Better founders won’t fix Silicon Valley

The pressure to maximize profit makes even the seemingly good executives compromise their values or move aside

Image: PickPik

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.

But we also need to be clear eyed about the problem. These billionaires have emerged as paragons of modern evil, but simply replacing them will not yield the better future we might hope. It’s easy to say we just have a bad crop of founders and executives, and if we replaced them these problems would be addressed. I wish that was the truth because it sounds reasonably achievable. Yet that’s not the reality.

There are undoubtedly specific quirks of these individuals that contribute to specific harmful actions they take. I have no doubt about that. But they’re enabled and encouraged to do so by structural forces that shape our society, lead corporations to profit-maximizing decisions, and guide the actions of executives that need to deliver on a narrow range of goals regardless of the social and environmental costs.

Those pressures will not be overturned by a new crop of founders who espouse more socially conscious ambitions or a different set of companies that promise they’d never do what the existing monopolists have gotten up to; that they will, they might say, do no evil.

In theory, that sounds great; but in reality, that’s not how things play out because capitalism has built-in pressures that only increase with scale.

The young PhDs Sergey Brin and Larry Page could write about how advertising would compromise their search algorithm and why it was important to have a search engine “in the academic realm” when the pressures of annual growth and profit maximization weren’t present. But once they incorporated and later went public, things changed.

They instituted advertising, but promised there would be guardrails. For a time, those guardrails were respected, but the larger Google became, the more pressure there was to dismantle them so the company could keep delivering for shareholders. Does anyone really believe that would not have happened if there were just some different executives at Google? The structural forces of capitalism, of the public market, of the demand for growth at all costs would have bowled them over too.

Indeed, we’ve already run the experiment on whether a set of companies and executives claiming they’d be better than the old guard will really deliver on that promise. That was exactly the narrative the tech industry sold to the world when it was a bunch of startups and scrappy founders fighting to displace the dominant firms they were going up against. They promised they would “do no evil.”

That narrative was valuable in selling themselves and their products to the public, with ample help from a credulous media that loves to chase money and power. Years later, we can see it was an effective marketing campaign that allowed them to evade regulation and taxation that applied to traditional industries for far longer than they should’ve gotten away with.

The tech oligarchs are just as bad as — if not worse than — the executives and monopolists that preceded them, and a new crop of founders won’t change the way that vast wealth and power tends to corrupt those who wield it.

There are certainly exceptions to these rules. Wikipedia remains a non-profit entity and Signal seems to be resisting the pressure to pursue growth at all costs. But they’re few and far between, and it’s not better founders that will change that. It requires upending the structural forces that push companies and the people who run them to cast all other considerations aside in the pursuit of power and profit.