| By Ryan Tate Why Are Tech Founders Such Assholes?
As Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher has noticed, it seems like there's been a spate of news about ethics-challenged startup founders lately. Paul Allen says in his new book that fellow Microsoft founder Bill Gates twice watered down Allen's stake in Microsoft—with Allen's consent but to his later regret—before later discussing with current CEO Steve Ballmer ways to dilute him further after Allen took a leave of absence for cancer treatment and his productivity dropped. The "spiritual leader" of Twitter and man who coined the company's name, meanwhile, still feels betrayed that he was fired by eventual Twitter CEO Ev Williams after Williams took a stronger interest in the microblogging service that Glass had been instrumental in developing and had championed from the beginning. Williams also left a bitter trail of colleagues at Blogger.com, the company he co-founded and later sold to Google. That's not to say either man is a lifelong asshole; Gates, for example, has given more than $28 billion to charity. Nor are angry former coworkers always trustworthy sources of information. But judging from the preponderance of stories circulating out there, it sure looks like tech founders collectively tend to act like jerks as they build their fortunes. Take Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has admitted to sending instant messages in which he wrote "I'm going to fuck them" in reference to associates with whom he was collaborating on a Facebook-like website. Or the emails that revealed that he'd referred to Facebook users as "dumb fucks." Then there's Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who once admitted, before some of his scammy advertising partners were publicized, that "I did every horrible thing in the book to — just to get revenues right away." And then there was the time, which is now part of Silicon Valley legend, when Steve Jobs misled his Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak about the size of a bonus the pair received from Atari, giving him only $350 and keeping $5,000 for himself. "My hope is that the next generation of young entrepreneurs can tell the difference [between right and wrong] and will choose to build ethical businesses," Foremski writes. Sadly, the biggest, shiniest, most profitable example of a young startup right now—Facebook—has one of the most checkered ethical histories of all. Recent charitable gifts notwithstanding, Facebook's history may prove to be inspiring in all the wrong ways. [Photos (from l. to r.) of Zuckerbrg, Gates, and Williams via Getty] 
| April 20th, 2011 Top Stories |
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