A rip-roaring profile of the high-rolling technology entrepreneur
Jim Clark, and the strange Silicon Valley subculture in which he
thrives, from one of our best business journalists. Michael Lewis,
the petulant sprite whose Liar's Poker (1989) hilariously exposed
the venalities of Wall Street investment bankers, vies for Tom
Wolfe's ice cream suit with an effortlessly glib account of how the
last decade turned Jim Clark, a middle-aged, chronically depressed
Texas-born physicist whose futuristic concepts earned him little
more than ridicule, into a Promethean, globe-trotting billionaire
vainly searching for the next new thing that might make him happy.
Like Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Clark is, for
Lewis, a romantic American outlaw, as well as a trickster who
avenges himself on starched-shirt capitalists by creating wildly
risky, money-losing hi-tech businesses that may never become
profitable - Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon - but that
nevertheless make billions for Clark when they go public. What
brings in the bucks is Clark's no-nonsense appeal to the brilliant
engineers who do the real work, his insufferable egotism, and his
pie-in-the-sky imagination, which is not always as prescient as he
would like. (When Clark's concept of a $1 million computerized
yacht that can sail itself around the world without human hands
doesn't survive the transition to working prototype, it isn't clear
whether the yacht's engine died in the middle of the Atlantic
because the computer thought the boat was in the African Sahara, or
simply because of a faulty sensor.) Lewis also notes in passing the
famous Microsoft antitrust suit, which Clark originated when he
leaked to the US Justice Department a Microsoft executive's threat
to put Netscape out of business if the company refused to let
Microsoft in as a partner. The result? Clark got even richer when
Netscape merged with America Online, and invited Microsoft to be a
partner in his next, new new thing. Funny, feverishly romantic
business reporting in which the American lust for wealth becomes a
Bryonic quest for the next dream that will change the world.
(Kirkus Reviews)
*The classic New York Times Bestseller* 'Hugely enjoyable...it
reads like a novel, a fantasy tale of rags and riches that happens
to be true' Sunday Times 'A superb book... Lewis makes Silicon
Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his
best-selling Liar's Poker' Time 'A fascinating journey into the
Wild West of American capitalism' Daily Telegraph __________ In the
last years of the millennium, Michael Lewis sets out to find the
world's most important technology entrepreneur, the man who
embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark,
the billionaire who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and who
now aims to turn the healthcare industry on its head with his
latest billion-dollar project. Lewis accompanies Clark on the
maiden voyage of his vast yacht and, on the sometimes hazardous
journey, takes the reader on the ride of a lifetime through a
landscape of geeks and billionaires. Through every brilliant
anecdote and funny character sketch, Michael Lewis allows us an
inside look at the world of the super-rich, whilst drawing a map of
free enterprise in the twenty-first century. __________ From the
author of the #1 bestseller THE BIG SHORT and the original business
classic LIAR'S POKER comes the definitive 21st-century business
story. 'A superb book. . . . Lewis makes Silicon Valley as
thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his
best-selling Liar's Poker.' Time
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