Why Are Tech Founders Such A**holes?
In the past couple of weeks, the co-founders of Microsoft and Twitter have been attached to the same kinds of unsavory stories that have long dogged the people behind Facebook, Apple, Zynga and other top tech firms. What is it about computers and money that instills villainy?
Context & Ripple Effects
Gawker's question lands at the end of a week when the 'villainy' thesis had fresh material: Apple confirmed its iPhones and 3G iPads have been logging device positions with timestamps into a hidden file since iOS 4 arrived, while Twitter was confirmed quietly hiding excessive tweets from timelines to cut spam — both moves by beloved consumer brands that look very different described plainly. The piece extends a running theme in the corpus: back in January 2008, Techland was already cataloguing the hard side of Mister Softie around Gates.
What makes the timing pointed is that the scrutiny is not coming from failure — Apple posted record fiscal Q2 2011 results with 95 percent profit growth and 113 percent year-over-year iPhone sales growth the same day. The argument is that success itself, not misbehavior alone, keeps producing these stories.
First-order effects
- Apple absorbs direct reputational damage from the confirmed iPhone location-tracking file, arriving just as it reports record March-quarter earnings — a rare moment where its best financial news and worst privacy story share a date.
- Twitter's co-founders are folded into the same narrative over its decision to hide excessive tweets from timelines, turning a routine anti-spam mechanism into evidence about founder temperament.
Second-order effects
- Once one company's hidden data collection is documented, every rival holding similar behavioral or location data gets measured against the same standard, converting single-company scoops into industry-wide privacy comparisons across Apple, Facebook and Twitter.
- Founders' personal conduct becomes a brand variable: communications strategy at these firms now has to manage the principal's public persona alongside the product, because the press treats the two as one story.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sustained adversarial coverage of founders becomes a standing cost of scale rather than a response to any specific wrongdoing — a dynamic visible here in that record profits and villain narratives arrive simultaneously.
- Consumer-data practices drift toward becoming a regulatory and journalistic battleground independent of product quality, as the gap widens between what platforms collect and what users understand they agreed to.
The trend: As consumer tech firms accumulate more personal data and cultural reach, press scrutiny is shifting from what the products do to the character of the people who built them.