If am constantly amazed at the silly things that dot-com billionaires spend their money on. Most of these people are relatively young men who came into a lot of money suddenly, usually as a result of an IPO or a buyout. Once they get all this money, they go on spending sprees, buying toys – very, very expensive toys. For example, one of these guys bought a zeppelin, the world’s biggest zeppelin. You can see it flying around San Francisco Bay. The owner of the zeppelin uses it to fly his friends from Oakland Airport to the Napa Valley for dinner at pricey restaurants like the French Laundry. Other expensive toys purchased by internet billionaires include a Russian submarine, a chocolate factory on a pier near Fisherman’s Wharf, and one of the Hawaiian islands, and a populated island too! Can you imagine anyone having enough money to write out a check for a whole Hawaiian island?
This brings me around to Timothy Draper, a billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist. In July, Draper announced that he had collected enough signatures to qualify a state ballot initiative to divide California into six states. Draper paid people to gather 1,300,000 signatures, well over the 800,000 needed to put the measure on the ballot in 2016. Draper says he did it because: “California needs a reboot”, whatever that means.
One of the six states would be called Silicon Valley and would include all the counties around San Francisco Bay including San Francisco itself. Critics say that Draper’s plan is simply designed to cut off the wealthiest part of the state from the rest, leaving poor people in the Central Valley to fend for themselves.
California is not actually going to become six states. This ballot initiative is just another internet billionaire’s toy. It takes an Act of Congress to admit new states into the Union, and there is absolutely no possibility that Congress will allow California to become six states.
Aaron Levie. My nephew Aaron Levie started an internet company 8 years ago in my backyard called Box.com. Box.com now has over 1,000 employees and offices all over the world. I wonder what expensive toys Aaron will buy when his company goes public, which could happen soon.
The Lady and the Tiger. One expensive toy that Aaron might want to buy is the ‘Lady and the Tiger’ trick. When Aaron was growing up, we used to go to magic conventions together every summer. Aaron and I once saw the Lady and the Tiger trick performed at one of these conventions. In this trick, a beautiful young woman is put into a cage. The cage is lifted into the air and covered with a cloth. When the cloth is removed a few seconds later, the woman is gone, and a live 500 pound Bengal tiger is in the cage instead. Although Aaron knows how this trick is done, he has never done it. Aaron doesn’t have a tiger. Now – Aaron doesn’t like it when I reveal magic secrets, but I am going to reveal a secret about this trick. No magician can actually turn a beautiful woman (or even an ugly one) into a Bengal tiger. No. In order for a magician to do this trick, he has to have a tiger first. I guess that’s not really a secret. You probably already figured that out.
Houdini Magic Shop. There are a number of magicians who do the ‘Lady and the Tiger’ trick, but I have no idea where they get their tigers from. They don’t sell tigers at magic stores. I have a friend who works at the Houdini magic shop at Pier 39 in San Francisco. Although they sell professional magic tricks there, I know they don’t sell Bengal tigers. I wonder where magicians get their Bengal tigers from. I looked up ‘Bengal tiger’ on Google Shopping, but nothing came up.
