The new WASPs

The new West Coast money culture is shaping up to look a great deal like the old East Coast money culture. Young men making their first few millions run the risk of being mocked by their colleagues for having a “red-car year” if they go out and buy a Ferrari, and showy rich guys such as Yuri Milner are savagely mocked for building fake French chateaus at $100 million a pop. (Larry Ellison’s acquisition of a Hawaiian island at $600 million, on the other hand, wasn’t mocked as a rich-guy extravagance but soberly greeted as an announcement of his intention to evolve into a full-blown Bond villain.) If anything, there’s a bit of protest-too-much modesty, young millionaires complaining that they really can’t afford to live here. It’s a strange kind of Puritanism, to be sure: You can buy a $150,000 Tesla, sure, but not a Rolls Royce. It is difficult to imagine Sergey Brin gold-leafing his name onto a jet in meter-high lettering. You don’t see a lot of Kiton suits in Mountain View.

It’s not that there isn’t conspicuous consumption here. There is, and it takes the same form as that of the great old capitalists slandered by the envious and the small as “robber barons,” which is to say: good works. You don’t advertise how rich you are out here with a flashy watch or an absurd Italian sports car, but by what you give away.

The commitment to philanthropy here is in fact remarkable. It isn’t just billionaires giving away a few millions they won’t miss — although, let’s not sneer at those mere millions, either — but an entire civic culture built around the assumption that successful people will invest both money and time in doing good on a large scale. That philanthropy is shaped by the tech industry’s expectations of high return on investment, and the business of measuring philanthropic effectiveness has taken off as a field of enterprise in itself. Of course there are carping critics, the antediluvian types at the New York Times who insist that these billionaire captains of industry should be fighting for the politically managed redistribution of wealth rather than working to make private philanthropy more effective — and that completely misses the point. There are not in fact very many self-professed libertarians out here, but the reflexive belief that government should be, or is going to be, the primary actor running the show when it comes to building a better world simply isn’t an operating assumption among the famous founders and venture capitalists who shape the culture of Silicon Valley.