The Valley of the Gods

Reporter Alexandra Wolfe’s biting but admiring story of Silicon Valley, and the men and women whose hubris and ambition are changing the world.

Each year, young people from around the world go to Silicon Valley to hatch an idea, start a company, strike it rich, and become powerful and famous. In “a jauntily paced anthropological look at Northern California’s techtopia” (Bloomberg Businessweek), reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal Alexandra Wolfe follows three of these upstarts who have “stopped out” of college and real life in the hopes of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.

Meet the billionaires who go to training clubs for thirty-minute “body slams” designed to fit in with the start-up schedule; attend parties where people devour peanut butter-and-jelly sushi rolls; and date and seduce in a romantic culture in which thick glasses, baggy jeans, and a t-shirt is the costume of any sex symbol (and where a jacket and tie symbolize mediocrity). Through Wolfe’s eyes, we discover how they date and marry, how they dress and live, how they plot and dream, and how they have created a business world and an economic order that has made us all devotees of them.

In her blistering and hysterical examination of this new ruling class, Wolfe “offers a revealing peek inside the privilege, power, and profligacy of Silicon Valley” (Town & Country). Valley of the Gods “captures the absurdity of this brave new world, pierces the hype, but also conveys the dreams and the passions that can shape a world’s economy” (USA TODAY).