Dear Liebling

Tom Steyer is the only billionaire who supports the California billionaire tax. He makes SO many powerful observations in the recent @NewYorker article about the selfish, decadent and morally corrupt elites running Silicon Valley right now. From the piece: "I suggested to several super-rich Californians, ‘Look, if you don’t like this, why don’t we sit down and come up with something that works from your standpoint and actually addresses the issues?’ And they had no interest in doing it." He lamented the passing of what he saw as tech’s originating spirit, entrepreneurial but also patriotic, which was exemplified by the Hewlett-Packard founders’ heavy involvement in philanthropy and public service." Can you imagine David Packard or Bill Hewlett doing the kind of self-promotion that Elon Musk does?” he said. “There’s obviously been just a really dramatic change. I don’t want to turn them into gods, but Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett felt a deep connection with the country and with the state and with the land. It doesn’t exist today.” I asked him how he explains this change. “The people who are making the big money in California are technology people,” he said, and many of them “are incredibly focussed on that and quite dismissive of the other kinds of learning. That is not something they respect. English literature is not something they respect.” It may be pertinent that we were speaking at the decidedly old-school Yale Club, in New York City—Steyer is an alum. “When you get too reductive in terms of focussing just on money, or just focussing on technology, there are a lot of things that you’re cutting away from that world view,” he went on. “And a lot of those things are what we would think of as human values, like compassion, some sense of honor, all the things that you read about in the soft courses. And, if you don’t have that, then O.K., good night. You have a different frame of reference and a different value system.”