Tech Insider Chamath Palihapitiya Wants To Disrupt The Way Silicon Valley Works

‘We were leaving behind all these other parts of the economy that needed the help way more than we needed a faster burrito.’

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA, founder of VC firm Social Capital

- Katy Steinmetz/Palo Alto, Calif.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYACOULD BE REVELING IN the status quo. The venture capitalist made a fortune serving as an early Facebook executive, started his own firm that now manages more than $2 billion in assets and even owns a piece of the NBA champions Golden State Warriors. Instead, he keeps talking about how Silicon Valley needs to change.

In recent months, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Social Capital has said that technology companies are “ripping apart the social fabric.” He has criticized advertising-based business models that rely on collecting users’ personal information. And during a long walk around Palo Alto in April, he told TIME that many of the people flocking to the Valley are driven by the prospect of getting their “slice of the pie,” even though “comments about saving the world” are commonplace. “It makes San Francisco and Silicon Valley not too dissimilar to Wall Street,” he said. “But it wraps itself in this moral high ground.”

Palihapitiya isn’t the only Silicon Valley insider to publicly criticize Big Tech. Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google, has blasted peers for engineering products that are made to manipulate people’s attention. Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee has accused the company of shirking responsibility for the bad things that happen on its platform. And engineer Erica Joy Baker has repeatedly called out the industry for not being inclusive of women and people of color.