What the Fall of the Wojcicki Sisters Reveals
The Girl Bosses who can't quite get it done... and the damage they do to the rest of us
Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki fired dissident software engineer James Damore after she talked it over with her children. She promoted diversity and equality to the exclusion of meritocracy. And Damore, being the sort of autist who actually replied to the suggestion box, got promptly fired for offering a plausible explanation for why there are so few female computer programmers. Now one of Wojcicki’s children — Marco Troper, aged 19 — has died from a fentanyl overdose in his University of California-Berkeley dorm room.
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, flush with cash from Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, stole 23andMe from her cofounder Linda Avey before it, too, was stolen by probably Russian hackers. She was too busy trying to be famous than to concern herself with safety. She was having fun palling around with Elizabeth Holmes and dating ARod (really) after divorcing her husband, Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
Brin’s most recent ex-wife — Nicole Shanahan — poured millions into Robert Kennedy Jr.’s SuperPAC Super Bowl ad after reportedly having an affair with Elon Musk who has his own cartel connections.
The mega-rich really are different from us.
Wojcicki’s mother Esther wrote a 2019 bestselling book, How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results. Pride apparently comes before the fentanyl.
Apparently Grandma Esther didn’t teach her children well. Susan Wojcicki spent all of her time organizing the sale of YouTube to Google. She apparently didn’t notice her own son’s downward turn to drugs.
It’s rude to note the parallels between YouTube’s digital radicalization and the death of the son of YouTube’s former CEO while the body is still cold. Still there’s something karmic happening here and we’d be remiss if we didn't point it out.
The Silicon Valley fortunes were built up real quick — and they may unravel just as quickly.
Easy come, easy go. But moving fast and breaking things has its human consequences.