Better founders won’t fix Silicon Valley

We pay a lot of attention to the billionaires who run Silicon Valley — and for good reason. They’re terrible people.

Mark Zuckerberg has polluted the information environment to such a degree his company contributed to a genocide. Sam Altman is now following in his footsteps and seeking to take social media’s harms to a whole new level with generative AI. Jeff Bezos crushed unions so he could (nearly) fly to space and take over a whole city for his wedding. Elon Musk is using the myth he built for himself to advance a renewed fascist project, after Peter Thiel set the foundations for him. And that’s just the tip of the tech billionaire iceberg.

These men — and, yes, they are mostly men — are using the vast wealth they hoarded in recent years to turn the world on its head all so they can increase their power over the rest of us and make even more money in the process. They absolutely must be reined in, and we’d be much better off without them lording over us.