Jesse Powell, the chief executive of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, released a 31-page document to its 3,200 employees this month purporting to describe the company’s values. But based on the edited version that was later published online, it seemed to reflect Mr. Powell’s own values. He characterized his beliefs as “libertarian,” a political philosophy that emphasizes a commitment to protecting individual liberty. Mr. Powell also swore that Kraken was committed to supporting a “diversity of thought.”
Neither theme is unusual in the rhetoric of Silicon Valley’s elites, but Mr. Powell’s conduct as executive illustrates why these ideas often sound hollow in practice. To demand that some employees pass an “ideological purity test” regarding the benefits of cryptocurrency, as Mr Powell was once quoted to describe it, does not demonstrate an openness to diversity of thought. And the pledge to “master the language” people use to describe their own gender identities, as Mr. Powell reportedly did at a company-wide meeting, hardly shows a commitment to protecting individual freedom.
Meanwhile, Mr. Powell said things to employees on Slack that would make an employment attorney blank — including that most American women have been “brainwashed” and whether they are less intelligent than men is uncertain. (He later said these comments were taken out of context or called jokes.) At one point, he tried to start a discussion about who should say the “N-word.”
So no, Mr. Powell’s toxic behavior is not rooted in his libertarianism or his commitment to diversity of thought; it’s simply an outgrowth of his narcissism, which has allowed him to turn the company he runs into an ideological vanity project.
And Mr Powell is not alone. Earlier this month, it was reported that SpaceX employees had written a letter requesting their chief executive, Elon Musk, to stop tweeting out of love for God and generally exhibiting the erratic behavior that causes chaos within the company — and that in any other industry can lead to removal. “It is critical,” the authors wrote, “to make clear to our teams and our potential talent pool that his messages do not reflect our work, our mission, or our values.”
Mr. Musk immediately fired several of them, claiming the letter distracted the company from its mission (which, of course, is exactly what the letter claims Mr. Musk is doing).
Technology companies are certainly not the only companies whose leaders have taken political stances: executives from Hobby Lobby, Martin’s Famous Potato Rolls and Bread, and Chick-fil-A have joined conservative politics, while the leaders of companies like Ben & Jerry’s have. welfare. unabashedly liberal. Nor are they the first to litigate culture wars within their own companies, as Disney and Starbucks know all too well.
But the Silicon Valley culture places a lot of faith in the idea that technology is inherently world-changing and that the industry’s goals are high. High-profile executives are hailed as innovators and revolutionaries whose vision surpasses that of mere mortals — and they often develop a following from people inside and outside their industry who see them that way.
The most prominent example of this phenomenon is Mr. Musk, whose fans range from the merely enthusiastic to the slightly unhinged. This, perhaps understandably, has reinforced Mr Musk’s misguided belief that he is capable of understanding and solving problems he does not know, including rescuing Thai children trapped in a cave, and fixing Twitter, where the product level expertise he has shown is mostly limited to his prolific use of the platform.
Mr. Powell also demonstrates this comprehensive assessment of his own capabilities, noting in a tweet that his efforts to demonstrate his open-mindedness by engaging in debate within his company were thwarted by the relative ignorance of his employees: problem is I’ve studied much more on the policy topics people get triggered by everything and can’t follow the basic rules of fair debate Back to the dictatorship’ i tweeted†
This know-it-all problem is especially insidious when it manifests itself among white male chief executives who believe their success equips them to dictate what should and should not be acceptable to employees — many of whom face different structural realities in workplaces where they are marginalized. .
It doesn’t seem to occur to these know-it-alls that their success depends at least in part on the benefits they have because of the identity-based inequalities they try to limit the conversation about. Or perhaps this idea occurs to them, but it violates their triumphant personal stories, so that they reject it. They must believe that they are extraordinary. By this logic, the people they hire are not.
This kind of leader believes that he is the greatest asset to the company, so of course his interests are paramount and his right to do and say what he wants should be unlimited no matter the consequences. The problem, for him and his company, is both employment law and a competitive market for top talent.
Workers have the right to a workplace that is free from discrimination, and while what that means is subject to legal interpretation, it doesn’t take a team of labor lawyers to understand that with other options, workers will avoid companies that are implied to be less intelligent because of their gender, or where they are discouraged from expressing their identity. When a chief executive even jokingly suggests that women are intellectually inferior, or invites a discussion about who can use racist comments, women and black employees hear the message loud and clear. What are the rights of an employee in this case?
The chief executive of another cryptocurrency platform, Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, who defended Mr Powell and called The Times’s reporting on his behavior a “hit piece” – he has faced this question himself. In Mr. Armstrong’s case, a wave of black workers’ departures in 2020 followed incidents in which racial stereotypes about drug trafficking were invoked by a manager and black people were characterized as “less capable” in a recruiting meeting.
In all of these cases, Kraken, SpaceX, and Coinbase claimed they would not tolerate discriminatory behavior or hostile work environments. But the adage that your right to punch ends where someone else’s nose begins doesn’t seem to apply in these executives’ offices, where the only person who has the right not to be punched is the person. is who is in charge.
These chief executive narcissists have a common refrain when people point out that they don’t like being spanked: You’re welcome to look for a job elsewhere. “Work somewhere you don’t hate,” a Kraken executive told employees of the Slack company.
Mr. Powell, Mr. Musk, and Mr. Armstrong all send the same message: Individual rights matter to them, but not to their employees, and diversity of thought is limited to expressing ideas within the confines of their own preferred ideologies. Any criticism of their behavior is inherently malicious. (Mr. Powell even went so far as to have his former employees anonymously post critical comments about working for him on the job board Glassdoor.)
Ultimately, shareholders, employees, customers and other stakeholders will have to choose between the companies in which they invest their time, labor and money, and the know-it-all who think the institutions would be nothing without them. Contrary to what these chief executives think, the two are not synonymous.
Elisabeth Spiers (@espiers), a contributing opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist. She was the editor-in-chief of The New York Observer and the founding editor of Gawker.
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