What Would You Do with $830 Million (or So)?

Here’s a piece in the New York Times today (mostly) about Max Levchin who was one of the co-founders of PayPal and became wealthy after it sold to eBay. It’s not only about him but about the larger phenomenon of young Internet entrepreneurs making lots of money and then heading back into the startup fray.

The piece in and of itself is mostly unremarkable: a fairly straightforward story about a man who’s already made “his money” but continues to work on similar projects without slowing down or changing direction. (One thing the article neglects to mention about Levchin is that he provided the original $1 million to start Yelp.) But there are many things that are interesting to me about the article and the larger culture that it now seems to arise out of.

The Times has written lots of stories over the past year or so about extreme wealth in America, with many of them coming out of Silicon Valley where lots of money is being made and changing hands. But the paper’s coverage is largely (and strangely) uncritical and basically makes a fetish out of wealth creation and accumulation. The wide-eyed tone of these pieces is generally: “gee, look at all the money these people seem to have.”

There’s a kind of throw away reference to philanthropy in the article: “He thought he would spend the time after the sale ‘exploring my inner self.’ Instead, he spent the better part of 12 months ‘feeling worthless and stupid’ and baffled by what he might do with the remainder of his life. He felt too young to retire or downshift a gear or two — and too restless to become a philanthropist.”

What’s interesting about this sentence and its “throw away” quality is that it’s a kind of metaphor for something more pervasive and disturbing to me.

America has historically been a place that immigrants have come for two primary reasons: 1) to escape persecution and/or 2) to make money. It’s interesting to note that Levchin and Google’s Sergey Brin are both Russian immigrants. (Levchin was born in Ukraine according to the article.)

It’s also true that many tycoons/titans/extremely wealthy individuals in America have historically donated money very generously to causes and public projects. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the latest examples of this.

Now I don’t know Levchin and don’t know what he does with his money. So I’m not being critical of him when I say that the culture today seems to instill virtually no sense of obligation or public duty in terms of “what to do with all that money.” There’s a disappearing culture of public “responsibility.” All sense of such obligations seems to be going away.

In some larger moral sense, “the public,” reduced to “the users” in Silicon Valley speak, has enabled the wealth by adopting the site/service/whatever. There should be some consciousness of this among entrepreneurs and a corresponding desire to “give back” or “help people.”

Google’s Brin and Page have set up a foundation and are tied to a bunch of valuable causes. Pierre Omidyar, of eBay, has essentially become a philanthropist. These are just top of mind. So there are examples of young entrepreneurs “doing good” with their money. But not enough unfortunately.

It could be that people in their 20s and early 30s who’ve made so much money – Facebook’s 23 year old founder Mark Zuckerberg is the next one set to become part of this new techristocracy – are just not yet mature enough to be fully aware of their connection and corresponding duty to others. It’s really a spiritual issue at bottom.

If I were in the position of one of these guys and never had to work again, which I’m not of course, I can tell you very clearly that I’d pay off my house and other expenses, put some money away for my kids’ college and then devote part of my life to some sort of effort to solve a public problem.

That of course doesn’t preclude working on private business ideas or starting companies and may well be compatible with it. But once your immediate needs are taken care of and you’ve had some time to indulge your fantasies about the vacation, the big car, the big house or writing the novel, it’s time to get back to work. And at least some of that work should be about helping other people.