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Nihilism, lust, and murder in Silicon Valley

A harrowing snapshot of life, “love”, and death among our overloads in Silicon Valley.

An ariel view of Silicon Valley. (Image: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia); An undated photo of Bob Lee. (Image: Wikipedia)

Bob Lee staggered around a swank part of San Francisco, bleeding from multiple stab wounds. He tried to flag down help. No one stopped. He managed to call 911, but he died not long later in the emergency room. He was chock full of cocaine and Ketamine. His story caught national attention.

Was this just another story of street crime in our failing cities? Or was it something else?

From the perspective of the world, it appeared that Bob Lee had it all; designer of Square’s Cash App, a stockholder in Elon’s SpaceX and Figma (purchased last year by Adobe for $20 billion), father of two girls, a happy separation from his wife, girlfriends, loads of cash. And, it turns out, a healthy appetite for dangerous drugs and a taste for what used to be called zipless sex. One is tempted to call it illicit sex, but the word “illicit” has no meaning in the tech melee of San Francisco. Lee participated lustily in a not-so-underground round of sex and drug parties called “The Lifestyle.”

Vanity Fair reported on these parties back in 2018. The sordid story begins this way:

About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same.

Vanity Fair says guests and hosts include “powerful first-round investors, well-known entrepreneurs, and top executives.” And loads of nubile young women.

To get in, you have to be on the list checked by muscular security. The evening may or may not begin with dinner, but dinner is never the point; the point is the sex, lubricated by the drugs, Ecstasy is among the favorites, but also more potent stuff like Ketamine, a powerful tranquilizer. Vanity Fair said the Ecstasy tabs sometimes come in the shape of company logos. Vanity Fair says, “These aren’t group orgies, per se, but guests will break out into twosomes or threesomes or more.” It is unclear to the great unwashed how “…and more” would not qualify as an orgy to Vanity Fair.

Also, note the blasé use of the phrase “per se.” The Vanity Fair reporter seems eager to be non-judgmental, except insofar as the mighty men may have the upper hand with the women. After all, the Vanity Fair piece appeared in the still-powerful penumbra of #MeToo.

But, primarily, these parties are understood as part of the permissive and progressive attitudes found in certain sectors, especially among those who are “changing the world.” Certain things in the world, however, don’t change. Rich and powerful men want action, and young women can always be found to provide.

That blasé attitude crops up in a lengthy, May 14th Wall Street Journal piece about the murder of Bob Lee. The reporter states: “Libertine though it might seem, the party scene is governed by an unwritten code of conduct.” It might seem libertine, but you would be wrong, peasant, because there are unwritten rules. What are those unwritten rules? Consent and boundaries! “If someone gets drunk and handsy they can get excommunicated very quickly.” Wait one second. Isn’t getting drunk and handsy kind of the raison d’être of these parties?

One of Lee’s party friends was a woman named Gift Kerati (sic), whom he met at a party in Acapulco. She said the pandemic cooled the San Francisco sex party scene, so they traveled around. During this period of pandemic wanderlust, she said Lee had (of course) several girlfriends and other women he was sleeping with. She says, however, that “he was always respectful toward them.” Lee went to sex parties and did drugs “because he liked to share experiences. He loved to exchange ideas.” Shall we share ideas over in the “cuddle puddle?” Yes, there is something they call the “cuddle puddle.” (Don’t ask.)

His friend Devon Meyers, who does art installations, said people go to such parties because it “provides them with different experiences and connections.” Meyers also said people like Lee are “highly functioning, very intelligent people, incredibly talented, and there’s not much in our world for them to do.” Like maybe reading.

Bob Lee very well could have been one of the best human beings that ever was, according to his friends, but he lived a genuinely tawdry life. And it is alarming that such tawdriness is so common among our overloads in Silicon Valley. These are people who exert tremendous control over culture, money, power. These are the same folks who tend to believe something called The Singularity, an event where computers become fully sentient, and we can upload our consciousness with theirs and live forever. Money can make some folks genuinely crazy. And now imagine what they may try to do to us with Artificial Intelligence.

It turns out that Lee’s killer was not some random guy on the street, although that would be a natural assumption for San Francisco. Lee’s killer, who stabbed him several times with a kitchen knife, was a friend—in the shallow and meaningless drug-and-sex-club-friend way. It seems that Lee had been in the “cuddle puddle” not only with the guy’s wife but also his sister. But you can be sure Lee was “always respectful” in the puddle.

At a memorial service for Bob Lee, his friends wrote letters to him and left them in a box the family plans to set on fire at the next Burning Man festival, an art, music, and sex fest in the Nevada desert. Well, of course. May he rest in peace and his family find comfort.


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About Austin Ruse 6 Articles
Austin Ruse is the author of four books including Under Siege: No Finer Time to be a Faithful Catholic (Crisis Publications, 2021). He is president of C-Fam, a New York and Washington DC research institute in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council and with the Organization of American States.

28 Comments

  1. “…because there are unwritten rules. What are those unwritten rules? Consent and boundaries! “If someone gets drunk and handsy they can get excommunicated very quickly.” Wait one second. Isn’t getting drunk and handsy kind of the raison d’être of these parties?”

    These types are forever “putting lipstick on a pig.”

    And, yet, upon reading this we ought all pray for the conversion of these types. It is these that Christ died in order that they might be saved. Who will be missionaries of truth for them?

    • One may reasonably suspect that these are the gold coins referenced in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, lost in their irrational materialism so objectively lost they have no idea how lost they are with neither the eyes to see nor the ears to hear in the hedonistic choices and life style, their atheistic gods of pride, money and lust, their secular trinity of me, myself and I.

    • Indeed, who COULD be missionaries to them? Who could possibly get through to them. Sad to tell, many cannot see any light until they first find themselves in the darkest of places. In short, such an experience may do it for them, but not another person.

      • Ask Archbishop Cordileone that question. I know he does his best
        Sometimes persistent prayer and charity are what finally reach those who are so troubled and lost. And you’re right, it may require being in the darkest place for these lost souls to see the light.

    • Because God’s love is unsurpassable and His mercy inexhaustible. You don’t know if Mr. Lee asked for the Lord’s forgiveness before he died. The Church does not say who is in hell. The Lord will not deny Mr. Lee’s family his consolation. Man, you need some remedial teaching on the basic Gospel message.

  2. Sad really. All their phony posturing and “virtue-signaling” at their depressing debauched parties. The LORD commands us to pray for them. I suppose that in their frame of reference, and unfortunate wealth and influence, they forget about or ignore their souls. I don’t know volumes about the culture of Silicon Valley, but I gather by what I hear it’s pretty bleak. I’ve never understood the stupidity and crassness of saying “but they had so much money, they had everything to live for … why did this one kill his parents, etc. or get into this or that. Of course such statements only reveal the need for God even more strongly. Wealth brings no lasting happiness, so certainly not the LOVE of wealth and passing vanities.

  3. What a sad, sad story. We need a Samson–Judges 16: 23-31.

    Interesting that here in St. Louis, this man’s story (he is a native of St. Louis) was told in such a way that we were led to believe that he was a hero, a brilliant and wealthy entrepreneur who created a world-changing (in a good way) technology. I believe that the story included that he had been at a party, but there was no description of the “type of party.” Yikes!

    This story does make me grateful that I am NOT rich and famous! These people face temptations that I never knew existed.

  4. Sad really. All their phony posturing and “virtue-signaling” at their depressing debauched parties. The LORD commands us to pray for them. I suppose that in their frame of reference, and unfortunate wealth and influence, they forget about or ignore their souls. I don’t know volumes about the culture of Silicon Valley, but I gather by what I hear it’s pretty bleak. I’ve never understood the stupidity and crassness of saying “but they had so much money, they had everything to live for … why did this one kill his parents, etc. or get into this or that.” Of course such statements only reveal the need for God even more strongly. Wealth brings no lasting happiness, so certainly not the LOVE of wealth and passing vanities!

  5. A sad commentary on our present cultural demise. Is Christ’s comming eminent? I see the only way out, short of the second coming, would be another great awakening. In any event we must have our bags packed and keep our eyes on Jesus.

  6. Drugs and illicit sex always seem to run together. Anything goes in the land of the rich and powerful. How sad for them all. If they only knew what awaited them on the other side. Yes, these are some of the ones Jesus would have us pray for; the ones He wept for and dies for. The ones that would not be going through the narrow gate.

  7. Terrence Malick gave us Knight of Cups 8 years ago. All of it cries for prayer and reparation. Sin makes you stupid. Nothing is new. Forgive us Heaven, we do not know what we are doing.

  8. Silly me, I thought that going to Church and working for the Lord would provide me with “different experiences and connections.”

    • I am Lazarus come from the dead, come back to tell you all. I shall tell you all. The purpose is to know. We resist knowing what really goes on. They count on that. Some of us must look and then tell.

      • Thanks for your reply.

        “The purpose is to know.” Know what? We already, unfortunately, know about the debauchery that is more and more common in our ‘culture’.

        “We resist knowing what really goes on. They count on that. Some of must look and tell.” Good answer, but even being 79 and living up in the boonies of Maine I already know about this, I just didn’t need the details.

        One prays for people like that.

  9. Yikes. So grateful to be a little nobody housewife in the Midwest who loves Jesus and our Blessed Mother more than her own life. How easily things could be different for any one of us but for the grace of God. I am truly grateful. And will pray for these poor rich people!! Incredibly sad and disturbing.

    • Thank you and God bless you Mary Anne.
      I have a family member who ended up in in Silicon Valley and I pray for them all the time. Prayers make a difference

  10. After a couple of centuries of the inevitable mishandling of freedom, the very stupid legal arbiters of our civilization have declared, with their infantile concept of freedom, that consent makes immoral acts moral. They’ve known for a long time they’ll never get pushback from a Church too embarrassed to talk about such things as their own values like a recognition of intrinsically evil acts such as child rape and child murder or fornication and adultery, which breeds a tolerance for creating mountains of aborted corpses, since so many are incapable of discussing such things as intrinsic evil, so committed they are to promoting cultural values that treat the alleviation of guilt feelings as the most essential moral consideration a modern Christian can make. Oh, and I forgot, and because so many are involved in intrinsically evil acts themselves.

  11. After reading this article and sitting on it for a while, I find myself agreeing with Mr. McManus above.
    This article is lurid. No doubt one can find similar disturbing tales under many rocks and not just those in Silicon Valley.
    I also suspect that there are many good people in said Valley who steer clear of this type of “recreation”. I’d rather hear from them.

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