rank Name Net Worth ($ billions) Increase needed to move up one place #1 Bill Gates 75 #2 Amancio Ortega 67 12% #3 Warren Buffett 60.8 10% #4 Carlos Slim Helú 50 22% #5 Jeff Bezos 45.2 11% #6 Mark Zuckerberg 44.6 1% #7 Larry Ellison 43.6 2% #8 Michael Bloomberg 40 9% #9= Charles Koch 39.6 1% #9= David Koch 39.6 1% Source: Forbes9 The average increase in wealth required to move up just one place is 8 per cent – a considerable undertaking against a moving target. Larry Ellison, for example, is extraordinarily wealthy but Bill Gates has almost twice as much wealth. Even though neither of them is constrained in their lifestyles, it is a reasonable assumption that Larry Ellison is painfully aware of the gap between himself and Bill Gates.

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

It has been nicknamed philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green1, and its followers believe that business thinking and market methods will save the world — and make some of us a fortune along the way. Bobby Shriver, Bono’s partner in the Red brand of products, hopes that sales will help “buy a house in the Hamptons” while simultaneously swelling the coffers of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.2 Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle, thinks that “the profit motive could be the best tool for solving the world’s problems, more effective than any government”3 — until government has to bail you out, of course, as it did for large swaths of American finance and industry in the aftermath of the financial crash in September 2008.

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In this book, I won’t be focusing on non-U.S. examples like these because so little rigorous information is available on their efforts, but it is clear that the influence of philanthrocapitalism is spreading from the United States to other parts of the world, just as in earlier generations of philanthropy. The four richest people in the world are philanthrocapitalists — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, and Larry Ellison, with combined assets of $135 billion, more than the gross domestic product of some of the world’s most populous countries, including Nigeria and Bangladesh.6 Not all philanthrocapitalists are rich (we’ll meet some of them in chapter 2), and not all rich philanthropists subscribe to these methods and approaches, but the basic message of this movement is pretty clear: Traditional ways of solving social problems do not work, so business thinking and market forces should be added to the mix.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

—these companies totally lost sight of the wider question of whether the online pet supply market was the right space to be in. Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting. When Pets.com folded after the dot-com crash, $300 million of investment capital disappeared with it. Other times, rivalry is just weird and distracting. Consider the Shakespearean conflict between Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle, and Tom Siebel, a top salesman at Oracle and Ellison’s protégé before he went on to found Siebel Systems in 1993. Ellison was livid at what he thought was Siebel’s betrayal. Siebel hated being in the shadow of his former boss. The two men were basically identical—hard-charging Chicagoans who loved to sell and hated to lose—so their hatred ran deep.

…

So Ellison was probably thrilled when in 1996 a small database company called Informix put up a billboard near Oracle’s Redwood Shores headquarters that read: CAUTION: DINOSAUR CROSSING. Another Informix billboard on northbound Highway 101 read: YOU’VE JUST PASSED REDWOOD SHORES. SO DID WE. Oracle shot back with a billboard that implied that Informix’s software was slower than snails. Then Informix CEO Phil White decided to make things personal. When White learned that Larry Ellison enjoyed Japanese samurai culture, he commissioned a new billboard depicting the Oracle logo along with a broken samurai sword. The ad wasn’t even really aimed at Oracle as an entity, let alone the consuming public; it was a personal attack on Ellison. But perhaps White spent a little too much time worrying about the competition: while he was busy creating billboards, Informix imploded in a massive accounting scandal and White soon found himself in federal prison for securities fraud.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Maybe some kindly billionaire would put me up in exchange for a little song and dance. As we turned down Broadway, the mansions grew bigger and even more ostentatious. One house was adorned with a giant robot boasting an impressive mechanical dong. The silvery cock wagged in the direction of Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s mansion across the street. Was this some decorative commentary on Ellison’s reputation as a massive prick? The robot’s owner happened to be married to the daughter of Ellison’s late Oracle cofounder, Bob Miner, and the art installation was widely assumed to represent some filial beef, although the owners rejected that interpretation in a Vanity Fair dispatch from the neighborhood.

…

The robot’s owner happened to be married to the daughter of Ellison’s late Oracle cofounder, Bob Miner, and the art installation was widely assumed to represent some filial beef, although the owners rejected that interpretation in a Vanity Fair dispatch from the neighborhood. One holiday season, the robot, named Goliath, was brutally beaten. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police found “a trail of robot pieces—including a Santa hat—that led across the street, in the direction of the home of Oracle founder Larry Ellison.” Apparently, Ellison’s college-age daughter Megan Ellison had thrown a party the night of the attack. Putting two and two together, it appears a couple of revelers may have been the attackers. Mercifully, Goliath’s appendage was left unharmed. Not far from Ellison’s place on Broadway was a seven-bedroom rental property valued at $8 million.

…

The author of this bloodthirsty screed was no illiterate barstool general. Bradbury was a Harvard-educated programmer who had been an early employee at Oracle—the world’s second-largest software company after Microsoft. He went on to found Aeiveos, a private corporation devoted to quixotic life extension research, bankrolled by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who had a well-documented obsession with finding the real-life fountain of youth. Bradbury’s friends and business associates included luminaries of the transhumanism scene such as Kurzweil. When Bradbury died in 2011 at age fifty-four, the chairman of the transhumanist Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, George Dvorsky, remembered the would-be nuclear genocidaire as a “generous, driven and often outspoken individual” who “railed against the needless deaths of people the world over.”

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

We’re buying an idea,” an Oracle engineer recalls being told.4 Thanks to the Reagan defense buildup, Oracle had the time and money to develop its product, and eventually it did work. In 1983, Don Valentine and Sequoia Capital helped boost the firm onto the commercial market, and after the Oracle version 5 software debuted, in 1985—the eccentric CEO Larry Ellison started at version 2—the company went public, in a spring cluster with Microsoft and a new Palo Alto computer company called Sun. The personal computer was, from the first Alto with its Ethernet board, the interpersonal computer. When Andy Bechtolsheim built the computer board for the router Cisco appropriated, he was building a knockoff version of the fancy workstations donated by Xerox.

…

The CIA started its own venture capital program called In-Q-Tel, pumping tens of millions of dollars a year into early-stage national security tech from an office in Menlo Park.9 But that was a drop in the bucket compared to the billions in “nat sec” spending, including the new Department of Homeland Security. Silicon Valley’s self-styled anti-authoritarians got patriotic very fast. Leading the race was database contractor Oracle and its aggressive CEO, Larry Ellison. Within two months of the attacks Oracle had a new division dedicated to designing and selling homeland security and disaster recovery solutions, headed by a 32-year CIA veteran named David Carey, whose last agency title was executive director, number 3 on the organizational chart. “How do you say this without sounding callous?”

…

They worked through the aerospace and telecom big shots like Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, AT&T, and Verizon, thereby avoiding even lenient direct oversight. These companies had to get their semiconductors somewhere, had to host their files on servers and manage databases; subcontracting was a good way to expand fast and flexibly, and they did. You were either with us or against us in the war on terror, the president said, and Larry Ellison more or less spoke for the sector when he joined the decade’s long “U-S-A” chant. Still, despite its role as the Western citadel of anticommunism and the world’s most exciting investment opportunity, Silicon Valley began as a minor partner in the George W. Bush coalition. The Cold War was over, and the region was still recovering after the dot-com crash.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

For now, the Kiribati government is building sandbag seawalls, and hopes the ocean will perhaps calm itself and drop back to what the landlubbers regard as its proper level.7 Poised between those unsung and solitary figures who have wrought some measure of beneficial change (the Australian coral scientist, the Japanese albatross protector, the generations of nameless Hawaiian cloak makers) and the might and power of governments who hope to do so, too, is a scattering of others who occupy a different category altogether: a corps d’élite of the extremely rich, usually men, who entertain the wish to leave their own substantial mark on the planet. One man who has publicly declared his wish to make such an impression on the Pacific Ocean is Larry Ellison, the billionaire sea-loving founder of the Oracle Corporation. His ambition for immortality stems from his purchase in 2012 of nearly all of the somewhat played-out but delightfully shabby little Hawaiian island of Lana’i, which once was the Dole Food Company’s largest pineapple grove, and the largest such plantation in the world.

…

The company’s entire business was eventually bought by an elderly Californian named David Murdock, who built himself on Lana’i a handsome home and a fine Victorian-style orchid house for his prodigious collection; threw up two enormous hotels, one in the cool of Lana’i City and the other down by the ocean; and when he arrived on-island, progressed through town in a horse-drawn carriage expecting displays of adoring fealty from his plantation workers, whom he called “my children.” But Murdock soon tired of the island, as most unsentimental businessmen tend to tire of an entity that doesn’t make them serious money. So it was Murdock who did the eventual deal with Larry Ellison: for the three hundred million dollars he paid, Oracle’s boss got just about everything available on the island, except for the orchids—he did get the empty orchid house, though, which has since been refilled—and a prescriptive right that is still retained by Murdock, who at the time was energy-obsessed, to build a wind farm on a headland up in the island’s remote northeast.

…

It was Mark Brazil’s excellent small book The Nature of Japan that first led me to the work of Hiroshi Hasegawa and his heroic rescue of the albatross population of Torishima. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum publishes an excellent online monograph describing the Hawaiian ceremonial cloaks in its possession. Jon Mooallem’s article on Larry Ellison’s purchase of and plans for the Hawaiian island of Lana’i in the New York Times Magazine of September 28, 2014, raised many hackles; much of what he observed confirms the impression I gained when I visited the island six months earlier. CHAPTER 10: OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS Three books in particular set the scene for the current Chinese expansion of influence in the far western Pacific and the fretfulness it is causing in Washington: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea; Robert Haddick’s Fire on the Water; and, by the always reliable Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Chapter 6: Fragile Ideas Then he turned around: A few members of Apple’s design team remember the watch effort becoming official in this moment. Others recall a text exchange where the idea first circulated, and designer Julian Hönig building an initial model of a watch afterward. Oracle founder Larry Ellison: Charlie Rose, “Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: Google CEO Did Evil Things, Apple Is Going Down” (video), CBS News, August 13, 2013, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oracle-ceo-larry-ellison-google-ceo-did-evil-things-apple-is-going-down/. The designer believed: Cambridge Union, “Sir Jony Ive | 2018 Hawking Fellow | Cambridge Union,” YouTube, November 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

…

THE WORLD OUTSIDE INFINITE LOOP was turning on Apple. In the months after Jobs died, impatient investors and customers wanted to know what product was coming next. Jobs’s practice of casting himself as the sole creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad had fueled doubt about what Apple could achieve without him. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of Jobs’s close friends, predicted that the company was destined for mediocrity and positioned for the type of long decline that had occurred after Jobs had left the company in the 1980s. “He’s irreplaceable,” he told Charlie Rose during a CBS interview. “They will not be nearly so successful, because he’s gone.”

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, Cass Sunstein, clean water, do well by doing good, end world poverty, experimental economics, Garrett Hardin, illegal immigration, Larry Ellison, Martin Wolf, microcredit, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Peter Singer: altruism, pre–internet, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, union organizing

His lifestyle is, rather, symptomatic of our culture, and it is that culture that I wish to criticize. After all, Allen isn’t alone in enjoying such toys. Octopus has now slipped to sixth place in size, behind yachts owned by royalty from Dubai and Saudi Arabia, the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, and Larry Ellison, the chief executive officer of the software company Oracle. Ellison is another extravagant billionaire who could be doing a lot more good with his money; he has been quoted as saying “Money is just a method of keeping score.” Currently ranking at fourteen on Forbes’s list of the world’s richest, he is estimated to be worth $25 billion.

…

In a single hour, Rising Sun burns up as much diesel as the average American driver would need to drive a diesel-powered Volks wagen Jetta for seven years.10 In terms of smog-inducing nitrogen oxide emissions, the yacht engines are even worse: It would take the average American driver twenty years to drive a Jetta far enough to equal the nitrogen oxide emissions that Rising Sun emits in an hour. And all that fuel is being burned up not so that people can grow food, or get to work, or visit their loved ones, but so that Larry Ellison can amuse himself and show off how rich he is. It’s time we stopped thinking of these ways of spending money as silly but harmless displays of vanity, and started thinking of them as evidence of a grievous lack of concern for others. We need an ethical culture that takes account of the consequences of what each of us does for the world in which we are living, and that judges accordingly.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Several insurance companies hoped the system might help with saving and reviewing documentation for claims, complaints, and reimbursements. In the end, only a few systems were installed, and the Videofile project was shut down. But Videofile was a fruitful failure; it helped to launch two major companies in brand-new industries. Larry Ellison, a cofounder of the database giant Oracle, worked on the Videofile system in the early 1970s. And Alcorn was about to meet the men who would found the world’s first wildly successful video game company, Atari.I Near the desk Alcorn had been assigned at Ampex, two men shared a small office. They made an odd pairing, Alcorn thought.

…

The venture capital community in Silicon Valley did not yet appreciate the importance of software. Today software accounts for more than half of venture capital investments in the Valley, but in 1977, the figure was 7 percent.24 Venture capital was for hardware: computers, semiconductors, disk drives, and other tangible, capital-intensive businesses. In 1977, when Larry Ellison and two cofounders tried to raise funds to launch Oracle—today one of the largest companies in the United States—venture capitalists were not interested. “When they heard the investment was about software, they wouldn’t even see me. In fact, their receptionists would search my briefcase to make sure I hadn’t taken a current copy of BusinessWeek with me when I left the room,” Ellison says.25 Kurtzig, who never used the word “software” in her 1976 business plan, would say she was in the “applications” business—in part because “software” was such an unfamiliar term that when she used it, people assumed that she sold lingerie.

…

Bechtolsheim had designed the workstation while a student at Stanford, so Niels Reimers’s Office of Technology Licensing received an invention disclosure.5 For years, Sun used MANMAN software, running on ASKNET, to track its materials resource planning.6 Sun, which at the turn of the millennium marketed itself as “the dot in dot-com,” crashed after failing dot-com companies canceled their orders for computers and servers. Sun, also facing competition from less expensive servers running Linux and Berkeley Unix operating systems, never recovered. In 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. Oracle’s cofounder and CEO was Larry Ellison, a former Ampex employee who had worked on the same Videofile system as Atari’s Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, and Ted Dabney. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left the Sun sign angled so that employees pulling out of the main campus parking lot could see it, he was sending them a message: take none of Facebook’s success—the wealth, the accolades, the free lunches, the pride you feel in your company’s name—for granted.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

In 1982, roughly 50 members of the Forbes 400 had college degrees. By 2006, 244 of those on the list had finished college and at least 132 had graduate degrees—or nearly a third of U.S. billionaires. That some of America’s richest people dropped out of college, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison, stands at odds with the broader trend. According to an analysis by Forbes, billionaires in the finance sector were the most educated group among the super-rich in 2006: 55 percent had graduate degrees. Attending an elite university seems to have much to do with getting rich, too. A 2008 analysis by Forbes found that 141 U.S. billionaires had gone to just five top schools for either undergraduate or graduate degrees: Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Columbia.

…

In any given issue of Vanity Fair, there are stories about Johnny Depp’s private island in the Caribbean or photos of George Clooney at his villa I 103 c05.indd 103 5/11/10 6:19:28 AM 104 fortunes of change on Lake Como or mention of the billionaire-owned mega-yachts that trawl the seas. (Paul Allen’s 416-foot Octopus has been spotted as far afield as Mombasa, Kenya, while the 453-foot Rising Sun, which is jointly owned by Larry Ellison and David Geffen, has turned up in Croatia, Sardinia, and St. Maarten.) But stereotypes of the rich as either neocolonists or jet-setters gloss over the complexity of attitudes that actually hold sway in the upper class. This group is anything but monolithic when it comes to America’s role in the world—and never has been.

…

The William Flora Hewlett Foundation is now among the top c08.indd 193 5/11/10 6:24:56 AM 194 fortunes of change five foundations in the United States and supports a wide array of progressive organizations. Steve Jobs isn’t alone in his lack of philanthropy. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos hasn’t gotten around to giving away large chunks of his wealth, either. Nor has Larry Ellison of Oracle, the third-richest man in the United States, or Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who was worth $14.5 billion in 2010. Inevitably, though, these and other giant tech fortunes will one day be harnessed to some kind of public purpose, as they are too big to be disposed of privately. Only then will we have a full picture of how the technology sector’s vast new wealth is likely to affect the United States and the world.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

As Ben Tarnoff, writing in the Guardian noted, one of the reasons Peter Thiel was drawn to Donald Trump’s authoritarian candidacy was that “he would discipline what Thiel calls ‘the unthinking demos’: the democratic public that constrains capitalism.” But for now there are few constraints on Tech capitalism. The monopoly profits of this new era have been very, very good to a few men. The Forbes 400 list, which ranks American wealth, places Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the top ten. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham (CEO of Y Combinator), in a 2016 blog post, was quite open about celebrating income inequality. He wrote, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it.

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Of the sixty-two richest people on the Forbes 400, twenty-six earned their fortunes from the media and tech businesses that are the subject of this book. The list of the top ten wealthiest people reads like our table of contents. 1. Bill Gates 2. Jeff Bezos 3. Warren Buffet 4. Mark Zuckerberg 5. Larry Ellison 6. Michael Bloomberg 7. Charles Koch 8. David Koch 9. Larry Page 10. Sergey Brin So only Warren Buffet and the Kochs do not owe their fortunes to technology. And only Buffet does not owe his wealth to the power of monopoly capitalism. During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney famously cast the Forbes 400 billionaires as “job creators,” but a look into the workforce of the technology business would indicate that this is not really the case.

The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

What has yet to sink in Actual 104 is that this downturn is some103 thing more than the bottom of 102 another cycle in the technol101 ogy industry. Rather, the 1 1960 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 2002 sector is going through deep Source: Intel structural changes which suggest that it is growing up or even, horrors, maturing. Silicon Valley, in particular, has not yet come to grips with the realities, argues Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, a database giant (who in his early 60s still sports a youthful hairdo). “There’s a bizarre belief that we’ll be young forever,” he says. It is not that Moore’s law has suddenly ceased to apply. In fact, Mr Moore makes a good case that Intel can continue to double transistor density every 18 months for another decade.

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Mr Gerstner, who has spent most of his career outside the it industry, does not point fingers, but examples of the industry’s “bizarre practices”, as he puts it, are not hard to find. The most obvious one is Oracle, a database giant which had a near-death experience in 1991, having cut some reckless deals to meet expectations. The firm is also known to 20 COMING OF AGE have released software prematurely, most recently its e-business suite. And it is run by Larry Ellison, arguably the most colourful boss in the industry, and Jeff Henley, the archetype of a grandfatherly cfo. To be fair, it must be said that the company has matured greatly in recent years. In future, technology itself could lead to a better balance in the sector as a whole. The internet made it possible to run asps such as salesforce.com, but it also enabled hardware-makers to monitor servers and bill customers remotely on the basis of the average use per month.

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POSTSCRIPT Since this section was published in 2003, the it industry has continued to mature and consolidate. There has been a series of mergers and takeovers, including Oracle’s purchase of PeopleSoft, the tie-up between Veritas and Symantec, Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia, and ibm’s sale of its pc division to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Larry Ellison of Oracle has 39 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY acted as the cheerleader for the idea that the industry will never recapture the glories of its youth. “It’s not coming back,” he said in an interview in 2003. “The industry is maturing. The valley will never be what it was.” The material on pages 4–40 first appeared in a survey in The Economist in May 2003. 40 2 SECURING THE CLOUD THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY Securing the cloud Digital security, once the province of geeks, is now everyone’s concern.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

As late as November 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book titled The Road Ahead, in which he predicted that the Information Superhighway—a network connecting all businesses and consumers in a world of frictionless commerce—would be the logical successor to the Internet and would rule the future. Gates later went back and changed references from the Information Superhighway to the Internet, but that was not his original vision. The implications of this proprietary vision were not good for business or for consumers. In the minds of visionaries like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, the corporations that owned the Information Superhighway would tax every transaction by charging a “vigorish,” as Microsoft’s then–chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, referred to it. It’s difficult to overstate the momentum that the proprietary Information Superhighway carried. After Mosaic, even Marc and his cofounder, Jim Clark, originally planned a business for video distribution to run on top of the proprietary Information Superhighway, not the Internet.

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You’ve already decided they can’t do it. Hiring scalable execs too early is a bad mistake. There is no such thing as a great executive. There is only a great executive for a specific company at a specific point in time. Mark Zuckerberg is a phenomenal CEO for Facebook. He would not be a good CEO for Oracle. Similarly, Larry Ellison does a terrific job at Oracle but he would not be the right person to manage Facebook. If you judge your team in advance and have a high sense of urgency, you will bring in executives who can manage at high scale in advance of needing them. Unfortunately, you will probably ignore their ability to do the job for the next twelve months, which is the only relevant measure.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

NetSuite was co-founded by a billionaire named Larry Ellison. (4) Corporate mobile data will double this year. Are you in control? This billboard advertised a company named Druva, which offered secure data integration across computers, tablets and mobile phones. Druva had raised funding from the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. (5) Oracle Open World, Sept 22 - 26, San Francisco, #OOW13 This billboard advertised a conference dedicated to the products of Oracle, a company that sold database management software to other companies. Oracle was co-founded by a billionaire named Larry Ellison. (6) NetApp is the world’s #1 storage OS?

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

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

“Now is the time for optimism,” a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst told CNN. Startups like PayPal still had money in the bank, and there was a widespread sense, however unrealistic, that there was no cause for alarm and that the information revolution would march on. Beenz, the virtual currency startup, raised an additional $51 million from Larry Ellison and others to remake the financial system. In August 2000, The Guardian wrote that Flooz had a chance of realizing “Hayek’s dream of companies challenging governments for the right to issue money,” referring to Friedrich Hayek, the great libertarian economist. Those two companies wouldn’t run into serious trouble until the end of the year.

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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.

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On May 6, BuzzFeed reported that a number of the company’s prominent corporate clients had been firing it—recent departures included American Express, Coca-Cola, and NASDAQ. Around this time, Thiel was secretly attempting to arrange a sale to Oracle, the big database provider, with Michael Ovitz, the Hollywood mogul, who was friendly with both Thiel and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, playing the role of matchmaker. There was a lunch with the three men and another investor, Marc Abramowitz, but the potential deal fell through, and, as the presidential election heated up, Thiel needed a candidate who would ensure that his wealth would be protected, as well as one who would be open to buying the kind of software that Palantir was selling.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

The name “Redshift” was suggested by Charlie Bell, a former engineer for Boeing on NASA’s space shuttle and the senior vice president in charge of AWS’s operations; it’s the term for the change astronomers see in light, the fastest thing in existence, that’s emitted from a celestial object like a star as it moves away from the observer. Nonetheless, Larry Ellison, then the CEO of Oracle—whose logo happens to be red—saw it as corporate trash talk and began to see red himself. That “never even occurred to us,” Jassy said. “When we were told later that Oracle believed that, we thought it was kind of funny.” A bitter rivalry between Oracle and Amazon, already simmering with Amazon’s entry into databases, intensified.

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“Then a customer would pay for that coat and they’d leave a review about the sleeves falling off in the first minute.” Gunningham, a member of the S-team, was in charge of global selling as well as FBA and the marketplace. He’d grown up on a ranch in Argentina, earned a mathematical sciences degree at Stanford University, and worked with Larry Ellison at Oracle and Steve Jobs at Apple before scoring a kind of high-tech hat trick by joining Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Colleagues said he was creative and empathetic—and a big thinker, in Amazon’s lexicon. Gunningham quickly recognized that the flood of Chinese merchandise would stir controversy among sellers in the West who would not be able to match the low prices.

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At least nine tech companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and SAP America, banded together to protest that the process was biased in Amazon’s favor and to lobby Congress and the Pentagon to split the contract into multiple parts. One of those companies, Oracle, then went even further. Acting in the flamboyant and antagonistic style of its founder, Larry Ellison, Oracle sued the Department of Defense, challenging the legality of a single-winner award and sowing doubts about the sanctity of the process. Its complaint alleged that several Defense Department officials had either worked for or advised Amazon in the past and had improperly influenced JEDI.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

More praise for The Lucky Years “Dr. Agus describes how a series of scientific breakthroughs enables everyone to lengthen and improve their lives—a future in which our body’s natural mechanisms can be enlisted to fight disease and our genes can be edited to eliminate inherited ones. It is an inspiring vision.” —Larry Ellison, cofounder and executive chairman, Oracle Corporation “The Lucky Years is a steady dose of actionable knowledge about the one thing relatable to everyone: life. It’s the doctor-patient relationship we all want and deserve. Dr. Agus is a trusted voice in a field of uncertainty.” —Ashton Kutcher “It sometimes takes a genius to know the difference between what’s good and bad for us amid all the noise in health circles.

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Your collective passion to understand and enlighten comes through every day. I am lucky to be a part of such a program. To my friends Dominick Anfuso, Marc Benioff, Glenn Boghosian, Yael Braun, Jerry Breslauer, Eli Broad, Sharon Brous, Bill Campbell, Steve, Jean and Stacey Case, Robert Day, Michael Dell, John Doerr, Bryce Duffy, Larry Ellison, Bob Evans, Sandy Gleysteen, Darryl Goldman, Jimmy (Taboo) Gomez, Al Gore, Brad Grey, Davis Guggenheim, Yoshiki Hayashi, Uri Herscher, Walter Isaacson, Peter Jacobs (and the CAA team), Ashton Kutcher, Jimmy Linn, Dan Loeb, Max Nikias, Fabian Oberfeld, Howard Owens, Chemi and Shimon Peres, Amy Powell, Robin Quivers, Bruce Ramer, Linda Ramone, Ed Razek, Shari Redstone, Sumner Redstone, Joe Schoendorf, Dov Seidman, Greg Simon, Bonnie Solow, Steven Spielberg, Tom Staggs, Elle and Paul Stephens, Gregorio Stephenson, Howard Stern, Meir Teper, Yossi Vardi, Jay Walker, David Weissman, Will.i.am, and Neil Young: your mentorship, friendship, and advice are appreciated beyond measure.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But we need to leave it behind in the quest to understand how that pay is structured. While much of Eisner’s pay may have been an attempt to motivate his ambitious lieutenants, to be fully effective the pay package should also have encouraged him to be honest, diligent, and smart. Did it? The really huge CEO payments that one reads about in the papers, such as Eisner’s, or Larry Ellison’s $706 million payout from Oracle in 2001, are almost always the result of stock options. Stock options, put simply, are contracts that allow their owners to buy shares at a specified price. If the actual price of the share rises above the price specified in the option contract, then the option can be cashed in for money.

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Stock options seem like a sensible way of paying CEOs because the higher the company’s share price rises, the more valuable the options are. Stock options should encourage the CEO to put all his efforts into boosting the share price—and the share price is, after all, the market’s best guess at whether the company will make money in the future. The stock option revolution that culminated with Larry Ellison’s mega-payout arguably began with a dry academic paper published in 1990 by two economists, Michael Jensen and Kevin J. Murphy. The best way to understand the paper is to think about dining out at a restaurant with a big crowd of people and then splitting the check equally. As we all know, this can be a vexing experience.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

Allen quit his job at Honeywell and Gates dropped out of Harvard to move to Albuquerque and start Microsoft. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were also at the forefront of the emerging computer industry (they would go on to found Apple Computer Company in 1976), while Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems) and Larry Ellison (Oracle) could also be said to be Son’s contemporaries. The digital information revolution was calling and all of these individual Damascus moments would lay the groundwork for it to become a reality. In September 1975, Son enrolled at Holy Names College, telling himself he had to really knuckle under and study.

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The order from on high was an odd one. ‘By tomorrow morning I want you to cover one of the walls in my office with photos of all of my rivals.’ And so Otsuki did as he was told, plastering a wall with faces of technology sector entrepreneurs and giants of the IT sector such as Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Philippe Kahn. When Otsuki asked why exactly Son wanted him to do such a thing, he replied, ‘Across the Pacific Bill, Scott, Larry and Steve are all putting a mighty shift in, achieving their own visions, and I want to be reminded of that every morning. It’s motivation and inspiration for me to go one further.’

A Short Guide to a Long Life by David B. Agus

Danny Hillis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Larry Ellison, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, personalized medicine, placebo effect, risk tolerance, TED Talk, the scientific method

I also have to thank those who continue to support and inspire me on a regular basis, including Jeff Fager, Sandy Gleysteen, Gayle King, Jonathan LaPook, Chris Licht, Norah O’Donnell, Karolyn Pearson, David Rhodes, and Charlie Rose at CBS News, who empower me to be able to educate and inform. To Dominick Anfuso, Marc Benioff, Gerald Breslauer, Eli Broad, Bill Campbell, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Robert Evans, Murray Gell-Mann, Al Gore, Brad Grey, Davis Guggenheim, Danny Hillis, Walter Isaacson, Peter Jacobs, Clifton Leaf, Max Nikias, Fabian Oberfeld, Howard Owens, Shimon Peres, Maury Povich, Carmen Puliafito, Bruce Ramer, Sumner Redstone, Joe Schoendorf, Dov Seidman, Bonnie Solow, Steven Spielberg, Elle Stephens, Yossi Vardi, Jay Walker, David Weissman, and Neil Young: your mentorship, friendship, and advice are truly appreciated.

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, Steve Jobs

But an employee can buy into an inspirational company vision without thinking, “I want to spend the rest of my life pursuing this future” or “These company values encompass all of my values in life.” Even the most focused and successful business leaders have values and interests beyond their day job. Larry Ellison is passionate about winning the America’s Cup, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has funded projects like the 10,000 Year Clock and bought the Washington Post. The goal isn’t perfect congruence on all dimensions, but rather a healthy alignment for a finite scope and time frame. Alignment means that managers should explicitly seek and highlight the commonality between the company’s purpose and values and the employee’s career purpose and values.

file:///C:/Documents%20and%... by vpavan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Bogle, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, margin call, Mary Meeker, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, payment for order flow, price discovery process, profit motive, risk tolerance, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, tech worker, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-coupon bond, éminence grise

If Cisco Systems Inc. had expensed options for its 2001 fiscal year, for example, it would have had to reduce earnings by $1.7 billion, turning a $1 billion loss into a $2.7 billion deficit. Moreover, when employees exercise their options, companies get a hefty tax break on the difference between the grant price and the exercise price. Cisco's tax deduction in 2000 came to $1.4 billion, on top of a $2.5 billion tax break in 1999. In 2001 Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison showed how options had failed as a tool to motivate managers to boost shareholder return, and instead had become a license to print money. Ellison reaped a record $706 million by cashing in his Oracle options in the same year that the software company missed earnings projections and its share price declined 57 percent.

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It did not, for example, have a separate compensation committee (although it does now). Instead, important executive pay issues were referred to the full board, which could hardly give them the attention they deserved, or be as objective as a subcommittee of independent directors. One director, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison— Jobs's close friend— was invited to join the board in 1997, even though he warned the company that he would not attend most meetings. Since joining, Ellison has attended a little less than half of Apple's formal board meetings, an abysmal record. One member of Apple's audit committee, Jerome York, is the CEO of MicroWarehouse Inc., whose Mac Warehouse catalog was responsible for nearly $150 million of Apple's $5.4 billion in 2001 sales.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

I’ve never been satisfied that I had the last word, always felt certain there were further insights and nuances to be learned; To have a life-changing positive impact on those I coached; and To leave an enduring mark on the field of swim coaching, to leave the profession better off than I found it. At 66, I’m just as passionate and curious as I was at 21, if not more so, and I have no plans to retire. I can’t imagine anything else I might have done which would have brought greater fulfillment. “After starting my first job at Oracle . . . I ended up in Larry Ellison’s old office, which he didn’t entirely clean out, leaving behind some 40 copies of The Mythical Man-Month.” Marc Benioff TW: @Benioff salesforce.com MARC BENIOFF is a philanthropist and chairman and CEO of Salesforce. A pioneer of cloud computing, Marc founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an enterprise software company with a new technology model based in the cloud, a new pay-as-you-go business model, and a new integrated corporate philanthropy model.

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Marc is the author of three books, including the national bestseller Behind the Cloud, which details how he grew Salesforce from zero to $1 billion in annual sales. ­Currently, he is one of only four entrepreneurs in history to have built an enterprise software company with more than $10 billion in annual revenue (the other three being Bill Gates of Microsoft, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Hasso Plattner of SAP). What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? One of the most powerful books in business I ever read was Managing, by the former head of ITT, Harold Geneen. It changed my life and my whole approach to business.

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A lot of the things we do at Salesforce are based on his techniques, such as our quarterly operations reviews, which we’re religious about. The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. is another book that had a huge impact on me. After starting my first job at Oracle, I was promoted in 1990 to be the youngest vice president. I ended up in Larry Ellison’s old office, which he didn’t entirely clean out, leaving behind some 40 copies of The Mythical Man-Month. Larry had given this book to every software executive whom he met within the company. This short book says that to write great software, do it in small teams; having 100 or 1,000 or 2,000 developers won’t make it happen.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

* * * PART 3: Poorness–The Sidewalk CHAPTER 5: THE SIDEWALK ROADMAP When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, “I'm right, and everyone else is wrong.” That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time, an invitation to be attacked. ~ Larry Ellison The Sidewalk Roadmap Most people are lifelong Sidewalkers, followers of the Sidewalk Roadmap. The Sidewalk is the plan most followed, a contract for a pleasurable today in lieu of a more secure tomorrow. A Sidewalker exists in a state of one-something-from-broke: One album failure from broke.

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When you own a three bedroom home on Elm Street, it's accessible to a few. This duality makes Internet systems one of the best business seedlings in existence. Additionally, computer systems aren't limited to the Internet. It could be software or applications. Some of the richest people on the planet are software billionaires, like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry Ellison of Oracle. Software enjoys plump margins because it is easily replicated. Once the code is written, it's done. You can easily sell one or 10,000. Can you replicate an office building with ease? You can't. Software millionaires can be “average Joes.” Facebook and iPhone application developers are making money fast.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Strictly speaking, that is not true; Bezos last saw him when he was three years old. It is of course unknowable whether the unusual circumstances of his birth helped to create that fecund entrepreneurial mix of intelligence, ambition, and a relentless need to prove himself. Two other technology icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, were adopted, and the experience is thought by some to have given each a powerful motivation to succeed. In Bezos’s case, what is undeniably true is that from his earliest years, his parents and teachers recognized that this child was different—unnaturally gifted, but also unusually driven. His childhood was a launching pad, of sorts, that sent Bezos rocketing toward a life as an entrepreneur.

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“I guess supply chain isn’t doing anything interesting next year.” [After reading a narrative.] “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B team document.” Some Amazon employees currently advance the theory that Bezos, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, lacks a certain degree of empathy and that as a result he treats workers like expendable resources without taking into account their contributions to the company. That in turn allows him to coldly allocate capital and manpower and make hyperrational business decisions while another executive might let emotion and personal relationships intrude.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

As Walter Isaacson recounts in The Innovators, “For much of the twentieth century, venture capital and private equity investing in new companies had been mainly the purview of a few wealthy families, such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Phippses, and Warburgs.”28 Venrock, the Rockefeller family’s venture capital vehicle, invested alongside Arthur Rock in Apple Computer.29 Technology is not the only field to benefit from the existence of inherited fortunes, of course. The institutions of high culture—symphony orchestras, museums, and such—are obvious fruits of established wealth, but popular entertainment benefits as well. Megan Ellison, the daughter of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, has taken her inheritance to Hollywood, producing such acclaimed films as Joy, American Hustle, and Zero Dark Thirty,30 while Teddy Schwarzman, the son of the private equity billionaire Steve Schwarzman, has The Imitation Game and other films on his movie-production résumé.31 Because some have abundant wealth to lose, the broad economy gains.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Applying that to a business model and making sure that the trains are running on time—and at the same time never losing the technology vision—is a feat. Eric’s technology skills mean that no one can bullshit him. You can bullshit me. I’m not an engineer.” Being an engineer, alone, is not enough. Oracle has thrived for a long time as a company founded and headed by Larry Ellison, who is not an engineer. Ditto Apple under Steve Jobs. This point is made by Dan Rosensweig, the former COO of Yahoo who is today the CEO of Activision Blizzard’s Guitar Hero franchise. What makes a successful CEO, he said, “is a balanced appreciation” of the many factors, including engineering, an entrepreneurial and business culture, plus good management.

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Right now they can afford to, but at some point in time they are going to need to have a crisp vision of who they are and where they’re going, and focus on that.” Although Mary Meeker believes Google is a great company, she offers another caution: the power and precariousness of a culture shaped by its founders. When founders stay involved in the enterprise—she cited Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Ellison of Oracle—they often maintain the core values and mission of the business and bring something invaluable to the enterprise. But Jobs and Ellison lost focus, and watched their companies suffer. They also profoundly learned from their ordeals, while Page and Brin have yet to “experience nasty failure” and its concurrent ability to teach, as Al Gore also noted.

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, David Attenborough, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, sharing economy, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sustainable-tourism, tech billionaire, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, walkable city

Renewable energy initiatives are popping up all over the islands. Wind and wave energy on Maui, geothermal power on the Big Island and solar panels across the archipelago are all signs that the islands are on track to achieve their goal of 70% energy self-sufficiency by 2030. Indeed, with the financial backing of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the small central island of Lana‘i hopes to become a self-sufficient dreamland of electric cars, sustainable agriculture and green energy. Festivals & events Starting on Easter Sunday, Hilo on the Big Island celebrates Hawaiian art and culture for a week with hula competitions at the Merrie Monarch Festival, honouring King David Kalakaua, who was known for his patronage of the arts.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Note that the global trend—which spans countries with vastly different political systems and domestic policy regimes—strongly implies that labor’s decline stems from economic fundamentals rather than shallow political or policy choices. Eight of the ten richest Americans: The ten richest Americans, according to Forbes magazine, are (in order): Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, David Koch, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. See “Forbes 400,” Forbes, accessed August 26, 2018, www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/. Of these, all but the Koch brothers are self-made, and the Koch brothers inherited a relatively small business (from its entrepreneur-founder), which they built into a much larger one, at a growth rate that resembles self-made entrepreneurship.

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., “Forbes 400: The Definitive Ranking of the Wealthiest Americans,” Forbes, October 3, 2018, www.forbes.com/forbes-400/#7de6813e7e2f. Hereafter cited as Kroll and Dolan, “Forbes 400.” The founders who hold these shares include: Jeff Bezos (1), Bill Gates (2), Warren Buffett (3), Mark Zuckerberg (4), Larry Ellison (5), Larry Page (6), and Sergey Brin (9). Others among the top one hundred—for example, George Soros (60) and Carl Icahn (31)—owe their fortunes to carried interest. reported by one-percenters: Victor Fleischer, “How a Carried Interest Tax Could Raise $180 Billion,” New York Times, June 5, 2015, http://nytimes.com/2015/06/06/business/dealbook/how-a-carried-interest-tax-could-raise-180-billion.html.

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Moreover, even these consequences would have followed only if the regnant legal order governing titles and property permitted the divestiture at all, rather than entailing the estate to guarantee that it remained in the family. See Langbein, “Twentieth-Century Revolution,” 725–26. upon their deaths: “History of the Pledge,” The Giving Pledge, accessed October 12, 2018, https://givingpledge.org. Signatories include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg, all in the top ten of 2018’s Forbes 400. Kroll and Dolan, “Forbes 400.” An advertisement for the Wall Street Journal: “People who don’t have time make time to read the Wall Street Journal,” Wall Street Journal, accessed October 12, 2018, www.wsj.com/maketime. When law students were recently asked: This is reported in an unpublished early draft of Heather Kappes et al., “‘Who You Are’ Heightens Entitlement More Than ‘What you Did’” (manuscript on file with author).

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik satellite in the 1960s led America to begin offering advanced math in high school Alvin Powell, “How Sputnik Changed U.S. Education,” Harvard Gazette, October 11, 2007. 27. For these reasons, many of the most ambitious engineers, developers, and entrepreneurs end up dropping out of college altogether Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, Travis Kalanick, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, John Mackey, Jan Koum, to name only a few. 28. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s famous invention, the dumbwaiter Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (Basing­stoke: Palgrave–MacMillan, 1990). Even today, Chinese laborers “finish” smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints Victoria Turk, “China’s Workers Need Help to Fight Factories’ Toxic Practices,” New Scientist, March 22, 2017. 29.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

In fact, Bezos personifies a new breed of executive that arose with the emergence of the game-changing technology companies in the 1980s and 1990s. In a January/February 2000 Harvard Business Review article by anthropologist and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, titled “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons,” Bezos was one of the business leaders singled out as a “productive narcissist.” (Bill Gates and Larry Ellison also made the list.) These executives have big enough egos to make up seemingly random rules of business leadership. However, unlike other narcissists, they get the job done. Bezos also has a hugely infectious enthusiasm for his company. One of his incredible talents has been to convince employees, from the highest manager to the lowest customer service rep stuck to her phone ten hours a day, that working at Amazon was not just a job—it was part of a visionary quest, something to give higher meaning to their lives.

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

Cable car with Transamerica Pyramid in the background BERTRAND RIEGER/HEMIS/CORBIS © Don’t Miss Powell-Hyde Cable Car The journey is the destination on this hilly line, with the Golden Gate Bridge popping in and out of view. Hop off the cable car atop zig-zagging Lombard St ( Click here ) to see Russian Hill’s priceless pine-framed panorama, naming rights to which belong not to resident billionaire and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, but penniless poet George Sterling, to whose memory Sterling Park ( Click here ) was dedicated. Powell-Mason Cable Car Powell-Mason’s ascent up Nob Hill feels like the world’s longest roller-coaster climb. Stop for a hilltop martini ( Click here ), or continue on to Chinatown’s Chinese Historical Society (Click here ).

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux

He notes, “My official title was at the outset ‘Vice President of Microsoft Alliance.’ So I used to hand out my card and say, ‘This is my title, but my real job is how do we beat Microsoft.’” When “it just became obvious that engaging with the open source community was going to be much more interesting for Oracle and for me than trying to figure out how to get Larry [Ellison, Oracle’s CEO] and Bill [Gates] to have a pleasant conversation,” his title became the more diplomatic “Vice President of Strategic Alliances.” Oracle had been thinking about a GNU/Linux port well before the announcement in July 1998. “As much as a year and a half or two years prior to that,” Miner says, “I had seen from time to time on the internal mailing lists various people, most notably Magnus Lonnroth, advocating that we ought to take a look at this thing.”

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He remembers that “the people from Oracle were completely overwhelmed” when they saw the size and enthusiasm of the crowd at that meeting. “Everyone just looked at us and went, ‘You know, there’s something going on here,’” he says. Miner concedes, “The timing of that meeting is not purely coincidental.” Even at this point, Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, was “skeptical of whether this would really be a serious commercial platform,” Miner believes. “But he’d been aware that we had products working on Linux and FreeBSD for some time, and to his credit in the end he was supportive of the decision to commercialize it and make the commitment to go ahead and support it not as just as a free give-away unsupported product, which is the approach that one or two of Oracle’s competitors took, but as a commercial product with a price and full support.”

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

Chris Brown Bill Broyles Jerry Bruckheimer Genevieve Bujold Sandra Bullock Ken Burns Tim Burton John Calley Robinson Cano Mark Canton Kate Capshaw Glenn Gordon Caron Jim Carrey Johnny Carson Graydon Carter Maverick Carter Dana Carvey Leo Castelli Gil Cates Bob Cavallo Chevy Chase Cher Peter Chernin Robert Chertoff Ted Chervin James Clavell Bill Clinton George Clooney Glenn Close Lee Cohen Sam Cohen Sam Cohn Chris Columbus Sean Connery Martha Coolidge Francis Ford Coppola Sofia Coppola Costa-Gavras Kevin Costner Katie Couric Michael Crichton Hume Cronyn Crosby, Stills & Nash Tom Cruise Lindsay Czarniak Bob Daly Matt Damon Andy Davis Geena Davis John Davis Martha Davis Marvin Davis Roger Davis Gavin de Becker Dan Deirdorf Fred Dekker Peter Dekom Freddy Demann Jonathan Demme Ted Demme Lisa De Moraes Rebecca De Mornay Robert De Niro Brian De Palma Johnny Depp Bo Derek Ira Deutchman Danny DeVito Dean Devlin Neil Diamond Cameron Diaz Leonardo DiCaprio Joan Didion Vin Diesel Barry Diller Celine Dion Richard Donner Lindsay Doran Michael Douglas Peter Drucker Clint Eastwood Blake Edwards Marty Ehrlichman Jane Eisner Michael Eisner Doug Ellin Larry Ellison Roland Emmerich Joe Eszterhas Chad Everett Jeff Fager Tony Fantozzi Frank Farian Chris Farley Will Ferrell Sally Field Bert Fields Carrie Fisher Ryan Fitzpatrick Mick Fleetwood Joe Flint Jane Fonda Harrison Ford Ted Fortsmann Bob Fosse Jamie Foxx Mark Frost Zach Galifianakis Sandy Gallin Alex Gartner Bill Gates David Geffen François Gilles Terry Gilliam Arne Glimcher Roberto Goizueta Eric Gold Whoopi Goldberg Leonard Goldenson Bo Goldman Akiva Goldsmith Roger Goodell Larry Gordon Berry Gordy Sam Gores Donald Grant Brian Grazer Steve Greenberg Brad Grey Wyc Grousbeck Andy Grove Phil Guarascio Peter Guber Marc Gurvitz Gene Hackman Hall and Oates Tom Hanks Tom Hanson Ted Harbert Mark Harmon Jack Harrower Patrick Hasburgh Ethan Hawke Goldie Hawn Salma Hayek Amy Heckerling Ed Helms Gary Hendler John Henry Jonathan Hensleigh Katharine Hepburn Kirk Herbstreit Marshall Herskovitz Steve Heyer Colin Higgins Masahiko Hirata Barry Hirsch Dustin Hoffman Jan Hoffman Ron Howard L.

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And that’s how it was, we could call anyone anywhere in the world, and our thoughts were valued and our presence was welcomed. We were perceived as the guys who understood the “secret sauce” of creating value from intellectual property—business wise, savvier, and, most important, able to get things done. We had reach to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Roberto Goizueta and Don Keough, Phil Knight, foreign media titans, heads of investment banks, and hedge funds. It seemed as if we could walk into any room at any time anywhere in the world. BRUCE VINOKOUR: I recall as if it were yesterday being pulled over to the side of the street by a police officer and getting a speeding ticket one morning while on my way to work.

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Nevertheless, there was clear value to be built by collaborating with each other, and so we met with many interesting companies—Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Virgin Interactive, and Sega, among others. If Michael was going to be in a meeting, that almost always meant we would be meeting with the company’s CEO. We met with Andy Grove. Discussions between Larry Ellison and Michael benefited greatly because of their shared values and interests in Eastern philosophies. I remember meeting with Steve Jobs in the Pei building, when concerns over his being seen there meant that we held the meeting in one of the more unimpressive conference rooms with no windows. And of course we went up to Apple headquarters in Cupertino several times.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The hard work of operationalizing the vision—to transform Enterprise from an asset financier and service provider to a digitally enabled network orchestrator—was still ahead. OPERATE Enact Your Network Business Model When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for people to tell you that you are nuts. —Larry Ellison, former CEO, Oracle WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR A LARGE FIRM TO INNOVATE? Let’s look at Google, one of the most innovative companies of the past decade, and its secret lab, X, previously known as Google X. Google is well known for its capability with digital technology and for its ability to innovate, and it has developed a specific structure and process for nurturing its most innovative projects, the ones it calls “moonshots.”

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

Business Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore The Ultimate Question, by Fred Reichheld Winning the Loser’s Game, by Charles Ellis The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin Friedman The MouseDriver Chronicles, by Kyle Lusk and John Harrison Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, by Michael Kaufman The Medici Effect, by Frans Johanson Free Prize Inside and the Big Moo, by Seth Godin Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison, by Matthew Symonds The Marketing Playbook, by John Zagula How Would You Move Mount Fuji? by William Poundstone The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, by Constance Bagley Good to Great, by Jim Collins On Becoming a Leader, by Warren Bennis 179 180 APPENDIX C Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian eBoys, by Randal Stross Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Compassionate Capitalism, by Marc Benioff Love Is the Killer App, by Tim Sanders Globalization The World Is Flat, by Tom Friedman Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen Globaloney, by Michael Veseth Money Makes the World Go Round, by Barbara Garson How “American” Is Globalization?

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

These are the ten wealthiest people in the world in 2019: Jeff Bezos (Amazon) Bill Gates (Microsoft) Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) Bernard Arnault (LVMH) Carlos Slim Helu (America Movil) Amancio Ortega (Zara) Larry Ellison (Oracle) Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP) Larry Page (Alphabet/Google) Are these the ten happiest people in the world? Probably not. But they’re probably not the ten least happy people either. The costs of being not-rich are significant.

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

A September to Remember So we found ourselves way out on a limb in underestimating and underpricing risk, and happily going about our business until such time as it could no longer be ignored. I remember the exact day that happened for me. It was Sunday, September 14, 2008. The Canyon senior managers had been invited to a beautiful party for the daughter of one of the partners. The event was held on a vast beachfront property in Malibu owned by Larry Ellison of Oracle, who has since turned it into a high-end commercial development anchored by a Nobu restaurant. It was a picture-perfect day and they had set up, as one does, multiple dance floors and bars, entertainers, dancers, white leather furniture, ice sculptures, and a splendid buffet. Hundreds of dressed-up guests with their spouses and children were determined to have a jolly time.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

He loves and emulates Jimi Hendrix’s playing style (and I might add is very good at it), which is why he personally financed this particular civic project. The list of wealthy people who have purchased or supported sports teams, or even whole sports, seems endless. For instance, Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison invested $300 million in the America’s Cup yacht race. Thom Weisel, founder of Montgomery Securities, personally organized a bailout of USA Cycling, the governing body for U.S. bicycle racing, in 2000. There’s a widespread belief that for the economy to thrive, we need a robust and healthy middle class.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

No, he cut out free coffee for employees to save money. As Tyco spiraled downward, its CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, spent millions of company dollars on personal items, including a $6,000 shower curtain, a $15,000 umbrella stand, and a $7 million Manhattan apartment. (Even successful CEOs are not always gentlemen. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, a fierce foe of Bill Gates, a couple of years ago admitted to spying on Microsoft. Amusingly, Oracle’s sophisticated snoops didn’t employ state-of-the-art electronics, but tried to buy the garbage of a pro-Microsoft group in order to examine its contents for clues about Microsoft’s public relations plans.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

How This Book Can Help You We’re not the first authors who seek to understand the phenomenon of building successful businesses from scratch or to understand personality, for that matter. You can find clues to such success in biographies of legendary entrepreneurs—from Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Larry Ellison to Mary Kay, Arianna Huffington, and Oprah Winfrey. These stories can be fascinating, educational, and even inspiring. You can learn much about what it takes to launch, grow, and sustain a business that way. This is not a book about the mechanical steps of launching a startup or another venture, product-market fit, or the keys to innovation.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

After tables and graphs, Jobs is content to project just one number per slide, a kind of abstraction of number, to produce a shock effect. One of the first climaxes in the show is the presentation of the new management team. After a Hollywood-style display—photographs of the candidates and their titles (all heavyweights of American business, including the co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison)—Jobs shows a video in which each member of the board gives his sense of the company’s future, in the form of a documentary interview. Rather than a usual lineup on the stage, a fake roundtable with a moderator or a beauty-pageant-style parade, Jobs opts for high-tech staging, bringing out the ubiquity of the tool and especially its great possibilities.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Pixar was working on its first feature film, Toy Story, which pioneered a whole new way to tell compelling stories. He (and Steve Jobs) got rich, but the rest of us got to see spectacular movies for ten bucks. Quite the bargain. I met Carl Rosendahl, whose Pacific Data Images was doing similar things for Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks with a project called Shrek. I met Larry Ellison as he was selling databases to corporations, when it wasn’t so obvious that he was going to completely transform their back offices, squeezing out costs in their finance and supply chains and making them much more productive. Oracle saved businesses a fortune, and they passed the savings along to the rest of us in the form of everything from cheap goods at Walmart to cheap trades at Charles Schwab.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The son of a cab driver, he borrowed $200 from his uncle when he was just twelve to finance his newspaper delivery route and later dropped out of college to become a court reporter. Today he owns the Venetian Las Vegas luxury hotel, as well as numerous other properties throughout the world. In 1995 he sold his successful trade show business, featuring the high-tech showcase COMDEX, for $860 million. Another college dropout, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is just behind Adelson with a total net worth of approximately $25 billion. The commonalities among America’s wealthiest people—selfmade wealth, entrepreneurship, modest backgrounds—are also prevalent among the wealthiest individuals from other countries as well. Mexico’s richest person, second overall in the world behind Buffett, is Carlos Slim Helu.

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

As the failure rate in Silicon Valley reveals, private investors are quite fallible, and yes, they are all-toocapable of funding egregious Solyndra equivalents. The major difference is that when Globe.com falters, investors quickly starve it of capital so that it can destroy no more. When politicians spend, they have an unlimited source of funds—you, me, Michael Dell, and Larry Ellison—to tap. They can continue to support that which doesn’t work. Stated simply, businesses disappear on a daily basis, but government programs are generally forever. Since the federal government’s “War on Poverty” began, in the 1960s, more than $16 trillion has been spent on the battle.3 Yet, it seems that both liberals and conservatives miss the real story here.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

And options offered gigantic payofis to senior execs (and, democratic rhetoric to the contrary, options were overwhelmingly concentrated among senior execs, not ordinary employees, as we saw at the end of chapter 3). When Business Week started doing its annual compensation survey in 1950, the highest-paid CEO was GM's Charles Wilson, who took home $652,156 (before taxes), or 229 times as much as the average worker. In 2001, the pay champ was Oracle's Larry Ellison, who exercised some long-held options, netting himself $706 million (even though the company and its stock was doing rather badly)—or 28,193 times as much as the average worker.Those are extreme cases compared over the very long term, but even nonextreme comparisons are stunning: the average CEO pulled down more than 400 times as much as the average hourly worker in 2001, up from a mere 42 times in 1980 (Borrus and Foust 2003).

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

But outside the highly specialized world of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP is almost totally unknown, as indeed are most of SAP's U.S. competitors, companies such as Peoplesoft, J. D. Edwards, and Siebel Systems. Only SAP's leading U.S. competitor, Oracle Corporation, has escaped such anonymity, but this is due more to the intense rivalry and personal animosity between Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison and Microsoft's Bill Gates than to Oracle's strong presence in the field of what has come to be known as "enterprise computing.'' As we have seen, ERP grew out of the reengineering of the early 1990s, taking the single business processes that were the concern of reengineers, and then joining them together to form giant megaprocesses.

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

This was especially true during the dotcom boom, when people who seemed perfectly reasonable would stop you on the street and tell you that the “new economy” of the internet had made investing metrics such as profit margins—or even actual revenues—relics of a bygone age. Sunk, Part II Manias don’t die easily, especially when they’re fueled by rich, powerful, and obsessive people. In 2013, fourteen years after Alan swore that “immersive viewing” would magically cause Americans to love sailing, Oracle founder Larry Ellison tried to bring yachting to the masses again when he hosted the America’s Cup on San Francisco Bay. Ellison made many of the same claims the CEO of Quokka Sports had tried out on me more than a decade earlier—specifically, that people would suddenly care about a bunch of billionaires on sailboats if they could see the action up close.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

If he were to write up on a whiteboard all the symptoms of aging without actually calling them aging, Maris figured it would look like any other degenerative, genetic disease that would eventually kill you. Surely science could find ways to stop such a sickness—even reverse it. But if that was true, where was the company that was getting on it? When Maris looked around in 2012, he found the answer was no one. Some nonprofit organizations like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s Medical Foundation and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging were exploring ways to eradicate aging diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. But none of these delivered the heft needed to really get at the problem in a truly fundamental way. To make matters worse, Ellison had recently decided to gut funding for any new antiaging projects after throwing almost $350 million at the problem over 15 years with little more to show for it than a lot of his Oracle profits disappearing down a black hole.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

ROLM, the company that had made Burt McMurtry’s venture career, earned 99 percent of its $10 million revenue in 1975 from “mil spec” sales of rugged, impact-resistant minicomputers designed for soldiers’ use in the field. A rising star of the 1980s, the relational database company Oracle got its start with a CIA contract that Larry Ellison and his co-founders completed while working at Ampex in the late 1970s. As military spending soared, this ever-present defense sector grew larger, even if it stayed partially submerged from view.11 The beating heart remained the place that started it all: Lockheed Missiles and Space, whose 24,000-strong 1980s workforce was nearly twice as large as Intel and five times larger than Apple.

…

As the president agonized, the titans of tech checked out the view from the other side, meeting with Republican lawmakers and reconsidering their somewhat recent conversion to the Democratic cause. Despite the personal entreaties of his Valley loyalists, Clinton vetoed the lawsuit bill. Congress promptly overrode him. It was a win for tech, a loss for Clinton, and an ugly crack in the White House love affair with Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison was so fed up that he initially refused to endorse Clinton’s reelection, and wrote a big check to Republican challenger Bob Dole.21 Lerach was furious as well. He decided to stop this government steamroller in its tracks at the state level, bankrolling a fall 1996 state ballot initiative to circumvent the new federal limitations entirely.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Russian venture capitalist and Facebook investor Yuri Milner owns a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot imitation French château in Los Altos Hills, for which he reportedly paid $100 million in 2011, which was said to be the highest price ever paid in the United States for a piece of residential real estate. Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is trying to unload his twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot Palo Alto mansion, which features a climbing wall and a disco, for just under $100 million, the Wall Street Journal reports. Both of those pale in comparison to Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s twenty-three-acre estate in Woodside, which is modeled after a Japanese emperor’s palace. The place took nine years to build, reportedly at a cost of $200 million. Its highlight is Katsura House, a replica of a teahouse from a sixteenth-century royal compound in Kyoto. The replica, which was built in Japan, then disassembled and shipped to California, is 10 percent bigger than the original.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

* * * In mid-May 2013, at the end of a marathon keynote presentation to open its conference for software developers, Google served up a surprise to its exhausted listeners. At the three-hour mark, Larry Page, the company’s publicity-shy CEO, came out to deliver remarks and take questions from the audience. Page isn’t a rock star CEO as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates once were, or as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Larry Ellison at Oracle continue to be. In fact, Page’s appearance was notable for the exact opposite reason: few could remember the last time they had seen him center stage. He has been Google’s CEO for two years and is one of its cofounders. But during that entire fifteen-year period—Google was founded in 1998—he has taken pains to avoid the limelight.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

The first 1982 list contained no hedge fund or private equity barons. These were industries about to be born. Gradually their founders have worked their way into and up the list. The premier division of American billionaires (the top 50) is still dominated by new technology tycoons—from Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft to Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page and Sergey Brin who invented Google. The top 50 also includes retailers like the Walton family who own Wal-Mart and Jeff Bezos of Amazon along with manufacturers like the confectioners, Forest and John Mars. The next group of 150, in contrast, is riddled with Wall Street financiers and hedge fund and private equity operators who have made their fortunes through the financial re-engineering of existing companies.

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

Conspicuous Consumption Before he started Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark said a fortune of $10 million would satisfy him. Before founding Netscape, he thought $100 million would make him happy. Before initiating myCFO and Healtheon, he believed $1 billion would be needed. More recently he said, “Once I have more money than Larry Ellison, I’ll be satisfied.”3 Ellison, the founder of the software giant Oracle, is worth $13 billion. How much is enough for you? Don’t worry about answering that question, because as soon as you get close to reaching that amount, your definition of enough will have changed. In 1899, the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe a certain group of people who, during the Industrial Revolution, had become extremely rich.

To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy

Apollo 13, computerized trading, index card, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

At the end of the first day’s trading, Pixar’s stock was at $39. That gave Pixar a market value of close to $1.5 billion and did indeed make Steve a billionaire. I later heard that while I was glued to the computer screen watching Pixar’s trades, Steve had stepped into a nearby office and made a phone call to his friend Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation. All he apparently said was “Larry, I made it.” The next day’s headline in the Wall Street Journal’s report on the IPO read: STEVE JOBS IS BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN, BECOMING A BILLIONAIRE IN PIXAR IPO The article said: There are plenty of analysts who think the market’s valuation of Pixar, at a total of $1.46 billion, is a sign of investors gone mad.

Lonely Planet Best of Hawaii by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, low cost airline, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation

Catch the shuttle into Lanaʻi City and pour your own coffee for breakfast at Blue Ginger Café (%808-565-6363; www.bluegingercafelanai.com; 409 7th St; mains $5-15; h6am-8pm Thu-Mon, to 2pm Tue & Wed) before strolling the town’s shops and superb Culture & Heritage Center (www.lanaichc.org; 111 Lanaʻi Ave; h8:30am-3:30pm Mon-Fri, 9am-1pm Sat) F. In the afternoon, snorkel at Hulopoʻe Beach or dive at Manele Bay before heading back to Maui on the sunset ferry. Life with Larry Decades of sleepy seclusion for Lanaʻi were interrupted in 2012 when the fabulously wealthy co-founder of Oracle, the huge software developer, Larry Ellison, bought out the island’s longtime owner Castle & Cooke (which once ran the ubiquitous pineapple plantations under the Dole name). For his estimated $600 million purchase price, Ellison got 98% of Lanaʻi (the rest is private homes or government land) and a bevy of businesses, such as the resorts.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

The ecstasy will always come with the agony—that’s the human condition. Nothing we do absolves us from the broke-open beauty of that journey. So there will be cracks. Thankfully, there will be always be cracks. Because, as Cohen reminds us, that’s where the light gets in. Conclusion Row Your Boat or Fly Your Boat? In 2013, what Larry Ellison wanted, beyond all reason, was a win. So the founder of the software giant Oracle and one of the richest men1 in the world spent more than $10 million building the fastest boat ever to compete in the America’s Cup. The Oracle catamaran was equipped with futuristic hydrofoils that lifted the entire boat out of the water, enabling speeds of up to 55 knots.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

It was perfect for schools and workplaces and it seemed, at first glance, ideal for consumers eager to access the Internet. Before Jobs’s return, in May 1996, Apple had joined Oracle Corporation and thirty other hardware and software companies in the Networking Computing Alliance, which set the standard for cheap, diskless computers based on a common networking platform. Jobs’s billionaire best friend, Larry Ellison, was especially bullish on NCs as the future of the computer industry. And as a newly installed member of Apple’s board, Ellison told the press that Apple was building an NC. He’d recently launched a start-up, Network Computing Inc., to kick-start the sector. Influenced by Ellison’s thinking, but also eager to compete with him, Jobs also talked up the NC idea.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

However, a combination of fortuitous timing and MySQL’s open-source model led it to become the dominant database platform used in many early stage start-ups and Web apps, including Facebook and Twitter. Ultimately MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, and in 2009 Oracle acquired Sun. The MySQL story is more compelling when one considers that it managed to use its free and open-source model to fend off competition from database juggernaut Oracle and its CEO, Larry Ellison, perhaps Silicon Valley’s most aggressive software entrepreneur. Wildly successful Peers Inc FOSS examples abound, including the popular Mozilla Firefox browser and the web server Apache. FOSS, because it is free, easily accessible, and useful, is fueling unprecedented rates of software/platform adoption and affordable innovation.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We teach future instead of history, we have a team-based approach rather than individualistic one, and while other schools fall in line with anything that ensures safety, we proudly declare ourselves to be a dangerous school, complete with survival training and open-ended projects and challenges. We believe that students, put to the task, can perform at a much higher level than ever imagined by other schools, and we believe that a student with a purpose can achieve anything in his or her imagination. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes, Michael Dell, and many others dropped out of school to pursue their dreams. And they were enormously successful -- in some cases, in spite of their formal education. At Draper University, we embrace and support people who have the gumption to break from the pack to start businesses that might transform industries.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Jobs ranted and cursed at the people around him; he went drunk-driving with Bono and smashed into other drivers; he threw scalding tea on his long-suffering assistant; he got into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission and lied to investigators; he visited sweatshops in China where children made iPhones and came away feeling that he was the victim. With Sting, he traveled to the Peruvian rain forest, where they tripped on ayahuasca and ended up hugging and sobbing on a mud floor. He and his best friend, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, drove to the Tenderloin in San Francisco and fired water cannons at transvestite hookers. They made prank phone calls, dialing a local Thai restaurants to order “penis sauce” or calling a hardware store in the Castro section of San Francisco to inquire about black caulk. Eventually I got caught.

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

You develop shoe-shining software in VB 3.0 using bits and pieces of JavaScript, Franz Lisp, and a FileMaker database running on an old Mac connected over the network using AppleScript, then 4. Everyone thinks it’s the cat’s whiskers, so, always having dreamed of starting your own software company and maybe being Bill Gates or perhaps even just Larry Ellison 5. You buy the rights to ShoeShiner 1.0 from your old company and get VC to start your own company, ShoeShiner LLC, marketing shoe-shining software, but Set Your Priorities 291 6. None of your beta testers can get it to work because of the obscure dependencies on AppleScript and the hard-coded IP addresses in the source code, so it takes a month to install at each client site, and 7.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

I knew exactly what I wanted, because I had seen it years before in the Ugly stacks. My hunch about Upside was correct. Within a year of launching, I had the boyish-looking CEO of Sun Microsystems on the cover, caricatured as Michelangelo’s anatomically detailed sculpture David. I commissioned a long investigative article on Oracle, with founder Larry Ellison as Genghis Khan, plotting with his warlords, severed heads at their feet. I had Apple CEO John Sculley as Little Lord Fauntleroy in a sandbox, getting sand kicked on him. Within two years of launching Upside, everybody in technology and venture capital was paying attention to it. Bill Gates of Microsoft gave me four hours of interviews.

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Similarly, they point to the success of Bill Gates and others like him when marginal tax rates were higher.7 Perhaps only curiosity or glory motivated them. These arguments ignore the fact that high-tech entrepreneurialism was nascent prior to Bill Gates’s windfall, and that it has accelerated greatly since. Surely, the successes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and the other technology billionaires have sparked an enormous army of wishful risk-takers in their wake. In the short run, slightly higher tax rates may make imperceptible differences in the motivation of determined entrepreneurs. But these small differences have proved to have large compounding effects in the long run.

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

airport security, Burning Man, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, information security, Iridium satellite, Larry Ellison, market bubble, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, packet switching, pirate software, profit motive, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, space junk, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, thinkpad, Y2K

Jeb had a whole set of legends attached to him, like a shark followed by remora fish. Jeb had heart arrhythmias. He had advanced diabetes. He’d had a fistfight with Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice had had to break it up (this was the best story, actually). Jeb got anxious phone calls three times a day from Larry Ellison. Jeb had a Republican Party slush fund. Jeb had hired Cuban exiles to wiretap the French Embassy. Jeb was addicted to Halcion pills. Jeb was secretly gay. He, Derek R. Vandeveer, had become the toughest, scariest cyberwarrior in Washington. It made Van wonder if he had ever understood anything about any other human being in his life.

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two-week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their BlackBerries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Ballmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the BlackBerry away and enjoy life. So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. …... I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

In fact, it was nine billionaires, not sixty-two, as Oxfam would later say when better data came in. And the following year, the number of billionaires it took to account for half the world’s resources dropped from nine to eight. Six of those eight made their money in the supposedly equalizing field of technology: Gates, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Carlos Slim of Telmex and other Mexican businesses, and Michael Bloomberg, the purveyor of computer terminals. Another, Amancio Ortega, who built the retailer Zara, was famous for applying advanced technology to manufacturing and for automating his factories. The final member of the gang of eight, Warren Buffett, was a major shareholder in Apple and IBM.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

By this measure, incomes in the U.S. economy today are almost as skewed as they were in the rock and roll industry when Bruce Springsteen cut “Born in the U.S.A.” One reason the entire economy has veered toward a superstar, winner-take-all affair is the rise of digital technology. Successful entrepreneurs can turn apps and digital technology into fortunes worth billions of dollars. Five of the six wealthiest Americans (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos)—whose combined wealth equals nearly that of half of the world’s population—made their fortunes because of digital technology.16 Digital technology is scalable. One day soon the top surgeons may be able to operate on a great many more patients due to improvements in digital technology.

Family Trade by Stross, Charles

book value, British Empire, glass ceiling, haute couture, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, land reform, Larry Ellison, new economy, retail therapy, sexual politics, trade route

Once the Clans recognize me officially, at an annual session, that is. And assuming—as Roland says—nobody assassinates me. Princess Beckstein, signing off for The Weatherman, or maybe Business 2.0. Jesus, who’d have thought I’d end up starring in some kind of twisted remake of Cinderella? Or that it would turn out so weird?” And I called Craig Venter and Larry Ellison robber barons in print, she thought mordantly, keying the “pause” button again. “Put that way it sounds funny, but it isn’t. First I thought it was the feds who broke in and grabbed me, and that’s pretty damn scary to begin with. FEMA, secret security courts with hearings held in camera. Then, it could have been the mob, if the mob looked like FBI agents.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

But chances are that if Peter is alive a thousand years from now, many of his contemporaries will be also. Peter backs the Methuselah Foundation, an organization striving to slow down aging by propelling mankind to a “longevity escape velocity” in which every year, medical science figures out how to increase the human life span by more than one year. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, one of the few men whose wealth Peter might envy, also wants to live a long, long time. To further this end, Ellison has donated an estimated $100 to $200 million to anti-aging research.315 If billionaires aged differently than college professors, or if the cure for aging was in creating high-marginal-cost medical treatments, then Ellison and Thiel would have much greater expected life spans than I would.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

The most successful entrepreneurs had ring fingers 10% to 20% longer than their index fingers. As you hold up your hand to examine your own two fingers, this finding probably sounds downright absurd to you. For decades, people have speculated about what made Steve Jobs special, what set apart the Richard Bransons and Larry Ellisons and Mark Zuckerbergs from everybody else—what character traits facilitated their success, or what in their childhoods drove them to build their empires—and here comes two Italian economists to argue it’s all about the length of their fingers! Well, it’s not really about the length of their fingers.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Page drives a Prius, which costs around $21,000. Brin gets around for the most part on in-line skates, and he still lives in a rented apartment.” That same year, the BBC wrote that “far from living an extravagant lifestyle, complete with yachts and private jets like fellow software leader Oracle boss Larry Ellison,” Page and Brin “live modest, unassuming lifestyles. They don’t even have sports cars, and instead are said to each drive a Toyota Prius, a plain-looking but rather environmentally friendly saloon.” Last year, Business Week gushed, “Flash and ostentation cut no ice at Google. . . . The status vehicle of choice at the Googleplex is the Toyota Prius hybrid, which both co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page drive.”

The End of Illness by David B. Agus

confounding variable, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, Danny Hillis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, epigenetics, germ theory of disease, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, personalized medicine, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method

Specifically, David Golde, for taking me under your wing; I often wish today you were still here so that I could pick up the phone and once again seek your counsel. To Andy Grove for inspiring me to take greater risks in my thinking and career choices. To my dad for always modeling to me how to be as loving and attentive a doctor as a father. To Steven Spielberg, for your contagious passion and insight. To Larry Ellison, for your certainty and trust in me. To Marc Benioff, for your true friendship. To Al Gore, for pushing me in the right direction (and first introducing me to Danny Hillis). To Max Nikias, Carmen Puliafito, and Eli Broad, for bringing me to USC, a remarkable academic home. To Sumner Redstone, for your unwavering belief in me.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Of course, the strategy works the other way too—rather than selling to a larger platform, some entrepreneurs scale by expanding their original platform. Brian Chesky, cofounder of Airbnb, bought smaller platforms similar to his company’s model—Crashpadder and Accoleo, both in Europe. This has been Larry Ellison’s strategy at Oracle as well. And eBay has grown by buying PayPal and other smaller companies. Even Apple has begun to do this by buying the company that made Siri. Of course, you can still pivot and decide not to scale, at least not much. The growing local movement is putting a higher value on staying in the neighborhood than it had in the era when globalization was uncritically celebrated.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

The list of nongraduates is striking: Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Stanford University; Elon Musk did likewise; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University; Steve Jobs left Reed College; Michael Dell left the University of Texas; Travis Kalanick left the University of California; Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey left the University of Nebraska and New York University, respectively; Larry Ellison left both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago; Arash Ferdowsi (cofounder of DropBox) left MIT; and Daniel Ek (cofounder of Spotify) left the Royal Institute of Technology.22 This list could go on. Though these entrepreneurs stepped away for various reasons, all shared the same trajectory afterward: out of education, and into the stratosphere of the labor market.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Published accounts of Better Place and Segway that I draw upon in this chapter put Agassi and Kamen on the high end of the spectrum. If Agassi and Kamen are narcissists, then they’re in good company: In his seminal Harvard Business Review article, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons,” psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby puts Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Andy Grove in the same camp. Research has shown that, on average, entrepreneurs exhibit greater degrees of narcissism than the general public. But Maccoby draws a distinction between “productive narcissists”—leaders who leverage their vision, drive, and charisma to achieve breakthrough change—and those who stumble, after silencing dissenting voices and surrounding themselves with yes-men who’ll follow their direction uncritically.

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

What Benioff envisioned was the simplification gained by putting all of the software in the “cloud,” so that anyone with a Web browser could use it. With a cloud-based CRM, the user could simply sign on via the Web and have a CRM for a monthly fee. There would be no local servers, no charges for installation or maintenance, and no IT department. Benioff left Oracle in 1999 with the blessing of CEO Larry Ellison plus some $2 million in seed capital; other chunks of venture capital were fairly easily attracted. It was the boom years for dotcom, and the endorsement from Ellison was significant. The initial critical challenge he faced was attracting very good developers and more capital to feed them. How would you choose to attract the best developers?

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

“So I’m like, ‘He should definitely leave college.’ And he does!” They left him in San Francisco to round up the news during the day, and to show up at parties and try to gather gossip at night. It was an incredible ride, Douglas remembered later. Once he walked up to Mayer at a party at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s lavish mansion, and she literally ran away from him. For the young blogger, it was “a sick, undeserved rush of power.” One particular target was the young founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. “We Want to Know If You’re Single Mark Zuckerberg so We Can Contact You Maybe,” read one headline soon after the blog’s launch.

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

Summers recalls that there was fierce opposition within Harvard to his efforts to bring in new money and create new collaborative institutions inside the university, which can scare off some would-be donors. “There was often a sense in the Public Health School that they should have a monopoly over consideration of these issues and that there were no structural changes necessary,” Summers says. He managed to convince Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle and a reputedly reluctant philanthropist, to donate $115 million to create the Ellison Institute for World Health. But when Summers was forced out in 2006—having offended too many academics by his attempts to shake the university out of its ossified ways, as well as by commenting unwisely about the scientific abilities of women—Ellison withdrew his offer, saying he had lost confidence in the university’s ability to spend the money without Summers at the helm.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Despite their omnipresence in contemporary popular culture and sizable representation in the modern information economy, historians have thus far devoted little attention to these ubiquitous but mysterious computer specialists. There are, of course, whole shelves of books devoted to the small number of inventors and entrepreneurs—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison, in particular—who have managed to translate their computing expertise into fabulous wealth and personal celebrity. There is also considerable literature on the intriguingly subversive subculture of teenage computer hackers. Since the late 1970s, these geeky adolescents have been alternatively hailed as the heroic harbingers of the coming “computer revolution” or castigated as dangerous cybercriminals.7 But neither of these groups is representative of the larger computing community.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Half of Jewish Americans report annual household incomes above $100,000, and one-quarter report incomes above $200,000.30 While Jewish Americans are less than 2 percent of the American population, they make up 9 percent of US senators and a third of America’s billionaires.31 Jewish billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg—whose combined wealth exceeds $500 billion—are five of America’s ten wealthiest people.32 But every ethnic group that has accessed American power has one thing in common: rich white men eventually deemed their light skin as assimilable into whiteness. In his 1995 book How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev describes how oppressed immigrants became American oppressors.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Under Nardelli, 35,000 workers at Chrysler were laid off and Chrysler headed for bankruptcy. Nardelli left after only 21 months. In both of these instances, Nardelli was paid not on the performance of the business, but instead was paid to join the business. However, large compensation packages do not always necessarily indicate that a stock will underperform. For example, Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software maker Oracle, has been one of the highest-paid CEOs of any publicly traded business, earning in excess of $78 million in option awards alone in 2009, yet investors in Oracle would have made 3.5 times their money in the last 10 years ended 2010. (However, it is still difficult to argue that Ellison needs additional stock options to motivate him to do his job, as he owns 23.4 percent of Oracle, as of August 9, 2010.23) Look for Managers Who Don’t Monopolize Stock Options but Offer Options to All Employees You need to determine if the stock option plan of a company is geared to only a few of the top executive officers or if options are widely distributed among employees.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K