In a recent interview with the Rolling Stone magazine, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey shared a story of a dinner he had with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently, Zuckerberg served him a goat he didn’t only cooked himself but slaughtered as well.
The bizarre situation of one of the richest men on the planet killing a goat, and using a “laser gun” no less, is only reinforced by the fact that Zuck apparently botched the cooking and made an almost inedible dish, making the goat’s sacrifice pointless. It was a part of Zuckerberg’s yearly goals obsession and for that year, he set out to only eat animals he killed himself so that he would be, in his own words, “thankful for the food I have to eat”.
As outlandish as this sounds, when it comes to the eccentricities of tech billionaires, poor Zuck’s goat is barely worth a footnote. There are far more drastic examples of bizarre behavior out there. Here are a few examples.
John McAfee is seemingly obsessed with his ambition of becoming the president of the United States, just like Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks. While in general there is nothing wrong with people wanting to get to the White House, the current billionaire CEO occupying the Oval Office doesn’t seem t be working out for America, or the world for that matter, so why would anyone vote for another of them?
There is also another, tiny, issue with McAfee’s idea. At the moment, he is living on a boat outside the US territorial waters, since he is on the run from the federal government over unresolved tax issues. That would make campaigning somewhat awkward, but he has a plan for that as well. His plan envisions thousands of people gathering in one place, all wearing McAfee masks, while his speech is blasted through loudspeakers. In his head, this is a perfectly viable plan.
Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, known for his philanthropic work, is also a prepper. He bought a lakefront property in New Zealand in case sudden apocalypse befalls the human race. The strangest part is that there are plenty of tech CEOs who have the same idea. According to Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, 50% of them have properties purposely bought and built for just that occasion.
“Saying you’re “buying a house in New Zealand” is kind of a wink, wink, say no more,” Hoffman told the New Yorker in 2017. “Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, “Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.”
Elon Musk has had more than his fair share of headlines in the past few years, and not all of them were related to either Tesla or Space X. His solution for the apocalypse is to simply relocate to Mars. In the case of a nuclear conflict, Mars colony would ensure the survival of the human race. Oh, and it would have pizza joints, apparently.
Jack Dorsey, who had to suffer through Zuckerberg’s cookery attempts, is also known for bizarre behavior from time to time. Despite being the founder of Twitter, one of the nosiest places on the planet, Dorsey himself likes silence so much that every year, he spends 10 days in the complete absence of sounds. Unfortunately, choosing a place for this annual retreat has somewhat backfired on him, when it was announced that in 2018, he spent in Myanmar, in the midst of government and army crackdown on the opposition. Dorsey was quick to fire out a tweet, apologizing.
Jeff Bezos was the world’s richest man several years in a row. His run is about to finish, though, as his divorce gets finalized and his ex-wife gets half of his fortune. Not that he used it in a way one would expect from ultra-rich people. Instead of splurging on a Ferrari or a Bugatti, Bezos preferred Honda Accord as his daily drive, despite having enough money to probably buy the entire Honda company, not just one car. Bob Simon, who conducted an interview which revealed this fact, later said: “It was clear that Maseratis and yachts didn’t mean anything to him.” In our opinion, as far as eccentrics go, you can’t beat that.
