The gods of Silicon Valley are falling to earth. So are their warped visions for society | Moya Lothian-McLean

Tech titans like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried have been feted for their wealth, but see the world in ways that also merit scrutiny

The new gods are running into a bit of trouble. From the soap opera playing out at Twitter HQ, the too-big-to-fail bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space, to mass tech layoffs, the past month has seen successive headlines declaring a litany of woes facing the bullish tech boyos in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The minute-by-minute coverage of Elon Musk's escapades and the global levels of interest in the FTX collapse both go well beyond what you'd expect from a business story. I'm willing to gamble a few Bitcoins that the popular fixation has little to do with any particular interest in successful software engineering; rather it is the personalities who inhabit these spaces, and the philosophies that propel them in their godlike ambition. What is their end goal, we wonder. What drives them, beyond the pursuit of growth? It is easy to assume that money is all that motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Musk and Jeff Bezos. Except, when you start to examine the mindsets of these men, it's clear that cash is far from the whole story.

Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara Media

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