From Airbnb to Zoom, tech CEOs see a brave new, post-coronavirus world
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Alexei Oreskovic
May 13, 2020, 20:25 IST
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
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Remember the old saying about never letting a crisis go to waste?
My job doesn't meet the "dull, dirty and dangerous" criteria most days, so the droids probably won't visit my home office anytime soon. Then again, after seeing the video of a quadruped Boston Dynamics bot roaming a park in Singapore and urging residents to social distance, I'm on the lookout for the unexpected.
Speaking of unexpected appearances, the return of Chamath Palihapitiya is quickly becoming a fascinating Silicon Valley subplot of the coronavirus crisis. The outspoken 43-year-old tech investor and early Facebook exec's venture capital firm imploded in 2018, with some insiders blaming Palihapitiya's ego and scattershot strategy. Now, as Melia Russell reports in a must-read feature story, Palihapitiya is back and having a moment.
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1. In recent weeks Palihapitiya has taken two companies public, raising nearly $1.1 billion, at a time when the rest of the tech industry recoils from the public markets.
Note that there were only 9 IPOs in the US in April. Palihapitiya did 2 of them.
2. The companies he's taken public are Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs. These are essentially shell companies, bankrolled by investors to carry out a mission of finding and acquiring a promising business.
In other words: Investors are writing a blank check to the person whose last venture collapsed in a cloud of acrimony.
We've already seen plenty of evidence that working in industrial facilities, like factories and warehouses, carries real risks of contracting the virus. Musk only needs to drive 38 miles (about 15% of a Tesla Model 3's range) from his Fremont factory to the Amazon warehouse in Tracy, California, to see this first-hand. Amazon confirmed last month that a worker at that facility died of COVID-19. As chief tech correspondent Julie Bort previously reported, there are more than 600 Amazon warehouse workers across the US with confirmed coronavirus infections.
Until now, Amazon has had some political cover (despite taking heat from Congress) because the company could argue that the risks of infection at its warehouses were being borne in order to provide Americans with "essential services" like delivering food and toilet paper.
That means the justification for Amazon workers to punch in everyday and risk virus exposure will be closer to the reasoning espoused by Musk for his Tesla factory workers: It's not about heroic frontline workers providing essential services anymore, it's just about getting back to business.
That approach may resonate with certain audiences. But it's likely to sharpen an uncomfortable contrast between two classes of tech employees who often work for the same company — the stock-optioned, work-from-home programmers and the mask-wearing laborers.
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