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Silicon Valley CEO Called Employees the N-Word and Hit Three Women, Suit Claims
- edshiro 9y agoMoney can't buy human decency, but it can help you get Ferraris and penthouses. My question is thus: was he raised this way or did he become this horrible person once he struck it rich?
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoMichelle Obama has said that something to the effect of: "the presidency does not change who you are, it reveals who you are." Wealth, like power, I imagine, has the same effect.
- whistlerbrk 9y agoI suspect he didn't grow up. Dropped out of high school at 16, knew he was smart, never had any humbling experiences, etc, etc. Not at all to excuse his god awful behaviour.
- calbear81 9y agoActually this makes a lot of sense, basically struck it rich as a child and never had to go through the normal social experiences that help define who we are and our values. Believes that money is what defines him and everything in the world can be solved by more of it.
- exogeny 9y agoHe blocked me on Twitter, which I'm particularly proud of. And in addition to all of this, he's also promoting a (likely) scam ICO involving Paris Hilton. Good times!
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoPeople will simply have to drop their idea that reprehensible behavior should get you shut off from society, or that disproportionate earnings of money / status are only reserved for people that conform to a behavioral mode. Obviously it is all unrelated, but prosperity preaching has warped society's expectations. His $100m cryptocurrency raise will go off without a hitch. When the revenue event is front loaded like that, they will have no need to appease advertisers or conform to any behavioral model to continue doing business. Of course his lawyers didn't comment, the sale will happen by the end of the month, and nothing else money wise will really matter. The point of cryptocurrency is that the state couldn't even levy any sanctions against his accounts, even if they had the justification. So thanks for the informative article.....
- QAPereo 9y agoOn the flipside when his impulsive behavior, drug use, violence etc catch up with him and eventually he's killed or dies of his own accord, no one is going to care and no one is going to seriously investigate.
- avar 9y ago"N-word" and the article further says “n---rs” which matches "nosers", "namers" and "niners" but not "niggers". [1] comes to mind. 1. https://youtu.be/dF1NUposXVQ https://youtu.be/dF1NUposXVQ
- Eylandos 9y agoReported.
- mabbo 9y agoWe've built a system where guys like this are the ones most able to succeed. Why are we shocked that they do? Martin Shkreli, Travis Kalanick, this asshole- plus a hundred more behind them getting VC funding despite a complete lack of morals or ethics. In the short run, they win. In the long run, they're toxic and their companies flounder because of it. But still, the VC money flows towards these guys.
- beager 9y agoIn the long run, their being tolerated by VCs (and other capitalists) tends to push the liability onto public markets via acquisitions and IPOs, which you could argue makes it Not Their Problem, but that should eventually cause markets to develop a wariness or distaste for those VCs' companies, which is a long-term liability. So I can understand why the money flows toward them, but it can create complex, long-running problems. I'd like to live in a world where we follow the No Assholes rule a little more strictly.
- JBReefer 9y agoArguably, it's better that these people are in private industry than in government, which might be considered a feature of the system. Some have argued that civilization is mostly concerned with the management of sociopaths: this guy seems fucking horrible, but at least his ambition took him here, instead of being the "Duke of Feeding People and Medicine" or something where his shittyness would kill people. I feel kind of gross writing that, for the record, but think it's true.
- roflchoppa 9y agoIf this crypto coin is all about just making payments to this add firm, whats the point of even having the coin? Seems like vaporware. If his personal actions are this morally void, would management turn blind eye to wrong-doing by the company? Breach of client data, etc.
- beager 9y agoDodge regulators, capitalize on hype buyers who won't read the fine print. Taken in context, I don't expect one satoshi* of this to go toward anything real or good. (sidenote: is a "satoshi" the right term for the indivisible unit of a cryptocurrency that's not Bitcoin?)
- roflchoppa 9y agoI guess like in everything, lookout for the schemers, they always around.
- tristor 9y agoThere needs to be a website cataloging and calling out these sorts of people and their behaviors so that they can never escape from posterity. Call it "Silicon Scumbag" or something. It seems to be a trend that quite a few SV CEOs after striking it rich turn into total human garbage, especially in their treatment of women.
- beager 9y agoI feel like Valleywag did a pretty good job of that, but it's now shut down. One problem with Valleywag, or any enterprise that would chronicle these sorts of things, is that while abhorrent behavior by SVites waxes and wanes, the need to push constant volume leads them to be gossipy and vapid. Also, while we might have a substantive discussion about this guy's abhorrent behavior here, a normalized version of that discussion for general consumption may gloss over some aspects of the despicableness of this behavior that require addressing in order to promote higher quality actors in tech.
- Apocryphon 9y agoMaybe TechCrunch or PandoDaily could hire a couple of muckrakers to run a column, instead of devoting an entire site or periodical to gossip.
- TaylorGood 9y agoThere is a guy on HN who catalogs corporate actions of this sort, but not on an individual level.
- tristor 9y agoAny more information about that? I'd be interested in following.
- calbear81 9y agoThere are also the enablers (board of directors) who stuck by him even when there was clear damning evidence of sociopathic behavior.
- m13v 9y agoGravity4 had signed a 1 year contract with my employer, a SaaS company. They consumed millions of transactions through us over a 2 month period and never paid. They said they're cancelling. When I explained we've signed a yearly contract and it must be honored the employee claimed the signee had no signing authority and she only kept this guy in CC. I'm surprised Gravity4 is still operational, their employees are acting like mini Chahals.
- JBReefer 9y agoFor those who check the comments first - read this article. It's short, and his behavior is honestly horrifying. He sounds like an actual sociopath that has no human decency.
- wolco 9y agoWhen I see that yahoo paid 700 million for his company in 2007 it probably gave him enough fake credibility to hang himself. Curious was the 700 sale a good deal for yahoo at the time. The article spoke of an initial 40 million or 25 million deal that went sour immediately. That probably gave him enough creditability that yahoo felt it could make a 700 dollar deal because this young guy was a rasing talent. Those who base decisions on credibility vs obserable fact are cheating themselves. Credibility can be gifted as well as earned. For those who have it gifted you begin to rely on a third party who may have relied on a third party.
- 1024core 9y ago> When I see that yahoo paid 700 million for his company in 2007 it probably gave him enough fake credibility to hang himself. Yahoo paid 300M, not 700M. It's in the article itself. Of course, it's still 300M more than they should have.
- neo4sure 9y agothese guys are giving the valley a bad name.
- whack 9y agoI'm surprised no one's made a movie out of this guy yet. The Wolf of SandHill Road
- calvinbhai 9y agoSV is more than one lone wolf. You could probably have a series: "The Wolves of Sandhill Road" :)
- richardknop 9y agoA total sociopath and a danger to society (especially his violent physical attacks of women). This guy should be locked somewhere so he doesn't hurt more people.
- uncoder0 9y agoBut then where would we put these millions of non-violent drug offenders? /s
- pvaldes 9y agoThe man was shown as an evil psycho, and maybe he is, but just to play the devils advocate part here; as harsh and extreme as this sounds (and I agree that it sounds a lot extreme) to hit your partner is "not a crime" if happens in a private, consensual, adult and freely accepted by all parts contex. Human relationships can get very complicated sometimes. > he was filmed hitting and kicking his girlfriend 117 times Some parts of the history sound disonant to me. There was a camera in the room? Why? Who was recording the scene and, If a third people, why he/she keep recording instead to stop and try to help her? Why she do not just walked away and left the room at the second hit? Standing 117 hits without leaving the narrow camera angle is anomalous. Without a minimum context atached to the video history we can't really know if the man is just a psycho, or is another case of steroids fury, or drugs, or somebody tending a trap (unprobable, but not impossible) to suck as many money as possible from a millionaire, or...
- chrisbennet 9y agoWomen get abused all the time and there will be men who will defend the beater in some way or imply she might be lying because "we can't be sure". I probably shouldn't be surprised that even with video evidence of beatings that some people will still say "we can't be sure, maybe she asked to be beaten".
- pvaldes 9y agoNot. Some women get abused all the time, and some men also get abused. Most men aren't rapists or kick their girlfriends for sport. Of course we must be sure before to put one human in jail, this means that we need to be as cold as we can, study each case separately instead to automatically link all with the discourse of the woman opression around the history, and discard all the other options. Being too much emotional and bursting in revenge's flames do not helps to find the truth in this kind of cases. A private video surveillance system is good enough for me, yes. It explain a lot of things that would be strange otherwise.
- bshimmin 9y agoSome parts of the history sound disonant to me. There was a camera in the room? Why? "Chahal's penthouse apartment had a state-of-the-art video surveillance system that on Aug. 5, 2013, filmed Chahal hitting and kicking his girlfriend 117 times..." Is that good enough for you, or do you need to come up with some more "or..."s? He was recorded beating the hell out of a woman, why on earth are you coming up with hypothetical excuses for him?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoMy knee jerk reaction was "Fuck him." The reality is, he needs help. No one who is "normal" would do such things. Abnormal (usually) doesn't just happen. That is, there is something somewhere that drives these symptom to the surface. If there's a pattern, it's likely there's a reason(s) for that pattern.