Money, fame, goofball venture status games — last week, the industry watched in titillated horror, with little gasps and pearls clutched, as famed investors Paul Graham and David Sacks went to total, scorched earth war. In a lengthy back-and-forth on X, Paul told David he was “the most evil person in Silicon Valley,” and David stiffly rebutted: “in the wake of the Gaza debate, you tried to get some Jewish VCs fired from prominent firms,” he wrote, “which at a minimum makes you a bully and maybe something much worse.” With the stench of antisemitism now in play, there was no possible retreat. Prominent figures throughout venture chose a banner, and leapt into battle. Officially, this was all a matter of “ethics in venture capitalism.” But even the casual observer could see that sides had quickly broken along conventional political lines, with MAGA Force on one side, and Dark Brandon Team Coconut on the other. House affiliation was a second, notable factor, with many of David’s founders rising to his defense, and many of Paul’s colleagues from Y Combinator joining his attack. But the most important schism here, entirely ignored, was and remains the Valley’s growing division between men who’ve successfully built or purchased their own influential media entities over the last few years, filling a vacuum left by the industry’s retreating press, and men who have not.
