It’s a real pity. I circulated in the Downtown Tech scene in Las Vegas for a little bit. I felt like it was rather culty, but I also felt he really made people believe in the town’s ability to be more than a tourist destination. At the time, the city was still quite battered from the recession, and there was quite a lot of pessimism. The energy he brought was very needed, and the community he fostered had real energy and hope and value. I made friends then that I still have now, who are very dear to me. I’ve since left town, but I was back last year and walked around the places we all used to hang out… it was very sad to me to see all traces of that community gone, but I was happy I got to be part of it, and to have seen someone with that kind of wealth try to do something to really change their city for the better.
Of course, it had problems, and he was throwing money around to make it all work, and as time went on I think much of that money served to conceal those problems rather than confront them… though I never heard stories back then on the scale of what this article describes as happening in Utah.
I don’t know really how to feel about the information here, other than very, very sad. I hope despite how he wound up, someone else someday is able to draw inspiration from the parts of what he did that worked and created hope and strengthened the local community, and they can move the ball forward. And I hope wherever Tony is now, he’s free from whatever drove him into such a dark place. Rest in peace.
I didn't know him personally, so I wish I could say I had some firsthand experience. Rumor-wise, there was every story you can imagine. The guy loved the spotlight and was personally bankrolling something that was simultaneously a VC fund and an urban revitalization project, so obviously opinions went all over the board. In the end, he was a Burning Man kind of guy with huge amounts of money, vision and risk tolerance. Put that way, maybe it's not a shock that after the Downtown project collapsed he built a tiny little Bioshock-y dystopia for his clique, and blasted himself stupid with whip-its until he died. And maybe there's a better parallel universe somewhere in which the project succeeded and the right people came around him, and in that timeline's 2023, every billionaire there is cribbing notes about how to recreate what he did in their own city. Neither story is all that inconsistent from what I saw from my very, very distant vantage point as a lowly tech guy at the fringes of the whole thing.
Even before Hsieh left Zappos, anecdotes I heard from the fringes of his circle, including people who had worked at Zappos, made it clear he operated in a very heavy-drinking culture.
For example, both media & employee reports mention well-stocked office beer fridges & toleration of drinking during the workday in the office.
> He vowed that anyone who spent his money would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on the amount they spent. If someone booked out a restaurant and spent $1,000 on the tab, for example, they would earn $100. If they recruited someone to live in Park City, they would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on that person’s annual salary. And if someone could source a real estate deal and spent $1 million on the property, that person would earn $100,000.
This is, quite literally, the stupidest incentive scheme I've ever heard of.
Assuming you didn't get paid 10% off of buying stocks and bonds, it incentivizes actually spending the money on something. Don't forget Tony's recruiting process - whatever your current salary, I'll double it if you come work for me doing... whatever your heart desires. He had functionally infinite money, and you can't bring it with you, so what're you gonna do? Join the effective altruism crowd? Please.
It doesn't make sense of you have a limited a amount of money, but he was a billionaire and thought like one.
Putting the aggressive tone aside, this makes sense.
His acts were a different kind of altruism compared to other billionaires. But altruistic, nevertheless.
My take is that somewhere deep inside, he felt he didn’t deserve the amount of wealth he had. There was some guilt and pain that ate him up inside. He seemed like a good man who was motivated by something other than money. The fact that he made a lot of it seems coincidental.
A round peg in a square world, he was unlike his peers - much less obsessed with spending the wealth on himself. I hope that we can find some inspiration from his desire to build a community larger than himself.
Oddly, it's not that different from other commission/finder's-fee systems.
(It's also not totally different from the "commission" many governments collect via sales taxes: "everything happening within our nexus owes us 5-10% of the total spend".)
If in fact the ultimate spender is reasonably confident that their actual spend decisions fit their values, but they generally aren't finding enough things to spend on, it could even make sense! But of course if the spend-decisions are unhinged/reckless, then this system makes them 10% more wasteful.
Totally agreed, but still, finder's fees sometimes work that way – because the actual amount truly paid is considered the least-fakable proxy-signal of value delivered.
Similarly, utility-style government regulation often caps profits (or profit-like 'overhead' like salaries) as a percentage of expenditures. This creates an incentive for doing things in an expensive manner. It's kinda dumb, and has been understood as a problem driving excessive costs in regulated industries for many decades.
But the same thing was written into 2010's ACA ("Obamacare") as an "80/20 rule": insurers must pay out 80% of what they take in on certain preferred health expenditures, like medical procedures. So, the only legal way to grow the absolute size of the 20% an insurer must use for 'overhead' (including administrative salaries & profits) is to increase the totals paid for health services. That is, insurer management/shareholders can benefit when hospitals/providers charge them more.
If the federal government habitually makes this mistake, can we blame Hsieh?
> Similarly, utility-style government regulation often caps profits (or profit-like 'overhead' like salaries) as a percentage of expenditures. This creates an incentive for doing things in an expensive manner. It's kinda dumb, and has been understood as a problem driving excessive costs in regulated industries for many decades.
The term for this is "cost plus". As you note, it has long been understood to be a big mistake. And as you also note, it continues to be common.
Not necessarily, for stuff that genuinely doesn't exist yet, such as cutting-edge military technology , or for situations where there's literally only a single potential bidder, cost-plus contracts are the least bad method I can think of.
Interesting story. Wonder what caused his downfall into insanity. Was Zappos getting a sudden influx of money, giving him too much sense of power and importance ?
It's also sad that he felt he had to overachieve, our current system values achievements and work, and many times that goes really out of balance, people trying to become the next multibillionare no matter what, risking their personal health and even leaving them insane in the process like with Tony apparently.
This "biohacking your way to 10x" is unfortunately very prevalent in certain circles, and I understand it, but I think as a society and especially in Silicon Valley and in the software development circles we should remember the importance of resting and taking time off. Your body and especially brain can only take so much.
It is actually kind of stupid how little is talked about the importance of resting.
Thinking all the time takes an immense amount of energy, trying to push that year over year, even for decades, can lead to some really unpleasant states, where you try to start self medicating and finding ways to circumvent the need for rest.
I wish there was more talk about taking time off and just being, I bet it would save a lot of people from peer pressure to 10x perform all the time.
I think constantly trying to overachieve is one of the sicknesses in our industry, which is not talked nearly enough about.
Both wealth and drugs can cause small personality quirks, & slight mental instability, to grow in unchecked proportions.
Synergistically, especially, they can separate people from familiar moderating social situations, and introduce them to riskier situations & exploitative scenes.
Having already become a multibillionaire, it's not clear to me that Hsieh was still driven by any remaining desire or "peer pressure" to "overachieve". He rather seemed unmoored from usual social pressures or limits, and thus unchecked in how absurd his 'business' dealings, personal relationships, & self-exploration could become.
Had Hsieh still been seeking conventional success, or "work"/"achievements" legible to sane peers, he may have moderated his actions, or at least not cut himself off from people offering valid concerns.
I’ve noticed in some people that if they get rich and stop working day-to-day, they can go off the rails due to not needing to align their behaviour with the needs/expectations of other “ordinary” people - colleagues, employees, customers, suppliers, etc.
I’ve seen it happen with people who made a lot of money in cryptocurrency and then didn’t need to work anymore, sometimes with disastrous consequences (broken families, spiralling psychotic episodes).
I used to find Tony Hseih inspiring, since I saw him speak at a conference in 2009 when Zappos was at its peak.
But over time he seemed to develop a messiah complex, and with all that money combined with the loss of the anchor to normality that comes with having conventional responsibilities, it just spiraled out of control. It’s very sad.
There were times in my life where I was becoming a bit unhinged - egotistical, even a bit messianic at times. In the end I just couldn’t afford to keep going like that; I wasn’t rich and needed to work so had to figure out how to get onto a healthy path. I now count myself super lucky I never had a big financial windfall before I was forced to go through that process; I could easily have gone down a very bad path if I’d had that.
I'm in my late twenties. Not extremely wealthy, but wealthy enough that I do not work or ever need to worry about money. I think a part of the messiah complex comes from guilt. The guilt and feelings of responsibility that "I'm very fortunate so I need to do more for the world (and only I can do it!)". It starts out innocuous but it can become toxic very quickly, especially when combined with some ideological or political component as you stop viewing people as people and it just becomes about maximizing some metric.
Your point about day-to-day "ordinary people" interactions helping to align behavior is crucial. Besides a few close friends, most of my friends do not know of my financial situation. For work, I just say I do freelance consulting since that explains no employer and flexible hours. This does make me feel dishonest and disconnected from them, though. The only thing keeping me anchored to reality is keeping to a "normal" life as that's the only constraint to me going haywire like Tony did. Having regular friends is the only reference point to reality I have.
Something definitely happens to people when they become extremely rich. No one will say "no" to them for fear of reprisal. Most of us encounter limits on what we can do, not enough time/money/political power/etc., and it really seems like those limits keep us sane. Once we lose those limits, or believe we've lost them, bad things can happen.
I think–the way societies often have social norms around potentially harmful things–this reality is a significant driver of social norms among "old money" families with generational wealth. In those circles there is social pressure to not to talk about money, to not spend ostentatiously, and to socialize your children together at specific boarding schools and universities where they will be among others who share these values.
I agree totally with your point about learning to rest. I am a startup founder, do way too many hours, plus family life, social, volunteering etc. The funny thing I am just back from a two day break (viewing universities with my daughter) and that hard stop caused me to get some virus, it always happens. Work so hard to the point you need to stop, stop, get ill. I can't be the only one.
Aside from that, it's hard for people lots of people to know when to rest when you have this moronic grind culture buzzing in the background. I despise this crush it, work more, do more things attitude in the start up / tech scene. I would have hoped with a better understanding of peoples mental health this would have vanished by now.
I used to notice that I’d seem to come down with a cold as soon as I’d switch off for Christmas/New Year (and this is in Australia when it’s hot summer weather). It seemed to happen several times over consecutive years when I was in peak startup stress mode. Someone told me that it’s a virus that’s been in your system for a while, but “suppressed” somehow, and only when you take a rest is your body able to devote energy to a full immune response. I don’t know how true it is; but an interesting possibility.
There's only the testimony of the financial manager (Tony Lee) to imply that Tony Hsieh's brother Andy was "seeking to exploit his brother rather than protect him".
So I think it remains plausible that Andy was, in truth, trying to preserve some assets to return to brother, in the hopes there'd eventually be some bottoming-out, possible rehab, & return-to-sanity.
One of my mentors was an absolute business genius, who around the first dotcom bubble built many many products, many that were very successful. Then around 27 he started going pretty wierd, and 10 years down the line it turns out he's paranoid schizophrenic, and either takes drugs which greatly dimishes his energy and smartness, or he goes crazy.
Many of the crazy money spends and similar of Hsieh sound familiar, it's like the genius just gets more and more wacky ideas until they both get exploited but also destroy themselves.
It's such a crazy story for me personally. There's also so many of these around. There's something about genius up until about ~27 years old that then can go completely insane. Seems to me to be linked to the whole 27 club [1] too. Seems like something really changes in our brain chemistry around then.
I find it fascinating how permissive openness to new ideas and challenging convention in people like Hsieh is likely both responsible for their success and also their downfall.
Even though Hsieh had moved on from Silicon Valley after the first dot-com boom, it's a characteristic I'd apply to the Bay Area in general. Makes me wonder if the line between the folks attempting to disrupt the status quo with their startup and the folks living in tents and experimenting with drug cocktails in the tenderloin isn't in fact razor thin. And conversely, I wonder if by "cleaning up" places like SF, you might also kill the permissive attitudes that make the Bay Area the place to go when you want to birth a new idea.
A tragic tale. It is morbidly fascinating from the outside, the results of combining mental illness with lots of money. I hope his family and other loved ones can find peace and closure at some point.
Wow. That gives a lot of perspective on the lack of hindsight from silicon valley apologists who presented Tony and his company as models for everyone to follow. And of course on his book "delivering happiness".
I met someone claiming to be one of Tony’s best friends who told me that he had his drug induced idea that he needed to burn himself as a death and rebirth thing. That he had a secret death cult he was trying to start.
He also said that the man who ran into the Man at Burning Man a couple years ago had his final conversation with Tony before he self immolated.
The guy who shared was a rather successful entrepreneur and otherwise I had no reason to suspect he was lying.
> He also said that the man who ran into the Man at Burning Man a couple years ago had his final conversation with Tony before he self immolated.
His name was Aaron Joel Mitchell. I've supplied an article that timelines Mitchell's night. His last known interactions were with some people he knew from Switzerland. There were no drugs or alcohol found in his system. That's to say, both facts make it highly unlikely he was around Tony.
That's useful context - but both those details in the article seem like indirect hearsay, from people who don't necessarily have the whole story.
For example, the drug info isn't from an autopsy, but what some unnamed UC Davis medical staff told Mitchell's grieving mother, and she relayed to the reporter.
Similarly, the bit about "friends from Switzerland" is just passed on from Mitchell's friend, with no other confirming details – like, say any reports on Mitchell's last actions from those supposed people.
Now, the claim Mitchell last spoke with Hsieh still sounds like a made-up urban-legend to me. But the "Mitchell's mom said" and "Mitchell's friend said" accounts from the RGJ story aren't dispositive either way.
And even without drugs, or a dramatic "last talk", it's not inconceivable that Mitchell & Hsieh had met at some point, & even possibly shared a fascination (including when sober!) with fantasies of self-immolation. The world is weird. Distressed/depressed people with synergistic delusions can find each other via the internet easier than ever before.
> For example, the drug info isn't from an autopsy, but what some unnamed UC Davis medical staff told Mitchell's grieving mother, and she relayed to the reporter.
Kind of, but I wouldn't call that hearsay. If his mother got it from someone credentialed, it's good info. The caveat to that is that toxicology reports can only detect what's screened for. If he were given a research chemical, for instance, or unknowingly ingested one then we'd never know.
All of that is not for not though. There's some things to be learned:
- if you're planning on doing a new drug or an old drug from a new supplier then test your stuff and start small. If you're messing with hallucinagens then you need a benzo on stand by.
- never accept drugs from people at festivals, full stop.
If the reporter hasn't received a list of the things tested-for-and-negative, from a representative of the competent institution that did the testing, that's definitionally 'hearsay' in a legal context. Even in a lay context, I'd say that's hearsay from the perspective of both the reporter, and the article readers (albeit not from the perspective of the mother who received the claim directly herself).
Your point about only finding what's tested for is valid, and when imprecise assurances are passed from unnamed-medical-tech, to grieving mother, to reporter, it's especially likely relevant details get either filed-off, or embellished. A kind but nondefinitive mention, "we didn't see any evidence of intoxicants" could morph into the far-stronger claim, "they said they tested but found no trace of drugs or alcohol".
Note also the UC Davis burn center is more-than-an-hour by medivac from Black Rock Desert. If Mitchell was effectively lost before he arrived (even if not "called"), would any toxicology even be run? It wouldn't change the treatment or prognosis.
Also, at least one info page from a peer institution (UCSF) about toxicology screens does not include LSD, MDMA, or many other hallucinogens in its otherwise-detailed list about what might be detected: https://www.ucsfhealth.org/medical-tests/toxicology-screen
When I first saw the vague reference to "friends from Switzerland" in the article – without names or any reporting followup to speak with these last pre-incident witnesses – I even thought it might be a sly euphemism for a large LSD dose, given that substance's roots in Switzerland. But seeing that Mitchell had resided in Switzerland, seeing some friends from there becomes the far more credible interpretation.
Someone’s success in business doesn’t mean they’re a reliable source or information. You also have no reason to suspect they wouldn’t be motivated to lie. Even if they weren’t, there’s no reason to assume they had sufficient information in the situation to understand what actually happened.
One thing that stands out to me: if my best friend died like this, I would have absolutely no desire to spread this information about them after their death.
You wouldn't want to spread "this information" even if it happened to be true, and such truth might help others either navigate their grief, or recognize & head-off similar delusions in the future?
FWIW, the detail about the Burning Man self-immolator sounds sketchy in a "heard it from a friend of a friend" urban-legend manner.
But the idea that someone with all the other erratic behaviors & drug practices credibly-described in Hsieh's last days also had some odd & self-destructive beliefs about death is unsurprising. Such beliefs are not atypical in various mental illnesses, including those caused or aggravated by drug abuse.
I was referring to the burning man but. If I knew it was true beyond a shadow of doubt, I would share it when it was pertinent. If it was through the grapevine or pure speculation, I’d keep it to myself.
If the new facts materially affect the outcome and are indeed facts, then pointing out or corroborating the truth can be helpful. If they aren't/don't then you're just agitating.
Agreed: the dispositive factors are: "Is this true?" and "Could this truth help others?"
Given the other reports of Hsieh's erratic behavior, including with regard to health practices & psychoactive drugs, & the specific manner in which he ultimately died, it's very plausible he'd developed a fascination with death & self-harm.
And some people who do that also seek out others with similar fantasies, sometimes for mutual encouragement, aka, a 'death cult' or 'suicide pact'. Sad but true – and in my estimation, better to be aware of as a real possibility than reflexively deny as likely fabrication.
He was very against the casual use of dissociatives like ketamine and nitrous, and said it was from these visions that Tony felt he needed to burn himself.
Yep. And even without the perceptual/disassociative/hallucinogenic aspects of heavy use, daily nitrous exposure, without long periods away, apparently interferes with Vitamin B12 metabolism enough to cause nervous system damage.
Eventual symptoms of such damage can include tingling, numbness, headaches, lethargy, balance problems, memory problems, confusion, anxiety, & depression.
Even medical staff with daily exposure to sub-perceptual trace amounts (leaked or exhaled by patients) sometimes develop problems.
I was also in that burn ring. Repeating this story, with no factual detail unnecessarily dredges up a dark and traumatic event for so many people.
To suggest Hsieh would be associated with or have been influenced by the person who died that night is a shame.
The burn is no Eden, and participants are not saints. However, there is a positive spirit of gifting that Hsieh did foster outside the national event. The work he did downtown Vegas was a testament to this.
If anything, that is what should be remembered about Hsieh’s connection to BM.
I can't outside what was claimed to be a first person account by a sober, successful, health oriented person. I saw little incentive for him to manufacture that story -- he could have for sure.
strange, i had a buddy in high school that went to Burning Man about 10 years ago. Before going he was under the impression that he could control his drug consumption. There was a stark difference in his behavior when he came back, he was more rash in actions. After a couple months he was stuck on pills, last I saw he was not looking too hot.
Of course, it had problems, and he was throwing money around to make it all work, and as time went on I think much of that money served to conceal those problems rather than confront them… though I never heard stories back then on the scale of what this article describes as happening in Utah.
I don’t know really how to feel about the information here, other than very, very sad. I hope despite how he wound up, someone else someday is able to draw inspiration from the parts of what he did that worked and created hope and strengthened the local community, and they can move the ball forward. And I hope wherever Tony is now, he’s free from whatever drove him into such a dark place. Rest in peace.