Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth
Thankfully, the OP isn&#x27;t one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. It&#x27;s a short review of an autobiography of Tony Hsieh that focuses less on business-building details than on the psychological&#x2F;personal evolution of a young Asian American man -- who, despite his growing success and adulation by the media, found himself deeply unsatisfied and dependent on booze and drugs. The review ends with this tidbit, which I found insightful:<p><i>&gt; Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in “Wonder Boy,” nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. But it did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists.</i>