Tony Hsieh (1973-2020) Biography - Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh (Anthony Hsieh) , Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley , Happy At Any Cost 1250829097, 9781250829092

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For Grandad, “bula bula” —David

For 嬤嬤 —Angel

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild. —Mary Karr

PROLOGUE

Elizabeth Pezzello had been getting ready to leave shortly after 3 a.m. when she realized something was wrong. Dressed in sportswear, her blond ponytail swinging behind her, she and a half dozen others milled about the house, preparing to depart for an airport a few miles away on Connecticut’s southern shore, where a private jet was waiting for them. A light wind had been blowing in from the river across New London on the frigid November evening, and lines of manicured lawns had stiffened in the cold. Few clouds obscured the sky over Long Island Sound to the south, leaving the rows of homes along Pequot Avenue exposed to the night air. In just a few hours, the sun would climb above the industrial smokestacks across the river in Groton, illuminating the waterfront view afforded to the tony homes of the seashore. Outside the home at 500 Pequot Avenue, three vehicles idled, waiting for the party to emerge. But the most important person of the group, the person paying for everyone’s salaries, the private jet, and the chauffeurs, still wasn’t up. A few days earlier, his dog, a fluffy white mutt named Blizzy, had died suddenly, and he had been in a depressive spiral since. For much of the evening, the man had been inhaling laughing gas from a whipped-cream canister, as if drinking from a water bottle, and after an argument with his former girlfriend, Rachael, she had ordered him out of the house until they left for the airport. He could have retreated to one of the vehicles, even a hotel nearby where other members of his staff were staying. But in his stupor, he had insisted on a storage shed attached to the home. Those in the house had relented, bowing again to his irrational demands, which had become common behavior for him. In the shed, he was exposed to the cold.

Like many people the man surrounded himself with, Elizabeth had only met him a few months before. He had spent tens of millions of dollars on mansions in the Utah ski-resort town Park City to house a growing orbit of followers, many lured by the promise of riches. Elizabeth was one of them, and had worked her way into his inner circle. As his assistant, she now controlled his schedule and much of his communication, including contact with old friends; some had tried unsuccessfully to get in touch after hearing troubling stories about the man. Elizabeth was one of the few people responsible for spending Tony’s money, and had found a role for her fiancé, Brett, who had taken to doing whatever their boss told him to do in return for a handsome salary. Together, they had convinced the man to pay for the group to go on a Hawaiian getaway, starting with the private jet waiting for them this morning. The tagalongs that evening hadn’t been limited to new arrivals in the man’s life. Along with Rachael, there was his brother, Andy, who had been by his side almost every day for the past few months. Two years younger, Andy was by every definition a counterweight to his brother: outgoing, fasttalking, gregarious, and with a hint of arrogance. He had worked for his brother at one point years ago, before an unsuccessful attempt to launch his own tech startup. But as the man amassed an almost billion-dollar fortune and became a best-selling author, Andy lived in his shadow, and until recently the brothers hadn’t had much of a relationship. Andy was sleeping inside the house while Brett stayed up to check on the man. They had communicated by writing messages on Post-it notes and sticking them outside the shed door. Responding to the man’s demands, Brett had brought him laughing gas, marijuana, a lighter, pizza, a blanket, and candles. Lots of candles. It had been no easy task. The man had been lying on the concrete surrounded by naked flames. At one point another assistant had found the blanket covering him starting to burn from contact with a candle, and told the man to extinguish it. The assistant had opened the shed door a short time later to see him lighting a Ziploc bag on fire. “You’re going to smoke yourself out,” the assistant had said. “That’s poison.” The man had incoherently mumbled back. At one point, the assistant had found a propane space heater and dragged it into the shed, placing it inside the door.

Now with everyone ready to leave, a more terrifying scene had begun to unfold. A carbon monoxide alarm was shrieking. Smoke was billowing from the cracks in the door frame. And the door was locked. Elizabeth dialed 911. “What’s the location of your emergency?” an operator’s voice crackled over the phone. “500 Pequot Avenue,” Elizabeth responded calmly. “We need help as soon as possible, someone’s locked in a room with a fire.” “There’s a fire?” “Yes.” “Where in the room are they?” the operator said. “Where in the building are they?” “It’s a house, it’s a house.” “How many people are trapped?” “Just one.” In the background, muffled shouts were becoming clearer. Elizabeth turned away from the phone and called out, “Rachael, Rachael, they really need help; is there a code to the storage room?” referring to the lock on the door. A moment later Elizabeth yelled to someone else in the house, “Tenfourteen!” “Elizabeth, has the person barricaded themself?” the operator said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she replied. The cloud of smoke was inundating the shed, growing in size with every second that passed. Elizabeth could hear repeated thudding in the distance; someone was trying to break open the door. “Why did they barricade themself? Are they trying to harm themself?” the operator said. Elizabeth was losing her composure. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” “How old is the person?” About forty-five years old, she said, and added, “Please hurry up, this is urgent, this is really urgent … this is so bad.” Fire sirens were already wailing through the streets of New London, piercing the silence over the hamlet, when another call came into the dispatch office. It was from another woman at the house. “There’s a person barricaded,” the woman said into the phone. “We can’t get in.”

She told the operator she was a nurse who had been traveling with the trapped man, and she’d been responsible for administering an IV drip to him. She said they were supposed to leave for a flight in a few minutes. “We are not getting a response from him,” she told the operator, her words rushing out. “Who is he?” the operator said. The woman paused. “Um, his name is Tony.”

More than a week would pass before the townspeople of New London—and then the world—would learn the identity of the man trapped within the shed outside a nondescript home in a Connecticut town. When firefighters charged into the cloud of smoke and flames engulfing the shed, they found him lying faceup on a filthy blanket with his right arm across his chest, surrounded by singed pool equipment and camping chairs, unresponsive and without a pulse. The sight was an unrecognizable departure from the public image of Tony Hsieh. For years, Tony had been the face of Zappos, America’s most popular online shoe seller, and had become the shining example of an unconventional business leader who cared more about helping others find happiness—especially his own employees—than profit margins or meeting quarterly earnings forecasts. He wasn’t a household name like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos—arguably his equals in intellect, business acumen, and willingness to take risks—but he was one of the most consequential tech leaders of our time. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, he had graduated from Harvard in the 1990s before selling his first company to Microsoft for $265 million at the age of twentyfour. He then invested in and later took over as CEO at Zappos, where he played an integral role in writing the first rule books of e-commerce by introducing free shipping and a no-questions-asked return policy long before consumers were comfortable with buying things online. His costly, customer-focused risks were validated when Bezos himself led Amazon’s charge to buy Zappos for $1.2 billion in 2009. “Zappos is a company I have long admired,” Bezos said at the time. “I’ve seen a lot of companies and I have never seen a company with a culture like Zappos.”

But being a tech leader was merely his conduit. What made Tony Hsieh a rare icon was his stated desire to advance the human condition. Countless people from Silicon Valley to New York and Las Vegas had serendipitous meetings with Tony, often over shots of his signature drink, the digestif Fernet-Branca, that led to life-changing experiences. Whether he was sporting a mohawk or a shaved head, Tony’s image was plastered across magazine profiles, on documentaries, and on television during talks with Oprah and Barbara Walters. His stoic expression—sometimes broken by a cautious smile framed by dimples—was synonymous with the image of a genius focused on inspiring others. Through a best-selling autobiography, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony devised a revolutionary way to run corporations—by focusing on your employees and ensuring they are happy, you’ll have happy customers, and then your profits will soar. The book described his own search to understand how the science of happiness could be applied to improving the lives of employees, and how, by focusing on other people’s happiness, you might just increase your own. A New York Times bestseller, it propelled Tony to the global speaking circuit. He toured the late-night TV shows espousing a template for achieving happiness, shared the stage with Bill Clinton, and befriended celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Richard Branson, and the singer Jewel. Having achieved the height of American success, Tony then plowed his fortune—almost half a billion dollars—into building a downtown Las Vegas neighborhood that he would develop into an entrepreneur’s utopia, from where he envisioned more success stories like Zappos would grow. Starting in 2012, stories of his unrivaled generosity and miracle-making trickled from his new community. There was Natalie Young, a chef who had been in recovery when a chance encounter with Tony at a bar ended with him agreeing to give her the money to start a restaurant. Rehan Choudhry, a talent booker at one of the Las Vegas casinos, had always wanted to run his own music festival, a dream that became a thirty-thousand-person reality after meeting Tony. And there was Maggie Hsu, who watched Tony give a talk at Harvard Business School when she was earning her MBA, then coldemailed him for career advice. He convinced her to come to Las Vegas and she eventually became his chief of staff. Newspapers and magazines dubbed him everything from “Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas” to tone-deaf

descriptions such as “a young Buddha,” with the text run alongside photos of him wearing his signature Mona Lisa smile. His story also defied what it meant to be an Asian man in America, and he eluded stereotypes placed on him by society. From an early age, Tony wanted to be seen as something more than a quiet Asian brainiac with thick glasses. In an era when Asian men were depicted in popular culture as geeks who loved mathematics and were rarely seen in the C-suites of public companies, let alone Silicon Valley startups, Tony broke through with his life story and entered the pop culture psyche—a dynamic captured time and again through his career. There’s a photo taken at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, a year before Zappos was sold to Amazon. Bill Gates is standing in front of a cascade of brown boxes, flanked by six individuals, one of whom is Tony. Everyone else is white—executives and CEOs from Sears, eBay, Barnes & Noble—and wearing suits. Tony, meanwhile, appears years, even decades younger, relaxed in jeans and an untucked shirt. He looks unfazed by his company. In another photo, he is seen on a casino floor, making a face at the camera next to a grinning Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who is eating a hot dog. “He wasn’t just a tech entrepreneur who became cool, he was an Asian male who became cool,” said Jen Louie, a former colleague of Tony’s at Zappos. “He broke through the bamboo ceiling.” Renown and riches never seemed to cloud Tony’s desire to be a man of the people, either. Since coming into boundless wealth at such an early age, money had empowered his brilliant ideas and let him build companies, and then an entire neighborhood, from the ground up. Rather than live in a sprawling mansion in San Francisco, in a Manhattan penthouse, or on a Caribbean island alongside other corporate leaders, Tony built a trailer park in his Las Vegas neighborhood, choosing to live alongside friends, a pet alpaca, and his dog. Just as Peter Pan had found limitless wonderment in Neverland—no rules, judgment, or fear of growing up—Tony embodied what it meant to live with unlimited freedom long into adulthood. His childlike curiosity also illustrated how, in a world where business leaders followed bullet points and their guidance, Tony provided a model of how to throw away the corporate script to show the world that, beyond profit margins and earnings reports, companies—and communities—could

thrive on happiness. He was a figure for a millennial generation in search of an alternative to the mantra of living to work. But beneath his public message of happiness, his private search for inner peace remained out of reach, and at some point he drifted from the figurative mooring posts of the communities he had built. After a series of public relations hiccups, tragedies—including three suicides within his Las Vegas community—and internal issues with his style of management at Zappos, Tony became less visible as the face of the company and in his neighborhood. His increasing use of recreational drugs—whether fistfuls of psilocybin mushrooms at his trailer park or MDMA at the Burning Man festival—rarely alarmed those he kept close. Instead, they shrugged it off as something he did to expand his thinking, and to smooth and then deepen his connections with others. In turn, he retreated deeper into his trailer park, where those present seemed to orbit around his cult of personality. In the months before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the United States in 2020, Tony was introduced to ketamine, the popular party drug typically used to tranquilize horses, and it uncorked long-held insecurities and breaks with reality that led him to act in ways that some saw aligned with psychosis. He started to claim that he devised an algorithm to bring about world peace, that he figured out how to cure COVID-19, and that he no longer had to urinate because his body could recycle water. After months of drug use caused his behavior to spill into his public life in Las Vegas, Tony’s friends persuaded him to check into a rehab facility in Park City. It was the first of multiple failed attempts to get Tony sober, including botched interventions and attempts by his family to install a conservatorship. Each of these efforts was disrupted by a growing faction of people that were on Tony’s payroll, some who enabled his continued drug use and others who indulged in his delusions. After leaving rehab, he didn’t return to Las Vegas, and instead stayed in Park City, Utah, the ritzy mountain ski town, where he invited a cast of people to join him. While they lived large in the elaborate mansions he often paid for, some of them struck multimillion-dollar deals with a man descending further toward a fatal end. By the time he arrived in Connecticut with a small contingent of these followers, Tony had cut ties with most of his old friends and members of his family until he’d wandered so far from reality that he was left surrounded only by people on his payroll.

On that cold November night, Tony’s friends and family, even the firefighters who saved him, were optimistic that he would survive. After he was pulled from the shed, his body had, remarkably, not been burned in the fire, save for some damaged tissue on his shoulder. Most of the heat had been concentrated above him after the propane tank had caught fire and sent a whoosh of ignited gas through the shed. But what they hadn’t immediately considered was the extent of internal damage Tony had sustained inhaling a cloud of carbon monoxide, starving his organs and finally his brain of oxygen. Even if he had survived, he would never have been the same. On November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, Tony’s family turned off his life support at Bridgeport Hospital. News of his death flooded the internet, with thousands of messages and memories posted by people from Bill Clinton to Ivanka Trump to Jeff Bezos, offering a public mourning not seen for a business leader since the passing of Steve Jobs a decade before. The sight of his awkward smile—shared thousands of times across social media, in newspapers, and on television—crystallized his image of an uncommonly beloved tech entrepreneur, one who had changed the lives of countless people, from business leaders to workers in his call center, and strangers he’d met at the bar. As the tributes flowed in, we were working as business reporters for Forbes when a number of obvious questions quickly emerged for us. Angel had covered the lives of billionaires for years, and David had a focus on investigating tech companies. We were immediately perplexed by how a certifiable tech leader—the beloved face of a beloved brand, no less—had died in a fire in a nondescript New England town, of all places. Were there suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident? Was it a suicide? Why hadn’t anyone been able to help him, and what had led Tony to this fate? It was hard to stomach the contrast of Tony’s mantra of happiness with the tragedy of him dying alone, surrounded by flames. A week after his death, we published the first article that documented in detail how Tony, a man of boundless wealth and resources, had met such an unexpected and tragic end, describing how a COVID-era spiral with drugs had untethered him from reality, and how he was surrounded by people who

had done more to enable him than help him. It included a message from the singer Jewel, a close friend of Tony’s who had visited him in Park City and prophesied his fate in a letter, warning him: “The people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself.” But we kept speaking to more people who had known Tony—from Park City, from Las Vegas, and then as far back as his childhood—who led us to believe that his story was more than an oft-told rise-and-fall tale, or that of an eccentric billionaire who’d once again flown too close to the sun. For Angel, born to Chinese parents who fled the turmoil of communism and gave up everything for her and her two sisters to move to the United States and chase the elusive American dream, she understood what it meant to be on the receiving end of those sacrifices—and the pressures to succeed because of it. She also came into Tony’s story with a deep understanding of the stereotypes that are often placed on Asian Americans, and what it takes —and costs—to break those assumptions. And David, who’d cut his teeth as a police reporter in Australia and had covered humanity in its best and worst forms, was immediately drawn to seek an understanding of the dynamic between Tony and those around him. He’d traveled widely before arriving in the United States and took a broader, more cynical view of Tony’s effort to manufacture a world for people largely based on financial incentives. By the end of his life, Tony had fallen victim to the trappings linked to American success, leaving little room for happiness. Together, we found that Tony’s story exploited some uncomfortable truths about the opposing goals of wealth and happiness. It highlighted how one person’s generosity can motivate greed in others, and how those with good intentions can stray from their moral center when the promise of riches appears. And finally, it touched on how inner peace can remain out of reach as long as there is enough money to obscure the dangers of mental health problems and addiction. Our reporting took us first to Connecticut, then Las Vegas, New York, Park City, and then San Francisco, from where we sourced police reports, school yearbooks, court documents, photos, and financial records. Across hundreds of hours of interviews, we spoke to more than 150 people to reveal a never-before-seen look at how Tony Hsieh had changed the lives of others through every chapter of his own. Since he was a boy, we found,

Tony had been running from the life that was expected of him, and searching for the life he dreamed of. “There was some prototype in his head that he desperately wanted to achieve,” a childhood friend of his told us. In the pages that follow, we’ve sought to document how a boy of genius intellect, born a first-generation misfit—intellectually, emotionally, and racially—searched for his place in a world where success and happiness were not supposed to be mutually exclusive goals for someone who looked like him. We’ve detailed the tragedy of a man who craved companionship and human connection coming into wealth that he was not equipped to handle, distorting his relationships with friends, family, and himself. And, above all else, we’ve tried to illustrate a cautionary tale of how a brilliant man could destroy himself over time, armed with wealth that fostered his own worst impulses and those of people around him. In the end, were those surrounding him blind to, or complicit with, his own self-destruction until it was too late? Starting with the night of the fire, we found more questions than answers.

Andy was standing by as firefighters pulled Tony’s unconscious body from the wreckage of the shed. Above him, two floodlights fixed to the roof of the house shone through the white smoke blowing around the home, illuminating the scene below. Guided by his flashlight, a firefighter walked into the house to assess the damage from the fire in the attached shed. A police officer watched as paramedics secured Tony in the stretcher. When he was a boy, Andy had helped his brother launch one of his first entrepreneurial endeavors, selling custom-made buttons through the classified ads in a boys’ magazine. When the workload had become too great, Andy recruited their younger brother, David, to help out. It wouldn’t be the last time the younger brothers worked for the golden Hsieh child, but as they grew up, their relationship was distant at best. At one point, Andy had become estranged entirely from Tony. David, meanwhile, had lived modestly, eschewing any notion that his brother was a billionaire. Outside of scheduled, stage-managed events, the brothers didn’t spend time together later in life.

It was a familial relationship that few understood. So when Andy had arrived in Park City months before, it came as a surprise to some who knew he hadn’t had much of a relationship with Tony for years. There were murmurs that he was returning to take advantage of Tony during a low point. But unlike David, who had largely stayed clear of Park City and Tony, here was Andy, by his brother’s side. Andy repeatedly asserted that he was there on behalf of the family to make sure people weren’t taking advantage of his brother. After all, it was Andy who had provided updates to family and friends like Jewel, and had discussed potentially arranging a conservatorship for his brother. At times he had told these people he was at a loss for what to do. Privately, Andy had also negotiated for his brother to pay him a $1 million salary. He had asked for millions more in a series of proposed business deals. And like others, he quickly found himself doing what he could to stay in his brother’s good graces, which, among other things, meant satisfying demands for more laughing gas. It further muddied the dynamic between the two brothers. What had driven Andy to reenter Tony’s life after nearly a decade? Why hadn’t they spoken for so long? And what had brought Andy to be with his brother on that fateful night? Was it concern for his brother’s well-being? Or had he assumed an obedient role alongside the countless followers chasing Tony’s riches? As fire crews hosed down the shed, Andy walked into the light, stopping a few feet from the stretcher. Wearing a backpack and a hooded puffer jacket, Andy stared for a moment at his brother’s unconscious body lying before him. Then, without looking away, he slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a mobile phone. As paramedics pushed the stretcher away, Andy held up the phone in front of his brother’s body and started filming.

CHAPTER 1

THE GOLDEN CHILD

Tony would have been the first to admit that as a child he was obsessed with one thing: making money. Though his family was comfortably middleclass—his father, Richard, worked at Chevron, and his mother, Judy, was a psychologist—he understood early on that money equaled liberation. “To me,” he later recalled of his childhood, “money meant that later on in life I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted.” In his early years, this took form as a mildly successful string of garage sales, and then some failed ventures—including the sale of Christmas cards to neighbors one year—before he joined the workforce as a newspaper boy. His route would begin and end at the same address: 28 Coast Oak Way, Mont Marin, the two-story house where Tony and his two younger brothers grew up. About twenty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the sliver of brick and weatherboard homes of Mont Marin were within the sunny enclave of the city of San Rafael, an eternal snapshot of Americana. The Hsiehs, one of the few Asian families in the suburb, lived in a house toward the bottom of the sloping street, surrounded by the rolling greenery of Marinwood and Lucas Valley. Two palm trees stood to one side of the black driveway, swaying tall above the home’s terracotta-tiled roof. Tony—a slight boy with aviator-framed glasses that seemed more suited for a geriatric and took up a third of his tiny face—would pedal through the quiet, winding streets of Mont Marin, past well-groomed front lawns. As he hurled copies of the local newspaper, his haphazard fencing of bangs would flutter in the wind. It was the mid-1980s, and across the headlines was talk of the burgeoning technology industry that was slowly but surely stretching across

the region, from the hills of San Francisco down to the Peninsula and across the expanse of the South Bay. The semiconductor industry had already laid down its roots in the region a decade before, while soon-to-be tech giants like Apple and Oracle were just in their infancy. As one historian put it, the area was encountering its “Big Bang” moment, the fateful turn of events that gave rise to the personal computer and video gaming industries. Venture capital started percolating from the gold mines that those industries became, and that started to lay the very foundations that would cause the explosion of Big Tech. The types of people who were finding success in Silicon Valley were by definition optimistic and thought outside the box. As it turned out, the boy riding around the streets just north of the Valley was unwittingly learning on his paper route that he already had the DNA for the type of success the headlines wrote about. After adding up his pay, he realized that he was making about $2 an hour. As Tony pedaled around the neighborhood, he realized that he could make the job more favorable. Then he had an epiphany. What if, he thought, he started his own newspaper? That way, he would be the sole beneficiary of the venture, as opposed to what he reasoned was child labor exploitation by the local paper. He quit the paper route, and the first major phase of his entrepreneurial streak began. He created The Gobbler, twenty pages of stories, word puzzles, and jokes that Tony drew and wrote out himself. Priced at $5 each, Tony had expected that his friends would become his first subscribers. “P.S.: Subscribe to the GOBBLER!” Tony wrote in a middle school classmate’s yearbook, viewing a sentimental tradition as an opportunity to conduct business. His parents seemed mildly amused by their son’s claim that the newsletter would sell a hundred copies. They were probably even more surprised when, after his first issue, he secured his first advertisement sale from his barber, who agreed to pay $20 for a full-page ad in the second issue. But he managed to only sell two copies of the second issue, bringing The Gobbler’s total circulation to six copies. After failing to recoup costs and find more ad buyers, Tony ended the business. Even so, with one failure behind him, he realized that he had made his own money through an idea that he had formed, so his curiosity sent him back to the drawing board.

With his younger brother Andy, who was a little less shy but equally small-framed, Tony would spend much of his time poring over Boys’ Life, a monthly magazine (an offshoot of the Boy Scouts of America) focused on the great outdoors. Though the boys in the pages didn’t look like him, it provided a perfect escape. In one issue from 1984, a headline on the cover read, “How Computers Opened a Window on a New World for One Eagle Scout.” His favorite part of the magazine was always the classified ads section, which he saw as a catalog of all the “fantastic things that I never even knew existed but knew I had to have one day,” he later wrote. One day, he saw an item that struck the money-obsessed chord in him: a button-making kit for $50. Seeing the promise of profits flash before his eyes, he convinced his parents to “loan” him money to buy the machine, which could convert any photo or piece of paper into a pin-on button. Then he took out an ad himself in another book called Free Stuff for Kids. In his advertisement, he offered to make buttons for customers for $1 plus a selfaddressed stamped envelope. After doing the math, he calculated he would earn 75 cents on every button sold. To his parents’ surprise, he paid them back within a month and was soon working four to five hours during the weekend to keep up with the orders. Eventually he bought a more automated button-making machine for $300. Through middle school, he made $200 a month—a hefty sum for a teenager in the eighties. The success spawned a tradition of Tony inviting his two younger brothers to be part of his businesses. When Tony graduated, he passed the button-making business to Andy, who then passed it on to their younger brother, Dave. It also seeded another element of his future. “I learned,” he wrote later, “that it was possible to run a successful business by mail order, without any face-to-face interaction.”

Thinking up ways to make money often had more to do with Tony trying to think his way out of the limitations of childhood than it did with becoming an entrepreneur. His parents fostered his efforts, sometimes unintentionally. For his ninth birthday, Tony asked for a crate of earthworms, with the ambition of becoming the world’s largest worm seller. The idea—born out of a book that Tony had read about how, when cut in two, both halves of a

worm will regenerate, thereby doubling the number of worms at hand—was light on economic modeling, like whether demand would meet supply. Still, Richard and Judy were encouraging, and drove him to Sonoma to what claimed to be America’s biggest worm farm. There they bought a box of mud that was guaranteed to have at least a hundred earthworms squirming within. If he cut them all in half, his product inventory would double. But operating under the ill-conceived notion that feeding the worms raw egg would make them stronger, Tony drowned the dirt in yolk, provided to him by his mother. That attracted birds to the box—a worm’s worst nightmare. The next day, when he went to check on the box, not a single worm remained. Richard and Judy were also there to indulge Tony’s garage sales, which only ended when their cache of house junk was exhausted, prompting their boy to convince other friends to hold garage sales at their homes. His parents also listened to his plan to go door-to-door selling Christmas cards to his neighbors after seeing an advertisement in Boys’ Life during summer vacation. Given that it was August, his next-door neighbor—and first potential customer—told him to come back later in the year. Richard Hsieh, tall, lanky, and soft-spoken, was a chemical engineer at Chevron who had secured a reputation in his predominantly white neighborhood in Marin County as friendly and welcoming. Kathy Barrass, one of the Hsiehs’ neighbors who lived across the street, recalled a conversation with Richard outside her home on Coast Oak Way in which she shared with him that she and her husband had always wanted to visit China. “Richard told me to stay right where I was, and he ran back inside their house,” she said. Richard came back out with a travel brochure for China and instructed Kathy to call the number on the flyer. Three weeks later, Kathy and her husband were off on a seven-city tour across China, traveling by boat and plane from Shanghai to Beijing. Judy Hsieh, a child psychologist, was the kind of mother who would make breakfast and pack lunch bags for Tony and his two younger brothers every morning. The lunches were “insanely healthy,” one childhood friend recalled, adding that Tony apparently didn’t like them much either—he would often try to trade his lunches for one of his friends’ chocolate-frosted Ho Hos. She could also be strict at times, like many mothers, and Tony’s childhood friends often found themselves intimidated by Judy’s presence,

despite her petite stature. “I got the feeling that she always thought I was never quite good enough for Tony,” the friend said. Of the two, Richard was the more gregarious and social parent, and many of Tony’s friends later on in life found themselves on the receiving end of his FaceTime calls. But while they may have differed in communication styles, Richard and Judy, both immigrants from Taiwan, had one core goal in common: they had high expectations for their sons. They were “your typical Asian American parents,” Tony later said, a title that came with a demanding curriculum and strict confines, both in school and at home. They expected their sons to strive for immense intellect and to have a disciplined work ethic, the kind of progeny who would either become a doctor or get a PhD. The latter was an endeavor they both understood well: Richard earned his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Judy waited until after the birth of their third and last son, David, to get her PhD in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology. Their demands on their children stemmed from a much larger phenomenon affecting a new generation of Asian American children. Richard and Judy had been two among millions of people who arrived in America as part of a massive brain drain from China, prompted by the events that followed World War II. Shortly after Japan surrendered to the Allied powers, General Tsai Lee and Peggy Lee gave birth to Judy, born Shiao-Ling Lee, on December 10, 1945, on the southern coast of China in what is today known as Guangdong Province. Two years later, on December 7, 1947, Chuan-Kang Hsieh, or Richard, was born. Richard and Judy entered a world emerging from the horrors of global warfare, only to grow up in a country where national trepidation would continue. Two opposing factions within China—the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang—had resumed the final phase of their own decadeslong civil war, and the Communists took over mainland China in 1949 to establish the People’s Republic of China. The Kuomintang leadership and its loyalists, meanwhile, retreated to the island of Taiwan and built their own government. In their teens, Richard and Judy independently found their way to Taiwan, where they would both end up at National Taiwan University (NTU), a prestigious institution in Taipei from which they had an arm’s-

length view of the tragedies occurring on the mainland. While China endured famine, censorship, violence, and death under Chairman Mao Zedong, the citizens of Taiwan escaped the consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. America, meanwhile, recognized Taiwan as a legitimate government, as that meshed with the U.S. agenda to hinder the communists’ growing power. As the tension between the two Chinese factions continued, Taiwanese intellectuals who wanted to explore and advance their livelihoods felt there was only one place to turn to: Mei Guo, the Mandarin name for America, which translates literally to “beautiful country.” Such an opportunity was typically afforded to the best and brightest students from National Taiwan University who were accepted to graduate degree programs in the United States. That journey from NTU figured in the life stories of prominent Taiwanese like Ang Lee, the famed film director, and Min Kao, the cofounder of Garmin. Many graduates went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which had a robust program for international Chinese students dating back to the early 1900s. When Richard and Judy arrived in the Urbana-Champaign region at the end of the 1960s, there were three Chinese restaurants, one Asian supermarket, and not much else to welcome the Chinese students. But what the town lacked in accommodations for its Chinese arrivals, it made up for in its role as a gateway toward the American dream of purported success and freedom—an image as ubiquitous here as at other elite schools like Harvard or Yale. Richard immigrated in 1969, a year after graduating from NTU with a degree in chemical engineering, to pursue his master’s and PhD in the same field. Judy, meanwhile, had graduated from NTU a year earlier but would also end up at UIUC, enrolling in the master’s program for social work. It was a lonely endeavor for each of them, crossing an ocean and leaving family, friends, and everything else behind. But once at UIUC, the reality of their experience was a country and society reeling from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Race relations were still tense. More often than not, Asian students found themselves striving to fade into the background, to draw less attention to themselves. Like attracts like, and at UIUC Richard and Judy crossed paths and then fell in love. They both received their master’s degrees in 1971 in their respective fields, but Richard continued to pursue his PhD at the university.

He became a member of Phi Lambda Upsilon, a chemistry honor society, as well as the American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 1973, after Richard and Judy married, Richard published his dissertation with the esteemed Charles Eckert as his thesis advisor. Titled “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions,” his research received funding from the National Science Foundation and from the U.S. Army Research Office in Durham, North Carolina. “No man works alone,” Richard wrote in the acknowledgments section of his dissertation. “The deepest thanks are due to Dr. C. A. Eckert, not only for his encouragement, advice and assistance, but also for the corrections of poor English, bad grammar, false reasoning and obscurity in the manuscript.” He continued, “I must recognize my debt and gratitude to my parents who encouraged and supported their dearest son to pursue his higher education across the Pacific Ocean, and my wife Judy, whose patience and endurance made this work possible.” A few months later, on December 12, 1973, the young couple welcomed Anthony Chia-Hua Hsieh to the world in Urbana, Illinois. With the seeds of their family sown, they were determined to make something of themselves in the foreign but free, generous though sometimes unforgiving, land of America. And just as Richard’s parents pushed him to leave his home and his family behind in order to make what was then a fifty-hour flight halfway around the world to pursue his education, he and Judy would push their children to be the best they could be. Their new home was a place of opportunity and prosperity, and as long as you worked hard, seemingly anything could be accomplished. Two years later, Tony’s brother Andrew Chia-Pei Hsieh was born. Their younger brother, David, would arrive seven years later. One of Tony’s only memories of Illinois was catching fireflies in jars. “In my mind, I had invented it and no one else had done it before,” he later said. When Tony turned five, Richard got a job as an engineer at Chevron on the other side of the country, in Marin County, California. Richard and Judy packed up once more and moved the family out West.

Given everything they had endured, Richard and Judy shared a prescription for their children’s lives: nothing short of excellence. In practice, this meant an unusual amount of pressure and work, both in school and outside of it. Tony consistently wrestled with these constraints, and made frequent attempts to control his childhood on his own terms. Among the expectations outlined for him was a requirement for musical excellence, in the name of being well-rounded. Each weekday, if school was in session, he was expected to practice playing his instruments for two hours—thirty minutes each for the piano, violin, trumpet, and French horn. On weekends and during the summer months, Tony was required to practice each instrument for an hour. With four hours supposed to be dedicated to musical progress, this drastically cut into his summer vacation. So Tony came up with a risky scheme that would disappoint his parents and bring punishment if they ever found out. But on the slim chance that the plan succeeded, Tony would have more precious time to enjoy the kind of summer vacation he wanted. He decided to take the chance. One summer day during middle school, Tony sat in his room and recorded himself playing his instruments. He played hour-long sessions for each instrument, hitting “stop” on the tape recorder once he was done. Then the next morning, as the sun was rising, Tony climbed out of bed and tiptoed down the staircase, mindful not to wake his parents. Entering the sitting room clutching the tape recorder, he walked over to the piano, placed the recorder above the keys, and hit “play.” The sound of his own keystrokes lilted throughout the house. Perhaps the recording would stir his parents awake ever so slightly, only for them to fall back asleep with the warm satisfaction that their son was downstairs, practicing like they had instructed, like he’d said he would. Once the hour-long piano recording finished, Tony trudged back upstairs to his room and, behind a locked door, proceeded to play the recording of his own violin playing. Instead of spending those hours improving a skill that he knew would never become his life’s work, Tony instead spent the time reading issues of Boys’ Life. The ruse was a gamble, and it paid off. Kathy Barrass remembered hearing the bright notes of the violin and piano floating out into the street from the Hsiehs’ home during her daily strolls around the neighborhood. In retrospect, perhaps she had been an early, and unwitting, observer of Tony’s ingenuity. It was yet another

discovery: that besides having money, thinking outside the box—which meant defying his parents’ instructions, in this instance—could also allow him to define himself.

CHAPTER 2

WIDE AWAKE

Dixie Elementary School was a public school sandwiched between the fields of Lucas Valley Preserve and Sleepy Hollow. Renamed Miller Creek Elementary School District decades later due to the former name’s ties to the old South and Confederate states, the school was just a five-minute drive from the Hsiehs’ home on Coast Oak Way. Every morning at the school started with a Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. From Tony’s first day, it was clear he was unlike the others in his classroom. “There was all this buzz about the new kid, the wunderkind,” said Spencer Garfinkel, a former classmate of Tony’s. On the first day of school that Monday, he was a first grader. By Tuesday, Tony had jumped to the second grade, putting him in the same year as Spencer. “Literally, it wasn’t a week. It took a day,” Spencer said. Years later, Tony would say how skipping this grade made him feel different and singled out, even more so than he may have already felt, being one of very few Asians in the neighborhood. Tony’s last name was foreign enough that his elementary school soccer coach had trouble spelling out his name in writing when going over plays on a chalkboard. After a few failed tries, he quickly became “Tony H.” Richard and Judy very quickly identified the other few Chinese families in the neighborhood. “Somehow my parents managed to find all ten of them,” Tony later wrote. The families built a community within a community, coming together often in comfort and familiarity. Speaking with one another in fast and expressive Mandarin, the families would make a point of celebrating traditional holidays like Chinese New Year together, taking turns hosting potluck lunches and dinners at their homes. The kids

would play and watch television in one room, while the parents, in another room, gossiped and bragged about their children’s accomplishments. Tables and counters would groan under the weight of platters and bowls filled with fried and sticky rice, long noodles, and glistening braised pork. Kumquats and oranges would dot the house, the bright orange colors a symbol for gold and prosperity. The kids, Tony included, would have to bow to the parents in order to receive red envelopes, filled with $1 bills, $5 bills, even $20 bills at times. For dessert, sometimes there would be xing ren tofu, a traditional Chinese soft almond tofu. “But it was the Betty Crocker version, which was just Jell-O, flavored with almond extract, I think,” recalled one childhood friend of Tony’s. “It had canned fruit with it.” The gatherings were never anything fancy, but they were significant in other ways, particularly for the children. “It was cool to get together because it was one of the few times where we would see so many Asian people together in the same place.” Richard and Judy made sure that Tony, and later on his two younger brothers, Andy and Dave, attended Chinese school in the late afternoons on weekdays and on weekends so they could keep in touch with their native language and roots. The brothers were only allowed to watch television one hour a week and had to get straight As—anything less would be a badge of shame. One friend of Tony’s recalled watching him cry in elementary school because he received less than an A on a paper in French class. “He was inconsolable,” he said. “I don’t think it was necessarily even obvious to me how seriously he took academics because sometimes he could come off as somewhat cavalier about it.” Around the time that Tony entered Miller Creek Middle School, Judy would drive Tony and another one of his friends, Eric Liu, to the local library in the summertime for reading clubs. Aside from Boys’ Life, Tony also devoured a book series called The Three Investigators, which followed three teenage boys as they solved crimes and mysteries. In the series, the headquarters for the three boys was a damaged thirty-foot trailer in a junkyard. The idea that a trailer could have everything that the boys needed to solve their investigations—a small laboratory, an office and a desk, a typewriter, books—became a concept that Tony replicated later on in his life.

In sixth grade, his first year of middle school, Tony was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” The yearbook page that commemorated this superlative pictured Tony in his thick glasses with a messy bowl haircut, a zip-up sweater, and an awkward smile—most likely the forced response to a photographer’s command. He was never athletic and, as Tony H., never grew into soccer. “But he could kick your ass in ping-pong,” said David Padover, another childhood friend of Tony’s who, despite remembering his lack of athletic prowess, also remembered his sense of adventure very early on. “One of the things I remember doing with Tony was exploring in the hills up on Lucas Valley and the waters of Miller Creek,” said Padover, who lived about two miles away from the Hsiehs. They would bike to each other’s house and ride up and down the streets, sometimes going all the way to the base of the valley to hike up the hill. They stopped by creeks and used nets to catch small fish. “We would take all sorts of stuff up there so we could spend as much time hiking as we wanted,” he recalled. “One time, we found an alligator lizard and a bunch of field mice. We decided to take the mice home and raise them and sell them as pets.” Peers knew Tony as the child prodigy of Lucas Valley. But there were glimpses early on that he was more than just a studious and bookish boy wonder. The tape recording of him practicing instruments was just the beginning of a pattern of behavior. One of his friends recalled that as Tony entered the first stages of puberty, he secretly borrowed The “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Boys from the local library, a book that would have been considered contraband in his household. “I don’t know how he managed to do it, but it was like a big score for us,” recalled one of Tony’s childhood friends. “We were going through it half horrified and half fascinated.” For Halloween one year in middle school, Tony showed up to school as Sherlock Holmes in an outfit so elaborate that it surprised his classmates, who more or less knew him as the Asian brainiac. “I remember thinking, wow, his family went all out for this. With the cape, the shawl, and the eyeglasses. He was Sherlock Holmes, literally out of England,” said Spencer Garfinkel. His parents’ involvement in the costume was also noticeable to Garfinkel. “I’m not sure if that was the Chinese immigrant family wanting to come and fit in,” he said. Another year, Tony went a step further and dressed up as a girl. The outfit was so convincing that one of the

teachers did not realize it was a costume. “It was unbelievable,” Spencer recalled. “We were all lined up as contestants for the costume contest, and Ms. Troy, who was one of the judges, pointed at Tony and said, ‘But what’s that girl dressed up as?’” He added, “You don’t expect it from the computer whiz or math geek, but he had that goofy side. You’d never assume it, and then all of a sudden he’d come up with a costume or something and it’s like wow, where did that come from?” Few were able to glimpse the inner workings of Tony’s adolescent mind, but those spurts of expression indicated Tony’s curiosity for creativity and desire to break from tradition and conformity. This would come out in his writing as well, in a few poems he penned during middle school. In one called “Teeth,” he gave the reader vivid metaphors to chew on:

In another poem, aptly called “TOOMUCHTODONESS,” he writes with exasperation about his messy room and all the tasks at hand:

But one poem seemed particularly haunted. Written about a nightmare in which Tony is running away from a menacing octopus, it’s typed inside a drawing of the eight-limbed mollusk with large, soulless eyes.

Though Tony was barely a teenager when he wrote it, the poem was more telling than he could have known.

Nestled in a neighborhood of gated houses with long driveways, and hidden behind an imposing and carefully manicured hedge, is the Branson School, a prestigious private college preparatory school in Marin County. Once called “an enclave within an enclave within an enclave,” it is a high school unlike most, in which its $50,000-a-year tuition marks it as one of the most expensive high schools in the country. Today, the student parking lot is dotted with sports cars, and the school’s students are the daughters and sons

of California royalty, often going on to become part of that group themselves. One alum is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco turned governor of California. Just next door is the Lagunitas Country Club, the oldest private tennis and swim club in the county, which is also well known for its exclusivity. If an invitation is extended, one enters through the two pillared Branson Gates into a sprawling campus nestled within a lush valley, complete with a small creek that runs through the school grounds. Branson has always had a reputation for being a school that is strictly for the privileged elite. It is situated in the small town of Ross, where the median household income for the 2,300 residents is over $220,000 and the median home value is around $2 million as of 2019. It is one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Bay Area. But Tony didn’t live in Ross—he lived in Mont Marin, a thirty-minute drive away, where the households earn a third of what they do in Ross and the median home value is less than half. Most of his peers at Miller Creek Middle School went on to Terra Linda High School, a public school in the neighborhood. But for some parents— certainly for Richard and Judy—Terra Linda wasn’t enough. So, after a series of tests and interviews, Tony became one of four students in his class at Miller Creek who were admitted to Branson in 1987, earning seats among the eighty coveted spots. Tony got in not because of any favors from the family name but because he was academically competitive. And to Richard and Judy, Branson was the best of the best—100 percent of its students went to college after graduating. It was a feeder to the American dream. So, every morning starting in August 1987, Tony made the trek to the other side of town, into another world. He would either be driven by his parents or carpool with Eric Liu, his longtime friend who often attended the Chinese family gatherings and who had also been admitted to Branson. They would hop on the 101 freeway for just over three miles, then exit into central San Rafael, driving past the Jack in the Box on Second Street and the McDonald’s on Fourth. After winding through a series of turns, as the roads became better paved and the trees leafier, they would pass the nearly century-old St. Anselm Church. For another half mile on Fernhill Avenue, the journey took them past grand estates—homes with American flags waving on poles outside and gardeners out front. Finally, they would get to

the Branson gates, which were easy to miss unless you knew to look for them. Driving through the grounds, they’d pass students playing Frisbee on the lawn, or plotting which Grateful Dead shows they were going to go to next. As they pulled up in their modest family vehicles, Tony and Eric would get out of the car, take a glance at the rows of Volkswagen Beetle convertibles and red BMWs in the parking lot, and be reminded daily that they were from somewhere else. At a new school in a new neighborhood where none of the other students knew him as the whiz kid who skipped a grade, this could have been an opportunity for Tony to reinvent himself—but that didn’t happen. “I remember thinking that the first day of high school really didn’t feel that different from the last day of middle school,” Tony wrote. “I guess in my head, I had thought that suddenly I would feel older and more mature, that somehow life would suddenly be different now that I was in high school.” The same factors that isolated him from most of the other kids remained at Branson, only now they were exacerbated by an immense wealth gap, textured with teenage insecurities. While many other students went to Europe for the summer or Lake Tahoe every weekend in the winter, Tony worked multiple jobs during high school. He became a video tester for Lucasfilm for $6 an hour and started a computer programming gig that paid $15 per hour. He was still one of very few Asians in a very white school. At lunch, according to a former teacher at the Branson School who taught there during this time, it was not unusual for students of minority ethnicities to sit together at the same table, though Asian students were more integrated than Black students. Tony was still physically smaller than his peers, still a full year behind in growth spurts. His intelligence continued to burst through. In geometry his first year at Branson, he picked up concepts at such a breakneck pace that his teacher created a different set of problems specifically tailored for Tony. He still excelled. “I don’t often use the word brilliant, but he was brilliant,” his teacher later said. She also observed a level of restraint from Tony that she surmised was a direct response to a deep, innate desire to fit in. Though he knew the answers to every question and problem she posed to the class, he rarely volunteered his hand. “I just really got the feeling from Tony that he wanted the respect and admiration and to be accepted by his classmates,”

she recalled. “He didn’t want to do anything that would make them go, ‘Oh, there’s that brilliant kid. What is he even doing in our class?’” Tony spent his lunch hours and oftentimes his after-school hours in the computer lab, hidden in the library. He picked up the programming language Pascal and eventually became so adept at it that he taught it for a summer course. It was clear to those who paid attention, though, that Tony was not immune to the usual mischievous teenage antics. In fact, he sometimes led them. With a few other regulars at the lab, Tony figured out that the computer lab phone could make long-distance calls and they wouldn’t have to pay. So he had an idea—to call 976-SEXY, which ended up being a phone sex operator. The first time he called, the woman on the other line quickly caught on and asked what year he was born. “Twenty-one years ago!” Tony cried, before hanging up. He and his friends continued making calls to the number for the next few weeks for their amusement— before the teacher inquired about a phone bill that listed three hundred calls in the past month to that number. David Padover, who had also gotten into Branson, found himself in the computer lab as well during his freshman year, but it was not to pick up Pascal. Due to his social anxiety, he had found the cafeteria too intimidating a place to eat lunch. Instead, he preferred the quiet of the computer lab. He and Tony remained friends for the first year at Branson as one of four students from Miller Creek Middle School. But during their sophomore year, drama that had occurred during middle school followed them into high school. While at Miller Creek, a group of teenage boys used to bully David and call him names. While Tony didn’t take part, he did witness it. One day years later at Branson, when the two of them were in the school office together, David saw that Tony had drawn a comic about him. “I was stupid and dumb in this comic,” David later recalled of the caricature. “And everything I did didn’t work out.” There were striking similarities between the comic and what David endured in middle school. Though Tony tried to downplay the comic, he couldn’t explain why he had drawn it, and David ended the friendship. They never saw much of each other again at Branson or for the rest of their lives, even though both of their families remained in Northern California. Despite how hurt he remembered feeling after the incident, David later regretted ending their friendship over the comic. “I

knew a Tony that many people never met,” he later recalled. “But I never got to meet and experience the Tony that so many people got to know.” Tony continued thinking outside the box, which occasionally afforded him a different set of rules. Some of his teachers allowed him to not attend classes as long as he continued to ace tests. “As for homework, I tried my best to find creative ways around actually doing any hard work,” he later wrote. But even the hard work was too easy for him, so he invented ways to further challenge himself. One time, for an assignment that involved writing a Shakespearean sonnet, Tony submitted his paper in Morse code. “Depending on the teacher’s mood, I knew I was either going to get an A or an F. Luckily, my teacher decided to give me an ‘A++++++++++++.’” He was on the fencing team and joined the chess club and electronics club. He was voted into the Cum Laude Society, a group that honored “excellence in classroom achievement and other pursuits.” He also participated in mock trial, spending a few hours every Friday from January to March his junior year practicing debating with the rest of the team. Eric Liu was on the team as well—his last name misspelled in the yearbook photo of the mock trial club. “Branson’s prosecution was represented by Tony Hsieh, Eric Lui, and Mike Michaud and was able to convict Terra Linda’s Pat Haines of manslaughter,” reads the caption. His teammates are wearing blazers and collared shirts in the photograph. Tony is wearing a white T-shirt that reads “Dick’s Island.” Once, during his junior year, Tony drove by himself for two days from San Rafael to Mexico and back just to catch an eclipse. “I remember he came back with a Señor Frog’s T-shirt,” laughed one of his childhood friends, in reference to the Mexican-themed restaurant chain. “I can’t believe somehow his parents let him. But that’s just an amazing thing for a high schooler to do at the time.” Very rarely did Tony get in trouble, but he was suspended for one day after he was found with another student’s lunch card, a debit card for the school cafeteria, in his pocket. Summoned before a disciplinary committee, Tony provided what seemed like an unsatisfactory answer: it must have been an accident. Years later, Tony would claim this to be another important moment of his teenage years. “I walked away from that experience with the lesson that sometimes the truth alone isn’t enough,” he said. “And that presentation of the truth was just as important as the truth.”

As tradition goes, every senior is given their own page in the yearbook. Most students picked a series of photographs that represented the highlights of their eighteen or so years of life, such as photos of themselves as kids, shots of their pets, or pictures with friends at parties or pep rallies. Tony’s, however, was filled with mysterious-looking doodles, drawings, quotes, and inside jokes. It looked more like an invitation to an Acid Test party from the Merry Pranksters than a yearbook page. “It was very unusual,” said David. Tony wrote out his Chinese name in bold. There were references to fictional characters, including Indiana Jones and Angus “Mac” MacGyver, the dashing American TV hero who eschewed violence and instead used unconventional methods to solve conflicts and problems. Rather than a gun, MacGyver carried a Swiss Army knife. Tony drew a self-portrait of him doing a magic trick. And amid all the doodles and scrawls, he wrote a quote from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” “He had this pretty intense energy about him,” said his former geometry teacher. “Like he had deep thoughts in his head and he was grasping things at a really high level even back then.”

Perhaps Tony’s most impactful extracurricular at Branson was theater tech, a role that required him to toil behind the scenes to ensure a successful production for plays and musicals. The job entailed being in the theater auditorium after school and during lunch hours, fiddling with lights, tinkering with props, and finding camaraderie with other similarly onstageaverse students. Through theater tech, Tony met Janice Lopez, a Filipino girl with wide-set eyes who was on financial aid at Branson. Like Tony, she got into the school on intelligence and wits alone, and could also be painfully shy.

Together they took theater tech jobs operating the spotlight, which meant ensuring that the audience was focusing on the right character at the right time, whether that was at the student playing Danny Zuko in Grease or

the one playing Emily Webb in Our Town. Though the audience could not see Tony, they were being commanded by his light. “There was something alluring about being involved in something where the sole purpose was to create an experience and emotional journey for people,” he later wrote about his time in theater production. “Then to have nothing but memories left afterward to hold onto.” Sometimes he and Janice would sit shoulder to shoulder for hours in a cramped, six-by-twelve-foot control booth, watching the stories play out in front of them. Together they became comfortable in each other’s silence. It was a comfort they would find again twenty years later.

CHAPTER 3

THE BET

On a fall day in 1991, Jon Greenman was among hundreds of new students arriving for the first time at Harvard to start life among a new class of highachieving, and often wealthy, young minds. With a thick mat of brown hair and a nervous grin, Jon led his parents to the third floor of Canaday Hall A, one of a cluster of buildings that formed a giant question mark when seen from up above, where he’d be staying for freshman year. It was immediately clear that going to Harvard didn’t mean you were signing up for prestigious living quarters. Unlike other Harvard buildings, identified by Neoclassical trim and colonial-style columns, the Canaday buildings are boxy brick structures reminiscent of drab government housing built in the 1970s. Directly across the street, the booming toll of the Memorial Church bells shook Jon’s bedroom window at the stroke of every hour. Jon’s bedroom, part of a four-bedroom suite, barely had enough space for his belongings. Among his roommates were Sanjay Madan, a quiet boy with deep-set eyes and thick brows, and Jose Soto, a chatty young kid who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Amid the throng of students leading their wide-eyed parents around the campus, Jon ran into a tall, stick-thin Asian boy who was moving into the room across the hall. He introduced himself as Tony, and he, like Jon, was awkward and shy. They’d make fast friends, Jon figured. Tony, it turned out, had a room to himself. Jon decided he’d be spending most of his time there because Tony had two things that no one else did: a TV and video games. As residents of the third floor of Canaday A, Jose, Sanjay, Jon, and Tony became good friends. They also ventured upstairs and befriended

some of the girls who lived on the fourth floor, including Jill Wheeler and Kami Hayashi, and a few other guys below them on the second floor. Going to Harvard had not been Tony’s first choice. He had been accepted into every elite university he applied to: Brown; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; MIT; Princeton; Cornell; Yale; and Harvard. His original plan was to go to Brown because it had an advertising major, which Tony thought seemed more relevant to the business world than any of the majors offered by the other colleges. But Tony’s parents, Richard and Judy, had a plan for their son’s future that did not involve the liberal arts bent of Brown. While they had hoped he would become a medical doctor, they could settle for a computer science degree at Harvard, the global symbol of prestige and success. Over four centuries, the university had educated eight U.S. presidents, over a hundred Olympians, and nearly eighty Nobel laureates, which “yielded the most prestigious bragging rights” for Asian American parents, Tony later wrote. After everything Richard and Judy had sacrificed to achieve the American dream, sending their son to Harvard guaranteed a life of wealth and success, they thought. Choosing Harvard over Brown, however, would be one of the final times Tony capitulated to his parents’ demands. The TV was the first thing Tony bought when he moved into Canaday. No longer did he have to adhere to the one-hour-per-week rule of his childhood; in his new space he could watch his favorite shows whenever he wanted, for hours on end. It was the first in a long line of small freedoms that allowed him to make his own rules and shape his own environment. In addition to the desk, chair, and twin-sized bed that took up most of the space, he decked out his room with a hot pot, a computer, and a printer—all prized items for freshmen at the time. He owned a video game collection unmatched in the dorm; working as an intern at Lucasfilm had provided him with consoles and games that weren’t even available in stores. For dorm mates like Jon, it was these things that first drew people into Tony’s orbit. Then, organically, his room became the center of the universe for their group of friends. The main feature of his bedroom wall was a poster of Tony’s favorite idol, Angus “Mac” MacGyver, played on TV by Richard Dean Anderson. With a clean-cut face framed by a blond mullet, MacGyver had a geniuslevel intellect and could speak five languages, in addition to being

proficient in sign language and having mastered Morse code. With an extraordinary grasp of applied physics and engineering, he could defuse a bomb using a paper clip. In one episode, he made a magnifying glass out of a hairpin and wine to read the names of spies. The poster was the first image Tony’s friends saw as they walked into his broom-cupboard-sized room. Soon, photos of Tony with his friends adorned the walls. His room was right near one of the staircases that served as the only access to the dorm’s upper floors, and his door was always open, unless he was asleep, which seemed to rarely be the case—his friends knew they could find him awake and up for a chat deep into the night. Between marathon evenings of Bomberman—the Japanese strategic maze game on his Nintendo console—they crammed into his tiny room, sometimes a dozen at a time, and stayed up all night watching television or attempting to study. The longer they debated philosophy or each other’s romances, the higher the pizza boxes piled alongside buckets of buffalo wings. No matter what was going on in the lives of this group of friends, Tony and his room became the place to connect with one another. He was always there, listening, taking it all in. “There was a core group of about fifteen of us, and we were inseparable,” Tony wrote later. Like Tony, who was studying computer science, and Jon, who majored in astrophysics, the circle of friends in Canaday A had come to Harvard as the highest-graded students in their schools, achievements they had not reached by going to high school parties or rummaging through their parents’ alcohol cabinets. With Harvard’s enormous tuition fees, pressure from their families to succeed, and the crushing workload, alcohol did not meaningfully factor into the social equation of Tony’s group, nor did they express much curiosity about its ability to lubricate their experiences. In one candid photograph Tony is sitting on the ground, his arms around his knees, surrounded by friends. Cans of Coca-Cola, Sprite, Pepsi, and Canada Dry ginger ale line the window sills behind them—no alcohol in sight. There may have been a few beers at the events they did attend, though none recall stumbling home from a PBR-soaked college party. But even without the excuse of a hangover, the near-constant stream of people coming in and out of Tony’s room provided ample distractions from actually going to class. He arranged his schedule so that he had classes from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, leaving open

Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was problematic because he preferred to stay up late and sleep in, meaning that he would choose to stay awake for thirtytwo hours in a row and then sleep for sixteen hours straight. Sometimes he would cut class and instead watch reruns of the soap opera Days of Our Lives in his room. While Tony did have a small circle of friends at the Branson School, he confided in Jon that there were times he had felt excluded from the popular crowd there. “He did feel some desire for inclusion,” Jon said. “And he was very eager to have people happy when they were with him.” By the end of the first semester, Tony realized that he had created something special. Just before Harvard broke for the winter holidays, when everyone was preparing to go home to see their families, Tony wrote a card and distributed a scanned copy to each of his friends. In jagged handwriting, Tony scribbled on the front: “Yes, it’s a xerox. Yes it’s cheap. Yes, it’s a form letter. But it’s something I want to say to all of you so…” Inside, his message continued: A little over three months ago, we hadn’t even met. Call it luck, call it fate … Whatever brought us together, I feel very lucky to have you all as such good friends. Quite simply, you guys light up my life. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as happy with college as I am now (although my grades would probably be a bit better). Because of you guys, I haven’t even really felt homesick yet. Amazing what 90 or so days can do, huh? In any case, I just wanted to say thanks to all of you, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all that jazz. Oh, and one last thing … I hope that each of you invites me to your wedding, because I want to be there when the people dearest to me are having one of the happiest days of their lives. Alright, enough of this sentimental stuff … on with the presents! Tony

It took all of one semester for Tony to realize that what he really wanted to do was spend more time with his friends and less time doing work, while still getting good grades. Instead of using his intellect to study hard, he invested more time in trying to figure out how to hack his Ivy League education. Like in high school, he enrolled in subjects that were the most flexible in terms of the work required: linguistics, sign language, and Mandarin (which he already spoke fluently with his parents). During his senior year, he took a course called The Bible and Its Interpretation that met all his needs: there wasn’t any homework to be graded on, so he never had to go to class. “The bad news was that my grade in the class was going to be based on what I got on the final exam, which I was completely unprepared for, since I had never opened up any of the textbooks we were supposed to have been reading throughout the semester,” he wrote later. Two weeks before the final exam, the professor announced to the class that they would have to write a few paragraphs about five topics selected at random from a list of ninety possible topics discussed during the semester. Realizing that it was humanly impossible to do all the readings in two weeks, Tony posted a message on one of the electronic news groups on the Harvard network to see if any of the several hundred students enrolled in the class wanted to do a virtual study group—a revolutionary idea at the time, given that nothing was done virtually and the internet was still an infant concept. For those who wanted to participate, Tony would assign them three topics to research and they would have to email their findings to him. Once collected, he would compile the responses in a binder, and those who contributed could purchase the study materials for $20. “If we get enough people on the ’Net together, then each person will only have to do a few identifications,” he wrote on the harvard.general message board. Tony’s idea garnered enough attention to warrant a story in The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard. “Senior Forms ‘Bible’ Study Group On ’Net,” the headline read. Only forty people had responded to Tony’s message, according to the story, but it was enough to cover all the topics. Some students opted out of joining the group “out of concern that participating might somehow violate Harvard’s rules of academic honesty.” But a teaching fellow quoted in the story said, “I wouldn’t see anything different between this and students getting together in a room and working

together.” Another student quoted said, “I think some people who use harvard.general might learn from this in the future.” By slacking off, Tony had invented a new means of learning. “They say that necessity is the mother of invention,” he wrote later. “Without ever opening up a book or doing any writing myself, I ended up with the most comprehensive study guide that had ever been created.” In his memoir, published almost two decades later, Tony was intent on driving the idea that he aced Harvard by barely trying. But it was clear to his college friends that he put in more effort than he let on. During his sophomore year, he was one of three people on Harvard’s computer programming team that won first place in the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, beating 600 teams from around the world. “Programmers Win Contest,” a story from The Crimson read. “It was a really close contest,” Tony told the reporter. “We were pretty much neck-and-neck with Stanford. If we hadn’t got the last problem we would have lost.” A photo taken at the contest shows Tony standing between his two teammates, Craig Silverstein and Derrick Bass. They had just won $10,000. Having gone through a series of growth spurts, he towered over his companions, wearing a gray Harvard sweater, his eyes lit above a huge smile. He is gripping a trophy emblazoned with “1993 World Champions.” Seeing the photo years later, Craig was struck by Tony’s height; he had forgotten that Tony was taller than him. He recalled that they had barely slept in the weeks leading up to the competition. But the extraordinary achievement proved to be an early indication of the futures awaiting both men. After he graduated from Harvard, Craig was accepted to a PhD program at Stanford, where he worked alongside two other doctoral students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The students were working on a concept called a “search engine,” which sought to find a way to connect the millions of documents on the internet to a central hub that could be searched. When they dropped out of Stanford to start their company, Google, Craig followed them and was their first hire, a career move that would make him hundreds of millions of dollars.

What Tony omitted from his memoir was his connection to New York during this time. He makes no mention of his regular trips to Manhattan, which initially began as visits to see Alex Hsu, a friend from Branson who was studying information technology at New York University. One of the first things that drew him to the city was how different Alex’s college experience was from his own. Unlike Harvard’s campus, which is largely siloed in Cambridge away from the bustle of Boston, NYU blended seamlessly into the urban jungle of Manhattan, which fascinated Tony. There seemed to be no clear end to the campus and the beginning of the outside world. Instead, its student housing, libraries, and classrooms were interconnected with the world they existed within, sharing bars, parks, restaurants, offices, and apartment buildings with the citizens of New York. Such a connection provided a two-way laboratory that allowed NYU students to integrate and apply their experience to the surrounding metropolis, while the city could pull from the pipeline of educated individuals and the business and innovation they brought with them. It was a phenomenon that would stick with him for years. Tony’s visits to New York became so frequent that he found himself part of an entirely new circle of friends. Much of his time was spent hanging at Alex’s apartment at Zeckendorf Towers, which loomed above Union Square. The apartment served as a gathering place for Alex’s friends, including his girlfriend, Mei Lawn, and another young woman named Ying Liu, who was also a student at NYU. Ying had befriended Alex after they realized they were both Taiwanese. The four of them would stay up all night playing the card game Spades, surrounded by Chinese takeout boxes of chicken or shrimp and broccoli with hot chili sauce on the side. Other nights, they went to Broadway shows or the NYU students took Tony to dorm parties across the campus. Like at Harvard, this group of friends was similarly studious and uninterested in alcohol and getting drunk. Ying, who didn’t drink, noticed Tony took pains to reveal little about himself when he met strangers at the gatherings. When asked where he was visiting from, Tony’s response rarely changed. “I’m from a small school in Boston,” he would say. He seemed adamant about leading people to believe he was an unexceptional wallflower. “Without Harvard, he became like everybody else,” Ying said. “In fact, he was probably more invisible.”

Doe-eyed with a heart-shaped face that belied her commanding demeanor, Ying initially had found Tony to be painfully shy and quiet. But as they spent more time together, his introversion transformed into an intense curiosity, and during their moments alone he peppered her incessantly with questions. Ying had a nurturing and protective personality and found herself mothering Tony. Pour the noodles here, she would say, or Don’t throw that on the counter, put it in the trash. “I always felt like I had to take care of him,” she later recalled. They also shared a mutual curiosity about intimacy, as well as a lack of experience. Tony had yet to kiss a girl, and Ying had spent much of her teenage years changing schools between Taiwan, Indonesia, and Pennsylvania and New York, never staying anywhere long enough to start a relationship. She hadn’t even held a boy’s hand at that point, let alone kissed one, so she had few answers for Tony when he asked what girls like to do. One night, Ying, Tony, Alex, and his girlfriend were talking about sex, and out of curiosity, the group decided to watch a pornographic video. After a few minutes, Ying announced she was afraid of having sex in the future because of how painful it looked for the woman. The others burst out laughing at her naïveté. Ying recalled mostly assuming a big-sister role to Tony. She felt like they were on the same level and were both interested in trying to figure out why people behave in the ways they do. Sometimes she noticed how he would fixate on the smallest observations in wonderment. Other times she would accuse him of being childish—she often found his pranks immature. But as Tony’s visits to New York became more frequent, their mutual friends wondered whether Tony’s interest in Ying was perhaps driven by something else, maybe romance. While Tony was at Harvard, Richard took a job in Hong Kong and moved there with Judy and Dave, so Tony used summer break to visit them. Upon learning that Tony was heading to Hong Kong, Ying mentioned that she too was planning on going to Asia during the summer to see her father, though she would be going to Taiwan. She was somewhat surprised when he promptly invited himself to come and see her. It wasn’t too much trouble, he insisted, as Taipei is only a two-hour flight from Hong Kong. Ying gently pushed back: she had nowhere for him to stay. Her father lived

with few means in a minuscule apartment in a run-down part of the city. There was only enough room for a tiny bathroom and a double bed, which Ying shared with her father when she visited. Tony did not seem to care, so Ying relented and asked her father to book Tony a hotel near his apartment. The morning after Tony arrived, he met Ying at her father’s apartment building. The elevator violently shook on the way up. The stench of urine filled the cabin—someone had relieved themselves in the corner. “He was okay with it,” Ying said. “So I was okay with it.” Standing in the studio apartment with Ying, her father, and her brother, Tony mentioned that his first night in Taipei had been quite an experience. Ying asked him what happened. At around midnight, he explained, there was a knock at the door. A woman was standing there, offering a massage. When he declined, she clarified, saying that what she was really offering was a “happy service.” Ying turned to her father. “What did you do?” “Oh my God,” her father said. “I think I booked a love hotel.” As they laughed, Ying realized that the initial embarrassment that had made her hesitant about inviting Tony to her hometown was unnecessary. Tony, unlike many of her other NYU friends, did not come from wealth. Ying felt a quiet comfort knowing that Tony did not seem to be bothered by her family’s living quarters. “I wasn’t ashamed,” Ying said. But Tony’s ability to put Ying at ease was overshadowed by his reluctance to communicate his own feelings, and she was never quite able to truly understand him. While she didn’t press him, or even really ask, she sensed there was a disconnect between Tony and his own family. Even when they became closer, he never spoke about his parents. She only learned years later that Tony had two younger brothers. One day on a bus during their trip in Taipei, Ying noticed Tony looking at her with his wide eyes. “Why are you suddenly speaking English to me?” he said. In New York, Tony and Ying always spoke in Mandarin with their friends, in a way that felt almost like a secret code. In Taiwan, she had switched. Tony’s fascination with human behavior applied to her too, she realized. Ying never asked Tony how he felt about her, but some, including Alex, always thought that Tony had romantic feelings for her. Sometime after the

Taipei trip, Ying got a boyfriend, and Tony’s visits to New York became less frequent. “When I was single, he was very close to me,” she later said. “When I got a boyfriend, he drifted away.”

Tony’s jaunt in Taipei was one of many experiences that opened him up to the realities of the world, far from his sheltered suburban childhood. At Harvard he threw himself into opportunities outside of school. He earned a certificate in mixology at the Harvard Bartending School and started bartending at weddings and other catered events. He visited a friend’s farm and learned how to milk cows. He held several computer programming internships as a student, working at Harvard Student Agencies, Spinnaker Software, and Microsoft. For another internship at BBN, a subsidiary of the military contractor Raytheon, which developed technology that eventually became the backbone of the internet, Tony had to undergo a background check to earn a security clearance with the federal government. One summer he joined the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit organization of volunteers who patrolled the streets of Boston wearing red berets and making citizen’s arrests. Initially founded in New York City in the 1970s to combat rising crime in the subway system, the organization had more than a hundred chapters in cities across the world. He spent a summer patrolling the Boston train system and sidewalks, and was given the code name “Secret,” he wrote later. “I learned later that one of the other gang members had originally wanted to name me ‘Ancient Chinese Secret.’” One of his most formative experiences occurred during a trip to the hospital. David Camacho, who lived in his dorm, had cut his finger, and Tony and Jose volunteered to take him to the emergency room. As the boys sat in the waiting room, a mentally unstable patient was shouting and making a commotion. The patient approached and began flicking them with blood from a festering wound. Tony was traumatized, not least by the fear of contracting AIDS or other bloodborne diseases. He took the experience to his creative writing class, where he wrote about the episode for an assignment. Jon recalled that Tony’s essay went into vivid detail about his encounter. “We were living in a bit of a cocoon,”

Jon said later. “He just wanted to highlight that there was another world out there.”

Tony may have been breaking loose from the shackles of childhood and beginning to understand the ways of the world, but he also missed being an entrepreneur. So in his junior year he came up with an ambitious plan: he would take over the late-night food joint in his dormitory, Quincy House, a student enterprise traditionally run by seniors. Unlike his past endeavors, such as button-making or newspaper delivery, which were motivated by Tony’s desire to make money, with the Quincy House Grille Tony had a different aim. With its foosball table, pinball machines, and proximity to their rooms, the Grille could be another hub for Tony to orchestrate connections between his friends. He discussed the idea with Sanjay, who agreed to partner with Tony. Later, at a dorm party, Tony met another student named Alfred Lin and told him about his idea. While Alfred would come to devise his own way to contribute to the business, it would be the first of several money-making ideas that Tony would share with the two young men. In order to manage the Quincy House Grille, potential student owners had to bid for ownership. Tony figured that since he was a junior and all the other bidders were seniors, he could afford to outbid all of them, as he had two years to cover the cost and even run up potential profits. So his plan was to top the highest bid by $1. It worked, and Tony and Sanjay took over the restaurant, meaning they did everything from deciding the menu and getting the ingredients to setting prices and cooking the food. For the first few months Tony took the subway to the nearest McDonald’s every day, where he negotiated with the manager there to sell him one hundred frozen McDonald’s hamburger patties and buns for a dollar each. Tony and Sanjay would then sell them at Quincy for $3. But the real money was in pizzas, which could be made at a cost of $2 and sold for $10 before toppings. So they spent $2,000 on a pizza oven and reopened the Grille as a pizza shop. Considering other ways to attract customers, Tony thought about why his dorm room was most often the preferred gathering spot for his friends. He called Alex in New York and

asked whether his mother, a successful television producer in Taiwan, might want to invest a couple of thousand dollars into the business. She said yes, and Tony spent the money on a new television. He then spent nights recording music videos on MTV and episodes of Melrose Place, the popular soap opera set in West Hollywood. Whenever commercials came on, he paused the recording, ensuring that his customers could enjoy uninterrupted viewing the next day (this was three years before TiVo was invented). Since their conversation at the dorm party, Alfred Lin had been thinking about his own plans for the Quincy House Grille. Each night, almost without fail, Alfred arrived at the cash register with an order for a large pizza, something that didn’t strike Tony as odd—Alfred had a voracious appetite, and Tony had given him the nicknames “Trash Compactor” and “Monster” due to his habit of finishing his friends’ leftovers at the local late-night Chinese restaurant. But some nights Alfred would return to Tony for a second pizza. Tony soon learned that Alfred—the future chief finance and operating officer of one of his companies—had started a pizza arbitrage business, selling pies by the slice to his roommates upstairs for a profit. The new pizza menu combined with nonstop music videos and TV shows made the Quincy House Grille into a real business venture with healthy profits; they paid off the pizza oven in three months. Had Harvard kept subsidizing employee wages at student-run enterprises, and had burglars not broken in and stolen more than $2,000 from the registers, Tony and Sanjay could have made some real money from it, and Alex’s mother could have recouped her investment. But it wouldn’t be the last time she invested in one of the boys’ half-baked ideas.

On graduation day in the spring of 1995, Tony and his friends gathered on the lawn, dressed in black commencement caps and gowns. Tony and Sanjay had graduated summa cum laude, among the group with the highest grades in their class. Jon Greenman, who had completed an internship with NASA during his studies, graduated magna cum laude. A photograph taken on that day shows Tony with ten of his friends. Half of Sanjay’s face is obscured by Jill Wheeler’s graduation cap, while Tony is standing tall

above his friends, staring unsmiling into the lens. The lack of expression on his face belied the overwhelming excitement he felt for an unknown future. That excitement was evident to his classmates, who saw through his introversion to a young man who was full of adventure and curiosity and was destined for greater things, even among a class of Harvard graduates. They agreed that it would be Tony who bound them together in the years ahead. “At the time, we were surrounded by all these people who we expected to go on and do great things,” Jill, who would go on to work in government in Washington, D.C., later told friends. “We were so worried that we would lose each other as life went on.” So they made a bet: If Tony became a millionaire within ten years of graduation, they would all go on a cruise and Tony would pay for everyone’s trip. If a decade passed and Tony still hadn’t become a millionaire, they would still go on a cruise, but everyone else would pool money to pay for it. Tony had already done the calculations. “To me, it seemed like a winwin situation,” he wrote later. “Either I would be a millionaire or I would get a free cruise. Either way, I would be happy.”

CHAPTER 4

LINKEXCHANGE

It was a weekday, and Tony and Sanjay were again lounging by the pool during a very long lunch break at their new condo in San Mateo, California. They had landed jobs right after college as software engineers at Oracle, the high-flying enterprise software behemoth at the heart of Silicon Valley. Led by the brash Bronx-born contrarian and playboy billionaire Larry Ellison, Oracle, which at the time was the world’s largest maker of data management software, was a keystone in Silicon Valley. Comparing their $40,000 salaries to what their other Harvard classmates would be earning, Tony and Sanjay learned they would be making a lot more money than the rest of them. “I felt that I’d succeeded,” Tony said. Aside from the pizzazz of working at a flashy company, the job checked Tony’s only requirements: it paid well and required very little effort. Tony was assigned to test software for bugs and ensure that it worked after updates, a process known as regression testing. Each day it took him five minutes to set up a test and three hours to wait for it to finish. Then he would repeat the process two more times and his day would end. But instead of waiting for the tests to end, Tony walked the few blocks back to his apartment, took a long lunch, napped, and then went to the pool with Sanjay if he was home. It did not take long for Tony to realize that his initial requirements did not equal fulfillment. He also became acutely aware of how the languor he was experiencing starkly contrasted with what was happening outside Oracle. The year 1995, business magazine Fast Company declared, was “The Year Everything Changed.” Silicon Valley was brimming with innovation. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and those who understood its

potential were finding multimillion-dollar ideas everywhere they looked. In January, a young Stanford graduate called Jerry Yang had registered the website domain Yahoo.com for a database he’d been building that sorted internet pages in a hierarchical order, making them easier to find, and thus launching the first popular search engine. Two months later, as Tony was finishing his last semester at Harvard, a man named Craig Newmark started an email distribution list to his friends to highlight local events happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. This grew into Craigslist—a national online classified-advertising website that would one day strip newspapers and magazines of a vital revenue stream and change the media business model forever. Then in April, the online dating website Match.com launched, opening introductions for millions of people to meet virtually, shifting the millennia-old method of courtship online. And by July, as Tony was toiling away at Oracle, a young investment banker named Jeff Bezos launched a small online bookstore called Amazon.com out of his garage in Seattle. Companies that were preparing society for the twenty-first century and that would one day change the world—the way we learn, meet, buy, sell— were popping up left and right, many within a few miles of where Tony lived. And because California prohibited—and continues to prohibit— companies from baking noncompete clauses into contracts, any employee could quit and immediately create a rival startup. And yet here were Tony and Sanjay—who graduated at the top of their class at Harvard— completely disengaged and bored, languishing around the pool. Making easy money at a big-name company, it turned out, didn’t align with Tony’s vision of being in control of his own destiny and creating his own rules. To combat their ennui, Tony and Sanjay began toying with ideas for a side business. They landed on a website design project. Sanjay was a gifted graphic designer and programmer but was even more introverted than Tony, so he focused on designing and coding the sites. Tony, despite all his fears and insecurities when it came to talking to strangers, assumed the role of salesman. To the surprise of both, their new venture, which they named Internet Market Solutions, seemed to take off. After the local chamber of commerce agreed to let them design its website for free, other small businesses signed up. A local mall paid them $2,000. Tony’s lunch breaks got longer. So did Sanjay’s nights, as he stayed up coding once his workday was done. After

five months the two had realized they weren’t going to build this company from their cubicles at Oracle, and something had to give. Tony walked past his manager’s office three times before he mustered the courage to quit. “Wow! You must be joining another startup,” his manager said to him. “How exciting for you.” Tony thought of his two-man operation working from the living room. Within a week, however, they learned a crucial lesson: neither of them was actually interested in web design. Tony wondered whether quitting Oracle had been a good idea; his father, Richard, made it clear that he did not think Internet Marketing Solutions would ever be a success. So they went back to the drawing board and on a weekend in March 1996 came up with the idea of LinkExchange. By building websites for local businesses, Tony and Sanjay learned that the only option for advertising online was to buy ads from tech behemoths like Yahoo or Netscape, which at a cost of as much as $10,000 a month was cost prohibitive. Just as Tony had crowdsourced study materials for his virtual Bible study group and then packaged the information into neat binders and sold it, LinkExchange enlisted small businesses to display banner ads for other companies on their websites for free. With hundreds of small business websites, LinkExchange could then sell packages of banner ads across these sites to larger companies that would pay to advertise within the LinkExchange-enlisted websites. This was achieved with a credit system: every time a visitor viewed a small business website and viewed the banner ad, the small business owner would earn half a credit that could be exchanged to display their own ad across the LinkExchange network. So if a business had a thousand views on its website, it could display an ad five hundred times across the network of other websites. LinkExchange would keep the other half of each credit to build out its own advertising inventory to sell to large clients. LinkExchange rapidly developed traction, and Tony and Sanjay soon found that their workload had become overwhelming. So they started calling up their friends. Among their first hires were Tony’s childhood friends Alex Hsu, who had just finished at NYU, and Eric Liu, who had just graduated from UC Berkeley. Anytime a Harvard friend visited San Francisco, Tony would try to convince them to stay and work at LinkExchange. When Hadi Partovi, a

Harvard friend Tony knew through the computer programming team, was offered a role, he declined because he was already working at Microsoft. But he offered up his twin brother, Ali, who he claimed was so similar to him that they sometimes switched places for job interviews. Ali was hired as the third partner for LinkExchange in August. Tony and Sanjay needed money to pay their new employees, so Tony turned to the only investor who knew his track record—Alex Hsu’s mother. Despite losing $2,000 in his pizza business at Harvard, she was open to hearing another pitch from him. This time she agreed to provide a $200,000 seed investment. Five months after they started in Tony and Sanjay’s living room, LinkExchange had grown into an office on Second Street, in San Francisco’s South of Market district, with fifteen employees. Looking around, Tony could see that with every new hire, he was recreating the magic of his Harvard dorm room. LinkExchange was becoming a hub for all his friends to be in one place. If everyone got along and had fun, he figured, they would work hard, play hard, and succeed. And like at Harvard, they often slept where they worked; employees recall Tony and Sanjay sleeping on a cot set up in the conference room. Outsiders were starting to notice that the formula was paying off. “Any time of the day or night, somebody would pick up the phone,” said Ariel Poler, a Silicon Valley veteran who had founded an internet company and served on several boards for other tech startups. Ali had reached out to Ariel, and after a meeting the three partners—Tony, Sanjay, and Ali—they asked him to be a part of LinkExchange. “I remember being blown away by how active and energetic, how smart they were,” Ariel said. He soon became chairman of LinkExchange.

Other Silicon Valley moneymakers were taking notice, too. Shortly before Poler signed on as chairman, Tony and Sanjay received a call from a man named Lenny Barshack. A former Wall Street executive, Barshack had spent ten years working for Salomon Brothers and New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg before deciding to leave finance for a chance to capitalize on the dot-com boom in the mid-1990s. He started an email

directory company called Bigfoot, which eventually became a holding company for several internet companies. Barshack wanted a meeting, so they went to a steakhouse in San Francisco. The pair of twenty-two-yearolds listened as Lenny, sipping a Kahlúa cocktail, made his offer: $1 million in cash to acquire LinkExchange and add it to Bigfoot’s portfolio. Tony, with his mop of hair, and Sanjay, with his dark bushy eyebrows, tried not to flinch. It was a life-changing amount of money. They told Lenny they needed a few days to think about it. Within twenty-four hours, Tony and Sanjay replied with a counteroffer of $2 million, so they could each walk away with $1 million. “I have read somewhere that you’re in your best negotiating position if you don’t care what the outcome is and you’re not afraid to walk away,” Tony said. “I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime,” Lenny responded, declining to meet their price. “But I’ve also lost a lot of money when I decided to bet the farm instead of taking money off the table. I wish you the best of luck.” Four months after Barshack’s offer, Ariel introduced Tony, Sanjay, and Ali to Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo. Jerry’s company had become the embodiment of the dot-com boom, its logo emblazoned on the homepage of millions of internet surfers, pre-Google. Yang had just led Yahoo through an initial public offering in April 1996, at a whopping $1 billion valuation—an extraordinary size at the time. Yang also had more in common with Hsieh than most other Silicon Valley founders at the time: they were both Taiwanese and at the helm of tech companies in an industry where the majority of C-suite-level executives were white. The three LinkExchange partners assumed Jerry wanted to broker an advertising deal between Yahoo and LinkExchange. But Yang didn’t want to negotiate a contract; he wanted to buy LinkExchange, for $20 million (the figure Tony cited in his memoir; according to Ali, it was actually $25 million). For the second time, Tony was doing everything he could not to flinch. The three founders informed their employees, still a tight-knit group of friends, of the offer, and for several nerve-racking days they considered their options. Tony understood that if they said yes to the deal, he would never have to work another day of his life. He then made a list of all the things he would buy with the money: a condo in San Francisco, a bigscreen TV, a computer. Maybe some long weekends in Miami or Las Vegas. But ultimately, he realized, he would likely use the money to start another

company because he loved the process of building and growing a venture. Why sell a company he was already excited about, only to start another company to be excited about? In the end, he and the other founders turned down Yahoo’s offer. It was a seminal decision he would cite over and over again to underpin his assertion that chasing profits had never been his game, that it was always about passion and purpose. “There will never be another 1997,” Tony said during a company meeting, announcing that the Yahoo deal was not happening. His voice trembled as he looked around at the familiar faces of his homegrown company and realized he saw relief. This was not a moment of failure. It was time to continue building. Yang, meanwhile, was dismayed by the failed acquisition and complained about it during a Yahoo board meeting, which caught the attention of one of his board members, Michael Moritz, a famed investor at the storied venture firm Sequoia Capital. Moritz, a British former journalist whose short-cropped hair and frameless glasses made him look more like a professor of capitalist theory than a venture capitalist, was known for being introspective and proper. Days after meeting the three founders at the LinkExchange office on Second Street, Sequoia invested $2.75 million in LinkExchange, bringing invaluable cachet and credibility to the company. Before this point, the only outside investor they had was Alex’s mother. Shortly after, Tony approached Alfred Lin, his Harvard classmate, who after graduating had decided to get a PhD in statistics at Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. Tony had wanted to work with Alfred on a business ever since they graduated and had pitched to Alfred everything from a joint Subway sandwich franchise to LinkExchange when he and Sanjay first thought of the idea in March 1996. But Alfred was cautious as well as obedient—he did not want to anger his parents and drop out of grad school to go into what seemed like a very nascent idea with Tony. He had been intrigued enough, however, to join LinkExchange part-time while he was enrolled in his PhD program. Now with backing from Moritz, he was entirely onboard and joined the company full-time as vice president of finance.

Over the next year and a half, the company spun into overdrive. They opened sales offices in New York and Chicago, and expanded to additional floors in their building on Second Street. The three founders ensured that they were accessible to the workers, eschewing corner offices and choosing instead to sit in the pit with the rest of the rank-and-file employees. All three had a computer science background, but they played slightly different roles. None was officially given the chief executive officer title. “We didn’t really have a CEO,” said Poler. “We just had the three guys splitting things. They were always a group to me.” Ali took charge of business development strategy, while Sanjay, still painfully introverted, remained behind the scenes as head of product. Tony, described by early LinkExchangers as genuine and authentic in more intimate settings, was not necessarily a natural choice for a leader, and he was uncomfortable with public speaking. Kevin Ascher, an early employee, recalled seeing one of Tony’s speeches during a company meeting. “He was shuffling his feet. Not making eye contact and staring at the ground,” he said. “He had his hands in his pockets the whole time.” But while Tony lacked presence in the spotlight, he went out of his way to ensure that everyone felt included. “Tony instantly made me feel welcomed and comfortable,” said Susan Cooney, one of LinkExchange’s first female employees. “It was all those small interactions. They would all be walking out the door and it would be all guys and Tony would say to me, ‘Hey, Susan, come join us, we’re going to grab a bite to eat.’” Tony’s words were few, which made anything he said seem more important. “Tony was the most visible founder,” said Skye Pillsbury, a public relations employee at LinkExchange. “People just had a respect for Tony. He was a kind person, he always seemed fair, and when he spoke you wanted to hear what he had to say.” Public speaking and building out the story around himself and the company was a skill that he wanted to improve, Skye recalled. “After we met with a journalist, he would always ask me, ‘How did I do? Was it a good meeting?’ He really wanted to parse it out afterwards, and he was very open to any advice and guidance that I had for him.” So while there was no official CEO, to Sequoia and the rest of the board, “Tony was their darling,” Susan Cooney said. This was particularly evident from his ability to humanize LinkExchange’s corporate entrants. Moritz, who had joined the board, was

not necessarily an ideal culture fit—buttoned-up and twenty years older than the majority of employees—but he understood founders and also knew when to crack a smile. Shortly after Michael joined the board, the company asked him to come to the offices for the “initiation meeting,” a monthly event at LinkExchange where new employees would be tricked into wearing suits and ties for what they thought was a formal event, when in reality it was a practical joke—an idea of Tony’s. During this meeting, Moritz and the new hires stood at the front of the room. Then, under Tony’s direction, someone broke out a boom box and started blasting Los Del Rio’s “Macarena.” Everyone in the room started clapping and cheering as Michael Moritz was forced to cross his arms and sway his hips in front of the entire company. Tony looked around at all the laughing faces in the room with feelings of contentment and happiness. I can’t believe this is real, Tony thought. Outside of hazing new hires, LinkExchange started other traditions like happy hours at the local Irish dive bar, called Kate O’Brien’s. Another staple event was DrinkExchange, a monthly party hosted at different venues for tech employees from all over Silicon Valley, who were required to buy two drinks and give one away—a play on the credit system at LinkExchange. “Where Wuppies Gather: DrinkExchange Draws Hundreds Every Month,” read a 1997 headline from the San Francisco Chronicle. A play on “yuppie,” the word “wuppie” was reserved for flashy young professionals who made their fortunes on the web. “Last month, 400 revelers—mostly people in their 20s who work for Internet startups— congregated at Backflip in the Tenderloin,” the Chronicle article stated. “A line snaked out into the street and the wait at the bar was so long that people snuck in beers from the outside.” Many of those who worked at LinkExchange during this time recalled a fast-paced and exciting culture. “It still goes down as my favorite work experience for my whole career,” said Kevin Ascher. “It was magical, and it was just fun. Everyone liked each other, and it was as much a social life as it was a work life.” Tony started to drink more at LinkExchange. Having lived mostly a life of sobriety, he was now twenty-three years old and willing to embrace libations. Michael Bayle, one of the employees who organized DrinkExchange, remembered Tony being one of the biggest supporters of the event, even with his “Asian flush”—a reaction to alcohol that typically

affects people of Asian descent (because of a missing enzyme that processes alcohol in the body) and which turns people’s faces red while speeding up their heart rate and inducing headaches and nausea. “He would turn super red within seconds of any beer,” Bayle said. Skye Pillsbury also recalled Tony’s enthusiasm during one press tour trip, when he bought everyone tequila shots. “I actually remembered being really surprised because I didn’t picture him as a guy who would stay up until 1 a.m. drinking tequila shots,” she said. She recalled him being giggly and funny that night. “I remember feeling that he was more himself, like he came out of his shell after drinking.”

To those who saw and worked with Tony during this time, he seemed like a natural leader who was still learning but had all the potential to be great. To former Harvard classmates whom Tony had hired to help out at LinkExchange, he remained the mischievous and curious friend with wild ideas. In the summer of 1998, Tony organized an impromptu trip to Yosemite, and went to the camping store near the LinkExchange office to buy everyone tents. In addition to Sanjay and Alex Hsu, other college friends including Jill Wheeler and Kami Hayashi joined them. Packed into Tony’s mother’s minivan, they left after work and arrived at Yosemite after dark, complicating the process of setting up the tents. No one remembered to bring flashlights, but of course Tony kept night-vision goggles in his mother’s minivan. Once they finished setting up one of the newly purchased tents, they realized yet another mistake: they would not be able to fit inside because Tony had bought ones meant for kids. The party ended up sleeping in the van. Tony was also in charge of groceries for the trip, which to him meant a bag of potatoes, hot dogs, and beer. The plan was to cut open the beer cans and cook the potatoes inside. But cooking potatoes on a campfire took longer than expected, so they ended up eating cold hot dogs. Just as the group thought not much else could go wrong, the minivan’s brakes overheated on the drive home and stopped working as they wound through Yosemite Valley. Counting the mishaps and hijinks, the trip made for yet

another typical adventure with Tony. It was the fairy tale that Tony had envisioned for himself and his friends all along. But even fairy tales have an ending. Tony’s time at LinkExchange was soon marred by internal politics and drama that led to lessons learned. In 1997, as the dot-com era was in full swing, Ali had started discussions with Viaweb, a newer startup led by Paul Graham (who would later launch the storied startup accelerator Y Combinator), about merging their businesses. Just as the discussions were starting to finalize, Jerry Yang came knocking again. He offered $125 million for Yahoo to buy LinkExchange. It was a lot of money, and enough to do away with any previous hesitations Tony, Ali, and Sanjay might have had. They said yes to Yahoo, signed a term sheet, and agreed to cut off talks with Viaweb. Days before signing the final agreement, Ali met Jerry Yang—the “undisputed king of internet at the time,” Ali later recalled—for drinks. In Ali’s excitement, he suggested to Yang that Yahoo should also think about acquiring Viaweb to make Yahoo’s search engine a powerhouse. “Our guys looked at them,” Yang responded. “We weren’t that impressed with their people.” Ali, an excitable twenty-five-year-old, his confidence boosted by alcohol as well as the looming prospect of more wealth than he had ever imagined, challenged Yang. “Jerry, your guys are wrong,” he said. “The Viaweb team is amazing. Their engineers are probably better than yours.” Then Ali added, “They are hands down better than us.” “Interesting,” Yang replied. A few days later, after news of the Yahoo acquisition had already filtered through the LinkExchange halls, exciting employees of every rank, the founders received a devastating call. The $125 million deal was off. LinkExchange chairman Poler, who knew Jerry Yang personally, remembered that Yahoo had claimed there was “an issue with a pooling of interest or accounting problems,” he said. But in fact, with the help of Ali, Yang realized there was a better deal out there. A few weeks later, a new headline blared through the press and across the internet: Yahoo was buying Viaweb for $49 million. LinkExchange soon realized that they needed a backup cash reserve, in case their revenue suddenly disappeared. An initial public offering (IPO), which could generate much-needed cash while paying out to investors like Sequoia that were seeking high-yield returns, seemed the most obvious

resolution. That was until the Russian financial crisis hit in August 1998, creating a cascading effect on economies worldwide that suddenly erased the possibility of an IPO. The other solution would be to seek an emergency round of funding or an acquisition. To prepare the company for a big exit, LinkExchange’s board decided to bring in a new chief executive officer named Mark Bozzini. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for a board to bring in a more seasoned CEO to a company in which the founders were very inexperienced business-wise. But according to several former LinkExchangers, hiring Mark—who was the chief executive at Pete’s Brewing Company before joining and did not have relevant experience in tech—was not a good move from the beginning. “Things did not go well with the CEO,” said Ariel Poler. “Not a happy thing. I don’t think it was a good cultural fit.” “I would not describe him as someone who was beloved,” Skye said. It felt like “outsiders coming in to make us look ready for the next step. Tony didn’t sound like a talking-points founder. Mark was the opposite.” Meanwhile, according to one former LinkExchanger, there were employees who wanted to invest in the company ahead of the acquisition so they could make money by selling shares when the company was worth more. Tony and Sanjay were pushing for this plan, but other leaders shot the idea down. “Tony and Sanjay were doing their darndest to keep the culture together, and I believe they both struggled,” according to the employee. Now in three cities with hundreds of employees, Tony started seeing unfamiliar faces in the office. “At the time, I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing. If anything, not recognizing people due to our hypergrowth made things even more exciting,” he later said. “But looking back, it should have been a huge warning sign for what was to come.” Tony never said whether there were specific employees who were hired or certain events that happened that led to his feelings of ill will toward the LinkExchange culture. Instead, he described it as a death by a thousand cuts. “Drop by drop, day by day, any single drop or bad hire was bearable and not that big a deal,” Tony said. “But in the aggregate, it was torture.” Somehow along the way, Tony felt he had lost control of the culture and direction of LinkExchange. Toward the end of 1998, Tony became disengaged. One morning he found himself pressing the snooze button on the alarm clock six times

before coming to a harsh realization: the last time he’d pressed the snooze button that many times was when he was running software tests at Oracle. His detachment was felt throughout the company. “When Mark came in, you just saw less of Tony,” Pillsbury recalled. Despite Tony’s personal withdrawal, the board was still searching for funding that could help it survive a potential economic crisis but realized that LinkExchange remained an attractive asset with solid financials. In the end, Microsoft came to LinkExchange with the highest offer. Hadi, the twin brother of Ali, who worked at Microsoft, sent a message to Microsoft’s chief executive at the time, Steve Ballmer, vouching for LinkExchange. As part of the deal, Microsoft wanted all three founding partners—Tony, Sanjay, and Ali—to stay at LinkExchange for another twelve months. In most acquisitions, the board of directors has a say in such requests. But in this instance, in another vote of confidence, Michael Moritz turned to the three founders during a board meeting and said, “Look, guys, it’s your company. Whatever you want to do.” After some deliberation, they decided to go through with the sale, which garnered mixed feelings. At the time, Microsoft was seen as “the evil empire” by many in Silicon Valley. The company was in the midst of major antitrust investigations launched by the U.S. government and was largely viewed as a bully to competitors. There was also a sense that Yahoo could have been a better fit as a parent company. “Yahoo was more our culture,” said Skye. “Being acquired by Microsoft felt like being acquired by corporate America. It wasn’t the acquisition or exit that a lot of us pictured.” The exit negotiations left a deep impact on Tony. It was his first experience in true corporate America—the dog-eat-dog kind of dealmaking that was unforgiving toward empathetic leaders who cared more about changing the world and helping employees and small business owners than just a big, cash-positive heavy exit strategy. “Without getting into too much detail (and to protect the guilty), it was an education to me in human behavior and character,” he later wrote. “Large amounts of money have a strange way of getting people’s true colors to come out. I observed the greed of certain people who had joined the company right before the acquisition trying to negotiate side contracts for themselves at the risk and expense of everyone else in the company. There was a lot of drama as

people started fighting and trying to maximize the financial outcome only for themselves.” According to Steve Valenzuela, the chief financial officer of LinkExchange who was brought in right before the acquisition to work with Alfred Lin and prepare the company for an IPO, the negotiations started at noon on a Sunday in Redmond, Washington, at Microsoft’s headquarters. Microsoft first punted over a price tag of $120 million, which Valenzuela said was “totally unacceptable.” After six hours of back-and- forth in the board room, Valenzuela finally got Microsoft to $250 million. He then negotiated an additional $15 million to go toward key employees of the company for retention purposes—which Tony and Sanjay then took to the LinkExchange board for approval. Tony also encouraged executives to give up some of their equity to give back to employees who did not have as much stock, including some lowerlevel employees. This was not well received by all the executives at LinkExchange. “It was pretty unusual at the time,” Valenzuela said, who gave up some of his own equity, per Tony’s suggestion. As for the financial outcome for Tony, he would be set for life. If he agreed to stay for the full year after the acquisition, his take-home would be $40 million in Microsoft stock. If he didn’t, he would still take home roughly $32 million. A few weeks later, in early November 1998, Tony and Sanjay found themselves at lunch together at a restaurant close to LinkExchange. As they were about to finish eating, Tony got a call. It was Alfred. He had just heard from Steve, who was closing the deal at Microsoft’s headquarters. “Well, I guess the deal closed,” Tony said to Sanjay. They stared at each other— Tony with the same mop of hair, Sanjay with the same thick brows. Except this time they weren’t staring at each other in shock, as they had after Lenny Barshack made his offer. It was in apathy and relief—relief that this was finally over. “I guess we should probably walk back to the office then,” Tony said to Sanjay. “Okay,” he replied. Shortly after, Tony found himself making a list similar to the one he’d made when they got the first offer from Jerry Yang. This time, however, the list was not about all the things he would buy with his newfound wealth. It was a list of the happiest periods in his life. He realized that none of those moments involved money. All of them included building businesses and

experiences. “Being creative and inventive made me happy,” he said. “Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy.” Tony left LinkExchange before a year passed. Though he left about $8 million behind, his stake was still worth $32 million—an eye-watering sum for a twenty-five-year-old. Shortly after, he took his friends from Harvard and a few others on a cruise. A bet is a bet, and Tony had become a millionaire within three years of graduating. But while surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy. What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered. Such questions guide the lives of many, only now Tony had more money than most would ever see in a lifetime. “If you hate someone, give them a winning lottery ticket and announce it to the world,” his childhood friend Alex Hsu later said. “Having so much financial success in your twenties and early thirties comes with a different set of challenges that most people will never have to face.”

CHAPTER 5

RAVING

Their heads swayed in unison, their minds and bodies seemingly connected by the bass line thundering through the warehouse, as green laser beams cut through the darkness. Black light illuminated the neon-hued objects and artworks that soared above their heads and decorated the walls, while the acrid smell of fog machines and sweat filled their nostrils. Thousands of faces looked forward, as if possessed by a higher power, their eyes transfixed on the DJ commanding the space at the end of the room. With every tweak of the track, every bass drop, every brush with the person next to him, Tony was experiencing an epiphany. For the first time, his body and mind were connected to a group of unknown people through techno. “The steady wordless electronic beats were the unifying heartbeats that synchronized the crowd,” Tony later wrote of the night in early 1999. “It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness, the same way a flock of birds might seem like a single entity instead of a collection of individual birds. Everyone in the warehouse had a shared purpose. We were all contributors to the collective rave experience.” In what seemed like a single moment in time at a run-down warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of the Bay Area, Tony let go of all the logic and rationale that had guided his life to that point and instead found himself being swept by a sense of spirituality. Not a religious feeling, but a connection to those around him. The experience would prove life changing, like an undiscovered power had been unlocked in his mind. “I had awakened,” he wrote later. “I had been transformed.”

The rave scene in San Francisco had been sparked in the early 1990s, partly driven by self-professed computer geeks who arrived in San Francisco as open-minded, sexually liberated, optimistic young people. “They not only created Internet communities around rave culture; they nurtured and participated in the dot-com boom itself,” wrote one journalist. Fueled by acid and MDMA (Ecstasy), the Bay Area was awash in party drugs, with raves popping up in abandoned warehouses all over. To avoid authorities trying to shut the events down in a game of Whac-A-Mole, organizers used clandestine methods to issue times, dates, and locations to attendees by handing out rave flyers at company events or college campuses. One reveler recounted that for one such rave, known as Eon, attendees were told to call the number on a flyer. A voice on the other end of the line provided the next step: Go to the donut shop on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley and find the two men sitting in a corner with a cash box and hand over five dollars. Then the men would write instructions and an address on a piece of paper, revealing the secret location. “Some rave club owners and promoters sell specialty items to dancers in a way that arguably promotes MDMA use,” read a notice from the National Drug Intelligence Center at the time. “They provide bottled water and sports drinks to manage hyperthermia and dehydration; pacifiers to prevent involuntary teeth clenching; and menthol nasal inhalers, and chemical lights, and neon glow sticks, necklaces, and bracelets to enhance the effects of MDMA.” Tony tried MDMA for the first time in 1999, the same year he went to his first warehouse rave, and not long after he became a millionaire at twenty-five years of age. “The drug was transformative for us to a certain degree,” said a close friend of Tony’s who had known him for years and was present when Tony first tried the drug. “It kind of consumed our lives for a little bit.” The experience of taking MDMA can be cathartic, and by coupling that with raving, Tony was connecting to a side of himself he hadn’t tapped into previously. The most common effects of the substance are to give users a heightened sense of awareness, well-being, empathy, and transcendence. The chemicals release a rush of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine that medical practitioners say provide “optimal conditions for engaging in processing of difficult or traumatic material.” Later in life, he’d deflect reporters’ questions about potential drug use, but acknowledged that it was part of the scene. Unlike

the Tony of yesteryear, who’d remained quiet around strangers and stuck close to his circle, during the warehouse raves he found himself opening up and meeting strangers in a euphoric state and felt his walls come down. “At raves, it was part of the culture and considered perfectly normal to approach strangers and strike up a conversation,” he later said. This was a practice that he took beyond the warehouse raves. “I learned to feel comfortable starting conversations with complete strangers no matter where I was or who they were.” Tony also began to experiment with acid. After he tried it, “he would just try to do it himself just to explore who he was,” a friend said.

While the raves were a defining feature of Tony’s newfound freedom after his LinkExchange windfall, he and his friends were building their next idea. One day during the winter, Tony had been driving around San Francisco in his modest Acura Integra when he saw that AMC Theaters was opening a new complex at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, an ornate building in the center of town. Upon closer inspection he learned that the building, which had formerly been a Cadillac showroom, had just been converted into a flashy mixed-use residential and retail space. Tony saw what it could become, with its high ceilings, tall windows, and architecture that mixed Renaissance Italy with idealized Spanish colonial style, and he convinced Alfred, Sanjay, Eric Liu, and Alex Hsu to buy residential condos in the building alongside him. He also bought a handful of other apartments to convince other friends to move in. He and Alfred started an investment firm called Venture Frogs—a name chosen after one of their friends dared them to name the firm after her pet frog—with a mandate to invest in companies with great founders and great ideas. They convinced Sanjay, Alex Hsu, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Ariel Poler, and other former LinkExchangers to back the firm. Together, they raised $27 million. Venture Frogs would be headquartered in one of the loft apartments at 1000 Van Ness, and they took over two retail spaces adjacent to the lobby. In one of the spaces would be the Venture Frogs Incubator—an office space their portfolio companies could work from, with the hope that the companies’ teams would collide and germinate new ideas. Eric, who

founded a web design company that Venture Frogs invested in, worked in the incubator. There were days when they never left the building because there simply was no need—the commute from home to work was a short elevator ride. The other retail space would be the Venture Frogs Restaurant, which Tony gave to his parents, Richard and Judy, to manage with the goal of feeding the founders and other employees working out of the incubator. It would go through several iterations, including noodle dishes and boba. At one point its menu had a tech industry theme, with cocktails named after venture funds on Sand Hill Road, the famous street in Palo Alto where all the biggest firms like Kleiner Perkins and Accel were located. The dishes, meanwhile, were named after tech companies, like SoftBank Chicken Satay and Cisco Chinese Chicken Salad. More than a decade before Adam Neumann, the Israeli entrepreneur and marketing spin doctor who blurred the lines between work, play, and other parts of life with the ethos of the co-working venture WeWork and its residential arm WeLive, Tony fused those elements together at 1000 Van Ness, just as he had done at Harvard. Once they moved into the building, Tony and his friends owned 20 percent of its apartments—technically registered to a separate address, 151 Alice B. Toklas Place, because the complex was so large—and had 40 percent of the seats on the board of the building’s homeowners’ association. “We could create our own adult version of a college dorm and build our own community,” he wrote later. “It was an opportunity for us to create our own world. It was perfect.” But at Harvard, he and his friends had been connected by an underlying thread: they were all naturally gifted intellectuals. They would stay up all night together, to be sure, but it was not to party—it was to watch movies, play cards or video games, and order takeout. Until now, he had spent his life on a strict path first laid out by his parents and then guided by his own intelligence and ambition, and there hadn’t been time or the environment for him to truly let loose. The adventurous and experience-creating side of him that dared to take out The “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Boys from the local library or drive all the way to Mexico by himself to watch an eclipse was about to enter a new phase. “I think all the growing up that we all did, in high school and college and post-college, a lot of that was delayed for him,” said a close childhood friend.

While he already lived in a 1,400-square-foot loft on the seventh floor, there was a sprawling 3,500-square-foot penthouse on the floor above: unit 810. Seeing the open space in his new figurative dorm, Tony knew exactly what to do with it. He purchased the loft and decided that the space would be used to “architect our parties and gatherings,” as he later said. It quickly became the central hub for socializing, partying, and after-hours debauchery. With two bedrooms, a contraband indoor hot tub, a setup for a deejay to spin, and a living room so large that it would look empty even if a hundred people were in there, it became an epic party spot for his growing circle of friends (much to the chagrin of his neighbors). Club BIO, as it became known because the unit number looked like the letters B-I-O, was part of Tony’s grand vision to re-create elements of the TV shows Friends and Melrose Place: all of his friends living, working, and partying in close proximity. Tony was enamored with the idea of creating an enclosed world for him and his friends within a single city block. “I wanted 810 to become our tribe’s own private version of Central Perk,” he later wrote, referring to the famous coffee shop in Friends. “I envisioned our friends gathering in 810 on Sundays for champagne brunches. I envisioned 810 as being the afterparty meet-up spot after a night out at a club, bar, or rave.” Victoria Recano first met Tony and Alfred when she arrived at 1000 Van Ness to interview them for a piece on ZDTV, a cable channel that focused on computers, technology, and the internet. She’d been skimming news stories looking for a lead and had come across an article that detailed how Tony and Alfred, after the success of LinkExchange, had launched a new startup incubator in the former Cadillac building. It was Tony’s first oncamera interview, and he appeared terribly nervous. She thought it was intriguing that his parents were managing the restaurant in the building, and interviewed them, too. Once the cameras were off, Tony mentioned they were having a party at their place at 1000 Van Ness and that Victoria should come. In her early twenties, Victoria, who had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri, still considered herself both conservative and pretty innocent— she hadn’t ever been drunk—but she had arrived in San Francisco only recently and didn’t know many people. So she agreed, and brought along a friend of hers named Tom. When they walked into the party in Club BIO, the first thing they noticed was the

hot tub in the living room. Tom thought it was awesome. Victoria thought it was gross. Walking farther into the space, Tony showed her over to a table, where there was a gigantic bowl of punch and other drinks. “Let me make you something and you can try it,” he said to her, adding that if she didn’t like it, she didn’t have to drink it. “I had a couple of sips and that was that,” Victoria recalled. Looking around at the party, she saw a group of people having fun. She and Tom attended a few other parties at Club BIO, but often left early enough to avoid the wildness of the wee hours. Another new entrant to Tony’s life during this era was a man named James Henrikson. The two met on a camping trip in 1998 when Tony’s childhood friend Eric Liu brought along James, whom he knew from UC Berkeley, where they had been fraternity brothers. “It was not what you thought of when you think of Greek life,” said James. “It was more a bunch of guys with no money going on ski trips with no girls.” James studied biology, physics, and chemistry at Berkeley, then moved to Hawaii with his girlfriend for a year to study for the MCAT with the intention to go to medical school. After a year in the Aloha State, he decided he did not want ten more years of school. So he went back to San Francisco and, after a year of little income, started working three jobs: options trading for a brokerage firm, lab work at UC San Francisco, and retail management at the clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch. After getting back in touch with Eric, who was still at LinkExchange right around the time of the acquisition, James found himself making s’mores around a campfire next to Tony. “When I got there, I didn’t know who Tony was,” James said. “When I left, we were best friends.” The two connected over a love for meeting new people. But while Tony was initially shy around strangers, James was extroverted in comparison, which made him a perfect companion for Tony. The two started hanging out together and soon became inseparable. Though James lived only a few blocks away, Tony asked him to move to 1000 Van Ness. “You need to move in with me,” Tony said to him. “I’m tired of walking back and forth.” James moved into the building shortly thereafter. San Francisco was the bedrock of two social undercurrents that peaked in 1999: the lavish dot-com era and rave culture. The dot-com bubble had been frothing for a few years by now, and startup companies that had zero track record and no path to profitability were still somehow either getting venture funding or going public in the markets. Whether the companies

were celebrating an IPO or a new product, tech startups became notorious for spending excessively on massive soirees. “Dot-Com Party Madness” was one headline from the online publication Salon. “Forget about return on investment. Bay Area tech companies spend $1 million a month on food, drink and music in exchange for ‘buzz.’ … In any given week, technology companies throw 15 to 20 parties in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Tony and James became regulars on the circuit. Shortly after Marc Benioff launched Salesforce.com in 1999, a company that would propel him into the billionaire ranks and make him the self-appointed benefactor-in-chief of San Francisco in decades to come, he threw a party to commemorate the company’s founding. “The company had 200 customers by then but still minuscule revenues and no profits,” read a CNN story at the time. “That didn’t stop Benioff from wanting to throw the best launch party ever.” Benioff rented the entire Regency Theater in San Francisco for a 2,000person event headlined by the B-52s, whose hit “Love Shack” could send even the most introverted software engineers into a hip sway. “It’s simply become part of the way we do business,” Craigslist’s Craig Newmark told a reporter at the time. Tony dove deep into his new social life and picked up new interests. He found a group of people to start playing poker with, and another set of friends who partied much more than his Harvard and LinkExchange friends. He reconnected with high school friends who since their time at Branson had met new people, who were now brought into the sphere. Tony relished it. “As our group grew, I realized that forming new friendships and deepening the connections within our burgeoning tribe was bringing both a sense of stability and a sense of excitement about the future for all of us,” he wrote later. “The connectedness we felt was making all of us happier, and we realized it was something that we had all missed from our college days.” On nights at Club BIO, friends recalled as much as $10,000 being spent on alcohol, only to have it run out before midnight. DJ Solomon, the local deejay for the Golden State Warriors, the Bay Area’s NBA team, would occasionally be seen spinning a record in a corner, amid enough fog machines to cause a fire hazard. At one point, one of the rooms in the penthouse earned the nickname “the penalty box”; it was a room full of

mattresses. “Let’s just say they kind of liked to explore the boundaries,” said the friend. On a weekly basis, Tony and his group were attending warehouse raves or going to nightclubs. Some friends recalled what felt like endless nights at 1015 Folsom, a nondescript building in a then-seedy part of San Francisco’s South of Market. On any given Friday, two chaotic dance floors were illuminated with strobe lights and lasers flickering around the windowless club, piercing the faux fog. The floor would be covered with sweat, spilled drinks, and empty beer cans. As bouncers bottlenecked the line snaking from the entrance doors out on the sidewalk, Tony and his friends were getting lost in the rhythm of techno inside. Their nights ultimately continued with a thirty-minute pilgrimage back to Club BIO, where the party would live on. But as the partying intensified and the spontaneous afterparties ultimately wound up at 1000 Van Ness, college friends like Alfred and Sanjay often skipped the Club BIO nights, preferring to go back to their own apartments instead. Some were in serious relationships; most were simply disinterested in this new lifestyle. Where they left holes, Tony found people to fill in the gaps. Tony would think, “‘I like partying with this person, and I shall absorb her into the orbit,’” said a close childhood friend. “Which is just really different from what kind of drove the earlier groups.”

By day, away from the raves and drug experimentation, Tony was still reserved, shy, and thoughtful. He often slept in one of the rooms at Club BIO, but when he needed quiet or solitude, particularly when he wanted to read, he’d hang out in the lobby of the building or go to Unit 706, where his younger brother, Andy Hsieh, had moved. That unit “was a more controlled environment,” said James. “[Unit] 706 was basically Andy, and quiet. It was kind of like Tony’s bat cave.” One night in 1999, Tony met a woman named Eva Lee during a group dinner. Small and slight, she was similarly introverted and kept to herself. For a while, their friendship was platonic—but it was clear Tony took a liking to her. After learning that she was a huge fan of Star Trek, Tony took

her to see Star Trek: The Experience, a themed attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton, despite his having a fever. Tony finally worked up the courage to ask Eva out around nine months after they met, and even then, he found a roundabout way to do it. Instead of outright asking her, Tony gave her a CD for the single “Sometimes” by Britney Spears, who had just released her debut album in January. Sometimes I run, Sometimes I hide. Sometimes I’m scared of you. But all I wanna do is to hold you tight. Britney’s sweet and gentle croon, it seemed, was enough to sway Eva. They started dating shortly after, and Tony saw in her someone he could connect with. He took her to her first rave. Eva went with Tony and his family back to Branson to attend his younger brother Dave’s high school graduation. Eventually Eva moved into 1000 Van Ness with Tony and started working for the Venture Frogs Restaurant as the assistant manager. One event they attended together as a couple was the wedding of Victoria, the news reporter, and her friend-turned-husband Tom. There’s a photo of the just-married couple with a group of friends, including Tony and Eva. Tony, looking like another version of himself—out of character in a black suit, tie, and a crisp white shirt—has a slight smile on his face. Tucked behind him is Eva, wearing a black dress, her head tilted toward the lens. At first glance, they look like they could have been the next couple in the group to tie the knot.

Amid the parties, raves, and relationships, Tony was still running a $27 million fund with Alfred at the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999. Though Alfred was rarely seen at the afterparties or clubs, he was the one being photographed next to Tony in news clippings about Venture Frogs. In one photograph for the San Francisco Chronicle, the two are smiling and looking at each other—Alfred in thick glasses and a blue button-down tucked into khakis, and Tony in a black-and-white checkered collared shirt, unbuttoned and untucked.

Their investment philosophy was to make small angel investments— anywhere from $100,000 to $3 million—in a lot of internet companies. Then after a few months, during which the companies would ideally be working out of the Venture Frogs Incubator and eating from the Venture Frogs Restaurant, they would get the bigger venture firms like Sequoia and Accel to invest as well. In their first year, they invested in twenty-seven companies, including AskJeeves, OpenTable, Tellme Networks, Entango, NeoPlanet, and Fusion. But it quickly turned out that they were better at leading companies than investing in them, and not all of their investments were well thought-out. In 1999 there was a frenzy to buy internet website addresses when people realized that often-used words generated vast internet traffic. Many of the domain names, as they are known, were sold through auctions. For example, www.business.com was sold for $7.5 million to a company called eCompanies, while Bank of America paid $3 million to own the domain www.loans.com. Tony decided he wanted to buy www.drugs.com, and won with a bid for $823,456, a number he chose because it was Alex Hsu’s cellphone number. “We hope to be partnering with Drugstore.com and PlanetRx and other online pharmacies,” Tony said at the time, though the mischievous side of him simply enjoyed the idea of owning drugs.com. They never got around to it, and sold the domain within two years. Tony also decided to purchase www.bbq.com and asked Alex to repurpose it to sell grills, along with two other former Harvard classmates who were now working at Venture Frogs. “I was coming to work every morning being like, wait, what am I doing with my life?” Alex said. One day, as Tony and Alfred walked into their Venture Frogs office— which was still in the one-bedroom loft—Tony saw a blinking red light on his voice message machine. The voicemail was from a man named Nick Swinmurn. He had recently bought the domain name www.shoesite.com and set up a website, he said, and wanted to create the largest online shoe store in the world. Tony’s immediate thought was that it made for a ridiculous premise for an internet company: There’s no way people would be willing to buy shoes online without trying them on first. Then the disembodied voice started citing data points, which piqued Tony’s interest. Footwear is a $40 billion industry in the United States. Catalog sales make up $2 billion. It is likely that e-commerce will continue to grow. And it is

likely that people will continue to wear shoes in the foreseeable future. Soon after, Tony invited Nick to an informal meeting at the Venture Frogs office. Nick, who had just graduated from college a few years earlier, showed up wearing shorts and a T-shirt, which made Tony like him even more. The idea behind ShoeSite, Nick told Tony, had grown out of his frustration with buying footwear in stores. What if there was a single place online where people could search for exactly the shoe they want, in exactly the right size, and have it show up on their doorstep in a few days? Repeating his voicemail pitch, Nick told Tony that 5 percent of sales in the $40 billion footwear industry were already conducted through paper mailorder catalogs. The numbers not only disproved Tony’s initial reaction that people wouldn’t buy shoes without trying them on but also made him realize the opportunity was massive. Though Nick’s pitch hyped ShoeSite as a tech-driven company, its origins were laughably archaic. Nick would go to a nearby shoe store, take photos of their inventory, and put it up on the website. When a customer purchased shoes from shoesite.com, Nick would go back to the store, buy it, and ship it out himself. And he’d started getting customers. The theory worked—people were willing to buy shoes online. Now he just had to refine it and make it scalable and profitable. At the moment, he’d only raised $150,000 from friends and family, and Nick wanted Venture Frogs to be his first outside investor. Hearing Nick’s pitch and story, they were intrigued. But on a call later, Alfred asked a simple question: “Do you have any experience in the footwear industry?”

CHAPTER 6

THE SHOE GUY

Fred Mossler was surrounded by boxes in a stockroom when he noticed the light on his desk phone blinking. Probably another voicemail from a vendor, he figured. As the regional men’s shoe buyer for Nordstrom, he had spent the last eight years working his way up through the ranks of the retailer. He was good at what he did, and until that moment before he picked up the phone to listen to the message, he had what he figured was a pretty easygoing, well-to-do life. After graduating from Southern Oregon University in 1990 with a business degree, Fred had headed north to Seattle for a job at Nordstrom’s headquarters. It was still an old-school shop nearing its centennial at that point, and the retailer still required all of its employees—including the fourth-generation Nordstrom family members— to work the shop floor before moving into corporate roles. From selling shoes, Fred had since moved with the company from Seattle to Sacramento, then to Hawaii—where he met his second wife—and now back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’d grown up in the 1960s and 1970s. At six foot four, with the look of a Northern California surfer and a thick shock of hair that framed a face some would say resembled the movie star Nicolas Cage’s, he had recently become a father to a baby boy, and he and his wife were planning out their future; they had just put a deposit down on a house in San Francisco. It had taken him hard work to get to this point, but now, in his early thirties, life’s promises were opening up before him. The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as Nick Swinmurn. He was a recruiter for a new internet startup that was selling shoes online, and he was looking for someone with experience in shoes. He

did not immediately offer that he was also the CEO and primary employee of this company, ShoeSite. What he did say was that his startup was going to be revolutionary: the destination for online shoe shopping. Nick couldn’t have known he was leaving a message for someone who also harbored a sense of entrepreneurialism, something that hadn’t been satisfied by dealing with vendors for Nordstrom. Back at Southern Oregon University, Fred had come up with a range of ways to make money and create things, like hosting a baseball card show, or hiring a dance instructor to put on lessons for students. So while he now had a mortgage and a family to support, there seemed no harm in calling Nick back. A few days later, in June 1999, Fred met with Nick at Fourth Street Bar and Grill to hear his pitch. The concept had already been proven, Nick told him; people were buying shoes unseen from his website. He began reeling off the metrics about the size of the current retail market, customers’ willingness to buy shoes through catalogs, and so on. He had interested investors, but the problem was they wouldn’t commit until Nick had hired someone with retail buying experience—a “shoe guy.” Fred told him that it sounded like an interesting prospect, but he was hesitant: his life commitments were currently supported by a well-paying and stable job at Nordstrom. Nick suggested another meeting, this time with investors. What the heck, Fred figured, and agreed.

When Nick had last spoken to Tony and Alfred, they had given him some advice. First, he should consider renaming the company. ShoeSite was too generic and too limiting, Tony had said. What if he wanted to expand to selling other categories of merchandise? After some thinking, Nick came back to them with a new name: Zapos, from zapatos, the Spanish word for shoes. Tony said he should put an extra “p” in it, to avoid people mispronouncing it as “ZAY-poes.” Thus in July 1999 was born a name that would stick with them forever. Nick also had found a solution to their other piece of advice. By coldcalling Nordstrom he’d found a potential “shoe guy.” On an afternoon in July, Nick, Fred, Tony, and Alfred met over lunch at Mel’s, a casual diner chain a block away from Venture Frogs. Sitting down over turkey

sandwiches and chicken noodle soup, they began to talk business. Since Nick had last seen Tony and Alfred, Zappos had more than proven that people were willing to buy shoes online. They were averaging about $2,000 worth of orders weekly, and the numbers were increasing, fast. If Fred decided to join, they felt they could convince shoe brands to start shipping from their own warehouses directly to customers, meaning they wouldn’t have to worry about running a warehouse on their own. At the end of the meal, they found themselves in a stalemate: Fred would join only if Venture Frogs invested, and Tony and Alfred would invest only if Fred was in. “Nick and Fred were exactly the type of people we were looking to invest in,” Tony later wrote. “We didn’t know if the shoe idea would work or not, but they were clearly passionate and willing to place big bets.” They invested $500,000 in seed capital into Zappos. Fred quit his Nordstrom job a week later. For the next few months, Nick and Fred hustled, traveling to as many shoe conferences as possible to sign footwear brands to Zappos.com. At their first conference in Las Vegas, they approached eighty brands. Only three agreed to do business with them. Because this was a nascent business in the still-nascent industry of e-commerce, no question they received was too trivial for them to address—Who is your shipping carrier? How do you plan to handle returns? What is an email? How do I make an email for myself? Every two weeks, Tony and Alfred checked in on Zappos, as they did with every other company in their portfolio. But Tony found himself checking in with Zappos more and more, offering as much technical advice as he could. And despite his nonstop social calendar and two dozen other companies to think about, he was starting to miss the grind, the highs and lows of being part of a burgeoning startup. He wanted to start building again.

Anticipation hung in the air in December 1999. It was the last month of the millennium, and the invisible threat of Y2K—the shorthand term for the year 2000—was upon humankind. It was also the holidays, and Tony’s birthday was coming up. For months, Tony had been planning two massive

parties at Club BIO—one for his twenty-sixth birthday on December 12, and another party for New Year’s Eve. These were potentially the last parties that Club BIO would host. The week before his birthday party, Sequoia told Tony and Alfred that they were not willing to invest in Zappos. Tony and Alfred had wrongly assumed it was a no-brainer—after all, they had turned Sequoia’s $2.7 million investment in LinkExchange into a $68.3 million exit (once the firm sold the Microsoft shares it received in the acquisition). But there were now even more signs that the economy was going to turn, so venture firms were less bullish than before, and they wanted to see more progress and growth before investing. Sequoia suggested they reach out again in several months. But this was problematic: Zappos was days away from running out of cash. Tony and Alfred had a decision to make. Providing a second round of capital to Zappos was technically against their investment philosophy. It would also prevent them from investing in another company. But they liked the team’s passion and drive—and they believed in Nick and Fred. So they decided to invest in another round, under the condition that Zappos move into the Venture Frogs Incubator. This would save Zappos money on rent, and it would also allow Tony to be more involved, as he lived right upstairs. However, the incubator space was under construction at the time. “I have my birthday party this weekend, and a New Year’s party in two weeks,” Tony said to Alfred. “Let’s have them move into my loft right after New Year’s. We’ll convert it into an office until the incubator offices are ready downstairs.” “Sounds good,” Alfred replied. Tony then called Fred to deliver the news—they were going to provide three to four months’ worth of funding. However, Tony was going to be much more involved, and they would have to move into his loft. They accepted his terms. The parties were a resounding success. Tony planned for them to have an underground warehouse feel to them, which meant thumping electronic music, dancing, fog machines, and a huge amount of alcohol. At the New Year’s Eve party, after most of the partygoers had left by 3 a.m., Tony decided to turn on all the fog machines at full blast to fill the entire Club BIO with fog. Then an alarm started shrieking—he had set off the smoke alarms for the entire building. Firefighters showed up and, after realizing it

was all a fluke and the person who was responsible was a shy, goofy young Asian man, they laughed it off and wished Tony a happy new year. A chance encounter with an anonymous blond woman shortly after that episode had an impact on Tony that night: “Isn’t this amazing? You created all of this,” Tony later recalled the woman saying in his memoir. I looked over to see who it was, but it was someone I didn’t recognize. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, and was also leaning out the window to marvel at the flashing lights of the fire trucks below. “Yeah, they were pretty nice about it. I was worried that they would be mad at me, especially since it’s New Year’s,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. I mean all of this,” she said. She turned and gestured toward the rest of the people that were still at the party. “You could have done anything you wanted and you chose to create an experience that people will remember forever.” She gazed into my eyes. I could still hear the music in the background, but the rest of the world seemed to disappear. I had no idea who this girl was, but somehow the universe had brought us together for a single moment in time that I would remember forever. “Envision, create, and believe in your own universe and the universe will form around you,” she said softly. “Just like what you did tonight.” Her words convinced Tony he no longer wanted to just be a passive investor in Zappos. He wanted to be deeply involved in creating something again. And while the parties he was architecting were great, he found himself yearning for something more. He was addicted to the art of building a company from the ground up. So Tony decided that with the new year, he was going to go all in on Zappos.

A long, hard road lay ahead. The new millennium brought forth a dose of skepticism and higher interest rates that prompted the market to crash. All

the optimism and hope that had been building behind tech companies imploded in April 2000 as the stock market cratered. Capital immediately dried up, and many tech startups whose entire business models depended on external funding for free services—including some of Venture Frogs’ portfolio companies—soon went bankrupt. Though a few Venture Frogs companies moved into the incubator office, and others had presented small exits when they were sold or went public, most of them failed to secure additional funding from the bigger venture firms. With Zappos becoming the primary bright spot in their portfolio—and even that was relatively dim —Tony and Alfred decided to use what was left in the fund to invest again in Zappos. “Our decision to focus on (Zappos.com) is that it seemed like a much bigger opportunity,” he later said. They tried to raise a second fund from new and existing investors, but no one wanted to park their money in a tech-focused fund. They continued calling Sequoia to invest in Zappos, but the larger venture capital firm remained disinterested. Tony had already begun to personally fund Zappos, but as the year dragged on, he became chief executive officer of Zappos. Nick and Fred were still intimately involved in steering the ship, but it was clear they were now depending on Tony to see the company through. “Right now, because we are unprofitable with very limited cash, we are in a race against time,” Tony wrote in an email to the company in October 2000. “Once we get to profitability, then we will be able to think longer-term and bigger picture, and fantasize more about how to rule the world.” The path to profitability for Zappos, first and foremost, meant cutting expenses wherever possible. They laid off nearly half of their forty employees, and those remaining had to take pay cuts. Zappos’s headquarters moved from Club BIO to the Venture Frogs Incubator in the lobby of 1000 Van Ness, and Tony put five beds into Unit 810 to start housing Zapponians for free, including Nick. The other three condos that Tony owned in the building also started to house Zappos employees for free. Less than three years before, he’d been a newly minted multimillionaire. Now, with four condos, the retail space in 1000 Van Ness, other property investments, his dabbling in day trading and poker, and his lavish spending at parties and bars (where he most often paid the tab for others), on top of his personally funding Zappos every three to four months, he watched the numbers in his bank account dwindle.

In one of his last-ditch attempts to raise money, he tried to get Alex Hsu and his mother to invest in Zappos. “Listen, I know everything’s going belly-up,” Tony said. “But there’s one company I want you to invest in. I’m sure it will do well.” “Tony, there’s just no way,” Alex said. There seemed to be no other way out for Zappos, so Tony sold nearly all his properties in the Bay Area for less than what he’d paid for them. Eventually, all that remained were two properties, including Unit 810. Tony and Alfred also sold all the domains that Venture Frogs had bought, including drugs.com, to fund Zappos. “That’s right, Venture Frogs, a startup incubator run by Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, is in the process of selling its domain name drugs.com to an undisclosed buyer,” Wired reported in 2001 about the sale. “Instead, the company will focus on building out Zappos.com, its e-commerce site that sells more than 100 brands of shoes.” It became clear to Tony that the company needed a deus ex machina— an unexpected miracle in a hopeless situation. They had tightened the company’s belt as far as possible in order to cut costs. Tony, meanwhile, had more or less poured his entire net worth into the company. If they did not come up with another solution quickly, everything they built would be lost. “The situation was dire,” Tony recalled later. “Everything I was involved in was running out of money. The restaurant, the incubator, Zappos and myself personally.” One weekday afternoon, Tony and Fred were having a drink at the bar in Venture Frogs Restaurant. They were feeling downtrodden and rudderless. Over a beer (Fred’s) and a Grey Goose and soda (Tony’s), Fred helped Tony realize that their initial business plan of not having their own inventory of shoes to sell from was not going to work. If they were going to make it through, they needed their own warehouse. They also needed to somehow convince shoe brands to sell to them; at the time, brands like Skechers or Nike only sold their shoes to third-party vendors that had brickand-mortar stores. Zappos was supposed to be purely online. So they devised a plan. They would hire more employees who had experience managing and buying shoe inventory. Their headquarters at 1000 Van Ness would become a hybrid office space and warehouse to store inventory. They would buy a small, cheap brick-and-mortar shoe store to create the illusion of having a physical location for shoe brands. In the

meantime, they would use their office address and hope that shoe brands would not ask to tour their “store.” They would also need to update the Zappos software for these changes. Doing the math, they calculated that their new plan would cost about $2 million. “Where are we going to get the money?” Fred asked. “I’ll worry about that part,” Tony replied. “Just assume that if you can convince a brand to sell to us, then we’ll have the money to pay for the inventory for that brand.” Fred had recently been thinking about the leap he’d taken leaving Nordstrom. Seated behind Tony in the apartment/office space at 1000 Van Ness, Fred had been awestruck by him on a daily basis, and had come to trust him. One afternoon, Tony had swiveled around in his chair and asked, “What would make Zappos better?” Fred had been drowning in the monotony of trying to manually register Zappos’s hundred-plus vendors into the online portal and uploading their products to the website, and he told Tony that if there was some kind of portal where these vendors could log in and submit their products themselves, then Fred could focus on actually running the business. Tony had swiveled back without a word. “Three hours later, he turned around and said, ‘Something like this?’” Fred recalled. Lo and behold, the Zappos extranet had been born—a portal that would come to define the company’s success and be used by thousands of vendors. While they had been talking at the Venture Frogs bar, Tony had come to another decision. He was going to sell everything in his name at fire-sale prices, including Unit 810, and put all the money back into Zappos. He did not want to give up on his dream of a Central Perk for him and his tribe, but right now he had a more important dream to achieve. Friends would have to wait.

Tony would sell a total of eleven properties and pour almost $6 million of his own money into the business before the plan worked. In 2000, Zappos’s gross sales were $1.6 million. By the end of 2001, sales had quadrupled to $8.6 million. To get there, they first turned the reception area of their office into a small shoe store in lieu of an actual separate brick-and-mortar

location. Soon after, Fred found a small shoe store in a town two hours north of San Francisco that was looking for a buyer, and by chance there was an abandoned building across the street. They bought both, and turned the latter into Zappos’s first official warehouse. Tony worked side by side with the engineers to rewrite the website code so that it could handle the new business model of selling both inventoried products as well as products that could be shipped directly by shoe brands. Fred, meanwhile, also delivered, signing on more and more shoe brands to Zappos. But the company was still not profitable. As much as they were making, they were spending just as much to buy the inventory and cover the added costs. Eventually, Tony decided they needed a warehouse located somewhere in the middle of the country; shipping times from California to the East Coast were simply too long. They settled on Kentucky, near a distribution center with close proximity to carriers. But the process of setting up the new warehouse was fraught with problems. While driving inventory from California to Kentucky, one of the semitrailer trucks got into a major accident and flipped over. Around $500,000 worth of shoes, or 20 percent of their inventory, was now scattered on the side of a highway. Separately, it came to light that the warehouse logistics company they were working with to get the Kentucky warehouse up and running had oversold its capabilities—they had never worked with products that had as much variance as shoes did (colors, sizes, widths, brands). Entire swaths of Zappos’s inventory languished outside of the warehouse, unsorted and uncataloged—which meant it couldn’t be sold because it hadn’t been logged into the system.

By the middle of 2002, Zappos was once again strapped for cash. The company had about two months left of funds before it would go out of business. Tony was also nearly out of cash, too. The future of Zappos and Tony’s fiscal health now depended on the sale of Unit 810, which Tony had overpaid for and was now proving to be impossible to sell without taking a huge loss in a down market. The efforts to sell the property had coincided with a long-scheduled trip to Tanzania, where Tony planned to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest

peak in Africa. For the three-week journey, he would be joined by a young woman named Jenn Lim, whom he had met at his twenty-sixth- birthday bash in the apartment he was now trying to sell. They’d become fast friends, and after Jenn was laid off from her internet consulting job, she and Tony thought the adventure would be a great chance to get away. Though the trip couldn’t have come at a worse time, considering the logistics mishaps and the cash drain, Tony had figured there was nothing he could do to help solve either of those issues by staying. But ten thousand miles from San Francisco, he found those problems weighing on him. Neither Tony nor Jenn was all that athletic, and neither took great pleasure from physical activity. On their first day of the hike they found themselves walking through a rainforest downpour only to then head up into a cooler climate that left them shivering in their drenched clothes. Collapsing in his tent, Tony struggled to stay both awake and asleep. In the darkness, his phone was ringing, which was weird: there wasn’t supposed to be reception on the mountain. His real estate agent was on the end of the line giving him the news he wanted to hear: they had found a buyer and Unit 810 had sold. “Zappos was saved,” Tony recalled later. But it turned out to be no more than a vivid dream, and when he awoke, there were still four more days of hiking ahead. When he and Jenn returned to San Francisco, Tony’s real estate agent told him there had in fact been an offer on the unit, but the buyer backed out because their fortune teller had told them the apartment had bad feng shui. Tony instructed the agent to drop the price to 40 percent below what he had paid for the condo. Shortly after, he found a buyer. “As your friend and financial adviser, I’m advising you not to do it,” said Alfred. He had since left Tony’s immediate orbit and started working for Tellme Networks, a telephone tech company that Venture Frogs had invested in, as vice president of business development. But Alfred still looked out for Tony’s blind spots. “It may pay off in the long run, but it’s not worth the risk.” Tony and Alfred were two very different people, however. Alfred had always been more careful and deliberate. Tony, meanwhile, had always been willing to risk it all for an idea. He accepted the offer on the apartment. Now the company had at least half a year of runway. Tony rolled up his sleeves and got to work at the warehouse. It had been his idea to open up a

warehouse in Kentucky, so he felt it was his problem to solve. Tony ended up spending five months there, cleaning up the mess as well as building an entirely new warehouse system that they decided to call WHISKY, an acronym for Warehouse Inventory System in Kentucky. They stopped working with their previous warehouse logistics partner and, despite not having any background in warehouse operations, somehow built a system within a fifty-thousand-square-foot space that could work for Zappos. By the end of 2002, the company had nearly quadrupled its revenue to $32 million. Tony’s bets had paid off. “Everyone could feel it,” Tony later said. “We were at a turning point for the company.”

By now, Tony and Fred were inseparable. Both were obsessed with the company and its potential, and they talked about its future and prospects at every opportunity, whether it was at the Venture Frogs Restaurant or Mel’s Diner, the spot where it had all started. After a series of lunches, they decided that they didn’t want Zappos to be just about selling shoes. It needed to have a bigger purpose than taking as much market share in the shoe category as possible. Reflecting on their journey over the last few years, there was an underlying theme beneath it all—they had always chosen the route that would improve the experience for the customer, even if it was hard or incurred short-term losses. If they followed that edict for all of their operating decisions, could it keep customers coming back, and pay back tenfold? They decided that Zappos as a brand would be about providing the very best customer service. Full stop. The first decision they made was to remove Zappos’s practice of allowing shoe brands to send products directly to customers. They realized that the best customer service came when all the inventory was processed in their own warehouse systems. Though this would wipe out about 25 percent of sales on Zappos.com, they bet that it would improve the Zappos experience in the long term. And they were right: in 2003, the company ended with $70 million in gross sales. The next year, in keeping with Zappos’s newfound purpose, Tony and Fred discussed their own customer service department. It was hard to find competent workers in this industry in San Francisco—the

workforce in the Bay Area catered more to Silicon Valley tech companies. The majority of workers were trained as engineers, sales representatives, or marketing consultants; working at a call center was not what the average San Franciscan saw as a promising career trajectory. They needed to move the company to a place where hospitality and customer service were priorities. They also decided that instead of building out a satellite call center, they needed to move the whole company. Customer service was not going to be an afterthought for Zappos. It was its entire business model. So, after weeks of deliberating between various cities, from Phoenix to Portland to Des Moines, they landed on Henderson, a suburban town just south of the city limits of Las Vegas. Though it wasn’t the cheapest place to build a company, it was more affordable than San Francisco. There was no state income tax in Nevada. And its proximity to Vegas—a city built on nightlife and hospitality—meant that employees in the area typically worked for one of two industries that hinged on the experiences of their customers. Above all, Tony believed that Las Vegas would be the happiest option for his employees. So in 2004, Tony sent out an email to the ninety Zapponians that the company was moving to Sin City. Seventy employees agreed to make the move. Tony had made yet another decision that would change the course of the company. This time it would change the course of Tony’s life, too.

CHAPTER 7

THE TRIFECTA

Mark Guadagnoli was one of the first parents to arrive at the elementary school math competition that afternoon in 2006. His six-year-old son had a knack for numbers, and Mark was quietly confident that he might even win. Scanning the auditorium, Mark saw a tall lanky man sitting on his own, and decided to go over and introduce himself. Looking up with a genial smile, the man said his name was Fred, then pointed at his own son, the tall half– Pacific Islander boy towering above all the other students. In his early forties, with a Mediterranean face and a subtle Texan twang, Mark exchanged pleasantries with Fred as they watched the number of child contestants onstage dwindle. By the end of the competition, it was just their sons left standing. The final problem was an impossible equation, and Mark was sure there was no chance either boy knew the answer. Fred’s son, Kalei, passed on the question. Mark’s son, Max, was up by one point; because he wouldn’t lose any points if he too passed on the question, all he had to do was pass, and he’d win the competition. Mark sighed heavily as Max attempted the problem, provided the wrong answer, and lost his lead. Then, to Fred and Mark’s bewilderment, the two boys looked at each other and embraced in a bear hug, Max disappearing into Kalei’s arms. “What Max knew was that if he answered the question wrong, he would be deducted points, and he and Kalei would tie,” Mark said. “So they both won.” Mark invited Fred and his family over for dinner to celebrate a few days later. Over homemade pizza, Fred became fascinated by Mark’s backstory. Mark was a tenured kinesiology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and recently he had been helping struggling athletes reinvent their

game through a type of talk therapy he had created. He explained that he had been working with a kicker on UNLV’s football team who’d had a stellar freshman year but was now a train wreck, making only half of his field goals, and the coaches were at a loss for what to do. Aware of Mark’s work, they asked if he could try and turn this young man’s future around. When Mark arrived at training, the kicker set up the ball on a small stand and repeatedly nailed the shot between the posts from forty yards out. But when Mark simulated a real game by holding the ball in place for the kicker, the ball went spinning far away. Mark began working with the player and after two months the kicker was making 85 percent of the goals. “Hey, I’ve got a friend,” Fred said. “I think he’d be really interested in talking to you.”

The year before, Mark had emerged as a minor celebrity in academic circles after co-authoring a study on the science of learning. Under an unmemorable title, the Challenge Point Framework, his paper claimed to have discovered a revolutionary hack: by undertaking a customized challenge, an individual could change their thinking to learn a task three to four times quicker than if they followed a conventional curriculum. The root cause of failure in elite athletes, for example, often lay in training regimes that either didn’t challenge them enough or pushed them too far beyond their limits. In essence, Mark’s research provided a scientific backbone to a philosophical conundrum: How much is too little, or too much, and where is the sweet spot? In the case of the UNLV kicker, Mark found that the kicker did no mental preparation before taking a shot, and the presence of Mark holding the ball in place made him so nervous that it became overwhelming. After several weeks, the kicker became comfortable with Mark standing nearby and then ultimately holding the ball. He later broke the career goal record for the regional conference and ended his senior year on the list of top potential draft picks in the nation, signing a free-agent contract with the St. Louis Rams. In the years after Mark’s paper was released, more than a hundred subsequent studies cited his research, testing the framework out on

overworked surgeons, burned-out PhD students, and more struggling athletes, each of whom saw astounding results. Mark had since been hired to consult for USA Track and Field and for the PGA Tour. Seated at an American-style restaurant a few minutes’ walk from the Zappos headquarters, Tony was listening with intense curiosity as Mark retold his story. Alfred was also there, having joined Zappos in 2005 as chairman and chief operating officer, and he had questions too. Fred sat back and watched his introduction unfold. At Zappos, Tony explained, he was trying to figure out ways to improve the orientation program for new hires. Could the Challenge Point Framework be applied to corporate executives, employees, and entire companies, creating a workforce that learned and then performed multiple times faster, better, more effectively? It hadn’t been done before, Mark said, but he couldn’t see why not. When the group stood up to leave, Tony suggested Mark join them back at the Zappos office for a tour. At the front entrance, Fred opened the glass door for Mark, and Tony walked in alongside him. Looking up at Mark, Tony said, “Would you come work for Zappos?” Beyond being a tech company, Mark had little idea what Zappos did, nor what roles the three men in front of him held. But after spending an hour at lunch with these guys, he felt a synergy between them that he’d never encountered, and whatever they had in mind, he was sure it would be worth the risk. “I’d love to join,” Mark replied.

On his first day, Mark was shown his seat in a row of cubicles shared with Fred, Alfred, and Tony. His first task would be to build on the orientation program for new employees using elements of his Challenge Point Framework. They had been looking for a way to get new hires engaged that didn’t involve sitting through hours of lectures. The end result was a program that focused on employees’ motivations. For instance, an offer to pay employees to leave the company during orientation tested whether they were committed. The program also required that everyone from new executives to entry-level employees spend time working in the call center before they started their official roles—a practice that had proven successful for Fred during his time at Nordstrom.

But Mark’s work quickly expanded beyond its initial purview. Tony often complained that their cubicle was referred to as “executive row,” so Mark took to calling it “monkey row” and decorated the space to illustrate the point with a series of nets to the ceiling from which stuffed animals and plants hung. Once Tony added some more plants to make it feel like a jungle, the ceiling was barely visible. Multiple times a day, Tony would spin around in his chair and toss out an idea that Mark would frantically scribble down and then try to figure out how to execute. One day, Tony told Mark he wanted a Zappos University. When Mark asked what that was, Tony replied, “We don’t know; we’d like for you to tell us.” Building on the orientation program, and the company’s existing curriculum around customer service, culture, and warehouse operations, Mark launched Zappos University by expanding it to an inhouse professional development program that could teach employees new skills—regardless of whether they applied that skill to their job—from yoga classes to playing golf. It also involved other initiatives that would pay employees to do community service, or volunteer at a local soup kitchen during work hours. Another pillar of Zappos University was Zappos Insights, which provided consultations to other companies on how to improve their corporate culture. Over three-day “camps,” executives from other companies would learn how Zappos managed HR, how to give their employees more impetus to focus on customer service, and how to achieve a “wow” factor. On the final day, attendees went to Zappos’s legendary quarterly all-hands meetings, led by musicians and rousing speeches—years before concert-style corporate gatherings were made famous by WeWork and its enigmatic CEO, Adam Neumann. To try to keep up with Tony’s cascade of ideas, Mark devised a system in which he wrote all of Tony’s suggestions on a whiteboard and asked Tony to rank them by urgency. But no matter how hard he tried, he could never remain as calm as Fred, who seemed to have an intuitive system for mentally sifting through Tony’s ideas and deciding whether it was possible to execute them. Alfred, meanwhile, would punch away at his computer, ensuring that execution lay within the bounds of fiscal responsibility. “[Tony] comes up with ideas, brilliant ideas, sometimes crazy ideas, sometimes crazy, brilliant, all different variations,” Mark said later. “But his ideas were much more interesting to him than execution. I mean, he wanted

the execution to happen; he just didn’t want to have to be the guy who made it happen.” Watching Fred, Alfred, and Tony, Mark realized that the three men together were a trifecta—each parlaying their skills into a Venn diagram of effective leadership—unlike any other he’d encountered. Within the company, the trio were known as “FAT,” and each played integral roles to support the others. Without one of them, the Zappos flywheel could stop spinning. “If you take anyone out of that mix,” Mark said, “it’s nothing like it is.”

Zappos had clearly proven that buying shoes online without first trying them on was something that customers could embrace—and its success was helping to build the foundation blocks of a nascent e-commerce industry. By 2004, the year Zappos moved to Henderson, eBay was operating in dozens of countries and making $800 million a quarter while shaping the world of online auctions for new and used goods. It had expanded into car sales and even sold a private jet on its platform. It was also building an arsenal of tools and features to offer the ideal online marketplace. It acquired the payment processing company PayPal for $1.5 billion, and bought Rent.com, America’s largest real estate leasing site, for $415 million. It even took a 25 percent stake in Craigslist, which had since expanded its online classifieds far beyond San Francisco. The other e-commerce giant fighting for ground was Amazon, which had moved beyond just selling books and established a vast portfolio of music, videos, and consumer electronics. By the end of 2004, Amazon’s largest sales category was no longer books but electronic gadgets. Amazon also started allowing third parties to sell on its site, which vastly expanded the number of products it offered, pushing Amazon further in the direction of becoming an “everything store” and changing the instruments of consumerism. Buyers were becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of shopping online rather than in malls. But selling clothing through computers was more of a challenge for Amazon because customers weren’t ready to abandon storefront changing rooms. Zappos, which had generated

$70 million in sales the previous year, would make a fine crown jewel to propel Amazon’s clothing venture. But when Jeff Bezos flew to see Tony in 2005, meeting him in a conference room at a DoubleTree hotel a few blocks from the Henderson headquarters to discuss buying Zappos, the answer was a hard no. “I realized that to Amazon, we were just a leading shoe company,” Tony wrote later. “That was why we told Jeff that we weren’t interested in selling at any price. I felt like we were just getting started.” In an era when the drab offices of the 1990s were standard, business attire was limited to crisp shirts and blazers, and co-working companies like WeWork had not yet ushered in the beautification of office spaces with plants, open-plan offices, and free coffee and beer, Zappos was different. As opposed to the top-down management that guided corporate giants of the previous century, Tony turned to egalitarianism to devise Zappos’s core values by sending a company-wide email asking employees to submit what they thought should guide the company and represent its culture. After a year of workshopping the submissions, Zappos’s company policies looked more like the list of rules for a summer camp than a corporate policy: “Create fun and a little weirdness”; “Build a positive team and family spirit”; “Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded”; “Be humble”; and, finally, its number one policy, “Deliver WOW through service.” Zappos was first a customer service-oriented company, a shoe seller second—an ethos its new values set in stone. Rather than marketing a product heavily to drive sales, Tony believed that extraordinary customer service would lead to a critical mass of return customers, lowering marketing costs and widening profit margins. Workers in the Zappos call center were encouraged to spend more time, not less, talking to customers and getting to know them, while going far beyond what any customer could expect from a company help line; the record for the longest customer service call was ten and a half hours. During one weekend in Los Angeles when Tony and a few of his friends got back to their hotel after a night out, they tried to order pizza through room service and found that the kitchen had closed. As a joke, one of his friends decided to call the Zappos customer service line to see if the rep could help in this situation. Incredibly, the Zappos rep found the five closest pizza shops to their hotel that were still open at that time.

To double down on the customer service emphasis, Tony became obsessed with the happiness of his own employees, which he believed would translate to happy customers. So he vowed to make Zappos among the best places to work in the world. It paid 100 percent of its employees’ health insurance premiums and invested in professional development courses. Individuality was treasured and encouraged: employees brought their home and personal lives with them to the office, filling every inch of their cubicle walls with personal photos, notes, cards, Silly String, or whatever else most represented them. Beyond monkey row, plants hung from the ceiling throughout the office like a greenhouse, a style of which Tony was the architect. The company was also growing at such a pace that Tony and Fred could no longer interview new hires for culture fits, and so they devised a secondary interview process for new hires, who would be judged against the company’s core values. To weed out those who made it through but still weren’t in it for passion, the company built on Mark’s orientation program and went from offering new hires $100 to quit Zappos within their first few weeks to as much as $5,000. Growing sales coupled with the move to Henderson, for which seventy employees and their families uprooted their lives from San Francisco, validated that Tony’s model was working. For Chris Peake, one of the Zapponians who agreed to move to Henderson, it was an easy decision. He had worked at Lombardi Sports, an athletic apparel company, in San Francisco just down the street from Zappos’s previous office at 1000 Van Ness for over a decade before quitting to join Tony and Fred as an assistant buyer in 2003. He was thirty years old at the time with a newborn, and it had been surprisingly easy to convince his wife to move the family to Henderson. The prospect of Nevada excited the Peakes, and his new role invigorated him in a way that Lombardi had not. In his first year, Chris received an assignment from Fred, his new manager, that made him realize he was working for a unique company. During one of their regular check-ins, Fred reached into a box full of books that was lying on the floor inside the office, picked up one, and handed it to Chris. “Read this by Wednesday,” he said curtly. The book was called The Fred Factor—which made Chris think that Fred was having him read his autobiography. The book was in fact written by motivational speaker Mark

Sanborn, who retold the true story of a postman named Fred who saw real purpose and passion in his job. “Where others see delivering mail as monotonous drudgery, Fred sees an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those he serves,” the book’s cover summarized. Through Fred’s story, Sanborn teaches readers four principles that will bring creativity and inspiration to life and work: make a difference every day, no matter how small; build strong relationships for more success; create value for others without spending money; and constantly reinvent the self. The following Wednesday, the book was discussed at the weekly Zappos roundtable meeting, which consisted of all the Zappos managers and buyers. “I just get goosebumps thinking about it,” Chris later recalled. “When was the last time I read a book? When was the last time someone told me to learn a job besides the job?” That’s when Chris realized Zappos was not just focused on him as an employee but “also focused on me becoming the best version of myself,” he said later. Tony and Fred were intent on making sure that employees bought into the customer-service-centric ethos of Zappos. Having their employees read the same books they were reading, like The Fred Factor, was one method of cultivating this idea. If the company was sold to Amazon, Zappos would become just another brand of the growing conglomerate, and everything Tony had worked for in this company would be lost. Besides, Zappos had big plans: it saw itself as more of a company like Virgin, which owned music labels, airlines, and a spaceflight venture. Zappos was already considering an airline. By Tony’s calculation, Zappos was going to do just fine on its own: it was on track to generate $1 billion in revenue by 2010.

It may have seemed, to those looking in, that Tony had it pretty good. His company was soaring; it was influencing other tech companies with its maniacal focus on corporate culture, and it was being sought out as an acquisition target by the bigger players. He had happy employees like Chris Peake, and customers who were leaving rave reviews on Zappos’s website. And he was surrounded by longtime friends every day, Fred and Alfred among them, who knew his every whim and ambition—people who could sense when to indulge him and when to say no. But Tony had been

searching for something more than good business mantras and lessons. Something deeper, perhaps closer to the meaning of life, or inner peace. Something that would give everything he did purpose. Something he had been searching for since he was a boy. What he found was the science of happiness. Psychological treatment for mental health had largely focused on healing people with mental health issues by abating anxiety, depression, and other symptoms. But Tony was intrigued by an emerging concept called positive psychology, with the stated goal of reinforcing sustained happiness. Among his required readings was the 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by social scientist Jonathan Haidt, who drew on ancient teachings from India, China, and the Mediterranean and reinterpreted readings from the Bible, the Koran, and Confucius to establish a series of philosophies and questions that could lead one to sustained happiness. At its climax, the book answers what Haidt sees as the meaning of life, and therefore happiness. I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, “What is the purpose of life?”Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. Tony went further and studied the story of Tal Ben-Shahar, who wrote a book called Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. Ben-Shahar was a lecturer at Harvard who had launched a class

on positive psychology in 2002. It was a nascent concept, and only eight students signed up; two dropped out. In the class Ben-Shahar sought to answer what he “believed to be the question of questions: how can we help ourselves and others—individuals, communities, and society—become happier?” Two years after he started the course, it became the most popular class at Harvard when 855 students enrolled. The popularity of his curriculum led Ben-Shahar to believe that he was tapping into a deep desire within the American psyche for happiness. Americans, citizens of the richest and most powerful country on earth, had earned great material prosperity as the decades went on. But in the meantime, rates of depression had soared: in the early 2000s they were ten times higher than they had been in the 1960s. Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading scholar in the field of positive psychology, Ben-Shahar posed this question: “If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy?” In Happier, Ben-Shahar laid out a series of findings that conclude with meditations, asking the reader to consider things like balancing self-interest and benevolence, temporary highs, and patience, before concluding: One of the common barriers to happiness is the false expectation that one thing—a book or a teacher, a princess or a knight, an accomplishment, a prize, or a revelation—will bring us eternal bliss. While all these things can contribute to our well-being, at best they form a small part of the mosaic of a happy life. The fairytale notion of happiness—the belief that something would carry us to the happily ever after—inevitably leads to disappointment. A happy—or happier—life is rarely shaped by some extraordinary life-changing event; rather, it is shaped incrementally, experience by experience, moment by moment. To realize, to make real, life’s potential for the ultimate currency, we must first accept that “this is it”—that all there is to life is the day-to-day, the ordinary, the details of the mosaic. We are living a happy life when we derive pleasure and meaning while spending time with our loved ones, or learning something new, or engaging in a project at work. The more our days are filled with these experiences, the happier we become. This is all there is to it.

What Tony came to see through his research was that, for most people, “achieving their goal in life, whatever it was—whether it was making money, getting married, or running faster—would not actually bring them sustained happiness,” he wrote later. He pointed to research on lottery winners, whose happiness levels may have spiked with the new wealth but a year later had reverted to where they had been before. “And yet, many people have spent their entire lives pursuing what they thought would make them happy.” He drew on concepts like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which determines that once the requirements of survival—things like water and food—are met, humans can achieve happiness by first pursuing security and safety, then family and a sense of belonging, a sense of self-esteem and respect within a community, until self-actualization is reached, meaning the display of creativity, acceptance of facts, self-sufficiency, and morality. A more distilled version of happiness could be attributed to three experiences: pleasure, a sense experienced for short periods of time; passion, when peak performance meets peak engagement, and sense of time is lost; and finally, a higher purpose, or the sense of being a part of something bigger than oneself. Taking it a step further Tony realized that there were parallels between happiness achieved by oneself—pleasure, passion, and purpose—that could be applied to Zappos, and every company in the world: profits, passion, and purpose. Tony ultimately concluded that happiness was about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness to others, and being part of something bigger than yourself. Using these four principles, Tony surmised that they all applied to leading his company. He could give perceived control to Zappos call-center workers by offering pay bumps every time they learned a new skill offered by Zappos, giving them the impression they were in control of their own pay. Previously, entry-level employees in the merchandising department could only be promoted after eighteen months, but to give a sense of perceived progress, he implemented a rule that gave three mini-promotions over the same time period, even though at the end they would reach the same level of seniority in the company. He believed that Zappos’s emphasis on company culture met the requirements of a sense of connectedness, and that Zappos’s vision—which was changed in 2009 to “delivering happiness in the world”—met the

conditions of his fourth principle of happiness: being part of a higher purpose. He wrote later: “Whether it’s the happiness that customers feel when they receive the perfect pair of shoes or the perfect outfit … or the happiness that employees feel from being part of a culture whose values match their own personal values—the thing that ties all of these things together is happiness.” Not until later would these philosophies define him to the world. But when Tony’s obsession with happiness began, few had the foresight to ask: What was he looking for?

If Tony was building his own mantra, he was going to live and lead by it too. It was something that Mark saw time and again. Zappos off-site meetings were known to get rowdy, and libations were a staple of the events. On the final evening of a seminar held at a small hotel in Mesquite, at the edge of Nevada’s border with Utah, Zappos employees were milling about a lounge in the lobby. Whoever had booked the accommodation appeared to have found one of the only hotels in the state that didn’t have a bar. But no matter—someone had fetched a few cases of Bud Light to appease the group. As the night was nearing its end, Mark was sitting on a couch opposite Tony watching the group mingle and talk. One employee staggered over and paused to inspect a case of beer before fishing out a bottle. As they watched the employee weave diagonally through the lobby, Tony noticed a grand piano standing silently across the room. Without saying a word, he stood up and walked over to it, then sat down in front of the keys. Mark had by now become accustomed to Tony’s ability to surprise. One time during a presentation to Zappos employees, Mark had told a joke and then laughed as he delivered the punchline. At the end of the presentation, Tony approached him and, looking directly at him without expression, said, “Next time when you tell the joke, it would be funnier if you didn’t laugh,” and then walked off without saying a word. Mark burst out laughing. He later learned that Tony had been studying the art of comedy to work on his own public speaking. Another time in the Zappos office, Mark had told Tony he was trying to figure out a way to change Zappos’s external

messaging to reflect how its customers talk about the company. Tony, typing away, appeared to ignore him. Mark continued, saying that perhaps there was a way to go through the company’s customer emails and find out what they were saying about the company. Turning to face Mark, Tony said, “Here’s the frequency of the top ten words that people are saying.” In the time Mark had been talking, Tony had written a programming script to scan through thousands of emails. Now, though, watching Tony’s fingers glide up and down the piano keyboard was something else. “He started playing some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard,” Mark said. The space hummed with a warm timbre, as the keystrokes flowed seamlessly from Tony’s memory. Against the backdrop of the lobby’s bland decor, it was as if someone were filling the room with color. Tony had been so absorbed that by the time he stopped and looked up, the group had thinned out until it was just Mark and another executive. The employee who’d fished out another Bud Light had long called it a night and disappeared into the elevator. After cleaning up, Mark was standing shoulder to shoulder with Tony when the elevator chimed and the doors opened. As they walked in, they looked down to see shards of a smashed Bud Light bottle strewn across the floor. Beer was everywhere. They were quiet while the elevator shuttled them upstairs; when it came to a halt, Mark stepped off. He returned to the elevator a minute later with a trashcan and towel he’d fetched from his suite. But when the doors opened again, he was surprised to see Tony, on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Mark knelt down beside him, and the two men cleaned in silence.

While Tony was doing everything he could to upend corporate culture and build Zappos into an anti-corporate establishment, the corporate shadow of Amazon continued to grow. In 2007, it launched its own online shoe and handbag site, Endless.com, selling brands like Ben Sherman and Bruno Magli. Under images of shoes and notices of promotions, within an information box titled “Our Promise to You,” the website shouted what amounted to a direct challenge to Zappos: free overnight shipping, free

return shipping, 365-day returns, and a 110 percent price protection guarantee—phrases it mirrored from the Zappos website. “For Bezos and Amazon, the irresistible temptation was Zappos.com,” wrote Brad Stone, a journalist who profiled Jeff Bezos in his book, The Everything Store. “In many ways, Zappos was the Bizarro World version of Amazon; everything was slightly similar but completely different. Hsieh, like Bezos, nurtured a quirky internal culture and frequently talked about it in public to reinforce the Zappos brand in customers’ minds. But he took it even further.” Despite Amazon’s efforts, Zappos kept jumping from success to success. After almost a decade of Zappos trying to get Nike, the athletic apparel giant finally agreed to sell on the company’s platform, bringing huge credibility. New Balance also signed on as a footwear partner. Revenue soared, and Zappos made $100 million in sales in a single month. Despite increasing revenue in recent years, Zappos had still been losing money as marketing, logistics, and sales costs rose alongside the company’s growth. But by the end of 2007, it had $840 million revenue for the year and, for the first time, a profit. The next year, it was on track to hit $1 billion in annual sales, two years before its initial timeline. Tony saw this as further validation that his bet on culture and customer service had trumped concerns of generating sales by traditional means. Still, the bean counters on his board weren’t convinced, and viewed such endeavors as Tony’s “social experiments.” Venture capitalists look for returns of many multiples of their initial investment, and typically achieve this by pushing startups to focus on maximizing sales and then go for an initial public offering, at which point the VCs can sell their shares in the company at a higher price. Things like company culture are secondary to making money. When the 2008 financial crisis hit in September, every bank—and investor—in the country was looking for ways to tighten their belts. A few weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Sequoia held a meeting with its portfolio companies to convey a straightforward message: cut expenses and get to profitability as soon as possible. While Zappos was profitable, it was still growing and had to cut expenses, which meant that it would need to fire employees.

On November 6, Tony sent a company-wide email announcing that Zappos was laying off 8 percent of its workforce, about 100 employees. While such a move seemed to fly in the face of Zappos values like “Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit,” Tony took pains to point out that they would take care of the departing employees with exceptional benefits— costs that would drive the company’s expenses higher for the year, rather than lower. “Because we are being proactive instead of reactive about it, we are able to take care of our employees and offer them more than the standard 2 weeks’ severance (or no severance) that most other companies are giving. We are offering to pay each laid-off employee through the end of the year (about 2 months).” Long-term employees would be given a little more, and health care benefits would be paid for another six months. While the move garnered some positive media attention—“Zappos became a model of how to nurture employees in good times and bad,” read one article in Fortune—the company was facing an even greater threat. At the time, Zappos had a revolving $100 million asset-backed line of credit that it used to purchase its thousands of shoes and apparel items. But the loan was contingent on the company meeting revenue and profit targets, and if any of those targets were missed, the lender could theoretically recall the loan and cork Zappos’s access to more inventory. Considering the credit crisis, there weren’t lenders lining up to give the company another $100 million. In other words, the company needed a more stable source of money, and the current board was unwilling to give it. If he didn’t act, Tony would likely be replaced as CEO and his “social experiments” would all but be abandoned. With Zappos facing a dwindling number of bad options, one solution would be to find new investors to buy out Sequoia and existing shareholders, which would cost about $200 million. When word got out that Zappos was looking for new investors, Jeff Bezos came calling again. Tony flew to Seattle in April 2009 and met with Bezos at Amazon’s headquarters. Tony stuck to his typical presentation notes, focusing on Zappos’s corporate culture and how that translated to good customer service and therefore sales. As he concluded the presentation, Tony turned to the science of happiness and its role at Zappos. Jeff interrupted. “Did you know that people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy?” he said. Tony clicked to the next slide, and

the very words Jeff had just uttered appeared on the screen. “Yes,” Tony said, “but apparently you are very good at predicting PowerPoint slides.” While Tony had reservations about the gulf between Amazon’s approach to customer service—providing the lowest prices—and the Zappos mantra of making personal connections with customers using oldschool phone calls, he left Seattle convinced that it was the best option. With the money from selling itself to Amazon, Zappos would be able to buy out its board and install a new group of believers. Part of Bezos’s pitch to Tony had been that Zappos was onto something with its focus on employee culture and customer happiness. Amazon had already started mirroring Zappos’s overnight shipping and free returns at Endless.com. But Amazon was about twenty-five times Zappos’s size. What if some of Zappos’s teachings were implemented at Amazon? They would have twenty-five times more impact there. Tony was seemingly more than aware of this opportunity. But he was thinking bigger. What if, by infecting Amazon with Zappos’s policies, those precepts could then be adopted by other conglomerates, and then change the lives of millions of workers? On July 22, Tony sent an email to his employees, announcing that Zappos was being bought by Amazon. With Amazon as a partner, Tony said, Zappos would remain unchanged, its culture untouched, but it would achieve its goal of delivering happiness to customers, employees, and vendors faster. It’s definitely an emotional day for me. The feelings I’m experiencing are similar to what I felt in college on graduation day: excitement about the future mixed with fond memories of the past. The last 10 years were an incredible ride, and I’m excited about what we will accomplish together over the next 10 years as we continue to grow Zappos! He included a message from Michael Moritz that sounded more like a dismissal: “You are now free to let your imagination roam—and to contemplate initiatives and undertakings that today, in our more constrained setting, we could not take on.” (Tony later took a parting shot in his book: “Unlike our former board of directors, our new management committee

seems to understand the importance of our culture—the ‘social experiments’—to our long-term success.”) In addition to assuring employees that their jobs would be unaffected, Tony also stressed that neither he, Fred, nor Alfred would leave the company. “We believe that we are at the very beginning of what’s possible for Zappos and are very excited about the future.” The deal ultimately closed in October 2009, at a value of $1.2 billion, making it Amazon’s largest acquisition at the time. Once again, Zappos had hung on by the skin of its teeth by doubling down on an unhinged commitment to disrupting corporate culture. As if to prove that it would keep to its core culture and values, the company threw a wedding-themed company holiday party to commemorate the “marriage” between Zappos and Amazon. “Most people came dressed as either brides or grooms,” read a descriptor for a video from the holiday party uploaded by Zappos. “There were bachelorette and bachelor parties (complete with semi-clothed strippers) and Elvises marrying people. You HAD to be there!” But just as Mark Guadagnoli and Chris Peake had noticed, as had other employees, old friends, and any entrepreneur who had visited the Henderson office, the implementation of Tony’s vision was by no means a single person’s achievement. Rather, it was a joint effort that involved the other two men who sat beside him in monkey row. Alfred, in particular, had been keeping Tony’s chaos under control since college. “Tony didn’t mind throwing a thousand plates in the air and juggling a ton of balls,” Chris Peake said later. “Alfred was then really good at saying, okay, cool, let’s take away all those plates except for this one or that one, and you focus on this stuff.” Jeff Bezos noticed it too. “You’re in such great hands with Fred, Alfred, and Tony,” Bezos said in a video to Zappos employees to announce the acquisition. “That’s a really big deal. I’ve seen a lot of leaders of companies too, and I haven’t seen people better than those three.”

CHAPTER 8

DELIVERING HAPPINESS

One afternoon in the fall of 2009, Tony was gliding around a kitchen island on a scooter, trying his best to avoid the dozen people milling about his mansion in the Southern Highlands neighborhood of Las Vegas. Papers were scattered across the floors and counters, like in a crazed academic’s office. He looked up as a woman named Holly McNamara, blond with the affect of someone who was quick to laugh, ambled into the kitchen. It was her birthday, and she had plans to go out for dinner with Tony and some friends. She watched with bewilderment as he zoomed past. “What are you doing?” she asked. “And who are all these people?” “I’m writing a book!” Tony yelled, like a kid during recess. Holly had been introduced to Tony by one of his poker friends a few years before, and he had since opened his world to her. Though she lived in San Diego, her job as a structural engineer often brought her to Vegas during the housing boom, and he would invite her to group dinners at Yellowtail in the Bellagio or to Korean barbecue joints off the Strip with confidants like Fred and Alfred. If there was someone that Holly didn’t know at the dinner table, Tony always took the time to introduce her. “This is my friend Holly,” Tony would say. “She’s friends with us now.” Holly had become such a part of this new community that Vegas started to feel like a second home, and she would often stay at Tony’s mansion. “We’re putting the chapters together,” Tony said. He pointed to a woman with shoulder-length hair, who looked up and smiled. “This is Jenn. She’s my editor,” he said. It was Jenn Lim, who had grown so close to Tony since they hiked Mount Kilimanjaro seven years before that some referred

to her as his girlfriend. To each other, they were partners. “Holly, why don’t you write a passage for the book?” Tony said. He was pretty famous now. After Amazon announced it was buying Zappos, curiosity around the wunderkind chief executive—who had introduced the world to free shipping and zany corporate culture—had become unmanageable. There were no longer enough hours in the day to answer the thousands of emails from fans, admirers, customers, and entrepreneurs seeking his advice or direction. The days of obsessively answering every inquiry at LinkExchange were long gone. With his newfound popularity, Tony realized that a book would provide a single channel to share the lessons he’d learned and his philosophies. Called Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, the book would become a gospel of his accomplishments and failures, from his backyard worm farm to Zappos. An autobiographical self-help memoir and corporate handbook rolled into one, the story would start with his childhood in Marin County, discuss his pizza business at Harvard University, show how he built LinkExchange, and then provide a riveting account of saving Zappos—success he’d achieved by believing in himself and his team. Beyond his life story, Tony would also use the book to espouse his study of the science of happiness. It would outline the four core principles that he believed underpinned the road to happiness: perceived control of one’s destiny, perceived perception of progress, connectedness with others, and being a part of something bigger than yourself. It was a template he believed could make people, companies, and the world happier. The treatise would conclude with the most important lesson he’d learned during his thirty-six years: that “by concentrating on the happiness of those around you, you can dramatically increase your own.” With help from Jenn, he had already written most of the book. The two had hunkered down in a cabin at Northern California’s Lake Tahoe and written the manuscript in two weeks, fueled by coffee beans soaked in vodka and Excedrin, an over-the-counter migraine medicine. “I found the most effective technique was taking Excedrin when I didn’t have a headache because there’s actually a lot of caffeine in Excedrin,” he told a reporter. Now Tony’s confidants, friends, and advisors had been arriving at the mansion to push the draft of the memoir through a round of edits. What

Holly was witnessing was the final effort to get the book done. But despite the chaos and looming deadline, Tony was still going to make time to celebrate Holly’s birthday that weekend. She felt buoyant being at the center of his world.

A few months later, Holly and Tony were getting into the back of a car in front of the Palms Casino Resort. It was the end of a long evening. An Amazon executive had been in town to meet Tony for dinner, and Tony had invited Holly and her friend along to join them for drinks once business had been discussed. For Holly, the night had been a distraction from the fact that she was now unemployed. She’d long contemplated a move away from engineering before finally following through on it, and Tony was now encouraging her to chase her newfound passion for being a nightlife concierge in Las Vegas. But after days of meetings and networking, she was growing increasingly frustrated with an industry that felt so different from construction and engineering. As the car pulled away from the Palms, Holly was curious to know the outcome of Tony’s discussion with the Amazon executive, Peter Krawiec, the vice president of worldwide corporate development. But before she could ask, Tony turned to her in his seat and began peppering her with questions: “So, your new business, you’re moving to Vegas? Where are you going to live? What do you actually want for your future? How much money do you need to live every month? Are you worried?” As the car rolled through the shimmering lights of Las Vegas, Holly struggled to come up with answers. Where is this going? she thought. Is this an interview? Before long, they were pulling up to Tony’s home. As they stepped out, Tony turned to her again. “I have a proposition for you,” he said. He was getting ready to embark on a press tour to drum up interest in his book, and he needed help managing his calendar, answering emails, and handling booking arrangements as well as managing the distribution and press campaign for Delivering Happiness. Jenn was leading the team, but they needed more assistance. Most importantly, he needed someone he could trust. This person would have access to everything from his address book to his

American Express Black Card. Why not help me out, while you get your concierge business off the ground? Tony suggested. He offered her $3,000 a month, less than she was used to making, but the offer came with a free room in his mansion and a front-row seat to his whirlwind life. He technically already had two personal assistants, one at Zappos, and another named Mimi Pham, who managed his affairs outside of the company. But the Zappos assistant was about to go on maternity leave. And Mimi, petite, sharp-chinned, with a huge grin, was “never around,” he said. Holly had met Mimi a few years earlier during a pool party on Memorial Day weekend at the Southern Highlands house. Holly remembered Mimi being a friendly and bubbly presence. She also recalled thinking she must be close to Tony, because her clothes, purses, shoes, and other belongings were scattered around Tony’s house. Though she seemed to be an infrequent presence in Vegas, Mimi had a permanent room there. She likely worked for him, Holly thought, but what she did exactly was a mystery. The two women had become friendly enough that Mimi invited Holly and her friend to crash at her apartment in Los Angeles one weekend. During the stay, Holly asked Mimi what exactly she did for Tony. Mimi explained she did “whatever Tony needed,” from planning trips to house chores. As if as an afterthought, she added, “Don’t tell Tony that I have this apartment in LA.” Why? Holly asked. “Tony just doesn’t need to know that I have this apartment,” Mimi said. “How does he not know? Don’t you live in his house?” Holly asked. “Well, yeah. But he just doesn’t need to know.” “What does Tony think you’re doing in LA, then?” “He thinks I’m sleeping at friends’ places.” It struck Holly and her friend Kimberly Schleifer as odd. Why would Mimi want to hide from Tony the fact that she lived in a humble unit off Santa Monica Boulevard? After all, most of her belongings were in Tony’s mansion. “She was always so mysterious and secretive,” Kimberly recalled. Unbeknownst to Holly and Kimberly, Mimi’s role in Tony’s life was undefined by design, much like the role of a consigliere. People often cycled in and out of Tony’s life, but Mimi had remained a constant presence

from the moment she met him at a shoe conference years before. They had initially bonded over a common feeling of being misunderstood by their Asian parents. But Tony came to rely on her to manage his life. She proved efficient at juggling tasks ranging from mundane to the seemingly impossible—from organizing housework and buying his meals to booking itineraries and screening people for meetings. Ahead of music festivals and parties, Tony and his friends knew that Mimi was the go-to person to arrange recreational drugs. (She had previously had a brush with the law after a drug-related incident: in 2001, she was arrested in Northern California when her boyfriend sold MDMA to an undercover police officer. She was a passenger in the car during the transaction and pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance. The conviction was expunged in 2016.) “I think the reason why Tony trusted her a lot and that she stayed around for so long is because she played her cards right,” Joey Vanas, an ex-boyfriend of Mimi’s who would also join Holly on the book’s press tour, said later. When Tony had bad news to give, it was Mimi who most often delivered the message—distancing him from decisions that would upset those around him. Most importantly, Mimi had maintained her role in Tony’s life by guarding her territory. She was possessive of her tasks and her access to Tony’s world, which included his schedule, his house (they shared an address on their driver’s licenses at one point), and his bank accounts. “She has a very direct manner,” said Joey. “A lot of people’s impressions were that Mimi was always trying to leverage to have more power.” While Tony’s offer to Holly seemed like a genuine effort to help her during a tough time, her role as personal assistant on the book’s press tour would directly conflict with Mimi’s responsibilities, something that was sure to complicate her relationship with Mimi. When Holly arrived at the Southern Highlands house at the start of 2010 and moved into a room filled with Mimi’s things, she asked Tony whether they could make some more room for her own belongings. “Just ask her to clean it up,” Tony said. With those few words, Holly’s collision course with Mimi was charted. When Holly called to ask if Mimi could move her stuff out of the room, Mimi stated adamantly that her belongings were there to stay, and accused

Holly of trying to replace her. As the conversation derailed, Mimi said something to Holly that gave her a sense of what she was walking into: “Tony is all I have.” A day later, Mimi flew to Vegas. When she entered the house, she briefly met Patricia McHale, who had recently become Tony’s other assistant at Holly’s suggestion. That day, as Patricia tended to the hummingbird feeders and misters in the backyard, Tony and Mimi walked outside. Mimi was crying, and Tony looked guilty. “She was telling him something that made him feel bad,” Patricia said later. “She wouldn’t stop crying.”

The press tour started in March 2010, three months before the book was to be released, with Tony crisscrossing the country to meet with reporters. One of those stops included South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual film, technology, and arts festival in Austin, Texas, that had earned a spot on the event calendars of the tech glitterati. “I’m outside South by Southwest with Tony Hsieh from Zappos, and he’s got a new book coming out in June,” said tech journalist Frank Gruber during a video interview in front of the Delivering Happiness coach, an old school bus painted gray with the words DELIVERING HAPPINESS in bold. A large yellow smiley face was plastered on the side. Inside, it looked like a typical party bus—no rows of seats, just benches lining the perimeter around a central dance floor. With blacked-out windows and green LED lights dangling from the ceiling, the school bus could become a mobile nightclub at the flick of a switch. “It’s empty now ’cause it’s in the middle of the day, and we don’t really start drinking until what—3 p.m., 4 p.m.?” Tony said to the journalist, grinning. As Gruber and the camera crew followed Tony into the bus, they found Jenn Lim tidying up. “Last night we had about fifty people on this bus, so it was pretty crazy.” A rolling thunderclap of events and interviews ensued across the country. The bus appeared at some events, but Tony was most often flying to interviews. Despite being a certified multimillionaire, he made a point of flying Southwest Airlines, the low-cost airline that only offered economy-

class seats. During one flight, as Tony and Holly were boarding the plane, another passenger looked up from his seat, saw Tony in his Zappos T-shirt, and said, “Hey, my daughter works at Zappos!” Tony smiled. “Oh, really? That’s great,” he said. “Do you work at Zappos?” the man asked, not realizing he was talking to its chief executive. “Yeah, I do!” Tony replied with a grin. The press tour culminated in three book launch events in June, held in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York City—each an opportunity for Tony to hold court and hobnob with other celebrities. There were sponsors at the launch parties such as cancer support nonprofit Livestrong as well as vodka brand Grey Goose, Coors Light beer, and Red Bull energy drinks. Among the stars at the New York event was Ivanka Trump. The year before, Tony had appeared as a guest judge on The Apprentice, the reality show hosted by Ivanka’s real estate mogul father, Donald Trump, and their friendship had since grown. The New York event was only the latest photo opportunity for the pair: shortly before his Apprentice appearance, Ivanka and Tony had been photographed in front of the White House, where Tony had been invited to meet Barack Obama for a meeting about rebuilding the recessiondevastated economy along with other young entrepreneurs, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Standing next to a broadly grinning Ivanka, Tony looks unrecognizable at first glance: it was one of the few times he had been photographed wearing a suit and tie. It was Tony, Ivanka later said, who showed her the power of social media, and how it could be used “to push your company’s core values and core beliefs in a personal way.” Years later, in 2017, after her father had been elected U.S. president, Tony provided an editorial review for her 2017 self-help book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success. “The advice is spot-on for everyone, not just women,” he wrote. At the New York book party, Tony was holding a drink while trying to shuffle into position for a photo alongside Ivanka and Jenn Lim at the book party, when his new publicist, Christine Peake (no relation to Chris Peake), ran over to interrupt. She had met Tony a few weeks prior at an event in Vegas, after being introduced by a mutual friend who thought Tony could use her public relations services. In one of their first conversations, Christine confided in

Tony that she had brought her teenage son as her plus-one to the event in hopes that he might spot Tony Hawk, the pro skateboarder, who was also in attendance. Moments later, Christine spotted the two Tonys chatting. Unexpectedly, Tony Hsieh waved Christine and her son over to them and introduced her son to the skateboarder. Touched by this unusual show of kindness from a celebrity, Christine offered her public relations services to Tony—and he accepted. She had been watching him at the New York event to ensure that he and those around him looked good; pictures are forever, especially on the red carpet, so no lipstick on teeth, no holding handbags, no smoking, and no alcohol. To style the photo, Christine quickly took Ivanka’s jacket. She then went to grab Tony’s drink and was met with slight resistance before he gave it up. “It was a bit of tug-of-war,” she later recalled. Once the camera flashed, a member of Tony’s team approached Christine and scolded her. “You don’t take away his drink, ever,” the person yelled. Tony was one of the most humble clients Christine had ever worked with, but as a new entrant to his world, she had just learned the cardinal rule: never separate him from alcohol, his social lubricant. “At that moment, well, we’ve established we’ve got a drinking problem,” Christine later said.

At one point, Tony and Holly had mailed out advance copies of Delivering Happiness to friends and celebrities. Among them was the rapper Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent. Tony wrote a note on 50 Cent’s copy and used two quarters to draw smiley faces. As Holly started laughing, Tony giggled, “Do you think he’s going to find this funny?” His media tour had been going well—so well that by the end of June, buzz around Delivering Happiness had driven the book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. In July, Tony briefly left the media tour to attend a political fundraiser for Nevada senator Harry Reid in Las Vegas. President Barack Obama was also in attendance. Photos from the event show the three men in blazers, deep in conversation. Tony, true to form, was the only one without a tie. At the event, Tony gave a copy of his book to Reggie Love, President Obama’s

aide, in hopes that he would pass it along to the president. Ten days later, Reggie wrote to Tony, “I was unable to get the President to read your book, b/c I’ve been glued to it.” He continued, “If you ever have time to connect or chat, my phone is always on and my door is always open.” He ended with a PS: “I’ll now also be sure to pass along your book.” With accolades coming from everywhere, Tony thought that perhaps it was time to take the promotion of his book to the next level. He decided to take an entourage on another tour. This one would be a three-month, twenty-three-city bus tour across the country to promote the book. This time the vehicle would be a new and improved Delivering Happiness bus. They would hold events and book readings in universities, at company offices, and with charitable organizations. It could deliver Tony’s template of happiness to the masses. As if to drive the rock star theme home, he purchased a tour bus from the Dave Matthews Band and wrapped it with his Delivering Happiness sign and yellow winky faces—a logo that had become synonymous with his brand. A tour on the scale Tony was thinking would typically take months, even a year, to plan. But he wanted to launch by the end of the summer. So he turned to Joey Vanas, Mimi’s ex-boyfriend and an event producer who had overseen Zappos’s corporate events for years—including the vendor parties and the wedding-themed party celebrating the Amazon acquisition —and had most recently helped Tony pull off the whirlwind of press events around the book. Joey had two and a half months to figure out the logistics of a massive nationwide bus tour. During the first meeting to organize the tour, Joey could see the nervous excitement of those around him. Tony addressed the members of his new entourage in the living room of his Southern Highlands home—Jenn, Mimi, Holly, and several others, each keen to prove themselves to the Tony Hsieh —then gave the floor to those gathered. Tony listened as people came up with ideas on where to visit and what to do in each location. Some proposals made a lot of sense, and others had great intentions. But by Joey’s account, there were too many ideas being thrown out and not enough decision-making from Tony. “I just had a sinking feeling. We’re going to end up way overcommitted, underprepared, with a hodgepodge team,” Joey said. The only way to continue, Joey thought, would be to temper his own expectations for the tour, realizing that it was likely going to be chaotic; if

so, it was better to run with it instead of fighting against it. In other words, Joey later said, “I remember thinking we’re fucked.”

Angela Morabito was among the younger members of the bus tour group. An impressionable college graduate from Arizona State University, she had recently been hired by a small marketing firm called Digital Royalty, which Tony had invested in and had hired to do marketing for the book tour. Angela had already worked on some earlier Delivering Happiness events, but she was eager to impress Tony. Her boss had told her that Tony thought she was not talkative enough, and Angela took that to mean that her boss valued partying stamina over work ethic, especially if the client was Tony. She wasn’t much of a partier, but the last thing Angela wanted to be labeled was “the not-fun one” while working for one of the world’s most successful business figures. One night in August, the Delivering Happiness team gathered for a group dinner at Pink Taco at the Hard Rock Hotel. After many drinks, Tony asked everyone to huddle in one of the private rooms inside the casino. Sitting around a purple velvet gambling table, what was supposed to be a kickoff meeting quickly devolved into something more bizarre. It started when Tony abandoned formalities and dared someone in the meeting to fit themselves inside a Delivering Happiness sports bag. Eleen Hsu, whose title on the team was “Project Specialist Supreme,” got in the bag, and the group started carrying her down the hall. The group headed outside to the Delivering Happiness tour bus and went inside. Next came Tony’s second idea: What if we passed a vodka shot from mouth to mouth in a row? In theory, the shot would have gone from Tony to Jenn to Angela and down the line. The idea sounded gross, but Angela felt that keeping up with these antics was part of the job, so she tried to catch the shot in her mouth as it dribbled from Jenn’s. She failed, as the vodka shot was mostly saliva. Right after, Angela turned to her boss, Amy Jo Martin, who was also on the bus. “I remember looking at Amy’s face,” Angela later recalled. “I didn’t know if it was disappointment, anger, or jealousy.” The bus tour hadn’t even started, but Angela figured it was time to look for another job.

The Delivering Happiness bus departed Vegas in August. At each stop, Tony was typically committed to several engagements. “We were overcommitted and always playing catch-up when we would get somewhere that we didn’t have proper time to prep for,” Joey recalled. While the purpose of the bus tour was to promote Tony’s book, Tony did not actually travel with the bus for the majority of the tour. For the most part, he and Jenn would fly into a city, meet up with the bus, attend the speaking engagements, and then party hard with the crew. Tony and Jenn would then head back to the airport, either to return to Vegas or to go to some other non-book-related engagement. “And then it was just a bunch of hungover people rushing to get from here to there after all the disorganization and stress from the weekend,” Joey recalled. If Joey asked why they’d drunk so much the previous night, they would often remind him that it had been Tony feeding them shots. To add to the growing headaches, they had to find a new bus driver, twice. The first driver kept stopping for smoke breaks, while the second driver was a wild card. “He was a tough Aussie who you would want on your Armageddon team,” Joey said later. “He was running people off the road, flipping people off. And he was driving what was supposed to be the happiest bus!” With Tony’s missing leadership creating a vacuum, petty arguments snowballed into seemingly insurmountable conflicts. During the first weeks of the tour, the crew would eat meals together and hang out during breaks. But as the bus journeyed on, the Delivering Happiness workers kept to themselves whenever they could. Mimi, who was also flying in and out of some cities and held the title “Little Miss Sunshine,” was helping to program the tour. She was central to the complaints of several people on the bus, Joey said later, who took issue with her demands. “Everybody complained about Mimi,” he said. No one was more bitter about Mimi’s presence than Holly. The tension between the two women was palpable. Mimi had assumed many of the duties that Holly, whose title was “Life Managing Director,” believed she was responsible for, and Holly was increasingly incensed about the minimization of her role. She had raised complaints to Tony and Jenn at the beginning of the bus tour, but they were mostly ignored. Her breaking point came during their fourth stop, in Chicago. Normally Holly would meet the

public relations team prior to interviews, conduct sound checks, and make sure Tony had his outfit sorted. But when they arrived in Chicago and Holly went to speak with Tony to prepare him for an interview, Tony dismissed her: “Mimi has it, it’s done.” It might have been a subtle comment, but Holly felt slighted. She had left a stable career and had been giving her new concierge venture a red-hot go in Las Vegas. Tony had made what seemed a goodwill offer to help her during a hard time, but now this tour was consuming her life, and she felt not only ostracized from Tony’s world and without a clear purpose on the bus but isolated from him too. In tears, Holly called Patricia, the friend she had convinced Tony to hire as an assistant. “I was told Tony would take time to talk with me, which never happened,” Holly said. Patricia, who was back at Tony’s Southern Highlands mansion to look after his affairs while he was on tour, was alarmed, fearing that Holly was on the edge of slipping into depression, and sent Jenn an email: It’s human nature to want to help people whenever we can … and we’re supposed to be delivering happiness.This is a confusing time for Holly and she really needs support right now … she’s not feeling part of this team, for more than one reason. I’m sure at this point it’s an accumulation of more than one thing. I hope you might help her move through this difficult time on the three month journey you are all on. Jenn quickly responded and checked in on Holly, to little avail. The fight between Mimi and Holly was an issue that could only be resolved by one person: Tony. After all, the two women were jockeying for his support. They were also fighting for their livelihoods. Both women’s entire worlds revolved around him, from their jobs to their rooms at his mansion. But he refused to enter the fray, seemingly hoping that they would resolve the conflict on their own, which only made it worse. “He was off-loading the conflict, effectively,” Joey said later. Their fight was just one episode from the Delivering Happiness bus tour, Joey later concluded, that highlighted the downside of Tony’s hands-off management style, and how it could bring out people’s worst instincts. It was also something that would have far greater consequences one day in the future, when Tony would oversee an

entire neighborhood underpinned by his mantra of happiness. “The bus tour for me was the microcosm for pretty much all that happened later on in downtown Vegas,” said Joey.

At one point, Tony finally made an effort to resolve the conflicts. In October, around the halfway point of the bus tour, the crew was staying in Miami for a few days. He noticed the team’s energy was low. As he prepared to leave the bus again with Jenn, he sent an email, reminding those on the bus tour that they were promoting a book that focused on the importance of culture. “This email is meant as a Step 1 for our core values exercise to do over the next few days while Jenn and I are away from the bus,” he started. His email, sent to everyone on the tour, instructed everyone to make four lists. The first list would be names of people “that you enjoy connecting with,” Tony wrote, while the second would be “a list of people or types of people that annoy you.” From these two lists, Tony instructed, the writer should try to understand what values they had in common with people in the first list, and what was missing in the second list. The third was a list of the happiest moments in the writer’s life, and the fourth the least happiest. “The happiness usually comes from one or more of your values being expressed,” he explained. “Write down what those values are next to each moment” on the third list, he instructed. “Get ready for step 2!” he wrote at the end of the email. Tony never sent the second part of the exercise. It seemed he moved on to something else, and the crew continued to fend for themselves. At the last stop in Seattle in November, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, Holly brought up the battle against Mimi with Tony once more. “I’ve been mustering up the energy to talk to you about this, but what’s going on? One day I’m doing everything,” she said. “Then all of a sudden I’m doing nothing. Did I do something wrong?” “No, no, you did nothing wrong,” Tony said. “Well, what’s going on?” “I don’t want to talk about it,” Tony replied.

To outsiders, the Delivering Happiness bus tour looked like the embodiment of joy. The bus crew had filmed a rap music video, which received coverage from TechCrunch. At the center of the video is an enigmatic young woman, Laura Lombardi, whose title was “The Happiness Fairy.” Her lyrics are catchy and the video looks happy, with clips showing children lunging forward in potato-sack races, or the crew riding bikes around Times Square brandishing signs with the yellow winky face logo. And by quantifiable measures, the book and the bus tour were a success. Tony had given his presentation espousing his life story and the science of happiness to packed rooms and auditoriums across the country. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-seven weeks straight. It reached the USA Today bestseller list, staying there for nine weeks, and was among the top ten Amazon bestsellers for June and July 2010. But the Delivering Happiness rap video presented a misleading image of a group of young, energetic crew members having the time of their lives, when they were actually miserable. The book’s presence on the bestseller lists was also phony. Tony used ResultSource, a company that helps authors buy their way to the top of these lists by taking bulk buys and breaking them up to look like individual purchases, circumventing safeguards used by the lists to prevent this. Asked by a reporter later about his work with ResultSource, Tony gave a written response, polished with spin: “At many of those events, people paid to come watch me speak and receive an autographed copy of my book. ResultSource managed the speaking, book ordering, and distribution of the books for us during the tour. We’re excited that the book has continued to do well over the years since the launch, and are also excited that the paperback version of the book will be coming out next month!” Most of the bus crew members came on tour with lofty expectations— reinforced by the literal message of “Delivering Happiness”—only to have them unfulfilled. Angela, the young college graduate from Digital Royalty, quit after they stopped in Chicago. Laura Lombardi had hopes of hosting Zappos.TV—a series of Zappos videos uploaded onto YouTube—after her role in making the rap video, but it never happened. Holly’s role, meanwhile, dissipated as soon as the tour ended. Tony introduced Holly to several of his lieutenants in Las Vegas and Zappos to

try and find a new position for her, but nothing came to fruition. A few months later, Tony told Holly he needed all the rooms at the Southern Highlands mansion for Zappos and other events, and gave her two weeks to move out of the mansion. While she remained an acquaintance of Tony’s, their friendship never recovered. She eventually moved back to her hometown in Massachusetts and got into local politics. Over the years, her experience on the tour often came to mind. “Tony would invite people into his world and give someone the earth, moon, and stars and sun without realizing how the other person might perceive it,” Holly later mused. “It might have been my bad for having certain expectations, but the lack of structure, the lack of confrontation and communication—it became very negative. It was almost like the opposite of Delivering Happiness.” Holly was given access to Tony’s world but couldn’t get what she—and many others after her—would want and come to expect: access to Tony himself. There was one other thing that she sometimes thought about, and discussed with her friend Patricia, as she watched Tony’s world from afar. After Patricia had seen Mimi crying in the backyard in the summer of 2010, Mimi kept coming and going from the Southern Highlands mansion. One day before the start of the bus tour, Mimi called Patricia and asked her to go into one of the spare rooms in the house to throw some documents away. The room, decorated in a rock-and-roll theme with a guitar on display, was technically a guest room, though Mimi had taken over the closet. As Patricia walked into the room, she noticed a trash bag that already had some papers in it. Mimi asked her to put the rest of the documents scattered on the floor of the closet into the same trash bag and discard them. As Patricia put the papers in the trash bag, she noticed they were Tony’s bank statements, bills, and other financial records. With the bag in hand, she went to find Holly, who was working in Tony’s library, a room with fifteenfoot ceilings, walls lined with book-filled shelves, and a scattering of empty Grey Goose vodka bottles. Patricia told Holly what Mimi had asked her to do and said that something felt off. So the two women sat on the ground and started looking through the documents. Mimi had full access to Tony’s accounts, so it was not unusual for her to sign documents or checks for Tony. However, Holly recalled seeing duplicates of certain transactions. For example, there would be a check to a landscaper for several thousand

dollars. Below that, there would be a check of the same amount written out to Mimi, and the memo line for that check would say “landscaping”—as if she were reimbursing herself for a service that had already been paid directly to the vendor. By her estimate, there were hundreds of thousanddollar checks written to Mimi. They never threw away the documents. Instead, they hid them in a corner of the library.

CHAPTER 9

THE NEW PROJECT

Tyler Williams was at a crossroads. It was the spring of 2011 and he had moved to Las Vegas three years before, with a dream of making it big in the music industry—only to have it taken away when his band’s label became victim to a corporate takeover. He had been on the move around the West Coast for nearly a decade, working one construction job to the next to support his passion. He’d also been working to pay his wife’s medical bills. After years of life on the road, Tyler was ready for some semblance of stability. The son of a Pentecostal Christian youth pastor, Tyler had grown up in an idyllic town in southern Oregon, before moving with his family to Anchorage, Alaska, when he was twelve. The outdoors had afforded him a life of creation and wonderment, and he had watched his father build water balloon catapults as an activity director for a Bible camp. Tyler had learned early on about the power of empathy when his mother started a foster home for Alaska Native youths, and the family adopted four children and became the legal guardian of four others. As a singer in the church band, his mother also ensured that music was a major pillar of their lives, and Tyler found himself more focused on his high school band than his studies. He also found himself focused on a girl named Elissa, whom he started dating. After graduating, the couple traveled south, got married at the age of twenty-one, and moved to Seattle. But their honeymoon period hadn’t lasted. Elissa started experiencing intense symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, and she struggled to get out of bed in the mornings, her joints too stiff to move. Some days, Tyler would

draw her a hot bath, then carry her into the tub to bend her legs and arms as she cried in pain. Saddled with medical bills, the couple were just getting by when Tyler got a call in 2007 that had the potential to change their fortunes: his friend was looking for a drummer to join a Las Vegas–based band. A place where Elton John or the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir could be playing on any given night, Vegas was the place where Tyler might finally turn his music dream into reality. Plus, the warm climate might help Elissa’s condition. While the band had gained some recognition and toured the country, it was dropped by its label within a year. But the couple was determined to stay in their newfound city; Elissa’s symptoms had improved immensely. Tyler was looking for other jobs when Elissa started working as a Monster Energy girl, passing out samples of the energy drink along the Strip, at conferences, and in offices, including those belonging to a tech company called Zappos. She was amazed. It was unlike any office she had seen before: employees were parading around the office in costumes amid a tangle of plants hung from the ceiling. It was all a bit weird—just like Tyler. Upon Elissa’s urging, Tyler found himself Googling the search terms “Zappos” and “Tony Hsieh.” None of the web pages that he found had anything to do with selling shoes. What he found instead was that Tony and Zappos were well on their way to becoming part of tech industry folklore. Though still soft-spoken and slightly awkward, Tony had become the perfect host for the onslaught of visitors and camera crews coming to Henderson to capture the nontraditional corporate culture of Zappos. While other tech companies like Google and Facebook were developing the “golden handcuffs” of Silicon Valley—above-market salaries and extraordinary employee benefits like onsite gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and free food, making it impossible for workers to leave—Zappos already had most of these things, and it also offered a different benefit: a place for misfits to find purpose and a home. “When you have the little Z’s on people’s cheeks, you can understand why people would say, ‘Oh, it feels a little cult-like,’” commented a journalist who visited the company with a camera crew in 2010 on Bald and Blue Day, an annual event where Zapponians shaved their heads, dyed their hair blue, or had “Zappos” or “Z” painted in blue on their bodies to show

company spirit. “You mean, that’s not normal?” Tony had answered with a smile. From costume parades to Superhero Week, it was not unusual to see a Zapponian walking around the office in a full-body Spider-Man suit or a male employee in a barmaid outfit. Loud cheers erupted in the middle of the day as employees gathered around a set of cubicles to watch two toy cars race down a miniature track. Employees recited legendary stories from the Fourth of July barbecues and New Year’s Eve parties that Tony would host at his home in Southern Highlands every year. There were workout rooms and areas where employees could go lie down and take a nap. There was an open bar with whiskey, vodka, and beer. Balloons, streamers, and Silly String hung from the ceiling year-round, giving the sense of a perpetual, never-ending office party. “It was pure happiness,” said Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas. Tony, meanwhile, rarely strayed from his uniform: a black Zappos Tshirt or a Zappos hoodie, jeans, and black Donald J. Pliner slip-ons. Journalists would come to Henderson, follow Tony around, and leave perplexed by his idiosyncrasies. “At times, Mr. Hsieh came across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times. “That can intimidate those who are not accustomed to his watchful style.” Antonia Dodge, who was working at Zappos as a personality assessor, told the reporter that Tony had a form of social phobia. “But he gallantly walks over it by not letting it stop him and always pursues social situations,” she said. “And second, he lubricates with tons of vodka.” Tony’s romantic life was a quandary as well. “For all of Mr. Hsieh’s emphasis on the importance of relationships, his romantic life remains a mystery,” the reporter wrote. “I don’t usually define dating or not dating, together or not together,” Tony told the New York Times. “I prefer to use the term ‘hang out.’ And I hang out with a lot of people, guys and girls. I don’t really have this one person I am dating right now. I am hanging out with multiple people, and some people I hang out with more than others.” While Tony may have seemed out of place, the company he built was even more so. The Zappos culture—fun, weird, and referred to by Barbara Walters as Tony’s “social experiment”—was also off-putting for some,

especially for buttoned-up corporate America. But in a post-recession world in which tech companies seemed to have all the answers to society’s problems, a new generation of young workers without technical coding skills looked away from big tech firms in Silicon Valley and instead to Zappos, with its lack of formality and an emphasis on hiring around culture, not resumes. Its core business was selling shoes online, but that seemed to be the last thing that came to mind when people thought of Zappos and Tony Hsieh. The news segments and talk show interviews—from Tony explaining Zappos’s core values of staying humble and embracing weirdness to B-roll of pranks being pulled in the office—mythologized Tony and his stated purpose of creating happiness for customers and employees. They also became recruiting tools for the company: Tony was sending out smoke signals to people looking for more in their lives. Tony could show them the way. The more Tyler learned about Zappos, the more he became intrigued by Tony’s way of talking about his business, as if his workforce were a true community of like-minded individuals, bonded and built upon a core set of values. Then he saw one statistic that caught his eye: at the time, the company claimed that Zappos was harder to get into than Harvard. Tyler, who never went to college, felt compelled to apply.

Tyler didn’t know it yet, but he was about to enter Tony’s world as it entered a new chapter that would expand far beyond Zappos. For all the hullabaloo about the successful leadership synergy at the top of Zappos between Tony, Fred, and Alfred Lin, it didn’t last long after Amazon bought the company. A year after the sale, Alfred departed and took a role at Sequoia alongside his mentor Michael Moritz, where he would end up steering investments into companies like DoorDash, Instacart, and Reddit. (In 2012, he joined the board of Airbnb.) With Alfred gone, there were rumblings that Tony and Fred were working on something massive. “They were actually very, very explicit about the fact that they had this secret project,” recalled Chris Peake, the Zappos employee who reported to Fred.

Tony and Fred had been inspired by an economist named Edward Glaeser, whose book Triumph of the City unpacked how urban metropolises like Athens, London, Tokyo, and Singapore have historically fostered humans’ leaps forward. Cities “spur innovation by facilitating face-to-face interaction, they attract talent and sharpen it through competition, they encourage entrepreneurship and they allow for social and economic mobility,” read a New York Times review of the book. Glaeser’s theory posits that when cities increase in size, the productivity and innovation of each resident increase. But when companies increase in size, the opposite happens—with more bureaucracy and red tape, each employee actually becomes less productive and creative. With this in mind, Tony and Fred had embarked on a new kind of project, one that would be centered around making Las Vegas a hotbed for innovation. Perhaps Sin City could become the next Silicon Valley. An opportunity had emerged in 2009, when Tony was introduced to Oscar Goodman, the infamous mob-lawyer-turned-mayor of Las Vegas, who had preceded his wife, Carolyn, before she was elected in 2011. Decades earlier, Oscar had been a fixture of downtown Las Vegas, north of the modern Strip, when it was a glitzy playground for Hollywood royalty, vagabonds, and the mafia alike, an escape from the rigidity of the nation’s metropolises. But the area had become a forgotten corner of America and fallen to crime and poverty once the corporate mega-casinos started emerging from the desert floor along Las Vegas Boulevard in the 1990s. Some efforts had been made to bring the downtown area back to its former glory, including the construction of a gigantic canopy made of 50 million LED lights that featured mesmerizing visual displays over the neighborhood’s main vein, Fremont Street. Under Oscar’s tenure, the city had doubled down and embarked on a head-spinning number of projects, acquiring sixty acres of land west and south of Fremont Street. The famed architect Frank Gehry was hired to design a world-class brain disease research center, a crumpled metal structure that looked as though it had been crushed by a giant fist. Plans were drafted for a performing arts center, and construction began on the area’s first green space, Symphony Park. A cluster of antiques stores and furniture wholesalers south of Fremont Street became known as the Arts District, attracting hip locals to new bars. By 2008, construction on the five-million-square-foot showroom complex

World Market was completed, attracting hospitality conventions. Finally, Oscar vowed to build a new City Hall to anchor his newly modern neighborhood. But the one thing missing was a large company to bring jobs to the area. So when a shrewd local real estate dealmaker named Andrew Donner told Oscar about a tech company called Zappos that was interested in moving to the area, he realized the company could move into the old City Hall building—a semicircular structure built in the 1970s that had recently undergone renovations—and complete his downtown puzzle. His hunch was confirmed when he toured Zappos’s Henderson office soon after. “It was unlike any business I had ever seen,” Oscar later recalled. “I didn’t know what they did. Apparently, they were selling shoes over the telephone.” In 2010, Zappos announced that it would be moving to downtown Las Vegas and would take over the old City Hall building when the council moved out in 2012. (After lengthy negotiations, Andrew Donner’s company, Resort Gaming Group, closed on the acquisition of the property in the summer of 2012, ultimately paying $18 million, and Zappos’s parent Amazon committed to a fifteen-year lease.) It came as a surprise to some. Why move hundreds of employees out of suburbia to a rough part of town? Despite the development over the past decade, the neighborhood was still pockmarked by boarded-up properties, run-down motels, and empty lots. Although it explained why Tony and Fred had been spending less time on Zappos affairs recently—they had been making trips downtown to take clandestine meetings at a bar and there were rumors of plans for employee housing and charter schools for the children of Zapponians—but it still wasn’t clear what was behind the announcement. What Zapponians could assume, however, was that Tony and Fred thought big, and whatever secret project they were working on was going to be a whole lot more than simply moving the company headquarters again. Away from Vegas, Tony and Fred had been touring the famed campuses of Google, Nike, and Apple. Tony found them beautiful. At Nike’s headquarters in Portland, he loved the running track that bordered one of its buildings, as well as an on-site pub in another building. “We need one of those,” Tony said. But he also found the campuses incredibly insular, and with “golden handcuff” perks, there was little reason for employees to

leave; these companies had essentially built fortresses. At the Googleplex in San Mateo, there was no need for a Google employee to buy lunch at a local restaurant—thereby contributing to the local economy—or to integrate with the community when everything was provided. Instead of looking at company campuses, Tony had been thinking about his visits to New York University when he was at college. What he liked most about NYU was that there were no clear lines for where the campus ended and city life began. “The more we thought about it, the more we thought maybe we should actually turn this whole idea inside-out,” Tony later said during a presentation at a tech sustainability conference. “What if instead of just investing in ourselves, we invested in the community and the ecosystem?”

Whatever they were planning, it was going to be people like Tyler Williams who would one day ensure its reality. Though he could not have foreseen what awaited him after entering Tony’s world. Applying for a role at Zappos seemed a long shot, Tyler thought, but he had tried, succeeded, and failed more than once in life. He saw an option to apply with a video cover letter—so he got to work, creating a catchy beat that spelled out Zappos’s ten core cultural values. To perform the song in the video, he cloned himself seven times, creating a full band of Tylers with mohawks. Five versions of him played instruments, from the drums to maracas, while the other two fiddled with a Rubik’s cube and snapped to the rhythm. The Tyler with the guitar crooned: It’s a family that loves to play. It’s a place that I’d like to go someday. Throw all my insecurities away and be honest in the things I’d say. You can be a little weird if you’re humble. Grow and learn while having fun. Creating open-minded sense of adventure. Train for a marathon. Determined to run. Yes it’s true. Yes it’s true. Za-a-a-ppos. Where they embrace the change with a click.

Za-a-a-ppos. They create a masterpiece, Out of only a wish. The music video not only secured him the job but became a Zappos legend. He started at the call center, as most other Zappos employees had before him. Even though he applied for the position of events and audiovisual technician, he was happy to work his way up in the company. A few months after his start date, the company hosted its annual costume contest on Halloween. Tyler made a centaur costume so elaborate that his managers told him to take the day off the phones to walk around the office and make people laugh. At one point, he made his way past a glass-walled conference room in which Tony was filming a video interview. The interviewer and Tony laughed as the centaur ambled through the camera frame, emphasizing Tony’s point that Zappos embraced fun and weirdness in the office. Later that day, when Tyler was on his way back to his desk, Tony caught up with him. “What are you doing tonight?” Tony said to Tyler. There was a Halloween parade that night in downtown Las Vegas, and Zappos had submitted a float for it. “Would you like to come?” Tyler, who had never spoken to the CEO before, stumbled through an explanation that he too would be downtown that evening, but he couldn’t accept the invitation because he had a show to play that night with the Beau Hodges Band, a new part country, part rock, part blues band that Tyler had joined. Tony, who didn’t have a costume on, asked where they were playing. Tyler told him that it would be at an outdoor stage far removed from the main street and well after the Halloween parade ended. Tony nodded with a smile and walked off. Tyler wondered whether he had just missed the opportunity of a lifetime. That night, the Beau Hodges Band started playing to about five people on an empty street. Tyler and his four bandmates treated the show as a rehearsal. But thirty minutes into their set, they heard some honks and saw a caravan of large vehicles driving toward the stage. A red double-decker, a school bus painted in an Alice in Wonderland theme, the Delivering Happiness tour bus, and a Zappos parade float pulled up, and close to sixty people poured out of the vehicles to dance to the Beau Hodges Band. Tyler saw Tony watching from the top of the open double-decker bus, smiling

down at the Zapponians swaying to the music. As Tyler watched Tony and the scene before him, he started to understand the magic behind his boss. “Tony instilled in me that night what ‘wow’ really means,” Tyler later remarked. “It’s about making someone feel really special.”

Such enchantment was about to take hold in downtown Las Vegas. At the start of 2012, Tony and Fred announced during a company all-hands meeting that they were finally moving the Zappos headquarters into the former Las Vegas City Hall building in the Fremont East district. The move would happen in phases, with the first task at hand being to convert the jail cells on the second floor into either conference rooms or a speakeasy. But they saved the biggest announcement for last. They would be embarking on an entirely new venture: a $350 million investment, most of which would be privately funded by Tony, to revitalize Fremont East, a long-decaying corner of Las Vegas, and turn it into a mecca for technology, culture, and community. Tony called it “the city as a startup”—as if it were possible to apply the “move fast and break things” ideology of Facebook and other high-flying tech startups to an entire metropolis. His fourteen hundred employees weren’t just moving offices. They were going to rebuild their own slice of Las Vegas. “How many opportunities in a lifetime do you have to help shape the future of a major city?” he stated during one of his talks. The project, led by Tony and ten of his most trusted lieutenants, including Fred, Tony’s cousin Connie Yeh, and her husband, Don Welch, would be named the Downtown Project, with the new Zappos headquarters serving as an anchor to the community. The $350 million would be distributed across four categories: $50 million to attract small business owners to open up restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, and more in Fremont East; another $50 million on art and cultural projects, including an art museum and new live music venues; $50 million to invest in tech startups, on the condition they move to downtown Vegas, just as Tony had required his portfolio companies to move into the Venture Frogs incubator in San Francisco; and finally, $200 million to buy up land and buildings downtown and build residential high-rises to house the entire vision.

Underpinning the Downtown Project were three central goals. The first was to make downtown Vegas the most community-focused city in the world. The second was to provide everything one of its citizens would need to live, work, and play within walking distance. Third, Tony wanted to make downtown Vegas the co-learning and co-working capital of the world. These goals were not only lofty; some were simply unquantifiable. How do you measure whether a city is focused on its community? And how do you define and determine what makes a co-learning capital of the world? To address this, Tony invented new metrics to decide which companies and ventures the Downtown Project would invest in. Instead of maximizing return on investment (ROI)—a common measure in business to assess profitability—he said he would only invest in businesses and projects that focused on maximizing long-term return on community (ROC). Like Zappos’s reputation for hiring employees based on whether they aligned with its culture, the logic was now being applied to entire companies: the definition of the Downtown Project “community” seemed largely dependent on whether a company would simply fit in with the neighborhood Tony was creating. Another metric he would use to determine where his capital went was return on luck (ROL), a phrase borrowed from Jim Collins in his book Great by Choice, which meant he would invest based on whether a business or project would encourage more serendipitous collisions among strangers, bringing new ideas to light. All this meant that even if a business could make Tony and the Downtown Project a lot of money, but it was not good for the community, then he wouldn’t invest. “This is part of the reason why we don’t have outside investors and we’re not working with traditional building developers or land developers,” Tony quipped later. No outside investors also meant another consequence (or perhaps an advantage, in Tony’s eyes): despite the overwhelming emphasis on giving back and focusing on the community, Tony would ultimately have full control of the entire venture. Zapponians were sold. “This was way bigger than just the campus,” recalled Chris Peake. “We felt like this could go down in history books as something that Tony Hsieh, Fred Mossler, and Zappos did to recharge cities.” Since Tony had so much of his personal money on the line, onlookers wondered what motivated him to do this. “Some speculate it’s ego, a desire

to remake downtown in his image—his personal Hsiehville,” wrote the Las Vegas Sun in 2012. “But others say Hsieh looks like a young Buddha, hinting that some Eastern religious ethic accounts for what can be viewed as a selfless endeavor. Still, others say he can’t pass on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help remake the urban center of a city known around the world.”

CHAPTER 10

THE DESERT TECH UTOPIA

Like other locals of downtown Las Vegas, Natalie Young had heard that there was a rich guy walking around the neighborhood. Rumor had it he was going to spend millions of dollars to transform the area. But she was wary of this new arrival, Tony Hsieh. He was always surrounded by an entourage, like some hotshot. The last thing downtown needed was a moneyed tech bro to gentrify the neighborhood and break open the tightknit group of locals who spent their nights at the Downtown Cocktail Room. But on a fall night in 2011, Natalie’s life changed. She had been reluctant to go out that evening. Actually, she wasn’t much of a night owl at all. She’d been in recovery for more than a decade, and going to bars with friends wasn’t her idea of a good time. But after months of unemployment, she’d relented and agreed to go check out the new Thai restaurant downtown. After one thing led to another, she was now seated in a booth with her girlfriends in the dim light of the Downtown Cocktail Room. She had been a cook since she could remember, a career she pursued at the insistence of her father. When she was younger, she had gone astray with the wrong crowd in her hometown, Aurora, Colorado, but after multiple stints in rehab she got sober in her late thirties, and landed a job as a broiler cook at Eiffel Tower Restaurant in the Paris Hotel. Standing in front of a superheated cooker preparing rib-eye, rabbit, veal, and Dover sole for ten hours a day was grueling, adding to the pressures of working for a fine-dining establishment on the Strip. But the discipline held her life in place, and she channeled her energy into her work. After being promoted to

sous-chef, she was recruited by the Hard Rock Casino to work as a room chef at one of its restaurants. After a decade in Las Vegas, though, she was beginning to feel that it was time to move on. She was thinking of moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the pace was slow and the food was good. Whether Natalie was in the kitchen or outside, rarely was she in anything but Dickies trousers and Chuck Taylors. She had a round face with a full-bodied grin, but her expression could darken in an instant, with the seriousness of someone who knows what happens when a line is crossed. Her last job in Vegas leading a kitchen had ended acrimoniously and left a bad taste in her mouth, marring a successful run as a chef in the Strip’s casinos: after being lured with a big paycheck to open a new restaurant, she had set up the business only to be replaced by someone being paid less. Had she done some due diligence, she would have learned that the employer had a history of shady business practices. “I was going to either commit suicide or homicide … seriously,” she said later. While plotting her exit from Vegas, she spent most days at the downtown neighborhood’s only cafe, the Beat Coffeehouse, a beloved spot on the corner of Fremont and Sixth Street where customers were encouraged to bring in their own vinyls to play on the store’s record player. That, and dogs were allowed; it was Natalie’s idea of a perfect place to pass the time in an otherwise run-down part of town. She was close with the owners of the Beat, married couple Michael and Jennifer Cornthwaite, the latter of whom she’d gotten to know when she was working in the casinos. The couple also owned the Downtown Cocktail Room. It had been Michael’s dream to build a bar downtown for years, one that didn’t rely on slot machines or cable TV to draw patrons, and in 2007 he’d made it a reality. Housed at the bottom of a windowless brick building on Las Vegas Boulevard, a few steps south of Fremont Street, it had the feel of a Prohibition-era speakeasy, with an inconspicuous entrance in an alleyway several feet from the boulevard. After ringing the doorbell, patrons passed through heavy curtains that concealed the intimate space within. A long polished-concrete bar extended away from the entrance, opening up to a low-slung room dotted with candlelit tables. Beyond the main floor space an even smaller room was filled with booths, where Natalie was now sitting, sipping on a Coke.

Michael slid into the booth and sat next to her. “Are you set on Santa Fe?” he said. “Yeah, I’m pretty set,” she responded. “Is there anything that can change your mind?” “I don’t really, you know, see what’s next here.” “Well, what if you could have your own restaurant?” “You’re stupid,” she said. “I don’t have any money.” “What if you don’t need any?” Someone approached the table. “Hey, Michael, Tony’s here.” Before leaving to greet his new arrival, Michael turned to Natalie and looked at her seriously. “Don’t leave.” She hung around for a little while longer before going to find Michael to say goodbye. When she found him, he asked her to follow him to a table where Tony was sitting with his party. “Hey, Tony, how’s it going?” she said. “I’m Natalie.” “I know who you are,” Tony responded. “What size restaurant do you want?”

Understanding how blighted corners of cities transform into “cool” neighborhoods—the study of gentrification—has been the focus of urban planners for decades. Williamsburg, a former manufacturing neighborhood in Brooklyn, was once a cluster of run-down warehouses and home to an insular sect of Orthodox Jews and Italian immigrants. Over a decade, the neighborhood became unrecognizable. Now countless high-rise towers line the East River and offer residences with panoramic views of Manhattan; at street level are boutique stores and overpriced coffee shops. Despite scarce parkland, it is the kind of neighborhood where new one-bedroom apartments often start at $4,000 per month and young New York elites go to be seen. Most who study these urban transformations agree that they typically occur as a series of clear and predictable events. In 1979, an MIT professor named Phillip Clay published one of the first comprehensive studies of gentrification called Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, which laid out four

stages in which neighborhoods transform from poor, run-down areas into enclaves for the upper class. While some modern factors can affect how gentrification occurs, the study remains true for many cities. According to Clay, who became the chancellor of MIT, the first indication that change is afoot is the arrival of artists in search of cheaper housing or members of LGBTQ communities seeking safe spaces to move into. These people begin renovating individual spaces. A music and arts scene inevitably builds around them, breathing fresh air into local bars or developing new ones. Street art will begin to mask blighted buildings and add light to dark alleyways. Next, vacancies drop and foot traffic spikes with the arrival of more residents, attracting middle-income earners, who begin buying up more properties from the original residents and pricing them out of the neighborhood. With more money, the properties are renovated and the allure of the neighborhood improves. As eyesores start to disappear behind new facades and trees are planted in front of trendy cafes, corporate and public money begins to flow in, growing the demand for boutique storefronts, Starbucks, and hotel chains. Roads and streets are improved, and new parks are built. Public institutions like universities and hospitals are built. A modern twist on Clay’s model would include the arrival of hipsters and moneyed millennials. By stage four, the artists that catalyzed the change in the area have themselves been priced out of the neighborhood, to make way for a solid upper class who move into flashy new condo buildings that fill the remaining vacant lots or are built on land where the old homes once stood. The original residents have long been forgotten, pushed farther away as surrounding neighborhoods have similarly been boosted, in a continuous cycle. In March 2010, as Tony basked in the success of the Amazon sale and prepared to promote his memoir, the downtown neighborhood of Las Vegas was very much on the cusp of Clay’s first stage. Tony had loved the urban vibe of San Francisco with its sense of “cool.” Living and working in Henderson amid the banality of suburbia had left him wondering if there was any place that felt anything like San Francisco in Las Vegas. He was told that there was one bar north of the city called the Downtown Cocktail

Room. Walking into the sultry space, Tony felt it was exactly what he’d been looking for. But it was in Michael Cornthwaite, the bar’s owner, that Tony found an enthusiastic guide to lay out an idea for downtown that he’d been dreaming about for years. Michael’s vision had been shared by Mayor Oscar Goodman, who had vowed to invest in the area, promising to improve the roads and streets. The city had plans for an arts center nearby, and construction on a park had begun. And a newer, younger, cooler crowd had started coming to the area as new bars—Beauty Bar, Vanguard, and the Griffin—opened along Fremont Street. While those watering holes supported a blooming nightlife on the block, they did little to brighten Fremont Street during the day, which was still pockmarked with run-down storefronts. A pawn shop stood at one end and a sex shop at the other. In the middle of the block was a take-out spot that sold Philly cheesesteaks, which occasionally came with a viewing of cockroaches. Other establishments did little to attract the type of crowd that Michael’s bar did. Just north was the Gold Spike casino, which advertised “sexy blackjack” and “$1 shots.” Its gaming floor was filled with cigarette smoke and penny slot machines, and attracted a tough clientele; gang members had once robbed the place at gunpoint. Another time a woman was shot by her husband in the parking lot. East along the next block, opposite the Beat, on the corner of Sixth Street and Fremont, was the El Cortez casino, a place where one might see someone being kicked out of the venue instead of enjoying a pleasant evening of roulette. For another five blocks, the only respite from empty car lots and run-down motels was an old dive bar on the corner of Tenth Street called Atomic Liquors—a name it earned during the 1950s, when its patrons could stand on its roof and watch the nuclear bomb tests to the north send mushroom clouds bulging above the desert. But if there was one more reason to see the neighborhood as a diamond in the rough, a burgeoning grunge rock music scene was what stitched the place together. Just a block from Atomic Liquors was one more venue, called the Bunkhouse, a saloon-style bar that, locals declared, was where one could experience the “real Vegas.” The bar looked like it was falling apart, adding to its allure. Inside the peach stucco walls was an open floor space soaked with years’ worth of beer, with a foot-high stage at one end and a long bar at the other. On the walls hung aged posters of Roy Rogers

and John Wayne, and a stuffed stag head. When the bar was full and a band was playing, there would often be headbangers down at the front. “Downtown is a happening scene, there’s a revolution down there and it’s great to be a part of it,” Tony DiVincenzo, a bass guitar player with the local band Lazy Stars, told a reporter after a gig at the Bunkhouse. “You know, musically, artistically, spiritually, man. It’s awesome.” Among the scene’s most die-hard fans was James Woodbridge, a philosophy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who had realized that the energy of the Bunkhouse could be expanded to a festival that signed bands like the Lazy Stars to play at the downtown bars and showcase the neighborhood. Realizing this vision, he co-founded the Neon Reverb festival in 2008, mostly by using his own savings. The festival only drew around fifty people in its first year, but by the time Michael took Tony to see the festival in the fall of 2010, there was a Red Bull–branded party bus shuttling hundreds of fans from the Bunkhouse to Beauty Bar to the Downtown Cocktail Room. “Here we had this amazing thing where the whole area was activated,” Woodbridge said. Save for the El Cortez and Michael’s businesses, Tony and the Downtown Project would eventually own all of these properties and businesses. They would also pour money into the Neon Reverb festival. As Tony came and went from downtown, he learned that his own Zappos staff had been frequenting the bars independently of him. Tony saw that downtown Las Vegas was ripe for reinvention, like the Sixth Street district in Austin, Texas. The artists were already here, and so were the bars. And with so many vacant lots, there was plenty of space to create. Fred introduced Tony to Andrew Donner, the real estate developer who owned some properties in the neighborhood and knew who owned what. On tours around the area, ideas were flowing for Tony as he walked from block to block. One day, as they approached the corner of Stewart Street and Sixth Street, in front of the old City Hall building, Tony turned to Andrew and pointed at a dusty lot. “Can we build a ski slope right here?” By Clay’s reckoning, the process of gentrification can take years, often more than a decade. By the time Zappos announced in December 2010 that it was moving into the former City Hall building, Tony’s vision for the neighborhood was unfurling by the day. And if Tony was going to be the

primary catalyst behind the transformation of Downtown, he wasn’t going to wait decades to see how his investment would pay off. In 2011 Tony went to the Burning Man festival for the first time and had seen how a vibrant community could be built seemingly in an instant. The festival, held every September in the Nevada desert, draws almost a hundred thousand revelers, who essentially build a self-sustaining city with its own neighborhoods and infrastructure that exist for a week before disappearing overnight again. People sleep in elaborate “camps,” complete with arts projects, musical performances, and fire-breathing sculptures that distract from the intermittent dust storms and heat waves. “Citizens,” as attendees of the event are known, exchange items rather than pay for goods in currency. To convince people to move to a neighborhood in Las Vegas, away from the Strip, Tony would first need to attract artists, creatives, and small business owners to make the neighborhood cool. Then he envisioned building an element of Silicon Valley in the neighborhood, where innovators and technologists could come, create, and invent, without fear of failure. To sweeten the arrival—and supercharge the development—new citizens would have a place to stay, sometimes for months at a time, for free. At the time, there was only one residential building that could seem appealing to young millennials and tech workers arriving in the run-down neighborhood. The Ogden was a 248-unit luxury condominium building that towered above the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Ogden Avenue, virtually a halfway point between the former City Hall building to the north and Fremont Street to the south. From a distance, the white facade of the building stood as one of the most visible markers of downtown. The building had recently been pulled out of bankruptcy, which it had endured thanks to poor sales following the Great Recession, and when Tony moved there in May 2011, it was only 20 percent occupied. Tony’s condo, twentythree stories above the street, was in fact several apartments connected together, with views looking south toward the Strip and north toward the valley. Walking through closets or obscure doors could lead to another apartment, where surprises abounded; one room was designed to look like a dark jungle, with plants covering the walls and hanging from the ceiling, illuminated by purple light. Fred moved into a neighboring apartment, in an

arrangement not dissimilar to Tony’s fiefdom at 1000 Van Ness in San Francisco, where all his work colleagues and friends had moved in while he oversaw Venture Frogs. Only Tony would scale the experience of living at 1000 Van Ness exponentially: within a year, the Downtown Project had leased eighty units in the building. Beyond the Ogden, part of the Downtown Project’s plan was to buy as many of the surrounding apartment blocks as possible, freshen them up with renovations, and then install new residents who belonged to the growing community. When the Downtown Project was announced in January 2012, Andrew Donner had by then been leading a real estate acquisition campaign that would grow to forty-five acres of land and buildings mostly surrounding Fremont Street. Once the buildings were acquired, the Downtown Project contractors would move in and renovate the properties. They purchased the single-story motels that lined Fremont Street—formerly places that charged by the hour and served as locations for prostitution and shelter for drug addicts—and boarded them up. In front they installed new neon signage, illuminating the names of hotels and motels along Fremont Street that had last seen their glory days in the 1960s: the Western, the Ambassador, Fergusons, the Star View Motel, the Las Vegas Motel, and the Fremont Motel. The Downtown Project would eventually oversee a residential real estate portfolio of almost a thousand apartments. The process of beautifying a neighborhood may sound like a positive thing, but mention “gentrification” in a local bar, and it’s sure to divide a crowd. While the new facades looked nice, Tony’s organization was moving into a place that had existing residents. He and other Downtown Project lieutenants had repeatedly referred to the area as a series of empty lots—an ignorant assertion considering the dozens of low-income apartment blocks, which were in turn surrounded by homeless encampments. Referring to it that way also ignored the reason the city’s vulnerable had been drawn to the area in the first place: there were several social service agencies based in the area, along with soup kitchens operating out of the area’s churches. When the Downtown Project began trying to insert new residents, they were met with immediate hurdles. After a $1.5 million donation to Teach for America, Tony convinced the organization to move its Las Vegas office to the neighborhood. With more than a hundred teachers set to arrive in the

neighborhood, the Downtown Project bought a boxy fifty-unit apartment block known as Towne Terrace to house them. The only problem was that people already lived in the building. After waiting anxiously to learn if they would be evicted from their homes, the residents met with Andrew Donner, who—clearly underestimating the hurdles to evicting tenants—told them that the Downtown Project would extend their leases for another twelve months, and promised to be transparent if anything changed. Tony later told a reporter from the New York Times that he would do better: “We made some bad assumptions. Next time, we’ll dig deeper.”

While Natalie had led her own kitchen several times, she’d never owned a restaurant. After her encounter with Tony at the Downtown Cocktail Room in late 2011, she’d been asked to submit a business proposal to Don Welch, a task that quickly became overwhelming. She had to learn how to set up small business insurance. In fact, she’d need more than one type of insurance: she’d have to obtain general liability, professional liability, business income coverage, and workers’ compensation. She’d need to learn how to balance books and install a phone line. She submitted her proposal seven times, and each time was told to try again. Michael spent days with her at the Beat coaching her on how to refine the plan. On the seventh attempt, she had herself a deal. What Natalie didn’t know was that Tony had a lot riding on her: her restaurant would be his new neighborhood’s first small business investment. Tony agreed to provide $150,000, and a further $75,000 would be contributed by Fred Mossler, Don Welch, Andrew Donner, and Donner’s partner Todd Kessler. The money came with some conditions, which would become the standard offer for other small businesses in the Downtown Project, from tech startups to bars. The capital would be interest- free, and there was the unusual caveat that if the restaurant failed or shuttered, Natalie could walk away from it with no questions asked, nor any obligation to pay back the money. But in exchange, the investors would be entitled to 50 percent of all future profits of the business. Essentially, they

were taking a huge chunk of the potential upside to offset the risk of the downside. Even though Natalie knew little about running a business, the future profits clause seemed like a burden. When she spoke to a business-savvy friend, though, he pointed out that “fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing,” Natalie recalled the friend saying. And after being burned by her previous employer, Natalie was intent on doing her research on Tony. “I went as far back as I could, and I couldn’t find a negative thing about the guy,” she said. The next challenge was finding a location. She didn’t expect to generate enough revenue to be able to afford any of the high rents on Fremont Street, next to the other bars and restaurants. Prices had begun to shoot up amid the buzz that Tony was preparing to splash $200 million buying property in the neighborhood. One searing hot day, Natalie was cooling down in the Beat and lamenting to Michael that there was no way she could start a restaurant nearby on her budget. There was a place she might be able to afford, he told her, but it was a couple of blocks away. Standing on the corner of Seventh Street and East Carson, a block south of Fremont Street, Michael showed her a boarded-up storefront that occupied the corner of a run-down duplex apartment building. The space had been closed for years, and in her time living in the area, she’d never noticed it. Looking around, she saw a Motel 6 directly across the street that charged $30 a night, and not much else. But at $2,000 per month, she could afford it, and so she began work on the neighborhood’s newest restaurant, Eat. A restaurant like Eat, with an eclectic brunch menu and good coffee, was one among dozens of ideas spread out on a wall in Tony’s apartment in the Ogden. Tony and a Zappos employee named Zach Ware, who was helping to organize the transition of the company’s headquarters, began leading tours of downtown that started in Tony’s apartment. Those on the tours were encouraged to scribble their business ideas on multicolored Postit notes that were added to the wall and sorted in a grid. Ideas ranged from an outdoor chess board to a vintage music store, artist/music development, a doughnut shop, a dry cleaner, a beauty salon, a thrift shop, and a restaurant serving raw vegan cuisine.

New arrivals to downtown Vegas came together at a block party organized by Joey Vanas called First Friday, held the first week of every month at a rotating slate of bars, which allowed people to see what the buzz was about. Paul Carr, a journalist with TechCrunch and a contributor to the Huffington Post, agreed to go on a tour around the downtown neighborhood, at Tony’s invitation. “This will be a completely different area in the next five years,” Tony said. “We’re bringing food, live music, an entertainment scene; we’ve even talked about opening a charter school.” Developing the neighborhood was sort of like playing a real-life game of Sim City, Tony added. “From Sin City to Sim City.” He paused. “You know, like adding another little hump on the ‘n.’” During another visit months later, Carr met with Tony at the Downtown Cocktail Room. Carr had just quit his job, and with a glass of Fernet-Branca in hand, Tony asked Carr what he wanted to do: “Like, if you could do anything in the world, professionally, what would it be?” Carr said he’d start a wildly unprofitable print magazine, like The Economist, but with jokes. On the condition that Carr start the business downtown, Tony said, he would fund him. Tony would end up investing around half a million dollars in Carr’s news website, NSFWCorp. Some people even traveled halfway across the world to join Tony’s world. Mark Rowland, a British retail executive who lived in Sydney, first heard of Tony in 2010 when he was researching how to improve the corporate culture of Wagamama restaurant chains, for which he was CEO of the Australian licensee. When he came across Zappos, he’d been so amazed that he decided he was going to start his own company, StyleTread, to essentially be a carbon copy of Zappos, but in Australia. Before he went ahead, he wrote to Tony to inform him of his plan and that he meant no ill will. Tony had responded fifteen minutes later, saying that it was he who was sorry: after eating at Wagamama in the United Kingdom, he’d stolen the idea for his restaurant at 1000 Van Ness that his parents had managed a decade earlier. Now, at the start of 2013, Mark had just sold StyleTread and was looking for his next challenge. Tony suggested he come to Las Vegas and start a mentoring business that could help guide members of the community. The result: a coaching company called ROCeteer—a name that played on the Downtown Project’s “return on community” metric. Neither

man could have imagined that Mark’s venture would become a literal lifeline to some of the neighborhood’s new citizens.

From the start of 2012 until the end of 2013, it felt like businesses were sprouting out of vacant lots or glossing over eyesores every week. Old office buildings were being refurbished to house arriving tech companies and organizations, most of which were funded through an arm of the Downtown Project called the Vegas Tech Fund. Whether at bars or offices, entrepreneurs would go through several rounds of pitching before facing Fred Mossler. Sometimes Tony would sit in the corner, typing away at his computer, seemingly not listening. Among their first investments was a company led by a young entrepreneur named Keller Rinaudo, a recent Harvard graduate who’d been part of a team that developed a tiny, implantable biological computer made of human DNA and RNA, a breakthrough technology that could one day be used to direct therapies to diseased cells or tissues. Rinaudo was lured to downtown Las Vegas to work on his new startup called Romotive, which made toy robots that could be controlled by iPhones. Rinaudo was given $500,000 to build the company, growing it from three to fifteen employees, all of whom lived in the Ogden. Keller said he chose downtown Las Vegas over San Francisco because it was a place where he could truly build his company culture from scratch. “I don’t think there’s a chance there [in San Francisco] of building a tribe of people who love each other, and that’s what we’ve built here,” he told a reporter. Jody Sherman, a frizzy-haired surfer from Santa Monica who’d known Tony for years through the tech industry, had come in late 2011 to see what Tony was building. Standing in Tony’s penthouse apartment in the Ogden, he stared at the Post-it wall of ideas, and then looked out the window overlooking Tony’s neighborhood. “Downtown basically sells itself,” Jody told a reporter about the view from the Ogden. With a $600,000 investment from the Downtown Project, Sherman agreed to move his e-commerce company Ecomom to Vegas in 2012. Jody himself moved into the Ogden, four floors below Tony.

To house companies like Ecomom and Romotive, the Downtown Project acquired three- and four-story office buildings dotted around the area. Most were located several blocks from the central Fremont Street vein, so Tony introduced rules that would force people to intermingle with the community. “Even though there’s plenty of parking inside those office buildings, we’re actually requiring new tenants to park a couple of blocks away, so they have to crisscross the city,” Tony said during a talk at SXSW in 2013. “So we prioritize collisions over convenience.” His host was bewildered. “That’s fascinating,” she said. “You’re playing like, not God, [but] in some way, orchestrating interesting situations.” On the ground, fervor surrounded the Downtown Project’s leader. At any one time, Tony could be followed by an entourage of five or even up to a dozen people. “They’d be talking passionately and trying to pitch their idea to him,” Mike Henry, a former stage manager for SXSW who was hired to manage the Downtown Project’s music events booking, said later. “They’d come closer and then come closer and you’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, it’s gonna happen again.’” Ultimately Tony would introduce his gaggle to Mike and suggest they all talk to him; perhaps there might be some synergies, or things they could work on together. “And then Tony would bolt and you would just inherit these fucking people,” Mike recalled. (After such interactions, Mike typically walked the group to a bar, where he made his own exit.) Just as Tony had envisioned, a tech community was emerging from the desert floor. To ensure that it lasted, he would need a pool of talent to pull from. Silicon Valley had Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Cal Poly students, who were ripe for picking for the tech workforce. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, meanwhile, did not have the same strengths in innovation or science, so Tony struck an agreement with an organization called Venture for America and donated $1 million to the organization. The brainchild of entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who would later run unsuccessful bids for U.S. president and mayor of New York City, the organization was similar to the concept behind Teach for America by pairing college students and recent graduates with startup businesses based in lower-tier cities around the country, like Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Baltimore—and now downtown Las Vegas.

Among the first class of students who arrived in 2012 was a bright-eyed twenty-three-year-old named Ovik Banerjee, who had just graduated at the top of his class from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ovik had studied environmental science and biology, but he was also tugged by an entrepreneurial streak. Weeks before his arrival he wrote with measured enthusiasm about joining a societal experiment unlike any other. “The path will not be easy. Urban revitalization is not a formula that can always be solved with money, endorsement and enthusiasm,” he said in a blog post. “Cities are complex, and the Downtown Project may leave Vegas where it started, or even worse. But it is an incredible experiment in urbanism, and I for one am excited to be a part of it.”

Last, to bind the neighborhood together, Tony would need art, and lots of it. Mimi, who had been managing some of the Downtown Project’s rollout, was assigned to strike an agreement with the Burning Man festival to import art sculptures and the iconic “mutant vehicles”—ranging from alien spaceships to beat-up cars on which were poised frightening creatures—to be displayed around the neighborhood like an outdoor gallery. It would also be an opportunity to intertwine some of the philosophies behind the festival with the neighborhood, like radical self-expression and civic responsibility. “Tony asked them to submit anything from small projects to large projects,” Mimi told a reporter. “But he likes fire.” Perhaps the most impressive arrival was a rusted praying mantis with bulging eyes that glowed a neon green at night and could shoot jets of fire from its antennae. “It is not about, ‘Let’s try to make downtown Vegas a mini Burning Man,’” Hsieh said at the time. “It is really about combining all these different perspectives … that can help build a unique community for downtown Las Vegas.” As more citizens flooded in, buildings that were once to be avoided at all costs were now go-to spots. No longer was the Gold Spike a place to drive past and ignore. After buying the Gold Spike, the Downtown Project bought a neighboring business, the Oasis Motel, and combined the buildings into a single place connected around a swimming pool. Tony wanted to make the building one of the main nerve centers of the Downtown Project—a place where people could get work done and then

stay for drinks as the day turned into night. They tore out the slot machines, banned smoking, and upgraded the Wi-Fi. Now oversized games like chess and Jenga filled the former gaming floor. And if the Downtown Project was going to be a place where big ideas were driving its mission, then it would need to host a perpetual roster of big-thinking speakers—in essence, a place to hold TED Talk–style events. So they partnered with Michael Cornthwaite and purchased a shuttered convenience store next to the Downtown Cocktail Room, which they turned into a three-story building that housed a 150-seat theater complex, complete with a rooftop bar, a cocktail lounge, and a cafe. It would be called the Inspire Theater. When Natalie opened her restaurant in May 2012, a few months after Tony and Fred had announced the launch of the Downtown Project, she was all too cognizant of the opportunity that Tony’s generosity had afforded her. No one had ever invested in her like this before, let alone a stranger, and she was determined to show that she was deserving of the opportunity. She paid herself $66 per day, which she calculated was enough to cover her rent, food for herself, and food for her dogs. She forwent everything she deemed nonessential: car insurance, health insurance, cable TV. “It was very important for me to get his money back,” she said later. She paid back her loan in a year and three months. Almost immediately she saw that her hard work was going to pay dividends. Her restaurant was becoming a central place drawing people into a previously darkened corner of Las Vegas, and it was only getting brighter. Two months before she opened, the Downtown Project announced that it had bought the Motel 6 across the street and planned to demolish it. In its place would be an open-air shopping center built with shipping containers, with boutique retail shops, funky restaurants and bars, and a children’s playground. Welcoming people to the Container Park, as it would be called, would be the giant praying mantis, shooting flames fifty feet above the ground from its antennae.

CHAPTER 11

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Opening a Las Vegas casino in the twenty-first century requires a lot of money, but arguably less creativity than it did decades before. Unlike the elaborate themed resorts built in the 1990s, like the Luxor or Paris, which lured visitors with a sense of wonderment, newer casinos sought to create buzz by rolling out a calendar full of live events and performances with the biggest artists in the world. When the Cosmopolitan opened in December 2010, with its two glass towers that would look at home in Manhattan, its talent schedule was unrivaled in Las Vegas, perhaps even the world. In its first eighteen months, dozens of headliners, most of whom were used to selling out stadiums—Jay-Z, Coldplay, Florence + The Machine, Adele, and Mumford and Sons—played in the resort’s various bars and clubs. Deadmau5 played his first Las Vegas concerts there. With the Cosmopolitan’s checkbook, Rehan Choudhry had perhaps one of the most envied talent booking roles in America. Most of his nights would end with strobe lights and the thumping bass line of another musician he had booked. His life in Vegas felt far removed from his childhood in Virginia, which had in some ways been limiting: the son of Pakistani parents, he often dealt with the tensions of growing up in a firstgeneration immigrant family. After college, and a few other roles, he landed at Caesars Entertainment in Atlantic City, booking celebrity chefs for its casinos there. Shortly after, the Cosmopolitan had poached him to lead their opening. The thirty-year-old was now a regular fixture at most big Las Vegas events, with what felt like the keys to Sin City. But amid the glitz of being the go-to guy at the Strip’s clubs, there was one thing Rehan dreamed about: his own music festival. So in early 2012,

when the Cosmopolitan decided it had spent enough, Rehan decided it was time to strike out on his own. What he had in mind was a small festival somewhere in Vegas that would combine music, keynote speakers, and high-end food offerings. Rehan was always throwing ideas around with Ryan Doherty, a close friend who co-owned a media and publishing company in Las Vegas. Ryan, a creative with an extraordinary attention to detail, had seen opportunity in the Tony Hsieh buzz happening downtown and was currently opening a couple of bars in the area, Commonwealth and Park on Fremont, independent of the Downtown Project. Rehan had first met Ryan and his business partner, Justin Weniger, when they were working with the Cosmopolitan to help promote its launch, and they featured him in one of their magazines, Vegas Seven. Ryan and Justin had started a flyer printing business in the days before social media and had since built a company called Wendoh Media, a play on their last names, which included a video production unit, multiple magazines and websites, and a marketing agency. While Justin was more of a friendly acquaintance, Rehan and Ryan were often seen together around town. “I was very new to the city, so Ryan became a friend early on,” Rehan said later. “We just became buddies. We went to shows together, we went to dinner together.” As Ryan listened to Rehan’s festival idea, he thought the best person for Rehan to speak to was the new neighborhood patriarch, Tony Hsieh. As it happened, Rehan had been trying to broker a meeting with Tony. Like some who entered Tony’s orbit, Rehan didn’t know much about him, but he was aware that Tony was the rich guy throwing money around downtown. Through a mutual contact, Rehan was told to come to the Zappos all-hands meeting in June 2012, which was being held at the recently opened Smith Center for the Performing Arts. Outside, Rehan was introduced to Tony, and he stammered his way through a thirty-second elevator pitch: to bring a music festival to the Downtown area that “celebrates the beauty and love and hope in the world.” Tony stared ahead and made no eye contact, nodding a couple of times. It reminded Rehan of the times he’d spoken to disinterested celebrity musicians—“like talking to a wall that wanted nothing to do with me.”

But as Rehan mulled his insecurities, Tony was absorbing the pitch like a sponge. A music festival was exactly what he’d been looking for. Though he’d spent plenty of time with reporters, talking about his zany ideas about how collisions could transform a neighborhood, no amount of press coverage could draw tens of thousands of people to the downtown area like a music festival. Just as he had seen the several hundred people being shuttled from venue to venue in the Red Bull party bus during Neon Reverb, he could fill the city blocks with people and music and lights and art. During several meetings with Fred Mossler and Don Welch at the Downtown Cocktail Room, which had since become the de facto headquarters of the Downtown Project, Rehan laid out his idea to take over six city blocks of downtown. Joey Vanas, who had been running the monthly block party First Friday, was brought in to provide further feedback. Rehan envisioned a stage for live performances, alongside keynote speakers like Bill Clinton and Jay-Z. There would be an area to screen art-house films, and a “village” where some of the best chefs in the world would be flown in to provide fine dining. Poets would read their work on the street, as surprise fashion shows popped up seemingly out of nowhere. All this would come together under the festival name: Life Is Beautiful. In the kitchen of Tony’s sprawling Ogden apartment, Rehan made his final pitch to Tony, Fred, Joey, Don, and Michael Cornthwaite. As a bestcase scenario, he calculated that after ticket sales and expenses, the festival would lose around $600,000 in its first year, and become profitable the following year. His presentation concluded with a touch of highmindedness: “The downtown Las Vegas community has the opportunity to achieve whatever their minds can dream for the future.” Tony didn’t say much. Rehan was then asked to leave. Sitting in a pizza shop at the Plaza Hotel an hour later, Rehan got a call from Don, saying he and Fred were looking for him. When they arrived, Fred informed him that the festival had been greenlit. He’d be given $1.5 million; in a structure similar to Natalie’s restaurant agreement, Tony and the Downtown Project would put up 100 percent of the cash for 50 percent equity in the company. It would also be entitled to 50 percent of future profits, and any other future investors would first need to be approved by

Tony and the Downtown Project. In addition, Joey Vanas would come on as a co-founder, and be given a minority stake in the company. As the cofounder and CEO of the festival, Rehan’s salary would start modestly, at $60,000 a year. And if it all failed, Rehan could walk away, no questions asked. While he digested the terms of the agreement, he considered the fact that he was, after all, being given an opportunity beyond his wildest dreams. He had booked big names for events, and done concerts, but never led his own festival. Fred told Rehan that there was an all-hands meeting happening for the Downtown Project, at the Plaza Hotel, right now, and Tony wanted him to announce the festival in a few minutes. “I just became a part of the family,” Rehan recalled. Minutes after his speech in front of the Downtown Project employees, Joey grabbed him and led him to a table to meet more people. One of them, Joey commented on the way over, was Mimi, who, Joey warned, would not like him: Rehan was yet another person to enter Tony’s orbit without her approval. This warning was confusing to Rehan. Once he sat down with her, he found that “she was polite, but clearly not enthusiastic about meeting me.” When the festival was announced in November 2012, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a front-page story quoting Rehan, and from then on he became the face of the festival. He was talking to reporters from Entrepreneur and NBC. Ryan and Justin put him on the front cover of Vegas Seven. “I had the mayor on speed dial. I could get permits approved, deals done with 48 hours’ notice,” he said. “I was invited to every major charity gala, every major event … There’s a lot of social clout that came with it.” To put it subtly, Rehan’s ego had become enlarged. Mike Henry recalled that during his job interview to do music booking for Downtown Project events, Tony was showing him around the neighborhood when they bumped into Rehan, and Tony suggested the two men chat over their mutual interests in bringing shows to town. As Rehan looked at him with what felt to Mike like contempt, Mike thought, “I will never fucking hear from this guy. Not once. No way. And I didn’t either.” During one press interview, Rehan had talked about the marvel of the existing music scene in the neighborhood—namely, the Neon Reverb

festival. But when James Woodbridge’s team contacted Rehan with an idea to launch a stage for local bands under the Neon Reverb name, or program some shows at local bars, they were met with radio silence. Several more requests were made, and none of them got any response. “A reply of some sort would have been nice to prevent the impression of just being completely blown off,” James said later. Another slighted Neon Reverb musician put it more bluntly: “I took it very personally that the work that had been done organically by locals to build the Neon Reverb festival was ignored in favor of, you know, giving millions and millions of dollars to a douchebag like Rehan Choudhry to basically do a terrible, awful version.” Little of the naysaying mattered to Rehan: he’d made one pitch, one time, to one organization and, just like that, had been given more than a million dollars to launch a multiday music festival with the biggest musicians in the world. He could not help but feel awestruck by the power Tony had granted him. Rehan found himself among a swirling group of people who were enamored of Tony’s presence. He was spending time with celebrities as Tony pushed further into the realm of pop culture icon. The model Amber Valletta came by one day to meet Tony. Ashton Kutcher stopped by another time. Richard Branson did multiple tours of the neighborhood. One time, Rehan was standing in a VIP section at Coachella with Tony and Kimbal Musk, when Elon Musk walked over and put his arms around them, grinning. Anything felt possible. “We drank the KoolAid. We changed all of our social media feeds to promote our relationship with him,” Rehan said later. “We had gained press associated with him, we gained awareness associated with him, we were meeting people through him that we would never have met before.” Rather quickly, Rehan was wielding significant social capital within the community as the head of the Downtown Project’s biggest marketing exercise. He soon learned that holding such a role meant that his responsibilities extended far beyond just spearheading Life Is Beautiful. He was being thrust into situations in which he had no experience, like weighing in on business ideas or helping with recruiting. “All of a sudden, I was in meetings for things that I had nothing to do with,” he said. “I was being asked to vet people that I had no business vetting, or didn’t really understand the context for.”

One day, a young woman named Aimee Groth showed up at his door. Tony had sent her there to learn from him, but Rehan took that to mean she was there to be vetted. She had just moved to Downtown to launch her own project: a book that was to document life in the Downtown Project. She’d been convinced to move into the neighborhood after a chance meeting with Tony in 2012. Aimee had been a senior editor at Business Insider when she met Tony at a Venture for America gala in New York. Later at a Manhattan nightclub, he turned to her and asked, “If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”

The Life Is Beautiful festival would also help to reinforce another message about Tony’s social experiment: it was a constant party. Part of what bonded the neighborhood together was the seemingly never-ending cycle of social events and the blurred lines between work and the rest of life. The common denominator was the presence of alcohol, and as the man at the center of the village, Tony’s alcohol intake rose alongside his increasing fame. Tony had recently expanded his Delivering Happiness brand and launched a company of the same name with Jenn Lim, with the goal of providing Zappos-style human resources and leadership training to other corporations and businesses looking to improve employee satisfaction. In one video interview, done in London in 2012 to discuss the new venture, Tony deferred to Jenn whenever the interviewer asked questions. While she answered, Tony took hold of a bottle of vodka and poured generously into three glasses. “An actual video of Tony Hsieh pouring me a vodka,” the interviewer says. “This is quite gangster, I’ve got to say.” In the first years of the Downtown Project, the company had no corporate office. Instead workers were encouraged to meet and work at the various bars in the neighborhood, like the Gold Spike or Michael’s Downtown Cocktail Room. Another venue that became a fixture was Parlour Bar, an unappealing black-walled space on the gaming floor of the El Cortez. Kenny Epstein, a longtime Vegas casino figure who owned the El Cortez, recalled how Tony would come into his casino, almost without fail, around 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and slump down in a bench seat in a corner of the bar. A half hour later, another half dozen people

would come in, either groups from Zappos and the Downtown Project or new arrivals pitching business, and slide into the bench seats around two knee-high tables. It was hardly a suitable work space, but with a constant stream of liquor, the group would sit around, their faces illuminated by the screens of their MacBooks, while the ring-ding of the gaming floor floated in. After three or four hours, they would leave and their evening would begin. Unlike many of his newer colleagues, Tony’s older friends noticed the increasing role of alcohol in his life. Jon Greenman, his former Harvard roommate, came to see Tony multiple times in Las Vegas. Whether at the Bellagio for dinner or at a house party, Tony would order round after round of shots. It was certainly a different Tony from his days in Harvard, but it also didn’t seem problematic to Jon. Tony’s drinking never became a cause for alarm for Jon because, by all appearances, Tony simply held his alcohol well, and his day-to-day output never seemed to be impaired. He didn’t become belligerent, violent, or overly happy. Ying Liu also noticed a difference from their days at NYU. It had been nearly two decades since she and Tony explored New York as college students, when she’d been touched by Tony’s curiosity about her. They had been in and out of contact over the years, and she visited him in Las Vegas on two occasions. On the first visit, she was initially put off by the fact that she needed to schedule time with him through an assistant. When she and her family showed up for their appointment, what she thought would be a catch-up breakfast with Tony ended up being a group tour of the Downtown Project. “I’m sorry,” he said to Ying after he finished leading the tour. “I just couldn’t find the time. Are you guys going to stay longer?” They chatted for a few minutes, but he seemed preoccupied. Ying complained about his new attitude to Alex Hsu, the fellow NYU classmate and childhood friend of Tony’s who was also visiting Las Vegas that weekend. “He is not the same Tony anymore,” Alex reasoned. “He’s an influential leader now. What did you expect?” On her second visit, however, she decided to leave the family at home, and instead she came to Las Vegas with her girlfriends. On this visit, Tony made time for her. Per an itinerary sent by his assistant, she was instructed to meet Tony in the afternoon at a bar in downtown Vegas. “The schedule said, ‘Drink with Tony,’” she recalled. Tony had already been at the bar for

hours when she and her girlfriends arrived, and he was surrounded by people. “I still don’t drink,” she said. “And he was already heavy with alcohol.” Tony then took Ying and her girlfriends to his favorite Chinese restaurant in downtown Vegas. He asked Ying if she might serve him a chicken drumstick—just like college, she thought. It was a glimpse of the old Tony, the one she would mother and serve food to from Chinese takeout boxes during her NYU days. Later that evening, Tony invited Ying and her girlfriends to an outdoor event space where members of the Downtown Project often gathered around a fire. At one point, Tony turned to Ying with a playful look. “Do you still think women screaming during sex is because they are in pain?” Ying rolled her eyes. But the fond reminiscence didn’t last long. Ying watched as Tony offered each person sitting around a campfire a tiny bottle of Fernet-Branca —one of the defining factors of every visit to the Downtown neighborhood. An Italian herbaceous digestif typically consumed in small amounts after a meal, Tony had adopted the drink as his signature. Visitors like Ivanka Trump would recall drinking Fernet with Tony. While he provided several explanations for his love of the obscure drink, another reason he gave to a friend was that it allowed him to create a new experience for everyone who did it with him. “He said that you could have a lot of it and you won’t have that hangover effect,” Ying recalled. As the night continued, Tony was surrounded by others, and Ying again found it difficult to have a conversation of substance. As the evening slowed down, Tony came over, put his arm around Ying, and asked her how she was doing. It was one of few moments Tony and Ying had been alone, and it could have been a good time to chat—but she didn’t quite know where to start. She mumbled a response and they stood in silence, staring at the campfire. “I just felt guarded because he was not Tony anymore,” she later said. “He wasn’t the same.”

Drug use also factored into the routine of events, festivals, and nights out. In her book The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia, published years later, Aimee Groth recalled taking MDMA at

several events alongside friends and people in Tony’s orbit. Tony himself refused to discuss his relationship to drugs publicly—he told Aimee, “I stay away from talking about religion, politics, or drugs in general because those topics are very polarizing, and people have already made up their minds on what side of the issues they want to be on.” In an interview with Playboy magazine, he said, “My hesitation in answering questions like these is that there’s a perception that you need to do drugs in order to have certain experiences. People have a visceral reaction to that idea, so I don’t like to state a preference one way or the other.” The constant drinking and partying was something that Rehan, who had been around the club scene for years, had recognized as an element of the culture of the Downtown Project: alcohol would factor into almost every situation. He could remember meetings ending at 11 a.m. with Tony offering everyone a round of Fernet. Because of the flow of people and meetings, Tony was rarely surrounded by the same group of people for more than a couple of hours. “Nobody could ever really get a sense of how much he was drinking at any given moment,” Rehan said. One morning after an event to announce the lineup for the Life Is Beautiful festival, Rehan was supremely hung over and went for a walk with Tony. He turned to Tony and asked how he kept up with drinking so much. “At some point along the way, I stopped getting hangovers, so I wake up in the morning feeling fine,” Tony replied. “I think that that may be the first sign of being an alcoholic.”

As the party of the Downtown Project rolled on, the neighborhood’s inaugural festival was approaching. Rehan had managed to secure hometown superstars the Killers to headline Life Is Beautiful. Other international acts included the Kings of Leon, Beck, and Imagine Dragons. Fine-dining restaurants were slated to open pop-up stalls at the festival, providing a culinary experience that departed far from the fast food offered at most events. But the contracts were still being negotiated with musicians when several other festivals across the country announced that they were being canceled, citing financial issues. As a result, talent agencies like William

Morris Endeavor, which represented the Killers, began demanding 50 percent up-front payments, as opposed to the typical 10 percent deposit, according to Rehan. Life Is Beautiful would also need to guarantee that 100 percent of the money would be paid, even if the festival did not go ahead. What this meant was that Tony and the Downtown Project would need to pour in an additional $2 million. Rehan’s request for money immediately ricocheted around the Downtown Project. Several people wondered whether they had made the wrong decision by choosing him to lead the festival. Tony, looking around his leadership, decided that he needed someone who could inspect the finances, so he appointed Andrew Donner to consult for the business before joining as a partner. Andrew offered Rehan $1 million to buy out his equity in the festival and to step down from his management role. “I was still very much good friends with Tony,” Rehan said. “I was very much one of the leaders of Downtown Project’s social structure, and had a good amount of influence in the organization.” Rehan turned down the offer and felt reassured about his decision when Fred pulled him aside during a trip to New York. He and Tony valued people who didn’t try to make a quick buck, Fred said. “It shows that you’re with us and shows your faith in us.” (Fred said he didn’t recall the conversation.) On October 26, around thirty thousand people descended on the festival grounds. The two parking lots that separated the Ogden and the Zappos headquarters were now the main stage. The festival spanned more than a dozen blocks along Fremont Street; one section was covered in grass. Popup art installations lined the streets, new street art was covering the walls of old buildings, and fine-dining restaurants like Nobu had their own storefronts. Now that the streets were filled with festivalgoers, it was exactly what Tony had imagined his neighborhood would look like at its most vibrant. “Tony was really excited,” Joey recalled. “It was something that was really important to him.” The greatest power of the event, Joey realized, was that it exhibited the neighborhood to its highest and best potential. For the first time in half a century, downtown Las Vegas was teeming with life again. Unlike the megafestivals Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival, where more than a hundred thousand people would squirm through jam-packed mosh pits or wait an hour in line for the bathroom, the first year of Life Is

Beautiful felt like revelers were being offered all the perks of a music and arts festival without any of the usual downsides. There were barely lines for food, drinks, and bathrooms, and because it was held in an urban center, there was plenty of space for car parking. “It was magic,” Joey said later. “You’re eating Nobu, watching Kings of Leon … As you’re laying out in the grass, you have five feet around you of space.” On the second and final day of the festival, strong winds swept through the grounds. The day before, a beam at the main entrance gate had fallen down. The organizers lowered the stage towers and shut down a Ferris wheel. But the bands and DJs played on. Not long after the Killers finished their closing set and the last revelers trickled out, Joey walked around the festival grounds. The winds were still blowing trash around. On his walk home, he sent Tony a text: “On a scale of one to 10 how happy are you right now?” Tony replied: “11.”

CHAPTER 12

THE DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE

Much as new business partners like Rehan felt like they were on cloud nine once they’d entered Tony’s inner orbit, the experience for the women in his life was similarly intoxicating. But Michelle D’Attilio was going to learn that loving Tony came with a big caveat. At thirty-nine, with two preteen kids from a previous marriage, she was around the same age as Tony when they met in April 2013. He was visiting Milwaukee for a speaking engagement at an entrepreneurship event. At the time, she ran a social media marketing firm called Sosh and was also in a committed relationship. When her company was hired to promote the entrepreneurship event, Michelle offered to do it for free as long as she could get time with the Zappos leadership team in exchange. She had been shopping on Zappos for years, and she wanted to land them as a client. Michelle soon got a text from one of the organizers of the event. “The Zappos crew is here,” he said, “it’s Friday night, and they are getting drinks at the Iron Horse Hotel before going out.” So Michelle, wearing a cocktail dress that complemented her jet-black hair and piercing green eyes, joined the Milwaukee welcoming committee and met Tony, Fred Mossler, and Andrew Donner. Initially, the plan was to go to a posh lounge at the top of a twenty-three-story building that had panoramic views of the city and Lake Michigan. “I took one look at these guys and said, ‘No. This is a group of people who have been all around the world. They’ve already been to all of the nicest bars.’” Instead of taking them to the best and fanciest that Milwaukee had to offer, Michelle announced she would be taking them to Victor’s, a bar with a dance floor that was all neon and leather. En route in a party bus, the group was bopping to classics when a song came on and

someone asked who the artist was. Tony immediately answered that it was Kylie Minogue, and Michelle laughed and poked fun at him for knowing who she was. At the bar, the group danced all night to songs from the nineties. Hours later at closing time, the bar served frozen pizzas. Michelle sensed Tony’s comfort with her. He texted her after he gave his talk, asking where she was. During a dinner that weekend, Michelle had to leave early as she had told her kids she would be home by ten that night, and Tony offered to walk her out, suggesting he wanted a cigarette, anyway. They exchanged emails over the next few months. Michelle was growing her business and was eager for advice from the Tony Hsieh. He invited her to a conference in August in downtown Vegas. Known as Catalyst Week, and billed as “more affordable and less exclusive than TED Conferences,” the four-day event series included talks, tours of Zappos and the Downtown Project, and networking events for entrepreneurs. As Tony’s guest, she stayed at a unit in the Ogden. Shortly after she arrived, she met Tony at his penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Ogden. After a few pleasantries they walked out of the apartment and waited for the elevator. “I’m a small-town Wisconsin girl, standing here with this extremely successful human, and I’m feeling nervous,” she said. But as she darted a glance at Tony, she saw that he was keeping his eyes on his phone. He started pacing sheepishly around the elevator bank. Eventually, at the mercy of a slow elevator, he started walking in circles around her. She realized he was nervous too. “It was really endearing to see this human who had so much success still be nervous or anxious,” she later recalled. That day, he took her on a tour around downtown, showing her his favorite Vegas haunts. They talked about their shared love for junk food. They agreed that chicken tenders with light breading were superior; she preferred a thicker patty in a cheeseburger, while he liked it thinner. They also realized that they both had social anxiety and needed solitude to recharge. Years later, when they were together and needed to get away from crowds or noise, they took long walks without saying a single word. Afterward, Tony would say to her, “Nice talk.” The morning after their tour around downtown, Michelle woke up early to go for a run around the neighborhood. She had mentioned to Tony the day before that it was part of her routine to go on a jog and wake herself up.

When she entered the lobby downstairs, a security guard was waiting to join her on the run. Though Downtown Project–powered gentrification was crawling across the neighborhood, parts of it were still unsafe, and Tony wanted her to run with a security detail. They stayed in touch over the next year. She attended several more Catalyst Weeks, and their friendship grew. But had she ever considered romance? Well, there was one thing that made her pause.

One of Tony’s favorite books was The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Published in 2005 by journalist Neil Strauss, the book describes a series of social techniques used by so-called pickup artists to seduce women. With chapter titles such as “Select a Target,” “Isolate the Target,” and “Blast Last-Minute Resistance,” the book lays out a misogynistic road map for supposedly training awkward, insecure men to seduce beautiful women, while also pushing the idea that women are simply inconsequential compared to the whims of men. Despite Strauss’s later conclusion that a life solely focused on chasing women was “empty” and “for losers,” the book was a bestseller and became a bible for men in need of a confidence boost. For someone who often felt challenged by social engagements and would sometimes make those around him uncomfortable with his shyness, Tony saw techniques in the book that could offer instruction on how to manipulate social settings for certain outcomes, not unlike the enchanting question he had posed to Aimee Groth—“If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”—that ultimately convinced her to move to the downtown neighborhood. Aimee, who spent five years coming and going from the neighborhood, staying on couches or renting one of the Downtown Project’s apartments, concluded in her book that by issuing invitations that contained lofty ideals, Tony had used techniques from The Game and the pickup artist community to convince her and others to come to the neighborhood. In an interview with Playboy, Tony acknowledged as much, and said that his interest in the theories generated by the pickup community had partly inspired his thinking about how the Downtown Project was created.

“I remember hearing that if you’re going on a date with a girl, the best thing to do is change locations every half hour or hour and do something different,” he explained. “Basically, at the end, if you’ve gone to seven different locations, it will have the same effect on memory as going on seven dates in single locations.” The whole point of compressing memory, and seemingly time, in this way is to seduce a girl faster. “But that technique has other applications as well,” he said. “It’s part of what I’m trying to do with Downtown Project. When people come visit us we basically hop from location to location to location, so even though they’ve been here only two or three nights, it will seem as though they’ve been here two weeks. It’ll have a big impact on their memory. Humans remember things in terms of geography and number of stories. I want a city where all this stuff is within walking distance so you can have a bunch of different experiences.” But given how literally he interpreted the social engineering tools in Strauss’s The Game, surely he had used them in his sex life. The Playboy reporter pointed out that he was forty and single. What were his thoughts about monogamy? Well, from a Darwinian perspective, Tony responded, a monogamous guy would have fewer copies of his genes in the next generation than a guy who wasn’t. “I think it’s pretty hard to find one partner and call it a day,” he went on. “Using the analogy of friends, why not find just one friend and call it a day? The answer is because you get a different type of connection, different conversations, different experiences with different friends. I would say the same thing is true on the dating side.” It was something Tony had no qualms talking about both publicly and privately. Sometimes at events—it could be a Zappos holiday party or a conference—there would be two, three, four women who were there as his dates. Sometimes women would arrive and Tony would introduce them to the other women. Often it seemed like Tony was engaged in some type of game, and as young women flooded into the neighborhood, many of them tried to get close to him. He dated people from Zappos, people from the Downtown Project, and others who orbited the community. One girlfriend was Rachael Brown, who had joined Zappos in 2004 as a temporary worker in the call center before she was promoted to train new customer service hires. At some point Tony had taken a liking to her and promoted her to teach Zappos

culture to all new hires, and by 2010 she was overseeing production of the company’s famous quarterly all-hands meetings. It was also around this time that she and Tony started dating. While they eventually went their separate ways, and Rachael ended up leaving Zappos to turn her attention to her new career as a cellist in Las Vegas, she would reenter Tony’s life years later. To outsiders, it may have raised eyebrows for the CEO of a company to engage in a relationship with a subordinate. Certainly, as cultural views on workplace behavior sharpened in the wake of the #MeToo movement, such relationships might have attracted further scrutiny years later. But to those inside the community at the time, the fact that Tony dated employees and was expressly open about being polyamorous seemed to allow most to overlook any questions they had. This arrangement also existed in a community he was building where the traditional boundaries of work, life, and play were essentially nonexistent; people worked in the same offices, lived in the same apartment buildings, and drank at the same bars. While polyamory was a consistent thread in Tony’s romantic life, the outcomes often differed. Suzie Baleson, a former high school cheerleader who grew up in a bayside town on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, was in her late twenties when she met Tony in 2012. She had spent the better part of a decade working as a tax consultant for Deloitte and the global professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal when a mutual friend introduced her to Andrew Donner, who was looking to hire someone to help on the financial side of his real estate company, Resort Gaming Group. Andrew, who now oversaw most of the Downtown Project’s real estate deals, was joined by Tony for a trip to New York where they met with Suzie for an interview. She joined Andrew’s firm, then moved into the Ogden and was sucked into the local community. She also spent more time with Tony, and before long she was hopping on airplanes, visiting places around the country with him, and going to Las Vegas Knights games. “When you are his plus-one to something, people literally felt like they were the chosen one,” Suzie recalled. “He made me feel special all the time.” Like Rachael, she also maintained a friendship with Tony over the years before playing a significant role in his life later on. The setup worked for some women, but not for others. Antonia Dodge, the Zappos contractor who had been quoted by the New York Times

discussing Tony’s social phobias, first met Tony in the summer of 2010 when she was hired by Zappos to assess the personalities of a small team within the company. As part of Zappos Insights, the team held in-person workshops for C-suite-level executives from other companies who wanted to learn more about how Zappos built its culture. Antonia was brought in to understand what every team member’s blind spots were in order to effectively train the high-ranking executives who were coming through their workshops. While she acted as a consultant for Zappos, she was also asked to assess Tony. Though it was unclear to her whom that directive came from, one thing was clear—it was not something that he had requested for himself. “He barely answered” her questions, Antonia later recalled. “He could not have been more uncomfortable about being personality-profiled by a stranger.” As she started asking her usual round of questions—What is your relationship to alone time? What is your relationship to deadlines or schedules?—she watched as Tony slowly started to physically turn into himself like a roly-poly bug as he pulled his knees to his chest and cradled his head with his own arms. Eventually she cut the session short. “I think he might have been one of the top five most uncomfortable people in a profiling session.” The next week, Antonia was at a party with other Zapponians at Tony’s house in Southern Highlands. When she approached Tony, bracing herself for yet another awkward conversation, she found a man entirely different from the one she had profiled during her evaluation. Instead she met Tony the host. He started giving her a tour of the house and introduced her to other guests. It was a different side of Tony, and one that she was drawn to when they became friends shortly after. As she got deeper into the Zappos circle, she understood that Tony had at least two girlfriends at the time, one of whom was Rachael Brown. A few months after her work with Zappos had ended, Tony asked Antonia if she would join him at a Halloween golf tournament that the company hosted every year for vendors. Still in her early thirties, and having had friends who were in polyamorous communities, she found herself intrigued. When she arrived, she quickly realized that she was not his only date to the event. There were five other, much younger women surrounding him, dressed in Halloween costumes. “I showed up as part of a

little harem,” she said. “It was essentially as many women as you could fit into a golf cart.” Antonia, with a set of serious green-yellow eyes and signature streaks of white hair, found herself the odd woman out. “All the other girls were dressed up as the sexy version of whatever they were dressed up as. And I never dress up as the sexy version of anything. So I think he wanted eye candy, and then he wanted conversation. I suspect I was the conversation.” As the golf tournament progressed, Tony and Antonia got into a heated discussion about romantic relationships. She shared with him and the rest of the women that in order for her to be in a relationship with a partner, she needed him to be an equal in terms of success and ambition. “I don’t agree with that,” quipped one of the younger women in the group. “I don’t agree with it either,” Tony said. Of course you don’t, Antonia thought as she glanced at the swarm around Tony. By the end of the tournament, Antonia found herself laughing about the absurdity of the day. But Tony texted again a few weeks later, this time inviting her to a Zappos holiday party. Why not? she thought. When she arrived at Tony’s house in Southern Highlands, in jeans and a shirt, she expected to be greeted by yet another group of women. But it was just Tony. As they rode in the car together, Antonia found him disengaged, choosing to pay attention to his BlackBerry instead of conversing with her. She ended up chatting with the driver in order to pass the time. When they arrived at the location, she realized it was a house. In fact, it was an intimate, swanky party of senior-level Zappos employees at Fred Mossler’s home. Oh, okay, she thought. I guess this is a date. As she tried to make conversation with Tony throughout the night, however, he continued to either ignore her or feign disinterest. Antonia thought about Tony’s study of the pickup artist community. “That night, I couldn’t tell whether he legitimately found me incredibly boring or if he was running [The Game],” she said. “But either way, I was being strategically ignored.” According to the rules of pickup artists, ignoring a person was supposed to enhance attraction. Later on that night, Tony suggested that Antonia should date another party attendee she had just met. Again, Antonia wondered, Is The Game being run? “It was a weird

night,” Antonia later recalled. “It was probably the last time I really ever hung out with him.”

In September 2014, Michelle’s long-term boyfriend broke up with her on her birthday. “He basically walked out on me,” she said. After hearing what happened, Tony had an idea. “Come to Hawaii with me,” he said to Michelle. “What are you talking about?” she laughed. The plan was to go to Honolulu to celebrate a friend’s fiftieth-birthday party for a few days, and then go to Atlanta for the electronic dance music festival TomorrowWorld. Along with Fred, they were going to do some research for Life Is Beautiful. Michelle was eager to take her mind off her breakup, and Tony said he’d cover the costs—so she said yes. From the start of the trip, Tony’s antics were on full display, endearing him more and more to Michelle. On the flight over, Tony started pulling several power cords out of his backpack. He shared that he always brought them traveling because it was the best way to strike up a conversation with strangers at an airport, where people were often looking for an outlet. In the process of pulling out the cords to show her, he dropped his phone, which led to a chaotic scene of Tony pulling off all the cushions in search of his mobile while Michelle watched, laughing. As they sat in first class—Tony had since abandoned his habit of flying budget airline Southwest—they shared headphones connected to an iPod and danced in their seats for most of the six-hour flight. She remembered how she could not stop laughing. “This silly, magical, fun side of Tony was the reason that people fell in love with him,” she said. “Not necessarily romantic love. I mean the human who could create fun out of any little thing.” Soon after, Tony invited Michelle again to Hawaii. Until this point, their relationship had been platonic. Michelle had never felt pressure from Tony, but she wondered whether his feelings were warming. Maybe he had been courting her since they met eighteen months before. All these thoughts, she realized, were emerging because she was starting to develop romantic feelings for Tony. “It was a gradual build,” she said. “When you have two

people who have social anxiety, putting yourself out there is a little frightening.” They discussed what they looked for in a partner, and their futures. Tony was steadfast in his views around polyamory. Michelle craved the stability and comfort of monogamy. But, she found comfort in Tony, and she was having fun. The only pressure she felt from Tony was whether she had the bandwidth to jet-set with him around the world. There was one element of Tony’s polyamory that suited her: radical honesty and transparency. For example, if Tony was spending time with another woman, he would never hide it. Though Michelle knew that at the end of the day she wanted a partner who was committed only to her, she found herself opening up to the idea of dating Tony. She understood they would most likely never marry. But if she could date Tony while continuing to date others, she saw no harm in adding herself to his growing group of lovers. The next month, ahead of his birthday, Tony flew Michelle to Las Vegas. She was known for her meatball recipe, and that night it was on the menu for the few dozen people gathered for Tony’s birthday dinner. Looking around, she found herself welcome in Tony’s community with open arms. “I have always struggled with the feeling of home,” Michelle said. Later that night, Tony and Michelle kissed. Seemingly overnight, Michelle found a part of her life revolving around Tony. They came up with a system where Tony would email her a list of engagements he had coming up in the next few weeks—from weddings to conferences to birthday parties—and she would respond with the events she would attend. For those that she couldn’t come to, Tony would usually then invite another woman. Unless it was an international trip, she rarely liked to leave Wisconsin for longer than three days at a time because of her kids. Throughout 2015, they crisscrossed the globe, from New York and Florida to South Africa and Dubai. Though Michelle never asked, Tony always paid. He visited her in Milwaukee a handful of times. Sometimes, Michelle would bring her kids with her to Vegas, and she enjoyed watching him interact with her kids. In turn, she met Tony’s parents. During Life Is Beautiful one year, his mom, Judy, took a photo of Michelle with her kids. Looking up at her, Judy remarked how nice it was that she had such a close relationship with her children.

At times Michelle felt conflicted, but she reminded herself that blurred lines were part of the deal. “We were never in a fully committed relationship,” she said. “He dated other women, and I dated other men. But he was basically my person. He always came first, and I was comfortable in that situation. In fact, I met some of the most amazing women I’ve ever met in my life through him.” It went well—until it didn’t. During a trip to New York in October 2015, Michelle was with Tony at a group dinner at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan when she took notice of his interest in two other women at the table. It was a bit much. “He turned it on a little more when they were around,” she recalled, seeing him tell more jokes or become more animated in telling stories. After the dinner, she decided to bring it up with him. “I know we’re not monogamous,” she started. “But when we’re together, you are with me.” Tony didn’t understand why she was upset. As they argued, Tony applied his logic to the situation: Michelle knew what she was signing up for, he said, and he hadn’t done anything to break their rules of engagement. The discussion reached an impasse, but in the weeks after, Michelle started having doubts about their relationship. She soon visited Tony in Vegas again, but left feeling uncertain once more about where they stood. Some weeks later, after yet another whirlwind trip, she texted him from an airport, expressing as much. With hopes of comforting her, Tony responded, “This too shall pass.” Over the holidays, Michelle found herself at a crossroads. A friend had reentered her life and he wanted to be in a committed, monogamous relationship with her. Given her feelings of doubt about Tony, Michelle realized it was time to end the romance with him. “Hey, we need to be friends for a little bit,” she told Tony on a FaceTime call that December. “That means no physical relationship.” “Why?” he asked. She’d met someone, she said. She’d bent her own rules to be with Tony, but regardless of her love for him and the comfort she found within his world, she knew that being true to herself ultimately meant being in a monogamous relationship. Tony never called Michelle his girlfriend while they were dating, but after they broke up, he would tell people she was his ex-girlfriend. Michelle, meanwhile, maintained her friendship with him. He eventually

hired her to manage all of his social media accounts. “You’re the only one that understands how to communicate in a way that I would,” he said to Michelle. To outsiders, it may have appeared Tony was capitalizing on the women in his sphere. For some of the women who took his arm at events or jetted with him to foreign corners, Tony was exciting to be around. For Michelle, he was someone to spend time with until she found a lifelong monogamous partner, and Tony never indicated that it bothered him. But even as the rotating cast of women ensured that Tony was never alone, they also allowed him to spread himself a mile wide, across relationships often an inch deep, and avoid the struggles and rewards of committing to a single person.

CHAPTER 13

ANDY

If Tony’s dalliances with women were unconventional, his relationships with his two younger brothers were just as ill-defined. The three Hsiehs were by no means a close set of brothers. Over the years, Tony had rarely mentioned Andy and Dave in public or to friends. As for Andy and Dave, it was rare not to have Tony mentioned in conversation, whether they wanted to talk about him or not. Even so, Tony had made room for Andy and Dave in his various business ventures. Starting with his newspaper route and button-making enterprises in Marin, when he passed the roles down to his brothers, he then went on to hire them at Zappos. Sometimes they would even share clothes. “So is it true, I heard that you don’t even have a business suit?” Oprah Winfrey asked Tony during a 2008 interview on her talk show. That day’s episode was called “Young Millionaire Moguls” and Tony, who was thirtyfour at the time, was featured in a segment that followed an interview with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the twenty-two-year-old actress twins who had a combined estimated net worth of $100 million from their films. Though the twins appeared on-set for the interview with Oprah, Tony opted to call in through a video conference. As Oprah and the audience shifted their attention to the large screen, Tony’s face filled the camera view. Behind him, a thicket of ferns hung from the roof above his desk in the old Henderson office of Zappos. “I’m not much for dressing up, so my brother and I actually share a suit,” Tony answered. The studio audience roared with laughter. “But it’s a little awkward when my brother and I have to go to the same wedding. Usually, I just end up wearing a collared shirt instead.”

Tony had never been selfish nor boastful about his fortunes, but it inevitably forced Andy and Dave to live under the very large shadow of their big brother. For Dave, the dynamic seemed to instill in him a deep desire to avoid the fact that his brother was almost a billionaire. While Tony referred to him as David in Delivering Happiness, he was known to most as Dave. Dave was soft-spoken and awkward, and people were often shocked by his resemblance to Tony. But while Tony lived in a penthouse in the Ogden, in addition to his mansion in Southern Highlands, Dave lived in a modest home with his girlfriend. “He was sweet and quiet,” said Jen Louie, who met the Hsieh brothers when she was an event producer in Las Vegas in the early 2000s. “Dave is not a man of many words.” Rarely was he seen around Tony outside of family events. Friends who knew Andy, though, observed a spark of jealousy within the middle Hsieh brother that generated a constant desire to prove himself. And as the years wore on, some saw the beginnings of a Shakespearean tale of fratricidal strife. “[Andy] didn’t have the golden touch that Tony did, but not very many people do,” recalled one friend who worked with Andy at Zappos. “I never saw any warmth between them.”

When Tony left for Harvard in the early 1990s, Andy was already following in his big brother’s footsteps by attending the Branson School, the elite college preparatory school in Ross, California. He assumed the role as head of the button-making business and proved to be a gifted piano player, even more skilled than Tony. After graduating from Branson, Andy was admitted to an industrial engineering program at Stanford University in 1994. Dave, meanwhile, went with Richard and Judy to Hong Kong for a brief stint during this time, after Richard got a promotion at Chevron. Like the hundreds of freshmen arriving at the storied Stanford campus, Andy took part in Rush Week, an orientation where first-year students tour the campus meeting with fraternities and sororities to vie for an invitation. By the end of the week, Andy was welcomed into Lambda Phi Epsilon, an Asian American fraternity. As one Lambda Phi Epsilon alum put it, their fraternity was “less gross” and slightly more academic than the other fraternities that weren’t

exclusively Asian. But still, it wasn’t without the traditional hazing. One of Andy’s former fraternity brothers remembered the new members being forced to do push-ups on command at random moments of the day. Other times they were ordered to run laps of the football field. Once they were instructed to run naked around the Stanford Quad, the university’s central courtyard. Andy was a popular kid within Lambda Phi Epsilon. He was easy to talk to and immediately personable, especially among his fraternity brothers, who came from Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese families. He was not overly gregarious, one fraternity brother recalled, nor did he run for any leadership positions in the fraternity, but he was open and friendly. The hazing went on for six months before Andy graduated from pledge to brother. By this time, Tony had gone from Harvard grad to the millionaire tech founder of LinkExchange, and any hope that Andy would match his brother’s achievements grew further out of reach. His brother’s success was evidently weighing on his own vision for the future. One evening during the fraternity induction process, brothers had to share something that made them vulnerable. When Andy’s turn came, he told those gathered that he felt immense pressure living his entire life in the shadow of his brother.

Andy graduated from Stanford in 1999 with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in industrial engineering, seemingly with a world of opportunity before him. But within three years he was working for Tony at Zappos. He worked briefly as a consultant for a specialty food marketing company after graduating, but he remained well within his older brother’s orbit—he moved into one of Tony’s units in 1000 Van Ness during the heydays of LinkExchange and Venture Frogs. Andy’s apartment was a two-bedroom unit on the seventh floor directly below the infamous Club BIO, which was dubbed “Tony’s batcave.” While Club BIO was for socializing, Tony sought peace and quiet in his younger brother’s apartment. “No one went into 706 except for me, Andy, and Tony,” recalled James Henrikson, Tony’s old friend who lived in 1000 Van Ness.

When Zappos moved to Las Vegas, Andy followed Tony there and took a job with the company, landing on the merchandising team. For the most part, there was little acknowledgment at the company that Andy and Tony were brothers, and Tony purposely kept an arm’s-length distance from Andy. “If there was a problem with Andy or even if it was a win for Andy, Tony had nothing to do with it,” recalled Chris Peake, who worked alongside Andy under Fred. Dave also eventually joined Zappos, working in the human resources department. Andy had shown a desire to prove himself at Zappos, but he was less enthusiastic about his role on the merchandising team, which was to secure vendors for kids’ shoes. To combat his ennui, he had been assigned to work with Mark Guadagnoli in a team internally called Black Ops, which was tasked with finding new—sometimes abstract—revenue streams for Zappos. Andy combined pep talks with an entrepreneurial drive and streams of ideas during BlackOps meetings. Mark said he often talked about “hitting home runs.” Andy had found a confidant in Mark, and some of their work was earning nods from Zappos brass. They launched the Zappos yearbook, a collection of photos and memories from employees—hot-dog-eating contests and office parades—and sold advertisements to vendors for a quarter million dollars a year. Another venture included designing a limitededition Zappos Monopoly. Instead of train stations, different models of Clarks shoes were for sale. Rather than Boardwalk, Lacoste went for $400, or to the highest bidder. Their projects together also meant the two men would work late at Zappos’s headquarters. During some of these evenings, there were moments when Andy confided in Mark about his relationship with Tony. First and foremost, Mark recalled, Andy admired Tony. Andy saw his brother as someone who had achieved everything he had been taught to value as a child: vast wealth, success, and admiration. Mark also sensed sibling rivalry during some of these conversations. Not resentment, but a wanting within Andy for what his brother had amounted to. Andy believed that if he too could catch a lucky break, then he could achieve what his brother had.

By the time Tony became known to the world, the younger Hsieh brothers’ tenures at Zappos had come to abrupt ends. Dave was let go during the 2008 financial crisis when Zappos announced it was firing 8 percent of its workforce and around 100 employees were let go. Getting laid off had hit Dave particularly hard, according to Holly McNamara, who had been acquainted with all the Hsieh brothers but was yet to work for Tony on the Delivering Happiness tour. Dave confided in Holly at the time that it was not just being let go from Zappos that hurt—it was that Tony never talked to him about it afterward. Andy’s departure, meanwhile, was less straightforward, with conflicting accounts about why he left Zappos. In the recollection of one Zapponian who worked on the same team as Andy, it was a mutual decision that boiled down to Andy being a poor cultural fit. “We had different ideals of what Zappos was and different ideals of work ethic and leadership,” the person said. In short, Andy did not seem as hardworking as his older brother, and he used his familial status to skate by. But Andy’s departure from Zappos presented him with an opportunity to chase a lifelong pursuit: creating a company just as successful as his older brother’s. As Andy mused on what he hoped would be his billiondollar idea, he thought about his last few years in Las Vegas hanging around in the periphery of Tony’s circle. On some nights, he’d been surrounded by other young tech millionaire founders and CEOs who came to Sin City for private and exclusive experiences. Though Andy had yet to earn his stripes as a successful tech founder, spending time with his brother had given him a window on such a lifestyle. So shortly after moving back to San Francisco in 2011, Andy started building a company called Lux Delux, an online invitation-only membership club that connected users to high-end experiences in dining, wellness spas, and nightlife in Las Vegas. Being related to Tony helped in more ways than one. A former Lux Delux employee who joined the company in its early days said the fact that Andy was Tony’s brother was a decisive factor in why he decided to join the company. “With that last name, you know, the brother of Tony Hsieh, I felt like he could bring in a lot of resources,” the employee recalled. “Maybe Tony might even invest in the company, right?” In 2012, Lux Delux raised its first significant round of funding. Quite remarkably, Andy put in $3 million of his own money, according to

documents. Their father, Richard Hsieh, was the largest outside investor by far, putting in $1.6 million. Their mother, Judy, and Dave each put in around $100,000, with Dave eventually taking on a role at Lux Delux. In fact, every single Hsieh family member was an investor in the company— except for Tony. That said, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where Andy would have had $3 million to invest in Lux Delux unless he had help from Tony. Other investors included SV Angel, a venture capital firm headed by legendary tech investor Ron Conway; Alex Hsu, the childhood friend of Tony’s; and Joe Lonsdale, the future libertarian venture capital investor who would go on to start the data mining behemoth Palantir with billionaires Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp. Joe wrote a roughly $100,000 check to Lux Delux. Asked about the investment a decade later, he wrote, “That was just a small investment and one among over a hundred from that time period—I met him via Tony whom I knew through friends in technology founder circles.” Just as Tony had launched Zappos from his condo in 1000 Van Ness, Lux Delux’s product and engineering operations were primarily based out of Andy’s San Francisco apartment in the South of Market district, a part of town that had started attracting new tech talent and companies like Airbnb and Zynga. His two-bedroom loft had an open-plan kitchen and dining room, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the neighborhood. But unlike Tony, who likely knew how to code better than all the engineers at Zappos combined, Andy did not bring any software engineering expertise to his work. There was a clear knowledge gap, and some of his employees noticed. One worker recalled arriving at Andy’s loft and seeing him frantically scribbling mathematical equations on the windows overlooking the industrial streets of SoMa. Taking a closer look at the figures, the employee realized they were nonsensical formulas and asked Andy what he was doing. “We have an investor coming in,” Andy replied. “We need to look like we are a startup.” Andy also enlisted the help of Holly McNamara, whose concierge business had taken off after she left the Delivering Happiness tour, and who had a wide network of contacts in the Las Vegas nightlife scene. She helped Lux Delux get its public relations off the ground, and pitched the company to club promoters, restaurateurs, and other Vegas contacts who could

become partners in providing VIP experiences. The company’s Facebook page had become a big selling point, given that it had rapidly amassed over 100,000 followers. The data point was promoted in emails to drive partnerships. But shortly after, Andy instructed the company to stop advertising the number of Facebook followers the company had, and Holly wondered if Lux Delux had bought its followers. But Andy was simply following the well-worn path of archetypical tech founder: fake it till you make it. He was finally seizing his opportunity to show the world what he could do. Less than two years after Lux Delux was born, Andy suddenly pivoted the business. Food delivery apps like Postmates and Seamless were becoming popular in San Francisco, and Andy wanted to bring that concept to Vegas. “It wasn’t just a partial change but a complete brand identity change,” said Jen Louie, who was eventually hired by Andy and given the title of head of strategic partnerships at Lux Delux. Prior to signing on with Lux Delux, she was an independent business development and marketing consultant who had a deep Rolodex in Vegas. Her brother, David Louie, also worked at Lux Delux in a similar capacity and had a close working relationship with Andy. By Jen’s recollection, Andy put everything he had into his startup and worked as hard as anyone in the company. Despite her hefty-sounding title, Jen kept her other client work. “Lux Delux was a startup,” she said. “So they couldn’t pay me enough to be full-time.” In the beginning, Andy appeared to spare no expense for Lux Delux’s operations, paying for first-class flights and even private jets for some employees on work trips. But soon after Lux Delux made the pivot to food delivery, Andy asked Jen if she would be willing to work for half her salary. She agreed, attributing it to typical startup woes. A month later, Andy asked her if she would be willing to work for free. She declined and quit shortly after. Lux Delux never took off, and by the end of 2014, no one seemed to be working for the business. As of 2022 its Facebook page remains active and has more than a million followers. Stock images with general captions alluding to a dreamy and luxurious lifestyle are still posted every few days there and on its Twitter account, which looks more like an account administered by a bot than a real person, and what the business offers today is unclear. Its main tagline, which is imposed on a banner photo of a woman

with her back turned to the camera wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, ambiguously states, “Experience Life.” Tony had always made it clear he had no interest in selling shoes. His passion for Zappos came from a desire to build the best customer service experience with a strong company culture that made his employees excited and happy to come to work. When Andy explained his vision for Lux Delux, he painted a rosy picture full of generalities to friends and potential employees—it would be an engineering-driven company, similar to Facebook, and culture would come above all else, he said, parroting lines from Delivering Happiness. But oftentimes Andy’s employees were left wondering what drove him toward the tech entrepreneur path. “It felt like he was just repeating things that people said of what a great startup should be,” said the former Lux Delux employee. “I never understood why he wanted to build this company. Maybe he just wanted to prove to everyone that he could do it too—maybe not as great as Tony, but at least close to what the Tony Hsieh built.”

CHAPTER 14

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

Tony’s downtown Vegas experiment was now roaring ahead. Dreams were being made, and businesses being built. But soon enough a more troubling reality of building a community emerged, too. It would be one of the youngest members of the community, the recent college graduate Ovik Banerjee, who would reveal its darkest chapter. Ovik wasn’t the most physically affectionate brother—he hated hugs— but he did find ways to connect with his younger brother, Anondo, by discussing and debating their purpose in the world. Their conversations often turned to how they were going to live a meaningful life, how to live alongside their values, and how to be happy. When the opportunity to join the Downtown Project as a Venture for America fellow arose, Ovik felt that he had found a way to answer all of life’s biggest questions. He devoured every piece of literature he could find on Tony and his life; he’d read the memoir, and encouraged his family to read it, too. He’d even read the Zappos culture book. In a world where people did a lot of talking, he saw that Tony was doing a lot of doing. When Ovik’s family arrived in Las Vegas to visit him in the summer of 2013, they were, like many who came to downtown Las Vegas, amazed. His mother and father, both immigrants from India, had raised their older son and his younger brother and sister in Hoover, a leafy suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, before moving to nearby Tuscaloosa. In Las Vegas they were put up for free in a luxury high-rise apartment in the Ogden, from where they could view the neighborhood Ovik was living in. They saw that he kept a nice space in the Town Terrace apartments, which was now housing Downtown Project workers, along with his other Venture for

America fellows. At Eat one morning, Natalie Young came out to greet Ovik by name, and his parents were glad to see that their son had become a part of a community. Ovik’s father, Subhankar, was particularly impressed to hear about how Natalie’s restaurant started, and her backstory about straightening her life out in the Strip’s kitchens. Business was going so well, she told him, that she was opening a second restaurant in the neighborhood with Tony, this one with a menu focused on fried chicken. After the meal, Ovik gave his family a tour of the area, starting at the Container Park, which was almost complete and due to open in a few months. Many of the shipping containers had been shifted into position, stacked on top of one another, and would soon be filled with restaurants and bars. In the center would be an elaborate jungle gym, and at the rear, behind a performance stage, would be an old train caboose, which would house a hair salon called Bolt Barber. As they walked by the praying mantis at the entrance, Anondo asked what Ovik thought about the frequent jets of flames it shot from its antennae. Given Ovik’s degree in environmental science and his views on global warming, the question made him bristle. “I didn’t get to be involved in that decision,” he said to Anondo. In the evening, Ovik took them to the Gold Spike, where they stood in a room that looked like a fun park for adults, filled with foosball, billiards, and ping-pong tables. Kegs of beer were stacked against the wall. Ovik appeared uneasy in this setting; he wasn’t a big drinker, and the nonstoppartying side of the Downtown Project didn’t appeal to him. There were a few other things that made him uncomfortable about the Downtown Project, his family later learned. Despite the nice accommodations and pleasant eateries, his first months had been chaotic and directionless; he’d been shifted from project to project, and encouraged to find purpose in the neighborhood on his own. One of his tasks had been to secure building permits for the construction of what would become known as the Learning Village, a series of modular trailers that would house classrooms and meeting spaces on a landscaped lot next to the Container Park. He had no experience obtaining permits but figured he would rely on his intuition, conduct the necessary due diligence, and figure it out. When he concluded he would need to get a permanent building license, he was instructed by several superiors to get a temporary license instead, as it was simpler to obtain and had fewer restrictions. Even though he knew the

Learning Village was being built as a permanent structure, Ovik obliged. The breach of his principles shook him. But his family didn’t quite grasp his unease when it came time to leave. A few months later, when he went home to Tuscaloosa for Thanksgiving, Ovik was visibly distressed. He had been reassigned to work on launching a new project called the 9th Bridge School, a pre-K education facility, and had been tasked by Tony’s cousin Connie Yeh to research and help design the curriculum—something he had no training for or business doing, he told his family. But he was most concerned by the prospect of getting fired after he cold-emailed Tony to outline his concerns. Ovik had detailed three major issues with the Downtown Project. There was seemingly no direction or mission, and the core values felt meaningless. There was little communication. And management was not held accountable. When Tony did respond, he began by telling Ovik that the values and culture of the Downtown Project weren’t meant to mirror that of Zappos, and that it took five years to figure out the company’s own values and culture. “fred and I are confident about the long-term outcome because we’ve done this before and know what to expect,” Tony wrote in an email. He then addressed Ovik’s complaints point by point, starting with Ovik’s concern that the Downtown Project lacked “culture, mission, and core values.” Getting the culture right was a priority, Tony wrote, but he countered that it would take time: unlike a company, building culture for a city is a whole other challenge. “At zappos, we can choose who we hire and fire. you can’t choose who lives or works downtown, and each business dtp invests in will have a different culture and set of values which dtp needs to somehow integrate with,” Tony wrote. Ovik also said there was poor communication and connectivity within the Downtown Project, and suggested holding monthly meetings to keep the community informed, and serve as a place to air grievances. In response, Tony suggested Ovik take it upon himself to organize meetings if it was something he was passionate about. And finally, there seemed to be a lack of accountability at employee and manager levels, Ovik wrote, adding that there should be an established line of feedback to ensure that people are meeting their goals. Tony again said this was something that would be addressed over time but added: “i would

encourage each employee to just meet regularly with his/her manager to accomplish the above.” When Ovik came back to Tuscaloosa for the winter break, he seemed more at ease. His parents had reassured him that if he did leave the Downtown Project suddenly, they would be there to support him until he figured out his next step. His two-year fellowship with Venture for America would end in the spring anyway, and he was starting to think about returning to school, maybe getting a medical degree like his father. After feeling that he had been forced to compromise his moral compass with the Learning Village permits, one thing he knew was what he didn’t want to do with his future: work somewhere that was long on idealism and short on realism. While he was home, Ovik celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday with his family. “Thank you all for the birthday wishes!” he posted on Facebook on December 27. “Looking forward to what my next journey around the sun has in store.” On New Year’s Day, he climbed into the car with his parents for the hour-long drive to the airport in Birmingham. He seemed happy. Before getting on the plane, he shot off a tweet: “Vegas friends, anyone want to give a ride to a wayward Indian from the airport at 9pm tonight?” He didn’t get any responses, though. Five days later, on January 6, 2014, Ovik jumped to his death from his apartment balcony.

A year before, the body of Jody Sherman, the affable CEO of the ecommerce site Ecomom, who’d arrived in downtown after Tony’s tour of the area and subsequent investment, had been found in his car with a selfinflicted gunshot wound to the head. Jody had been seen as an insistently positive member of the community. At forty-eight, he was a little older than the fresh-faced entrepreneurs streaming into the neighborhood, and he had assumed something of a mentor role. His laid-back surfer vibe was a contrast to the typically high-strung demeanor of most founders. His death had shocked not only the Downtown Project community but also Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, where he’d had a decades-long career as an entrepreneur. Many of his former colleagues and friends posted and

wrote about their despair, but they also were forced to consider the fact that not only had he died, but he’d killed himself. Prominent venture capitalist Jason Calacanis wrote at the time that Sherman was remembered for being “relentlessly positive, driven and fun,” and that “he was a human router who left an impression.” Calacanis said Jody’s death forced him to think about two other entrepreneurs who had died by suicide recently: Aaron Swartz, the twentysix-year-old co-founder of Reddit, and twenty-two-year-old Ilya Zhitomirskiy, who had founded the social networking site Diaspora. “Perhaps we owe it to these three amazing humans to examine if the pressures of being a founder, the pressure of our community’s relentless pursuit of greatness, in some way contributed to their deaths?” Calacanis wrote. “I’m not an expert on suicide, but I am an expert on being a founder. Many of the founders I know have been desperate, depressed and overwhelmed in their careers. For everyone that shared this with me, I’m certain 10 more didn’t … Is it worth exploring why this happens and if it is, in fact, a trend?” Over the years such a phenomenon had been explored, but many questions remained. In his 2005 book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, John Gartner had explored whether American entrepreneurs share a common condition: hypomania, “a mild form of mania, often found in the relatives of manic depressives. Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas. They think, talk, move, and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions ‘just doesn’t get it.’ Hypomanics are not crazy, but ‘normal’ is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, between normal and abnormal.” Gartner, a clinical psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, zeroed in on the tech industry, which had just gone through a boom-and-bust cycle. In a survey of ten internet CEOs, Gartner found that each of them identified with most traits of hypomania: feelings that they were “brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world”; “channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand ambitions”; “often works on little sleep”; and “sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that can have painful consequences.” Part of being hypomanic, Gartner stated, was that in

addition to euphoric highs and feelings of grandeur came susceptibility to a depressive down cycle that can be magnified under the stresses of leading a company. A few years after Jody’s death, a study was launched at the University of California, Berkeley, led by a professor named Michael Freeman, to study the mental health histories of entrepreneurs. Published in the journal Small Business Economics in 2018, Freeman’s study found that 72 percent of entrepreneurs acknowledged having either a personal or family history of mental illness. When compared to the general population, Freeman and his team found that 49 percent of entrepreneurs reported having one or more mental health conditions in their lifetime—like ADHD, substance abuse, bipolar disorder, or anxiety—compared to 32 percent of non-entrepreneurs. Depression was specifically high, with entrepreneurs experiencing twice as much as the general population. While rates of suicide among entrepreneurs have never been adequately measured, there has been growing momentum among some tech leaders to increase dialogue around identifying warning signs. Brad Feld, another venture capitalist, became a shining light for entrepreneurs seeking help after he began speaking openly about his struggle with depression over the years, and highlighted the unique challenges facing those whose identities are often tied to their success. “The intensity of being an entrepreneur, especially when your company is failing, or you are failing at your role, can be overwhelming,” he wrote on his blog. “It’s ok to fail. It’s ok to lose. It’s ok to be depressed.” Fear of failure was evidently facing Jody. It was later revealed that his death occurred days before a scheduled company meeting, when he was going to have to inform the board that Ecomom had run out of money, just six months after raising $5 million. The company had been bleeding money thanks to an offer that allowed customers to receive a 50 percent discount every time they purchased from the website, meaning that every time Ecomom sold a product, it actually lost money. While it’s a strategy employed by some tech companies desperate to build a customer base— before changing the pricing model to a profitable one when enough customers have signed on—it’s an extremely risky play. The board only learned that the company was facing bankruptcy after he died, when a recently hired accountant revealed that Jody had asked him to produce

several financial forecasts. In the week before his death, after seeing the forecasts, Jody had handed a will to his secretary and made subtly dour comments to the accountant: “If you want to fire me that’s ok” and “I’m too old to start over.” In the months after Jody’s death, Mark Rowland had been coming and going from Las Vegas as he developed a business plan to launch his mentor service, ROCeteer. He quickly saw that beyond Jody, there were others in the community in need of help, and they had nowhere to turn for it. Many of the entrepreneurs had been handed a $500,000 check to launch their company and then were basically told to run with it. As more people came to ROCeteer for help, Mark found himself sharing an anecdote about the pressures facing entrepreneurs. Before arriving at the Downtown Project, he was the founder and CEO of StyleTread, the Australian copy of Zappos. Even though he had children of his own, he often compared the growth of his company to fathering a child, and his love of being an entrepreneur was paying off. In 2012, he was on a multicity tour around Australia to talk about StyleTread’s success. What his audiences didn’t know was that he was also in talks to secure a hefty funding round to keep the company afloat; it was still growing, but its sales alone couldn’t sustain the business. A Chinese investor had agreed to provide $10 million, and an Australian firm was willing to give him $7 million, but the fine print was still being negotiated. The deal was scheduled to close the day before a planned speech in Sydney, and Mark envisioned announcing the deal during the talk. The crowd would respond with raucous applause, he imagined. But as the deadline approached, he received an email: the Chinese firm was backing out. No reason was given. Without the Chinese investor, the Australian firm said it wasn’t willing to move ahead either. It was devastating news: he would have to lay off his seventy employees, and the outward appearance of his image as a successful entrepreneur would evaporate. That and his entire life savings were on the line: without telling his wife, he had used their house as collateral to buy the company’s inventory. He would be forced to pull his kids out of private school, and they’d likely have to move. Life as he knew it would end. Driving his car home that night, he contemplated suicide. “God, wouldn’t it just be easier if I just ended my life now,” he recalled thinking. “Don’t have

to worry about all this stress, don’t have to worry about telling all these people.’” After twenty seconds of considering the possibility, a rush of faces and memories entered his mind. He had a wife who loved him, two kids who depended on him, and family in England who missed him—human connections. Now his mind was finding ways to reinforce the reasons to stay on earth. Those few moments in the darkness scared him so much that he vowed never to contemplate suicide again. “When you’re potentially gonna lose the company, and potentially going to fire everyone, you get your identity confused with the identity of the company,” Mark said. “And then the company’s a failure, then you think you’re a failure.” (As it turned out, Mark secured financing before the deadline and kept the company afloat, selling it a year later.) Even after Jody’s death, the facade of a utopia for entrepreneurs in downtown Las Vegas had remained. But with Ovik’s death marking the second suicide in a year, clouds were moving in on the sunshine, rainbows, and open bar tabs. The people who worked, ate, and drank together were now looking for a place to turn to, and found nowhere to go. The Downtown Project acknowledged Ovik’s passing in a Facebook post, but no leaders, including Tony, addressed the community with public meetings to process the grief. People could see a doctor at the Downtown Project’s medical practice, Turntable Health, who could refer patients to therapists, but they would have to foot the cost on their own. ROCeteer essentially became a clearing house for people in the community in need, and Mark and his team found themselves hearing the concerns of entrepreneurs and other citizens who felt that they had nowhere to talk about the pressures they were feeling. In extreme cases the ROCeteer staff would pass on information about the suicide helpline and other mental health support services. But ROCeteer could only do so much. Aside from having a life coach on staff, they were not equipped to employ psychotherapists or provide access to therapy services. Tony’s acknowledgment of Ovik’s death was limited to a company-wide email to Downtown Project employees, where he announced they would be assessing ways to help the community. “I know it’s been a tough couple of weeks for everyone. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is

that different people grieve and cope in different ways—sometimes we need support, sometimes we need space, and sometimes we need time.” Mark, he wrote, had been assigned to lead a group of people to figure out how to “nurture the emotional health of Downtown Project employees, affiliated partners, and the ways in which we support one another.” Even though Tony was a difficult person to read at the best of times, Mark felt that Ovik’s death had weighed on him. “You could just see it in his face, his body language,” Mark said later. “He’s a very stoic person … it was weighing on him.” With a team of eight others, Mark fielded proposals that ranged from a dedicated crisis hotline to starting a church. One of the initial efforts included taking members of the community on bus trips to the surrounding mountains and valleys for day-long hikes. They then looked at more longlasting efforts, the most promising of which was brought to the Downtown Project management by a British consultant named Pritpal Tamber, who specialized in advising companies on how to implement healthcare initiatives. Tamber proposed coming into the neighborhood, conducting interviews with some of its members about their access to medical services and their general well-being, and then proposing a”framework” that would underpin the Downtown Project’s efforts to improve the mental health of people in the community. However, it was going to cost around $1 million. The Downtown Project deemed it too expensive, and it was abandoned. Then, four months after Ovik’s death, another person died by suicide. Matt Berman, the fifty-year-old founder of Bolt Barber, the hair salon in the Western-style caboose at the back of the Container Park, was found dead at his home. Members of the Downtown Project reeled at the third suicide in sixteen months. Again, the Downtown Project leadership seemed to be at a loss for what to do. For community members, there was again nowhere to readily seek help, and no public display of grieving. After Matt’s suicide, Aimee Groth wrote that she had difficulty processing the loss: “It hardly felt real because no one talked about it. There was no outward mourning the loss of another member of the community.” It turned out that the three suicides were just the tragedies that had bubbled to the surface. As ROCeteer tried to provide support and direct dozens of people to places where they could get help, Mark said that on at

least four other occasions he and his colleagues had to intervene and spend time with people who were at high risk of harming themselves. A few months after Matt’s death, Tony was asked by a reporter to comment on the suicides in his community. “Suicides happen anywhere. Look at the stats,” Tony said. “It’s harder for people who are really good students in school. Then they move into this, where there is no instruction manual, and you have to be MacGyver on your own.” Tony’s apathetic response prompted some jaws to drop. Kimberly Knoll, a therapist who specialized in marriage counseling, had been working with some members of the community after Ovik’s death. She told a reporter that yes, the pressures of working for startups could trigger dormant, preexisting mental health issues. But in the Downtown Project, “the difference here is the focus on happiness—that’s a goal,” she said. “If we negate the negative emotions in our lives, it takes us away from happiness and brings around shame. The whole idea of Downtown is grand and wonderful and purposeful, but sometimes the way we’re going about it isn’t psychologically healthy.” The environment and pressure around happiness, Kimberly said, were unique to Downtown Vegas. “It comes from top down. It comes from Tony, from Zappos,” she said to the reporter. “The book is called Delivering Happiness.”

After Ovik’s death, Andrew Yang cut ties with the Downtown Project and stopped sending Venture for America fellows. Ovik’s father, Subhankar, concluded that Tony had failed in a personal responsibility to maintain the welfare of his eldest son. Tony’s absence from any kind of public address further angered him. “With your silence, you’ve just compounded that failure,” Anondo recalled his father saying. Subhankar died four years later, of a heart attack while traveling on an airplane. What was most painful for Ovik’s family was learning that he had written a suicide letter just days after he celebrated his birthday with them. Throughout his life he had struggled with insomnia and was sometimes removed, but no one among his friends or family saw any clear danger that he was at risk of harming himself.

“My brother was an incredibly smart, driven, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed twentysomething-year-old, coming into a place trying to make it better,” Anondo said. “I don’t blame Tony Hsieh or the Downtown Project. I just blame the broader system that takes advantage of, you know, people who want to try and change the world.”

CHAPTER 15

“THE MAYOR OF DOWNTOWN LAS VEGAS”

At some point, people who lived downtown and visiting reporters began affectionately referring to Tony as the “Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas.” When Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, was asked by a reporter for her thoughts on Tony’s moniker, she said it made for good PR. “A puff of energy,” she said. But for some time, the title had been sharpening the spotlight on Tony’s role in the community and raising questions about what exactly he was responsible for. He was, after all, the primary financier of the entire neighborhood, and had the final sign-off when his money was spent. That meant people looked to him for guidance on how to get more of his money. And when people thought about how to envision their neighborhood, it was his philosophies and quotes that people turned to for direction and motivation. With the burden of leadership at his feet, Tony attempted to shrink away from the title by drawing clear distinctions between his social experiment and the actuality of running a city. Much of the confusion, he realized, was of his own doing. When he and Fred announced the Downtown Project, they did so with enormous emphasis on the word “community.” They even invented the metric “return on community” to guide the neighborhood’s investments by tracking things like “collisionable hours” (the amount of time people are in public space where serendipitous meetings can occur) and “co-learning” (how much time people spend learning from one another). Tony’s philosophy was that a return on community would ultimately lead to more

profits if people were being empowered by one another to achieve their dreams. But in the wake of Ovik’s death, a clear fissure had emerged in the veneer of happiness that shone around the Downtown Project, and the community was looking to their mayor for guidance, something Tony was not comfortable with. He now saw that he needed to walk back what it meant to be a part of the Downtown Project. No longer would it be using the metric of return on community. In fact, the word “community” was to be removed from language associated with the Downtown Project. The word was to be replaced by “connectedness.” The new “Three C’s” of the Downtown Project would be collisions, co-learning, and connectedness. “In the past, we used the word ‘Community’ a lot more but we learned that a lot of people misinterpreted or misunderstood our goals,” Tony wrote in a post online in February 2014. “There are a lot of people that seem to expect us to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city (for example, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health). We have to sometimes remind people that we’re not the government.” The emphasis on “community” had also created a perception for some that the Downtown Project was a charity or nonprofit. Tony wrote, “We found that when we used the word ‘Community,’ there were a lot of groups that suddenly expected us to donate money to them or invest in them just because they lived in the community or because it was for a good cause. People would be upset if donating or investing in them did not happen to fit in with our priorities and business goals, and they would refer back to our use of the word ‘Community.’” Tony had also put himself in a seemingly impossible situation: not only was he the default leader of, primary investor in, and visionary behind an entire neighborhood, he was still the CEO of Zappos. He had long stressed that his style of management was purely visionary and that he wouldn’t be involved with personnel matters; he had once told a publication, “I view my role more as trying to set up an environment where the personalities, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come out and can shine.” Since 2013, an effort had been underway to roll out a new management structure for the Downtown Project that was meant to eliminate job titles and force people to make up their own roles—kind of like a tribe, Tony

would say. Holacracy, as this structure was called, would also further remove Tony from the spotlight, and shift responsibility for the neighborhood away from him. “Tony doesn’t really like conflict,” said Maggie Hsu, who was assigned to lead the rollout of the management system at the Downtown Project. “Holacracy was this way to diffuse that because he wasn’t the bad guy or central decision maker.” The concept of Holacracy was created by Brian Robertson, a software developer who had been trying to reduce management decisions at a company he started. After seeing him at a conference, Tony was immediately struck by how Robertson’s management idea could address the issues he was facing: he was drowning in responsibility. During the latter half of 2013, Robertson and his consulting team spent weeks holding seminars with Downtown Project employees to school them on how to give up their titles and, seemingly, their designated responsibilities. Robertson’s rules were governed by the Holacracy Constitution, which he made up, and contained language that was more akin to a scientific study than plain English. That was frustrating for the hundreds of people who had better things to do than decipher its nonsense. When conflicts arose, for example, practitioners were expected to engage in an act called “processing tensions,” an act that the Holacracy Constitution defined by the following statement: A Partner duly filling a Role shall regularly compare the current expression of such Role’s Purpose and enactment of its Accountabilities to such Partner’s sense of an ideal potential expression of such Purpose and enactment of such Accountabilities to identify gaps between the current reality and such a sensed potential (each such gap a “Tension”). For each tension so identified, such Partner shall attempt to reduce such Tension by identifying and enacting one or more appropriate courses of action given the authorities and other mechanisms available to such Partner under this Constitution. It was angering for some, eye-rolling for others. Rather than bosses, teams, and divisions, there were now “circles,” “links,” and “tasks.” It sounded confusing, and it was. After endless meetings, the members of the

Downtown Project could never quite grasp how to use the system or implement it. Instead it created more friction among the community.

As the Holacracy rollout sputtered, some of the Downtown Project’s bets were not paying off. A slow-moving exodus had grown into a steady stream of tech companies closing or moving out of Vegas. In addition to the collapse of Ecomom, other companies were either shuttering or leaving Las Vegas for places where they could hire better talent, as efforts in Las Vegas to build a pool of skilled workers paled in comparison to what was being done in other tech hubs. Romotive, which had grown to twenty employees and was widely seen as one of the Downtown Project’s most successful investments, left Las Vegas in 2013, merely a year after arriving. A few months after a $5 million funding round led by the venture capital firm Sequoia—spearheaded by none other than Alfred Lin—Romotive announced it was moving to Silicon Valley to be closer to “strategic partners and hiring brilliant senior talent,” founder Keller Rinaudo wrote in a community-wide email. “This was a difficult decision for us because Romotive wouldn’t be the company we are without the constant support of Downtown Project, Tony, Zach, Fred, and many others.” (Years later, Keller pivoted the business to automating logistics with drone delivery and renamed it Zipline. In 2022, Zipline was valued at $2.5 billion and employed 800 people.) Jen McCabe, an entrepreneur who’d been leading tech investments for the Downtown Project, had been given $10 million to launch a company called Factorli at the start of 2014. It was expected to manufacture small hardware parts with 3D printers in a warehouse the Downtown Project owned. Even before it opened, Factorli had gained so much attention that President Barack Obama highlighted the company during a speech at the White House about innovative American companies. “You’ve got Jen McCabe,” Obama said, “who is setting up a space called Factorli, in Las Vegas, to provide custom, small-scale manufacturing, kind of like a Kinko’s or a copy shop, but instead of printing flyers, they’re going to be able to print custom parts for American products.” But before the warehouse even opened, the company was shut down.

Some of the smaller businesses were faring better, like Natalie’s Eat and another restaurant called Vegenation, a vegetarian spot that had opened across the street. A nearby dog park was maintaining steady business. Another restaurant opened by Fred, Nacho Daddy, was a success. Others included Carson Kitchen and La Comida. But it was grueling for other small businesses. Despite claiming that the Container Park received 300,000 visitors in its opening three months, Downtown Project executives saw that the overall neighborhood wasn’t getting the foot traffic it had hoped for, and there was a realization that few Zappos employees were venturing far from the campus to mingle in the surrounding neighborhood. Six months after the Container Park opened, Michael Cornthwaite sold his interest in three restaurants he had opened in the center. With suicides and business failures, cracks were starting to appear in the startup utopia. But none of this was yet apparent in the public narrative about Tony and the Downtown Project. Wide-eyed fascination in the neighborhood continued, and national reporters were still returning to their newsrooms with notepads full of inspiring stories. While on assignment for Re/Code, Nellie Bowles spent three weeks living downtown during the summer of 2014, and on September 29 published the first installment in a planned series of stories: “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia.” In the article, she wrote that “there’s an excitement to being in a startup city devoted to startups, a sense of camaraderie.” When she asked Tony to explain his phenomenon, he described downtown Las Vegas as “TED meets SXSW meets Burning Man, but as a lifestyle, rather than events … and we can scale this to multiple cities.” One person who had been sold on Tony’s vision was David Gould, a professor at the University of Iowa who met Tony when he came to speak to Gould’s students about unique leadership during his Delivering Happiness bus tour. After the talk, Gould’s students had followed Tony all the way back to his bus with more questions. “It was like a real live Pied Piper,” Gould said. A few years later, Gould followed Tony, too, leaving his job to come live downtown after Tony said he wanted to push the “boundaries of education” and would fund whatever he wanted to do. While Nellie couldn’t figure out exactly what Gould’s role was, he told her his title was “Director of Imagination” and that he managed a community space downtown.

One thing Gould mentioned was that he had become bothered by community groups in Las Vegas that were not linked to the Downtown Project but were pushing for grants and funding. He felt they were taking advantage of Tony’s generosity, citing one example of a group of teachers who were seeking funding for a theater. He told Nellie, “The umbrella Tony has in his hand—only so many people can fit under that umbrella.”

There was a much different story about to break that had not filtered back to Nellie before her article appeared on Re/Code’s website. Mike Henry, Downtown Project’s director of music booking, had noticed recently that Tony had been in the office frequently, attending meetings with grave-faced leaders like Michael Downs, a local casino executive who had joined the Downtown Project in 2012, which was weird: Tony was almost never in the office. The evening Nellie’s story was published, Mike was among a select group of Downtown Project employees who began receiving calls from their managers. Close to midnight, Michael Downs was on the phone. “I imagine you have heard that some changes are going to be made,” Downs said. “Your position is not being eliminated. It will be a difficult day for all of us, but you will be fine.” Then he hung up. It seemed Mike’s suspicions were being confirmed. That night, Tony texted Michelle D’Attilio, who was back in Milwaukee. Sitting at the kitchen table with her kids, she turned her phone over and read the message. “Some news is gonna come out,” he wrote. “It’s not going to be great.” She called him and they spoke briefly. Though he did not share details with Michelle, she could hear it in his voice. She told him that she wished she was in Vegas right now with him. “It made me realize that he was having a really, really rough night and that he was sad,” she later recalled. Mike’s cellphone was pinging with text messages the next morning. When he stepped off the elevator, he ran into his boss, Ashton Allen, who looked like he’d seen a ghost. “Not right now,” Ashton muttered as he walked past. One after the other, employees were instructed to go to an upper level of the building, where six Downtown Project leaders—including Michael

Downs and Maggie Hsu—were seated in separate glass offices, each alongside a member of human resources. As the employees sat in front of their respective managers, they were then told they no longer had a job. Mike and the remaining workers watched the office descend into chaos. Some cried; others looked shell-shocked. Several people huddled in small groups and embraced one another. “It was like a show,” Mike recalled. Amid the beanbags, ping-pong tables, and Nerf gun pellets, the shock for some employees turned to white-hot anger. “This is bullshit!” one person yelled as they stormed through the office. “Supposed to be about community,” wailed another. One person, in a rage, walked over to the wall next to the elevator bank and tore off a large banner pinned to the wall that read, COMMUNITY, COLLISIONS, AND CO-LEARNING. In total, thirty people lost their jobs out of a staff of one hundred in the Downtown Project’s corporate headquarters. In public statements, Tony pointed to the fact that the Downtown Project employed around three hundred people in a community of around eight hundred. But while the number seemed comparatively small, the layoffs became the figurative straw that broke the neighborhood’s utopian back. A day after being quoted singing Tony’s praises, David Gould, the “Director of Imagination,” wrote an emotional letter announcing he had handed in his resignation before he could be fired. The note, which sounded more like the scrawl of a jilted lover, was published in the Las Vegas Weekly and accused Tony and the Downtown Project of “a collage of decadence, greed, and missing leadership.” Dear Tony, We met in the fall of 2010, when your “Delivering Happiness” book tour stopped by my University of Iowa class. I could never have imagined how dramatically that hot August afternoon would change the course of my life. I have retold the story many times of how the students spontaneously followed you out of the classroom that day. Exactly three years later, I left my home, and position at the university, to follow you as well. He went on:

While some squandered the opportunity to “dent the universe,” others never cared about doing so in the first place. There were heroes among us, however, and it is for them that my soul weeps. Once local reporters picked up on the story, it was like a balloon filled with happiness had burst. All that was left were sneering onlookers. “‘Bloodletting’ at Downtown Project with Massive Layoffs,” blared the Las Vegas Weekly, writing that “Hsieh has washed his hands of Downtown Project recently and has upper management handling the layoffs.” Paul Carr, whose coverage of the Downtown Project in NSFWCorp had soured —leading to Tony’s refusal to give him more money and forcing him to sell the company to another publication, Pando Daily—wrote an article summarizing the comments of his business partner, who said of the layoffs that “bad management and broken promises at the DTP eroded public trust” even as “they were given a pass by ‘breathless’ reporting in the media.” The most scathing piece came from an opinion writer for the Review-Journal, who wrote, “The cult of Tony Hsieh developed a crack this past week, and that’s a good thing.” The columnist, John L. Smith, mocked what he called “Hsieh’s true believers,” who “bought into his rhetoric like kids waiting in line to sit on Santa’s lap.” Targeting David Gould, he continued, “What was your first clue, professor? The nebulous business plan? The daily boozefest? The suspicious suicides of other true believers?” Concluding his piece, Smith’s words dripped with condescension: “If losing 30 workers spells the beginning of the end of Hsieh’s Downtown Dalai Lama routine, that’s a good thing.” A day after publishing her largely positive profile of Tony and the Downtown Project, Nellie Bowles followed up with a series of stories in Re/Code with a rather different tone. She reported that Tony was stepping back from his lead role at the Downtown Project, and quoted an anonymous source who blamed the layoffs on bad hiring practices. “Tony is not always altogether the most wise judge of character. There’s a lot of family. There’s a lot of drinking buddies. And some poor choices were made,” the source said. The Washington Post followed up with a piece that suggested Tony’s experiment was doomed—“Why Zappos’s CEO Couldn’t Save Downtown Las Vegas”—while Bloomberg opened its story with “Is Tony Hsieh giving up on Las Vegas?” The online publication Slate declared that “if there’s a

dark side of techtopia—of the arrogant-bordering-on-delusional notion that a multimillion-dollar investment and a happiness manifesto can remake a struggling city—this is it.” After years of reporters coming and going from Tony’s social experiment with stories of lives changed and unmatched generosity, he and the Downtown Project were totally unprepared to navigate the media storm, and their rebuttals were drowned out by the slew of negative headlines. In a statement, Tony tried to emphasize the fact he was never the CEO of the Downtown Project, and that his position was the same it had been six months before the layoffs: “an investor, advisor and equivalent of a board member that sets high-level general direction and strategy but is not involved in day-to-day management of people or projects.” Unlike a singular business or company, the Downtown Project “is a collection of several hundred businesses and legal entities,” each with its own goals and personalities. But his explanations were futile; the Delivering Happiness brand and the utopian messaging around the neighborhood contrasted too starkly against suicides, layoffs, and the realities of managing companies. Some members of the community tried to boost morale. Mark Rowland and his team at ROCeteer contacted Downtown Project businesses and asked them to submit thank-you notes, which he compiled in a booklet and presented to Tony and Fred. Three dozen businesses responded. “Tony and DTP changed my experience of Las Vegas—and my life!—for the better,” Natalie wrote on behalf of Eat. “I probably would have left town two years ago. Instead, I’m a business owner, creating jobs and inspiring positive change in others—just as Tony and DTP did for me.” A group of employees at a company called Launchkey, which provided password-free login software, wrote that the mission of the Downtown Project would prevail. “Changing a city is hard. But so is changing the world,” they wrote. “We will all be remembered by the impact we have on the future, not the people we piss off today.”

CHAPTER 16

THE ISLAND

There was one other person who stepped in to help Tony, with far greater consequences. Justin Weniger had been around more often since he and Ryan had opened their bars downtown, including Commonwealth. Like the Downtown Cocktail Room, it was inspired by Prohibition-era speakeasies, and had transformed an old, seedy sex shop into a cavernous space for lowkey candlelit conversations. Inside, one could find all sorts of trinkets lining the exposed brick walls. Hanging above the twenty-foot-long bar was a magnificent peacock, its plumage fanned out as if it was courting a mate. With a rooftop made for a DJ set, the venue came complete with a secretive speakeasy bar called Laundromat, tucked behind an obscure door. While Ryan typically ran point on the bars, which they controlled through an entity called Corner Bar Management, and sought new opportunities for Wendoh’s media business, Justin had overseen operations and finances for their ventures. More recently, though, Justin been taking a greater interest in the Life Is Beautiful festival and had been leading Wendoh’s efforts to help market the event as a media partner. Despite the controversy swirling around the Downtown Project, the festival was still scheduled to launch in a few weeks; Kanye West would be headlining the event. Tall and tanned with cropped blond hair, Justin was watching the onslaught of bad press when one of his editors at Vegas Seven came into his office to let him know they were planning to write a story about the Downtown Project layoffs. “Have you spoken to Tony?” Justin asked. They hadn’t been able to reach him, the editor said. “Well, then it’s not a story,”

Justin replied. Instead Justin suggested he would try to get Tony to agree to an interview, to get the “real story.” Under the headline “Tony Hsieh Speaks” was a glowing two-page Q&A that touted an exclusive interview with Tony. “There are those who want the Downtown Project to fail, and last week, those naysayers were given an unwitting gift,” the article stated. “For what it’s worth, Hsieh says he isn’t worried about the Downtown Project’s future.” Opening the feature, the reporter asked, “Why do you think the media has been gunning for the Downtown Project?” “It’s probably a combination of things … it could be a branding mistake that causes confusion,” Tony replied. Had all the bad press affected him personally? “The part that bothered me the most was the misleading headlines, the inaccuracies … there was one headline that said I was stepping down from Downtown Project. Similar headlines implied that Downtown Project was falling apart … that’s not something we ever prepared for.” Tony said he planned to spend hours talking to each person who had been fired, including David Gould. “Stepping back, last week was hard. I got a hundred text messages alone. I have a long list of people to reach out to.” He concluded by acknowledging “we could have done a better job of communicating” but he remained convinced that Downtown Las Vegas had the ingredients to succeed. “I just hope we can do it together.” Much of the news cycle had moved on by the time the article was posted in the second week of October 2014. Tony was preparing to announce the opening of the neighborhood’s first grocery. A new boutique hotel would be announced the week after. But after Justin emailed Tony a link to the article, along with an invitation to meet up for a drink, he received a response sometime in the middle of the night: “I really appreciate what you did.” It turned out Justin’s gesture to commission the article had piqued Tony’s interest.

A few days before the 2014 Life Is Beautiful festival in October, Rehan got a call from Fred asking him to meet at a wine bar in the Container Park.

While Rehan had maintained his role as the face of the Life Is Beautiful festival in glossy magazine covers and articles, his control over the company had all but been removed after he was replaced as CEO in January by Andrew Donner. Despite the management shift, the festival was expected to lose more money this year, and ticket sales were going to be short. He wasn’t sure what was on Fred’s agenda, but given the fact he was barely on speaking terms with Andrew and that Fred only weighed in if there was a major development, something felt fateful about the invitation. As he approached the bar, he saw Fred and Andrew but noticed Tony wasn’t there. Surely he would have had to sign off on any major decision. He thought about how his near-daily interactions with Tony had dried up, and he no longer felt like Tony was looking out for him. As his social capital had declined, his rose-tinted view of Tony became jaded. One night a few weeks before the festival, Tony had texted Rehan around 11 p.m. asking him to come meet him at the restaurant Carson Kitchen. When he arrived, Tony was seated with the owner of a local taco shop. He looked up as Rehan approached. The taco shop owner had some ideas about the upcoming festival, he said. Specifically, Rehan should consider ditching Kanye West as its headline act. The previous year, Kanye had come to downtown ahead of the first festival to tour the grounds and meet with Tony. During a private meeting after the tour, Kanye had asked Tony for his feedback about starting his own shoe company. Tony responded that “we should stick to what we know.” A couple of weeks later, Kanye went on a podcast and trashedtalked Zappos. “I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he’s trying to tell me what I need to focus on,” Kanye said. “Meanwhile, he sells all this shit product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling shit product.” While Kanye took his idea elsewhere—he partnered with Adidas to launch its Yeezy line of sneakers, creating what would become a $5 billion business (Adidas cut ties with the rapper in October 2022 after he made antisemitic remarks)—he had since come around and agreed to perform at this year’s festival. The taco shop owner explained that because Kanye had disrespected Tony and therefore didn’t stand for the values that the Downtown Project and Life Is Beautiful represented, Rehan should publicly announce that Kanye was being thrown off the lineup. Doing that would show Rehan’s

commitment to the culture and values of the Downtown Project. He could book another headliner, the taco shop owner reasoned, and the announcement would probably create enough publicity that it would sell more tickets. Thinking about how such an announcement would result in Rehan and Life Is Beautiful being blacklisted by all of America’s talent agencies, Rehan struggled to swallow his pride, and glanced over at Tony, who didn’t look up from his phone. (Rehan ignored the advice, and Kanye headlined the event.) Now, sitting at the wine bar opposite Fred and Andrew, Rehan listened as Fred told him that they had sold half of the Life Is Beautiful company to Wendoh Media. Justin and Ryan were being brought in as partners for the festival. In exchange, the Downtown Project would be taking a 50 percent stake in Wendoh Media. And the millions of dollars of debt owed by the festival to Tony would be wiped out.

Rehan took a few days to process the news. Tony had once asked him what he thought about Justin leading the marketing for Life Is Beautiful fulltime, but selling the company hadn’t been on the table, nor were Justin’s and Ryan’s roles as partners. It turned out that after the Vegas Seven article, Tony had invited Justin to join him and others, including Fred and Andrew Donner, on a trip to Maui to attend a conference. On the island, Tony probed Justin about his background and was seemingly impressed by his trajectory: from top college football player at UNLV to selling nightclub flyers, publishing magazines, and now operating bars. Justin, Tony said, had all the qualities of MacGyver. Ryan insisted to Rehan that he had known nothing about the deal until the last minute and that this was something spearheaded by Justin. But, he reasoned, perhaps having Justin involved wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Justin and Rehan were around the same age, and Justin was someone Rehan could negotiate with, unlike Andrew. Rehan relaxed a little when Justin reassured him that he could maintain creative control of the event. But their relationship rapidly soured. Justin confronted Rehan over excessive spending on dinners, clothes, and other entertainment expenses. (Rehan later said Justin never directly confronted him, and said his

spending was approved by Fred.) Justin also took issue with the efforts from the Life Is Beautiful public relations team to get publicity for Rehan, which included a Q&A interview with Complex about his personal style and morning routine, a feature sponsored by men’s product company Gillette. Now, instead of jumping on planes for trips to New York or Chicago or Atlanta, Rehan was finding out after the fact that Justin and Ryan were going in his place. By the time the next festival had come and gone in 2015, Rehan was making a last-ditch effort to stay involved. Looking at how much money the festival had lost again, approximately $8.5 million, he proposed bringing in an outside hedge fund to invest and assume the financial burden of future festivals while guaranteeing that it remained downtown. In response, Tony emailed Rehan to say he was meeting with Fred to discuss Life Is Beautiful, but reinforced that he was not involved in the decision-making regarding the festival and that Rehan should instead be seeking approval from Fred. “The only purpose of [Fred] meeting with me (and everyone else) is to get all the different perspectives, *not* for me to greenlight or not greenlight anything.” Rehan pushed for one more meeting with Tony: “Does that mean we can’t grab drinks?;)” Tony replied, “We definitely can, but it will need to be a little ways out —i just didn’t want to delay things on the LIB side as this week is crazy with halloween stuff and amazon visiting us for several days, and i’m out of town next week…” Rehan’s reply was his last interaction with Tony: “Cool. Definitely miss hanging out with you man. Let’s plan something when you’re free.”

Shortly after, Tony, Fred, Andrew, Justin, and Ryan went on the annual trip to Hawaii. Rehan had asked Fred and Andrew if he could come, but was ultimately denied. When they returned, Andrew Donner invited Rehan to his house, where he informed Rehan that he was being fired. It was Justin’s decision, and Tony had signed off on it, Andrew said. Rehan was given $200,000 for his stake in the company—a fraction of the $1 million he had been offered the year before—and signed a document saying he would not speak ill of the festival or its executives.

He left Las Vegas shortly after and moved to New York with his new wife. He remained angry for years, and while he could dismiss Justin as someone he just despised, processing the loss of his relationship with Ryan was much more challenging. At one point Rehan returned to Vegas and ran into Ryan in front of Commonwealth. Standing before Rehan, Ryan maintained that he hadn’t known it was going to end the way it did. Rehan could barely hold himself together. “Ryan, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about you. I literally think about you every single day,” Rehan told him. “And every day, I wish and pray that someone will call me, and tell me that you got hit by a fucking bus.” Like others before him, Rehan felt that Tony had shown him the world and the stars, only to have it all ripped from him in an instant. “It was strangely like a reality show where you could get voted off the island at any given point,” Rehan said later. “And in doing so you were very publicly voted off.” As Rehan built a new life in New York, Justin took his place on Tony’s island. In the coming years, being voted off was an outcome that Justin would manage to avoid, no matter the cost.

CHAPTER 17

THE TRAILER PARK

Janice Lopez had been watching Tony from afar for years. Ever since they parted ways on the last day of high school, she had often wondered what became of the soft-spoken boy with whom she shared the silence of the theater all those years ago, directing the spotlights onto the stars of their school performances. After Branson, she had faced a decision: either stick with her love of performing arts or pursue her talent for architecture. She chose Hollywood, and after graduating from the University of Southern California, she landed at a boutique talent agency before joining Warner Brothers as a film director’s assistant, working on shows like Friends and The Drew Carey Show. She got married. As the years wore on, Janice never had to look far to see how her old friend was doing. She read online about Tony selling LinkExchange for millions of dollars to Microsoft, and then saw him on TV, talking about his quirky shoe website. She had been home one day in 2008 when Oprah came on the TV and introduced her next guest: Janice’s high school buddy. Jumping up and down at the sight of Tony Skyping into Oprah’s studio, Janice couldn’t stop laughing. He totally hacked this shit, she thought. He figured out how to not be there, while still being there. By the end of 2013, Janice had long since abandoned Hollywood and was working as a real estate agent in Los Angeles. She had also revisited her high school dreams, gone back to college, and launched a career as an interior designer and architect. While she had solidified her professional life, she was now twice divorced, had two kids, and was feeling ready for a change of scenery.

That Christmas, she was in Las Vegas to visit her stepdad with her kids, and was thinking about whom she might know in town to meet up with. Her stepdad had often said that if you reach a standstill in life, ask someone how you can help. Considering her current situation, now seemed like a good time to take his advice. It was a wild thought, twenty years later and all, but what if she reached out to Tony? She had heard he was building an entire neighborhood or something. She sent him an email—“it’s been a hot minute”—and got a reply shortly after saying that he would love to meet, asking her to talk to Mimi about arrangements, and offering to let her stay in one of his crash pads at the Ogden. As had happened to countless people before her, Janice’s life was about to change. Meeting at the Container Park, the two looked at each other for a while. They were both still shy and awkward, but it was like nothing had changed, and Janice felt comfort in seeing him. Tony looked at her seriously and asked what she was up to in life. She told him about her new career as an architect. “How could I be helpful here?” she asked. What she didn’t know was that her own skills would serve a crucial part of Tony’s next chapter.

Once Janice was settled, she learned pretty quickly that she was entering Tony’s life at a time when he was searching for his own new direction. As reporters, commentators, and anyone else with an opinion zeroed in on Tony’s reputation and legacy, he had begun his retreat. Suddenly the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas was looking to shed responsibilities and shrink his personal footprint. Soon after stepping down as leader of the Downtown Project, Tony was told by the building owners of the Ogden that they no longer wanted to lease the units. The landlord was now demanding that Tony either buy the eighty apartments that the Downtown Project was currently leasing— including his personal luxury condo on the twenty-third floor—or vacate the building. This ultimatum came at an opportune time because Tony no longer wanted to live at the Ogden. Before, he’d welcomed serendipitous moments

with strangers in the building. But having an open-door policy no longer served him. Given the media assault in recent months, as well as the legions of followers he had gained in downtown Las Vegas, Tony was feeling exposed. He yearned for privacy. As Tony and his team brainstormed where he should live next, Janice stood on his twenty-third-floor balcony, looking across Tony’s fiefdom of Fremont East. She spotted a row of Airstream trailers glinting in the sunlight, parked in an empty lot about the size of half a city block. They had been purchased by the Downtown Project as part of an ill-thought-out plan to turn them into hotels, and had been sitting idle for more than a year. Her mind started to race. While studying interior architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, she had gutted and renovated the interior of an Airstream trailer for a project. She walked back inside to where Tony was sitting and typing on his laptop. “Hey, Tony,” she said. Tony continued to type, his eyes locked on the screen. “What if you lived in an Airstream?” He stopped and looked up. The idea floated around the room. Tony thought back to the days of his book tour. “When I was on the Delivering Happiness bus, I learned that I didn’t need much,” he said. “I pretty much had everything I needed on that bus.” Tony sent out a message to his closest friends and confidants: We’re going to do a living experiment for two weeks, he wrote. Janice is available … tomorrow. Meet her at the Airstream lot, and see if you might be interested in living in an Airstream or tiny house. The experiment would last well beyond two weeks. In November 2014, Tony moved into an Airstream trailer permanently, along with about a dozen of his friends, who paid around $950 a month in rent. Janice moved in with her two young children. So did his old girlfriend from the Venture Frog days, Eva Lee, who was in the process of getting a divorce at the time. “The original idea behind it was to basically try to create an urban version of Burning Man where there’s just lots of creative stuff going on,” Tony later told a journalist. “What I love about it is that the place is literally changing every week.” Within six months, the lot had a name: Airstream Park. The village of trailers and tiny homes on Fremont became Tony’s safe haven within

downtown Las Vegas. There were live music jam sessions every weekend and a constant stream of art installations that lit up the space. A giant jellyfish was erected at one point. Most nights at the park ended with conversations around campfires, a favorite pastime of Tony’s. Eventually, dogs, cats, and chickens settled in the park, as well as a chocolate-brown alpaca named Marley that roamed the grounds. One day Tony took Janice’s kids to Zappos for an event and returned with Blizzy, a fluffy white mutt. The dog would be Tony’s loyal companion for years to come. Every Airstream trailer and tiny home opened toward the center of the lot, a common “living room” with AstroTurf carpeting the concrete where people set up camping chairs, tables, and fire pits. To complete the space, a large outdoor screen was set up for movie nights. Like 1000 Van Ness in San Francisco and the Ogden, in more ways than one Airstream Park became the latest reincarnation of Tony’s Harvard dorm room, where everyone he knew and trusted lived within feet of him. Airstream Park, in his mind, was the ultimate utopia of community living. Even as his net worth crept toward $1 billion, observers pointed out the seeming contradiction in Tony’s choice. “With a net worth of $840 million, Tony Hsieh could have a Caribbean island or a palatial estate overlooking an ocean vista all to himself,” read one story from the Washington Post. “Instead, the Zappos.com chief executive has set down roots in a less exclusive locale: a dusty Las Vegas trailer park.” Reporters seized the opportunity to tour his living quarters. In an interview with the Las Vegas Weekly in early 2015, Tony chatted with a reporter in the park’s community kitchen, housed in a shipping container. As he tended to a large pot filled with spicy kimchi noodle egg drop soup, he told the reporter, “I have two skills. I’m the world’s best iPhone photographer and I’m the best improv soup maker.” In another video segment for ABC News titled “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life,” Tony gave the reporter a tour, even inviting the camera crew into his small trailer home. In one shot, Tony fed Marley the alpaca a carrot from his mouth. As Marley chomped, Tony’s eyes crinkled with laughter. Genuine glee spread across his face. After a year of turmoil in the Downtown Project, Tony was eager to put forth another image: a simple man of few needs and with a penchant for homemade soups, living among friends and farm animals.

As Tony successfully steered the media coverage, much of it left out other notable components of Airstream Park. Though there were parents and children who lived in the community full-time, the atmosphere was not completely wholesome. Parties happened frequently, alcohol was freeflowing, and recreational drugs were easy to find. “There were people who lived in the village who were sober,” said a frequent visitor to the Airstream Park. “But you could also easily go up to anyone there and say, ‘Hey, do you have some mushrooms laying around somewhere?’” It was during this time that Tony met Anthony Taylor. Anthony (not his real name) was working in internet marketing when he was introduced to Tony through a mutual friend at an art show. Tony immediately loved his energy: Anthony Taylor was the quintessential hype guy. Full of excitement and quick to smile, he became the face of the park to many visitors, giving tours and prompting awe among them as he showed them how to live with less—often wearing outfits that looked as if he’d just arrived from Burning Man. At the end of each tour, he’d hand his guests a carrot to feed Marley the alpaca. To his new neighbors at the park he would say it felt like a home, compared to his rough upbringing. But once the music started and events were in swing, his party boy spirit was complemented by his reputation as the go-to guy for recreational drugs. “A lot of us used to say Tony collected lost souls in a way,” said the frequent visitor. “He would bring them into his world, treat them really well, and then they would become fiercely loyal to him. Anthony was one of those people.” Unsurprisingly, he became a polarizing figure within Airstream Park. There were some who saw Anthony as a bad influence on the community. Others sympathized with Anthony’s fascination with and devotion to Tony. “People say, ‘Oh, he was the Airstream Park drug dealer,’” said the visitor. “Well, if he was, then everyone who lived in the village was. There was not a single person in Tony’s close sphere that didn’t overlook things that probably should have been thought about.” Either way, it was a lifestyle shared by Tony, Anthony, and many others within the community. Though it was an open secret in downtown Las Vegas, it was still a part of his identity that Tony preferred to keep away from prying eyes.

Airstream Park gave off an air of radical inclusion—one of the ten guiding principles of Burning Man. But the media coverage never mentioned the six-foot-high concrete wall surrounding the park. There were a few gaps for entry that were guarded by “park rangers,” who essentially acted as bouncers for Tony’s community. The wall was just tall enough to keep out curious and unwanted eyes, though not so tall as to feel suffocating for its inhabitants. Airstream Park was Tony’s world, and he was eager to protect it from anything that might dare invade and disrupt his safe haven.

It had been two years since Tony announced Holacracy’s roll-out at Zappos, but the company had yet to reach the state of radical self-management he envisioned. In March 2015, he sent a 4,700-word company-wide email. “We’ve been operating partially under Holacracy and partially under the legacy management hierarchy in parallel for over a year now,” Tony started in his note. “Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization. “After many conversations and a lot of feedback about where we are today versus our desired state of self-organization, self-management, increased autonomy, and increased efficiency,” he continued, “we are going to take a ‘rip the bandaid’ approach.” In other words, employees either had to adopt Holacracy or take a buyout. Zappos lost 210 out of 1,503 employees over the following months. Some Zapponians had started wondering whether Tony should resign from Zappos. “The brewing employee discontent reflects the paradox at the heart of any company’s move to Holacracy,” read a New York Times story about the debacle. “For all the talk of self-management and consensus building, the decision to go down this path was Mr. Hsieh’s alone.” Tony remained defensive about Holacracy to a press that was unwilling to accept it. “The media has kind of portrayed it as ‘there’s just total chaos,’” he said during an onstage interview with veteran technology reporter Kara Swisher during a conference in early 2016. During the fireside chat, Tony stumbled over his words, appearing even more

uncomfortable than he usually was in media interviews. “There actually still is a hierarchy.” “No, I think they portray it as a crazy cult,” Swisher responded. The audience laughed. “A crazy cult, in total chaos,” Tony clarified sarcastically. “Well, that’s sort of the definition of a crazy cult,” she responded. The narrative of Tony being the leader of a cult had been building for years. Back when Tony was on his book tour for Delivering Happiness, he had appeared on The Colbert Report with comedian Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central, during which Colbert—who found it difficult to fathom a company like Zappos, one that only hired employees if they were “a little weird” and could join costume parades and even spend the night in Tony’s house in Southern Highlands—asked Tony point-blank, “Is this a cult? Are you Dear Leader father of a cult? Do you have child brides? How far—how much control do you have over these people?” The audience was still laughing then. People began to throw the word “cult” around more seriously when journalists reported that Tony’s friends were required to get tattoos to attend his fortieth-birthday party in December 2013—a small circle, representing a pixel. “It’s an intense display of loyalty—getting inked for a boss generally isn’t part of corporate culture—and it exemplifies the concerns some Las Vegans have about Hsieh,” read a Las Vegas Sun report. “Hsieh’s grip has reached the point that when online tech publication Gizmodo recently sent a reporter downtown, the author said the entrepreneur’s empire ‘can feel cultish.’” From his struggle to upend corporate hierarchy to his devout group of followers, his public image as a zany visionary morphed into a more disquieting figure. “Many believe Hsieh … fosters an environment where devotion is rewarded and criticism isn’t tolerated,” the Las Vegas Sun wrote. “Downtown Las Vegas, they say, is becoming Tony’s Town, a place where either you follow Hsieh—and line up for a tattoo—or you’re deemed in the way.” By the time Tony appeared onstage at the conference with Kara Swisher in 2016, the fissures in Tony’s philosophies were starting to appear. And as the public punches started again, this time targeting Holacracy and claiming that he was running a cult, Tony’s sanguine exterior started to crack.

In Airstream Park, his closest confidants started taking notice. In the fall of 2016, Tony threw a party at Airstream Park for Michelle D’Attilio’s birthday. At one point during the night, “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson blasted through the speakers. As soon as she heard the song, Michelle immediately thought back to her last birthday, when she had been with Tony at a bar with a few girlfriends. When the song came on that night, Tony had hopped out of his chair and started doing the moonwalk. Tony had told Michelle the next day that he used to watch Michael Jackson as a kid and mirror the moonwalk by himself. So when “Billie Jean” came on at Airstream Park, Michelle urged Tony to do the moonwalk again, in front of all their friends. Tony seemed hesitant, but after some pushing from Michelle and a few others, he did the moonwalk for just a few seconds as partygoers whooped and cheered. He quickly sat back down. Later that night, Tony brought up the moonwalk moment in private. “Why are you so upset?” Michelle asked. “Why did you make me do the moonwalk in front of everyone?” he said. “Because you’ve done it before and you’re so good at it!” “Listen,” Tony said angrily. “I can’t just turn it on anytime.” Michelle was confused. What are we really talking about here? As she stared at Tony, something about his facial expression made her stop. She looked closer and realized he had tears in his eyes. As she took the moment in, she thought about the recent media coverage as well as Tony’s standing at Zappos and the Downtown Project. The pressure was getting to him, she thought. It was one of the only times she ever saw Tony cry.

CHAPTER 18

THE RIGHT HAND

When Tony had been leaping from one chapter to another—building Zappos, the Amazon acquisition, the Delivering Happiness book, the launch of the Downtown Project, Holacracy—there was one man by his side the entire time: Fred Mossler. Since the early days of Zappos, Fred had been Tony’s right-hand man. And when the Downtown Project came along, it was a vision the two men created together. They donned costumes at Zappos all-hands meetings and biked around Burning Man each year. Fred was one of a dwindling number of people who could tell Tony no. He was a giant in the community that they had built. And he had an important role: a check-and-balance for Tony’s untethered ambitions and ideas, just as Alfred had been before he returned to Silicon Valley. But by 2014, Fred was forty-eight, had remarried, and had three children. When Airstream Park was being built, a trailer had been reserved for Fred and his wife, Meghan, whom he had met at Zappos years before. After staying there for a weekend, they decided not to move in. For all the years of unconventionality under Tony’s wing, he simply could not stomach moving into a trailer and raising his kids in a pseudo-commune. As Holacracy continued its troubled rollout at Zappos, Fred supported the effort internally by sending encouraging company-wide emails while listening to employees’ gripes with the new system. He appeared in media interviews with Tony to defend the corporate structure. “As I noodle on the press coverage, what no one has mentioned is if any company were bold enough to offer their entire employee base a severance the likes of which we did,” Fred said during an interview in early 2016. “In reading all the exit

interviews and speaking with people leaving, the exodus is less about Holacracy/dissatisfaction and more about the opportunity to pursue other passions or fulfill other goals in life. The fact we can make such an offer and only 18% choose to leave is, I’m guessing, an impressive statistic in the corporate world.” “I completely agree with Fred,” Tony said. But unbeknownst to the wider public, Fred was contemplating his own exit from Zappos. Some Zapponians had started noticing Fred’s increasing absence. In the past, when both Fred and Tony were in a meeting, it was not unusual to witness the two debating, with Fred talking Tony down from his outrageous ideas. But Fred, some noticed, had started to disagree less. “Fred was also at his desk more,” said Chris Peake, who reported directly to Fred. “Before, he was never really at his desk. He was usually moving and shaking, just very busy.” A few months after the interview, Fred announced he was leaving Zappos. “I’ve spent almost seventeen years with Zappos and have seen it grow from a two-bedroom apartment to the amazing company it is today,” Fred wrote in a company-wide email. “There are no words that can describe what this company has and what the people in it have meant for me.” He continued, “Tony will remain focused on Zappos, but we’ll still be tied at the hip and I still expect to contribute to Zappos as his thought partner. Downtown Las Vegas is where my heart and soul are and where all of my closest friends are. I will always be around and available for collisions downtown.”

First Alfred and then Fred had served as Tony’s life partners, in business and in friendship. Neither of them was afraid to disagree with Tony, and he regarded them as equals. But after Fred’s departure, there was no clear successor, and Tony boasted to old acquaintances that his friends kept getting younger and younger. The crowd at Zappos and Airstream Park partied more, disagreed less, and were woefully ill-equipped to become Tony’s peers. Despite surrounding himself with deferential people, Tony still saw value in a right-hand man who challenged him and demanded his respect.

When Fred left, Tony started trying to recruit a man named Victor Oviedo, a partner at a New York–based investment firm whose warm eyes and bright smile contrasted with his no-nonsense, Ivy League–bred financier background. Victor was a partner at SkyBridge Capital, a hedge fund founded by Anthony Scaramucci, the enigmatic Wall Street figure who would later have a tumultuous stint as President Donald Trump’s press secretary. Since 2009, SkyBridge had held its annual SALT Conference in Las Vegas, a meeting of the minds where the guests and keynote speakers included billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman and politicians such as future President Joe Biden and former British prime minister Tony Blair. In 2017, Victor asked the singer and songwriter Jewel to perform at SALT. Jewel agreed and asked if she could also give a talk on mental health and mindfulness at the conference with her new friend Tony Hsieh. The two had just met on billionaire Richard Branson’s Necker Island at another conference, and they had connected on a variety of topics, from Holacracy to mindfulness. Jewel was passionate about mental health, and she told Victor that having Tony at this panel would give it more credibility among the SALT crowd. Victor agreed, and met Tony for the first time at the conference. Several months later, Jewel invited Victor to a charity event in Las Vegas. Tony, who was also there, threw his usual line at Victor. “The next time you’re in town, come stay with me at the Airstream Park,” he said to Victor. “My email is [email protected].” “All right, [email protected], next time I’m in town, I’ll shoot you an email,” Victor said. He thought it was unusual for Tony, a prominent CEO, to invite him to stay with him so soon after meeting. But from their brief interactions, Victor could tell that Tony’s life was far from ordinary. A few days later, Victor emailed Tony and told him he already had a trip planned for Vegas later in the month. Tony wrote back, “Why don’t you come to the office for a tour and then come shadow me for a day?” Soon after, Victor arrived at Zappos and received tours of the company headquarters and the Downtown Project before the guide dropped him off at Airstream Park at the end of the afternoon. He found Tony sitting at a long table with a few other residents, drinking Fernet.

Victor sat down, and the two dove into a conversation about Holacracy at Zappos. Tony told Victor he wanted Holacracy to evolve into a new system called market-based dynamics, in which every team would be run like its own independent business and every employee would have to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset to thrive. The structure was based on Tony’s theory that everyone could become a self-starting entrepreneur so long as they were given the tools to succeed. Victor later told confidants that his friendship with Tony began at this precise moment, when he challenged Tony on his new idea. “What parts of market-based dynamics don’t make sense to you?” Tony asked Victor. The others at the table turned to pay attention to the debate. “This idea you believe in that there is an entrepreneur in everyone,” Victor said. “You don’t think anyone could become an entrepreneur?” “Maybe anyone could be, but not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, Tony. Some people just want to go to work, and then they want to go home to their friends and family. Or maybe they want to pursue personal hobbies. I just do not agree with the premise of a setting where you force everyone to become an entrepreneur.” Tony stared at him, slowly nodding. He seemed taken aback that Victor was willing to openly debate his theory. Then, Victor looked around the table and saw some of the shocked faces looking back at him. Having spent a lot of time with successful individuals through the SALT Conference, Victor quickly read the room: Tony’s intellectual curiosity and his ability to transform ideas into conclusions were elite. But he had surrounded himself with yes-men. Victor left the trailer park that night wondering if he had gone too far. But the next day Tony again invited Victor to shadow him for the day. Victor sat in on several Zappos meetings, including one in which Tony and his core lieutenants were prepping for a presentation to Amazon’s Jeff Wilke, a high-ranking executive who reported directly to Jeff Bezos. Tony asked Victor for his input, despite having no formal role at Zappos. Is this a test? Victor thought. Am I being interviewed right now? Tony ended the day by inviting Victor to move to Vegas. “Zero chance,” Victor immediately replied. “How about you come work for me?” Tony asked.

“I have no interest in becoming employee number seven hundred thousand at Amazon,” he said. But they kept talking, and Tony invited Victor on a ski trip to Powder Mountain in Utah with a few of his friends, including Zappos employees and Airstream Park residents. On the ski trip, Victor watched as Tony made soup for the group of twenty people while everyone else played beer pong. Once the soup was served, Tony curled up on a couch in the corner of the living room. People came up to him to chat. When they moved off, Tony would open a book on his lap and read while surrounded by partying chaos. Victor’s excursions with Tony started happening every month, from Zappos meetings in Vegas to Life Is Beautiful festival planning in Hawaii, and even to distilleries in Guadalajara to do research on a potential new tequila branding opportunity with Nacho Daddy. They attended conferences together when Tony was speaking, and met fellow entrepreneurs at their offices to explore various partnerships, from StockX to MIT Labs in Boston. Then one day, Tony handed Victor forty pages of financial documents. They were a summary of Tony’s investments tied to the Downtown Project and the financials for Life Is Beautiful. Tony told Victor he was concerned that he was being ripped off, and he was particularly disappointed with the financial performance and structure of Life Is Beautiful. Victor went through the documents. “If you are basing the performance solely on financial returns, then your concerns are valid,” he said to Tony. But wasn’t Tony investing in these ventures to build community? By that metric, Victor said, these businesses are somewhat successful. It appeared that Tony needed Victor to remind him that the community-building aspect of these investments was the ultimate measure of return. Victor never minced his words around Tony. As a result, Tony kept asking Victor to come work for him at Zappos and the Downtown Project. Tony even recruited others to ask Victor for him. After months of courtship, Victor made his observations clear to Tony. “I would love to do something with you,” he said. “But frankly, I think you’re wasting your time at Zappos. You’ve done everything there is for you to do here. When you’re ready to jump into your next adventure, I’d be happy to join you as your partner.”

Tony struck out with Victor. They remained friends, but Tony still needed a right-hand man in Vegas to deliver on his ideas for Zappos and the Downtown Project. Instead of recruiting from the outside, Tony realized he could find someone within his ranks.

“It’d be really fun to just have a ball pit right here,” Tony said, pointing to a corner as Tyler Williams followed him around the Zappos campus. Tyler was scribbling down notes as Tony dumped the outputs of his whirring mind onto him. “I would like a slide here that comes from the second floor. It could be great to have music in the plaza, or maybe a dog park.” Tyler had been at Zappos for five years now and had been promoted several times. Internally, he was known as the “Fungineer,” a role that served as a clearinghouse for any strange idea that Tony came up with. In one instance, Tony asked Tyler to build a jacket that had built-in portable chargers and other gadgets, similar to the jacket worn by Richard “Data” Wang, a character in the 1985 cult classic The Goonies. In another case, Tyler helped build the “instant dance floor” in the Zappos lobby. At the push of a button—which said NEVER PUSH THIS BUTTON—speakers would slide up from the ground, thumping music would blare out, and fog machines would fill the Zappos lobby with smoke, creating the illusion of a dance floor. In 2016, Tony promoted Tyler to lead Zappos’s brand expansion department, giving him a $20 million annual budget. Prior to this, the biggest budget Tyler had managed was around half a million dollars. Tony had also never given the branding role to anyone other than himself. Tyler, who was a decade younger than Tony, looked up to the Zappos visionary. Like Rehan, who had been swept into Tony’s inner circle, Tyler now had a front-row seat to Tony’s life as a tech leader and cultural icon. In his new role, Tyler started jetting off with Tony across the world, from music festivals to conferences. When Tony drank a shot of Fernet, Tyler was usually right there with him. When Tony went up onstage to talk about Holacracy, Tyler was sitting in the audience. In many ways, they were polar opposites. Tony was introverted at heart, while Tyler was effusive and loved to entertain. But Tyler was a crutch for Tony in social situations: when Tony

wanted to slink into the background, it was Tyler who stepped up to take attention away from him. Tyler was resourceful, and he was usually more or less willing to partake in the festivities. He was now Tony’s new right hand. Being at Tony’s side also meant hobnobbing with celebrities like Jewel. The Grammy Award–winning artist had become more involved in Tony’s world after the SALT Conference and had recently agreed to build a program at Zappos that could help his employees maintain their mental health. Called Whole Human, it would provide Zapponians with a series of courses on how to achieve optimal emotional and physical health. In their conversations, Jewel and Tony realized their missions and goals were complementary—that fostering Zappos employees’ happiness would be key to a successful corporate culture. But the Zappos definition of employee happiness—an open bar at the office with a philosophy of “work hard, play hard”—was at complete odds with the philosophy that Jewel was trying to introduce. “Happiness is different than excitement,” Jewel said. “Excitement and perk-driven culture becomes addictive in nature and creates entitlement.” By her definition, in fact, Zappos had it all wrong. So in the spring of 2018, Jewel organized a mindfulness retreat on the Colorado River in Nevada for about a dozen Zappos employees including Tony and Tyler. While Tony backed out of the trip at the last minute, Tyler and the others showed up with boat gear and coolers full of beer and hard alcohol. “Hey, guys, that’s not the point of this trip,” Jewel said. This was to be an alcohol- and substance-free retreat. They chuckled and packed the alcohol back into their cars. For the next few hours, they boated up the Colorado River, stopping by hot springs and cavernous coves. In one of the caves, Jewel sang a capella, her soprano echoing around the red rock chambers. For Tyler, it was one of the most amazing days of his life. He only wished that Tony had been there to experience it. In fact, Tyler had started to worry about his boss. In the last couple of months, Tyler had started to notice a yellowing in the whites of Tony’s eyes —jaundice, he later figured, a symptom of alcoholic hepatitis. Tyler also saw that Tony’s hands would tremble during Zappos meetings. Sometimes during morning meetings, mimosas would appear, and Tony was always a

willing participant. Tyler realized that he had never seen a day when Tony was not drinking. Tyler reached a point in 2018 where he physically could not keep up with his mentor’s vices. In the fall, Tyler started experiencing nausea and heartburn. His doctor asked him what his diet looked like, and was shocked to learn how much Fernet-Branca Tyler was drinking. “You are teaching your body not to digest anything, because it’s thinking the digestif will do it for you,” the doctor told him. The doctor instructed Tyler to make serious life changes. As Tyler wondered how Tony was stomaching his Fernet habit, he witnessed another, even more troubling encounter. A meeting had been scheduled at the El Cortez between Tony and a man named Ben Jorgensen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had recently raised $30 million for his new blockchain technology company, Constellation Labs. Ben and Tony had met previously during the early Downtown Project days and had remained friends. There was enough mutual respect between the two men that during a visit to Airstream Park, Tony had once confided in Ben about his frustrations. “Everybody seems to want something from me,” Tony had said. “I don’t want anything from you,” Ben said. “You want my time,” Tony said. “It’s still something. I’m so tired of it all.” The two ended up going back to his trailer and watching a YouTube video about the perspective of the human eye. There Ben watched as Tony turned off from the world. Still, Ben had been inspired by Tony’s vision and generosity. Many times he had witnessed Tony in conversations gently nudging people toward their purpose. For the meeting at the El Cortez, Ben had wanted his Constellation cofounders to meet Tony and be inspired. But as the meeting approached, Ben —who had only been working on his startup for eight months and was in the trenches of building it—was forced to reschedule. Tony, who had nearly every waking minute of his life accounted for, made it clear to Tyler in private that he was peeved. On the day of the rescheduled meeting, Tony showed up at the Parlour Bar at El Cortez with his entourage, Tyler included. As their drinks arrived,

Ben discussed his company and his views on the wider crypto community with Tony and his group. When Ben finished, Tony bored into Ben with a series of questions. “How do you make a business out of crypto? What exactly is the business model?” Tony’s tone felt hostile. As Ben tried to answer, Tony interrupted him. “Well, what is the value of it? How do you even sell that?” Ben was used to people being skeptical about his cryptocurrency business—it was 2018, after all, when Bitcoin crashed from $20,000 a coin to just over $3,000. But this was the last thing Ben had expected from Tony. He had brought his team to Vegas hoping for what Tony was famous for— encouraging entrepreneurs through productive and inspiring conversation. “It was a very weird dynamic, and my co-founders eventually started to object to Tony’s questions,” Ben said later. “They knew how much the meeting meant to me.” As everyone at the table watched the uncomfortable encounter go down, Tyler sat quietly. He had rarely, if ever, seen Tony be so hostile. He wondered whether Tony felt intellectually threatened by Ben, a sign of ego that seemed foreign to the Tony he knew. The meeting ended on such a sour note that Tyler was compelled to reach out to Ben and apologize. But as he walked away from the El Cortez, he found himself thinking, Where the hell did that come from?

CHAPTER 19

GENIE IN A BOTTLE

The small propeller plane was circling high above the playa as Tyler looked out the window. His body felt the hum of the engines as he scanned the view below before him: a sprawling sea of encampments organized in the shape of a horseshoe, a seeming hieroglyphic mirage emerging from the haze of the desert. He felt his adrenaline shoot up, and a smile crinkled across his face. We’re back, he thought. Back to Burning Man. The annual pilgrimage to Black Rock City—the ephemeral town that exists only one week a year in the name of Burning Man—occurs at the end of every summer. By 2019, Tony and his crew were veterans. To get an invite from Tony was to receive a golden ticket to join his circle of confidants and followers. Tony’s camp, which for liability reasons—given open drug use at the camp and the event—was technically called Mimi’s camp even though he footed the bill, provided everything a so-called Burner would need to survive and thrive for a week rolling around in the playa dust. Their “Welcome to Burning Man” starter pack included individual trailers with stocked fridges, scarves, dust masks, goggles, and light kits. Tyler first joined Tony’s crew at the festival in 2014. He remembered being told as a child that Burning Man was a gathering of devil-worshiping pagans in the desert, all coming together to burn an idol, procreate, and get weird. But he was no longer that kid, and he was excited to experience the community that had inspired so much of Tony’s work in Zappos and downtown Las Vegas. That first year, Tony never left his side; he wanted to make sure his newest member of the Burning Man crew was having a good time. It was

almost as if he wanted to vicariously experience going to Burning Man for the first time again through Tyler. He took videos of Tyler’s awed reactions to Black Rock City: tens of thousands of individuals coming together to create a world of kaleidoscopic art and rapture as the sun went down. He had gone to Burning Man every year since, and they had experienced some wild events. Two years before, on the final night of the festival, Tony had been watching the main ceremony—the burning of the sculpture at the center of Black Rock City—when a man he had just been talking to ran into the fire and died. Now it was Tony’s ninth time at Burning Man and Tyler’s sixth. There were first-time Burners in their camp this year, including Tony’s parents and his former girlfriend Michelle D’Attilio. For Tony, Burning Man was a place where he could search for inspiration and ideas. Weeks after his first burn on the playa in 2011, he invited four of the founding leaders of Burning Man to Las Vegas to discuss how he could apply the ten principles of Burning Man to Zappos and to the yet undeveloped Downtown Project he planned to build. And through the years, he continued the tradition of taking what he could out of the playa into “the default world”—a term that Burners used in reference to the rest of the year spent away from the festival. Tony purchased a gutted Boeing 747 that acted as a club at Black Rock City for several years, and he intended to bring it to downtown Las Vegas to turn it into an event space. The theme for Burning Man in 2019 was “Metamorphoses”—a celebration of change and an exploration of uncertainty. But Tony’s life had remained unchanged for quite some time, at least by his standards. In 1998, he sold LinkExchange. About a decade later in 2009, he sold Zappos. Now another ten years had passed. He was forty-five years old and Zappos had just celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Holacracy had failed to take hold, so Tony was now steering the company toward market-based dynamics. The transition was still sluggish at best, and he was pushing his executives to go faster. They pushed back, with long-term veterans like Chris Peake telling Tony they had to go slow in order to educate the thirteen hundred Zapponians on the completely novel corporate structure. Meanwhile, the Downtown Project was approaching its seventh year, and it was still a money-losing venture. Many of the Downtown Project

businesses Tony had invested in had yet to figure out how to be selfsustaining and independent and were still asking him for more funding. Two of his top Downtown Project lieutenants, Fred and Andrew Donner, had taken a step back to focus on their own projects, which made Tony question whether he still had the right group of leaders to steer the project’s course. All this made Tony ponder a question he had considered many times before: What’s next? He was eager to embark on his next chapter. Members of Tony’s Burning Man crew were usually given plastic watches synced to the same time. Phones barely had reception on the playa, so their watches would be the only tool they had to guide meet-up times and points. It was another spectacularly planned year. Around a dozen RVs parked in a circle surrounded a dome tent in the center, where a hanging chandelier illuminated the Persian rugs and accented throw pillows across the ground. Though his parents, Richard and Judy, tried their best to keep up to the pace, they usually turned in early at nighttime. Judy took a nap one night on Tony’s cloud-nine-themed art car. One night, Tony got Judy, who was wearing a long flowy dress, and Michelle, clad in thigh-high dusty boots and an LED necklace, to dance with each other as a crowd surrounded them. Though Tony knew this would make them uncomfortable, he still pushed them to the front, giggling as he videoed the two women awkwardly dancing together. Once his parents retired to bed, Tony went off into the night with Tyler. Aside from alcohol and cannabis, of which there was plenty, Tony also sought out psychedelic mushrooms and MDMA to enhance his experience, which he said he used to elicit a different perspective and connection to Black Rock City. “The thing about doing recreational drugs with Tony was everything was always intentional,” said a member of his Burning Man crew. “As in, we’re going somewhere to see something so we can get inspired and then integrate that thought process into making an environment better for people in the default world.” As they biked through the playa, following the bass lines and neon lights pulsating in the dark, they crossed paths with Shelby Sacco, which is not her real name. She represented a new crop of Burning Man attendees in recent years: techies who came to Black Rock to discover life outside of their screens and algorithms, in the hope of achieving enlightenment.

As the desert’s energy throbbed around their chance encounter, Shelby reached into her bag and took out a small container. Inside was a white powder, and she told Tony and Tyler that it was ketamine. Typically used as an animal tranquilizer, ketamine had made an entrance to the rave scene in recent decades, giving users a dissociative high that can distort sights and sounds and make the user feel disconnected from reality—especially when that reality involves physical or mental pain. She explained that ketamine was a nonaddictive drug, there are no hangovers or negative health effects, and under its influence you can only be happy. “Those are two things that Tony always searched for,” the Burning Man crew member said. “It was basically described as like the perfect drug.”

Ketamine was first synthesized in 1956 by chemists at the pharmaceutical firm Parke Davis Company, as a means to replace the surgical anesthetic PCP, which had a tendency to trigger hallucinations and psychotic episodes after surgery. Formerly called CI-581, ketamine was supposed to be a safer alternative, and it went on to become the world’s top-selling anesthetic, used by pediatricians and veterinarians. During the 1970s, it was used as an anesthetic in the field for soldiers during the Vietnam War, which sparked the beginning of abuse of the drug when soldiers and veterans became addicted to its hallucinatory and calming effects. But the publication of Journeys into the Bright World by Marcia Moore and Howard Alltounian in 1978 offered scientific literature on the potential benefits of the drug, while other advocates like John Lilly, a neuroscientist who later documented his use of the drug in The Scientist, helped spread ketamine use across the East Coast social scene in the 1980s and 1990s. The drug moved into raves and clubs, earning the nickname Special K for its trance-inducing qualities on the dance floor. In 1999, ketamine was deemed a Schedule III narcotic by the Drug Enforcement Agency, which meant that unless it was dispensed by a medical practitioner, it would be a crime to sell or intend to sell the drug. The earliest studies on the effects of ketamine in treating mental disorders started in the 1960s, when a controversial Mexican psychotherapist named Salvador Roquet started using the drug as a form of psychotherapy. Roquet was arrested by Mexican authorities in the mid-

1970s due to his use of illegal drugs. “I think the major reason was that conventional psychiatrists were angry at the publicity that Salvador had been receiving,” said Stanley Krippner, a psychologist who was a friend of Salvador’s and helped facilitate his release from detention. But a decade later, psychiatrists in the Soviet Union launched their own experiment with ketamine as psychotherapy to treat alcoholism. After ten years of research, Russian doctors Evgeny Krupitsky and A. Y. Grinenko published their findings in the 1990s: “The results of a controlled clinical trial demonstrated a considerable increase in efficacy of the authors’ standard alcoholism treatment when supplemented by ketamine psychedelic therapy.” The researchers also found that ketamine-assisted psychedelic therapy induced “positive transformation of non-verbalized (mostly unconscious) self-concept and emotional attitudes, to various aspects of self and other people, positive changes in life values and purposes, important insights into the meaning of life and an increase in the level of spiritual development. Most importantly, these psychological changes were shown to favor a sober lifestyle.” In 2000, the drug was tested on patients to treat depression in a study led by Robert M. Berman at Yale University. Seven patients with major depression were given intravenous treatment of ketamine for two days. The researchers found that “subjects with depression evidenced significant improvement in depressive symptoms within 72 hours after ketamine but not placebo infusion.” The research has largely been limited to small sample groups, with a need for more data on longer-term efficacy and safety. But the few that exist show evidence that ketamine, in a supervised setting, could help patients with mood and anxiety disorders. In 2020, psychiatrists at the Karolinska Institutet, a medical research university in Sweden, ran another experiment where thirty patients with “difficult-to-treat depression” were randomly assigned to a ketamine-infusion group or a placebo group. Then in the next phase, those who wanted to could receive ketamine twice for two weeks. “The result was that over 70 percent of those treated with ketamine responded to the drug,” the researchers found. Recent studies into the potential therapeutic uses for ketamine have looked into it as a treatment for suicidal ideation, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In addition to anecdotal evidence, word of

mouth, and off-label uses, the studies bolstered support for more research into ketamine therapies. But even though ketamine has shown positive signals in research studies to treat mental disorders, professional psychiatrists remain wary of mass-prescribing the drug. “Ketamine has the advantage of being very rapid-acting, but at the same time it is a narcoticclassed drug that can lead to addiction,” said Johan Lundberg, one of the authors of a Swedish study on the drug. “So it’ll be interesting to examine in future studies if this receptor can be a target for new, effective drugs that don’t have the adverse effects of ketamine.” “I think if you put ketamine into an overexcited brain, it will calm it down,” said Dr. Karl Jansen, one of the premier researchers in ketamine who has studied the use and abuse of the drug. “If you put ketamine into a calm brain, it will over-excite it. It’s probably pro-convulsant in a normal brain, and anticonvulsant in an epileptic brain. It’s a very complicated drug.” But it was in California-based tech circles that so-called ketamine clinics—facilities in which licensed doctors administer ketamine in a supervised setting—found an audience in the mid-2010s, around the same time it became clear that entrepreneurs were more susceptible to depression due to the stressors of their jobs. Because the clinics offered the drug for an off-label use, insurance companies would not cover the treatments, so the kinds of patients these clinics attracted were wealthy—from technologists to executives to stay-at-home parents. Those who could afford the treatment would sit back in a reclining chair hooked up to an IV drip as the ketamine triggered hallucinations and other dissociative experiences to help cure mood and anxiety disorders. The claim that ketamine is nonaddictive has never been supported by any medical research, even though some doctors have made such bold statements. In a 2017 Los Angeles Magazine story about the rise of ketamine clinics in the city, Dr. Steven Mandel stated outright that the drug is nonaddictive, “insisting there’s no danger of tolerance or addiction.” But abuse of the drug is possible. Ketamine made the crossover from an anesthetic to Special K—the club drug version that can be snorted as a powder instead of being injected. “Recreational users claim that a snort of the stuff (some prefer injection) can make a Daft Punk concert transcendent,” read the Los Angeles Magazine story.

But snorting the drug in an unsupervised setting is not the same as having a professional administer it with an IV drip. Far from the supervised clinics in California, Tony, Tyler, and their ketamine-espousing friend bent over to snort the white powder as the festival swirled around them. Tyler didn’t think much of the drug; it made him feel a little loopy, like he was drunk, but that was the extent of it. And he thought Tony had a similar experience. They said goodbye to Shelby and moved on through the playa. Unbeknownst to Tyler, a seed had been planted in Tony’s head. In recent months, Tony had come to see that his years of alcohol consumption were finally catching up to him, and he had been looking for a healthier alternative. Could ketamine be the answer? Like most ideas that he gravitated toward, its tentacles started to wrap around his mind.

About a month later in Las Vegas, the annual Life Is Beautiful festival roared ahead. By now, it had grown to a massive event as part of the international festival circuit, drawing close to two hundred thousand attendees over the course of a three-day weekend. With mind-boggling neon lights and fireworks lighting the downtown Vegas skyline, Tony’s vision had again come to fruition: a weekend that his closest friends could come together and enjoy. That year, Tony was most excited to see Billie Eilish, the eighteen-year-old phenom with a propensity to be unapologetically herself. “Tony loved Billie,” said Michelle, who attended the festival with her daughter and watched Eilish with Tony. “He just thought she was the coolest.” As the weekend wore on, Tony told Michelle that he had been attending drug-assisted therapies with one of his other girlfriends. He had done a lot of research on psychotherapy, he said, particularly therapies that involve MDMA and psilocybin (the clinical name for the active substance in hallucinogenic mushrooms). Recently psilocybin, in particular, had been getting attention in biotech circles as a legitimate form of treatment for mood and anxiety disorders, but it had yet to pass the clinical trials required to receive approval from the FDA. Like ketamine, a contingent of alternative psychotherapists were using these drugs in an off-label manner.

Tony insisted to Michelle that the sessions were mostly for his girlfriend and not for him. But the therapist had been working on Tony, too. Michelle asked him what they had learned. “She said there’s nothing wrong with me,” Tony replied. “Apparently I have it all figured out.” She laughed. Any therapist who tells a patient, especially one like Tony, that he had it all figured out should have her license revoked, Michelle thought. “No, for real,” Tony said. “She thinks that the way I think and everything I’m doing is good.” And Tony claimed the therapist had said he could not get addicted to drugs because he did not have an addictive personality. Michelle was hearing a newfound arrogance in Tony’s tone. In the years she’d known Tony, her favorite memory of him was when he walked around her in circles at the elevator bank in the Ogden, too nervous to talk. His humility back then had been surprising and endearing. But this new version of Tony that spoke as if he was invincible—she had very little idea where he came from or who he was.

A few weeks later, in November, Tony, Tyler, and a few others attended the Summit conference in downtown Los Angeles. It was a four-day gathering of Silicon Valley elite, and Tony had been a regular attendee over the years. The event included talks from Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell. But of all the technorati in attendance, Tony had only one person he wanted to rendezvous with: Shelby, the woman from Burning Man. He told Tyler he wanted to meet up with her to try ketamine again. Just as he had researched the science of happiness, how to build a city, and even the art of comedy, Tony had been researching ketamine. He had read several books on the drug, including The Little Book of Ketamine, which he later started passing out to his friends. The book doesn’t rubberstamp the drug, but it doesn’t indict it either. While researching the drug, Tony read that when under the drug’s influence, people can have spiritual and insightful revelations that can provide relief for physical and emotional

pain. The most common reason patients want to explore ketamine therapy is to treat depression, but Tony never told his confidants he felt depressed. He framed it more in a spirit of exploration. And so they met with Shelby again. Over the course of the four-day event, Tony was continuously on ketamine, throughout the day and night. He told those around him that it was triggering his brain in a way that he had never experienced before. Tyler was right alongside him. He was doing less than Tony—not unusual, given Tony’s higher tolerance for substances than most people— but Tyler had also gotten feedback from his wife: “I don’t like you on that drug. You’re not the same person for three days after you do it.” Tyler also started to notice behaviors in Tony he hadn’t seen before. Tony was usually very discreet about his drug use. Discretion was core to Tony’s way of living and allowed him to balance the contradictory circles of his life, from corporate boardrooms to festival revelry. But at Summit he was very open about his ketamine use, trying to convince others to do it with him, including the girlfriend he had gone to therapy with. She said no, and later became so concerned about his usage that she ended her relationship with him. Like Michelle, Tyler also started noticing Tony’s newfound arrogance. “I respond to things differently,” Tyler heard him say at one point during Summit. “I’m a super genius, and I have complete control. I can do things that others can’t. I can download tae kwon do and instantly be a master of it.” Tyler realized that Tony was reciting lines and scenarios from The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves’s character Neo discovers he is living in a simulation and vows to break out of it. There’s a famous scene in the film where he “downloads” tae kwon do and kung fu, as if a person could download skills like they would an app on their iPhone. Immediately after the download, Neo becomes a trained fighter. Tyler was unsure what to make of all this. But after giving it a little thought, he brushed Tony’s bizarre claims aside. He probably just needs to sober up and get some rest, Tyler thought. After the conference, Tony immediately wanted more of the drug, and it didn’t take long for him to reunite with it again. Around Thanksgiving, Tony toured down the California coast for a series of events and gatherings. It started at Belcampo, a thirty-thousand-acre regenerative and organic farm

at the base of Mount Shasta. He came as a guest of the supply chain director, who had heard about Tony’s love for Belcampo’s famous bone broth. After the farm, he went to Oakland to attend the Soiled Dove, a circus-themed dinner event, as a guest of actor David Arquette. Finally, the trip concluded in South Lake Tahoe for an immersive art event at the MontBleu Hotel. Tyler joined him with Michelle, who had been hired by Tony a few months prior to manage his social media accounts. Shelby was there too. Only on this trip did Michelle learn that Tony was doing ketamine. She was also told by Tony, Tyler, and Shelby that it was nonaddictive, it was being used in psychotherapy, and it opened up the mind in revolutionary and creative ways. Michelle decided to try it, but she didn’t do much, and she finished the trip thinking little of the drug. A few days later in December, Michelle was in Vegas at the opening of Fergusons, a formerly run-down motel in downtown Vegas that Tony had spent $15 million to convert into a trendy town square. Behind the property, he had built a new and improved Airstream Park, in which he was now living. A series of events had been organized to celebrate the opening of another linchpin of Tony’s grand plan for downtown Vegas. His parents, Richard and Judy, had come to support the event. During one performance at the theater room in Zappos headquarters, Michelle took a photograph of Tony as he smiled at the performers onstage. “This was probably the last time I saw him okay, like in a good space,” Michelle later said. “Happy and healthy.”

CHAPTER 20

WINTER CAMP

The temperature often hovers above freezing on Las Vegas nights between December and January. The flow of conferences and festivals has typically dissipated by then, and people spend more time making plans to see family than arranging business trips. With the downtime surrounding Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Tony had built a weeks-long tradition for his community every year: Winter Camp. A stream of family-friendly events revolving around Airstream Park, from potsticker-wrapping parties to poetry slams, would keep his circle of friends coming back to his home. Every night, a movie played on the big outdoor screen. It was usually a wholesome time among the Airstream trailers, and now that they had just moved into their new location behind Fergusons, this year was supposed to be special. But Tony was not himself. His behavior had become so outside the norm that those living with him grew increasingly concerned about it. Tony started telling people that he and Tyler had discovered a new drug called ketamine, prompting many of them to confront Tyler. Why is Tony so into ketamine? they would ask. Why are you encouraging this heavy use of it? Tony had secured a large batch of ketamine and was snorting it daily, pressuring those around him to take the drug so they could all be on the same “flow.” He invited psychotherapists from a ketamine clinic in Los Angeles to give a talk about the positive effects of the drug. But when they arrived, they only encouraged using the drug in a controlled setting under supervision. In his Airstream trailer, he had a chart that tracked how often he was using the drug, and how much his friends were using it, including Tyler.

Tyler had initially been unperturbed by Tony’s ketamine use. But faced with questions and accusations, he started visiting Winter Camp more often to check on Tony. What he witnessed made him realize that something bigger was going on: Tony’s world and legacy were now at stake. Typically, Tony was quiet and reserved. He was often the last to talk and when he did, he was a man of few words. But now he was acting in a manic manner, appearing shirtless and shoeless in the frigid air, pacing around the trailers and tiny homes and ranting about new, strange ideas. He wanted to start a new religion. He claimed he could morph his body into a gazelle and become one with nature and terrain. He was working toward unlocking the escape combination to the universe. If he could break out of this simulation controlled by artificial intelligence, he said to friends, he could become the new controller of the universe and heal everyone from all physical and mental maladies. He started offering everyone massages and would randomly start stretching while walking around Airstream Park. There were moments when his personality went from calm to manic to calm again, as if he were switching it on and off at will. When people asked Tony why he was acting so strangely, he told them it was Method acting. He also started treating his friends in a way that was alarming and almost cruel. He gave friends “strikes”—like a parental warning issued to a misbehaving child—for interrupting him. He continued to pressure them to do ketamine with him, even when they made it clear that they did not want to. He started putting people on time-out. When his friends told him they were concerned, he offered them half of his net worth if they would sign a pact to never question him. Tyler started to track Tony’s sleep patterns on his Apple Watch—a feature that Tony shared with his close friends—and saw that he was barely sleeping. He also noticed his weight dropping. Tyler made steaks for him, a food that he knew Tony loved, but now they went uneaten. Tyler was still getting pressured by Tony to do ketamine with him. He would oblige, but he was increasingly worried for his mentor. He wondered if Tony was in a drug-induced psychosis. Tyler started doing his own research, and came across a study in the Shanghai Archive of Psychiatry suggesting that about 60 percent of drug-induced psychosis cases can be resolved within a month if the person completely stops taking that drug, 30

percent of cases may persist for one to six months, and about 10 percent can persist for more than six months after drug use ends. As the reality of the situation began to sink in, Tyler, after some cajoling, got Tony to agree to a pact: they would no longer use ketamine when Winter Camp was over at the end of January.

Despite a growing number of concerned friends watching Tony’s behavior become more bizarre by the day, those around him still didn’t do much to intervene. After all, he was the Tony Hsieh. Surely he could handle himself. For instance, no one seemed too concerned when Tony proposed taking a trip to Maui with a few friends and a baby, to test whether polygamy-style parenting was possible. He had been discussing the concept with close friends for years. “I liked the concepts of the tribes who raised all their children as their own, regardless of whose kids,” he once wrote in an email to a friend. “It exists to a smaller extent at Airstream park and I’m pretty confident if you researched you’d find it exists to a greater extent in the US.” The baby boy was Eva’s, his ex-girlfriend who was still living at Airstream Park, and Tony was his godfather. Three other friends, including a recent entrant named Don Calder, who oversaw operations of a Burning Man sculpture park in a California ghost town called Nipton, and Jillian Tedrow, a former bartender at Bunkhouse Saloon, came along. Neither Eva nor the baby’s father attended. But some people who had known Tony for a long time felt the change in him more acutely. One night at Fergusons, Mark Guadagnoli, the university professor and former Zappos executive, arrived with his two teenage kids to have dinner with Tony and Michelle. In years past, Mark and Tony would embrace, make note of the fact they missed each other, and then enjoy themselves. But Mark had noticed that this Tony had less time to sit and be present. Tony spoke to Mark and his kids only briefly before disappearing to talk to others. Later, Mark realized that he had been watching his friend spin away like a golf ball. “If you put a little bit of right spin on the ball, it’s gonna go straight for a while,” he said later. Not until the last moment does the ball lurch away from its straight path.

Justin Weniger had also been having a hard time getting in contact with Tony. After what seemed a successful Life Is Beautiful, the festival had again lost money, despite its massive turnout. It was also the last festival Ryan Doherty would be involved with after he and Justin had split their business earlier in the year; Justin had sold his stake in Corner Bar Management, the entity that oversaw their growing portfolio of bars on Fremont Street, in exchange for Ryan’s stake in Life Is Beautiful. In other words, Justin bet the farm on the festival. On Tony’s birthday in December, Justin sent him a message wishing him well. He didn’t hear back. He did, however, have a meeting scheduled with Millie Chou, the Downtown Project’s lawyer. After he arrived at her office, she told Justin he was being removed as CEO, and the festival’s director of finance, a man named David Oehm, was replacing him. When Tony did respond days later, he said he had been busy digging himself out of emails and other matters and hadn’t had a clue about Justin being removed as CEO. Later that week, Tony agreed to take a break from a poker tournament at Fergusons to meet with Justin. “Either you knew it and you’re a liar,” Justin told him, “or you don’t know it, and you’re stupid. And I know you’re not stupid.” Tony looked up at him with a tear in his eye and said something Justin hadn’t heard from him before: “I’m sorry.” Two weeks later, Justin met with him at the El Cortez, and found Tony preoccupied by something. Sitting in the bar chain-smoking cigarettes, Tony told him that he was planning a surprise for Ryan Doherty in a few days: “So check this out. I want to turn the laundry room at Fergusons into a spoof of the Laundry Room at Commonwealth.” Justin watched as Tony spoke with animation about how he wanted to show his appreciation to Ryan for creating experiences for people with his bars. He was going to blindfold Ryan, give him a vacuum-sealed frozen salmon, pick him up in a roadster from Commonwealth, and then drive him to Fergusons, where a party would be held in the laundry room, complete with chandeliers and furniture like those in the actual Laundry Room bar. That was my bar and my business six months ago, and I gave it away to do Life Is Beautiful with you, Justin thought. Now you’re rubbing my nose in it.

Later, Justin went to the party and watched as Ryan took off his blindfold and put down the fish. Looking bewildered, Ryan walked around before wandering over to Justin. “What the fuck is going on?” he said.

Ryan’s party was one of several events where Tony raised eyebrows. In January 2020, Michelle came to Vegas to help run social media at the Zappos holiday party. Though Michelle had been largely kept out of the loop regarding Tony’s behavior at Winter Camp, she noticed he was unusually elated to see her. Throughout the weekend she woke up every morning to a series of text messages that Tony had sent at odd hours of the night, and she realized he wasn’t sleeping. Seeing Tony, it made her think of one of her family members who is bipolar. “There’s no other way to put it,” she said later. “I’ve seen manic behavior.” Knowing how drugs and a lack of sleep could take a mental toll on her relative, she decided to raise her concerns to Tony in his trailer at Airstream Park. “I’m worried about you,” Michelle said. “Will you just get some sleep?” “I’m totally fine,” he said. “I will sleep tomorrow.” They went around in circles, talking for an hour. Eventually Michelle started to cry—she could not understand why he refused to sleep. He stared back at her with a blank face and left the trailer. The next day, Michelle texted Tony to see if he was up. Yes, he wrote back, he had just woken up. Michelle, feeling a sense of relief that he had finally slept, walked over to his trailer to have one more chat before she flew back home to Milwaukee. When she got there, Tony led her to the back of the trailer. They sat on his bed facing the front of the trailer, and he showed her a wall of Post-it notes by the bed. The notes were arranged in a scale, and they were numbered from +3 to -3. Below each number were names of family members and friends. “You were a plus two until last night,” Tony said to her. “Now you’re a negative one point five.” Michelle stared at the wall. She noticed that his parents, Richard and Judy, were on the negative scale.

“You were behaving like my parents,” he said to her. “You were trying to control me. You were judging me, and I don’t want to be judged.” “Okay,” she said. She bit her lip to keep the tears from rolling down her face, and walked out of the trailer.

Eventually, word of Tony’s behavior reached Zappos’s top brass. Tyler, now a leader at Zappos who served as a direct conduit to Tony, found himself getting pulled into daily meetings with Zappos leadership. Executives like chief operating officer Kedar Deshpande, chief people officer Hollie Delaney, senior director of culture Christa Foley, and head of internal operations John Bunch were asking for daily updates on Tony’s mental and physical state. But despite the alarming reports, they were unwilling to give up on Tony. He was more than just the CEO of Zappos—he was Zappos. Further, Kedar, who was effectively second-in-command, had only recently been promoted to the C-suite and was excited about the prospect of working with and learning from Tony. So the leadership team at Zappos agreed not to alert Amazon to their CEO’s current troubles. For decades, Tony had been the fearless leader of Zappos and the Downtown Project. Though he had gotten himself into tough spots before, he had always somehow conquered them. Why was this time any different? Plus, Tony was still making efforts to keep up appearances. News of a novel and highly infectious virus called COVID-19 had emerged on the other side of the world, threatening to upend the world. Having first appeared in China, it was now showing up in Europe, and governments were being forced to shut down businesses, events, and their economies. Stay-at-home orders were introduced to limit human-to-human interaction. While it was only a matter of time before the virus arrived in the United States, Tony was still sticking to his social events calendar and in the last week of January he had gone to Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival. But at the start of February, Tony’s behavior reached a critical point. He had been asked to officiate the local wedding of a couple who owned a beloved Thai restaurant downtown. While the bride wore a white qipao (a

traditional, formfitting Chinese dress) and the groom wore a suit with a black tie, Tony showed up to the ceremony in a bright orange long-sleeved shirt. Holding a stretching stick covered in Post-it notes as he led the couple through their vows, Tony seemed high, and spoke in a slow and robotic drawl, drawing laughter from many of the wedding guests. Later, some people turned around to see Tony leading a yoga class during the reception. What seemed funny to the crowd, and which might have been dismissed as “Tony being Tony” in years prior, was yet another alarm bell to his friends who had witnessed him unraveling over the last two months. Almost a dozen people at the wedding called and texted Tyler, who wasn’t there, describing Tony’s behavior. By this point, Tyler estimated that Tony was doing three to five grams of ketamine a day. Winter Camp was also over by now, and it was clear that Tony had broken the pact they’d made. That night, Tyler went to the trailer park and tried to talk to Tony about his behavior at the wedding. Tony told him that he had not been under the influence of ketamine and that he was simply engaging in Method acting. “Tyler, you’re starting to drain my energy,” Tony said to him. “You’re constantly coming at me.” After their conversation, Tony asked people who had been at the wedding to call Tyler and tell him that they hadn’t found his behavior concerning. By this point, Tyler had started talking to interventionists and researching rehabilitation facilities. He was working with a few others close to Tony, including Ryan Doherty and Mimi Pham, to try to get him to commit to getting help. Tyler also knew he was on thin ice. Tony was worried that his friends were talking about him behind his back—which they were—but he concluded that much of the impetus stemmed from Tyler, and he was becoming increasingly agitated by Tyler’s concern. Taking place beyond the confines of Airstream Park and Fergusons, the wedding had marked a tipping point. Tony’s drug use was now an open secret in downtown Las Vegas. And it wasn’t just concern for Tony’s wellbeing: he was the central nerve for Zappos, which employed fifteen hundred people and was owned by one of the largest corporations in the world. He was also financing all of the Downtown Project, a city within a city that could crumble if anything happened to him. Enough was enough. Tony needed to leave Las Vegas and either be immersed in a new environment, away from his access to drugs, or go to a

rehab facility. So the night after the wedding, Tyler and one of Tony’s former girlfriends entered Tony’s trailer and embarked on a heated negotiation with Tony to try to convince him to get out of town, maybe to a place that Tony loved like Park City, Utah. He attended the Sundance Film Festival there every year, he loved to ski, and it was tranquil, far from the sins and impulses of Vegas. He was also in the process of purchasing a house there. “Let’s take a group of friends,” Tyler pleaded, “and let’s just get out of here.” But after a marathon six hours, they were unable to get Tony to commit. At around four o’clock in the morning, Tyler decided to leave the trailer, sensing that Tony had no fight left in him. Tony remained a scarce presence and barely left his trailer over the next couple of days. Others at Fergusons talked about staging an intervention, but couldn’t seem to pin him down. Among them was Ryan Doherty, who arrived at Fergusons the following evening for a scheduled meeting with Tony. After Ryan waited among the Airstream trailers for hours, Tony never came out to greet him, and he eventually left. Though the next morning, Ryan returned, and this time walked into Tony’s trailer, shutting the door behind him. Several hours later, the two men emerged and left Fergusons bound for the airport.

CHAPTER 21

FLOW STATE

Tyler stood outside 255 Park Avenue in Utah’s Park City and looked up at the house before him through his thick-rimmed glasses. He’d been here many times before. It was right in the heart of Old Town on a street carved into the side of the mountain, as if floating above Park City’s saloons and restaurants. Tyler scanned the property—the gray ledger stones framing the wooden garage door, the olive-green weatherboards, its snow-covered roof, and the neighboring houses on either side, one painted in a rich cerulean and the other in farmhouse red. From Main Street, the house was just one of hundreds of vibrant and picturesque ski houses that dotted the mountainside, giving Park City its postcard charm. As he took in the crisp air, Tyler thought back to his last stay here, just a few weeks prior, recalling how he’d felt the last time he was inside this house. Tony usually rented 255 Park Avenue every year for the Sundance Film Festival, the ten-day affair in Park City at the end of January when Hollywood actors, directors, press, and other industry folk descend on the high-end ski town. Indie film premieres and heavy libations at corporatesponsored lounges were followed by star-studded afterparties. Beginning in the early 2010s, Silicon Valley became a regular presence at Sundance. Google would host concerts at TAO, a nightclub on Main Street, while Microsoft, still hoping for the success of its search engine, Bing, would take every opportunity to sponsor events and plug its search brand. As Hollywood continued its shift toward digital media, the growing technorati found more and more reasons to bill a trip to the artsy, glitzy event as a corporate outing.

The lodge on Park Avenue was a five-minute walk from the Sundance box office. In years past, Tony would host breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for his friends and guests inside the home. Mimi and Tyler often organized the gatherings, attended by other tech founders and a sprinkle of Hollywood stars. One Los Angeles–based music branding agent who introduced Tony to actor David Arquette and whose clients included hip-hop artists Mary J. Blige and Anderson .Paak said she always made it a point to see Tony at Sundance. “He would rent that home and curate different dinners and conversations,” she said. “He wanted to be around that kind of energy and creativity.” Despite Tony’s alarming behavior at Winter Camp, attending the film festival had offered what appeared to be a brief return to normalcy in Tony’s life just days before he officiated the wedding. That year for Sundance, Zappos partnered with a digital content company called HitRecord, which was co-founded by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the actor who would go on to play Uber founder Travis Kalanick in a Showtime special called Super Pumped, based on the book of the same name by New York Times journalist Mike Isaac. Together, they aired ten mini-documentaries at Sundance, each representing one of Zappos’s ten core values. Tony spent time with Joseph at the festival, as well as with singer Paula Abdul, whom he had met just a few weeks prior. Paula came to Sundance at Tony’s invitation and even stayed on a bunk bed in one of the rooms at Tony’s rented lodge. “A trip to Sundance and Zappos all in one week!?” Abdul tweeted. “So fun hanging out with these amazing people that have become my new friends!!” It might have seemed like any other year, but Tony did not stop doing ketamine for the film festival. Though many who kept company with him were unaware of his increasing habit, he made no effort to hide it in front of Tyler. One night, while the other guests were asleep at the house, Tyler agreed to stay up late with Tony and watch The Matrix. Under the drug’s influence, Tony insisted that the two of them do ketamine together and reenact scenes from the film between Morpheus and Neo. “I don’t want to,” Tyler replied. It was a phrase that Tyler had started saying more in recent weeks as Tony’s requests to do ketamine escalated. Sometimes Tyler would say yes, but as time wore on, he would say no more often than not. It was then

usually followed by Tyler telling his boss how he did not like the way Tony behaved on the drug and what his episodes were doing to the wider Airstream community. But Tony always knew exactly what to say to get Tyler to lay off. I only need to do it for a little longer to figure some things out, Tony would say, or I’m dealing with a lot emotionally, and this is the only thing that’s helping me. Tyler would look at his boss and relent. But at Sundance, the conversation went in a different direction. “I wish I had a Tyler coin,” Tony said one day, staring at Tyler sitting on the couch, “that I could just put into you, and you would do anything that I asked.” Tyler stared back. To think that this might have been Tony’s intention all along—that he had been investing all this time and energy into Tyler not because he wanted to mentor him but as a means to groom him into a blind follower—was disturbing. Tyler could barely believe this was the same Tony he had looked up to for so many years. In the weeks since Sundance, Tony’s unraveling had become a public conversation after the wedding in downtown Las Vegas. Inside Tony’s Airstream trailer, Ryan Doherty, who had previous experience helping friends with addiction issues, had gotten Tony to commit to finding help by convincing him that if he didn’t go to rehab on his own terms, he would lose control of his own narrative if Zappos—or even worse, Amazon— stepped in and forced him to. With Mimi’s assistance in making arrangements, he had boarded a private jet with Tony to take him to the facility near Park City. When speaking to friends, Tony had told them that rehab would be like beating a boss in a video game. Tyler didn’t know quite what to make of Tony’s comparison, but he still felt a tinge of hope. A week into his stay, Tony called Tyler and asked him to write a list of all the things that he had done in the last few months that seemed concerning. Tony then asked him to come to Park City and present it to him when he was out of rehab. “We can go over the list one by one,” Tony said over the phone. It was strange, Tyler thought, but in some ways it was a very Tony kind of ask. It seemed logical and methodical—much the way Tony had always approached and hacked through problems in the past. While Tyler remained optimistic, Tony stayed in rehab for not quite two weeks before checking himself out of the facility. It had not been enough time, Tyler thought, thinking about the Shanghai Mental Health Center

research about how long a person needs to be clean before coming out of a drug-induced psychosis. It simply did not seem like enough time. But it didn’t matter what Tyler thought; Tony was already out. A week after Tony’s rehab stint had ended, Tyler was now back in Park City, standing in front of 255 Park Avenue, nervously waiting for Tony. Tony emerged from the house, and they decided to walk to Pink Elephant, a discreet coffee shop on the second floor of a small black building on Main Street. As they walked past snow-covered porches and down the grated steel outdoor stairs that connected the residential streets to the bustling corridor of Old Town, Tyler stole glances at Tony. He seemed normal and calm enough, Tyler thought. Reaching Main Street, they took a quick left and walked inside a multiuse retail space, through a gold-painted door frame and past racks of trendy ski wear, past the buzzing sounds emanating from the clippers at Billy’s Barber Shop, then up a flight of stairs that brought them to the coffee bar. Tyler ordered a coffee, black, while Tony opted out of a drink. Once Tyler fetched his cup from the barista, the two settled around a small round table. The coffee shop was noisy and crowded, not uncomfortably, but just enough to mask the strange conversation that was about to unfold. “So what’s on your list?” Tony asked. Tyler pulled the letter out of his pocket and started reading it out loud. He never made eye contact with his mentor as he read. “You said you were becoming Neo from The Matrix,” Tyler started. “That you were transcending human consciousness. You said you were achieving Limitless, unlocking your full brain,” referring to the 2011 science fiction movie about a man who takes a drug called NZT-48 that exponentially enhances his intelligence and emotional quotients. The list continued: You said you could run a three-hour marathon without training. You said you could grow your height, so that you were seven foot tall. You said people are molecules. You said you could download skills, like in The Matrix. You offered a million dollars for somebody to wake you up. You were telling people, “I’m not mad at you. Because if I were mad at you, it would be like being mad at the dog.”

You said you didn’t have to pee anymore, that your body could recycle urine. You said you could manifest things like create water from a spigot. You said you could solve and cure COVID. You could solve world peace. You were interpretative dancing. You were pretending like you were inside movies. You started talking like a robot, and started speaking in other made-up languages. You barely slept. You forgot things and had no memory. Reckless, fearless, open drug use, giving everybody a book about ketamine and talking openly about it. Not enjoying the things you normally like. The wedding, going from normal to manic. Putting people on time-out for lowering your energy flow. Your physical appearance. Weight loss, bruising on your body. Hollow eyes. Pulled muscles, you were clearly in pain. Blank looks. Stares. No energy. Tyler slowly looked up. Tony was staring straight at him, giving little away. After a moment of silence, Tony spoke. “I need to stack all of that as the combination,” Tony said, his gaze never leaving Tyler’s. “It’s all the key to exiting into the next dimension.” Tyler stared back, the same way he had when Tony brought up the idea of a Tyler coin. As he processed what Tony just said, days out of rehab, he came to one simple conclusion: Tony is still not okay.

Tyler came and went from Park City over the next few weeks, joining a revolving door of friends and family arriving in town to check on Tony. His family—Richard, Judy, Andy, and Dave—were among the first to arrive, and they stayed at a nearby lodge. Tyler, it turned out, was one in a small circle of people who knew Tony had been in rehab. During his time in

rehab, Tony was able to use his phone, and he had been sending messages to others, urging them to join him in Park City and stay with him at the rented house in the days after his release. Justin had been flying home from a work trip to Bermuda when he received a text from Tony asking him to come to Park City. Despite Justin’s demotion from Life Is Beautiful, he’d heard about Tony’s stay in rehab, and decided to go and see him. Suzie Baleson, who had attended events and parties as Tony’s plus-one for years and had run into Tony at Sundance just a few weeks before, also accepted an invitation from Tony to join him in Park City. Zappos executives and a younger crowd of friends also got the call-up. Ryan Doherty, however, was not welcome: Tony believed Ryan had duped him into going to rehab under false pretenses, and deemed him persona non grata. Tony indicated that he intended to stay in the town for the foreseeable months, a decision cemented by his purchase of a new ski lodge at 1422 Empire Avenue, a chalet sunk into a sloping neighborhood a half mile from Main Street. He’d first inquired about the property when he’d been in town for Sundance, and after a month of negotiating, he took over the building. Across the street from a parking lot at the bottom of Park City mountain, where skiers and snowboarders trudged awkwardly toward the chairlifts, the five-bedroom property was impressive. Hardwood beams as thick as trees emerged from cemented blocks of river rock, holding up the eaves that framed the front of the home. Thanks to two pines that stood on either side of the short driveway, and neighboring homes that looked like they were designed by the same architect, the property was barely noticeable to passersby. The unassuming exterior belied a grandiosity within. At the center of the house was a timber staircase that spiraled up three floors like a drill bit. Walls and ceilings had exposed framing, giving the feel of a wealthy man’s log cabin, and the hardwood floors were covered in immaculate rugs. In the mornings, Tony could wake up in the master bedroom to a vivid panorama of the famed mountain through two red-framed doors that opened onto a balcony hanging over the garage. He first invited Suzie and Justin to stay at the lodge with him, along with an assistant, Juliet. Justin had most of his wealth tied up in the Life Is Beautiful festival, and now, with all live events canceled for the foreseeable future, it was entirely unclear whether the festival would survive. The

cancellation of live events had also impacted a large chunk of Suzie’s prospective income. Her company, Wellth Collective, had been planning to organize events at SXSW—which was now canceled—and many of her clients were cutting back on marketing expenditures. Aside from seeing their friend, being in proximity to a man as wealthy as Tony would have been a comforting notion as they stared down the uncertainty of the pandemic. At first, they implemented a regimented program around Tony, reasoning that if he was in recovery, then his environment should revolve around health, wellness, and productivity. The space became a co-working and living area where Tony could receive his guests and work on sporadic projects. Suzie ordered workout equipment and a Peloton exercise bike to turn one room into a gym, while Justin started organizing hikes through the mountains. Over the coming months, however, those who entered Tony’s orbit found themselves in situations that prior to Tony going to rehab would have been considered “normal.” But now the shots of Fernet, hours-long trips on psychedelic mushrooms, and spending his money at his request on dinners, accommodations, real estate, and private jets all came across differently. He often seemed coherent during walks at dawn through the mountains and during dinners at the lodge. His obsession with devouring books also had not abated and on most mornings he and Justin would allocate an hour to reading followed by discussion. This would then lead to Tony writing his conclusions on Post-it notes and slapping them on walls around the house, creating a dizzying visual scene of his thoughts. But it was hard to ignore that his outlandish ideas, once seen as the musings of a contrarian thinker, could now be interpreted as symptoms of psychosis. Along with Tyler, several other members of the Zappos leadership had been making trips to Park City. Tony hadn’t been out of rehab for long, and his future at the company was increasingly unclear. Over barbecues and meetings in the lodge’s vast interior to discuss work matters, company leaders like Kedar Deshpande and John Bunch, the latter leading the rollout of Zappos’s market-based dynamics program, listened as Tony dictated new ways to run the company. It was difficult to ignore that Tony’s behaviors were a significant departure from his typical demeanor during discussions with leadership.

Normally he would sit quietly in a corner and type on his laptop, occasionally speaking up to offer a thought, or sometimes not speaking at all. Now he was commanding a room for thirty minutes at a time without letting others talk, and directing the Zappos leaders to execute wildly irrational ideas. For years, he had been fixated on the concept of flow states, a widely held belief in Silicon Valley and upper corporate circles that individuals can improve their output and well-being by striving to be “in the zone.” One text he frequently invoked was Stealing Fire, a bestselling book that outlined a road map for achieving a state of positive psychology. One of the authors, Steven Kotler, had previously written another bestselling book, The Rise of Superman, which studied the neuroscience behind the peak performance of action sports athletes. With Stealing Fire, he and co-author Jamie Wheal expanded that research to conclude that seemingly any discipline could achieve an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” After consulting and studying the methods of CEOs, Navy SEALs, and scientists, they argued that when this state is achieved, motivations like self-awareness and time fall away as mental and physical performance takes hold. It’s easy to imagine a jazz player reaching this state every time they pick up an instrument, for example, but harder to picture an academic being in the zone for weeks at a time to finish their dissertation. Its teachings didn’t veer too far from the Challenge Point Framework that Mark Guadagnoli had espoused all those years ago at the steakhouse in Henderson with Fred, Alfred, and Tony, describing how giving people a task of optimal difficulty can help them learn faster. While he talked about how he was trying to achieve his own flow state, Tony told the executives that the concept should be scaled up from individuals to the entire Zappos workforce. Under other circumstances the idea could have been seen as just another one of Tony’s edgy, if sometimes weird, ideas to manage his company. After all, these executives were working for a company that had a corporate culture unlike any other company of its scale, where employees had tripped on psychedelic drugs with the CEO at Burning Man, visited his home at his trailer park, and led wild parades through the company offices. To achieve company-wide flow state, Tony proposed, they should entirely do away with organizational calendars and instead introduce a new

way of managing schedules: if everyone was in the same flow state, they would just know where to be, and when to join meetings. More than once he said that if all the employees were in the same flow state, then he could show them his superpowers. As he pushed the patience of Zappos leaders, he developed an obsessive focus on testing the boundaries of his own mental and physical strength. Over the years at conferences, Tony had met Wim “the Ice Man” Hof, the Dutch athlete known for his ability to expose his body to conditions of extreme cold, and had been somewhat intrigued by his achievements. Hof first gained renown for swimming a record fifty-seven meters under an ice sheet, then went on to set numerous Guinness World Records for feats like running the fastest barefoot half-marathon across ice and spending the longest time in direct contact with ice (more than two hours). In an ultimate show of his ability, he once climbed 24,500 feet up Mount Everest wearing only shorts (he aborted the ultimate mission to the peak due to a foot injury). Using a combination of yoga, meditation, cold exposure, and breathing techniques, Hof had been able to defy what were commonly thought of as the limits of the human body. Dutch scientists had studied Hof’s practices and found that, in short, he had developed a heightened control of his body’s stress hormones. He had gained a following of people trying to emulate his practices and launched an eponymous patented regimen that employed his disciples to teach others how to test the limits of their bodies. As it turned out, one of these disciples worked in Utah, so Tony hired him to spend time at the lodge, training him and his friends on how to implement Hof’s methods into his own daily regimen. Tony started doing away with shoes on hikes through the surrounding mountains. One day, he, Justin, and Tyler sat next to one another in gigantic ice buckets on the rear deck after a lengthy meditation and breathing exercises. Tony and Justin would go on jogs through the town wearing only T-shirts, even as snow fell around them in below-freezing temperatures. Hof’s teachings planted a seed within Tony to study the much broader field of biohacking. The concept had become popular recently in Silicon Valley, where prominent tech leaders like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had begun to talk about their embrace of it. In addition to cold exposure therapy and enhanced breathing techniques, Dorsey had spoken about eating only

one meal a day and fasting completely on weekends as a way to improve his tolerance of stress and optimize other aspects of his health. Others had invoked biohacking as the logic behind various experiments aimed to increase longevity. Dave Asprey, the self-described “father of biohacking” who founded the Silicon Valley supplement startup Bulletproof Nutrition, underwent an operation where a doctor harvested stem cells from his bone marrow and then injected them back into his body in the hope that it would enable him to live to 180 years old. And in the far nether regions of biohacking are people who call themselves “grinders,” those who implant computer chips under their skin in experiments to wire the brain directly to a digital output. While such efforts sound radical to most people, they have become widely accepted, even adopted, as ways to further the realm of productivity and individual betterment within Silicon Valley, a place where its leaders consistently pioneer what was previously thought unimaginable. Living longer, for example, is something that Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel have each spent millions of dollars on researching. But as his fixation on biohacking and flow states deepened, Tony was venturing closer to a dark rabbit hole from which he might not escape. His friends in Park City tried to find comfort in reverting to their old habits, despite his changing behavior and ever-grander visions. Some clinked shots of Fernet with him. For some Zappos executives, the longstanding bizarre corporate culture seemed to be re-creating itself on a smaller scale in Park City. Brandon Hollis, Zappos’s chief legal counsel, was often around, either manning the barbecue or downing drinks with his boss. Tyler and Tony would embark on so-called hero’s journeys, where they would take a handful of hallucinogenic mushrooms and trip for half a day while remaining motionless—something they had done many times before. Despite Tyler’s concern for Tony, there were parts of their friendship that he appeared unable to let go of. By April, another element was added to Tony’s vortex of people: a crew of younger friends who were there to party and have fun.

At 3:22 p.m. on the last Saturday of May, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence watched from a viewing pad in Cape Canaveral,

Florida, as a rocketship lifted off, en route to space. Made by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturer, the flight was historic, marking the first privately owned spaceship to carry astronauts into space and heralding a new era in spaceflight. It also was the first time astronauts had eschewed NASA’s Airstream-built Astrovan to shuttle them to the launch pad since spaceflight began in 1961. Instead, they climbed into Musk-owned Tesla SUVs while listening to AC/DC. On a television screen within 1422 Empire Avenue in Park City, Tony was also watching as the rocket passed through the stratosphere. Tony had often talked about Elon Musk. Elon’s pronouncements about a multiverse and the concept that we are all living in a simulation were things that Tony believed in, and for that reason he saw Elon as an equal. Tony had long harbored Elon’s belief, shared by many people who build artificial intelligence technology, that humans exist in multiple dimensions and our current experience is no more than a simulation. Just as with religion, only faith binds its believers, but the notion has recently taken on new dimensions, so to speak, with Facebook’s introduction of a “metaverse,” where one can interact with others in a virtual world. Tony believed Elon Musk was a person of a caliber shared by Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, a group that he saw himself as a part of. Surrounding him in the lodge were Zappos employees who he deemed had failed to execute on ideas, like implementing a company-wide flow. Not only were they not doing as he demanded; they were becoming a frequent presence in his home. He’d been especially incensed by the presence in his house of Brandon Hollis, who in his role as general counsel of Zappos had been reporting back to executives what he’d been seeing. Brandon had also relaxed into the comfort of Tony’s home and had been staying there without asking Tony if he minded. (Brandon later disputed this, stating that Tony “expressly” invited him and provided “continued permission” for him to stay at 1422 Empire.) At one point a guest of his came to stay for several weeks, and then another guest Brandon had invited came to stay. As Tony stared at the television screen, a tap was dripping in his mind. Then the faucet broke. “I’ve been doing it all wrong,” he said, standing up in the middle of the room. He picked up his laptop, sat at a nearby table, and began bashing the keyboard. It looked as if he was hardwired into the computer itself.

For as long as he could remember, he’d been trying to empower others. What he really needed to do, he told those in the room, was to operate at his own full mental capacity. Just as Elon was sending astronauts into space, Tony’s intellect and drive could come up with a cure for COVID-19. He would usher in world peace. No goal would be too grand. All he needed was to reach the flow state. “We have to go faster,” he said, not looking away from the screen. He paused momentarily to scribble messages on Post-it notes, which he stuck on the wall. The words “flow state” appeared among arrows and other markings. Those standing around him exchanged glances. Tony wanted people who could execute his vision, whatever that may be. “I need the message to get out to people that I’m willing to pay top dollar.”

There was a lot happening when Tyler walked into the house that afternoon. He could see that a new array of Post-it notes now covered the wall behind where Tony was sitting, and people were quietly muttering to one another. One person said something about Tony having a revelation. Taking in the scene of the living room, Brandon approached Tyler with a baffled look on his face. Brandon told him that Tony had set him and another person an objective: to get everyone in the same flow state. If they could achieve the task, then he would pay him $100,000. Brandon acquiesced to Tony’s insistence, though he told Tyler he had at least negotiated the figure down to $10,000. Tyler suggested they rent a pontoon boat at Deer Creek Reservoir, about twenty miles south of Park City. If everyone was chatting, eating, drinking, and swimming together, Tyler reasoned, then perhaps Tony would see that everyone was in a synchronized flow state. A short time later, the two Zappos executives and Tony joined half a dozen others, including Suzie and Justin, in a black Sprinter van parked in front of Tony’s chalet. One of Tony’s on-again off-again girlfriends, Ali Bevilacqua, was there, too. With Tyler behind the wheel as the Sprinter wound its way south, everyone seemed excited for the day ahead. Tony had a serene look on his face.

As the only person in the group who knew how to drive a boat, Tyler volunteered to be captain for the day. The passengers were giddy as the boat, stocked with drinks, food, and blankets, put-putted away from the shore. Almost as soon as the land began to recede behind them, the calm was interrupted by a disturbing storm in the form of Tony. As the sun crested high above the lake, Tyler looked over from the boat’s controls to see something change in Tony’s demeanor, as if a switch had been flicked. Tony had a Sharpie in his hand and was scribbling what appeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphs on his arms and torso. Others turned their heads to steal a glance at him before averting their eyes. The more furiously he dragged the marker over his body, the more he began muttering to himself. He flinched and tightened his jaw, and some heard him spitting the words “flow state.” He stood up and stalked to the rear of the boat, where he sat in the shade of the upper deck. As the boat idled in the middle of the lake, Tony’s flinching became more violent. Someone jumped into the lake, making a splash. “You are interrupting my flow state,” Tony yelled. “I need to be in a flow state.” He lurched up, snatched a blanket, and climbed up to the upper deck. Everyone watched in silence as he curled up in a fetal position and pulled the blanket over him. His mumbling continued, sometimes breaking out into incoherent shouts. The words “flow state” kept coming. Tyler steered the pontoon boat back to shore. The fun was over. Everyone was mostly silent on the journey home, and once they reached the chalet, a quiet fell over the house. Ali was sobbing to herself. Others looked ashen-faced. Tony, they believed, seemed to have found more ketamine. Tyler trudged up the winding staircase to Tony’s bedroom. Until they’d set out on the boat that afternoon, Tyler had been hopeful Tony might be changing for the better. Now it was clear that Tony had found his kryptonite, and Tyler’s hope was replaced with dread. As he reached the top of the stairs, he looked up to see Tony standing in the doorway. Before Tyler could say anything, Tony said, “Hey, I just want you to know. I was acting.” Tyler stared back at him.

“I had tasked Brandon to get everyone in flow, and I was trying to be a hindrance,” Tony said. Tyler looked back at him with quiet disappointment. Tony sensed it. “Can you tell everybody in the house that that’s what I was doing?” Tony said. Before Tyler turned to go back downstairs, Tony said something that made Tyler feel defeated. “If you don’t question me again,” Tony said, “I’ll give you half my net worth.”

CHAPTER 22

THE GORDIAN KNOT

“Let’s go for a walk,” Tony said. “I’ve got a surprise.” It was a morning in early June in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Justin was standing in the living room of the lodge. Tony’s episode on the boat had made clear to the group that he was far from okay. Justin, Tyler, and others had concluded that Tony may have acquired more ketamine during a visit from Anthony in the days before they went out on the lake, and they had each taken turns demanding that Anthony not provide Tony with drugs. While Tyler had left for Vegas to put some space between him and Tony, Justin had reached an agreement with Tony and scrawled the terms of a new “contract” on a piece of paper, stipulating that Tony would not do any chemical drugs for thirty days—specifically ketamine—and that if he planned to do mushrooms, he would have to notify Justin ahead of time. The penalty would be a loss of friendship, and Tony would need to donate to a charity. Justin walked out the front door, following Tony as he took a left, heading south down Empire Avenue. “Pop quiz,” Tony said, turning to him. “Do you remember the year Zappos was founded?” They took another left down a side street, and Justin thought for a moment. There was a woman who worked behind the front desk in the lobby of Zappos’s Las Vegas headquarters who was a huge Prince fan. Under the company’s market-based dynamics program, which encouraged employees to start their own ventures within the company, she had launched her own bar in the lobby called the 1999 Bar—in honor both of Prince’s famous song and of the year that Zappos was founded.

They took another left down a street that ran parallel to Empire Avenue. “It was 1999,” Justin replied. They walked for another minute, and then Tony stopped in front of a towering three-story house clad with navy and brown timbers, built on a river-rock foundation. It looked more suited for a corporate retreat than a weekend getaway with friends. Justin figured you could throw a stone over the property’s back fence and hit the lodge they had just walked from. “Go type it into that door right there,” Tony said, pointing to a keypad on the front door. Bewildered, Justin walked over to the door and pressed in the code. The door clicked open. “Well,” Tony said, gesturing, “let’s go in, then.” Tony had grown tired of the constant stream of people coming and going from his lodge at 1422 Empire, so he’d decided to rent this mansion around the block as a way to reclaim his privacy. His thinking, he told Justin, was that he could get people like Brandon Hollis out of his home, while employing other friends, like Jillian, who’d managed one of his nowshuttered Las Vegas bars, to run the property. It also fit in with his plans to create a new community in Park City. Artists, entrepreneurs, and others could come to see him and pitch him on ideas of how they were going to build something, just as previous entrepreneurs and guests had done while staying at Tony’s apartments in the Ogden. Complete with a Jacuzzi, indoor gym, billiards room, elevator, and sauna, the ten-bedroom, ten-bathroom mansion was listed on rental websites like Expedia and Vrbo as the “Epic Lodge.” Tony had struck an agreement with the owner to lease the property on a month-to-month basis, with an option to perhaps buy it. “I want you to make this the Life Is Beautiful house,” Tony said, walking through the home. He had been coming up with all sorts of ideas for Life Is Beautiful since the pandemic had canceled the festival. Justin’s proximity to Tony also meant that his role remained central to Life Is Beautiful, and Tony had been discussing some ideas with him for how he could lead it forward. A few weeks before, they had hiked up Park City mountain and reached the backside of the slope, where Tony had first spotted what he believed was a natural amphitheater in the mountainside. Turning to Justin, Tony had

proposed they launch a COVID-friendly festival, where everyone could socially distance outside. Tony would give Justin $100 million to pull it off. Justin had ignored the proposal, and he was now shooting down this idea. Most of the festival’s employees had been furloughed; immediately occupying a multimillion-dollar house named after the festival would make for terrible optics. After some wrangling, Tony proposed the property be called the “Welcome House,” and that it would serve as base camp for the dozens of people that Tony was inviting into town to help him create his new community. The contradiction between Tony’s need for privacy and his instinct to invite anyone who’d come and stay on his dime wasn’t lost on Justin. But, Justin figured, if Tony could make it thirty days without another drug-induced psychotic break and was surrounded by people looking to innovate, then perhaps they could build from there.

On the morning of June 27, Steve Maroney, a man who went by his nickname Steve-O, and who had been a driver for Tony for years, steered his coach into Park City. Along with Tyler and a half dozen others, including Ava Zech, the daughter of a Zappos executive whom Tony had dedicated his memoir to when she was just eleven years old, Steve-O had driven overnight from Vegas, and was stopping in Utah to pick up Tony and Justin before heading north to Montana for the annual July 4 trip. In years past, the Montana trip was one of the highlights of the year. The group would stay at a lodge on the eastern bank of Flathead Lake, facing the Blacktail Mountains. Aside from daily barbecues and hikes, the group would typically work remotely during the day and Tony would feverishly respond to emails. Then, when the clock struck 5 p.m., happy hour would commence, and the libations would come out. This year was different from others, however. Not only because of pandemic-imposed hurdles, but because it was unclear whether Tony would slip again. The jury was still out on whether Tony was making his way back to reality. He’d spent the past few weeks focused on business ideas and had shown some determination to get back on track. He’d stuck to his

commitment to Justin and appeared to have stayed away from drugs. He was still devouring books, and he had resolved his privacy issue: Brandon Hollis and others had now settled into bedrooms in the Welcome House. Word had also spread far and wide that Tony was looking to do deals and was spending his money again, like in the early days of the Downtown Project in Las Vegas. More people arrived in town at his invitation, as well as on his promises of vast sums of money and a mandate only to build something. Tony had been leading the ever-growing group hiking through Park City’s mountains each morning. To manage the influx of guests arriving at the Welcome House, Suzie struck an agreement with Tony to use her company, Wellth Collective, to manage the operations of the house— organizing transportation, events, and accommodations—for a fee. People from all eras of Tony’s life were arriving by the busload with business ideas. One new arrival was asked to build a 3D printing lab at the Welcome House. Another group of people pitched an idea for cashing in on the COVID-19-driven boom in demand for personal protective equipment. One apparent deal had consumed him: a virtual reality company that had agreements with commercial landlords to set up demonstrations in malls. While the pandemic had forced malls across the country to close, putting the virtual reality company at risk of bankruptcy, something obscure got Tony’s attention. As he described it to Justin, the company had exclusive rights to stream Disney-owned content in live settings—a clause that Tony proclaimed would return a billion-dollar payoff once people returned to malls. He was determined to raise funding for the company and save it, but a deadline to invest was looming in the week before July 4, and so he asked Justin to help him close it. In Tony’s mind, he was the one who could identify million-dollar ideas that could become billion-dollar companies, and he was going to pay whatever people asked. Despite cautious optimism about Tony’s condition, Tyler had been somewhat reticent about reentering Tony’s Park City orbit. Since he’d been back in Vegas, he had been receiving calls from several people who had seen Tony in Park City. Tony had been talking maniacally at points, they told Tyler, returning to his goals of ensuring world peace and curing COVID-19. Tony had conducted some meetings while in his underwear. Other times he talked about how he had psychic abilities and had learned how to levitate.

After stepping off the bus, Tyler walked into the Welcome House for the first time and saw faces he didn’t know. His concerns were confirmed when he learned about one woman staying at the Welcome House. She was a Zappos employee who worked in the tech department and had arrived in town at Tony’s invitation. After meeting Tony for the first time, he had offered to give her $10 million to start a new business with undefined goals. She barely knew him, and had expressed her discomfort to a friend when Tony had asked her if she would join him on the July 4 trip to Montana as a plus-one. Tyler found Tony and interrupted a one-on-one meeting he was having. Tony was visibly enraged, but Tyler calmly said the Zappos employee wouldn’t be joining them in Park City, nor did she want to accept his multimillion-dollar offer.

The Montana trip seemed destined to be a failure before it even started. For one, there seemed to be something off with Tony. As the group prepared to leave Park City, he had walked onto the bus wearing nothing but pajama pants and holding only a box of crayons. As the bus wound out of Park City, he emerged from his bedroom at the rear of the bus and called for everyone’s attention. There would be a change of plans: he and Justin would spend only twelve hours in Montana, using each hour to complete an activity they would typically do during the week-long trip. One hour for jumping in the lake. One hour to do the mouse race. One hour at Burger Shack, and so on. Then he and Justin would take the bus back to Park City that night and work on the virtual reality deal for the rest of the week. The bus was quiet for a moment, and then Ava spoke up. “That’s a bummer,” she said. “We don’t go to Montana just to go to Montana. We go to Montana because that’s the time that we get to spend with you when you’re not working.” Tony’s expression flickered, and his eyes drifted around the cabin coldly. “Well, I’m paying for everyone to be here. You should all be more grateful.” He looked at Ava’s boyfriend and noted aloud that he was on the trip, all expenses paid. His eyes then fell on Tyler. “Tyler, you never pay attention,” he said. Tyler sat in silence as Tony assigned him a percentage

rating for his supposed attention span. Tony then berated Tyler for having poor bus etiquette and leaving his shoes on the bunk. After hurling more insults, Tony retired to his bedroom. Justin followed him.

The bus was rolling through the Montana plains when an alarm woke Tyler soon after dawn. During his rant, Tony had told Tyler he would pay him $1 million to wake him up at 8 a.m., giving him enough time to prepare before their 10 a.m. arrival at the lodge. After climbing out of his bunk, Tyler walked to Tony’s bedroom and saw that the room was a mess, but Tony wasn’t there. In the bathroom, past Tony’s bed, Tyler could hear the shower running. He’s up already, Tyler figured. He knocked on the bathroom door, but no one responded. Tyler went to the front of the bus and chatted with Steve-O as the bus pushed north. Twenty minutes later, he went and knocked on the bathroom door again. Still no answer. This is a really long shower, thought Tyler. He knocked a half dozen times over the next hour and a half without response. It was almost ten o’clock when the bus reached the lodge and swung into the parking lot. Tyler went to check on Tony once more, but this time he saw water seeping from under the bathroom door. He knocked furiously and called out until he was jolted by a response. “Get Justin,” Tony screamed from behind the door. “Everyone else get the fuck off the bus.” Tyler sighed deeply. He walked to Justin’s bunk and shook him awake. “Good luck, man,” Tyler said. Once everyone had filed off the bus and headed to check into the lodge, Justin crouched outside the bathroom. The floor was wet. “What’s going on?” he said through the door. “Justin, is that you?” Tony replied. “Yeah.” “Are you alone?” “Yeah.” Justin could hear the shower still running. Before they’d gone to bed last night, he and Tony had chatted briefly in Tony’s bedroom. Tony had

even told a few jokes, and he was under the impression Tony had cooled off since railing against his guests. Justin looked around Tony’s bedroom. It was a mess. His eyes fell to the bed, where he saw a crumpled gold foil wrapper. He’d seen them before, back at the Empire Avenue house in Park City: they were used to store magic-mushroom-infused chocolates. Then he saw a second wrapper, and a third. He counted five in total. A single mushroom chocolate could typically induce a hallucinogenic trip for hours, even an entire day. Whatever Tony was experiencing now would be beyond what any mind could sustain. Justin walked back to the bathroom door, and was hit by the smell of shit. The shower had stopped running. “The water, I need the water, I need the water,” Tony yelled. The bus’s tank, it seemed, was empty. Justin stepped off the bus and tried to think. The gray water would begin backing up through the shower drain and flood the bus with sewage if they refilled the tank before draining the gray water tank first. And dumping the gray water in the lodge’s parking lot wasn’t an option. Back on the bus, Justin told Tony through the bathroom door that the shower would have to stay off. “You had one job,” Tony roared. “Are you bringing a commitment? Everyone breaks commitments, everyone breaks commitments. We had a contract, we had a contract that you were going to fix the water.” “Tony, you need to stop this,” Justin growled back. “Just get the fuck off my bus,” Tony screamed. “You’re useless.” Justin tried to calm him down. Eventually silence fell between the two men. “Justin,” Tony said finally, his voice muffled by the door. “Do you trust me?” “Yeah, I trust you, Tony.” “Do you trust me unconditionally?” “No, I don’t trust anyone unconditionally. But I trust you generally; we can agree on that.” “I need you to trust me unconditionally.” “I can’t trust you unconditionally unless I know what you’re gonna ask me.” There was a long pause before Tony spoke in a lowered voice. “I’m going to solve corona. I’m going to solve COVID right now. I almost have

it figured out.” He paused again. “I just need more mushrooms.” “I’m absolutely not doing that,” Justin replied. “I will give you a million dollars right now.” “Tony, there’s no amount of money in the world—” “I’ll give you $10 million right now.” “Tony, there’s no amount of money in the world—” “I’ll give you half of my net worth,” Tony said. “We’re going to be partners in everything that I do going forward. And if you trust me, I promise you this is going to work out, and we’re going to solve corona, we’re going to solve COVID, we’re gonna create world peace, and we’re gonna change the world together. You just have to trust me.” Justin found himself with few levers left to pull, if any. How long would he have to stay with Tony until his trip ended? And how long would it be until Tony was capable of a rational conversation? On the other hand, if he left the bus, Tony might find a way to get more drugs to Montana. As Justin considered his options in silence, Tony’s voice came through the door once more. “Fine. I’ll find somebody else that will.”

It had been a long day for those at the lakeside lodge. Tyler, drained of patience, decided not to venture onto the bus. But he knew there was something he had to do. On the phone to the Zappos leadership team, he informed them that something needed to be done about Tony: the events of the past day proved he wasn’t going to get better. Tyler didn’t know what action needed to be taken, but the ball was now in corporate’s lap. Some people had stepped onto the bus and tried reasoning with Tony, only to walk off in tears or leave shaken at his condition. During the day, Tony came to believe that he was in an active shooter simulation and started trashing the bus. Perhaps most distressing, Tony at one point asked his friends to join in a suicide pact with him. Dying, he told them, was the best way to transcend human consciousness, and the only way to hack the “AI simulation” was to burn the bus with them all inside. Ava, who had started the trip excited to spend time with Tony, left the bus looking visibly distraught. When she walked past Justin, who sat under

a nearby tree most of the day, she wouldn’t say what had been discussed. She only offered that “Tony wants to damn you to a multidimensional hell.” Justin had kept an eye on the bus throughout the day to make sure Tony didn’t leave. If Tony was seen in public in this state, the secret would be out, and the world would know the happiness guru of Zappos was in a really bad place; he could picture the headlines. Tony never tried to leave the vehicle, but instead made it clear that Justin was no longer in his circle of trust. Toward the end of the day, he told Justin there would be a private jet leaving in the early hours of the next morning to fly him back to Salt Lake City. Tony would be taking the bus back to Park City. This actually didn’t seem like a bad idea, Justin thought. Perhaps Tony would calm down without Justin around, and rest for a few hours on the ride back. Then, once they were back in Park City, they could discuss what had happened. Unbeknownst to Justin, Tony had been sending messages far and wide from inside the bus. Later that evening, two chartered jets arrived at a nearby airport. Anthony Taylor had arrived in one; Ali Bevilacqua was in the other. It seemed Tony was willing his wishes into being.

The next morning, twenty-four hours after they’d arrived, Tyler and the rest of the Montana group decided that they’d stay there until they could find their own way back to Park City. Before leaving on the bus the night before, Tony had agreed to share his location in a group message chat with members of the Montana trip, allowing them to follow his movements. Tony seemed to be coming down from his trip, Steve-O reported to Tyler that morning, but he was still in the process of calming down. They were due to arrive back in Park City later that afternoon, Steve-O told him. Justin would already be there by then and could meet Tony when he arrived. But though the plan seemed straightforward, Tony managed to derail it. At one point, Tyler got wind that Tony had been texting people asking them to join a scavenger hunt, the specifics of which he couldn’t figure out. Tyler checked Tony’s location and realized the pulsing blue dot on his phone screen hadn’t moved for a while. It appeared to be in Salt Lake City. The only person they knew who lived there was a friend of Anthony Taylor’s. Tyler connected the dots. “Please don’t give Tony ketamine,” Tyler wrote in

a text to Anthony. “I know I can’t match whatever Tony is offering, but I’ll give you everything I have in this life.” Anthony didn’t respond. Tony wasn’t responding to texts either. Tyler wrote to him: “How come you’re not texting me? Did you stop trusting me?” Tony’s reply came soon enough. In the group chat, he sent a screenshot of Tyler’s text to Anthony. He followed up with a large block of text accusing Tyler of going behind his back. Then, in rapid-fire instructions, Tony demanded that Brandon Hollis, the Zappos general counsel, write up a contract guaranteeing the transfer of Tyler’s assets to Anthony. Tyler sent a text to the group chat, addressed to Tony: “We are all your friends and love you but the last couple days you’ve attacked each and every one of us for no reason. Elissa and I paid to be here to connect and spend time with you. We love you. No matter how much you push us away or attack us, we love you. No matter what you say we love you. Wish you were here to spend an amazing week with us.” It was the last time Tyler ever communicated with Tony.

Justin had arrived back in Park City by now, and spent much of the day trying to figure out his next move. Tony had made it twenty-eight days into his agreement to abstain from drugs. But he’d broken his commitment and was now seemingly at the point of no return. Either Justin had to commit to getting Tony medical help—an effort that had failed before—or it was time for him to go back to Vegas and move on. That evening, Justin was on his way home after meeting Suzie for dinner at a restaurant in town when he received a call shortly before midnight. It was Juliet, one of Tony’s assistants. She was at the house at 1422 Empire, and Tony had just arrived at the home. He was acting manic, she said. He was rearranging furniture and other objects, placing candles everywhere, and talking desperately to himself. She was there with Ali, and they were each in separate rooms upstairs. Justin headed to the house. It was quiet when he arrived. He found Ali and Juliet downstairs. They seemed tense. Tony had calmed down, they told him, but was now upstairs in his room. Justin told them he was going to

stay nearby at the Welcome House. If anything happens, call me. He’d leave his phone on loud.

Around 4 a.m., Justin was woken by rapid knocking on his bedroom door. It was Suzie. She had received a frantic stream of messages from Ali and Juliet and had come to the Welcome House to wake him up. He checked his phone and saw that he’d missed more than twenty calls, and dozens of texts. Tony is breaking things in the house, he’s writing messages on the walls, came the urgent messages from Ali and Juliet. He’s talking to himself about multiple dimensions. Justin ran into the street but stopped short before he reached the house. Tony’s bedroom upstairs had a balcony that overlooked Empire Avenue. If he saw Justin approaching the house, he might be startled, and, depending on his state of mind, it couldn’t be ruled out that he might harm himself. Justin walked around the property before reaching the front entrance. He pushed open the door, and time slowed down as he came to terms with the nightmare he was witnessing. He could see candles flickering from within the darkened house, revealing streams of water cascading down the grand staircase at the center of the home. Smashed glass and plates were strewn across the floor. Candles were everywhere. On the walls were messages scribbled by a furious hand with a thick black marker. Names of friends. Incoherent text and Post-it notes across every wall. Then Justin noticed one message on the front door: “This is Tony’s house. He gets what he wants.” Walking around the exterior of the home and looking through the windows, Justin tried to process the scene. Tony appeared to have flooded a bathroom upstairs after trashing the house. It occurred to Justin that if a live wire were to come into contact with the flowing water, the house could go up in flames. Justin met Ali and Juliet at the back door and they left the property. He returned to the Welcome House around the corner and dialed a number for mental health services in Park City, before the operator patched him through to 911. He stressed that he wanted to remain anonymous and was

calling on behalf of his friend, who was a “high-profile” person and who appeared to be having a psychotic break and was at risk of hurting himself. Several police cars arrived within minutes, and Justin went out to the street to meet them a few houses down. An ambulance arrived seconds later, followed by firefighters. The police found Tony sitting on his back porch. Despite the devastation around him, his expression was serene.

For the second night in a row, Justin and Suzie met for dinner in town and tried to piece things together. After Tony was taken to Park City Hospital, Justin had called Mimi because she managed Tony’s medical records and personal information. He also called Richard Hsieh and recounted what had occurred over the past twenty-four hours. Considering the destruction done to the property, and the perceived risk that Tony could have harmed himself, or others, Justin felt sure Tony would be held at the hospital for at least a few days, until a psychiatric evaluation could be completed. That would then provide an opening to potentially coax Tony back into a rehab facility. Justin and Suzie hadn’t been allowed to join him in the hospital because they weren’t family, so they had remained at the Empire Avenue house throughout the day. Mimi had hired professional cleaners to help restore the building, and a flood damage service arrived, cut holes in the wall, and used heaters to blow hot air into the walls to dry them out. They scrubbed the walls to wash away the black marker, and all of the Post-it notes were removed. Furniture was reorganized. And garbage bag after garbage bag was filled with broken glass and plates. At one point Justin had gone into Tony’s en suite bathroom and found a glass bottle, like an old-fashioned milk bottle, tipped over on the floor beside the toilet. The bottle was about a third full of what appeared to be vitamin capsules. By the brown substance within them, he assumed they were mushrooms. A handful of the capsules were scattered across the floor. It was impossible to tell if the bottle had been full or where it had come from, but as he looked around the house, Justin could only wonder. At the restaurant, Suzie ordered a margarita. After the events of the past forty-eight hours, they decided, perhaps Tony had finally hit rock bottom.

The only feasible outcome, they thought, was that Tony would be committed to a psychiatric facility or rehab, and then the slow road to recovery would begin. Their conversation was interrupted by Suzie’s phone ringing. It was an unknown Utah number. Odd, she thought, considering it was late. She held the phone to her ear, and Justin watched her face drain of blood. She looked up and mouthed: “It’s Tony.” The hospital was releasing him. “What do you mean?” Suzie said into the phone. Justin called the police officer who had taken Tony from the house the night before. Why is Tony being released? The police have no power to stop Tony from leaving the hospital, the officer told him; all they could do was pass on their recommendation to the medical staff. A short time later, Justin and Suzie pulled into the emergency room entrance and saw a figure huddled on the curb. Tony was wrapped in a purple puffer jacket and wearing gray sweats. He looked up, his eyes glazed and hollow.

CHAPTER 23

STICKY NOTES

The sun was beating down on Park City when David Hill cracked his first beer of the day. He and his friend Tyler Davis had just sat down on the front porch after a morning hiking the surrounding mountains and were using the moment to relax before a night of July 4 celebrations. A small garden separated the blue miner’s cottage from the sidewalk, and from where they were sitting, they could look up and down the street toward the hills at each end of Park Avenue. “Happy Fourth of July!” they called out to a group of people walking by, lifting their drinks. It was a marvelous day. The skies were clear, and the sound of one of their favorite bands, the reggae funk group Iration, was playing from a speaker on the porch. The two men had known each other since they were kids, and trips like this were among the few times they could catch up. Tyler lived in Florida and worked at a real estate company, while David worked at a recruiting firm in Dallas. “Happy Fourth!” they hollered with big grins at two men walking by. After the pandemic closure of the spring, Park City had reopened its restaurants in June and had become a hot spot for those in need of the outdoors. Tyler and David had rented the cottage via Airbnb for the long weekend; it was the first time they’d been able to get away with friends since the pandemic had started. As the reggae played, Tyler stared after the two men who’d just walked past, and noticed one of them wasn’t wearing shoes—an odd sight in a ritzy town where financial advisors and tech workers in polo shirts and vests line the sidewalks. He exchanged a glance with David as they realized the two

men had turned around and were now walking back toward them. One man was taller and looked to be about fifty, with long gray-streaked hair that dangled over his shoulders, giving him the look of an older “hippie guy,” Tyler recalled. The other man, without the shoes, looked more disheveled as he came closer. With a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he was wearing a tattered maroon button-down shirt. His blue jeans scuffed along the ground. “What are you guys up to?” the shoeless man said, looking at them with glassy eyes. On the porch, Tyler and David tensed slightly and mumbled something about relaxing and drinking beers. “How long are you guys staying here?” the man asked. They told him they had been renting the house from Airbnb and planned to leave the next day. “Why don’t you stay for an extra week?” he said. “I’ll pay for the Airbnb.” What is going on here? Tyler thought. These two strange men, standing in front of them chain-smoking cigarettes, were now proposing they cover the cost of the Airbnb so they could stay another week? The shoeless man looked at David. “What do you do?” he said. David was cautiously interested to see where this was going and told him he worked in recruiting. The man became more animated. “I’m actually trying to recruit people to move to Park City,” he said. “Would you be willing to start recruiting for me?” “Well, we focus on, like, sales recruiting, specifically software and medical device sales,” David said. “What’s your placement fee?” the man responded. “On average, $10,000.” The man said he would pay double that for every person that David could recruit to come to Park City. After some more back-and-forth, David gave the man his phone number, and then wrote the man’s contact information on a piece of paper, but threw it away. “I legitimately thought he was homeless,” David recalled. “I didn’t think that the deal was serious at all.” Had David followed up, he would have joined a burgeoning group of people about to make fortunes off a seemingly unwell man.

Three weeks later, Tony was walking through a cavernous living room, his footsteps echoing on hardwood floors. As the real estate agent guided him and his friends past a river-rock wall, he looked through floor-to-ceiling windows toward an expansive balcony that overlooked a blue-green lake. In the distance, the mountains framed the horizon. Tony turned to the real estate agent. “I’ll double your commission if you let me smoke a cigarette right now.” The sprawling ranch at 2636 Aspen Springs Drive would be the first of almost a dozen properties Tony would buy nearby, but it was by far the most impressive. Sunk into the base of Iron Mountain in a small, exclusive neighborhood about three miles north of Park City’s town center, the property fell away from the street, obscured by paper birch and pine. Driving past, one could fail to notice the mansion’s exterior. The ninebedroom home spread across two floors and a loft space; several rooms had fireplaces. Below the balcony was an enclosed gym and indoor pool, and somewhere within the rabbit warren of rooms was a theater, cellars, and multiple bars. Outside, the lake lapped softly on a small sandy beach, and farther down the hill a two-story carriage house complete with its own horse corral had been converted into a guest residence with a panoramic view of a rolling meadow all the way to the four-lane state highway a quarter mile away. The $15 million Tony put up for the house was but a fraction of his spending in recent weeks, and he was only getting started. Ever since his release from the hospital, Tony had become convinced that he was building a whole new world in Park City. He was fixated on building his community —an ecosystem, as he called it. He was putting out the call far and wide for people to join him: to friends in Las Vegas, former girlfriends, people he’d spoken to at conferences, people he’d met at Burning Man—seemingly everyone he knew. He told people that he wanted to build a new community here in this swanky mountain town, home to the rich and famous. Like Las Vegas, only better. What that meant, exactly, wasn’t clear to anyone who accepted his invitation. But Tony was making them an offer that made it easy to put aside any doubts. They could come and stay in one of his mansions, most

often rent-free, all expenses paid. Food would be catered. They would be hired as “project managers” and be given free rein to invent their own roles and find their purpose. In return they’d earn more money than they ever had before. If they could show Tony a tax return, he would double their best salary. Only one other primary condition came with some of these lifechanging contracts, often written on neon-colored Post-it notes: those who arrived had to “be happy.” Adding to the stream of people who had been coming and going from Park City in previous months, dozens more arrived to see what the buzz was about. Friends and former confidants at Zappos and the Downtown Project arrived in town, including Janice Lopez, John Bunch, and Jamie Naughton, his chief of staff and head of corporate communications at Zappos. So did Don Calder, the man who’d joined Tony in Hawaii for the baby experiment during Winter Camp. Rachael Brown, his former girlfriend, moved into the ranch, and Blizzy, Tony’s beloved fluffy white mutt, was brought along, too. In addition to handling social media accounts, Michelle D’Attilio was hired to create websites for various projects that Tony and Suzie were building. The day after he purchased the ranch, Tony led Michelle around the grand estate. He was wearing sweatpants, but no shirt or shoes. Michelle had heard about what happened in Montana and the destruction at 1422 Empire, and she was now visiting every other week to check on him. She hadn’t brought up his meltdown, reasoning that she might have more sway over him if she worked behind the scenes to support him, rather than question his behavior and risk joining Tyler on the time-out list. During one visit earlier in the month, she had noticed how dirty Tony’s feet were. Michelle snapped a photo of them and sent it to a friend who had been with Tony. “Has he washed his feet?” she texted her friend. “What’s going on?” As Tony and Michelle walked the property, they stopped at the front porch and sat on the ground with their backs to the main door. As they had countless times before, they sat in silence taking in the pristine air and summer heat. At last Tony turned to Michelle. “I’m thinking of retiring from Zappos,” he said. “What do you think?”

By now, Zappos executives were more than aware of Tony’s troubles. It was unclear to Michelle whether this thought had come to Tony of his own volition or if he was starting to get pressure from the company to take a step back. Michelle looked at her friend. She noticed his face was unwashed and gaunt. He seemed sober but exhausted. She could sense the weight on his shoulders. “Do whatever is going to make you happy,” she said. “You’ve done so much already for so many people. It’s okay for you to step back and take care of yourself.” Tony stared back at her. The silence hung for a moment longer before someone approached them, breaking their moment of solitude.

To accommodate the swelling number of people arriving in Park City, the ranch served as the nerve center of Tony’s new world. A stream of tour buses and Sprinter vans shuttled people to and from Las Vegas, cluttering the quiet residential street in front of the property. Tony hired a chef from Las Vegas to run the kitchen and build out the equivalent of a restaurant operation; with a $10,000-per-day budget, caviar was on the menu one day, king crab legs another. Beyond the bedrooms in the main building and the extra rooms in the carriage house, Tony ordered Airstream trailers and tiny homes to be parked in the horse corral, allowing for more people to stay onsite. Tony ended up spending more than $50 million on seventeen houses and vacant lots in the Park City region to accommodate his followers. New arrivals, whether they’d known Tony for months or years, found themselves entering a community where there existed a clear hierarchy of people, each wrestling for power, influence, and Tony’s attention. At the top of the pyramid, Mimi and Suzie established themselves as competing factions seeking to serve as gatekeepers to the community. Mimi spent most of her time away from Park City but beamed into Tony’s bedroom during daily video conference calls and secured the role of managing logistics at the ranch: ordering food, paying bills, and monitoring who was leaving and arriving. Tony also assigned Mimi to be the final sign-off on most business ideas, ventures, or other major purchases. Outside of the ranch, most logistical issues were claimed by Suzie and her employees at Wellth

Collective, who served as the primary travel agent for people arriving in Park City, coordinating where they would stay, what flights they were booking, and how they were getting to and from the airport. Others seemed to have less defined roles. After hearing Tony’s plan to build a new community in Park City, Victoria Recano, the TV reporter Tony had first met in San Francisco twenty years before, arrived with her husband and children in July, moving into one of the properties with a mandate, among other things, to produce videos for Tony to watch. Among the first projects Tony assigned her was to produce a video about herself, a forty-five-minute compilation of her news clips and family videos spliced together. Soon after, Tony told her he wanted a documentary on the history of the Swahili people, the millennia-old civilization from the coastal areas of East Africa near Tanzania. “Defining the Swahili people isn’t easy,” Victoria’s raspy newswoman voice declared over images of men in robes standing by ragged tents in the desert. “It all depends on who you ask, where you ask it, and when. It’s very tricky.” Millions of dollars were being promised every week, for salaries, for projects, and for investments, and Tony hired a team of court reporters— people typically employed to transcribe legal proceedings—to stay at the ranch and document his conversations. Mark Evensvold, who for years had managed the Nacho Daddy restaurant in Las Vegas, which Tony part-owned with Fred Mossler, came to Park City, and on the lakefront one afternoon in August, Mark and Tony discussed the terms of Mark’s purpose in Park City, while a court reporter typed nearby, recording their words. Mark’s roles would involve overseeing several bars at the ranch—the bar next to Tony’s bedroom, another one next to the pool, and the upstairs kitchen bar—to make sure they were always stocked and in service. If Tony wanted to go to sleep, Mark would have to tell people to leave. In addition, he could also embark on other projects that interested him. Maybe he could build a koi pond or construct a treehouse? “You just work on whatever you feel like,” Tony said. “There’s no real schedule.” On a Post-it note, in a barely legible scribble, Mark wrote down the terms of the deal they’d just discussed. Tony asked him to read it aloud. “I will arrive on-site here as of September 20, 2020, responsible for bars, help with security and project management. Salary is $450K a year,” Mark said.

As a sign-on bonus, Mark went on, Tony would transfer most of his 25 percent stake in Nacho Daddy to Mark. Tony leaned over and signed his name on the note.

CHAPTER 24

OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

The Hsieh family had already come and gone by the time Tony bought the ranch. After Tony’s episode at 1422 Empire Avenue and subsequent stay in the hospital, Richard had arrived in Park City with Judy, Dave, and Andy. Despite their arrival, Tony spent little time with them, and asked friends to ensure that he would never be left alone with them. In the moments Tony did spend with his family, he left them struggling to connect with their boy. At one point Tony told them that he planned to start a new family business. The purpose of the endeavor was unclear, but it was the responsibility of each of his family members to come up with a plan to raise money in a few weeks. He never followed up. During another moment with Judy, he said he would be open with her if she would act like his friend. If she acted like a family member, then he would hide information from her. When she told him that he needed to see a therapist, he said he would, but only if for every minute he was in therapy she would be in an ice bath. When she pressed the therapy point once more, mentioning his issues with attention, Tony left the house in a rage. When it came time for the family to depart, Andy thought twice about leaving. Despite their distance over the years, seeing a swirl of new people he had never met before made him want to stay in Park City and keep an eye on his brother. Ten days later he returned and quickly realized that he’d entered an ecosystem where people were competing for Tony’s money, pitching projects that didn’t make sense, and living in houses they would never be able to afford otherwise. And there was a rule that ominously dictated many behaviors in the Park City enclave: never tell Tony you were

concerned about his behavior. To do so meant risking excommunication, along with Tyler and Ryan Doherty. One solution Andy came up with was to bring in people he could trust to identify bad actors. As it happened, Andy knew that his brother had been wanting for a while to work with their longtime friend Tony Lee. Lee had spearheaded Wells Fargo’s loans to Zappos in 2003 when it was close to bankruptcy. Since then, Lee had worked at a number of smaller banks before settling in Texas to manage the finances of the Bass family, the oil dynasty that was worth more than $5 billion. He and Andy had remained close friends over the years; Andy had asked Lee to be the best man at his wedding before it was canceled. Now, at a time when his brother’s spending was spinning out of control, Andy figured they could benefit from a professional financial manager to conduct some due diligence. Lee was reluctant to entertain the idea of uprooting his life in Texas and to leave a comfortable job to join the mania of Tony’s world, but he agreed to a meeting. During a dinner in late July at a restaurant on Main Street, Tony told him that he was turning Park City into a community similar to the one he had built in downtown Las Vegas, but better. Lee’s role would involve overseeing all finances in the Park City ventures. As he had done with others, Tony offered to pay double Lee’s current salary, which meant he would be earning $1.5 million a year. Sensing Lee’s hesitancy, Tony turned to one of the people at the dinner, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and suggested that if he could convince Lee to stay, he’d receive a 10 percent commission, or $150,000. After dinner, Andy pulled Lee aside. Coming to Park City made sense for multiple reasons, he said. Andy and Lee could finally work together after trying to figure out a way for years. Second, Andy said, with Lee overseeing the finances, he could also help weed out people who were taking advantage of his brother.

Andy’s request came with a sense of urgency, as money was streaming from Tony’s accounts. If people had concerns about taking money from a man drifting further from reality, few seemed to consider the Faustian bargain

they were entering—an oversight that took vivid form when Tony found another destructive fascination. In the weeks after his release from the hospital, Tony returned to the idea of biohacking as a way to increase his own personal output, and became convinced that inhaling nitrous oxide was a way to heighten his blood oxygen levels and eliminate the need for sleep. Better known as laughing gas for its use at dental offices, nitrous oxide is commercially available as an everyday kitchen item: the cartridges used in cream whipping machines, known as Whip-Its. The shiny silver canisters are about two inches in length and slot into Whip-It machines. While it’s illegal to inhale the gas, it has found popularity with teenagers who can’t legally buy alcohol and among festival revelers seeking a cheap, quick high. Inhaling the gas induces an immediate high, making one feel relaxed and sometimes giggly for a minute or two. But the brain can only handle so much nitrous oxide before it begins to dissociate and lose connection with reality. Excessive use can lead to brain damage, and some teenagers have died from chemical asphyxiation; the actress Demi Moore passed out with seizures and was sent to a hospital after a night of inhaling Whip-Its. Between cigarettes, Tony was inhaling from the Whip-It canister like he was drinking water from a bottle. As he sat in bed at the ranch, the floor around him was covered by hundreds of Whip-It cartridges. By one estimate, Tony was using more than fifty a day. “You could hear his dog coming because it would jingle jingle through the things,” one person who was at the ranch daily recalled. Tony found comrades to indulge his newest addiction. Among them was Don Calder, who had been pitching Tony on potentially buying the town of Nipton and all of its sculptures as a Burning Man–style fun park. When their canisters ran empty, they were replenished from a pallet of Whip-It cartridges like those used to stock department stores, which Tony kept in the garage. Tony’s near-constant stream of nitrous oxide prompted strange behavior. One time Tony stepped on glass, cut his foot, and walked around the ranch leaving streaks of blood on the floor—a trail, Tony said, that would make it easy to find him. On another occasion, he tried starving himself of food and water to eliminate the need to use the bathroom. His physical appearance changed, and his weight fell below one hundred pounds, leaving his frame

looking skeletal. His head seemed to bulge above his body, while his slender limbs moved with fatigue. At one point paranoia took hold, and Tony was convinced one morning that Tyler was in Park City, trying to stage an intervention. The scare prompted him to hire a legion of black-clothed security guards to form a human perimeter around the ranch. Visitors who came to see Tony encountered guards in different wings of the property, as if they were entering a fortified estate. Tony then became fixated on finding ways to justify his nitrous oxide habit, and dispatched those around him to find out more about it. Victoria produced another video at his request, this one titled “The Nitrous Oxide Advantage,” a montage of psychedelic images and videos cut between sound bites from supposed experts answering questions Victoria had crowdsourced from people at the ranch. “Nitrous oxide has control over the brain in ways no other drug does,” Victoria’s voice-over said. “It is at our lowest level of brain wave activity. Any lower and we are brain dead.” Not unlike what he’d done during his fascination with ketamine, Tony called for research on whether nitrous oxide was something that could change lives; maybe it could become another legal high like marijuana. He found a willing volunteer in a man named Nadeem Nathoo, the co-founder of an organization called the Knowledge Society, who was also seen inhaling nitrous alongside Tony. Nadeem had met Tony after a conference one night in Las Vegas. His organization offered training programs to highachieving teenagers interested in entrepreneurship and seeking internships at places like Microsoft and IBM. Nadeem had arrived in Park City after receiving a text from Tony, and at Tony’s insistence Nadeem invited three alumni of the Knowledge Society program to join them as well. Almost as soon as they arrived, the fresh-faced twentysomethings were asked to produce a research paper on the health benefits of nitrous oxide. Tony dipped in and out of megalomania. One morning he preached to Michelle about achieving world peace. Given that he was paying her to oversee his social media accounts, he posited how they could be used for such a goal. Before going down the rabbit hole, Michelle said, they needed to define what world peace meant. For Michelle, it meant a world with peaceful resolutions to conflict. Tony’s definition was both more simplistic and reductive: for him, world peace meant a world without any conflict.

“He wanted to create this playground where everyone would be happy,” she said later. Everyone in Park City understood that the best time to speak with Tony was at dawn—it was when he was at his most lucid. Justin and Suzie, who had both remained in Park City but were staying in other houses, would often join Tony on the lakefront beach as he cooked breakfast and was more clear-eyed. There they would discuss business affairs—from property acquisitions to contracts with new entrants—before Tony’s mental state declined throughout the day. Tony raised eyebrows by leading group hikes through the mountains without shoes on while inhaling from his nitrous cartridge. While he was initially seen at mealtimes and held meetings in various rooms at the ranch to discuss the stream of projects being pitched to him, he gradually started spending more time in his bedroom, and would hold court while sitting in bed, surrounded by nitrous oxide cartridges. “His room looked like a homeless shelter,” Andy said later. “There was feces on the ground. Plants in his toilets. Broken glass, broken plates all over the ground. Rotten food under the bed. Rotten food on the walls … it was disgusting.”

People were finding new ways to spend his money, as Tony seemed willing to spend himself broke. On multiple occasions he said he wanted to shed any attachment to the world he’d created in Las Vegas. There were too many broken commitments there. And rather than his community coming together for him, they’d forced him into rehab instead. No more Zappos. No more shoes. No more Downtown Project. No more people asking for money to build a community he no longer cared about. One way to achieve this, Tony declared, was that he would sell his entire real estate portfolio in Las Vegas. Despite having paid in excess of $200 million for the properties downtown, he wanted them gone, no matter the price. To execute the plan, he turned to the two people who’d been meeting him every morning on the beach. On a Post-it note stuck to his bedroom wall, he delegated the task to Justin and Suzie. The first person to bring him back a deal would earn a 10 percent commission.

Such agreements were encouraged by a nonsensical incentive scheme Tony had come up with, called 10X. It started when Tony declared that for his new community to be more effective than his Las Vegas experiment, it must reconsider how output was achieved and measured. Therefore, he told people, everything would need to be achieved in multiples of ten: ten times faster, ten times bigger, ten times more. Initially, the first iteration of 10X launched with a noble goal: to help the town of Park City reopen amid the pandemic. Suzie had been in charge of spearheading the effort with her company, Wellth Collective. With the help of a recently hired assistant named Elizabeth Pezzello, who in turn had brought her fiancé, Brett Gorman, to Park City to work for Suzie, the three approached restaurants downtown and secured agreements to book them out on Sundays, guaranteeing thousands of dollars for revenue-starved businesses. The plan was to walk around downtown and sell $10 memberships to people, granting them an all-you-can-eat-and-drink pass to any of the restaurants; participants were given T-shirts and merchandise with a 10X logo. It might have sounded charitable, given that the venture made no financial sense, but the state of Utah took issue with running an open bar tab on an entire town and shut the program down after its second week. But the philosophy of 10X remained, and morphed into something else. In addition to the double-your-best-salary deals, Tony vowed that anyone who spent his money would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on the amount they spent. If someone booked out a restaurant and spent $1,000 on the tab, for example, they would earn $100. If they recruited someone to live in Park City, they’d be entitled to a 10 percent commission on that person’s annual salary. And if someone could source a real estate deal and spent $1 million on the property, that person would be entitled to $100,000. Starting with smaller tasks around the ranch and expanding all the way to Tony’s entire Las Vegas real estate portfolio, commissions were being doled out on a daily basis.

Tony Lee had by now assumed the role of financial overseer and had a front-row seat as money left his old friend’s bank accounts. Unlike the mundane stock performance charts Lee had been overseeing for the Bass

family, he was now staring at receipts for investments in gold and real estate properties, hot air balloons, and proposals for helicopter tour companies. Lee could also see those vying for Tony’s money beginning to fight for it—a development often motivated by the 10X incentive program. For many of the big-ticket items, Mimi and Suzie were attempting to establish themselves as the source of deals, to prove to Tony that they were deserving of a commission. This manifested in strange ways. One day, Suzie’s top assistants, Elizabeth and Brett, who were employed by Wellth Collective, announced that they had been hired to cater solely to Tony. As part of the swap, they would now be paid through an LLC that Mimi controlled, and Elizabeth and Brett would be getting a pay raise: each would be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. For years, Mimi had been paid a flat $9,000-a-month salary from Tony, in addition to travel expenses. But after Tony’s Park City chapter began, Mimi negotiated a pay raise and was now earning a $30,000-per-month base salary—a sum that soon became dwarfed by the money she was scooping up in 10X commissions. In total, through an LLC she controlled, Mimi sent invoices for what amounted to more than $20 million. In one case, Mimi “managed” a contractor who was being paid $83,333.33 a month for “assistance and management of various projects”—earning her $8,333 every time the contractor was paid by Tony. When Tony bought a fleet of buses and asked that Mimi arrange for them to be retrofitted at a cost of $3.7 million, she took 10 percent of the fee. Then there was the $7 million acquisition of the Big Moose Yacht Club, an event space on prime real estate at the foot of Park City’s ski lifts, which entitled Mimi to a $700,000 commission. In a twisted way, Tony’s incentive structure was working the way he envisioned it; people were vying to execute his every whim. When he had an idea to launch a film studio that produced documentaries, Mimi took up the proposition. On a sticky note, she and Tony wrote up the terms of a contract to set up an LLC with $10 million to fund documentary film projects produced by an existing studio called XTR. The LLC would be controlled by Tony, Mimi, and her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, a former lawyer and aspiring film producer. As part of the agreement, Mimi and her boyfriend were entitled to 55 percent of the profit from the venture, despite

not putting in their own money. And in line with 10X, Roberto would be entitled to a $1 million commission for setting up the LLC. Mimi then charged Tony another 10 percent fee on the cost of hiring the lawyers to arrange the $1 million commission payment to Roberto. It might have seemed excessive, but two months later, Roberto told XTR that Tony had approved another $7.5 million for the venture. It’s unclear if the money was wired, but soon afterward, the attorneys who had written up the terms for the $1 million commission payment to Roberto amended the contract to state he was now owed $1.75 million. Mimi’s efforts often came into conflict with those of Suzie, and at one point she introduced a “Suzie penalty,” which Tony agreed to: for every day Suzie was on one of Tony’s properties, Mimi would fine him $30,000. While it seemed outrageous, Tony racked up $1.83 million in fees under the scheme and received an invoice from Mimi’s boyfriend. Tony ended up paying $420,000. But Suzie gained ground in other ways and successfully convinced Tony to commit to one-on-one time, which gave rise to other opportunities. After her restaurant program on Main Street was abandoned, Tony told her she had a $1 million weekly budget to throw events around Park City every Sunday, a figure Suzie claimed she never spent in its entirety. Then, in addition to trying to broker a deal to sell Tony’s real estate portfolio, she worked with Tony to launch a project known as the Magic Castle, a $5 million proposal to turn an event space in town into a co-working facility. Like Peter Pan’s Neverland, every new project or idea could sound enchanting. Another person Mimi seemed to be constantly feuding with over the 10X commissions was Andy. Since Tony had met Paula Abdul earlier in the year, he had wanted to convince her to come to town and do some shows; because tours had been canceled as a result of the pandemic, she had spare time. So Tony proposed that Paula do 180 shows at a local event venue known as Yellowstone for a $9 million contract. Whoever could close the deal would get the $900,000 commission. Andy claimed that he had arranged it, while Mimi argued that in fact she was entitled to it, but nothing ever came of the proposal. In another dispute, Andy and Mimi lobbied Tony regarding who they thought was entitled to a 10 percent commission on the $15 million ranch he was now living in.

Andy tried to rally support among others to pursue deals with Tony’s money. At one point, he urged Janice to try and convince Tony to invest $10 million in an entity that would own a tequila company. He brought it up to her on at least five other occasions, eventually suggesting she ask for $50 million for the venture. But Janice refused, and it went nowhere. Lee, for his part, initially seemed to encourage Andy’s pursuit of Tony’s commission payments. After Tony had dangled the 10 percent commission in front of Ryan Fitzpatrick at their initial dinner in July, Andy encouraged Tony Lee to make it clear to his brother that it was he who was entitled to the commission, if he ended up taking the job. “You are welcomed [sic] to go broker a deal for me,” Lee wrote in a text to Andy. “Go talk to him.” “Yeah I’ll talk to him,” Andy replied. “Tell him I’m your broker.” Lee seemed enthused. “You have to earn your commission now and make it happen.:)) hope tony pays you.” “I’ll make it happen with Tony! And you make it happen with him that I’m your broker:),” Andy replied. “The higher my number whether 1.4 or 1.5 [million dollars] you will get a bigger commission. Go fight for me now.:))” “Win win!” Andy wrote back. “Mainly excited for you to be here and we can hang out together.” Lee later claimed he wasn’t aware how ill Tony was until after he decided to take on the role. After he started working, he soon soured on Andy and came to believe that he was seeking to exploit his sick brother, rather than protect him. At one point, Lee claimed that Andy asked him to divert as much as $100 million to an account he controlled, to put aside for Tony’s “retirement,” which he refused to do; a claim Andy later denied. As for Andy’s efforts to secure a 10 percent commission on Lee’s salary, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, those fell by the wayside when Tony himself refused the proposal. It didn’t seem to matter though, as Andy had already negotiated his own salary contract with his brother—one valued at $1 million a year.

CHAPTER 25

WHO WILL SAVE YOUR SOUL?

The chaos spiraling within Tony’s community was finally about to spill into public view, but for just a moment. On a Sunday evening in August, as the sun began its descent behind Iron Mountain, a group of residents were huddled at the top of the driveway of 2636 Aspen Springs Drive. As they waited to enter the ranch, there was an element of cautious curiosity; mention of the address had raised eyebrows among the neighbors for weeks. Among those gathered was Bill Ciraco, a former Wall Street trader who had reached the edge of burnout before moving into the neighborhood with his wife and teenage daughter a few weeks before. At first he’d been enamored of the area, a cluster of ski chalets and palatial winter lodges strung along a one-mile loop of road that ascends and descends the base of Iron Mountain, granting a panorama of the valley below. Bill’s real estate agent had told him the neighborhood had an active homeowners association, made up primarily of year-round residents who looked out for one another (in part through the security cameras that peered out from under the eaves) and knew when something was amiss. An unknown car with out-of-state plates parked in the street for too long could prompt alarm and even a 911 call. And unless an invite was issued by one of Aspen Springs’s wealthy residents, strangers had no business being there. It was like a gated community but without the gate, Bill had been told. But after the disturbances of the past few weeks, he was wondering whether he’d made a huge mistake. Two weeks after moving in with his wife and teenage daughter, Bill learned that a supposed billionaire had paid $15 million for the ranch at the bottom of the loop, one of the

neighborhood’s most extravagant properties. While he’d initially been buoyed by the idea that the sale could raise home prices in an area he’d just moved into, his excitement turned to concern when he’d seen a group of security guards flanking the property—hardly the image of a safe neighborhood. A deluge of vehicles had started coming and going from the property, too. As many as twenty-five cars lined the street outside the home at one point, and then even tour buses began arriving at the property. Finally, what felt like nonstop nights of parties had prompted 911 calls from neighbors. Now, gathered at the problem house, some nodded in agreement that the recent events had been a great concern to their tranquil community. An olive branch had arrived the day before, in the form of an email to the homeowners association inviting the neighbors for a night of cocktails and entertainment at the ranch. The message also revealed that their new neighbor was Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, a company that Amazon had bought for over $1 billion. Outside of a small group of people, no one even knew Tony was here. Perhaps tonight the neighbors would have an opportunity to quiz Mr. Hsieh on what business he had being in Aspen Springs. Bill made his way down the driveway with the neighbors, where they were asked to stand in front of the garage to wait for a COVID-19 test. A man wearing a denim jacket weaved through the group; a red bandana was tied around his neck. With a grin, he introduced himself as Anthony. “I’m Tony’s guy,” Anthony said. He raised a fistful of bandanas and motioned for Bill to take one and tie it around his wrist. “It’s so Tony knows who his guests are versus his employees.” As he took a bandana, it took a moment for Bill to register where he had met guys that reminded him of Anthony. On Wall Street, the best traders didn’t have to work for Morgan Stanley to get the best clients. With charisma and million-dollar smiles, they just had to raise hype by spending more on strippers and cocaine. Standing on the deck, Bill took a glass of wine from a server and observed the scene around him. A few dozen people dressed like hipsters stood around, chatting. Most looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. Someone passed by and mentioned that Tony was so happy to host all the neighbors. Bill thought it was weird that Tony was being spoken for. Where was he? Bill’s mind drifted to one of those celebrity cocktail parties

he’d attended at the Mondrian in West Hollywood. Everyone was smiling and looked pleased to be at a fancy party. They were there on the host’s dime, but no one really even knew the host. The small talk was interrupted by a woman who stood in front of the fireplace holding a microphone. “We have a special guest here tonight,” she said, prompting a murmur. “Jewel is here to perform.” Cocktails at a supposed billionaire’s home were one thing. But a private show with a Grammy-winning artist was pretty cool, Bill thought; he was a longtime fan and the proud owner of Jewel’s first album. Jewel emerged from the far side of the room, wearing a pink tie-dyed flight suit that faded to purple down the leg. Two lengths of blond hair fell below a cream cowboy hat and swung over her chest as she moved in front of the microphone, holding a guitar. Introducing herself, she told her audience about her life story, growing up in Alaska, overcoming great hardship, experiencing homelessness in California, and being a victim of abuse. She now led a charity that helped youth get back on their feet in underserved communities. Then she began to sing. More than a dozen candles shimmered on the table in front of her as she swayed and dipped with her guitar. The living room was shrouded in dusk by the time she sang her final ballad, “Who Will Save Your Soul.” She reached a crescendo, then descended into the final chorus: … And who will save your soul? If you won’t save your own? The room was silent for a moment before those gathered broke into raucous applause. Everyone marveled at what they’d seen. Whatever the disturbance of the past few weeks, the neighbors agreed there seemed to be a sincere effort to make peace with them. Only they couldn’t thank their host. Tony was still nowhere to be seen. Bill was grinning when a woman approached him and the neighbors, identifiable by their red bandanas. “We are moving on to the dinner section of the night,” she said. “So we’re going to have to ask you to leave.” Bill’s wonderment vanished like a wisp of smoke.

People outside of Tony’s inner circle had been trying to reach him for weeks. While the neighbors didn’t know it, they were part of a growing group of people to whom Tony Hsieh remained unseen. As stories of outrageous spending, drug use, and neighborhood uproar filtered beyond the properties in Park City, those in Las Vegas began to discuss what to do about Tony. The lives of thousands of people—employees at Zappos, the Downtown Project business owners, residents of the community he had built in Las Vegas—were vastly impacted by the whims of a man who was descending into madness. These concerns had become even more urgent when word got back to the Downtown Project executives that Tony intended to sell his entire Las Vegas real estate portfolio, doing away with the Downtown Project, Fergusons, and everything else he owned there. On multiple occasions Michael Downs, the Downtown Project executive, and Jen Taler, who lived at Fergusons and oversaw operations there, had arrived in Park City to try to find out what Tony’s intentions were for both institutions. After learning that Tony was trying to sell his entire real estate portfolio, both left incensed, not knowing what was next. Without more money from Tony, their world in Las Vegas would likely collapse. Since leaving in June, Tyler had shared what occurred on the bus to Montana with some people in Las Vegas and at Zappos, and momentum grew to send an interventionist to Park City to, effectively, retrieve Tony. With the help of Tony’s parents, Tyler arranged for an interventionist named Elisa Hallerman, who specialized in celebrity cases, to go to Park City in early August. In order to get her onto the property, Tyler needed to convince someone who was on the ground at the ranch to add Elisa’s name to an approval list for the security guards. Tyler called Michelle just before midnight on August 4. “We have to get Tony healthy,” Tyler said to her. Michelle was exasperated. Not only had Tyler become persona non grata by this point, but there was now a narrative in Park City that Tyler had a savior complex. There were also other rumors—rumors that Tony believed—that Tyler was going to come onto the property and kidnap Tony in order to get him into rehab. Tony’s paranoia was also being fueled by

whispers that his parents were preparing to set up a conservatorship, a court order that allows guardians to make decisions for individuals deemed incapacitated or incapable of managing their own affairs. “Tyler, I get it,” Michelle said. “We’re working on it. But your involvement right now is causing more issues. You are creating more paranoia, and we are trying to get him help. Just let us do this.” The next morning, Michelle received a text message from Justin—he had found a doctor that he believed could help Tony. He wanted Michelle to walk the doctor onto the property that day at 11:30 a.m. With the intent of appeasing Tyler, Michelle texted him to let him know that there was a doctor coming to the ranch. But Tyler had other plans, and once he heard from Michelle, he notified the interventionist. Fifteen minutes before Justin’s doctor was scheduled to arrive, Hallerman showed up at the ranch in a car with two other men—plainclothes police officers—and asked the security team for Michelle. When she came out, Hallerman introduced herself and asked Michelle to join her in the car. “We have extremely powerful people that have hired me,” Hallerman said to Michelle inside the car. “This is a Michael Jackson situation, do you understand? You would be liable if he dies.” As Hallerman bore into her, Michelle saw the doctor Justin had sent walking up the hill. She immediately jumped out of the car and took him onto the property in hopes of finding Tony. Before they could, however, the security team—unaware of any scheduled medical visits, and operating under strict instructions to keep strangers out—pulled Michelle and the doctor into two separate rooms and interrogated them. While Michelle and the doctor were being questioned, Hallerman demanded that Tony come outside to see her and the two police officers for a welfare check—typically an in-person visit from law enforcement officers responding to a request from a friend or family member concerned about a person’s mental or physical health. Standing at the top of the driveway, Tony talked with her and passed the welfare check. “He could snap in and out of anything,” Michelle later said. At the end of their discussion, Tony asked the officers who had requested the welfare check. “Your parents,” they responded. Even though the family had been involved in organizing the intervention, it was untrue that they had asked for the welfare check—it was technically Tyler who had

done so. But Tony made it clear to those at the ranch that his parents were now excommunicated. People within the house were similarly irritated by the unsolicited intervention attempt, and Tyler stopped receiving updates from Suzie, Justin, and Michelle.

Other friends began making individual efforts with more desperation. From Las Vegas, Tony’s old friend Mark Guadagnoli had on multiple occasions tried to reach him on his phone to schedule a visit. Instead he received responses from Elizabeth Pezzello, who was now managing most of Tony’s communications, telling him that Tony was either out of town or unavailable. She didn’t know when he’d be free. A few days after the failed intervention, Mark decided to call the Park City police and request that they do a welfare check. On the phone to a clerk, Mark provided his details, gave the address of Tony’s ranch, and expressed that he was concerned for his friend’s safety. The clerk said they’d send a car out to the address. Thirty minutes later Mark received a call from a Park City police officer who wanted to know who he was, why he wanted the welfare check conducted, the nature of his relationship with Tony, and how long he’d known Tony. Mark answered the questions, adding that he’d known Tony for “less than twenty years.” The officer sounded more annoyed than willing to help, but agreed to call Mark once a wellness check had been done. Hours went by without a response, and Mark decided to call the police station again and leave a message with the clerk. The officer phoned back two hours later and told him that no, he hadn’t conducted the welfare check or gone to the house. Instead, he knew people at the house, and they’d told him everything was okay. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have just gone to the house yourself,” Mark said. The officer told him, “That’s not the way we do it. I already knew these people, and I trust them.” It so happened that Fred Mossler and his wife, Meghan, were also in Park City that day. It was the second time they’d come to check on Tony. Seeing the state Tony was in, this time had been harder than before. After talking with him on the beach, they resolved that he was very ill. When it came time for them to leave, Suzie offered to walk them to their car. As

they neared the car, Suzie turned to them and asked that upon their return to Vegas they please urge people to stop calling in welfare checks. That morning alone, she’d learned of a welfare check request that had been put in from a friend who had known Tony for “less than twenty years.”

Ultimately, it was Jewel who, with her star power, could glide past the guards and Tony’s followers to capture his attention long enough to hold a mirror up to him. Eager to move past the disturbances of the past week, Tony had been anticipating her arrival and was excited to show her around his compound and the world he was building there. When she received the invitation, Jewel was at first reluctant to go. Over text message, Janice Lopez had told her that Tony recently bought a large property, and wanted to host her; it would be a COVID-friendly environment. If she was willing, Tony would send a coach or private plane, Janice told her. Jewel had spent the pandemic at her home in Telluride, Colorado, a town tucked away in the San Juan mountain range, known for its worldclass skiing and unpretentious airs. She spent those months taking long hikes and watching her son canoe across the lake by her home. The last thing she wanted was to leave her bubble of tranquility. But something about the text worried her. Unsure of what to do, she asked her friend and business partner Ryan Wolfington what he thought. “What’s your gut telling you?” Ryan asked. “I’m worried about Tony,” she said. “But I feel like it’s the right thing to do.” Before they left, Ryan called Tyler, whom he had come to know over the years from the work that Jewel did with Zappos, to ask if there was anything they should know before their visit to Park City. “It’s not gonna be what you think,” Tyler said. “You’re gonna have to be really prepared for what you walk into.” With that in mind, Jewel, Ryan, and Aphrah Brokaw, who oversaw operations of Jewel’s holding company, flew to Park City. Arriving at the ranch, the first thing Jewel was struck by was the contingent of security

guards meeting them. It was so unlike the last time they’d seen Tony at his trailer park in Las Vegas, where he’d been there to greet them. Looking toward the compound, they were soon greeted by a group of Tony’s assistants. “It’s so good to have you here,” a member of the welcoming party said to Jewel and her team, grinning at them. At the ranch, they were told that Tony was going through a creative stage and was in the process of finding himself. He’d been supporting the community and individuals; through 10X he’d been trying to motivate people to build businesses to change the world. Tony was waiting for Jewel by the spa, they said. While Jewel went to find him, Ryan and Aphrah were given a tour of the property. When they walked through the house, they noticed a dozen people sitting around seemingly doing nothing; those were court reporters who transcribed conversations around the ranch, they were told. Everyone they encountered seemed to have forced grins pasted across their faces, as if they were welcoming arrivals for a tour around Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. “Tony’s a genius,” said one person. “Tony’s doing really great things,” said another. Hundreds of candles lit the rooms throughout the home, and melted wax covered the floor and window sills. As their tour continued, they noticed that water was gushing from the sinks and showers, even though no one was using them. The sound of running water, they were told, was intended to emulate the sounds of nature, specifically the ambiance of the Amazon jungle. Standing outside an exterior window looking into Tony’s bedroom on the ground floor, they were shown a ten-foot surfboard covered in AstroTurf that balanced on the window sill, serving as a ramp to enter his room. Inside, the room was trashed; the floor was covered in discarded Whip-It canisters. It was hard to ignore how the opulence of the home contrasted with the filth that filled it. Food scraps and dirt littered the floor, along with discarded clothes and misplaced furniture. They were particularly disturbed to see hand-sized clusters of trash covered in candle wax. A closer look revealed that the wax-covered substance was dog feces. Outside, Jewel found Tony sitting next to the pond in the area known as the spa. Walking toward the beach, Jewel saw that the spa was a ditch dug into the side of the bank, shielded by a tattered rag hanging on a clothesline.

Tony was meditating, seated on one of two chairs positioned next to a table. A large bowl filled with discarded Whip-It canisters sat on the table; hundreds of canisters and dozens of cigarette butts lay on the sand. Greeting Jewel, Tony looked around and explained that he often bathed here. The pond itself was where they washed many of the dishes and kitchen utensils, to reinforce a natural way of living. The sight of Tony’s gaunt face was disorienting and became only more so when he began to explain what he was working on. The secret to everything he was doing in Park City, he told Jewel, was world peace. He showed Jewel a Post-it note covered with a scribble of numbers and markings, which he said was an algorithm he’d written to enable him to “scale world peace” within six months.

Reconvening at the carriage house, where they were expecting to stay, Jewel discussed next steps with her team. “As the president of Jewel Inc., it is my obligation to tell you that you being here could compromise you,” Ryan said. “There’s obviously something untoward going on here. There’s clear drug use. This could become a liability.” Jewel looked up at Ryan and sighed. They would stay to help Tony, she told him. Looking around at the house—the filth, the drugs, the sycophants—they became convinced that Tony was going to die if he stayed on this path. They concluded that there seemed to be no one in Tony’s current orbit aware of his fate—or, if they were aware, then they were willingly enabling his demise and being paid for it. Ryan went back to the main house of the ranch with Aphrah, in an attempt to get a better handle on the environment. As they walked to the kitchen on the second floor, Elizabeth greeted them both, and she and Aphrah exchanged phone numbers. Elizabeth then introduced them to Suzie, who told them she owned a wellness business and threw events with Deepak Chopra. Others joined the conversation. At one point, someone told Ryan and Aphrah that if they wanted Tony to donate to Jewel’s nonprofit, Inspiring Children Foundation, all they

needed to do was write a dollar amount on a Post-it. Anything less than $2 million was okay, but anything over would have to go through Tony’s lawyers, they were told. Like a bribe, Jewel thought, when Ryan told her about the offer.

The next night, Tony, Jewel, and a few others gathered in the theater for a screening of one of Tony’s favorite films, the 1941 Frank Sinatra classic Las Vegas Nights. Seated on a lounge, Jewel told Tony about a manuscript she was working on, and mentioned that she had thought about addiction as a topic for the book. In between sips from his Whip-It canister, Tony immediately became agitated. He said that drugs were both mind- and heart-opening. “I’m not worried about me, because I can see through it,” he said. “I’m the 1 percent of people that can use these substances, and they become good. They become a skill.” He went on, “It becomes a value add to my life. But most people, they don’t know how to do that, and we’re gonna teach people how to do that.” Jewel was unmoved. If Tony wanted her to be someone who would agree with him, she told him, she wouldn’t. “That’s why I’ve gotten rid of anybody who comes into my ecosystem and talks about these things in a way that isn’t aligned with what we’re doing,” he said. “Because, you know, people have always doubted what I’m doing.” He’ll get rid of anyone who doesn’t support his drug use, she thought. She resolved that she needed to send a message to Tony and everyone who was living in his Park City world: Tony was going to die, and those around him were being put on notice. Jewel had planned to stay for as long as a week, and before arriving, she’d agreed to do a performance for Tony’s guests. But now the purpose of their stay took on a new meaning. Jewel and her assistants spent their days and evenings speaking with the other guests at the ranch to determine whom they could trust and who was there simply to take from a sick man. As she created the set list for the performance, she thought about how her lyrics now took on a heavier meaning.

Before walking into the living room to perform her set, Jewel and her team were told that the neighbors had been invited to attend the performance. Later, they learned the neighbors had been calling the police and complaining about the disturbance to their community; the security guards, parade of vehicles, and parties had been a rude shock. Jewel’s presence was supposed to legitimize what was happening here to the outside world, her team concluded. For a brief moment, Tony emerged from his bedroom to see Jewel sing, only to retreat again before the neighbors noticed him.

At one point during her stay, Jewel walked out to the front of the ranch to see Tony greeting a group of men. They had arrived in a truck, on the bed of which was fastened a giant octopus sculpture about the size of a sedan. Tony had seen the beast once before at Burning Man and been enamored by its appearance. It had since been on display in Nipton, and Don had arranged for Tony to bring it to the ranch. It was missing two of its tentacles now, but it was just as impressive as he’d remembered. As Jewel watched them unload the sculpture, she heard that one of the men had COVID-19 but had decided to come anyway, so she demanded he stay away from Tony. Her team tried to intervene and influence in other ways, and Ryan tried speaking with Andy. The conversations were shallow and brief. But on the night of her performance, Ryan approached Andy, and told him of their concerns about Tony’s well-being. He explained to him their background in helping folks with mental health problems. After listening quietly, Andy asked, “Can we talk about this privately tomorrow?” The next morning, the day that Jewel was scheduled to leave Park City, her team invited Andy to come speak with her at the carriage house for privacy. Andy arrived with one demand: “I can’t have anybody knowing that we are talking about this. I can’t get kicked out of here because I am the only one looking out for Tony, and anytime somebody tries to do something, the people around him really bad-mouth them, Tony gets paranoid, and then kicks them out of his life.” As the conversation progressed, Jewel and Ryan laid out to Andy their observations and their concerns. They said they believed Tony was in a

drug-induced psychosis. It was reaching a critical juncture, and it was time for doctors to come in to assess Tony. But their main message to Andy was simple: Tony was going to die very soon if no one stepped in. For a few moments Andy looked silently at Jewel and Ryan. Finally he said, “I don’t know what to do. I need your help. Can you help me get professionals or get somebody or do something? Someone tried to get doctors here,” he said, referring to the failed intervention attempt by Elisa Hallerman. “Tony has banned my parents—I’m not even allowed to talk to them. If they find out I’m talking to my parents, Tony won’t have anything to do with me.” They ended the conversation with Andy agreeing to keep them updated on Tony’s condition as they started efforts to get Tony professional help. As Jewel and her team left the ranch, they stopped at the top of the driveway, where there was a huddle of security guards at the entry gate. “Who’s in charge?” Jewel asked. One of the guards stepped forward. “Do you know what your oath is?” she continued. “Your oath as a security or a police officer is to honor and protect, do no harm. To help people, to protect people from doing harm to themselves and others. “There’s people taking advantage of Tony in there. There’s dangerous behavior. He’s not being protected. He’s being taken advantage of. And I’m putting you on notice that someone’s going to die in there. He’s gonna light that house on fire.” She held the guard’s gaze. “If anything happens to my friend Tony Hsieh, I’m gonna hold you 100 percent accountable.”

By Labor Day weekend, barely a night had gone by when music hadn’t been pounding across the pond, cars weren’t lining the street, and shouts weren’t echoing through the neighborhood. The night of cocktails and Jewel’s performance had done little to stop residents like Bill Ciraco from calling the police with noise complaints. Some nights people were gathered on the ranch’s beach watching movies on an outdoor screen, surrounded by hundreds of candles and tiki torches. On other nights, neighbors had been horrified to see giant flames spitting above the trees from what they later discovered were hot air balloon baskets.

On the night of September 8, police were called to the house shortly after 11 p.m., after yet another neighbor said that “music was blasting” from the property. When the police arrived, the music had been shut off, but the lead officer, Leslie Welker, insisted that this time they needed to speak with Tony Hsieh in person. She had been at the house multiple times now, and the noise complaints hadn’t been stopped by only talking with the security guards. The owner of the security company, Shawn Kane, approached Welker and said that Tony was sleeping and unavailable. Welker looked over her shoulder and noted the fact that most of the lights were on in the house, and inside she could see a “large” group of people. “It appeared that Kane and his employees were trying to stop us from going down to the house and trying to make contact with Hsieh,” Welker wrote in her police report later. Sensing that they were being had, Welker and her partner walked past the guards and down the sloping driveway toward the front door of the home. Through the windows on either side of the door, they could see people milling about. After half an hour, Shawn came to the door, this time with two men who identified themselves as Don and Andy. They told Welker that they were in charge of the house, in addition to Tony, who wasn’t available. They complained that neighbors had been harassing them; they had only been singing karaoke. Don provided his contact information when Welker asked. Andy refused to offer more than his first name. As the officers went back out into the darkness, they walked by the giant octopus, lying like a sentry to the dark world Tony had built.

CHAPTER 26

ON THE EDGE OF THE ETHERWORLD

A decade before, Tony Hsieh had been on the cusp of national celebrity, a newly certified tech tycoon with a grand ambition to create his own world in Las Vegas, a world where the opportunity to be happy was core to its existence. He had just traveled the country with his Delivering Happiness memoir in hand, offering a template for how people, companies, and the world could be happy. Fans were introduced through his recollections to an intensely curious child wunderkind who built a life that thrived on human connection. He spoke of experiences that had shaped him, and how they informed his decisions. Toward the end of his book, Tony urged his readers to reflect by asking two questions: What is your goal in life? And why? Tony had often recounted that one of his first memories as a child was of catching fireflies in a jar. During a Zappos all-hands meeting one year, Tony took to the stage with the motivational speaker Simon Sinek, a former advertising executive who had sold books on how to influence human behavior, among other things, and had a hugely successful run on the TED Talk circuit. Tony’s first memory was significant, Sinek told the audience, because every person’s worldview is a product of the experiences they had when they were young. Tony “sees everybody as a firefly,” Sinek said, sitting next to Tony on an oversized box, their legs dangling beneath them. “He sees the entire world as people with bright lights. He doesn’t distinguish who are the bright ones and who are the dim ones; everybody has a bright light and everybody is out there doing their thing.

“If you put them in a container,” Sinek went on, “where all of their brightness comes together, you create a flashlight. You can actually light a path for somebody else. And I firmly believe that when you are at your best, that is what you are doing with Zappos.” The message could hardly be limited to Zappos, and in his bestselling book Start with Why, Sinek writes that inspiration is one of two ways to influence human behavior. It takes time and hard work, but in the end it is more likely to result in loyalty, love, and a shared vision. The ecosystem Tony had built in Las Vegas had begun as a self-contained community of strivers and doers, bound by the goal of seeking and achieving happiness. Just by asking near-strangers a simple question—“If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”—Tony had inspired hundreds of people to chase their dreams, building businesses and experiences overnight, and changing lives along the way. Time and again, Tony had used his money to inspire others, from Natalie Young’s first restaurant to Rehan Choudhry’s vision of Life Is Beautiful. In essence, Tony had been doing the same thing since he was a child: finding lights, collecting them, and then inspiring them to illuminate a path forward for others. Inspiration can be futile, though, and somewhere along the way in Tony’s sprawling Las Vegas community, his ability to inspire fell to the inevitability of human conflict, leaving those in his village desperate for his validation. It was something he was often unable to give, and with few requests other than for more money, the singular goal of happiness gave way to a sense that it wasn’t happiness everyone was chasing after all. Perhaps it was security. At one point, it seemed, Tony had stopped searching for happiness, too. The other way to influence others, Sinek writes, is manipulation. And while Tony’s ability to inspire was a feature of him at his best, by the time he arrived in Park City, his dreams had been reimagined by a mind decaying by the day, and he’d created a new world whose citizens were often motivated by greed. A world of extravagant homes far from his trailer park, filled with people who hated one another but said yes to him, knowing that more fortunes were on the way. Rather than pushing people to chase their dreams, Tony had used his wealth to goad compliance. There were efforts to curb his behavior by some who stayed to help, sure. Efforts to bring in doctors and therapists, and to deny his most

outlandish financial escapades, which would have rendered him broke. But toward the end, his mother, his father, Fred, and Alfred—people who had said no over the years, no matter the cost—were all gone. Like wealthy geniuses afflicted by drug addiction before him, Tony Hsieh was on an island of his own making, one where his delusions had replaced his reality. There was no happiness or inspiration here in Park City, only money. Perhaps it was the fear of being voted off Tony’s island that kept people close to him. Maybe they were motivated by a will to help him, or a desire to take money from him, or both. But as days turned into months of living alongside this version of Tony, there could be no illusions about what those in Park City were a part of. And the music didn’t stop. It got louder, even as the sounds of his former life faded. In late August, Tony bought a convoy of tour buses for a cross-country voyage. He came up with the idea that buses were the transportation of the future, and he believed he could get people like Elon Musk to invest in a bus convoy venture. All on Tony’s dime, the purpose of the trip was to drive Rachael Brown to New London, Connecticut, where she’d just purchased a home. But the timing of the trip coincided with another important task. Tony was aware that he was supposed to sign documents to confirm his resignation from Zappos. Suzie, who was not going on the tour, initially asked Michelle to deliver the documents to Tony. But Michelle was only going on part of the bus tour, so she was never sent the documents. Instead, Elizabeth Pezzello was tasked with delivering them to Tony. A few days later, on Monday, August 24, 2020, the company announced that Tony was stepping down from Zappos. The company’s chief operating officer, Kedar Deshpande, released a clinical-sounding statement: “We want to thank Tony for his 20 years of work on behalf of Zappos customers, and we wish him well in his retirement.” Immediately after the announcement, Michelle’s phone rang. It was Andy on the line, and he needed her to track all the news stories that were being written about Tony’s retirement. It appeared that the timing of the announcement had taken Tony by surprise. It had also deeply upset him, and it remained unclear to many of his friends whether he had actually signed the documents or if Zappos, recognizing an impossibly deteriorating situation, had made the executive decision to remove him.

Tony resolved only to keep moving in the same direction. One week in September, Justin told him that he only had $12 million to his name—a false figure meant to encourage him to rein in his spending. Soon after, with a hefty supply of nitrous canisters in tow, Tony took a dozen people on a private jet to Alaska to meet with Brock Pierce, the former child-actorturned-crypto-billionaire who was running an independent campaign for U.S. president. During a talk at the Anchorage hotel where they were staying, Brock detailed his journey through spirituality, touched on the multiverse, and discussed with Tony whether the Illuminati were real. When Brock was finished, Tony told those gathered that he was giving each of them $1 million to pursue their own spiritual journeys—it seemed to be fate he’d brought twelve people with him, he told them. Justin would be responsible for distributing the funds. (Justin didn’t follow up, and Tony didn’t ask about it again.) Finally there was an excursion five hours south of Park City to a sprawling compound near St. George, Utah, called Holmstead Ranch Resort, which was for sale. Arriving on a tour bus, the group marveled at the size of the property and its numerous cabins, which came complete with an idyllic lake and an amphitheater. Tony envisioned turning it into his own theme park or event space, something like his very own Disneyland. While Suzie negotiated the sale price with the owner, Tony told Justin that he could use the property to launch events linked to Life Is Beautiful, and talked with Andy and Don about hosting a Rufus Du Sol concert there. But the excursions and events served as little more than distractions from the fact that Tony was on a wretched path, and it was becoming impossible for those orbiting around him to ignore that they were part of his journey. A week after Jewel left Tony’s world, a letter had arrived at the ranch, penned by the musician. Standing in his fiefdom, Tony had called together a group of people to view the letter, including Rachael Brown and Michelle, and asked someone to read it out loud. Hi Tony, It was great seeing you. I feel compelled to write: I am going to be blunt.

I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. I think you are taking too many drugs that cause you to disassociate. Your intelligence is formidable, but I see you creating rationalizations that are ludicrous and medically unsound, and the people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself. Your body cannot take not sleeping. And the amount of N2O you are doing is not natural. You will not hack sleep and you will not outsmart nature. Your goal of creating a new country is amazing, but you are not in a state to execute it. When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble. You are in trouble, Tony. I cherish you & can’t in good conscience not speak up. Anyone who sees you would be worried. It is not healthy or sane. If the world could see how you are living, they would not see you as a tech visionary, they would see you as a drug addicted man who is a cliché. And that’s not how you should go down or be known. Please don’t be like the stereotype of a billionaire who surrounds himself with yes-men and goes from eccentric to madness—but never sees the line that is crossed because he won’t listen to anyone that loves him. Maybe people are too polite or need too much money from you to tell you that the only harm to you right now is yourself. Please get sober. Prove that it is your brilliance that can pull off the impossible, and not the drugs. If you can only create and be brilliant when you are high, then it is not you anyway. It’s the plant speaking through you and anyone can be that. And I believe you are more than that. Your talent is for human connection. For creating culture for humans to thrive in. Not velocity. Everyone has their talent, don’t throw yours away because you are comparing yourself to someone else … you can’t connect when you are dissociating or high. You

cannot connect to anyone. You are rambling and not making sense, but you think you are. I need to be clear. You sound like a crazy person when you are talking and no one seems to be telling you. It’s because you are also very smart. And they are used to you being eccentric. What you are saying isn’t smart. It’s mental. The brilliance for creating connection is killed by the fantasy world you are living in. You can’t even connect with me or anyone who comes to the house. It’s sad. I find it incredibly sad and I don’t think this is your time to die. You made some sort of promise to humanity when you were young, to solve complex problems and create connection. You did that but now you have lost your way. The wolf is lost out on the edges of the ether-worlds. You can not help the pack from where you are. No one worth their salt will take you seriously right now. Please get grounded. If you want to save this planet, come back to earth and get to work in a way that will make a difference. I say this with love, and as possibly the only person in your circle who is not on your pay roll. I am here to help in any way I can. J Tony asked Michelle to post a photo of the letter on his social media accounts. Fighting back tears, she said no. But for weeks, the letter was affixed to a window overlooking the pond, for all to see.

CHAPTER 27

BLIZZY

“We’re going to Hawaii!” Elizabeth Pezzello exclaimed. Alongside her fiancé, Brett Gorman, she was standing in front of a screen clicking through a PowerPoint presentation. A few others stood around the garden outside Tony’s bedroom window. As one slide shifted to the next, Elizabeth and Brett showed a beautiful mansion on Maui, proposing a long weekend trip before Thanksgiving. As they scrolled through the slides, options for different-sized Gulfstream jets appeared on the screen, along with corresponding pricing options. Since Tony had taken them on as assistants, Elizabeth and Brett had become somewhat of a power couple in Park City. Many in Park City had bristled at how the pair had worked their way into Tony’s inner orbit. But they controlled much of Tony’s outgoing communication and served as gatekeepers to those who met with him. They had assumed the master bedroom of the ranch and had hired a legion of their own assistants to help them complete a list of seemingly nonsensical tasks, including arranging for their own dog to be cleaned and producing a daily newsletter called Blizzy Ranch Daily News. Often at night, they would go into town for expensive dinners. They had also found mutual benefit in aligning themselves with Andy, counseling him as he feuded with Suzie and Mimi. Considering the trips of the past few months, their Hawaii idea might not have seemed too far-fetched. But Tony was particularly unstable. Just days before, he had been taken to the hospital after complaining that he thought his blood had turned to metal. It would have been the best opportunity yet to get Tony admitted had he not grown impatient while

waiting to be processed in the ER and demanded that his friends, including Andy, Don, Janice, and Justin, return him to the ranch. A small glimmer of hope had arrived when Don convinced Tony to start taking nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, a brain supplement that can help improve cognitive function. A nurse had been at the ranch administering the supplement to Tony via an IV drip for several hours a day, and some people had remarked that Tony seemed more clear-eyed after the sessions. Miraculously, he had stopped doing nitrous oxide as a result, and elements of his old self had begun to shine through in conversation; he was lucid and laughing. Carting him away again on a private jet would only disrupt whatever limited will Tony might have had to continue taking the supplement. As Elizabeth and Brett scrolled through dollar sign after dollar sign on the PowerPoint presentation, some people looked on in disgust.

But Elizabeth and Brett got their way: Hawaii would be one of several stops on another whirlwind tour. Along with Tony, an assistant, Andy, Rachael Brown, a musician named Daniel Park, the NAD nurse with her IV drip in tow, and Tony’s dog, Blizzy, they returned to Connecticut at the start of November to hang out at Rachael’s house in New London for a couple of days. Janice Lopez was among those who had stayed behind at the ranch to try to clean up the place and get things in order. Before the group left, she had hugged Andy, feeling comforted that Tony would be in good hands if his brother was by his side. He promised to stay in contact. Only a few days went by before the group’s plans changed. The national election had come and gone, with Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump, and Brock Pierce was looking to celebrate his birthday and the end of his campaign, and to meet with friends who had supported him. While the group had intended to stay in Connecticut, they decided to make a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to attend Brock’s birthday party. They were en route to the airport when Janice, back in Utah, received a call. It was a FaceTime from Andy. He was holding the phone as Tony’s

face appeared on the screen. Tony was leaning against the wall of the coach, holding a Whip-It canister. “Did you get my text?” Tony asked. She hadn’t seen it, but smiled as her screen lit up: “R2D2 needs C3PO.” “Come to Puerto Rico,” he said. “I can’t,” she replied, “I have the kids.” Tony pushed. Could she trust Don to look after them? “I promised them more time, T, so they’re here to hold down the fort,” she said. Tony paused for a moment, then looked around, as if digging for a memory. “We’ve known each other a long time,” he said, thinking of the Branson School and those moments of silence in the theater. “Remember when we used to just hang in the rafters?” Aside from the fact that he was holding a Whip-It canister, something was off, Janice thought. Tony only ever became nostalgic when they were alone. Tony’s demeanor became serious. “Who do you trust?” “What are you talking about?” she said. “Like who do you trust around here in this ecosystem?” Janice looked at Don, and Andy through the phone, and chuckled. “Well, I trust these two yahoos,” she said. “And I trust you.” Tony looked into the camera as his voice fell to a whisper. “Don’t trust anyone.” Then, in a murmur, he repeated it again. “Don’t trust anyone.”

Janice received infrequent updates from Tony’s entourage from then on, and her worry only grew deeper when others told her that Tony was trashing the hotel room, and that he’d locked himself in the bathroom with Blizzy. The next morning she received another call, this one more disturbing. It was from a woman named Karla Ballard, a tech entrepreneur who had run alongside Brock as his vice presidential pick. She was in San Juan and had just gotten off a FaceTime call with Tony. He had called in distress from his hotel room, and now Karla was panicked.

“What’s going on with Blizzy?” Karla said. “You do realize I’m not there?” Janice said. “I didn’t go to Puerto Rico.” “Yeah, but I can’t get hold of anyone else,” Karla said. Tony had been frantic, Karla recounted, telling her that Blizzy was not well. The dog is sick, he had said. Judging by his agitation, Karla thought Blizzy could be dying, but Tony wasn’t offering more details, nor would he show her the dog. When she suggested calling a veterinarian to the hotel room, Tony said no. He was adamant. Then the call ended. “Is he okay?” Janice asked of Blizzy. “Is he alive? Is he dead?” “He’s alive,” Karla said. “But not well.” Though not for long. Soon after, when the others finally arrived in Tony’s hotel room, Blizzy’s body was saturated with water and bloated. The dog was dead.

The group flew back to Connecticut, bringing the animal’s body in a cooler. In the backyard of Rachael’s home, they held a small ceremony as Blizzy was buried in a hole dug in the ground. Tony was inconsolable, and for the next few days he seemed lost in a stupor, inhaling from his Whip-It flask constantly. Like before, he rearranged furniture in the home, lit dozens of candles, and left a trail of nitrous oxide canisters in his wake, much to Rachael’s chagrin. After midnight on November 16, a fire alarm shrieked through the home, sending an automatic signal to the local firehouse. A crew of firefighters arrived, but left the property after being told it was a false alarm. Twenty minutes after the crew left, however, another fire alarm summoned them back to the home, and this time the firefighters insisted on being let in. While the man who answered the door protested their entry, inside they found a room hazed in smoke, melted plastic on the stove, and some cardboard that was hot to the touch. They put the burned items in a sink and soaked them while the smoke dissipated, and then left again. By the next evening, before they were due to embark on Elizabeth and Brett’s proposed Hawaiian getaway, Rachael had had enough and ordered

Tony to leave her home. It was approaching midnight, and the flight to Maui was due to leave in a few hours. He could have slept at a nearby hotel, or even in one of the vehicles on standby. But as they yelled at each other, Tony marched outside into the freezing air and stood on the beach at the rear of Rachael’s home. She technically didn’t own the beach, he told her, so she couldn’t stop him from spending the night there. Andy and Brett came outside to mediate, and then Tony pointed to a shed attached to the side of the house. He would sleep there, he pronounced. Just as they had done time and again before, those around Tony relented.

CHAPTER 28

THANKSGIVING

Vernon Skau had reason to hope that Tony would survive that evening. Arriving at the house minutes after Tony had been taken away by paramedics, New London’s fire marshal checked in with Tom Curcio, the fire chief. There had been a fire in the shed, Curcio told him. Walking around the scene, Skau spoke to the other fire investigators, who told him that the paramedics had been able to resuscitate Tony in the back of the ambulance. At the hospital, the machines had detected a pulse. Tony was still alive, and despite the fire, he’d made it out with barely a scratch; there were no serious burns on his body aside from superficial tissue damage on his shoulder. Skau, who has a round, welcoming face that betrays a no-nonsense approach to his work, set about interviewing those at the scene to figure out what had happened. In his twenty years as a firefighter with the New London Fire Department, he had learned that to get the most accurate record of what happened, witnesses had to be separated and interviewed immediately. While he spoke with Rachael Brown, police and firefighters jotted down details provided by the others, who were interviewed in vehicles parked in front of the home. A picture quickly emerged. After the argument with Rachael, Tony had gone to the shed to wait until it was time to leave for the flight to Hawaii. It was freezing outside, and Tony had tried to stay warm, first by covering himself with a blanket and then by lighting pieces of paper and a Ziploc bag on fire. Surveillance footage from a camera affixed to the top of the shed showed Brett and an assistant frequently checking on him. Then, at one

point, the assistant had dragged in a propane space heater to try to warm the space. But a glaring question remained: What was Tony doing when the fire started? At 3:15 a.m., the surveillance footage showed that Tony had pushed open the shed door and dragged the propane heater outside, only to bring it back into the shed a few moments later. At this time, something was overheating in the shed, and a trail of smoke and small embers could be seen drifting out. Then, inexplicably, after Tony pulled the door shut behind him, the sound of a deadbolt latching shut could be heard. A few minutes later, Andy had approached the shed and knocked, telling Tony it was time to leave for the flight, evidently unaware of the danger his brother was in. Come back in five minutes, Tony had told him. Two minutes later, the carbon monoxide alarm started shrieking, a loud hissing sound could be heard, and smoke was billowing from the shed. As Elizabeth called 911 and fire crews were dispatched to the property, Andy, Brett, and the assistant had tried breaking down the locked door, without success. From within the shed, they could hear a loud hissing noise. Vernon’s early hypothesis was that a tragic accident had occurred. He considered the role of the propane space heater. Given its proximity to the source of the fire, and the abundance of black soot nearby, it seemed evident that the tank had become overheated by coming into contact with some sort of heat source, and then forced the relief valve to open—as it is designed to do under pressure, and likely the source of the loud hissing sound—releasing propane gas that came into contact with an open flame within the shed. But it was unclear if the heater itself had been the source of heat that triggered the tank to release gas. Perhaps the heater had come into contact with some sort of combustible, like paper or other storage items in the shed, and then ignited. Though this theory seemed somewhat unlikely: when Tony had brought the heater outside, the surveillance footage appeared to show that the heater was not working at the time. Another theory, that burning cigarettes or the marijuana pipe lying on the ground could have ignited one of the objects scattered across the floor, like the blanket, also seemed unlikely. Skau knew that cigarettes rarely start fires and can take anywhere between twenty-two minutes and five hours to ignite another object, by which point they are likely burned out anyway.

The presence of candles in the shed could also have started the fire, providing a naked flame to ignite a combustible. Several candles were lying around the area where the fire had started, and earlier in the night, one of the candles had been burning the blanket when the assistant asked Tony to extinguish it before it caught fire. However, a gray basket on the other side of the shed, away from where the fire started, presented a final potential explanation, one more troubling. Inside it were pieces of burned paper, which appeared to be Post-it notes. Closer to the source of the fire, a Ziploc bag also held pieces of burned paper. It would be impossible to determine Tony’s reason for lighting the pieces of paper, but their presence suggested he might have either recklessly or intentionally started the fire. There also was no clear explanation for why the shed door had locked once Tony closed it for the last time. Once the fire started, if the release of propane gas hadn’t rendered Tony unresponsive, the cluster of Fernet bottles, Whip-It canisters, and a marijuana pipe indicated he’d been heavily inebriated as the flames engulfed the shed. The only person who could provide answers was Tony. A few hours after arriving at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in New London, he’d been airlifted by helicopter sixty miles west down the Connecticut coast to Bridgeport Hospital, to the state’s burn center, where he’d been transferred to an intensive care unit. Once he arrived back at the firehouse the following afternoon, Vernon called the hospital, and requested an update on Tony’s condition. The response was limited: critical but stable condition. What wasn’t clear to Vernon, or to anyone outside the hospital, was the extent of any internal damage Tony had sustained. The first effects of smoke inhalation come within seconds, bringing an onset of nausea and loss of vision. Once carbon monoxide fills the lungs, it attaches to red blood cells, starving the body’s organs of oxygen. Death can occur within minutes, and even if the victim survives, the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning all but guarantee brain damage. Every day, once at the start of his shift, and once at the end, Vernon called the hospital for an update. The response was always the same: critical but stable. With each call, Vernon reported Tony’s status back to Tom Curcio. With a short crop of brown hair and a bushy mustache that makes

him immediately identifiable around town as the fire chief, Tom was vaguely aware of Tony Hsieh: his wife was a loyal Zappos customer and had been buying shoes from the website for years. She later bought him a copy of Delivering Happiness. “I couldn’t put the book down,” Tom recalled. “It just seemed like wherever he jumped to, wherever he went, he took an interest in that town or city, and he did a lot for it.” As Tony’s days in the hospital wore on, it became clearer that if he was going to make it out alive, he likely wouldn’t emerge the same person, and Vernon was beginning to sense that he might never learn how the fire started. The morning after Thanksgiving was the start of Tony’s ninth day in the hospital. Outside of his family and some of his friends, the world had no idea that Tony Hsieh had been in a coma for over a week. Vernon, who’d spent the previous day surrounded by his children and grandchildren, called the burn unit in Bridgeport from his home. The reply from the hospital staffer was different this time: “He’s just passed.”

CHAPTER 29

THE AFTERMATH

The day after Thanksgiving, Michelle was relaxing in her living room in Milwaukee with her boyfriend and daughter when the phone rang. It was Jamie Naughton, Tony’s longtime confidant from Zappos. Michelle was anticipating good news, as she had been hearing the same report as Vernon Skau: critical but stable. In the days before, a message had been sent out to friends, stating that Tony’s vitals were improving. But the call didn’t go as Michelle expected. “He—he died,” Jamie said. Michelle froze. Unable to process what she was hearing, she emotionally shut down. “He died,” Michelle repeated out loud. Her daughter looked at her and burst into tears. She had little time to process the news. A few hours later, she received a call from a woman named Puoy Premsrirut who had been working as Tony’s attorney for the last few months. She was with Tony’s family. “We’d like for you to write the post to tell the world,” Puoy said. The next day, a message was posted on Tony’s social media pages at 9:30 a.m.: Today we are saddened to share the news of Tony’s passing. We can only imagine what he would say if he were here to announce this to you all, but we envision his message would resonate that: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy is the ability to bring about change. Tony has given energy to so many people. For those who knew him well, you knew of his childlike wonder; his love for experiences and relationships over material things. Let us all feel Tony’s energy and use it to deliver happiness.

The outpouring of grief was immediate. From President Bill Clinton to Ivanka Trump, thousands of people took to social media to share memories, photos, and videos of a man who was universally admired. Jeff Bezos was among the peers, employees, and complete strangers who came together in a mass of voices on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, each reciting stories of lives changed by Tony’s vision and generosity—cementing a legacy of humanity rarely left behind by business leaders. “I treasure every conversation I ever had with Tony Hsieh,” Clinton wrote. “He was fascinating, brilliant, and inspiring, and his unwavering efforts to spread happiness—and enthusiasm for mentoring young entrepreneurs—touched countless lives for the better.” Ivanka Trump posted a collage of photos taken with Tony over the years. One photo was the image of them standing in front of the White House, taken years before Ivanka became the First Daughter. In another photo, Jared Kushner and Jen Taler are standing with Ivanka and Tony on a casino floor, laughing while eating hot dogs. “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss of my dear friend Tony Hsieh,” she wrote. “Tony was a deeply original thinker always challenging me to reject conformity & follow my heart. Tony was driven by the mission of delivering happiness & brought joy to all who knew him. Rest In Peace Tony.” In Jeff Bezos’s tribute to Tony on social media, the Amazon founder wrote, “The world lost you way too soon. Your curiosity, vision, and relentless focus on customers leave an indelible mark. You will be missed by so many, Tony. Rest In Peace.” Many of the public figures who wrote tributes to Tony had little to no knowledge of what the last twelve months of his life had been like. One person who did was Jewel, who posted a twelve-minute video elegy to Tony in the days after his passing. “I sat here for a long time before I pushed Record, trying to figure out what to say,” she started slowly. “I’ve seen a lot of posts which are beautiful but I haven’t really been able to bring myself to post.” The singer paused and looked down at the guitar on her lap. “The brain can’t comprehend why you can’t just call that person anymore. The heart can’t understand why you can’t just hug that person anymore,” she said quietly, fighting back tears. She then recounted how she’d first met Tony on Necker Island, and the conversations they’d had over the years. “I remember he asked me what

was my definition of success,” she said. “I can’t remember what my answer was. But I remember his—his answer was the willingness to lose it all. “He really brought a lot of love and joy into the world. His idea of collision points—again, mimicking nature, it was quantum. That molecular level of these atoms colliding and creating new things and that’s what he was creating with the Downtown Project. How cool was that? “We were very lucky to have known Tony,” she continued. “And I’m sad and sorry that he’s gone. I’m sure his cosmic spirit is floating around here so I would like to sing.” She then turned to her guitar and started to sing “Over the Rainbow.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she sang, “When all the world is a hopeless jumble and the raindrops tumble all around, heaven opens a magic lane.”

In downtown Las Vegas, emotions ran high. What started as sorrow and despair rapidly morphed into shock and anger, as more and more stories of Tony’s physical and mental decline over the last twelve months came into view. There was also an underlying fear of what would happen to the entire community now that Tony was dead, especially when it emerged that he had died without a will. Tony had picked up so many bills, millions of dollars every year, for so many ventures in Las Vegas since the birth of the Downtown Project. Tony hadn’t ended up selling his real estate portfolio while he was alive, but instead had agreed to another deal Justin had brought him in his final months. In the weeks before his death, Tony had instead closed on a deal to pay Andrew Donner’s company $65 million to buy the Zappos headquarters. Perhaps a final protest to the company he had spent two decades building, only to be unceremoniously farewelled. Now residents of his neighborhood wondered if Richard and Andy, who had been named co-administrators of Tony’s estate by Clark County District Court, would sell the estate’s property portfolio to the next opportunistic developer, turning downtown Las Vegas into another swampland of highrise luxury hotels and loud casinos. Zapponians, meanwhile, feared for their company’s future. Would Zappos, the company that was so crucial to

Tony’s legacy, get hacked into parts and disappear into Amazon’s corporate crypt? For those outside of Las Vegas, it was hard to come to terms with Tony’s passing without an explanation for his death. How did a seemingly healthy and massively successful forty-six-year-old tech visionary die so suddenly? Some wondered if he’d had a terminal illness that he had kept secret. One rumor was that Tony had been kidnapped by the mob for ransom and his death was the result of the kidnapping gone wrong. Without answers, people had started to fill in the gaps with outlandish theories and musings. The reality was worse. Many who knew Tony but had lost touch with him in recent years echoed a similar sentiment when they heard about the events of his last year: “I wish I had been there to help him.” What became clear was that the community Tony had built from the ground up had failed to come together in his time of need. Despite the various efforts to get Tony help, they were not coordinated and were ultimately futile. It was partly Tony’s own doing—his paranoia had spread and bred feelings of mistrust among the entire group. Michelle admitted that, at Tony’s request, she had ignored Tyler’s calls for periods of time when she was in Park City, having bought into the idea that Tyler had gone too far. “It was like groupthink,” Michelle recalled, pointing to the psychological phenomenon common in cults that drives people to desire conformity within a group. “It was the only explanation.”

There had also been vast sums of money on the line, which blinded some in Park City to the fact that Tony was slowly killing himself. Just how much money came into view shortly after his death. Alongside her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, Mimi filed the first lawsuit in February, three months after the fatal fire, in Clark County Superior Court. “Mimi Pham had been Tony Hsieh’s assistant, right hand person, and friend for the seventeen years preceding his death,” her initial filing read. The complaint stated that the two were so close that Tony had used Mimi’s cellphone as his own, that he had put cable and utility bills in her name, and that they shared the same address on their driver’s licenses. “Unlike the

relationship that existed between Tony Hsieh and Mimi Pham, neither Richard Hsieh nor Andrew Hsieh had a close personal relationship with Tony Hsieh, even though they are blood relatives. In fact, although Andrew Hsieh moved to Park City, Utah, to live with Tony Hsieh in the calendar year 2020, that is not an indication of a familial bond as he was offered $1,000,000 annual salary in exchange for said move.” Mimi sued the estate and the Hsieh family for $130 million. She hired high-profile Vegas lawyers David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, whose previous clients included Paris Hilton, Bruno Mars, and Robert Durst. In Mimi’s creditor’s claims to the estate, she stated she was owed $9 million as part of the fees related to managing Park City properties and the documentary film company venture. She sued for anticipated profit from the film company, claiming she was entitled to $75 million. Finally, she and Roberto said they were owed an additional $25 million for “interference with the contract and the prospective economic advantage.” The next week, Puoy Premsrirut filed court documents stating she was owed $360,000 in legal fees. Two months later, in April, Tony Lee sued the estate and the Hsieh family for $7 million for breach of contract, claiming he was promised an annual $1.5 million salary for five years. “At no time during Tony Hsieh’s life did Andy Hsieh or Richard Hsieh ever challenge or question the validity of the Guaranteed Contract,” Lee said. He also questioned the intentions of Tony’s younger brother in his lawsuit, labeling Andy as an enabler of Tony’s drug and alcohol use. “It was Andy that arranged the purchase of thousands of canisters of nitrous oxide at an alarming rate for Tony Hsieh’s continued use when others who cared for Mr. Hsieh refused to do so,” read Lee’s complaint. Lee claimed that Andy “plied Tony Hsieh with alcohol” and attempted to divert millions of dollars from Tony’s account to his own. Mark Evensvold, who had shown up in Park City with no mandate but to make up a role, sued the estate next, for $12.5 million, two months after Tony Lee’s lawsuit. “A man who supposedly had business dealings with the late tech mogul … leaves more than one question unanswered,” read a local Las Vegas news report about the case. The complaint included a transcript of the conversation with Tony, typed by the court reporter, and a copy of the contract scrawled on the Post-it note as evidence of a legitimate agreement.

Several months later, both Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger filed claims against the Hsieh estate for alleged money owed. Justin filed his creditor’s claim “out of an abundance of caution,” the filing claimed. Justin said he was “justly due and owned” a 27.7 percent equity interest in Life Is Beautiful. Suzie and her company, Wellth Collective, sued the Hsieh family for $8.7 million for work that she did for Tony in Park City. Her lawsuit also included a copy of the Post-it note that detailed the Magic Castle project, which Suzie said was supposed to receive $5 million from Tony. It also added that when Tony agreed to his contracts with Suzie, he “had clarity in what he had asked” her to do. By the end of Tony’s chapter in Park City, it later emerged, the balance on his line of credit was more than $250 million.

In the months after Tony’s death, the family largely kept quiet. Only one statement, from Richard, was released shortly after Tony’s passing: “We are so deeply grateful for the outpouring of love and respect shown in the wake of Tony’s passing. There is no human that did not fall in love with Tony’s humanity, which is why so many have been left heartbroken.” But with the family’s silence, a vacuum formed, and the debates and rumors around Andy’s role in Park City slowly came to a boil of confusion and outrage. The lawsuits from Mimi and Tony Lee painted Andy as a Judas-like character who took advantage of his older brother on his darkest days and kept him sick by fueling him with a never-ending supply of drugs and alcohol. Revelations of the $1 million annual salary and images posted to social media of him attending film premieres and walking the red carpet with Elizabeth and Brett to celebrate the release of projects by XTR reinforced to some onlookers an image of a man reaping riches from his deceased brother. What that narrative disregarded, however, was that for the last months of Tony’s life, Andy was secretly in constant contact with Jewel and Ryan Wolfington. The communications were clandestine because Andy feared that Tony would throw him out of his inner circle, as he had done with his mom, dad, and Tyler. The singer arranged a consultation for Andy with Dr.

Blaise Aguirre, a child and adolescent psychiatrist whose patients included highly suicidal individuals, so that Andy could better handle Tony’s deteriorating state. With Dr. Aguirre’s advice, the plan was for Andy to somehow facilitate a hospital visit for Tony, which could then set into motion the family’s plans to put Tony under a conservatorship and get him into a recovery facility. But every state has its own laborious process for setting up a conservatorship, and given Tony’s constantly changing whereabouts, it made the plan—which would have required a doctor to declare Tony unfit to handle his own affairs, as well as a judge to confirm the ruling—difficult to execute. At one point, the family had doctors and attorneys in Nevada, Utah, and Connecticut on standby. But in the end, the effort was futile. Some viewed Andy as the ultimate grifter who helped lead his brother to his death. Others saw Andy as an unwilling participant, forced to play by the twisted rules in Park City in order to stay close to his brother and not be excommunicated. Many wondered whether the events of the last twelve months would lead to a fissure in the Hsieh family, most notably between Richard and Andy, who were now co-administering Tony’s legacy. They got part of the answer in the fall of 2021, nearly eight months after Tony’s passing, when the Hsiehs filed a scorched-earth response to Mimi’s and Tony Lee’s lawsuits. The family hired Vivian Thoreen, a high-powered attorney based in Los Angeles whose clients included Jamie Spears, the father of pop icon Britney Spears. The legal team asked some of Tony’s closest confidants—from Tyler to Suzie—to sit for hours-long depositions and recount the events of 2020. In a court filing, the family issued blanket denials of nearly every allegation that Mimi made against Andy. The family accused Mimi, her boyfriend, Roberto, and Tony Lee of having “coordinated, influenced, and directed Tony’s activities in and around Park City, and deliberately profited from their insider status and Tony’s vulnerability.” The family laid bare Tony’s struggles and demons well before 2020. “Despite his professional successes, Tony struggled with significant social anxiety,” the family wrote in the filing. “Tony’s mind moved at an incredible speed and Tony described using alcohol as a social lubricant to alleviate his social anxiety and to allow him to better communicate and make deeper connections to the people around him.” The family revealed

that Tony had prescriptions for Adderall (to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), Xanax (to treat anxiety and panic disorders), and Ambien (to treat insomnia). The Hsiehs also stated that Tony suffered from depression. According to the family, ketamine was Tony’s attempt to find a healthier alternative to his alcohol and prescription medication consumption. But “it immediately caused Tony to suffer from disorganized delusions and delusions of grandeur. While Tony was known as a man with elaborate ideas, those same ideas while Tony was under the influence of Ketamine were delusional and destructive. Among other effects, the delusions caused Tony to believe he needed to consume more Ketamine in order to solve the problems existing within the delusion.” Charting the events from Tony’s ketamine usage at the Summit conference in Los Angeles through Park City in great detail, the court filing documented how mentally debilitated Tony had become and that anyone who had engaged with him in business in the months after were taking advantage of a sick man who needed help. “While Tony had always been an unconventional thinker and risk taker, there had always been a method and principles guiding Tony’s professional endeavors,” the family’s response read. “While using Ketamine, Tony was unable to exercise reasonable diligence and judgment and was vulnerable to those trying to take advantage of him.” Or as another friend of Tony’s put it, “The king had no clothes and the sycophants wouldn’t say a fucking word.”

It is indisputable that Tony had been surrounded by people who took advantage of his generosity—and his ego—during his last year in Park City. This dynamic, however, was sometimes countered by good intentions and actions, even from those who made business deals with him, from Justin and Suzie’s health regimen to Mimi’s role in helping to get Tony into rehab. Andy had slipped vitamins and protein supplements into Tony’s food. Amid the attempts to get Tony help, what emerged in the hundreds of hours of interviews we conducted with people who witnessed Tony’s descent was that there were no heroes or villains. Some well-meaning actors gave in to

the temptations of greed, while supposed bad actors had complicated histories that gave their roles context. Mimi and her boyfriend eventually dropped their lawsuit against the Hsiehs, a year after Tony’s death. In a victory for the family, Mimi also agreed to pay the Hsieh estate $750,000 to settle all claims. Tony Lee’s lawsuit and a number of other creditor claims remain ongoing. Two months after Suzie filed her claim against the Hsieh estate, she launched a venture capital firm called Wellth Ventures, “committed to building a healthier, more sustainable and more connected world” with another partner. Per a press release, billionaire Richard Branson has “made a financial commitment to support Wellth Ventures’ activities.” The same release also states that Suzie “worked in real estate and accounting as a partner in a $350 million Las Vegas–based development fund,” but made no mention of Tony Hsieh or the Downtown Project. Justin, as it turned out, had been successful in negotiating a deal for Life Is Beautiful during his year in Park City, and in February 2022 Rolling Stone announced it had acquired a majority stake in the festival. “The combination of Rolling Stone, with our scale of over 60 million readers, and our ability as a journalistic outfit, to combine that skillset with an unbelievable live event that attracts 180,000 people a year—that’s new territory and really, really compelling,” CEO Gus Wenner said. But by then, Justin had been paid for his equity and parted ways with the festival. Elizabeth and Brett got married in Park City, in a ceremony attended by Richard, Judy, and Andy. After moving to Florida, Elizabeth started a wellness company selling NAD therapies. Kedar Deshpande, who was appointed chief executive of Zappos after Tony, served only a year at the helm before leaving for another role. In the summer of 2022, the fears of Zappos employees were realized, and under its new CEO, Scott Schaefer, a stream of longtime executives were let go from the company. Tyler remained, maintaining his role of director of brand experience at the company. He is creating an archive of Tony-related assets to present to the Hsieh family from Zappos. Michelle continued to do media work for the Hsieh family, including the launch of the Tony Hsieh Award, which recognizes individuals who have achieved “significant advancement and bold innovation.”

Collaborators on this include TED Talks, Alfred Lin, and Fred Mossler. In 2016, years after Tony texted her the message, “This too shall pass,” Michelle had the phrase tattooed on her back in Tibetan. After Tony’s death, she added “12.12” above the existing tattoo—for Tony’s birthday. Fred, his wife, Meghan, and their children still live in downtown Las Vegas. After Fred left Zappos, the couple started a new company, Ross and Snow, which sells authentic Italian leather shoes. In 2022, after Justin left Life Is Beautiful, Fred accepted an invitation from Richard and Andy to join the board of the festival. As for Andy, perhaps no person has remained a more polarizing figure in the remnants of Tony’s community. But beyond the debate swirling around his motivations in Park City, there remained a seemingly unanswered question: Why did Andy film his brother as he lay dying on the stretcher? In hindsight, some considered his actions as documenting the event, however tragic, to gather evidence for the conservatorship he and the family were preparing. Perhaps he just hadn’t realized that his brother was actually dying. There was another reading of his actions, however. In the months leading up to Tony’s end in Connecticut, Andy had been frequently filming his brother and telling those around them that it would be good content for a documentary he was thinking of putting together about his brother’s life— even while he was being stretchered into an ambulance without a pulse. Just as Tony was the only person who knew how the fire started, only Andy could explain why he pulled out his phone while emergency crews worked on his brother. He has declined to talk to reporters, maintaining his silence. In July 2022, nearly two years after Tony’s death, Richard notified the court that Andy was no longer a co-administrator of Tony’s estate.

In his memoir, Tony wrote that if you ask why enough times in life, the ultimate answer is always happiness. But not until the final pages, in the first passage of his epilogue, does Tony offer a clue to his own reason, a question he answers with more questions.

As a guiding principle in life for anything I do, I try to ask myself, What would happen if everyone in the world acted in the same way? What would the world look like? What would the net effect be on the overall happiness in the world? Tony considered himself a builder—of companies, experiences, and communities. With these building blocks, he thought, he could build his way to happiness—that this ephemeral state of mind was an end output that could be achieved with only a source code. In the end, he kept acquiring and building until eventually, he had everything in the world—and it still wasn’t enough. Herein lies the tragedy of this story. Because for all those whose lives he touched—from Canady Hall A in Harvard to those who followed him for two decades at Zappos, and all the strangers in between—they could agree on one thing: Tony Hsieh was more than enough.

Walking through Aspen Springs in the months after his death, one could see a reminder that Tony once lived here. Down the sloping driveway of his sprawling ranch was a large sculpture, seven feet tall and thirty feet long. A psychedelic array of royal blue tiles flowed seamlessly into orange, a mosaic that wrapped around a half dozen concrete tentacles—two were missing. The remaining limbs were contorted in a menacing position, as if they were about to whip forward. Looming behind them was an enormous bulbous head, burrowed into the dirt, as if hiding in the sand of the ocean floor, waiting to seize its prey. Two black eyes the size of hands peered forward, keeping watch on the front door of the estate. The octopus had arrived that afternoon in August 2020 as the swirl of chaos at the ranch reached a crescendo. Tony had wanted art scattered through his property to re-create an element of Burning Man in Park City, just as he had done in Las Vegas. But unlike other sculptures at the property, the octopus was poised in the brush, center stage. It was the first thing Tony would see when he entered the property and when he left it.

It remained there, like a sentry, as Tony spent his final months spiraling toward his fatal end. It was there as his contingent of followers grew. As tens of millions of dollars drained from his bank accounts. As the memory of all that he had achieved in life faded amid his isolation from family and friends, old and dear. As he became a gaunt shadow of his former self, his genius obscured by drug addiction and breaks with reality. The octopus lay there, waiting. Many years before, when Tony was a boy, he had sat down in front of a typewriter to write a poem. Embodied within a child’s drawing that depicts a vividly soulless creature with hollow eyes and grasping tentacles, his words recount a nightmare in which he is running down the street he grew up on, Coast Oak Way. He is running from a slimy, smiling octopus that is chasing him—why, he doesn’t know. I run down the street, passing a court. The Octopus is getting even closer. He tries to climb a brown wooden wall, but he keeps slipping. No one is around to help him. The octopus is advancing. He is being chased farther from home. I run around the corner up Canyon Oak. Then the monster of Tony’s mind arrives. The Octopus grabs me And then there’s darkness. I am now wide awake.

EPILOGUE

Fred Mossler was the first to arrive at the Parlour Bar on a sweltering September afternoon. As his wife, Meghan, stepped inside next to him, his eyes scanned the black lounge chairs and booths. Tucked within the rabbit warren of the El Cortez’s gaming room floor, the bar rang with the dings and chimes of the slot machines. Effervescent air pushed through the vents above, suppressing the tobacco smoke that trailed through the room. With a pair of sunglasses resting atop his graying hair, he wore a royal blue and white checkered button-down shirt that hung loosely from his shoulders. A soft familiarity washed over his face as he walked farther into the space, glancing for a moment at a booth in the far corner. There was nothing visibly remarkable about the sunken leather seat. But Fred held countless memories of sitting there, next to Tony, hunched over their laptops. On two round knee-high tables, shots of Fernet would be placed between the keyboards and notepads, and they’d down the alcohol amid discussion of their next idea or their next deal. A revolving cast of dreamers and doers would join them, for advice or to pitch them new business. A smoke trail would float up from an American Spirit between Tony’s fingers, a dreamlike glow forming around his stoic expression. Now on the wall was a plaque above the leather booth in which Tony once sat. Tony’s Corner, it read. Dedicated to a true visionary and champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh. This corner of the Parlour Bar was a favorite meeting spot for Tony and his Zappos and Downtown Project teams for many years. The power outlet below was installed to help power their smart devices as big ideas were hatched and big deals were made.

Fred looked up as two other people walked through the rows of blackjack tables and entered the bar. He greeted a Zappos employee with an enthusiastic handshake, and they spoke quietly as other figures began appearing in the space. Justin Weniger walked in, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Life Is Beautiful logo. He looked around while greeting the party. It was the first day of the 2021 Life Is Beautiful music festival, and Justin’s three-day event was scheduled to start in half an hour. In years past, Tony had traditionally hosted a kickoff brunch for his friends at the trailer park. But this time, Justin had organized the gathering to toast Tony’s memory before the festival started. On this afternoon, thousands of people would descend on Tony’s neighborhood to fill the empty parking lots, its restaurants, and its streets, while a kaleidoscope of laser beams and lights would draw them further into the labyrinth of the world Tony built. Before international stars like Megan Thee Stallion, Glass Animals, and Tame Impala would lead the revelers to move in unison, just as Tony had with the other ravers all those years ago in the San Francisco warehouse, the horizon would swallow the sunlight as the night summoned the neons to light the desert valley. As far as the eye would allow, from the downtown that Tony had built all the way to the corporate casinos to the south, the lights would speckle the panorama like stars. Though Tony wouldn’t be there to see his creation come to life this night, the lights of Las Vegas would shine a little brighter than they ever had before. Fred stood up and walked over to the bar to join a Zappos employee. A dozen people had showed up to the toast. “Let’s make this year the best festival ever,” one person sitting at the table said. “Obviously this year is going to be different,” added another. Fred returned to the booth, carrying glasses of Fernet. “Here’s a little shot for our friend,” he said. He leaned over, then placed the glass where Tony used to sit.

Even at a young age, his peers recognized his unusual intellect. In the sixth grade, Tony won the “Most Likely to Succeed” superlative.

A school portrait of Tony in the seventh grade at Miller Creek Middle School.

(Above, center photo) Tony (left) in his first year at the Branson School with friend David Padover (center). Tony and David were two out of four students from Miller Creek Middle School who were admitted to the prestigious private college prep. Despite growing up together, Tony and David’s friendship ended at Branson due to a disagreement.

(Right, bottom left photo) Tony (left) in his sophomore year at Branson with friends, including Alex Hsu (center). They were two of very few Asians at the elite college prep. Tony and Alex would maintain a friendship, long after high school.

(Above, top photo) Tony (left) in Branson’s mock trial club. He was on the prosecution team with childhood friend Eric Liu (not pictured), and successfully convicted the opposing team for manslaughter. While his teammates are wearing blazers, collared shirts, and long skirts, Tony is dressed much more casually.

(Above, center left photo) Tony (center) in the electronics club during his senior year at Branson. He was also on the fencing team and in chess club.

Tony at graduation at Harvard University, surrounded by several friends who later became employees at LinkExchange. Included in the group photographs are Jose Santos, Jon Greenman, Sanjay Madan, Jill Wheeler and others.

Tony and Ying Liu in front of the Theater Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, during the summer of 1983.

Zappos’s San Francisco office, circa 2000.

Nick Swinmurn and Fred Mossler, circa 2004.

Tony with his book, Delivering Happiness.

In July 2010, Tony briefly left the media tour for Delivering Happiness in order to attend a political fundraiser for Senator Harry Reid (left). President Barack Obama (right) was also in attendance. Tony gave a copy of his book to Reggie Love, President Obama’s aide, at this event, in hopes he would pass it along to the president. Ten days later, Reggie wrote in an email to Tony, “I was unable to get the President to read your book, b/c I’ve been glued to it. . . . I’ll now also be sure to pass along your book.”

Tony Hsieh judges contestants during the annual Las Vegas Halloween Parade in 2013.

Tony with Mimi Pham in 2014 at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit Cocktail Party in San Francisco.

Tony with Michelle D’Attilio.

July 4 holiday break in Bigfork, Montana, 2017.

From left to right: Justin Weniger, Ryan Doherty, Tyler Williams, and Tony.

Tony (center) with Fred Mossler (far right).

Tony cooking in Park City.

Andy Hsieh and a friend with Brett Gorman and Elizabeth Pezzello (right couple).

The shed where Tony was pulled from the fire in November 2020. Courtesy of New London Fire Department.

View of the backyard of 500 Pequot Avenue. The shed that caught fire is attached to the right side of the home. Courtesy of New London Fire Department.

Memorial of Tony at Fremont Street Experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of hundreds of conversations with people who knew Tony intimately through each chapter of his life. Without them, we would not have been able to share Tony’s story in such depth, nor been able to capture why it matters to each of us. For their support and trust, we are deeply grateful to them for allowing us to tell the story of their dear friend. We want to thank Randall Lane, our editor at Forbes, who urged us to pursue our first story about Tony in December 2020, and whose encouragement, guidance, and prose got us through two days, and one long night, to ensure that we delivered “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy.” That effort was supported by leaders within Forbes’s editorial team, including Luisa Kroll, Kerry Dolan, Michael Noer, Alex Konrad, and Jessica Bohrer, and highlighted the magazine’s ability to support its reporters in pursuing and delivering high-caliber journalism and storytelling. Henry Holt & Co. have been remarkable partners, and we count our lucky stars that it was Sarah Crichton who found us. It was her unwavering belief in the story of Tony Hsieh, and in us, that ensured that this book was written. Our stellar editors, Serena Jones and Anita Sheih, showed incredible attention to detail, asking questions, pointing out narrative holes, and suggesting changes that breathed life into our manuscript. Additionally, we want to thank Michael Cantwell for providing a thorough legal review, and Majd Al Waheidi for doing a fantastic job fact-checking our book; we are thankful for their diligence. Our agent, Ethan Bassoff, with Ross Yoon, also took a chance on a pair of first-time book authors. Over two years, Ethan listened to our complaints, insecurities, and ideas, and provided nothing more than wisdom, advice, and comfort as we stumbled along this journey. From proposal to prologue, Ethan shepherded us through, and for that we are

immensely grateful. We also want to thank Howard Yoon for his role in helping us reframe parts of the manuscript. From Angel: To my two sisters, Christine and Carmen—for without their wisdom and encouragement, I would be nowhere close to where I find myself today. To Mom and Dad, thank you for all that you have sacrificed. To Gorjan Hrustanovic, for putting up with me all these years. In truth, you’ve been my best friend ever since we met, even if neither of us can agree on when that was. To Kerry Dolan, Keren Blankfeld, Duy Linh Tu, and Marie Beaudette, thank you for taking a chance on me. I owe my sanity and levity to my girlfriends in San Francisco and Los Angeles—thank you for saving me from a humorless, self-serious reality. To my coauthor David, thank you for the last two years, from your encouragement to your pasta Bolognese to your pretty awful jokes. There’d be none of this without you. From David: I have too many people to thank from both sides of the Pacific, but I’d like to make sure Meg Kissinger and Kevin McKenna know how grateful I am for their mentorship and friendship. I’m equally grateful for my editors at Forbes, Jeff Taylor, John Paczkowski, and Katharine Schwab. To Inti Pacheco, Grace Ashford, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Jacqueline Williams, and Kristin Schwab: thank you for supporting me in more ways than one. There are few words available to describe how incredible it has been to work on this book with Angel. In addition to being a killer reporter, her empathy can be seen throughout this manuscript. Reporting, debating, and writing alongside her for the past couple of years has been an experience I will treasure. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my family, who have kept me afloat with their love, and continue to inspire me. Each day I’m grateful for Michael, who always listens, and for Kate, whose wisdom knows few bounds. For Dad, my first reader for so many years, and for Mum, who never stops asking questions, and taught me to do the same.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The Hsieh family did not respond to our requests for interviews, nor did they respond to extensive fact-checking questions. The family has been involved in litigation for much of the past two years. Vivian Lee Thoreen and Stephanie Berardino, their attorneys, did not respond to our repeated requests for interviews or for comment. A few months into our writing process, the Hsieh family began to respond to the lawsuits with surprising candor, laying bare Tony’s struggles to the world. We interpreted these documents as the Hsieh family’s way of presenting their side of the story to the public. We incorporated information from their court filings in our book to the extent possible, in addition to reviewing thousands of pages of court documents filed by other parties, as well as police and fire reports; all have been cited in the endnotes. We interviewed more than 150 people for this book. Some spoke to us for dozens of hours, recounting both joyful and painful memories. They shared videos and photographs, digging up digital photographs from longlost cloud drives or yearbooks in dusty garage boxes. Many of them worked for Tony, Zappos, or the Downtown Project; were classmates of Tony’s from elementary school to Harvard; or have known the Hsieh family socially. Some of our sources only spoke to us on the condition of anonymity. On-the-record sources are cited in the endnotes. Relying on individual recollections can give rise to errors due to the fickleness of memory. To counter this, we re-interviewed a number of sources regularly over the course of a year and a half to reconcile their accounts with those of others and to ensure accuracy. All quoted dialogue in the manuscript has been drawn either from recollections of people who were present for those conversations, from audio or video recordings, or from written records.

The manuscript was independently fact-checked by Majd Al Waheidi, who knew the identity of each source, checked each quotation, and accessed all of our reporting and research materials—from legal documents to interview recordings. In the first half of 2021, we spent more than a month reporting from downtown Las Vegas, where we stayed at the Ogden and immersed ourselves in the neighborhood that Tony built. We later returned to attend Life Is Beautiful in September 2021. We also traveled to Park City, UT, New London, CT, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We consulted the University of Illinois Archives, which had an extensive library of accounts and details of Taiwanese and Chinese student life and culture at the institution starting from the early 1900s. We were lucky to connect with Salvatore de Sando, a trained archivist who was no longer working with the university at the time, but still pointed us in the right direction and helped us with our research. For Tony’s earlier years, we drew information—including inner dialogue and thoughts—from his book, Delivering Happiness. We crossreferenced his account of events with some of his close friends, peers, and employees and sometimes found discrepancies between those accounts. We made note of these discrepancies in the manuscript. In addition to our sources, we drew on research from other journalists, including the Wall Street Journal reporters Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, whose book Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh provided an account of Tony’s life, and Aimee Groth, whose reporting in various publications and her book The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia provided a first-person account of Tony’s Downtown Project. Most notably, we were able to piece together parts of Tony’s downtown Las Vegas world from articles published by the Las Vegas Review Journal and Las Vegas Sun—reporting that underscored the necessity and importance of local journalism. For the events of the last year and a half of Tony’s life, we relied largely on legal filings and on the accounts of people who were there, and we appreciate just how gracious they were with us. They continued to cooperate, even when we asked them to recount painful memories from 2020. This book would be without depth had they not entrusted us to

deliver a narrative that is both honest and cautionary. We thank them for their trust.

NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed. Prologue Elizabeth was one of them: Multiple anonymous sources. outside the shed door: Details of the fire, including the hours leading up to it, were documented in incident reports, videos, and photos provided by the New London Police and Fire Departments as part of their investigation into the cause of the accident. lighting a Ziploc bag on fire: New London Fire and Police Department documents. Elizabeth dialed 911: Recording of 911 call released by New London Police Department. they found him lying faceup: Incident reports provided by New London Fire and Police Departments. Bezos said at the time: “Video from Jeff Bezos About Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, posted by 07272009july, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. during talks with Oprah: TV interview, The Oprah Winfrey Show, episode “Millionaire Moguls,” October 23, 2008. and Barbara Walters: “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness,’” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OBZFVwu1s&t=5s. New York Times bestseller: “We’re #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List!,” Delivering Happiness website, retrieved July 31, 2022, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/were-1-onthe-new-york-times-bestseller-list. toured the late-night TV shows: TV interview on The Colbert Report, August 1, 2011, https://www.cc.com/video/mqbxt0/the-colbert-report-tony-hsieh. shared the stage with Bill Clinton: “Local Laboratories: Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Clinton Global Initiative, July 2, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHqslKiU4yY. Ashton Kutcher: “Delivering Happiness with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore—Part One,” YouTube, posted by Delivering Happiness, March 21, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK0r5821Kw.

Richard Branson: Branson, Richard, “Tony Hsieh Remembered,” Virgin company website, November 30, 2020, https://www.virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/tony-hsiehremembered. Jewel: Instagram post, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQ_i8bnZIu/?hl=en. Maggie Hsu: Interview with Maggie Hsu, February 10, 2021. “a young Buddha”: Schoenmann, Joe, “What’s Behind Tony Hsieh’s Unrelenting Drive to Remake Downtown Las Vegas?,” Las Vegas Sun, April 20, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/apr/20/behind-tony-hsiehs-passion-remake-downtown-las-veg/. photo taken at Microsoft’s headquarters: Rich, Motoko, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. who is eating a hot dog: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, 11:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. built a trailer park … a pet alpaca, and his dog: “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life,” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=3S9J0IGmRPo. introduced to ketamine: Some details of the events of 2020 are documented in a court filing from the Hsieh family in response to various lawsuits. Other sources are either noted in the narrative or in other footnotes in following chapters. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). were optimistic: Interview with Vernon Skau and Tom Curcio, February 20, 2021. sent a whoosh of ignited gas: New London Police and Fire Departments documents. turned off his life support: New London Police and Fire Departments documents. Bill Clinton: Bill Clinton, @BillClinton, “I treasure every conversation,” Twitter, November 30, 2020, 8:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/1333578663380520961. Ivanka Trump: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, 11:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. the first article: Au-Yeung, Angel, and Jeans, David, “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy: The SelfDestructive Last Months of the Zappos Visionary,” Forbes, December 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/12/04/tony-hsiehs-american-tragedy-the-selfdestructive-last-months-of-the-zappos-visionary/. started filming: Video footage provided by New London Police and Fire Departments; multiple anonymous sources. Chapter 1: The Golden Child “To me … money meant that later on in life”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 10.

As one historian put it: Olson, Emily. “Remembering Silicon Valley’s Trailblazing ‘Troublemakers’” TheSixFifty, December 7, 2017, https://www.thesixfifty.com/remembering-siliconvalleys-trailblazing-troublemakers-3968/. In one issue from 1984: Sklarewitz, Norman, “Tim Knight: The Computer Opened a Window,” Boys’ Life 74, no. 9 (September 1984): 96. “I learned”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 14. Richard earned his PhD: De Sando, Salvator, “Illini Everywhere: Taiwanese Illini, Since 1922,” Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 28, 2018, https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/taiwanese-illini/. to get her PhD in psychology: Hsieh, Judy S., “The Cognitive Effects of Chinese Language Training in a Sample of Chinese-American Children,” PhD diss., California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley/Alameda, 1991. recognized Taiwan: Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “The Taiwan Straits Crises: 1954–55 and 1958,” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953–1960/taiwan-strait-crises. Ang Lee: National Taiwan University of Arts, “NTUA Hall of Fame, Alumni,” 2006, https://portal2.ntua.edu.tw/enntua/4_102.htm. co-founder of Garmin: Garmin US/company/leadership/executive/min-kao/.

company

website,

https://www.garmin.com/en-

dating back to the early 1900s: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” in the same field: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” for social work: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” He became a member: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” his research received funding: Hsieh, Richard Chuan-Kang, “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1991, 183. catching fireflies in jars: “Simon Sinek Talks Culture with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Simon Sinek, August 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqUx4BJ1ENY. where the family moved: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 7. Among the expectations outlined for him: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 7. Chapter 2: Wide Awake Confederate states: Brenner, Keri, “Marin’s Dixie School District Officially Changes Name,” Mercury News, July 10, 2019, https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/10/dixie-changes-name-tomiller-creek-elementary-school-district/. “Tony H.”: Conversation with David Padover, June 2021. “Somehow my parents managed to find”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 7. The Three Investigators: On-background conversation with a childhood friend, February 2021. The yearbook page: Source material from a childhood friend, 1985 Dixie Elementary School yearbook, 47.

“enclave within an enclave”: Dougherty, Conor, “California Prep School Shaken by Arrests of Headmaster and Woman, 21, on Drug Charges,” New York Times, October 7, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/us/branson-prep-school-shaken-by-arrest-of-headmasterthomas-price-with-a-woman-21-on-drug-charges.html. $50,000-a-year-tuition: “Affording Branson,” Branson school https://www.branson.org/admissions/affording-branson, accessed August 25, 2022.

website,

in the county: “History Watch: Lagunitas Country Club Built on Site of ‘Pink Saloon,’” Marin Independent Journal, July 19, 2018, https://www.marinij.com/2015/07/13/history-watch-lagunitascountry-club-built-on-site-of-pink-saloon/. $220,000: Data USA of Deloitte, Datawheel and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT Media Lab,https://datausa.io/profile/geo/rossca/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20Ross%2C%20CA%20had,%2C%20a%20%E2%88%9210.2%25%2 0decrease, accessed December 5, 2022. $2 million: Data USA of Deloitte, Datawheel and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT Media Lab.https://datausa.io/profile/geo/rossca/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20Ross%2C%20CA%20had,%2C%20a%20%E2%88%9210.2%25%2 0decrease, accessed December 5, 2022. admitted to Branson: On-background conversation with childhood friend, February 2021. plotting which Grateful Dead shows: On-background conversation with former Branson teacher, June 2021. “I remember thinking that the first day”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 15. phone sex operator: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 16. “A++++++++++++”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 19. “excellence in classroom achievement and other pursuits”: 1990 and 1991 Branson School yearbook, provided by anonymous source. reads the caption: Branson School yearbook, provided by anonymous source. “I walked away”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 20. yearbook page: Branson School yearbook, provided by anonymous source. Chapter 3: The Bet by the other colleges: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 19. eight U.S. presidents: “Obama Joins List of Seven Presidents with Harvard Degrees,” Harvard Gazette, November 6, 2008, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-list-ofseven-presidents-with-harvard-degrees/. over a hundred Olympians: “Olympians,” Harvard University, https://gocrimson.com/sports/2020/5/5/information-history-olympians.

May

5,

2020,

“yielded the most”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 8. rarely be the case: Private conversation during a virtual memorial service among some of Tony’s Harvard-era friends, December 2020.

“There was a core group”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 24. In one candid photograph: Provided by anonymous source. leaving open Tuesdays and Thursdays: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 19. for sixteen hours straight: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 24. scanned copy: Provided by anonymous source. “The bad news”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 25. harvard.general message board: Wong, Brant K., “Senior Forms ‘Bible’ Study Group on ’Net,” Harvard Crimson, May 12, 1995, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1995/5/12/senior-forms-biblestudy-group-on/. “Programmers Win Contest”: Imes, Ann M., “Programmers Win Contest,” Harvard Crimson, February 1993, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/2/20/programmers-win-contest-pa-harvardteam/. named Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Board of Trustees page on The Exploratorium website, https://www.exploratorium.edu/about/board-of-trustees/craig-silverstein, accessed October 23, 2022. “NYU blended seamlessly into the urban jungle of Manhattan”: “Helping Revitalize a City|Hsieh, Tony,” YouTube, posted by Long Now Foundation, May 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ0wo-pczoI. weddings and other catered events: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 26. for the federal government: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 26. code name “Secret”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 26. A photograph taken on that day: Provided by anonymous source. “To me, it seemed like a win-win”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 51. Chapter 4: LinkExchange “I felt that I’d succeeded”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 30. “The Year Everything Changed”: McCracken, Harry, “1995: The Year Everything Changed,” Fast Company, December 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3053055/1995-the-year-everythingchanged. the website domain Yahoo.com: Wolfe, Jennifer C., and Chasser, Anne H., Brand Rewired: Connecting Branding, Creativity, and Intellectual Property Strategy (Wiley, 2010), 145. started an email distribution list: Craig Newmark Philanthropies website, https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org/about-us/craig-newmark-bio/, accessed August 25, 2021. Match.com: Kushner, David, “Recruiting Women to Online Dating Was a Challenge,” The Atlantic, April 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/how-matchcom-digitizeddating/586603/. in Seattle: Stone, Brad, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown, 2013), 28.

continues to prohibit: McPhate, Mike, “California Today: Silicon Valley’s Secret Sauce,” New York Times, May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/california-today-silicon-valley.html. I can’t believe this is real: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 46. Kate O’Brien’s: From interview with Kevin Ascher, May 2021. “Where Wuppies Gather”: Angwin, Julia, “Where Wuppies Gather: DrinkExchange Draws Hundreds Every Month,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Where-Wuppies-Gather-DrinkExchange-draws2808693.php. impromptu trip to Yosemite: Conversation during a virtual memorial service among some of Tony’s Harvard-era friends, December 2020. August 1998: “Russia Rebounds,” International Monetary Fund, September 9, 2003, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/nft/2003/russia/. “At the time, I didn’t think”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 47. “the evil empire”: Interview with Steve Valenzuela, former chief financial officer at LinkExchange, May 2021. “Without getting into too much detail”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 50. “Well, I guess the deal closed”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 50. Chapter 5: Raving “The steady wordless electronic beats”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 79. “They not only created Internet communities”: Buck, Stephanie, “During the First San Francisco Dot-Com Boom, Techies and Ravers Got Together to Save the World,” Quartz, August 2017, https://qz.com/1045840/during-the-first-san-francisco-dot-com-boom-techies-and-ravers-gottogether-to-save-the-world/. One reveler recounted: Durbin, Samantha, “Acid, Dance, Unity: What Happened to the ’90s Bay Area Rave Scene?,” The Bold Italic, June 2019, https://thebolditalic.com/acid-dance-unity-whathappened-to-the-90s-bay-area-rave-scene-50a5320b7001. National Drug Intelligence Center: “Other Dangerous Drugs,” National Drug Intelligence Center, California Northern and Eastern Districts Drug Threat Assessment, January 2001, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/653/odd.htm. “optimal conditions”: “Five Things to Know About MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD,” Mount Sinai Physician’s Channel, https://physicians.mountsinai.org/news/five-things-to-know-aboutmdma-assisted-psychotherapy-forptsd#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPeople%20taking%20MDMA%20report%20feelings,of%20difficult%20 or%20traumatic%20material.%E2%80%9D, accessed Octo- ber 23, 2022. deflect reporters’ questions: Hochman, David, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014. “At raves, it was part”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 80. after her pet frog: Private conversation during a virtual memorial service among some of Tony’s Harvard-era friends, December 2020.

Cisco Chinese Chicken Salad: Dean, Katie, “Not Just Food, It’s Fancy Food,” Wired, January 22, 2003, https://www.wired.com/2003/01/not-just-food-its-fancy-food/. “We could create our own adult version”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 56. “Dot-Com Party Madness”: Cave, Damien, “Dot-Com Party Madness,” Salon, April 25, 2000, https://www.salon.com/2000/04/25/party_5/. “The company had 200 customers”: Adler, Carlyle, “The Fresh Prince of Software,” CNN, March 1, 2003, https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2003/03/01/338759/index.htm. “It’s simply become part of the way”: Cave, “Dot-Com Party Madness.” Alfred and Sanjay often skipped the Club BIO nights”: Anonymous source, February 2021. There’s a photo of the just-married couple: Provided by an anonymous source. In one photograph for the San Francisco Chronicle: Sinton, Peter, “Incubators Coddle Web Startups,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 1999, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Incubators-Coddle-Web-Startups-2891370.php. AskJeeves,… Entango, NeoPlanet, and Fusion: Tom, Allison, “Venture Frogs: Startups Haven’t Croaked,” CNN, July 6, 2001, http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/07/06/venture.frogs/. $7.5 million to a company called eCompanies: Loftus, Peter, “ECompanies Pays $7.5 Million for Domain Name ‘Business.com,’” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 1999, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB943997934427207890#:~:text=ECompanies%2C%20a%20Santa%2 0Monica%2C%20Calif,Internet%20domain%20name%20to%20date. Bank of America paid $3 million: “BofA Paid Big Bucks for Domain,” Wired, February 8, 2000. a bid for $823,456: “Drugs.com: The $823,000 Name,” CBS News, August 16, 1999, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drugscom-the-823000-name/. Alex Hsu’s cellphone number: Anonymous source, July 2021. Tony’s immediate thought: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 57. Chapter 6: The Shoe Guy A few days later, in June 1999: Email from anonymous source. Tony said he should put an extra “p” in it: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 33. over turkey sandwiches and chicken noodle soup: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 56. “Nick and Fred were exactly the type”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 34. They invested $500,000 in seed capital: Eng, Dinah, “Nick Swinmurn: Zappos’ Silent Founder,” Fortune, September 5, 2012, https://fortune.com/2012/09/05/nick-swinmurn-zappos-silent-founder/. a $68.3 million exit: Lin, Alfred, “My Final Letter to Tony Hsieh,” Forbes, December 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/12/01/my-final-letter-to-tony-hsieh-by-alfred-lin/? sh=533275f1239b. Zappos was days away from running out of cash: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 72. “I have my birthday party this weekend”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 73. “Isn’t this amazing?”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 84.

the stock market cratered: Tymkiw, Catherine, “Bleak Friday on Wall Street,” CNN Money, April 14, 2000, https://money.cnn.com/2000/04/14/markets/markets_newyork/. “Our decision to focus”: Dean, Katie, “Drugs.com Kicks Domain Habit,” Wired, June 1, 2001. “Right now, because we are unprofitable”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 100. “The situation was dire”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 103. cost about $2 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 107. “Where are we going to get the money?”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 108. “What would make Zappos better?”: Interview with Fred Mossler, December 3, 2020. pour $6 million: Eng, “Nick Swinmurn.” tripled to $8.6 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 109. 20 percent of their inventory: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 111. “Zappos was saved”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 116. “As your friend and financial adviser”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 120. nearly quadrupled its revenue to $32 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 124. the company ended with $70 million in gross sales: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 132. deliberating between various cities: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 134. Seventy employees agreed to make the move: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 135. Chapter 7: The Trifecta go over and introduce himself: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 6, 2021. tenured kinesiology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Mark Guadagnoli online biography, https://www.unlv.edu/people/mark-guadagnoli, accessed October 23, 2022. He explained: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 6, 2021. Challenge Point Framework: Guadagnoli, Mark A., and Lee, Timothy, D., “Challenge Point: A Framework for Conceptualizing the Effects of Various Practice Conditions in Motor Learning,” Journal of Motor Behavior 36, no. 2 (2004): 212–24. St. Louis Rams: “Pfeiffer Kicks Way into Rams Camp,” UNLV press release, July 26, 2004, https://unlvrebels.com/news/2004/7/26/Pieffer_Kicks_Way_Into_Rams_Camp. cited his research: List of citations on PubMed, linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=15130871.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?

Tony was listening with intense curiosity: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 6, 2021. “We don’t know; we’d like for you to tell us”: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. three-day “camps”: “Zappos Insights Training Events,” https://www.zapposinsights.com/training, retrieved July 30, 2022. making $800 million a quarter: eBay SEC filing 10K, 2004 Annual Report, February 28, 2005, https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001065088/647583bb-4282–488d-9bcdc334e206c1ae.pdf.

acquired the payment processing company PayPal for $1.5 billion: SEC filing, July 8, 2002, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702026650/a2084015zex-99_1.htm. bought Rent.com: Mangalindan, Mylene, “Ebay Purchases Web Site Rent.com for $415 Million,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2004, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB110324713823002980. 25 percent stake in Craigslist: Richtel, Matt, “Ebay Buys 25% Stake in Craigslist, an Online Bulletin Board,” New York Times, August 14, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/business/ebay-buys-25-stake-in-craigslist-an-online-bulletinboard.html. no longer books but electronic gadgets: “Amazon.com Electronics Sales Surpass Books Sales for the First Time,” Amazon press release, November 30, 2004, https://press.aboutamazon.com/newsreleases/news-release-details/amazoncom-electronics-sales-surpass-books-sales-first-time. $70 million in sales: Hsieh, Tony, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010. in a conference room at a DoubleTree hotel: Stone, Brad, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown, 2013), 203. “I realized that to Amazon”: Hsieh, Tony, “Why I Sold Zappos,” Inc., June 1, 2010, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zapposs.html. Zappos’s company policies: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 156. five closest pizza shops: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 146. “Read this by Wednesday”: Interview with Chris Peake, March 24, 2021. $1 billion in revenue by 2010: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 120. “achieving their goal in life, whatever it was”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 131. “Whether it’s the happiness that customers feel”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 229. Zappos employees were milling about: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. “Here’s the frequency of the top ten words”: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. Under images of shoes and notices of promotions: Endless.com website front page, October 5, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071005045713/http://www.endless.com/, retrieved April 29, 2021. $100 million in sales in a single month: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” convey a straightforward message: Carlson, Nicholas, “Layoffs at Zappos, According to Employee Tweets, CEO Blog,” Business Insider, November 6, 2008. laying off 8 percent of its workforce: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 193. facing a dwindling number of bad options: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 207. Jeff interrupted: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” have twenty-five times more impact there: Interview with Fred Mossler, December 3, 2020. On July 22, Tony sent an email to his employees: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 219. at a value of $1.2 billion: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 220.

“Most people came dressed as either brides or grooms”: “AWESOME ZAPPOS VEGAS PARTY!!!,” YouTube, posted by Zappos.com, January 19, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=hJrxTR4z2b0. “Tony didn’t mind throwing a thousand plates”: Interview with Chris Peake, May 6, 2021. “You’re in such great hands”: “Video from Jeff Bezos About Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, posted by 07272009july, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. Chapter 8: Delivering Happiness gliding around a kitchen island on a scooter: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 6, 2021. Northern California’s Lake Tahoe: Lim, Jenn, “First There Was a Book…,” Delivering Happiness website, 2011, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/first-there-was-a-book. Excedrin, an over-the-counter migraine medicine: Hochman, David, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014. peppering her with questions: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. “never around”: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. her apartment in Los Angeles one weekend: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. shoe conference in 2005: Interview with Mimi Pham, May 13, 2021. She had previously had a brush with the law after a drug-related incident: Grind, Kirsten, and Sayre, Katherine, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (Simon & Schuster, 2022), 426. Joey Vanas: Interview with Joey Vanas, May 2021. “Just ask her to clean it up”: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. “She was telling him something”: Interview with Patricia McHale, March 2021. “I’m outside South by Southwest”: “Tony Hsieh Delivering Happiness Book & Bus Tour,” YouTube, posted by Techco Media, March 16, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rM4IaM2Qsww. During one flight: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. sponsors at the launch parties: “Delivering Happiness, Book Launch Event Recap: April–June 2010,” PowerPoint presentation, June 23, 2010, sent by anonymous source. a guest judge on The Apprentice: Norman, Jean Reid, “Zappos CEO Appears on ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’” Las Vegas Sun, March 9, 2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/09/zapposceo-appears-celebrity-apprentice/. Ivanka and Tony had been photographed: Snyder, Gabriel, “Do You Trust These People to Save the Economy,” Gawker, March 6, 2009, https://www.gawker.com/5165880/do-you-trust-thesepeople-to-save-the-economy. Tony provided an editorial review: “Women Who Work,” Penguin Random House website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/544570/women-who-work-by-ivankatrump/9781524734411, retrieved July 31, 2022. his new publicist, Christine Peake: Interview with Christine Peake, March 10, 2021.

“Do you think he’s going to find this funny?”: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. top of the New York Times bestseller list: “We’re #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List!,” Delivering Happiness website, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/were-1-on-the-new-yorktimes-bestseller-list, accessed October 23, 2022. a three-month, twenty-three-city bus tour: Interview with Holly McNamara, Match 6, 2010. purchased a tour bus from the Dave Matthews Band: Lim, Jenn, Beyond Happiness: How Authentic Leaders Prioritize Purpose and People for Growth and Impact (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), 2. “Project Specialist Supreme”: Delivering Happiness website, April 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110314092020/http://www.deliveringhappiness.com:80/contact/. did not actually travel with the bus for the majority of the tour: Interview with Joey Vanas, May 2021. “Little Miss Sunshine”: Delivering Happiness website, April 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110314092020/http://www.deliveringhappiness.com:80/contact/. Holly went to speak with Tony: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. In tears, Holly called Patricia: Interview with Patricia McHale, March 23, 2021. “It’s human nature to want to help people”: Email provided by anonymous source. he sent an email, reminding those on the bus tour: Email provided by anonymous source. Holly brought up the battle against Mimi: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 6, 2021. The bus crew had filmed a rap music video: “Happy Wrap—Take One,” YouTube, posted by DeliveringHappiness, September 20, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtiIXo9Id-s. Tony used ResultSource: Bercovici, Jeff, “Here’s How You Buy Your Way onto the New York Times Bestsellers List,” Forbes, February 22, 2013. One day, Mimi called Patricia: Interview with Patricia McHale, March 23, 2021. However, Holly recalled: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 10, 2021. Chapter 9: The New Project “When you have the little Z’s”: “From 2010: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by CBS Sunday Morning, November 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSHG3EU1EZ4. full-body Spider-Man suit: “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness,’” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OBZFVwu1s&t=5s. race down a miniature track: “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness.’” Donald J. Pliner slip-ons: Rich, Motoko, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. “At times, Mr. Hsieh came across as an alien”: Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?” A year after the sale Alfred departed: Arrington, Michael, “Alfred Lin to Leave Zappos, Join Sequoia Capital,” TechCrunch, April 9, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/09/alfred-lin-leaveszappos-joins-sequoia-capital/.

he joined the board of Airbnb: TechCrunch, “Airbnb’s Brian Chesky on How He Met Board Member Alfred Lin,” September 27, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/video/airbnbs-brian-chesky-onhow-he-met-board-member-alfred-lin/. Cities “spur innovation”: Silver, Diana, “Up, Up, Up,” New York Times, February 11, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.html. would take over the old City Hall building: Schoenmann, Joe, “Zappos Views Las Vegas City Hall as Perfect Fit for New Headquarters,” Las Vegas Sun, November 29, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/nov/29/zapposcom-moving-green-valley-las-vegas-city-hall/. closed on the acquisition of the property in the summer of 2012: Toplikar, Dave, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal Bringing Zappos Downtown,” Las Vegas Sun, February 1, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/01/las-vegas-city-council-approves-final-deal-bringin/. “We need one of those”: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Wisdom 2.0, March 3, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kaAVbf-17w. he also found the campuses incredibly insular: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” “The more we thought about it”: “Tony Hsei The City as a Startup–H264 MOV 1280x720 GBG Water 1800,” YouTube, posted by GreenBiz, March 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lkQVPx5kAxc. apply with a video cover letter: “Zappos Is a Weird Company—and It’s Happy That Way,” YouTube, March 2, 2017, posted by PBS NewsHour, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=5mknIg_Abfw&t=237s. became a Zappos legend: Garfinkel, Perry, “Engineering Happiness at Zappos,” New York Times, August 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/engineering-happiness-atzappos.html. He started at the call center: Garfinkel, “Engineering Happiness at Zappos.” he made a centaur costume: Bell, Jennie, “True Stories of How Tony Hsieh Taught His Zappos Team the Meaning of ‘Wow,’” Footwear News, December 21, 2020, https://footwearnews.com/2020/business/retail/tony-hsieh-zappos-employee-stories-1203085519/. “What are you doing tonight?”: Bell, “True Stories.” A red double-decker, a school bus: Bell, “True Stories.” finally moving the Zappos headquarters: Toplikar, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal.” either conference rooms or a speakeasy: Lazar, Shira, “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Unless You’re Tony Hsieh,” Entrepreneur, March 12, 2013, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226056. “the city as a startup”: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” The $350 million would be distributed across four categories: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh”; Semuels, Alana, “$350 Million Might Not Be Enough to Save Las Vegas,” The Atlantic, March 2, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/350-million-mightnot-be-enough-to-save-las-vegas/386213/.

$50 million to invest in tech startups: Downtown Project company https://dtplv.com/portfolio_page/technology-startups/, accessed October 23, 2022.

website,

Underpinning the Downtown Project were three central goals: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” return on community (ROC): “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” return on luck (ROL): “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” “This is part of the reason”: “Tony Hsei: The City as a Startup,” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lkQVPx5kAxc. “Some speculate it’s ego”: Schoenmann, Joe, “What’s Behind Tony Hsieh’s Unrelenting Drive to Remake Downtown Las Vegas?” Las Vegas Sun, April 20, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/apr/20/behind-tony-hsiehs-passion-remake-downtown-las-veg/. Chapter 10: The Desert Tech Utopia Natalie’s life changed: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. Michael slid into the booth and sat next to her: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. the Gold Spike casino, which advertised: Bohler, Peter, “How Zappos’ CEO Turned Las Vegas Into a Startup Fantasyland,” Wired, January 21, 2014. gang members had once robbed the place at gunpoint: “21 Las Vegas Gang Members Indicted on Federal Racketeering, Murder, Drug and Firearm Charges,” press release, United States Attorney’s Office, Nevada, August 14, 2003, https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nv/news/2003/08142003b.html. a woman was shot by her husband in the parking lot: Choate, Alan, “Woman in Critical Condition After Downtown Shooting,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 17, 2008. patrons could stand on its roof: Travel Nevada, https://travelnevada.com/bars/atomic-liquors/, retrieved July 31, 2022.

“Atomic

Liquors,”

“Downtown is a happening scene”: Video of interview with 702.tv, Las Vegas Weekly, provided by James Woodbridge. he co-founded the Neon Reverb festival: Interview with James Woodbridge, April 9, 2021. “Can we build a ski slope right here?”: Toplikar, David, “Goodman: Zappos Move a ‘Watershed Moment’ for Downtown Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Sun, December 1, 2010. poor sales following the Great Recession: Green, Steve, “Buyers Sue for Deposit Money on Downtown Condos,” Las Vegas Sun, July 1, 2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/01/buyerssue-deposits-back-downtown-luxury-condos/. when Tony moved there in May 2011: Corbett, Sara, “How Zappos’ CEO Turned Las Vegas Into a Startup Fantasyland,” Wired, January 21, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/01/zappos-tony-hsiehlas-vegas/. When the Downtown Project was announced in January 2012: Downtown Project 2019 pitch deck, provided by anonymous source. portfolio of almost a thousand apartments: Snel, Alan, “Downtown Project Breaks Through with Apartment Building,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 18, 2015,

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/downtown-project-breaks-through-withapartment-building/. Tony convinced the organization: Pratt, Timothy, “What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas,” New York Times Magazine, October 19, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/whathappens-in-brooklyn-moves-to-vegas.html. She submitted her proposal seven times: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. The loan would be interest-free: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. Standing on the corner of Seventh Street and East Carson: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. Ideas ranged from an outdoor chess board: Image provided by anonymous source. Tony asked Carr what he wanted to do: Carr, Paul Bradley, “Tony,” Paul Bradley Carr (blog), November 29, 2020, https://paulbradleycarr.com/2020/11/29/tony/. Tony would end up investing around half a million dollars: Lacy, Sarah, “NSFW Corp. Raises Mid-Six Figure Seed Deal (Our Incredibly Biased Report),” Pando, July 4, 2012. Mark Rowland, a British retail executive: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 22, 2021. Keller Rinaudo, a recent Harvard graduate: Harvard University, “In a First, Scientists Develop Tiny Implantable Biocomputers,” ScienceDaily, May 22, 2007, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070521140917.htm. Rinaudo was given $500,000: Schoenmann, Joe, “Joe Downtown: Is Romotive’s Departure a Sign of the Future?,” Las Vegas Weekly, March 20, 2013, https://lasvegasweekly.com/column/joedowntown/2013/mar/20/joe-downtown-vegastechfunds-romotive-silicon-valle/. Keller said he chose downtown Las Vegas: Corbett, “How Zappos’ CEO.” “Downtown basically sells itself”: Pratt, “What Happens in Brooklyn.” “Even though there’s plenty of parking”: “Tony Hsieh Talks Downtown Las Vegas, Zappos, and More at Samsung SXSW 2013,” YouTube, posted by What’s Trending, March 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwm9gL9IkH4. “They’d be talking passionately”: Interview with Mike Henry, April 20, 2021. Tony struck an agreement: Venture for America, “Venture for America December Newsletter,” December 14, 2012, https://ventureforamerica.org/2012/12/venture-for-america-decembernewsletter/. Ovik had studied environmental science and biology: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Water Institute Community Mourns Passing of Former Student Banerjee,” January 14, 2014, https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/water-institute-community-mourns-passing-of-former-staff-memberbanerjee/. “The path will not be easy. Urban revitalization”: “You’re Moving to Vegas?,” Polis (blog), July 19, 2012, https://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/07/youre-moving-to-vegas.html. “Tony asked them to submit anything”: Spillman, Benjamin, “Burning Man Culture Spreads in Downtown Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 24, 2012, https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/arts-culture/burning-man-culture-spreads-indowntown-las-vegas/.

“It is not about, ‘Let’s try to make’”: Spillman, “Burning Man Culture Spreads.” the Oasis Motel: Snel, Alan, “Downtown Project Unveils Boutique Hotel Oasis,” Las Vegas ReviewJournal, October 21, 2014. purchased an abandoned convenience store: Kirk, Mimi, “The Rise of Adaptive Reuse in Las Vegas,” Architect Magazine, May 1, 2019. Chapter 11: Life Is Beautiful When the Cosmopolitan opened in December 2010: The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, “The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas Opens Its Doors,” press release, December 17, 2010, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-cosmopolitan-of-las-vegas-opens-its-doors112093394.html. In its first eighteen months, dozens of headliners: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, March 4, 2021. His life in Vegas: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. Rehan had first met Ryan: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, March 4, 2021. “I was very new to the city”: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, March 4, 2021. stammered his way through a thirty-second elevator pitch: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, June 21, 2021. It reminded Rehan: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. the festival would lose around $600,000 in its first year: Life Is Beautiful pitch deck, provided by an anonymous source. When they arrived, Fred informed him: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. During one press interview: Patterson, Spencer, “Chatting with the Man Behind Planned Downtown Festival Life Is Beautiful,” Las Vegas Weekly, November 13, 2021, https://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-see-it/2012/nov/13/chatting-man-behind-planned-downtownfestival-life/. Another slighted Neon Reverb musician: Interview with anonymous source. “We drank the Kool-Aid”: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, December 9, 2020. Aimee had been a senior editor: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 19. Later at a Manhattan nightclub: Groth, The Kingdom of Happiness, 73. Tony had recently expanded his Delivering Happiness brand: Delivering Happiness website, https://www.deliveringhappiness.com/about. In one video interview: “Drinking Vodka with Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Jenn Lim (Delivering Happiness),” YouTube, posted by mediatechsocial, May 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=qBUfRf_VkmA (no longer available). Jon Greenman … came to see Tony: Interview with Jon Greenman, February 22, 2021. On the first visit: Interview with Ying Liu, May 10, 2021. On her second visit: Interview with Ying Liu, May 10, 2021.

Visitors like Ivanka Trump: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Tony would want us to celebrate his life,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/1332748999883976711? s=20&t=Xay0_RegJzR46iM3qUgeRg. “At some point along the way, I stopped getting hangovers”: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. Andrew offered Rehan $1 million: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, December 9, 2020. On October 26, around thirty thousand people: Patterson, Spencer, “Time of Our Life: Downtown’s Life Is Beautiful Exceeds All Expectations,” Las Vegas Weekly, October 31, 2013, https://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2013/oct/31/life-is-beautiful-festival-exceeds-expectations/#/0. “Tony was really excited”: Interview with Joey Vanas, May 26, 2021. On the second and final day of the festival, strong winds: Patterson, “Time of Our Life.” Chapter 12: The Darwinian Perspective At thirty-nine, with two teenage kids: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, April 2, 2021. “more affordable and less exclusive than TED Conferences”: McKinney, Sarah, “Amanda Slavin: The Creative Catalyst Behind CatalystCreativ,” Forbes, March 19, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahmckinney/2014/03/19/amanda-slavin-the-creative-catalystbehind-catalystcreativ/?sh=6fbbd5aa72ae. One of Tony’s favorite books: Hochman, David, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014. that ultimately convinced her to move to the downtown neighborhood: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 73. In an interview with Playboy: Hochman, “Playboy Interview.” the company’s famous quarterly all-hands meetings: Boley, Michael, “Meet the Women Who’ve Changed Zappos History,” Zappos, March 5, 2019, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/womenshistory-zappos. “When you are his plus-one to something”: Interview with Suzie Baleson, July 29, 2021. “He barely answered”: Interview with Antonia Dodge, April 23, 2021. “Come to Hawaii with me”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, April 2, 2021. he would tell people she was his ex-girlfriend: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 9, 2021. Chapter 13: Andy passed the roles down to his brothers: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 14. Dave was soft-spoken and awkward: Interview with Jen Louie, April 20, 2021. industrial engineering program at Stanford University in 1994: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn page, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhsi3h/, accessed October 23, 2022. Dave, meanwhile, went with Richard and Judy to Hong Kong: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 14. Andy took part in Rush Week: Interview with anonymous source.

As one Lambda Phi Epsilon alum put it: Interview with anonymous source. When Andy’s turn came: Interview with anonymous source. Andy graduated from Stanford in 1999: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn page. specialty food marketing company: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn page. one of Tony’s units in 1000 Van Ness: Interview with James Henrikson, March 7, 2021. “Tony’s batcave”: Interview with James Henrikson, March 7, 2021. “If there was a problem with Andy”: Interview with Chris Peake, April 10, 2021. he had been assigned to work with Mark Guadagnoli: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, November 16, 2021. young tech millionaire founders and CEOs who came to Sin City: Interview with Jen Louie, April 20, 2021. “according to documents”: Funding documents provided by anonymous source. “That was just a small investment”: Email from Joe Lonsdale, March 14, 2021. Andy’s San Francisco apartment: 601 4th Street, Unit 213, San Francisco, CA 94107, per funding documents. companies like Airbnb and Zynga: Cutler, Kim-Mai, “Watch Tech’s Takeover of San Francisco’s Office Space in This Visualization,” TechCrunch, February 25, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/25/tech-office-space/?ncid=rss. One worker recalled arriving: Interview with anonymous source. first-class flights and even private jets: Grind, Kirsten, and Sayre, Katherine, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (Simon & Schuster, 2022), 147. its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LuxDelux/, accessed February 1, 2022. Chapter 14: Trouble in Paradise he hated hugs: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. At Eat one morning: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. “I didn’t get to be involved in that decision”: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, June 24, 2021. things that made him uncomfortable about the Downtown Project: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. One of his tasks: Bowles, Nellie, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?,” Vox, October 1, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/11631452/the-downtown-projectsuicides-can-the-pursuit-of-happiness-kill-you. “fred and I are confident”: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 152. When Ovik came back to Tuscaloosa: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, June 24, 2021. the body of Jody Sherman: Chang, Andrea, “After Jody Sherman Death, Tech Community Seeks Dialogue on Suicide,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013.

Prominent venture capitalist Jason Calacanis wrote: Calacanis, Jason, “Do We Need to Talk About Suicide?,” Pando Daily, January 31, 2013, retrieved August 1, 2022, http://web.archive.org/web/20130204052814/https://pandodaily.com/2013/01/31/do-we-need-to-talkabout-suicide/. Freeman’s study found that 72 percent of entrepreneurs: Freeman, Michael A., “The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families,” Small Business Economics 53 (2019): 323–42, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-018-0059-8. “The intensity of being an entrepreneur”: Feld, Brad, “Founder Suicides,” October 2, 2014, https://feld.com/archives/2014/10/founder-suicides/. It was later revealed: Shontell, Alyson, “The Story of a Failed Startup and a Founder Driven to Suicide,” Business Insider, April 4, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/jody-sherman-ecomom2013-4. In the week before his death, after seeing the forecasts: Shontell, Alyson, “A Grave Financial Error Sank a Startup and Contributed to its Founder’s Suicide,” Business Insider, April 24, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/jody-sherman-ecomom-and-a-grave-financial-error-2013-4. In 2012, he was on a multicity tour around Australia: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 23, 2021. “God, wouldn’t it just be easier”: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 23, 2021. “When you’re potentially gonna lose”: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 23, 2021. Tony’s acknowledgment of Ovik’s death: Email provided by anonymous source. Tamber proposed: Email shared by anonymous source. Matt Berman, the fifty-year-old founder: Schoenmann, Joe, “Joe Downtown: Tragedy, Secrets and the Tough Side of Downtown Development,” Las Vegas Weekly, June 4, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/column/joe-downtown/2014/jun/04/joe-downtown-tragedy-secrets-andtough-side-downto/. After Matt’s suicide, Aimee Groth wrote: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 191. “Suicides happen anywhere”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides.” “the difference here is the focus on happiness”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides.” Andrew Yang cut ties with Tony: Groth, The Kingdom of Happiness, 157. “With your silence, you’ve just compounded that failure”: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. What was most painful for Ovik’s family: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. “My brother was an incredibly smart”: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. Chapter 15: “The Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas” “Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas”: Walker, Alissa, “Meeting Tony Hsieh, the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas,” Gizmodo, January 14, 2014, https://gizmodo.com/meeting-tony-hsieh-the-mayor-ofdowntown-las-vegas-1500530600.

“A puff of energy”: Bowles, Nellie, “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia,” Vox, September 29, 2014. “In the past, we used the word ‘Community’”: “Downtown Project: Collisions, Co-Learning, Connectness,” Evernote, February 7, 2014, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/client/snv? noteGuid=66aed622-6730-4009-86b02d2ffe7ea26f¬eKey=0fca9f01d630275220b4caea45a4bb41&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernot e.com%2Fshard%2Fs16%2Fsh%2F66aed622-6730-4009-86b02d2ffe7ea26f%2F0fca9f01d630275220b4caea45a4bb41&title=Downtown%2BProject%253A%2BC ollisions%252C%2BCo-Learning%252C%2BConnectness. “I view my role more as trying to set up”: “Zappos Milestone: Q&A with Tony Hsieh,” Footwear News, May 4, 2009. “Tony doesn’t really like conflict”: Interview with Maggie Hsu, February 21, 2021. “A Partner duly filling a Role”: Quoted in Groth, Aimee, “The Story of the Man Who’s Flattening the World of Corporate Hierarchies,” Business Insider, January 16, 2014, https://qz.com/167145/thestory-of-holacracys-founder-began-when-he-started-coding-at-age-6/. “strategic partners and hiring brilliant senior talent”: Lacy, Sara, “More Bad News for Vegas Tech Fund: Star Company Romotive Is Moving to the Bay Area,” Pando.com, March 15, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20140213154736/http://pando.com/2013/03/15/more-bad-news-forvegas-tech-fund-star-company-romotive-is-moving-to-the-bay-area/, retrieved August 2, 2022. Jen McCabe … had been given $10 million: Bowles, Nellie, “Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project,” Vox, September 30, 2014. “You’ve got Jen McCabe,” Obama said: Obama White House Archives, “Remarks by the President at the White House Maker Faire,” June 18, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/18/remarks-president-white-housemaker-faire. the Container Park received three hundred thousand visitors: Morrison, Jane Anne, “Las Vegas Council Favors Allowing Minors at Container Park,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 19, 2014. Michael Cornthwaite sold his interest in three restaurants: Shoenmann, Joe, “Joe Downtown: Group Lauds Container Park as It Pulls Plug on 3 Shops There,” Las Vegas Sun, April 1, 2014. Close to midnight, Michael Downs was on the phone: Interview with Mike Henry, April 27, 2021. “It was like a show”: Interview with Mike Henry, April 27, 2021. In total, thirty people lost their jobs: Snel, Alan, “Downtown Project Lays Off 30 Workers; Hsieh Role Unchanged,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 30, 2014. In a statement, Tony tried to emphasize: Bowles, Nellie, “Tony Hsieh Answers Some of Our Questions About the Future of Las Vegas’s Downtown Project,” Vox, October 2, 2014. compiled in a booklet: Provided by Mark Rowland. Chapter 16: The Island “Have you spoken to Tony?”: Interview with anonymous source. he received a response sometime in the middle of the night: Interview with anonymous source. Rehan got a call from Fred: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, December 9, 2020.

Tony had texted Rehan: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. Kanye went on a podcast: Ellis, Bret Easton, “B.E.E.-KANYE PART 1-11/18/2013,” Podcast One, November 18, 2013. “I got into this giant argument”: Chan, Jennifer, “Kanye West Slams Zappos CEO: ‘He Sells All This S—t Product to Everybody,’” E! News, November 19, 2013, http://www.eonline.com/news/482850/kanye-west-slams-zappos-ceo-he-sells-all-this-shit-product-toeverybody. Tony probed Justin about his background: Interview with anonymous source. Justin confronted Rehan over excessive spending: Interview with anonymous source. In response, Tony emailed Rehan: Email provided by Rehan Choudhry. Rehan was given $200,000 for his stake: Provided by anonymous source. Chapter 17: The Trailer Park Tony sent out a message: Interview with anonymous source. $950 a month in rent: “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life,” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9J0IgmRPo. conversations around campfires, a favorite pastime of Tony’s: Interview with anonymous source. a chocolate-brown alpaca named Marley: “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life.” a common “living room”: Video interview with Shira Lazar, Adventures in Curiosity, “Inside Ferguson’s Downtown Project Las Vegas With Tony Hsieh,” February 14, 2019. “With a net worth of $840 million”: Holley, Peter, “Why This CEO Is Worth Almost $1 Billion but Lives in a Trailer Park,” Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theswitch/wp/2015/07/21/why-a-ceo-worth-840-million-lives-in-a-trailer-park-with-his-pet-alpaca/. Tony chatted with a reporter: Totten, Kristy, “Living Small: At Downtown’s Airstream Park, Home Is Where the Experiment Is,” Las Vegas Weekly, February 5, 2015, https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2015/feb/05/airstream-park-experiment-living-small-hsiehdownt/#/0. Anthony … was working in internet marketing: Interview with anonymous source. “not a single person in Tony’s close sphere”: Interview with anonymous source. Airstream Park gave off an air of radical inclusion: “What Is Burning Man? The 10 Principles of Burning Man,” Burning Man website, https://burningman.org/about/10-principles/, accessed October 23, 2022. 4,700-word company-wide email: Groth, Aimee, “Internal Memo: Zappos Is Offering Severance to Employees Who Aren’t All In on Holacracy,” Quartz, March 26, 2015, https://qz.com/370616/internal-memo-zappos-is-offering-severance-to-employees-who-arent-all-inwith-holacracy/. Zappos lost 210 out of 1,503 employees: Usufzy, Pashtana, “200 Accept Buyouts at Zappos After Management Changes,” Las Vegas Sun, May 5, 2015, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/may/05/200-accept-buyouts-zappos-after-companysmanagemen/.

“The brewing employee discontent”: Gelles, David, “At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,” New York Times, July 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-sellingshoes-and-a-vision.html. “The media has kind of portrayed it”: “Tony Hsieh Explains Why He Sold Zappos and What He Thinks of Amazon (Full Interview),” YouTube, posted by Recode, May 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69WEofQd1DM&t=54s. “It’s an intense display of loyalty”: Komenda, Ed, “Is Tony Hsieh Downtown Las Vegas’ Savior or Conqueror?,” Las Vegas Sun, February 23, 2014, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2014/feb/23/tonyhsieh-downtown-las-vegas-savior-or-conqueror/. “‘can feel cultish’”: Walker, Alissa, “Zappos Isn’t a Cult? All Tony Hsieh’s Friends Got Matching Tattoos,” Gizmodo, February 24, 2014, https://gizmodo.com/zappos-isnt-a-cult-all-tony-hsiehsfriends-got-match-1529721696. The pressure was getting to him, she thought: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, April 15, 2021. Chapter 18: The Right Hand “As I noodle on the press coverage”: Ferenstein, Greg, “Exclusive: Zappos CEO Responds to Reports of Employee Departures After Radical Management Experiment,” Medium, January 19, 2016, https://medium.com/@ferenstein/exclusive-zappos-ceo-responds-to-reports-of-mass-employeedepartures-after-radical-management-3f6c51a71928. “I completely agree with Fred”: Ferenstein, “Exclusive.” A few months after the interview: Reingold, Jennifer, “Another Zappos Leader Departs,” Fortune, April 13, 2016, https://fortune.com/2016/04/13/another-zappos-leader-departs/. Ivy League–bred financier background: “Leadership,” https://www.stagelightgroup.com/leadership, accessed September 1, 2022.

Stagelight

Group,

tumultuous stint: Tracy, Abigail, “West Wing Chaos: Scaramucci Abruptly Fired as White House Communications Director,” Vanity Fair, July 31, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-mooch-cut-loose-scaramucci-fired-as-white-housecommunications-director. SALT Conference: “SALT Conference Returns to Las Vegas May 7–10, 2019 Targeting Growth,” press release, SALT conference, November 1, 2018, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saltconference-returns-to-las-vegas-may-7–10–2019-targeting-growth-300741703.html. In 2017, Victor asked the singer and songwriter: Interview with anonymous source. Necker Island: Instagram post, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQ_i8bnZIu/? hl=en. “All right, [email protected]”: Interview with anonymous source. “It’d be really fun to just have a ball pit”: Interview with anonymous source. “Fungineer”: Garfinkel, Perry, “Engineering Happiness at Zappos,” New York Times, August 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/engineering-happiness-at-zappos.html. Called Whole Human: Jarvey, Natalie, “CES: Jewel Launches Platform to Bring Mindfulness to the Workplace,” Hollywood Reporter, January 9, 2018,

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ces-jewel-launches-platform-bringmindfulness-workplace-1073163/. Jewel organized a mindfulness retreat: Interview with anonymous source. Tyler reached a point in 2018: Interview with anonymous source. Ben and Tony had met: Interview with Ben Jorgensen, October 22, 2021. Chapter 19: Genie in a Bottle We’re back, he thought: Interview with anonymous source. Tony’s camp, which for liability reasons: Interview with anonymous source. he invited four of the founding leaders: Burning Man Project, “Tony Hsieh’s Legacy Reminds Us All of the Importance of Community,” December 10, 2020, https://journal.burningman.org/2020/12/news/global-news/tony-hsieh-legacy/. Tony purchased a gutted Boeing 747: Johnson, Shea, “Zappos Will Use Burning Man 747 Jet for Downtown Project,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 17, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/las-vegas/zappos-will-use-burningman-747-jet-for-downtown-project-1959430/. “Metamorphoses”: “2019 Art Theme: Metamorphoses,” Burning Man website, https://burningman.org/about/history/brc-history/event-archives/2019-event-archive/2019-art-thememetamorphoses/. market-based dynamics: Peake, Chris, “First Steps for Learning and Engaging,” Zappos, May 5, 2019, https://hatch.apps.zappos.com/evolve/first-steps-for-learning-and-engaging. Members of Tony’s Burning Man crew: Interview with anonymous source. Judy took a nap … cloud-nine-themed art car: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 9, 2021. Though Tony knew this would make them uncomfortable: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 9, 2021. Parke Davis Company: Li, Linda, and Vlisides, Phillip E., “Ketamine: 50 Years of Modulating the Mind,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, November 15, 2016, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126726/. replace the surgical anesthetic PCP: Chun, Rene, “Inside the Los Angeles Clinic That Uses Ketamine to Treat Depression,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 19, 2017, https://www.lamag.com/longform/the-ketamine-club/. During the 1970s, it was used: Domino, Edward F., and Warner, David S., “Taming the Ketamine Tiger,” Anesthesiology 113 (2010): 678–84, https://pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology/article/113/3/678/10426/Taming-the-Ketamine-Tiger. offered scientific literature: “History of Ketamine in Psychiatric Medicine,” Avesta Ketamine Wellness, https://www.avestaketaminewellness.com/blog/history-of-ketamine-in-psychiatricmedicine. in the 1980s and 1990s: “History of Ketamine in Psychiatric Medicine.” Special K: “Ketamine,” Drug Enforcement Administration, https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drug_chem_info/ketamine.pdf.

September

2019,

Schedule III narcotic: “Schedules of Controlled Substances: Placement of Ketamine into Schedule III,” Drug Enforcement Administration, https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/fed_regs/rules/1999/fr0713.htm. Salvador Roquet: Witt, Emily, “Ketamine Therapy Is Going Mainstream. Are We Ready?,” New Yorker, December 29, 2021. due to his use of illegal drugs: Correspondence with Stanley Krippner, PhD. Evgeny Krupitsky and A. Y. Grinenko: Krupitsky, E. M., and Grinenko, A. Y., “Ketamine Psychedelic Therapy (KPT): A Review of the Results of Ten Years of Research,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 29, no. 2 (1997). In 2000, the drug was tested: Berman, Robert, Cappiello, Angela, et al., “Antidepressant Effects of Ketamine in Depressed Patients,” Biological Psychiatry 47 (2000): 351–54, https://www.amgketamine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/6-Antidepressant.pdf. “difficult-to-treat depression”: Tiger, Mikael, “A Randomized Placebo-Controlled PET Study of Ketamine’s Effect on Serotonin1B Receptor Binding in Patients with SSRI-Resistant Depression,” Translational Psychiatry (2020): art. 159, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-020-0844-4. “I think if you put ketamine”: “A Brief Chat with http://scotto.org/listing.php?id=178, accessed October 23, 2022.

Dr.

Karl

Jansen,”

Scotto,

Could ketamine be the answer?: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-–828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). two hundred thousand attendees: Kim, Kyndell, “Thousands Expected for ‘Life Is Beautiful’ Music Festival in Las Vegas,” KTNV, September 20, 2019, https://news3lv.com/news/local/thousands-expected-for-life-is-beautiful-music-festival-in-las-vegas. Chapter 20: Winter Camp What he witnessed: Interview with anonymous source. But now he was acting in a manic manner: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). sleep patterns on his Apple Watch: Interview with anonymous source. came across a study: Deng, Xianhua, “Long-term Follow-up of Patients Treated for Psychotic Symptoms That Persist After Stopping Illicit Drug Use,” Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry 24, no. 5 (2012): 271–78, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4198875/. “I liked the concepts of the tribes”: Provided by anonymous source. “If you put a little bit of right spin”: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. Justin sent him a message: Interview with anonymous source. “Either you knew it and you’re a liar”: Interview with anonymous source. Looking bewildered, Ryan walked around: Interview with anonymous source.

“There’s no other way to put it”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 15, 2021. “I’m worried about you”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 15, 2021. asking for daily updates: Interview with anonymous source. agreed not to alert Amazon: Interview with anonymous source. Holding a stretching stick covered in Post-it notes: Video provided by anonymous source. increasingly agitated by Tyler’s concern: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Chapter 21: Flow State Silicon Valley became a regular presence at Sundance: Wu, Tim, “Silicon Valley Takes on Hollywood—at Sundance,” Slate, January 23, 2012, https://slate.com/culture/2012/01/silicon-valleyat-the-sundance-film-festival-tech-companies-taking-on-hollywood.html. Google would host concerts: “Civil Wars to Headline Google Music Series at Sundance,” Rolling Stone, January 13, 2012. Bing: Wu, “Silicon Valley Takes on Hollywood.” a digital content company called HitRecord: “HITRECORD Returns to Sundance Film Festival 2020 to Celebrate Its Vibrant Community with Live Projects, in Collaboration with Zappos,” press release, December 19, 2019, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hitrecord-returns-tosundance-film-festival-2020-to-celebrate-its-vibrant-community-with-live-projects-in-collaborationwith-zappos-300977684.html. Zappos’s ten core values: “Announcing HITRECORD x Zappos at the Sundance Film Festival,” HitRecord, December 19, 2019, https://hitrecord.org/records/4099581. even stayed on a bunk bed: Interview with Victoria Recano, April 19, 2021. Abdul tweeted: Paula Abdul, @PaulaAbdul, “A trip to Sundance and @Zappos all in one week,” Twitter, January 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/paulaabdul/status/1223068569694605312. “I wish I had a Tyler coin”: Interview with anonymous source. asked him to write a list of all the things: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). The list continued: Reference to this list is cited in Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.) Tony was able to use his phone: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.).

The unassuming exterior belied a grandiosity within: Zillow listing, 1422 Empire Avenue, Park City, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1422-Empire-Ave-Park-City-UT-84060/89095788_zpid/, accessed October 23, 2022. At first, they implemented a regimented program around Tony: Interviews with anonymous sources. Over barbecues and meetings: Interviews with anonymous sources. fifty-seven meters under an ice sheet: Weeks, Jonny, “A Cold-Water Cure? My Weekend with the ‘Ice Man,’” The Guardian, May 8, 2019. fastest barefoot half-marathon across ice: Guinness World Records website, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-half-marathon-barefoot-on-icesnow, retrieved August 2, 2022. Mount Everest wearing only shorts: Odell, Michael, “He Swims in Ice and Climbs Everest. Meet Tough Guy Wim Hof,’” The Times (London), March 7, 2017. 180 years old: Kelly, Guy, “Meet the Man Who Plans to Live to 180 (and Has Spent $2 Million Trying),” The Telegraph, January 22, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/meetman-plans-live-180-has-spent-2million-trying/. Tyler and Tony would embark on so-called hero’s journeys: Interviews with anonymous sources. At 3:22 p.m. on the last Saturday of May: Luscombe, Richard, and Sample, Ian, “SpaceX Successfully Launches Nasa Astronauts into Orbit,” The Guardian, May 30, 2020. presence in his house of Brandon Hollis: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. “We have to go faster”: Interview with anonymous source. Brandon approached Tyler: Interview with anonymous source. Others turned their heads to steal a glance at him: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Chapter 22: The Gordian Knot “Pop quiz,” Tony said, turning to him: Interview with anonymous source. Expedia: Expedia listing, https://www.expedia.com/Park-City-Hotels-Massive-10-Bed-10-BathLuxury-Mountain-Home-In-Old-Town.h54112819.Hotel-Information, retrieved August 3, 2022. Vrbo: Vrbo listing, https://www.vrbo.com/1997020, retrieved August 3, 2022. Steve-O … steered his bus into Park City: Interviews with anonymous sources. for a fee: Interviews with anonymous sources. a virtual reality company: Interviews with anonymous sources. Tyler found Tony: Interview with anonymous source. destined to be a failure before it even started: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). nothing but pajama pants and holding only a box of crayons: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August

23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). he and Justin would spend only twelve hours in Montana: Interview with anonymous source. The bus was rolling through the Montana plains: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Justin walked back to the bathroom door: Interview with anonymous source. and tried reasoning with Tony: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. active shooter simulation … suicide pact: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Around 4 a.m., Justin was woken by rapid knocking on his bedroom door: Interview with anonymous source. Chapter 23: Sticky Notes “Happy Fourth of July!” they called out to a group: Interview with Tyler Davis and David Hill, December 15, 2020. Tony turned to the real estate agent: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. The sprawling ranch: Zillow listing, 2636 Aspen Springs Drive, Park City, UT, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2636-Aspen-Springs-Dr-Park-City-UT-84060/68846639_zpid/, retrieved August 3, 2022. Zappos executives were more than aware of Tony’s troubles: Interview with anonymous source. pressure from the company to take a step back: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Among the first projects Tony assigned her: Video provided by anonymous source. Mark and Tony discussed the terms: Mark Evensvold, Creditor’s Claim, In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, filed June 1, 2021, Clark County District Court, Case No. P-20–105105-E. Chapter 24: Old Friends and New The Hsieh family had already come and gone: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). At one point Tony told them: Grind, Kirsten, and Sayre, Katherine, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (Simon & Schuster, 2022), 212. Ten days later he returned: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). longtime friend Tony Lee: Tony Lee and his company, Pelagic LLC, filed a lawsuit after Tony’s death, detailing his account of events in 2020. See Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and

Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, A-21-833547-C. became convinced that inhaling nitrious oxide: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). the actress Demi Moore passed out: TMZ, “Demi Moore Health Crisis … Inhaling Nitrous Oxide,” January 26, 2012, https://www.tmz.com/2012/01/25/demi-moore-whip-its-nitrous-oxideseizure/#.TyFWacVSRvY. hundreds of Whip-It cartridges: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Tony found willing comrades like Don Calder: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Victoria produced another video: Video provided by anonymous source. Nadeem had arrived in Park City: Interviews with anonymous sources. Andy said later: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Creditor Pelagic’s Motion For Order Nunc Pro Tunc Concerning Order Granting Ex Parte Application To Accept Resignation Of Co-Administrator, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, P-20-105105-E. Transcripts of Andy’s depositions were part of the exhibits in this court filing. he wanted them gone: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Initially, the first iteration of 10X: Interviews with anonymous sources. Elizabeth and Brett would be getting a pay raise: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. she took 10 percent of the fee: See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). set up an LLC with $10 million: See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21–829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021, 20. Lee wrote in a text to Andy: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Creditor Pelagic’s Motion For Order Nunc Pro Tunc Concerning Order Granting Ex Parte Application To Accept Resignation Of Co-Administrator, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, P-20-105105-E. Text messages were part of the exhibits in this court filing. Chapter 25: Who Will Save Your Soul? a group of residents were huddled: Interview with Bill Ciraco, March 27, 2021. Jewel emerged from the far side of the room: Video provided by anonymous source. Michael Downs … and Jen Taler … had arrived: Interviews with anonymous sources. Tyler was going to … kidnap Tony: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, July 1, 2021.

once he heard from Michelle, he notified the interventionist: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Tony talked with her and passed the welfare check: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Mark decided to call the Park City police: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 15, 2021. Suzie turned to them: Interviews with anonymous sources. When she received the invitation: Interview with a member of Jewel’s team, April 2021. The sound of running water, they were told: Interviews with anonymous sources. On the night of September 8, police were called to the house: Police report provided by Park City Police Department under Government Records Access and Management Act, Utah. Chapter 26: On the Edge of the Ether-World one of his first memories as a child: “Simon Sinek Talks Culture with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Simon Sinek, August 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=uqUx4BJ1ENY. Tony bought a convoy of tour buses: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. the company announced that Tony was stepping down from Zappos: Schulz, Bailey, and Velotta, Richard N., “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Retires,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 24, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-ceo-tony-hsiehchampion-of-downtown-las-vegas-retires-2102935/. Michelle’s phone rang: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, September 10, 2021. It had also deeply upset him: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). One week in September, Justin told him: Interview with anonymous source. Finally there was an excursion: Interview with multiple anonymous sources. letter … penned by Jewel: Provided by anonymous source. Chapter 27: Blizzy “We’re going to Hawaii!”: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. somewhat of a power couple: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. producing a daily newsletter: Provided by anonymous source. he had been taken to the hospital: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. A nurse had been at the ranch: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Janice, back in Utah, received a call: Interview with multiple anonymous sources.

had just gotten off a FaceTime call with Tony: Interview with Karla Ballard, October 24, 2021. in a cooler: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. A crew of firefighters arrived: Incident report provided by New London Fire Department. She technically didn’t own the beach, he told her: Incident report provided by New London Police Department. Chapter 28: Thanksgiving Vernon Skau had reason to hope: Interview with Vernon Skau, February 20, 2021. A picture quickly emerged: “Origin and Cause” incident report provided by New London Fire Department. Tom was vaguely aware of Tony Hsieh: Interview with Tom Curcio, February 20, 2021. Chapter 29: The Aftermath The day after Thanksgiving: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, November 8, 2021. “We’d like for you to write the post to tell the world”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, November 8, 2021. Bill Clinton: Bill Clinton, @BillClinton, “I treasure every conversation,” Twitter, November 30, 2020, 8:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/1333578663380520961. Ivanka Trump: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, 11:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. Jeff Bezos: Instagram post, November 28, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIJYUQhHzLq/. twelve-minute video elegy: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQ_i8bnZIu/?hl=en.

post,

December

1,

2020,

Mimi filed the first lawsuit in February: Mimi’s company is called Baby Monster LLC. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, A-21-828090-C, Eighth District Court, Nevada. Paris Hilton: Toplikar, Dave, “Paris Hilton Pleads Guilty in Las Vegas Drug Arrest,” Las Vegas Sun, September 20, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/sep/20/paris-hilton-plead-guilty-vegasdrug-arrest/. Bruno Mars: Ritter, Ken, “Bruno Mars Gets Date for Las Vegas Cocaine Plea Deal,” Las Vegas Sun, February 4, 2011, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2011/feb/04/us-bruno-mars-vegas-arrest/. Robert Durst: Bagli, Charles V., “After a 14-Month Delay, Robert Durst’s Murder Trial Returns to Court,” New York Times, May 17, 2021. The next week, Puoy Premsrirut filed: Ferrara, David, “Attorney Seeks $360K in Legal Fees from Tony Hsieh’s Estate,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 16, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/courts/attorney-seeks-360k-in-legal-fees-from-tony-hsiehsestate-2282089/. Two months later, in April, Tony Lee: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, A-21–833547-C.

both Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger: Charns, David, “I-Team: Company Seeks Millions from Tony Hsieh’s Estate, Some for ‘Magic Castle’ Project, Included Traveling Magicians,” 8 News Now, November 22, 2021, https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/i-team-special-reports/i-teamcompany-seeks-millions-from-tony-hsiehs-estate-for-magic-castle-project-included-travelingmagicians/; Newburg, Katelyn, “Life Is Beautiful CEO Withdraws Creditors Claim in Tony Hsieh Case,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 28, 2022, https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/courts/life-is-beautiful-ceo-withdraws-creditors-claim-in-tonyhsieh-case-2520681/. Only one statement: Au-Yeung, Angel, and Jeans, David, “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy: The Self-Destructive Last Months of the Zappos Visionary,” Forbes, December 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/12/04/tony-hsiehs-american-tragedy-the-selfdestructive-last-months-of-the-zappos-visionary/. Andy was secretly in constant contact: Interview with a member of Jewel’s team, April 2021. doctors and attorneys … on standby: Interview with a member of Jewel’s team, April 2021. scorched-earth response: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Richard notified the court: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, P-20-0105105-E. a poem: Provided by anonymous source.

IMAGE CREDITS

Here Here Here Here Here

Map of downtown Las Vegas, designed by Gene Thorpe “Teeth” poem, Tony Hsieh, a book of poems written by students at Miller Creek Middle School, courtesy of an anonymous source. “TOOMUCHTODONESS” poem, Tony Hsieh, a book of poems written by students at Miller Creek Middle School, courtesy of an anonymous source. “Octopus” poem, Tony Hsieh, a book of poems written by students at Miller Creek Middle School, courtesy of an anonymous source. Senior yearbook page, Tony Hsieh, the Branson School yearbook, 1991, courtesy of an anonymous source.

Photo insert Fig. 1 “Most likely to succeed” portrait of Tony Hsieh in sixth grade, Miller Creek Middle School yearbook, 1985, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 2 Portrait of Tony Hsieh in seventh grade, Miller Creek Middle School yearbook, 1986, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 3 Tony Hsieh and David Padover, the Branson School yearbook, 1988, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 4 Tony Hsieh and friends, including Alex Hsu, at the Branson School, the Branson School yearbook, 1989, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 5 Tony Hsieh celebrating the mock trial club at the Branson School, the Branson School yearbook, 1990, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 6 Tony Hsieh in his senior year at the Branson School, the Branson School yearbook, 1991, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 7a Tony Hsieh at Harvard University’s graduation day, 1995, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 7b Tony Hsieh at Harvard University’s graduation day, 1995, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 8 Tony and Ying Liu in front of the Theater Museum, courtesy of Ying Liu. Fig. 9 Zappos office in San Francisco, circa 2000, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 10 Nick Swinmurn and Fred Mossler, circa 2004, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 11 Portrait of Tony Hsieh with his book, Delivering Happiness. Bloomberg/Getty Images Fig. 12 Tony Hsieh with Senator Harry Reid and President Barack Obama at a fundraising event in July 2010, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 13 Tony Hsieh judging Halloween contest, 2013. Ethan Miller/Getty Images Fig. 14 Tony Hsieh and Mimi Pham, 2014. Michael Kovac/Getty Images Fig. 15 Tony Hsieh and Michelle D’Attilio, courtesy of Michelle D’Attilio. Fig. 16 Tony Hsieh at Bigfork, Montana, 2017, courtesy of an anonymous source.

Fig. 17 Tony Hsieh with Justin Weniger, Ryan Doherty, and Tyler Williams, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 18 Tony Hsieh with Fred Mossler and others at Zappos event. Denise Truscello/Getty Images Fig. 19 Tony Hsieh cooking at Park City home, 2020, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 20 Andy Hsieh with Brett Gorman and Elizabeth Pezzello at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Noam Galai/Getty Images Fig. 21 Photo of burned-out shed at 500 Pequot Avenue, New London, Connecticut, November 2020. Courtesy of New London Fire Department. Fig. 22 Photo of backyard of 500 Pequot Avenue, New London, Connecticut, November 2020. Courtesy of New London Fire Department. Fig. 23 Memorial of Tony Hsieh at Fremont Street Experience, December 2020. Bryan Steffy/Getty Images

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. ABC News Abdul, Paula Abercrombie & Fitch Accel AC/DC acid Ackman, Bill Adderall Adele ADHD Adidas Aguirre, Blaise AIDS Airbnb Airstream Park Alaska alcoholism Allen, Ashton Alltounian, Howard Alvarez & Marsal Amazon death of Tony and Downtown Project and Tony’s decline and Zappos bought by Ambien AMC Theaters American Chemical Society American Institute of Chemical Engineers Anderson, Richard Dean

Anderson .Paak Apple Apprentice, The (TV show) Arizona State University Arquette, David Ascher, Kevin Asian Americans AskJeeves Asprey, Dave Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest Astrovan Atlantic City Atomic Liquors Austin, Texas B-52s Baleson, Suzie Ballard, Karla Ballmer, Steve Baltimore Banerjee, Anondo Banerjee, Ovik Banerjee, Subhankar Bank of America Barnes & Noble Barrass, Kathy Barshack, Lenny Bass, Derrick Bass family Bayle, Michael BBN Beat Coffeehouse The Beau Hodges Band Beauty Bar Beck Belcampo farm Bellagio hotel Benioff, Marc Ben-Shahar, Tal Ben Sherman Berman, Matt Berman, Robert M. Bevilacqua, Ali Bezos, Jeff Biden, Joe Bigfoot holding company Big Moose Yacht Club “Billie Jean” (song)

biohacking bipolar disorder Bitcoin Black Ops (Zappos team) Black people Black Rock City Blair, Tony Blige, Mary J. Blizzy Ranch Daily News Bloomberg Bloomberg, Michael Bolt Barber Bomberman (video game) Bowles, Nellie Boy Scouts of America Boys’ Life Bozzini, Mark Branson, Richard Branson School, The Bridgeport Hospital Brin, Sergey Brokaw, Aphrah Brown, Rachael Brown University Bruno Magli Bulletproof Nutrition Bunch, John Bunkhouse Saloon Burning Man Business Insider Caesars Entertainment Calacanis, Jason Calder, Don California School of Professional Psychology California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly) Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip) Camacho, David carbon monoxide Carr, Paul Carson Kitchen Catalyst Week Challenge Point Framework Chesnoff, David Chevron China Chinese New Year Chopra, Deepak

Chou, Millie Choudhry, Rehan Ciraco, Bill civil rights movement Clark County District Court Clark County Superior Court Clay, Phillip Cleveland Clinton, Bill Club BIO CNN Coachella Colbert, Stephen Coldplay Collins, Jim Colorado River mindfulness retreat Comedy Central Commonwealth bar Complex Confucius conservatorship Constellation Labs Container Park Conway, Ron Cooney, Susan Coors Light Cornell University Corner Bar Management Cornthwaite, Jennifer Cornthwaite, Michael Cosmopolitan casino, The COVID-19 Craigslist Crimson, The Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Cum Laude Society Curcio, Tom D’Attilio, Michelle Dave Matthews Band Davis, Tyler Days of Our Lives (TV show) Deadmau5 Delaney, Hollie Delivering Happiness company Delivering Happiness (Hsieh) book tour sales

written Deloitte depression Deshpande, Kedar Detroit Diaspora (website) Digital Royalty DiVincenzo, Tony DJ Solomon Dodge, Antonia Doherty, Ryan domain names Donner, Andrew DoorDash dopamine Dorsey, Jack dot-com boom Downs, Michael Downtown Cocktail Room “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia” (Bowles) Downtown Project (DTP) all-hands meetings artists and Burning Man and Catalyst Week and community and conditions for businesses in core values and death of Tony and drinking and events and financials and Fred Mossler and Groth book on Holacracy and layoffs and Life Is Beautiful and problems outlined real estate portfolio and startups and suicides and Tony and Fred first plan renovation of Tony as “Mayor” of Tony draws people to Tony’s dating and Tony’s decline and Tony’s drinking and drugs and Tony steps away from

Victor Oviedo and Drew Carey Show, The (TV show) DrinkExchange Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) drug-induced psychosis. See also ketamine; nitrous oxide; and other specific drugs Drugstore.com Durst, Robert Eat restaurant eBay Eckert, Charles e-commerce Ecomom eCompanies Economist, The Eiffel Tower Restaurant Eilish, Billie El Cortez casino Electric Daisy Carnival Ellison, Larry Endless.com Entango Entrepreneur Eon Epstein, Kenny Evensvold, Mark Everything Store, The (Stone) Facebook Factorli Fast Company Feld, Brad Fergusons Fernet-Branca 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) financial crisis of 2008 First Friday block parties Fitzpatrick, Ryan Flathead Lake, Montana Florence + The Machine flow states Foley, Christa Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Forbes Fortune Fred Factor, The (Sanborn) Freeman, Michael Free Stuff for Kids

Fremont East district Friends (TV show) Fusion Game, The (Strauss) Garfinkel, Spencer Garmin Gartner, John Gates, Bill Gehry, Frank gentrification Gillette Gizmodo Glaeser, Edward Glass Animals Gobbler, The Golden State Warriors Gold Spike casino Goodman, Carolyn Goodman, Oscar Google Goonies, The (film) Gordon-Levitt, Joseph Gorman, Brett Gould, David Graham, Paul Grande, Roberto Grease (musical) Great by Choice (Collins) Greenman, Jon Griffin bar Grinenko, A. Y. Groth, Aimee Gruber, Frank grunge rock Guadagnoli, Mark Guadagnoli, Max Guadalajara Guangdong Province, China Guardian Angels Haidt, Jonathan Haines, Pat Hallerman, Elisa Halloween golf tournament Happier (Ben-Shahar) happiness, science of Happiness Hypothesis, The (Haidt)

Hard Rock Casino (Vegas) Harvard Bartending School Harvard Student Agencies Harvard University Business School Hawaii Hawk, Tony Hayashi, Kami Henderson, Nevada Henrikson, James Henry, Mike Hill, David Hilton, Paris HitRecord Hof, Wim “the Ice Man” Holacracy Hollis, Brandon homelessness Hong Kong Hsieh, Andrew Chia-Pei “Andy” (brother) childhood and youth and death of Tony and education of Elizabeth Pezzello and Life Is Beautiful and Lux Delux built by Tony’s decline and Tony’s estate and Tony’s mid-career relationship with Tony’s resignation from Zappos and Van Ness condo and works at Zappos Hsieh, Anthony Chia-Hua “Tony” ADHD and Airstream Park and Alfred Lin as partner and check on Alfred’s departure and awards and honors and biohacking and birth of brother Andy and brother Dave and Burning Man and button business as teen and childhood and early youth of Club BIO and conservatorship attempts and costumes and

crypto and cult accusations and death of, in New London fire Delivering Happiness company and Delivering Happiness memoir and Delivering Happiness tours and depression and dog Blizzy and dog Blizzy’s death and Downtown Project and Downtown Project focus changed by Downtown Project layoffs and Downtown Project suicides and dress and style at Zappos and drinking and alcoholism and drug-induced psychosis, entourage, and decline of drugs and early jobs and early poems by early reading education of, at Chinese school education of, at Harvard education of, at Miller Creek Elementary and Middle Schools education of, at the Branson School entourage grows in Vegas estate of, and lawsuits Excedrin and family and friends attempt to help with interventions and welfare checks financial crisis of 2008 and fireflies and flow states and Fred Mossler as partner at Zappos and Fred’s departure from Zappos and friendships with Chinese students at NYU and friendship with Holly McNamara and friendship with James Henrikson and friendship with Janice Lopez and friendship with Jenn Lim and friendship with Ying Liu and Gobbler, The, created by happiness mantra and Harvard classmates cruise and hero’s journeys and Holacracy and image and physical appearance of Internet Marketing Solutions and Jewel’s attempts to help job at Oracle and

jobs at Harvard and Kanye West and ketamine and Las Vegas real estate portfolio and Las Vegas toast to memory of leadership ability and Life Is Beautiful and LinkExchange founded by LinkExchange sale to Microsoft and LinkExchange sale to Yahoo rejected by market-based dynamics and Mark Guadagnoli builds employee orientation for MDMA or Ecstasy and media and megalomania and Mimi Pham as personal assistant of nitrous oxide (laughing gas; Whip-Its) and NSFWCorp and octopus image and early poem of Ogden building home in Vegas and old friends visit during Downtown Project years Oprah interview and parents and parents and friends cut off by Park City entourage and spending during decline of Park City hospitalizations and Park City move and disturbing behavior of Park City psychotic break and Park City rehab attempt and personality of piano playing and pickup community techniques and poker and polygamy-based parenting and private search for inner peace and public image of, as head of Zappos Quincy House Grille at Harvard and rave scene and “return on community” philosophy and romance and friendship with Michelle D’Attilio romance with Eva Lee romantic relationships and polyamory of Ryan Doherty’s party and weird behavior of Sequoia and Soiled Dove event and Southern Highlands mansion of SpaceX and speaking by

stereotypes eluded by Summit conference and SXSW and trips to Hawaii and trip to Alaska and trip to Belcampo farm and trip to Holmstead Ranch Resort and trip to Hong Kong while at Harvard and trip to Mexico as teen to view eclipse and trip to Montana and meltdown by trip to Mount Kilimanjaro and trip to New London from Park City trip to Taiwan and trip to Yosemite and TV appearances of Tyler Williams and Van Ness Avenue home and Club BIO and Venture Frogs and Victor Oviedo asked to join Zappos by, with departure of Fred wealth of, vs. happiness goal WHISKY for Zappos and Winter Camp and as Zappos CEO, after sale to Amazon as Zappos CEO, during dot-com bust Zappos corporate culture and Zappos customer service and Zappos idea first pitched to Zappos launch and early funding and Zappos management and Zappos move to Las Vegas and Zappos name and Zappos resignation by Zappos sale to Amazon and Hsieh, David (brother) Hsieh, Judy Shiao-Ling Lee (mother) Hsieh, Richard Chuan-Kang (father) background and career of death of Tony and intervention and Tony’s estate and Tony’s psychotic breaks and Hsu, Alex Hsu, Eleen Hsu, Maggie Huffington Post hypomania Hypomanic Edge, The (Gartner)

IBM Imagine Dragons India “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life” (video) Inspire Theater Inspiring Children Foundation InstaCart Instagram Internet Marketing Solutions Isaac, Mike Jackson, Michael Jansen, Karl Japan Jay-Z Jewel Jobs, Steve John, Elton Johns Hopkins University Medical School Jorgensen, Ben Journeys into the Bright World (Moore and Alltounian) Juliet (Tony’s assistant) Kalanick, Travis Kane, Shawn Kao, Min Karolinska Institutet Karp, Alexander Kate O’Brien’s bar Kentucky warehouse Kessler, Todd ketamine Khosrowshahi, Dara Killers, The Kingdom of Happiness, The (Groth) Kings of Leon Kleiner Perkins Knoll, Kimberly Knowledge Society Koran Kotler, Steven Krawiec, Peter Krippner, Stanley Krupitsky, Evgeny Kushner, Jared Kutcher, Ashton Lagunitas Country Club

Lambda Phi Epsilon fraternity Las Vegas. See also Downtown Project; and specific sites death of Tony and map of Oscar Goodman’s early downtown plans in Tony plans to sell his real estate in Tony’s decline and Zappos first located in suburbs of Las Vegas Arts District Las Vegas City Hall Las Vegas Knights Las Vegas Nights (film) Las Vegas Review-Journal Las Vegas Sun Las Vegas Symphony Park Las Vegas Weekly Las Vegas World Market Launchkey Laundromat bar Laundry Room bar Lawn, Mei Lawrence Memorial Hospital (New London) Lazy Stars band Learning Village Lee, Ang Lee, Eva Lee, General Tsai (maternal grandfather) Lee, Peggy (maternal grandmother) Lee, Tony Lehman Brothers LGBTQ community Life Is Beautiful financials and half sold to Wendoh Media Justin Weniger fired from Rehan Choudhry fired from Lilly, John Lim, Jenn Limitless (film) Lin, Alfred leaves Tony for Tellme Networks leaves Zappos for Sequoia LinkExchange and as Zappos COO Zappos early years and Zappos sale to Amazon and LinkExchange sold to Microsoft

Yahoo and Little Book of Ketamine, The (Kelly) Liu, Eric Liu, Ying Livestrong Lombardi, Laura Lombardi Sports Lonsdale, Joe Lopez, Janice Los Angeles Los Angeles Magazine Los Del Rio Louie, David Louie, Jen Love, Reggie “Love Shack” (song) low-income housing Lucasfilm Lucas Valley Lundberg, Johan Lux Delux Luxor hotel “Macarena” (song) Madan, Sanjay Magic Castle project Mandel, Steven Mao Zedong marijuana Marin County market-based dynamics Marley the alpaca Maroney, Steve “Steve-O” Mars, Bruno Martin, Amy Jo Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Match.com Matrix, The (film) McCabe, Jen McHale, Patricia McNamara, Holly MDMA (Ecstasy) Megan Thee Stallion Melrose Place (TV show) Mel’s Diner “metaverse” #MeToo movement

Mexico Michaud, Mike Microsoft LinkExchange bought by Miller Creek Elementary School (formerly Dixie) Miller Creek Middle School mindfulness Minogue, Kylie “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions” (Richard Hsieh) Monster Energy girls Montana July 4 trips MontBleu Hotel (South Lake Tahoe) Mont Marin Moore, Demi Moore, Marcia Morabito, Angela Moritz, Michael Mossler, Fred Alfred Lin’s departure from Zappos and as check-and-balance for Tony death of Tony and departure from Zappos and Downtown Project and Las Vegas memorial toast to Tony and Life Is Beautiful and Mark Guadagnoli brought to Zappos by Nacho Daddy opened by Ogden building and remarriage and family and Tony’s psychotic break and travels with Tony and Zappos Holacracy campaign and Zappos launch and Zappos leadership team and Zappos sale to Amazon and Mossler, Kalei Mossler, Meghan Motel 6 (Las Vegas) Mount Everest Mount Kilimanjaro MTV multiverse Mumford and Sons Musk, Elon Musk, Kimbal Nacho Daddy

NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) Nathoo, Nadeem National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) National Drug Intelligence Center National Science Foundation National Taiwan University (NTU) Naughton, Jamie Navy SEALs NBC Necker Island Neighborhood Renewal (Clay) Neon Reverb NeoPlanet Netscape Neumann, Adam New Balance New London, death of Tony in New London Fire Department Newmark, Craig New Orleans Newsom, Gavin Newsom, Jennifer Siebel New York City New York Times, The bestseller list New York University (NYU) Nike 1999 Bar 9th Bridge School Nipton, California “Nitrous Oxide Advantage, The” (video) nitrous oxide (laughing gas; Whip-Its) Nobu Nordstrom norepinephrine NSFWCorp Oasis Motel Obama, Barack “Octopus” (poem by Tony) octopus sculpture Oehm, David Ogden building Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Mary-Kate OpenTable Oracle Orthodox Jews

Our Town (Wilder) “Over the Rainbow” (song) Oviedo, Victor Padover, David Page, Larry Pakistani immigrants Palantir Pando Daily Paris Hotel Park, Daniel Park City Andy and death of Tony and intervention attempts and welfare checks in Jewel’s visit to Tony in rehab in Tony moves to Tony’s line of credit in Tony’s psychotic break and decline in Park City Hospital Park City police Parke Davis Company Park on Fremont Parlour Bar Partovi, Ali Partovi, Hadi PayPal PCP Peake, Chris Peake, Christine Pence, Mike Pete’s Brewing Company Pezzello, Elizabeth PGA Tour Pham, Mimi Phi Lambda Upsilon pickup community Pierce, Brock Pillsbury, Skye PlanetRx Playboy Plaza Hotel Poler, Ariel polygamy-style parenting positive psychology Postmates Powder Mountain ski trip

Premsrirut, Puoy Prince Princeton University psychedelic mushrooms (psilocybin) Puerto Rico Quincy House Grille rave scene Raytheon Recano, Victoria Re/Code Reddit regression testing Reid, Harry Resort Gaming Group ResultSource return on community (ROC) return on investment (ROI) return on luck (ROL) Rinaudo, Keller Rise of Superman, The (Kotler) Robertson, Brian ROCeteer Rolling Stone Romotive (later Zipline) Roquet, Salvador Ross and Snow Rowland, Mark Rufus Du Sol Russian financial crisis “Sacco, Shelby” (pseudonym) Salesforce.com Salomon Brothers Salon SALT Conference Sanborn, Mark San Francisco San Francisco Chronicle Scaramucci, Anthony Schaefer, Scott Schleifer, Kimberly Schonfeld, Richard Scientist, The (Lilly) Seamless Sears Sequoia Capital

serotonin Shanghai Archive of Psychiatry Shanghai Mental Health Center Sherman, Jody ShoeSite. See also Zappos Shotwell, Gwynne Showtime Silicon Valley Silverstein, Craig Sinek, Simon Skau, Vernon Skechers SkyBridge Capital Slate Small Business Economics Smith, John L. Smith Center for the Performing Arts Soiled Dove event “Sometimes” (song) Sosh Soto, Jose South by Southwest (SXSW) Southern Highlands mansion Southern Oregon University South of Market district (SoMa) Southwest Airlines Soviet Union SpaceX Spears, Britney Spears, Jamie Special K. See also ketamine Spinnaker Software Stanford University Starbucks Star Trek Star Trek: The Experience Start with Why (Sinek) Stealing Fire (Kotler and Wheal) St. Louis Rams stock market crash of 2000 StockX Stone, Brad Strauss, Neil StyleTread suicides Summit conference Sundance Film Festival Super Pumped (TV show)

SV Angel Swartz, Aaron Swinmurn, Nick Swisher, Kara Taiwan Taler, Jen Tamber, Pritpal Tame Impala Tanzania TAO nightclub “Taylor, Anthony” (pseudonym) Teach for America TechCrunch Tedrow, Jillian TED Talks “Teeth” (poem by Tony) Tellme Networks Telluride, Colorado 10X scheme Terra Linda High School Tesla SUVs Theil, Peter Thoreen, Vivian Three Investigators, The (Arthur) TomorrowWorld Tony Hsieh Award “Tony Hsieh Speaks” “TOOMUCHTODONESS” (poem by Tony) Towne Terrace apartments Triumph of the City (Glaeser) Troy, Ms. Trump, Donald Trump, Ivanka Turntable Health Twitter Uber U.S. Army Research Office University of California, Berkeley University of California, Los Angeles University of California, San Francisco University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) University of Iowa University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University of Southern California USA Today bestseller list

USA Track and Field Valenzuela, Steve Valletta, Amber Vanas, Joey Vanguard bar Van Ness complex (1000 Van Ness Avenue) Vegas Seven Vegas Tech Fund Vegenation restaurant Venture for America Venture Frogs Venture Frogs Incubator Venture Frogs Restaurant Viaweb Vietnam War Virgin Wagamama Walters, Barbara Ware, Zach Warner Brothers Washington Post, The Weir, Bob Welch, Don WeLive Welker, Leslie Wells Fargo Wellth Collective Wellth Ventures Wendoh Media Weniger, Justin Wenner, Gus West, Kanye WeWork “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Boys, The (Madaras) Wheal, Jamie Wheeler, Jill Whip-Its. See nitrous oxide WHISKY (Warehouse Inventory System in Kentucky) “Who Will Save Your Soul” (song) Wilke, Jeff William Morris Endeavor Williams, Elissa Williams, Evan Williams, Tyler Winfrey, Oprah Winter Camp

Wired Wolfington, Ryan Women Who Work (Ivanka Trump) Woodbridge, James World War II World Wide Web Xanax XTR studio Y2K Yahoo Yale University Yang, Andrew Yang, Jerry Y Combinator Yeh, Connie Yosemite camping trip Young, Natalie Zappos Alfred Lin departs from Amazon buys Burning Man and corporate culture of customer service and death of Tony and Downtown Project and Elissa Williams discovers, in Vegas extranet created for “FAT” (Fred Mossler, Alfred Lin, and Tony) leadership team of financial crisis of 2008 and founding of, and early growth founding of, idea pitched by Nick Swinmurn Fred departs from Fred joins, as shoe guy Holacracy and Jewel’s Whole Human program for Kanye West and Las Vegas headquarters in old City Hall market-based dynamics and Mark Guadagnoli hired to train staff of meetings and Michelle D’Attilio and mini-promotions and moves to Henderson, Las Vegas suburb moves to Las Vegas downtown name created

parties and events at Simon Sinek’s message to StyleTread mimics Sundance Film Festival and Tony as CEO of Tony asks Victor Oviedo to join Tony dates employees at Tony decides to go all in on Tony hires, then lets go, brothers Andy and Dave at Tony’s drug problems and decline and Tony seen as cult leader at Tony’s resignation from Tyler informs leadership of Tony’s breakdown Tyler Williams hired by Van Ness Avenue complex and warehouse and shoe stores bought by Wells Fargo loans of 2003 and WHISKY and Zappos Insights Zappos Monopoly Zappos University Zappos yearbook ZDTV (cable channel) Zech, Ava Zhitomirskiy, Ilya Zipline (formerly Romotive) Zynga

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Angel Au-Yeung is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a former staff writer for Forbes. She was born in Hong Kong and grew up in California, the youngest of three sisters. She attended UC San Diego for undergrad as a cognitive neuroscience major and Columbia University for her graduate degree in journalism. You can sign up for email updates here.

David Jeans is an investigative reporter for Forbes, where he covers the tech industry. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School and has reported for the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other publications. He grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and lives in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.

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WONDER BOY: TONY HSIEH, ZAPPOS, AND THE MYTH OF HAPPINESS IN SILICON VALLEY. Copyright © 2023 by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271. www.henryholt.com Cover design by Emily Mahar Cover photograph © Jake Chessum / Trunk Archive Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Au-Yeung, Angel, 1991- author. | Jeans, David, 1992- author. Title: Wonder boy : Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the myth of happiness in Silicon Valley / Angel AuYeung and David Jeans. Description: First edition. | New York : Henry Holt and Company, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005568 (print) | LCCN 2023005569 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250829092 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250829085 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hsieh, Tony. | Zappos.com (Firm) | Businessmen—United States—Biography. | Footwear industry—United States. | Clothing trade—United States. | Electronic commerce— United States. Classification: LCC HC102.5.H75 A92 2023 (print) | LCC HC102.5.H75 (ebook) | DDC 381/.45685310092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005568 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005569 e-ISBN 9781250829085 First Edition 2023 Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

CONTENTS

Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Epigraph Prologue Map 1: The Golden Child 2: Wide Awake 3: The Bet 4: LinkExchange 5: Raving 6: The Shoe Guy 7: The Trifecta 8: Delivering Happiness 9: The New Project 10: The Desert Tech Utopia 11: Life Is Beautiful 12: The Darwinian Perspective 13: Andy 14: Trouble in Paradise

15: “The Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas” 16: The Island 17: The Trailer Park 18: The Right Hand 19: Genie in a Bottle 20: Winter Camp 21: Flow State 22: The Gordian Knot 23: Sticky Notes 24: Old Friends and New 25: Who Will Save Your Soul? 26: On the Edge of the Ether-World 27: Blizzy 28: Thanksgiving 29: The Aftermath Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Notes Image Credits Index About the Authors Copyright

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For Steve Grind. Even though I dedicated my first book to him, he deserves it even more this time. —Kirsten For my mom —Katherine

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. —Albert Camus

NOTE TO READERS

Tony Hsieh’s sudden death in late November 2020 at only forty-six years of age

sent shock waves through the business community and around the world. One of America’s most beloved entrepreneurs, Tony was adored and respected for his unconventional ideas on workplace culture and happiness, which he detailed in his best-selling book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. A near billionaire, he had almost single-handedly developed downtown Las Vegas over the previous decade. He had built one of the most joyful companies on earth as chief executive officer of the shoe-selling site Zappos, now owned by Amazon. Thousands of people around the world, many of whom didn’t even know him, loved him because of his singular ability to lift people up and see the best in them. His story might have ended there, with the beautiful obituaries published in newspapers and magazines that detailed his life and accomplishments, including where we work as reporters, the Wall Street Journal. But Tony died under mysterious circumstances at a young age in a shed fire in Connecticut. Almost immediately after his death, we began hearing stories about his last year as he embarked on a new vision in a new town, Park City, Utah. He had surrounded himself with people who were taking advantage of him. We were told that alcohol and drugs had played a role in his death, but we weren’t sure how. We learned that he might have suffered from mental health issues, possibly worsened by the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, few details about the fire that had killed him were released in the weeks after his death, including why Tony was in New London, Connecticut, at all. A much bigger story needed to be unraveled.

As a result, we were faced with a challenge. On the one hand, we had a mystery: How did Tony Hsieh die? But we also had a biography, the storied career of a person who saw the world differently and encouraged others to believe in themselves, to write. And so we ended up with two intertwined stories: one about Tony Hsieh’s life and one about his death. Because this is a deeply personal story, and to differentiate from other members of the Hsieh family, we have opted to refer to Tony by his first name throughout, while we use the last names of other people who are mentioned in this book. The exception is Jewel, who is commonly referred to by her first name. Tony Hsieh moved to Park City—which he had often visited for the Sundance Film Festival—in early 2020 after leaving rehab with big plans. He wanted to boost arts in the community, support local businesses, and bring people together. It was in some ways modeled after his famous Las Vegas Downtown Project, in which he had invested $350 million in the development of a struggling part of the city. But like so many of us, he was privately struggling. He began heavily abusing drugs, exacerbating lifelong mental health issues that he had always hidden from others. He spent tens of millions of dollars in just a few months, with people around him vying for pieces of his fortune. It all caught up with him one night in a riverside house in New London, Connecticut, when a shed he was in caught fire. We have based this account on more than two hundred interviews with his close friends, employees, business associates, and others such as lawyers, doctors, consultants, and professors who interacted with him in the last year of his life and throughout his career. Some people are quoted on the record; others spoke to us anonymously. This book is also based on thousands of documents, photos, and videos. We obtained hundreds of police, local government, business, and court records— from New London, the San Francisco Bay Area, Las Vegas, and Utah. Some we received through filing Freedom of Information Act requests or from public disclosures, others from people involved in the story. Related to Tony’s last year in Park City, we viewed dozens of pictures taken of Tony’s multimillion-dollar mansion in Park City known as the Ranch, watched videos taken by those who had interacted with him, and reviewed dozens of

employees’ schedules during the summer and fall of 2020. We viewed internal communications, such as emails and text messages, between members of Tony’s inner circle. We have detailed our sourcing in full at the back of the book, including our efforts to obtain some documents that have not been released by Park City officials and responses from some of the parties involved. We have also benefited from Tony’s own book, Delivering Happiness, which he published in 2010, as well as a more recent book about Zappos in Tony’s and his employees’ own words, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work and Your Life by Putting Service First. We ask you not to assume that a person or a business that appears prominently in the narrative, or is mentioned, participated in this book, although every person and entity cited was given the opportunity to do so. Dialogue is in quotes only when it is described in a record, or when it was relayed by someone directly involved, or by someone who witnessed a particular scene. Please keep in mind that even in seemingly private moments, Tony was nearly always surrounded by multiple friends or employees. A note about Cirque Lodge, the rehabilitation facility in Utah, in particular: it was enormously generous in granting us access to its owner, therapists, and other staff. We were allowed to tour its facilities and experience its program (including a helicopter ride!). However, the employees did not breach doctorpatient confidentiality by giving us information about Tony Hsieh’s stay there or his medical condition in general, nor did they discuss any other patients who had visited the facility. Some of the scenes in this book, particularly at the end, will be hard to digest. We’re especially aware of how difficult it might be for Tony’s loved ones. This is a story of a business pioneer who pushed countless boundaries throughout his career but also suffered from addiction and mental health issues, particularly in his last year. From the very nature of his death, parts of the story will be disturbing. But at the heart of Tony’s life story is his drive to connect with people—to solve problems for others and generally make the world a kinder place in which to live—a legacy that has continued even after his death and that we hope this book will contribute to.

Know that we have chosen the descriptions of his mental, emotional, and physical states with the utmost care and that we have not included many devastating accounts and details from friends, employees, and visitors that would have only served to repeat descriptions of his condition or make the story appear salacious. What we did choose to use, we did so with the intention of showing his unfortunate decline at a time when many people around him were taking advantage of his condition. Our primary hope, however, is that through these carefully selected scenes and details, Tony’s story will serve as a warning to many others not to ignore looming mental health and addiction issues. Indeed, many of the people we spoke to for this book were understandably concerned about how Tony’s last year would ultimately reflect on his legacy as a vaunted entrepreneur and beloved CEO. We would argue that not only will that legacy remain but one of his more unexpected gifts to the world will be to serve as an example of someone who could have been saved, by himself or others, if mental health issues weren’t so stigmatized. Tony’s struggles are also emblematic of the impossible expectations, often unspoken, that we place on society’s most respected figures—those whom we look to for answers and perfection. It is our hope that his story will shine a light on these issues, possibly helping others in the process. If you or someone you know is struggling, we have included an appendix with information on mental health and substance abuse resources. Our goal in telling Tony’s story is to break the cycle of silence and isolation around these issues with the hope of destigmatizing reaching out for help when you’re struggling. People are there to help, even when it might not seem like it, and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, and Crisis Text Line, 741741, provide immediate, around-the-clock assistance. A fuller list of mental health resources can be found at the end of the book.

PROLOGUE “A FREAK ACCIDENT”

New London, Connecticut, November 18–19, 2020

Fire

Chief Thomas Curcio drove across the dark neighborhoods of New London, Connecticut, in the early morning of November 18, 2020, the crackling sound of his car scanner the only noise breaking the silence in his SUV. He had been awakened by a call to his cell phone around 3:30 a.m. by dispatch with reports of a fire and a person trapped inside a house or possibly a nearby structure. That wasn’t unusual. New London is only six square miles, with a population of about 27,000, but it is a densely populated urban area—“like someone took a slice out of New York City,” his fire marshal, Vernon Skau, likes to tell people. The small department is busy enough on most days, handling about 7,500 calls a year. A large glass cabinet at the fire station showcases pictures and artifacts from some of New London’s most memorable fires, large and small: a blown fuse at a fast-food restaurant that had charred the inside; a Samsung cell phone that had exploded. Once the largest of a string of affluent coastal towns in southeastern Connecticut, New London has been in decline since the 1980s, when the Crystal Mall opened on the outskirts of town, sucking business away from local shops on State and Bank Streets in the downtown area. A recent attempt to infuse arts into the city stalled during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Chief Curcio was born and raised in New London and has worked at its fire department since he was twenty-two. As a kid, he pretended to respond to fires using his Matchbox toy cars. He had been given the top job at the department two years earlier, at an official ceremony covered by the local newspaper. Fifty-eight now, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pleasing New England accent, Curcio knows many of New London’s residents by name and its streets by heart. The address of the fire, 500 Pequot Avenue, was only half a mile away from his house in a high-end neighborhood of New London. It was the middle of the night and freezing—about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. He was not the first to arrive. It was a serious incident, and New London’s three fire trucks, including a ladder truck, had been dispatched to the scene. Several police cars and an ambulance had also pulled up in front of a fairly large gray house, not unlike others on the residential street overlooking the water. Curcio knew its previous owner, a local doctor, but not who lived there currently. If it was a house fire, it didn’t look serious upon arrival. A thin plume of smoke rose from the backyard. The front of the house, with a sloping roof and a round attic window, appeared undamaged. Most of the lights were on, turning the property into a glowing beacon in the middle of a very dark street. Curcio stepped out of his SUV in his firefighting gear and a face mask, a department precaution during the pandemic. As he hurried across the street, he could see the ambulance crew loading a man on a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The person appeared to be alive but unconscious, with an oxygen mask strapped around his head. Curcio didn’t stop to examine him further. His job as chief was to direct the firefighters at the scene while also performing an initial evaluation of what had occurred. He went to the backyard, where several of his colleagues were gathered around a small shed attached to the house. The shed faced a rectangular pool, which was covered for the winter months, and beyond a short wall at the end of the property, Curcio knew, was the Thames River, although he couldn’t see it in the darkness. In New London, the Thames River spills into Long Island Sound.

The shed was where the man who had been pulled out had been found. He had been lying on a blanket inside, unconscious. The wooden door had been locked, and firefighters had had to pry it open with “forcible hand entry tools” to pull him out, a later fire department report said. “He’s barricaded,” one rescue worker shouted into her radio to a dispatcher. The man hadn’t been badly burned, and the fire had been put out right away. Parts of the inside still smoldered, and it was a jumble of beach chairs and long foam floaties used in pools. A propane space heater was partially charred, as was the edge of the blanket the man had been lying on. A candle had tipped over, spilling wax over a plastic ziplock bag stuffed with Post-it notes. Small metal canisters littered the ground that fire investigators later identified as cartridges of nitrous oxide, the kind you might attach to a whipped cream dispenser, known as whippets. Cigarettes were strewn around, and a pool of Tiki torch fluid had spilled onto the floor. All of those objects Curcio’s department would later describe as possible causes of the fire. Curcio moved on to the basement of the house, which was attached to the shed and could be accessed by sliding doors from the backyard. The basement could theoretically have been harmed during a fire. It was there that he saw something unusual. All of the walls of the finished room were covered in bright yellow sticky notes, a mosaic of paper squares that traveled all the way to the ceiling. Words and messages were scrawled on them, but Curcio couldn’t make out what they said. “The man must be a scientist or an engineer,” he thought to himself, “someone who lays out their thoughts on many pieces of paper, like a map.” In addition to his day job, Curcio worked part-time at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital nearby, performing stress tests on patients in the cardiology department. He would sometimes see sticky notes or other scraps of paper tacked up on meeting room walls. Soon Curcio’s phone lit up with a text message. The New London police chief, also on the scene, had sent the name of the victim to everyone else working there: Tony Hsieh. The chief speculated in his text that he might be the CEO of the online shoe retailer Zappos. Later the fire chief researched Tony more.

He found that Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) was only forty-six and had become something of a business legend through his nearly two decades at the helm of Zappos, the online shoe company now owned by Amazon. Tony was known worldwide for his radical ideas about company culture and had led a redevelopment of downtown Las Vegas, plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into the downtown area of the city and funding dozens of new companies. Early in his career, before Zappos, he had sold a startup to Microsoft during the internet boom of the 1990s, cementing his reputation as a genius entrepreneur. Later Chief Curcio would ask his wife to buy him a copy of Tony’s best-selling book, Delivering Happiness, for Christmas. The book, published in 2010, detailed Tony’s life and the company culture at Zappos, inspiring business leaders, government officials, and readers around the world. Tony’s ties to New London were unclear; the articles Curcio found all showed that Tony lived in Las Vegas but had recently been buying properties in Park City, Utah. In a later police report, one officer at the scene of the fire had also googled Tony and written the barest of details, likely from his Wikipedia page: Anthony “Tony” Hsieh was an “American Entrepreneur and venture capitalist who has a net worth of $850 million dollars. He was born in Illinois on 12-12-73 and grew up in California. He earned his Computer Science degree at Harvard University. He retired as the CEO of Zappos in August 2020, after 21 years.” The night of the fire, the firefighters and police noticed three large Mercedes passenger vans, the kind that transport celebrities to events, parked in front of the house on Pequot Avenue. In New London, where the streets are filled with more economical vehicles, they stood out. Inside one of the vans, a group of men and women sat silently, looking shaken. Curcio and his team soon learned that many of them were employees of the wealthy businessman. The fire department had split up the interviewing with the police, a standard procedure in an investigation with many witnesses. An officer spoke to one of them, Brett Gorman, who described himself as an employee of Tony’s. Gorman said he was engaged to another employee, a young woman named Elizabeth Pezzello.

When the officer asked for more information about Tony, Gorman explained that Tony had several investments in and out of the country. The officer asked him to elaborate, but he just shrugged. “Does the business have a name?” the officer prodded. “No,” Gorman replied. “Well, how does the business make money?” Gorman laughed. “I don’t mean ‘business’ in that way, as in making money,” he said. “Tony is very rich, and he is retired except for a project we have going on in Utah.” He, Pezzello, and three other employees, he told the officer, were part of Tony’s “core team.” The Mercedes vans had been waiting to take them all on a trip to Hawaii. How does an accomplished chief executive officer, one of America’s most beloved entrepreneurs, end up in a burning shed thousands of miles away from his home city of Las Vegas in the middle of a devastating pandemic? As reporters at the Wall Street Journal, we wanted to find the answer. In stories for the Journal in 2020 and 2021, we explored Tony’s struggles with alcohol and, later, drugs. We deeply examined the entourage who surrounded him in Park City, Utah, during 2020, a group of friends and employees— including his own brother—many of whom enabled Tony’s worsening drug addiction while feeding off his wealth. But we quickly realized that Tony’s path to the burning shed in New London, Connecticut, was much more complicated and heartbreaking than we had first realized. His journey had actually started years earlier, with a fundamental goal that many people can surely relate to: he wanted to be happy. His desire to achieve happiness, and especially to spread it to those around him, was so great that he staked his entire career, and his livelihood, on that goal. It was his life’s mission, and it was ultimately his downfall. At Zappos, he infused the company with a culture known for its outrageous parties, constant happy hours, and a list of values that encouraged workers to be “a little weird,” an unusual workplace renaissance he detailed in his book,

Delivering Happiness. Determined to bring joy to people who bought shoes from Zappos and those who worked for him, he believed strongly in the value of customer service and in building a workplace culture that would allow all employees to be themselves. With the line between friends and employees already blurred, Tony took his happiness goal one step further by empowering his workers to take on more responsibility in a much-watched management experiment called holacracy. This decentralized organizational theory meant that he refused to adhere to a traditional company structure or the confines of a chief executive officer role; he thought everyone should be empowered to achieve his or her own goals. In downtown Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh dedicated $350 million of his own fortune to turning the forgotten corner of the city into an urban theme park filled with brightly colored art, bars, and event venues. He wooed entrepreneurs from across the country, investing in their businesses in exchange for their moving to Vegas. He asked his friends and acquaintances, “What do you need to live up to your full potential?” and then gave them the money or time they required. He rarely directed those questions inward, in part to avoid addressing his own problems. He failed to take care of himself. Tony was endlessly generous. He never asked for anything in return. Across the tech industry, charismatic, eccentric innovators have often been exalted—lifted up and put onto unrealistic pedestals for the rest of us to admire or vilify. Tony Hsieh was no different, and he was viewed as a sort of business culture messiah, a leader who could solve all the riddles plaguing the workplace. Thousands of business owners, government officials, and academics made the pilgrimage to Zappos each year to learn from his genius. But the relentless pursuit of happiness has a darker side. Beneath his public, happiness-focused veneer, Tony struggled privately: he had undiagnosed mental health issues and facial recognition problems that he kept hidden from even some of his closest friends. Across Silicon Valley, a work-until-you-break ethos is common as superstar CEOs and founders race to build products they believe will help humanity, whether they are operating social media platforms, renting out coworking space, or selling shoes. There is no time to stop. There is no room to stumble.

Only recently has it become more accepted for high-performing people such as CEOs, celebrities, and athletes—the tennis star Naomi Osaka and the Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, for example—to admit that they need a break. There is, however, still a great stigma. Tony, despite his close friendship with the singer and songwriter Jewel, a mental health expert in her own right, refused to seek help, always believing, as many in the tech industry do, that he could somehow hack his own problems through diet or exercise or cold baths. The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting quarantine away from his closest friends took a terrible toll on him. Tony never married or had children. Always a heavy drinker—a way of life, particularly at ZapposI—Tony increased his drinking in the latter years of his life as he continued to ignore his own internal suffering in the pursuit of others’ happiness. Even in his darkest moments, he wanted to make sure that those around him felt they were loved and taken care of. Ultimately, he turned to drugs—ketamine and nitrous oxide—to help free his mind and to try to find some relief. His life reached a devastating conclusion in Park City, Utah, where he tried to build a utopian community in 2020. He wanted his loved ones, and the people of the world, to live together free of Covid-19 and achieve the lasting peace he sought. By that time, though, his mental health problems had worsened, and he suffered a series of breakdowns that could no longer be ignored. By that point in his life, though, a new entourage surrounded him, including his brother. At their best, many of these people, paid handsomely from Tony’s fortune and beholden to a man they worshipped, simply stood by as he unraveled before them. At their worst, others enabled all his most terrible instincts and drug use. By the time he locked himself into a shed in New London, Connecticut, in November 2020 at a house owned by a woman considered to be his “soul mate,” Tony was lost, a wisp of the man so many people had loved. The man peddling happiness couldn’t make himself happy. By the time his friends and family tried to save him, it was too late.

This is the story of one great and flawed entrepreneur and the long, fateful journey he took to try to make the world a better place. It is also the story of a man who struggled silently with his inner turmoil for decades, even as he was surrounded by dozens of people who loved him and, in the end, some others who didn’t. More than anything, it is the story of the great desire in all of us to find happiness, and bring happiness to others, at any cost. Two days after the shed fire in late November 2020, a neighbor, Patricia Richardson, was at her house in New London, which shared a side yard with the site of the shed fire, 500 Pequot Avenue. The former publisher of the local newspaper, The Day, Richardson didn’t know her neighbors well, since they were almost never home. When she did see them, they seemed nice, and polite. A group of them had moved in that September of 2020, but the house appeared to be owned by just one of them, Rachael Brown, whom Richardson had greeted on several occasions. Brown was a middle-aged woman, friendly enough, with light brown hair that looked like it had been dyed blonde. One day in the fall of 2020, Richardson had looked down into her side yard to find a small lavender metal canister that fit into the palm of her hand. She had no idea what it was and, after examining it a little, had thrown it away. By that time, she had heard about Tony Hsieh and knew he was somehow affiliated with the property. She’d looked him up but had never seen him. The house at 500 Pequot Avenue stood empty for weeks at a time, and when Brown was home, she was usually with a small group of people. They were generally quiet, but one time in the fall of 2020 the neighbors were treated to an unusual spectacle. Spotlights were set up on the side of the house, and a wrestling ring was assembled. A group of people came out dressed in costume, including the actor David Arquette. Arquette is a former professional wrestler and a friend of Tony’s, but the neighbors didn’t know that. On the night of the fire in late November 2020, Richardson woke up to the sound of several people screaming outside. “Tony!” she heard the people yell.

“Tony!” She rushed to open her sliding glass door and looked over her balcony, from which she could see Brown’s backyard. A woman was on the neighbor’s balcony, pacing and yelling “1014!” over and over. Richardson later learned that it was the code to the nearby pool shed. Below, she saw two men clawing desperately at the door of the shed, which appeared to be locked. An alarm blared. Richardson couldn’t figure out what was going on until she heard one of the neighbors yell something about a fire. She immediately ran back inside and called the police. Later she watched from her yard as thick smoke poured from the shed. It smelled acrid, like an electrical fire. Across the fence the next morning, she saw one of the neighbors, a man named Anthony Hebert who visited there sometimes with Brown. There was a memorial on their side of the fence, a tacky, brightly colored thing that appeared to be marking a small grave. The memorial included a stack of white rocks, a bird feeder, two Tiki torches, and plastic flowers arranged over an arch. Hebert greeted her and explained, “Rachael’s dog died. It was really old and blind and sick, and she’s really upset. “And now her friend…” he trailed off. Richardson told him she had called the police the night before and said she hoped their friend would be okay. The details of who had been pulled from the shed had not yet made national news. Soon reporters from all over the country would be stationed on the residential street, and Richardson would be followed by camera drones as she walked down the beach. “It was a freak accident,” Hebert acknowledged, “but he’s young. He’s going to be okay. “It was really just a freak accident.” I. Zappos has a drug- and alcohol-use policy that prohibits illegal drug use in the workplace and requires that any alcohol consumption at company offices or at work-related events be done responsibly.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE “A VERY OPTIMISTIC, INNOCENT TIME”

Park City, Utah, February 2020–March 2020 San Francisco, California, 1995–1998

My role is about unleashing what people already have inside them. That is maybe suppressed in most work environments. —Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh was free.

He pushed through a set of double glass doors, pulling a suitcase with several changes of clothes, cell phone in hand. His eyes were clearer than they had been in weeks, and his face looked fuller. His black hair, which he had recently shaved off completely, had grown back into little spikes. He already needed a haircut. Tony paid little attention to the majesty of his surroundings as he hurried to a Mercedes van waiting in the sprawling parking lot. Directly in front of him towered the Provo Peaks, a set of mountains in Utah’s Wasatch Range, only miles away. To his left was what the locals called the “Wasatch front” side of Mount Timpanogos, one of the largest mountains in the range. On the “Wasatch back” side of the mountain, out of Tony’s view, was the Cascade Cirque. Even at a distance, the Cirque, a glacier-carved amphitheater, is recognizable by the dark, jagged slashes across its white surface, as if a tiger had run its claw horizontally across the snow. It was the end of February, and a light snow was falling. Earlier in the month, there had been several blizzards in the area, and snow from those storms was still

piled high in some corners of the parking lot. The drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in the town of Orem, Utah, that Tony had just left was named for the glacier—Cirque Lodge—and Tony would have seen plenty of the surrounding area during his stay. The facility, known as “the studio,” because of its affiliation with the Osmonds singing band in the 1970s, has a panoramic view of the mountain range through large windows in its dining room and common areas, and winding hallways that resemble dorm rooms. Cirque Lodge charges most patients $38,700 a month to stay in the studio, typical for a celebrity facility. Cirque Lodge was founded in 1999 by Richard Losee, a devout Mormon whose background was in the beauty and jewelry industries. After watching a relative deal with drug addiction without the right mix of treatment options, Losee made a life-altering decision to change the plans for a wellness center he had been planning to build in the mountains. Instead, he turned it into a rehabilitation clinic. He has since turned down several offers from private equity firms to purchase it. Losee, who keeps an office at the studio location, is known by clients for his quiet kindness and flexibility. Despite its reputation as a facility for the rich and famous, Cirque Lodge routinely cuts its prices for clients who can’t afford it, and many staff members have worked there nearly since it was founded. Others have been addicts themselves or watched loved ones suffer. Because of his stature, Tony would normally have been staying at Cirque’s smaller, more private facility, a mountain chalet known as “the lodge,” about a twenty-minute drive away, hidden at the top of an unmarked driveway in the mountains near Sundance, Utah. The treatment plan is about the same, but the rooms are private and guests are allowed more access to phones and computers. The monthly cost is also higher, about $64,000 a month. Big-name former clients such as Lindsay Lohan and Kirsten Dunst typically preferred to stay at the more intimate lodge facility because of its privacy and because it looks more like a cabin retreat. Never more than sixteen clients are in residence at any one time. But Tony stayed at the studio location, which resembled dorm rooms, instead so that he could quickly adapt to his preferred habitat—with a lot of people around him.

He did not want to stay at either location—or any facility at all, for that matter. But his friends had insisted. By the end of 2019, Tony had begun acting erratically. He had always been a heavy drinker—his cologne was the smell of his favorite drink, the Italian liqueur Fernet-Branca, his friends liked to joke—but he had begun experimenting with more drugs as well. He had started taking ketamine, a drug used medically as an anesthetic that can cause hallucinations, but also thought to help with inspiration and creativity. The practice had been encouraged by a shaman, a religious leader believed to fall into a trancelike state to communicate with the spirit world. Tony told his friends that the shaman was taking him on trips into the desert. Usually Tony reserved his drug use for his annual trip to the Burning Man art and music festival in the Nevada desert, one of his favorite events. His strange behavior started becoming noticeable at Zappos, where he had been CEO for two decades, veering from his standard silliness to downright puzzling. Working on his acres of new development plans, Tony was talking a lot, all the time, about outlandish ideas and plans as he walked around downtown Las Vegas. Usually reserved, he was even chatting to strangers, who didn’t know him and would stare curiously at him on the street. His friends really began to worry in January 2020, after he decided to throw one of his close friends, Ryan Doherty, a surprise party. Doherty, a clean-cut Boston native, is a longtime, well-known bar owner in Las Vegas. One of his most popular bars in the downtown area, Commonwealth, has a secret speakeasy tucked inside the back. Called the Laundry Room, the small brickwalled room has plush brown couches, small tables, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling near the wooden wraparound bar, and framed black-and-white portraits lining the walls. Tony had spent his life throwing parties for his friends, often with themes. And this time he wanted to give the entire parking lot where he lived in an Airstream trailer with a dozen other Airstreams and a scattering of tiny, wooden homes the same old-timey feel of a speakeasy in honor of Doherty. He wanted to somehow recreate the feeling Doherty gave others when they walked into his popular bar. So his plans weren’t unusual. But the entire night seemed off-kilter.

The party started in downtown Las Vegas. Someone picked up Doherty, blindfolded him, and handed him a cold package wrapped in paper, instructing him to hold it. He was then placed in a car that sped around the city, so he wouldn’t know where he was going. Doherty needed to brace himself in the car during the crazy drive, so he stuffed the package awkwardly down his shirt. He knew the Airstream park where Tony lived, but when the car pulled up and his blindfold lifted, he found a maze of sheets and makeshift walls, an experience that someone later explained had been aimed at “sensory deprivation.” In the twenty-four hours spent constructing the party, Tony had dispatched friends to Doherty’s speakeasy to borrow some of the furniture, arranging it in front of the Airstream trailers. The cold package Doherty carried was a bundle of raw fresh fish. He was expected to hand the fish to a waiting chef, who would cook it for the group’s dinner. Its significance was unclear. Attendees, most of them wearing white, speculated that it must be Doherty’s birthday for Tony to plan such an elaborate celebration. It wasn’t. His friends were confused, with the night not coming together fully and Tony acting strangely, and they tried to make sense of what was unfolding. Perhaps Tony was trying to create his own version of the Jejune Institute, an underground alternative universe in which players complete tasks based on a made-up story line that an artist invented in San Francisco. “A fake protest, drawing 250 people, was enacted for a ‘minichapter,’ created to delight hardcore gamers,” the New York Times wrote about the experience in 2012. Tony had recently discussed a vision of an immersive, real-life “game” experience in downtown Las Vegas like the one organized in San Francisco years earlier, and maybe, they thought, they were living through a trial run. The party became one of the incidents that ultimately convinced Tony’s friends that he might need help. Soon after, several of them began to broach the subject of Tony going to rehab. Talking him into something, however, always required careful framing, especially about more delicate issues. Some of his friends came on too strong, telling him that he was an addict or that he had a problem. Doherty, who knew Tony well, took another tack, persuading him in an hours-long conversation that if he went to rehab by his own choice, he could

control the narrative. He wouldn’t want Zappos to discover that something was wrong and then force him to go, Doherty argued. Doherty had prepared for the conversation, having researched the best rehab facilities in the country. He ultimately landed on Cirque Lodge, chosen in part because Tony loved the area. Almost every year he and his group traveled to the annual Sundance Film Festival, and they typically stayed in a rental in Park City, Utah. Tony was actually in the process of buying a property there in the winter of 2020 for vacation use, a wood-frame house across from the ski resort on Empire Avenue. It provided a cover for him to be out of town. Of utmost importance was keeping it quiet. Tony was a business celebrity, and Las Vegas was insular; word could spread quickly. No one wanted executives at Amazon, which had bought Zappos in 2009, to find out. Zappos operated largely autonomously from Amazon, but the parent company was likely to get involved if the company discovered that Tony had a drug problem. If anyone in Las Vegas asked, they were told that Tony and Doherty were visiting the new vacation property, getting it ready for visitors. The Sundance Film Festival would also have just ended, and parties sometimes continued in the days after. The program at Cirque Lodge seemed perfect for Tony. It is “experiential,” relying on various activities throughout the day to help treat patients. Its facility in the town of Orem, Utah, about an hour from Park City, has a state-of-the art ropes course housed in a 17,000-square-foot room that also features an indoor rock-climbing area and storage closets packed with outdoor gear. A recording studio featuring musical instruments and equipment that would make any professional band jealous is on hand for music therapy. In the summer, Cirque Lodge employees lead clients on hikes through the rising rock walls of nearby Provo Canyon, often taking the 1.5-mile trail to Bridal Veil Falls, a two-tiered waterfall gushing from the rocks. They go rafting and tubing down the Provo River. In the winter, they snowshoe. Most clients participate in equine therapy with a skilled, long-standing staff member, Dave Beck, an intense man with piercing blue eyes who is himself a recovering alcoholic. At indoor and outdoor staging areas, Beck teaches patients how to issue commands to the horses, trying to get them to trot in a circle around the client or change the direction in which they are walking. It is a challenge, even for people used to animals, so Beck hopes

to break through patients’ egos so they will ask for help when they are struggling. That is a skill he is hoping they will take back to the real world. Though the program at Cirque Lodge employs the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, among other traditional therapies, Beck and Losee early on introduced experiential therapies as a way to get clients distracted and perhaps interested in another activity besides their addiction. This awakening to something new is what Beck refers to as an “internal spiritual experience,” one of the main steps in the AA manual. “This is a very simple program,” said Beck, as he picked up his own manual, which was falling apart and duct taped in some places. “It’s very difficult to execute.” Tony agreed to go to Cirque Lodge after Doherty spoke to him and left Las Vegas in a private jet. When Doherty had broached the topic with Tony, much of their conversation had involved Tony negotiating his length of stay at Cirque Lodge, refusing to go for the full thirty days that is common in most addiction programs today. It is very rare for a client to stay at Cirque Lodge less than a month. Usually it takes a week or ten days just to become adjusted to the daily schedule and acknowledge the need for help. Some centers now promote stays as long as three months. “The longer someone stays, the more likely their chances are of staying sober,” Losee said later. Tony agreed to two weeks total. On day thirteen, he left. Though there is a small front desk, there is no security, only a reception desk. Clients can leave at any time. As he walked out, Tony climbed into the waiting Mercedes Sprinter van in the parking lot, and it drove through a pair of wrought-iron gates and away from the treatment facility. It wasn’t the first time Tony had left somewhere important early. In 1995, he sat at a desk in a row of other desks in a large room full of rows of desks at the database management giant Oracle Corporation. He had just graduated from Harvard University with a degree in computer science. Oracle had hired him for a software engineering position, even though Tony didn’t really know what the job entailed.

He was twenty-two, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, with a penchant for playing pranks, programming computers, and eating at Taco Bell. He wore his black hair shaggy, and it crept down the back of his neck. He looked no older than fifteen. Oracle’s business is not exciting; it helps companies around the world manage information. But it is one of the founding companies of Silicon Valley, and its chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, remains well regarded as one of the area’s original tech founders. When Tony arrived almost two decades after its 1970s founding, Oracle, located in the small South Bay community of Redwood City, was one of the Valley’s greatest success stories. Its custom-built headquarters spanned several multistory green glass towers that half circled a small lake. Employees called it “Larry’s Lagoon.” Oracle had gone public in 1986 and was bringing in more than $2 billion in revenue each year. The $40,000 salary that Oracle offered Tony straight out of college seemed like a staggering amount at the time. He had been raised in nearby Marin, California, just north of San Francisco, so he would be returning home, sort of, and definitely to warmer weather than in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had spent the last four years of undergrad. Tony was one of hundreds of software engineers at Oracle, and he quickly became bored. His parents, Richard and Judy, a chemical engineer and a psychologist, had imposed intense structure and discipline on his life and that of his two younger brothers, Andy and Dave, while they were growing up. As a result, Tony hated monotony and routine. He had gone to Harvard for his parents’ sake, but what he really wanted to do was start his own business. He wanted to make money, not because he needed it—his family had always lived comfortably—but because he wanted to build something that would deliver freedom from having to worry about the cost of anything. He didn’t have expensive tastes; he preferred jeans and a T-shirt over any other outfit and was happy sharing a rental with his roommate, Sanjay Madan, who also had graduated from Harvard and taken a job at Oracle. Madan was an ultrasmart computer programmer of Indian descent who, improbably, spoke less than Tony did.

Tony learned that at Oracle, no one was tracking his time in the office. He came in late and left early, taking an hour-long nap break during the day at his apartment nearby. He waited it out a few months and then quit. Madan also left his job at Oracle. Together the two planned to design company websites, a venture Tony’s parents did not support. Richard Hsieh told him frankly, “It didn’t really sound like that could ever become a big enough business to be meaningful.” Back then, the internet was in its infancy, a novelty called the World Wide Web—which helps explain why Richard Hsieh was doubtful about his son’s new career path. In 1995, only about 3 percent of the US population had ever signed on to the Web. Yahoo! had launched the previous year, and Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon all got their start as Tony was thinking about a web business. Oracle became one of the first software companies to design a strategy for the internet. It was a defining moment for Silicon Valley, a feeling in the air that people there were on the verge of something big, a small quivering that was about to turn into an earthquake. “It was all brand new to everyone,” recalled Alan Shusterman, one of the founding team members in the business Tony would start at the time, LinkExchange, and the director of product management. “It was like ‘Oh, my God, I could have my website visited by people all over the world! I can sell golf balls or anything I want online!’ It was a very optimistic, innocent time.” In August 1995, the web browser Netscape went public, with shares priced at $28 each. Demand for the stock was so high that the opening of trading was delayed by almost two hours. It closed at $58 a share that day. The frenzy set off what would later be described as a gold rush, a flood of money set to spill into the coffers of startups across the region. “Until then, Silicon Valley was just a place where microchips were made, not the fountainhead of global commerce,” the business magazine Fortune wrote a decade later. Tony and Madan had an idea for how to revolutionize internet advertising. The industry was burgeoning at the time, and few companies allocated any of their advertising budget to websites. Most of the money still went to traditional media such as television, radio, and print. When they did advertise online,

companies purchased banner ads, usually directly from the website where they wanted to advertise. The banner ads were cartoonish and clunky; the first one had launched in 1994 on HotWired with faded white text on a black background: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? → YOU WILL.” Tony and Madan came up with an idea for a collective advertising system, one that would lower the barrier to entry for smaller websites especially. It worked like this: any business could join the network for free and insert a code on its own website; banner ads from a variety of other businesses would then start showing up. The website would earn half a credit for every ad it displayed. The credits would rack up, and then the website could use them to purchase its own advertising banners on other sites in the network. Tony and Madan called the business LinkExchange. (LinkExchange kept about half of the advertising from its member businesses and sold it for a profit to larger companies. Members could also purchase advertising.) LinkExchange grew much faster than Tony and Madan had anticipated. After only a few months, they had tens of thousands of customers. After six months, they had fielded their first purchase offer from a private investor, for $1 million. They turned it down. LinkExchange was growing so rapidly that it seemed like a bad idea to sell so quickly. By 1997, LinkExchange had about fifty employees and had moved out of the cramped San Mateo apartment that Tony and Madan shared where it had been housed for almost a year. Now employees worked from two floors of a nondescript brick building in an area of San Francisco that was less than desirable at the time, the South of Market neighborhood known as SoMa. A sign in the lobby of the building warned tenants that it was not earthquake safe. Rather than pay for desks, which were expensive, Tony and Madan bought dozens of doors that came with holes for doorknobs from a local hardware store. Computers sat on the wooden doors, which rested on concrete blocks and sawhorses, their power cords snaking through the doorknob holes and into wall outlets. Underneath the desks, Tony and most of the other employees kept sleeping bags. They often worked late into the night, crashing on the floor afterward only to start over in the morning. Internet advertising had taken off, and

LinkExchange had fierce competitors, including its biggest one, DoubleClick, which would be acquired about a decade later by Google. When an important World Wide Web conference, Internet World ’97, was held in Los Angeles, LinkExchange couldn’t afford to pay for flights, admission, and the cost of an entire booth. But the conference was an important chance for startups to be noticed and promote themselves—Microsoft was introducing its next web browser, Internet Explorer 4.0, and AOL was showing off its latest software, Casablanca. Tony wanted to be there, so he rented a Winnebago, nicknamed it “Web-a-bago,” and drove a small group of employees the six hours to Los Angeles. He parked the RV, littered with junk food, guitars, and pagers, at a prime spot at the conference. He draped a banner with the LinkExchange logo across the front, a much lower-quality version of a booth than the nearby flashy digs of AltaVista, a new web search engine. The LinkExchange executives sent an email blast to their customers, telling them that they would get a free T-shirt if they showed up at the “booth” by noon on the day of the conference. Soon dozens of people were lined up and then walked through the conference venue wearing bright blue shirts with LinkExchange’s logo, far outpacing the impact of the more upscale booths. Tony had brought in two more recent Harvard graduates: his former college classmate Alfred Lin and the identical twin brother of an Iranian-American friend, Ali Partovi, to help with the business. Lin, whose parents had also immigrated from Taiwan, had met Tony at Harvard when Tony had devised a scheme to sell slices of pizza to his classmates, buying and installing a pizza oven in a campus hangout area. The way Tony remembered it and later described it in Delivering Happiness, Lin had one-upped him by buying whole pizzas and reselling slices to other students at a higher price. Though Lin wasn’t trying to make money off his roommates, he found that when he charged $1.25 or $1.50 per slice, his customers gave him $2 anyway. No one wanted to give up the precious quarters needed for laundry, vending machines, and arcade games. He and Tony would joke about Lin’s apparent pizza arbitrage. However it happened, the move impressed Tony, forever endearing Lin to him. The pizza story became their origin story. They shared a similar upbringing, both having been raised by strict parents who had high expectations

for their sons. In their early years in business, they also shared a feeling of not always fitting in at the party and hated being onstage to make presentations before both grew into business leaders with big successes. Tony didn’t know Partovi well, but his identical twin brother, Hadi, had been on the Harvard computer programming team with Tony. They had competed together at a renowned worldwide coding competition in 1994. Ali Partovi, Tony joked, was basically Hadi’s stunt double. Ali Partovi, who was also twenty-three at the time, helped Tony with aspects of management that didn’t suit him. LinkExchange was so small that Tony was essentially a co-CEO with all his other business partners: no one really held the formal title. Tony preferred it that way. He didn’t like bureaucracy and had chafed at the company structures set up by Oracle. At LinkExchange’s monthly all-hands meetings, Partovi would often handle the speaking, while Tony might say something brief and then step to the side. A San Francisco Focus magazine article on startup culture at the time referred repeatedly to Tony and his partners as “the kids,” and the reporter described how Tony, in his T-shirt and running shoes, “stares ahead, looking bored.” Partovi, by comparison, was a “chatterbox,” the article reported. In one-on-one meetings with employees, Tony sometimes never spoke. He sat silently, absorbing what the other person was saying. Some employees were disarmed by this and sat awkwardly waiting, while others kept talking to fill the silence. “It was the ultimate Socratic method,” observed Scott Laughlin, who headed up LinkExchange’s sales department at the time. “He would look at you until you asked all the questions you should have asked yourself. He didn’t like to hear himself talk.” Laughlin, who had moved over to LinkExchange after working at a popular Web magazine, recalled a meeting he had had with Tony and LinkExchange’s engineering director. In the meeting, Laughlin and the engineering director explained to Tony that some customers were unhappy with an aspect of the website—they couldn’t easily find the types of businesses where they wanted to place their own ads. But fixing the problem would require a massive overhaul of the website. Tony remained mostly quiet as the two detailed the problem, and the meeting ended without a solution.

The next morning, Laughlin woke up to a one-sentence email from Tony: “Is this better?” with a link to the LinkExchange website. Tony had spent the whole night since the meeting rewriting code so that the issue was fixed. He had done it himself, rather than assign it to someone else. “I was swayed by your argument,” he told Laughlin. There was a playfulness about Tony, a wry wit that shined through even when he wasn’t talking much. Despite his awkwardness, he had the ability to connect with people in a way that others didn’t, mostly because he truly seemed to care about everyone around him. It was clear that he thought about the world in an unusual way, with an almost childlike enthusiasm. “If you’re looking at a model of something, he would go off to the side and look at it at a twenty-degree angle because he saw the contours differently,” said Shusterman. “He would say these things all the time that were just really remarkable insights.” Tony once decided to take a road trip across the country to talk to other companies about advertising—itself an extraordinary move for a young startup founder. After he returned, he sent off a detailed email to the LinkExchange team with his predictions about how the advertising industry would change over the next decade, including how companies would want more control over their advertising by managing their own in-house platforms, a seemingly unlikely trend at the time. All of Tony’s predictions ultimately came true, Shusterman recalled later. At a time when workplace culture looked more like The Office or Dilbert, Tony instituted silliness. He hazed new employees, customers, and even prospective business partners. Shusterman was deputized as the “pledgemaster,” in charge of planning whatever zaniness might occur. Ahead of one companywide meeting, Shusterman asked Tony what was on the agenda from the executive team. “Oh, we have nothing,” Tony replied. The meeting was being held strictly to make the new employees dress up in business suits and do push-ups and jumping jacks in front of everyone else. Though it might sound harsh to some and could have been under a different CEO, Tony encouraged LinkExchange

employees to have fun and laugh at themselves, as opposed to a suit-and-tie culture of seriousness and business metrics. Tony came up with an unusual low-cost marketing strategy, dispatching his team to email thousands of customers, asking them to display the LinkExchange logo in an unusual way and then mail in a picture of it. Within weeks, the company was overwhelmed with postcards. One customer was shown walking through a mall holding a large, homemade LinkExchange sign; another mowed the logo onto his suburban lawn. One man had shaved it into his hair, another had painted it across his pet snake. The photos covered an entire wall of LinkExchange’s San Francisco office and frequently delighted visitors and job candidates. Ultimately Tony helped create a loyal, devoted customer base not unlike the fans of Steve Jobs’s Apple products. Tony and Partovi—who was much more anxious than Tony, even in his early twenties—one day discussed LinkExchange’s customer service department. Typically companies don’t like to focus on customer service because it doesn’t make money and in fact usually drains money because of the cost of employing people to answer phones and emails of existing customers. Partovi was brainstorming ways that LinkExchange could automate aspects of customer service to keep costs from ballooning as the business continued to grow. Tony thought about it and then challenged Partovi: “What if instead of controlling customer service costs, we just paid the employees more?” Tony theorized that if the division was handled well, it would translate to good marketing for LinkExchange. He also seemed to genuinely care about the people working in the department. The strategy worked. Sometimes Tony’s ideas didn’t translate to the real world, though, and it was up to Partovi and Lin to rein in his most outlandish schemes. “He had an extremely positive, creative energy,” Partovi said later. “There had to be a counterbalance to temper that.” Soon Jerry Yang, a cofounder of Yahoo!, came calling, interested not in investing in but in possibly buying LinkExchange. At the time, Yang was a legend, the Mark Zuckerberg, before the tech backlash, of his day. Yang had cofounded Yahoo! with a colleague, David Filo, in 1994 while a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford, and the company’s success had been rapid,

attracting many big-name investors. Named for Gulliver’s Travels—a “yahoo” is an uncouth and uncivilized being, a description that attracted Yang and Filo— Yahoo! tried to list websites for users in a directory format. It later became one of the first internet search engines. Yang wanted to buy LinkExchange for $20 million, a massive amount in the 1990s that would give Tony and his executive team the gift of financial independence at a very young age. Yang invited Tony and Partovi to Yahoo!’s small office in Sunnyvale to discuss a potential deal. For days leading up to the meeting, Partovi felt stressed. He wanted to talk about it constantly, weighing the pros and cons of selling versus growing more. Tony, in contrast, seemed unconcerned and not at all focused on the coming meeting. He continued addressing day-to-day issues at LinkExchange that seemed trivial in the context of the potential windfall at stake. When they met Yang, Tony smiled and shook his hand. “Hey, I heard you just got married—congratulations,” he said warmly. Yang had indeed just married a Costa Rican woman he had met in Japan. Immediately the tension in the room dissipated, and Partovi marveled at his twenty-four-year-old friend. “His ability to think about the other person and connect at a human level was amazing,” Partovi said later. The group debated selling to Yahoo! but ultimately decided against it. Again, LinkExchange’s rapid growth convinced them to hang on, although a second deal months later for five times as much nearly came together before Yahoo! got cold feet. After Tony and Madan turned down Yahoo!’s first offer, they drew the attention of Michael Moritz, a forty-two-year-old Welsh former journalist turned venture capitalist, who was a Yahoo! investor and aware of the company’s courting of LinkExchange. Moritz was among the best-known Silicon Valley investors, representing Sequoia Capital. His reputation would only grow due to his then-recent investment in Yahoo! and his early, prescient bet on Google. Meanwhile, Sequoia’s stature also increased, and it became one of the most sought-after venture capital firms by startups. Moritz invested $3 million in LinkExchange and was forced by Tony to awkwardly perform the macarena in front of employees.

LinkExchange continued to grow, and around it, San Francisco was going through a renaissance. Raves had become part of the culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, starting with meetups after dark hosted by bands with names such as Wicked that grew a cult following. Sometimes parties took place under the Golden Gate Bridge, along the wild, unpopulated shoreline of Baker Beach, and then moved to repurposed garages and underground clubs in the city’s iconic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. In the earliest meetups on Baker Beach, attendees constructed a giant statue of a person using driftwood that had washed up along the rocks. They then lit it on fire, creating a “burning man,” the genesis of the art and music festival that would later gain popularity after it moved to the Nevada desert. Before the days of group invitations on social media, ravers joined secret listservs, calling a phone number the day before to figure out the location. Much like the 1970s-era hippies before them, the ravers were a community, and they operated under the acronym PLUR—Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Many of them wore bright-colored necklaces, shirts, or backpacks, but there was no real dress code. Tony was skeptical of raves, even though he was slowly realizing how much he valued his close friends and having a group of them around all the time. He liked to throw parties, in large part because he wanted to make his friends happy and observe them as they enjoyed a well-planned get-together. At parties, he could also usually avoid one-on-one conversations. One night, he tagged along with his friends to a rave. They drove outside of the city to a warehouse with nothing else around it, except for hundreds of cars parked outside. The warehouse was massive, “the size of ten football fields,” Tony later wrote in Delivering Happiness. Green laser beams crisscrossed the crowd, and a machine churned fog into the cavernous space. Ultraviolet lights stationed around the warehouse caused the decorations on the wall to light up, giving the room an eerie glow. Not a fan of techno music—the backbone of raves—Tony didn’t understand the draw of the constant, repetitive thumping with no words. But then he entered the warehouse and, unlike in a typical nightclub, where people dance in small groups, often facing each other, here everyone moved at the same pace,

bouncing up and down, looking toward the DJ. Tony was struck by an inexplicable feeling of awe and was greatly moved by the scene. “As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational person in a group, I was surprised to feel myself swept with an overwhelming sense of spirituality—not in the religious sense, but a sense of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the universe,” he later wrote. “It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness, the same way a flock of birds might seem like a single entity instead of a collection of individual birds. Everyone in the warehouse had a shared purpose. We were all contributors to the collective rave experience.” He would spend the rest of his life chasing that feeling and trying to recreate what he called a “tribe” wherever he went. At raves, he also discovered ecstasy, a staple of the culture, and enjoyed the intense feeling of happiness and energy that spread through him after he placed the small round pill on his tongue. He’d usually add to the mix with vodka— Grey Goose was his favorite brand—straight or with soda. His friends noticed that drinking made him more confident and less shy, a feeling he seemed to crave. At LinkExchange, Tony supported Partovi and Shusterman when they organized a social club called DrinkExchange, open to anyone in San Francisco. The club held events at local bars, usually once a month, with operating rules similar to those of LinkExchange: attendees were asked to buy two drinks and give them away to two people they didn’t know, and then they would theoretically receive drinks back the same way. Hundreds of people showed up. One clunky online invitation read, “We’re hoping to build THE definitive social event for Wuppies (Web Yuppies), and we need YOUR attendance to get us there. Make sure you come and buy somebody a drink! Invite as many Internet-savvy people as you’d like, but make sure to tell them about the important DrinkExchange model.” At LinkExchange, the culture was souring. Tony, Madan, and Partovi had operated as a three-pronged chief executive officer team for most of the company’s existence. But LinkExchange had grown too large to sustain that unusual approach. Moritz stepped in to run it temporarily, but then the group hired an outsider, Mark Bozzini, the former CEO of Pete’s Brewing Company.

Bozzini, who had no real internet experience, brought in senior executives, and the group did not mesh well with the younger team. Bozzini and his team planned to take LinkExchange public, but a financial crisis in Russia suddenly triggered a temporary shutdown of the public market in the United States. Instead, LinkExchange began looking for buyers. The LinkExchange team found itself in a bidding war between Netscape and Microsoft, sparked in part by Partovi’s twin brother, Hadi. Hadi worked at Microsoft and told then president Steve Ballmer, “I haven’t talked to you about my brother’s company before, but they’re about to get acquired, and I’ve spent the last five years competing with Netscape.” Microsoft won the bid. The Seattle-based software behemoth, at the time the “evil giant” among tech companies, paid $265 million, more than ten times Yahoo!’s offer only a year earlier. In the local San Jose Mercury News, a story about the deal ran on the front page, packaged next to the day’s events in the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. Tony was only twenty-four, part of the first crop of startup superstars who helped create the myth of the fortune to be found in Silicon Valley. “Against the backdrop of a booming economy, capital aplenty and the wide open frontiers of technology, a new generation of entrepreneurs are utterly prepared to amass their fortunes under their own steam,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2000, describing Tony and other entrepreneurs’ good fortune. Startups that sold themselves or went public during those two years were affectionately called 98ers and 99ers, a reference to the wildly successful 48ers and 49ers during the Gold Rush. eBay, the online auction site, went public a few months before LinkExchange was sold in 1998, priced at the top of its range (and breaking the earlier IPO dry spell that had dissuaded LinkExchange from going public). “The 98ers cleaned up in the same way that the 48ers did,” said David A. Kirsch, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, in an interview. Kirsch had once maintained a giant database of Silicon Valley startup failures in the 1990s. Tony earned $32 million from the LinkExchange sale. He would have earned 20 percent more if he had stuck to an agreement with Microsoft to stay with the

company for a year. But Tony no longer liked the culture, even though LinkExchange had of course hazed Ballmer and his deputies after the sale, making them don silly clothes and dance. He found Microsoft to be much more political, and more formal. Tony dreaded getting up in the morning to go to work. He quit a few weeks after the deal was signed.

CHAPTER TWO TREASURE MOUNTAIN

Park City, February 2020–April 2020 San Francisco and Las Vegas, 1998–2008

To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. —Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

In the 1950s, Park City nearly disappeared.

Today, the town is nestled among ski slopes and rustic mansions carved high into the craggy Wasatch mountain rocks. Cross-country skiers glide across snowy paths that become biking routes lined with wildflowers in summertime. Ski lifts ferry vacationers up the tree-lined mountainside, where Wild West miners once dug for silver in the hope of becoming rich. The town sits a thirtyminute drive east—and roughly three thousand feet above—its neighbor Salt Lake City. Its roots, like those of other Western towns, go back to mining days after precious metals were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1898, the town was home to about 7,500 residents. Park City survived big fires and catastrophic mine collapses, but the late 1940s and 1950s brought an economic crisis after metal prices plummeted. Mines closed and thousands of people left, while Main Street businesses were boarded up. Park City appeared in a guidebook of Western ghost towns, even though 1,150 people still lived there.

When a mining company decided to convert its cableways used for carrying silver ore to ferry skiers and tourists instead, Park City was set on a new course in history. The Treasure Mountain ski resort opened in 1963; it later became Park City Mountain Resort. Now about 8,400 people live in town. The snowy months are the lifeblood of local businesses that cater to wealthy second homers and vacationers. In January, the Sundance Film Festival takes over the town. More than 100,000 people attend over the eleven-day festival of movie screenings. Hollywood stars walk the press line at the Park City High School auditorium. At the bottom of the ski slopes, tourists and locals stroll through Old Town, rows of quaint buildings that hint at the town’s origins as a mining camp. Now family-owned restaurants, bars, and shops line Main Street. This American West charm resides uneasily with the Park City area’s current booming industry: highdollar real estate. Stacks of luxury modernist homes and towering resorts have been carved into the mountainsides. Meanwhile, pricey fur shops, yoga clothing chains, and art galleries have cropped up alongside the family-owned businesses. The arrivals have aggravated locals, who dislike the image of Park City as a playground of the wealthy. “We look shiny when you see us in a Sundance story or some stupid Entertainment Weekly story,” said one longtime resident, Teri Orr. “We’re not based on shiny. We’re based on being outdoors. We’re based on being good neighbors. We’re based in disproportionately caring about our small town, if you read letters to the editor in the paper. We’re passionate.” Orr moved to Park City in 1979 with her two children to escape a bad marriage in Tahoe City, California. She had only $10,000 and no college degree when she arrived. “This was our second-chance place,” she said. In Park City, “we all kind of screwed up, whether it was divorce or a business, and for some people, it was meant to be a Band-Aid.” She worked for a ski shop, and she got a part-time gig writing a column for the long-running Park Record newspaper starting at $10 per month. Eventually she became editor. In 1993, she left the newsroom and founded a nonprofit that would become the Park City Institute. The nonprofit brings performing arts and other cultural events to the town: touring ballets, summer concert series, and talks from high-

profile figures such as Monica Lewinsky and Edward Snowden. The ambition, as she saw it, was to build an arts scene that would thrive beyond the expectations for a town of Park City’s size. The onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 hit Park City with a month left in the ski season. As news of the virus threat dominated worldwide headlines, the Park Record on March 14 reported the first known instance of community spread in Summit County, an adult man who “had not traveled recently and did not have contact with another person confirmed to have the virus.” “This really changes the picture,” a local public health official told the newspaper. In the following days, many businesses were ordered to close, and limits were placed on public gatherings. Park City business owners who stake their year on the ski season shuttered their shops with expenses looming. City Hall, too, foresaw an economic crisis due to the loss in tax revenues from the tourism economy. The future of a planned $100 million arts and culture district, a flagship project funded in part by tax dollars from tourism, was suddenly thrown into question. City leaders, including most recently Mayor Andy Beerman, had been working for three years to develop the district in partnership with the Sundance Institute, which would relocate its headquarters there. But Park City, like other cities around the world, fell nearly silent. Orr stayed home alone in her two-story lavender house off Little Kate Road, her grown children and grandchildren thirty miles away and down the mountain in Salt Lake City. One day in April, she needed a break. She drove her Subaru Outback the two miles to Main Street to retrieve her mail at the post office and stop by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory to pick up dessert. Outside Dolly’s Bookstore, a figure quickly caught her attention. A wiry, thin Asian man smoking a cigarette stood outside wearing no shoes despite the cold, his bare feet pacing the empty sidewalk. The man, she later learned, was likely the latest billionaire to move to town. And he had his own vision for the future of Park City. His name was Tony Hsieh.

After he left rehab in late February, Tony had his driver take him to the vacation home in Park City that he was in the process of buying, a wood-frame house on Empire Avenue. He planned to stay about a month and then return to Las Vegas. The Sundance Film Festival had officially ended for the year a few weeks prior, though some of Tony’s friends were still in town and the parties kept going. Over the years, Tony had become something of a regular at the festival, making friends not just with other executive producers who had helped fund films, as he occasionally did, but with the stars themselves. He had become particularly close with the forty-year-old actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, known for 500 Days of Summer and Inception, and with David Arquette of the Scream movie franchise fame. Recently, Tony had helped fund an independent film, Try Harder!, by the Asian American director Debbie Lum, about students at San Francisco’s largest high school trying to get into college. Tony is listed as one of ten executive producers, along with his longtime friend and assistant, Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, who for years had helped Tony run his day-to-day life. In late February 2020, fresh out of leaving rehab early, Tony attended parties and bar meetups as if nothing had happened. Most people didn’t know that anything had. He seemed more like his normal self, with his jeans and T-shirts not hanging quite so loosely off his frame. As he always did, he listened intently, made small jokes, and occasionally cracked his sly smile. A dimple punctuated his left cheek. He carried around a glass of Fernet, sipping it throughout the evening. The friends who knew about his rehab stay weren’t worried about his drinking because he had always seemed to tolerate it well. They only wanted to keep him off ketamine, believing that that was the chief cause of his downward spiral. Some of his friends still didn’t know that he had been to rehab, while the others were happy to avoid the topic. They wanted to make Tony comfortable. Though Tony hated being alone, he also avoided talking about himself, especially in social settings, curling inward mentally or walking away when he felt put on the spot. Now he seemed even quieter, if that were possible, as though he were mulling some things over that he didn’t want to discuss. He also seemed more closed off,

the usual brightness in his eyes turned pensive. Noticeably absent was Ryan Doherty, who had convinced him to go to rehab. Tony had started telling people that Doherty had forced him to go, when he didn’t need it. Doherty had also made clear to Tony that he did not want to be part of his Park City plans. Tony had an immediate problem, one that demanded he focus on his role as CEO of Zappos: he had to get the company ready for a brewing global health crisis. Long before businesses began to send their employees home in March 2020, Tony recognized the severity of the coming pandemic. “Do you really think it’s necessary to send everyone home?” one of his executives asked him as the staff worked night and day to ready Zappos to be run remotely. “It’s not a question of ‘if,’ ” Tony replied. “It’s ‘when.’ ” Through the transition, as Zappos closed its headquarters and sent hundreds of employees home, Tony wasn’t panicked by the unprecedented crisis, despite its long list of unknowns. He was as calm as he had been at LinkExchange, on the verge of selling his startup for millions of dollars. Tony was effectively stuck in Park City in the early months of the pandemic. He could have driven himself the six hours back to Las Vegas, but he hated to drive, and his driver, Steve Moroney, the owner of Experience Transport Agency, was based in Las Vegas. Tony had known him so long that he and his friends called him “Steve-O.” There also was the early fear of how the virus spread— could you get it walking outside or even in your car? No one knew for sure. Tony had become famous for living in a small Airstream trailer, surrounded by friends in other Airstreams, in a parking lot in downtown Las Vegas with his small dog, Blizzy, and an alpaca named Marley. His communal way of living, though, was anathema to the pandemic lockdown. Even if he had managed to get back, few people wanted to live in the trailer park right now if they had the choice. The pandemic isolated the world. For Tony, it quickly stole his foundation for being. He had spent two decades building communities in cities and with his friends in San Francisco and Las Vegas: at work, at parties he hosted, at raves he attended, and at Burning Man every year. Tony floated through crowds, preferred to have a lot of people around him, and had a repulsion to alone time. Even at night, he’d find himself waking up a friend and asking to go for a 2:00

a.m. walk. His friends always agreed because they loved and admired Tony, so they stepped outside into the darkness and waited for him to ask the first question. His desire to create groups of people around him had started early in his life, in the years after the LinkExchange sale in the late 1990s. Tony had walked away after the deal with Microsoft with $32 million, a newly minted twenty-four-year-old tech mogul little known beyond Silicon Valley. His seemingly limitless options stalled him, and he found that despite his wealth, he just wanted to spend time with friends. One day in the rough Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, he drove by 1000 Van Ness Avenue, a strikingly opulent 1920s building originally designed for a Cadillac dealership. Developers were converting the building into residential lofts and an AMC multiplex theater. Tony decided then that 1000 Van Ness would be his home base—for what, to be determined later. He and his friends would figure out what to do together with little space and few boundaries between them. He convinced Alfred Lin and other former LinkExchange coworkers to move into the lofts, and the group eventually owned 20 percent of the apartments. He and Lin launched a venture capital fund, Venture Frogs, and opened an incubator for their startups in the building as well. The investment fund had a few hits—OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site, for example—and some misses. In 1999, Tony got a voice mail from a stranger, cold-calling with an investment pitch for his website, shoesite.com, which sold footwear on the web. Nick Swinmurn, a native of England who had moved to Cupertino, California, with his parents when he was seven, was a marketing manager for an online carbuying service. He had come up with the idea for shoesite.com, which he hoped would be the Amazon.com of shoes, after being unable to find a specific pair of Airwalk boots in his size in a local mall. A search of the handful of online retailers had also failed. Tony shared the same skepticism of online retail as most people did in the early days. Other websites were losing money. Tony would later recount that he had worried that people would not want to buy shoes without trying them on first. But Swinmurn offered up some statistics, which always impressed Tony: in

1998, 5 percent of the $40 billion footwear industry was transacted through printed catalogs, and the number was quickly growing. If people would order shoes through the mail without trying them on, why not online? Tony, intrigued by the hard numbers, agreed to a meeting. Swinmurn, balding with a pointed goatee that grew longer over the years, showed up at the Van Ness Avenue lofts to meet with Tony and Lin, wearing board shorts and a T-shirt. Tony urged Swinmurn to find a person with retail footwear experience. Swinmurn called a Nordstrom store in a downtown San Francisco mall and found Fred Mossler, a shoe buyer. Mossler, a tanned thirty-three-year-old with a bright white smile, bears a striking resemblance to Nicolas Cage, a fact Tony delighted in. The two would become like family over the ensuing years. At that moment, though, Mossler had risk factors to weigh: he had spent eight years moving up at the growing Seattlebased department store, had bought a house, and had had his first child. But once Venture Frogs agreed to make an investment in the new company, he quit Nordstrom. The partners changed the name of the retailer to Zappos, a play on the Spanish word for shoes, zapatos. The Van Ness Avenue building, meanwhile, had become a nexus of partying alongside work. Tony organized elaborate nightlong events in his penthouse loft, number 810, which became known as Club BIO after a guest misread a sign in the elevator directing visitors to the apartment. He lived in a seventh-floor loft, but when the penthouse was listed for sale, he saw an opportunity—not for a real estate investment but for parties. “Owning the loft would ultimately enable more experiences,” he later wrote in Delivering Happiness. Meanwhile, Tony had been experimenting more with ecstasy and liked taking the drug, especially with friends. At one rave in 1999, he spotted a man sitting at a booth toward the back of a giant warehouse. Emanuel Sferios, a community activist, had recently founded the organization DanceSafe to test ecstasy before people ingested it. Sferios wasn’t a raver but had taken an interest in the drug after it had helped him recover from some of his own childhood trauma. By adding a particular substance known as a chemical reagent to MDMA, he could tell in thirty seconds whether it was truly the drug. He hoped to prevent rave attendees from

dying from counterfeit pills, but his new organization could do only so much with its staff of unpaid volunteers. Sferios had just been rejected for a $25,000 grant. Tony bounced up to his table—“clearly on MDMA,” Sferios recalled later— and introduced himself. He said enthusiastically, “I love what you guys are doing, this is great.” He explained that he had just sold his technology company to Microsoft. “If I could give you as much money as you wanted right now, how much would you ask for?” Sferios, surprised by the unexpected, benevolent stranger, re-counted to Tony the $25,000 grant he had just lost. Tony pulled out his checkbook and wrote out a check for the amount on the spot. “It catapulted us,” Sferios said later. DanceSafe trained people around the country to test drugs at raves and has since become one of the preeminent nonprofits advocating for harm reduction in the electronic dance community. Tony was its first large donor. In 2000, the investor euphoria that had helped propel LinkExchange and fueled huge valuations at other startups came crashing to an end. The Silicon Valley dot-com bubble burst, and investors shied away from the market just as Zappos was looking to grow. Tony, still an investor-adviser to the company, later wrote that he had felt he had something to prove, that LinkExchange “wasn’t just dumb luck.” So he stepped into the role of chief executive officer. “I decided that Zappos was going to be the universe that I wanted to help envision and build,” he wrote in Delivering Happiness. “It would be the universe that I believed in.” On October 19, 2000, Tony emailed Zappos staff, laying out a nine-month plan for surviving the tough market. “Right now, because we are unprofitable with very limited cash, we are in a race against time,” he said. Over the coming months, Zappos imposed a round of layoffs. Tony worked closely with Mossler to develop faster shipping methods to grow sales, and he gave up Club BIO and moved five beds into the apartment for Zappos workers to live there rent-free before selling the loft in 2002 to help save the company. He poured millions of dollars of his own money into the fledgling company. That sort of move might have terrified some young entrepreneurs, but Tony had a

large appetite for risk, and lived his life with little margin for error. In addition to his venture investments, he moved money into real estate and stocks. At one point, less than a decade after the LinkExchange sale, his cash balance, not including some assets he owned, was only $40,000. Tony didn’t seem to care much about that number. He was always confident that he’d make things work out. By 2003, Zappos was back on top and posted $70 million in gross sales that year. Tony implemented a new customer service incentive, designed to overcome customers’ hesitation about buying shoes online and trying them on at home: Zappos would give them 60 days to return shoes free; by the end of the year, Zappos had increased that to 365 days. Tony later attributed that trial period as the reason Zappos had survived while other dot-coms had failed. It was two years before Amazon would launch its popular Prime service, offering free two-day shipping for an annual fee of $79. Tony and his executive team then made a fateful decision: in 2004, they moved Zappos’ headquarters to Las Vegas, in a low-tax state that, they hoped, employees would enjoy. In the Bay Area, it had become difficult to hire staff, especially customer service reps who saw the job as no more than a temporary gig. But Zappos’ momentum as a company, along with the prospects of a lower cost of living and a bit of adventure, was enough to attract its existing staff. The built-up camaraderie was enough to convince seventy-two employees out of ninety to relocate. In those early years in Las Vegas, the company was headquartered at an industrial park in the suburb of Henderson, Nevada. A new family in the desert was born out of necessity since almost all the employees who had moved didn’t know anyone in Las Vegas. Zapponians—as they were called—invaded bars and restaurants together and explored the city. It had been six years since Tony had sold LinkExchange, but he was still a young CEO, only thirty years old. Still, he had developed ideas about how companies should be run, and he had especially learned from his last year at LinkExchange, when the culture had begun to sour with the influx of new employees and executives and he hadn’t wanted to go to work anymore. More than anything, he did not want that to happen at Zappos.

Zappos was growing rapidly in the early aughts, hiring between forty and eighty people every two weeks. That was a good problem to have, but before long, Tony couldn’t interview every single person himself, nor could Fred Mossler or Alfred Lin. There had to be some way to lay the groundwork for the type of person Tony wanted to work at Zappos without their having to meet each one individually. Tony began to study his friends and the employees that Zappos had already hired. He wrote down what he liked about them and what made them good or fun or interesting people. Over the course of a few months, he assembled a list that had dozens of different qualities on it, all the adjectives that described the people he cared about the most. He also asked his current employees what they thought about Zappos’ culture. He came up with a list of thirty-seven core values, including some that seemed obvious, such as “Company growth,” and others that were more specific, such as “Willing to laugh at ourselves.” Tony spent much of 2005 working with Zappos’ human resources team revising the list, hoping that it would help guide which employees should be hired and which shouldn’t. He emailed employees several more times to ask their opinions. For a fairly new company, Tony’s time spent on values was rare. In their early years, most startups are much more focused on their product and their growth. Decades later, it would become more common for companies of all sizes to adopt a values blueprint, following Tony’s lead. He “was really good at scaling himself,” one former executive observed. Ultimately Tony ended up with ten values that became the foundation of Zappos: 1. Deliver WOW Through Service 2. Embrace and Drive Change 3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness 4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded 5. Pursue Growth and Learning 6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication 7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit 8. Do More With Less

9. Be Passionate and Determined 10. Be Humble

Value number 3 garnered the most attention, and quirky tales of Zappos’ friendly customer service people and office antics prompted a growing number of media profiles of Tony and the company, glowing pieces about building community and passion in the workplace and keeping staffers invested in the culture. New hires were offered a $2,000 bonus to quit during their four weeks of training unless they wanted to stay, a new method developed by Tony that sparked more media attention. When Tony was featured on his first magazine cover in the early aughts, one Zappos employee bought dozens of copies and handed them out to everyone else in the office. Throughout the day, each employee walked up to Tony and asked him to sign it, laughing and making fun of his newfound fame. Tony was in on the joke—he had had no desire to be interviewed, but he also understood that it was a necessary part of the job. He wasn’t good at public speaking, but he was a relentless researcher and taught himself how to improve by studying comedians and carefully watching other experts. The motto “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness” spread throughout Zappos’ offices, and all employees had full license to make their workspace their own. The Henderson office was decorated year-round from floor to ceiling with personal knickknacks, posters, streamers, and stuffed animals, all crammed together. TV camera crews following Tony around captured the weirdness: an Oktoberfest celebration with workers wearing German folk costumes, a toga party, toy cars racing among cubicles. It wasn’t a silent office: noise machines went off, music played, and someone had one of those clapping toys. In contrast, Tony guided journalists and Wall Street analysts on tours in a demure fashion, often wearing a Zappos-branded T-shirt and jeans. He twirled a small umbrella to signal that he was taking visitors around. Tony’s own office was a space no larger than anyone else’s in the middle of the mayhem, surrounded by giant jungle-style plants and stuffed animals, as in a zoo. His desk was cluttered with mementos given to him by friends and employees.

For outsiders, the Zappos tours could be overwhelming, like visiting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a crush of colors and noise and decorations. A giant wall featured ties that had been cut off the business suits of stiffly dressed visitors. On tours, Tony hewed closely to his message of human connection, rarely revealing anything personal. “We really want people’s true personalities to shine in the workplace,” he said. Just like the DJs onstage at the all-night raves Tony loved, he orchestrated the fun from a place of power but somehow slipped into the background. He rarely mentioned shoes. “It was a little bit surreal because everyone seemed so happy,” said Wall Street analyst Colin Sebastian, who visited Tony on several occasions. “I’ve been to thousands of offices, and none of them were like this.” Some of the early employees who had moved from San Francisco suffered in the heat of the Las Vegas summers—“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” is a quip often heard among Bay Area residents—and soon a number of the Zappos men decided to shave their heads. Some of the women shaved their legs in solidarity. Later Zappos formalized the event, calling it “Bald and Blue,” and asked Zapponians to either shave their heads or dye their hair blue in allegiance to the brand. Visitors could see that Tony was a special, rare kind of CEO. He had come up with an unusual way to build a big company: by making sure that everyone wanted to come to work every day. “We call them ‘magic leaders’: they are able to build companies in ways that run against the grain of anything that has been done before,” Sebastian, the Wall Street analyst, said later. Under Tony’s leadership, Zappos grew to more than $1 billion in gross merchandise sales ($635 million in net revenue after customer returns) by 2008, what Inc. magazine called “an e-commerce powerhouse.” Internally, though, Tony and his board of directors disagreed about the company’s next steps. Some early investors who sat on the board wanted a financial exit, such as being acquired, rather than riding along with Tony’s big ideas. The board called those “Tony’s social experiments.” “The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes,” Tony said.

Meanwhile, Zappos was in a precarious financial position because of the unfolding 2008 financial crisis. Like many retailers, the company relied on revolving credit to pay for inventory, but if it missed certain monthly business targets, its current banks could walk away. In an environment in which access to credit was becoming incredibly hard, it was unlikely that another bank would step in to save Zappos, possibly leading to the company’s bankruptcy. (Zappos had not actually missed any payments yet.) Then in walked Amazon. The world’s largest and most powerful online retailer had unsuccessfully approached Zappos about a deal in 2005 and two years later had launched its own competitor to Zappos, an online shoe retailer called Endless.com. For Tony and his management team, a sale this time around seemed to solve a lot of problems as pressure from the board mounted. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was still interested. In April 2009, Tony met with Bezos in Seattle, an encounter he described in writing about why he had decided to sell in Inc. magazine. In a PowerPoint slideshow to the online magnate, Tony brought up how he strived to make workers and employees happy. “Did you know that people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy?” Bezos asked, interrupting Tony’s presentation. “Those were the exact words on my next slide,” Tony later wrote. That year, Tony signed an all-stock deal to sell Zappos for $1.2 billion, marking Amazon’s biggest acquisition in its fourteen-year history. Analysts speculated that Bezos, then Amazon’s CEO, had bought Zappos because it was the only real competitive threat to his company. Tony insisted that Zappos would continue to operate independently, its own weird family, despite Amazon’s reputation as more aggressive and buttoneddown. A personal video Bezos sent internally to the Zappos team seemed to confirm that. In the video, Bezos, standing in the front yard of what looked to be his house in Seattle, introduced himself to Zappos employees. “Hello, my name is Jeff Bezos,” he said, “and I started Amazon.com about fifteen years ago.” Bezos, who would go on to become the richest person in the world, operating one of the largest tech companies, told Zappos employees how he had launched Amazon in his house with only a few employees and not enough electricity to power the startup’s servers.

He then pointed to a sheet of paper on which he had written what he called “a short list” of the things he knew were important to any business: “Obsess over customers,” “Invent,” and “Think long term,” points that Tony also clearly valued. Bezos, who was effusive in the video, told the Zappos team, “I have never seen a company with a culture like Zappos, and I think that kind of unique culture is a very significant asset, and I’m super excited about that.” He described all the time he had spent talking to Tony, Lin, and Mossler and sought to reassure employees that they wouldn’t be going anywhere, saying that Zappos’ workers were in good hands. “I’ve seen a lot of leaders of companies, and I haven’t seen any better than those three,” he said. He concluded, “That culture and the Zappos brand are huge assets that I value very much, and I want those things to continue.” As the CEO of Zappos, Tony asked for a salary of just $36,000, less than some call service reps were paid. The stock deal had been lucrative for him, boosting his net worth to nearly $1 billion. His risktaking had paid off once again. Under Amazon, Zappos expanded from a thousand brands of shoes to clothing and even cookware. Some small details changed, like the way budgeting happened, for example. But otherwise, Zappos was left alone, hundreds of miles away from Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. Happy Zappos customers emailed constantly, asking Tony to take over the Internal Revenue Service or start a new business, such as an airline. “In 20 years, I wouldn’t rule out a Zappos airline where we offer the best customer service,” he said at a conference. In March 2020, Tony started calling and texting friends, imploring them to come visit him in Park City, despite the nationwide quarantine due to the spread of Covid-19. He could be very convincing, and many of his friends had grown used to saying yes to any of his plans. Some didn’t need much persuasion at all. Tyler Williams drove the six hours from Las Vegas, often leaving his wife, who had been his high school sweetheart, back home. The drive is beautiful: the

barren desert outside Las Vegas soon gives way to steep, rocky canyons, the Virgin River a trickle following the side of the highway for a stretch. After Interstate 15 briefly crosses through Arizona, the reds and beiges of the desert turn into vast stretches of green farmland, and finally, after more than five hours, the peaks of the Wasatch range open up in front of the highway. Williams visited Tony several times over the ensuing weeks, driving back and forth from Las Vegas. He was the quintessential longtime Zappos employee, and he had invented his own title: “fungineer.” A musician originally from Alaska with a chest-length beard the color of rust, Williams had been touring across the country a decade earlier with a little-known rock band before burning out and moving to Las Vegas. His wife had taken a tour of Zappos and encouraged him to apply. In 2011, the year he wanted a job, statistics showed that it was easier to get into Harvard than to get a job at the online shoe retailer. So Williams made a short music video, hoping to set himself apart from the thousands of other applicants. He cloned himself on screen, seven copies of himself wearing a V-neck sweater and plaid shirt, his red hair teased into a mohawk. The song featured lyrics about Zappos’ corporate values with a chorus repeating the company name over and over: “Za-a-a-apo-os.” Tony watched the video, and was impressed. Williams got the job, starting in Zappos’ customer service department, and then worked his way up over the years until he eventually controlled one of the company’s largest budgets outside of e-commerce, something called “Brand Aura.” “Brand Aura” basically described experimental projects, sometimes at the behest of Tony and sometimes involving frivolous exploits, such as building unique porta-potties for events. Called “Porta Parties,” the traveling toilets came with selfie stations and motorized squatty feet. “Zappos is always making things fun, and now I’m excited about the toilet,” one user said in a company promotional video. For Williams, as for many Zappos employees, his work relationship with Tony blurred into close friendship, and he was well known as one of Tony’s chief advisers, willing to do most anything for him and around him almost every hour of the day. Tony asked him once, “What if we built a jacket that had charging ports in it with batteries?” Though there was no clear use for it, Williams made one

anyway, a clunky prototype with wires hanging everywhere. It worked but was never used by anyone. In Park City, Williams joined a small group of Tony’s friends who had also come to visit, a hodgepodge of people who had touched his life at one point or another. Not all of them were part of Tony’s close inner circle in Las Vegas. A large entourage surrounded Tony at all times, so it wasn’t unusual to get to know a wide variety of people from all demographics anytime you spent time with him. The first few weeks of the pandemic shutdown felt like a retreat. The mountains were covered in snow, but the ski resorts were closed, so the group mostly stayed in. Not too concerned about catching the virus, Tony found a masseuse who was willing to come to the rental house, where guests were treated to long massages. Tony joined meetings through Amazon’s private online video service, continuing to run Zappos from afar. In their downtime, the group read books together, and Tony always had a recommendation for a new nonfiction or self-help book he liked. A voracious reader his whole life, he constantly read and researched new ideas. Often he used books to express his thoughts about a new philosophy or way of life he was contemplating. In Park City, he recommended The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success & Happiness by Jeff Olson, a slim manual by a little-known marketing executive that proclaims it holds the “SECRET to a successful life.” In life, the book argues, the people who succeed make small changes to their daily activities, focusing on time management and savings, rather than expect a big break to propel them to success. Tony also kept a copy of Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, a journalist, and Jamie Wheal, a leadership expert. The book outlines a process called ecstasis, a condition in which a group of people subconsciously act as one unit, with examples including Google engineers and Navy SEALs on a mission. This mode of acting makes one superhuman, with increased focus, quicker muscle reaction, and the ability to recognize patterns. Tony had long been interested in ways to maximize his body’s capabilities, a lifestyle that has become somewhat of an obsession in Silicon Valley. The

process, called biohacking or DIY biology, involves activities that aim to increase a person’s physical and cognitive abilities, many of them unproven by science. That can include everything from intermittent fasting and specialized diets to running experiments on yourself. In the latter, more controversial practice, some adherents of biohacking have inoculated themselves with healthy feces in attempts to improve their stomach function, while others have injected themselves with the blood of a younger person to try to improve their vitality. One biohacker described biohacking to the website Vox as “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” Biohacking started gaining popularity in 2014 after a twenty-five-year-old engineer in Silicon Valley, Rob Rhinehart, introduced Soylent, a bland beige liquid that professed to include all the nutrients of a single meal. Even though some customers described it as tasting “rancid,” it gained a cult following among people who wanted to skip the hassle of buying food and preparing meals. It soon raised over $70 million from well-known investors. Rhinehart claimed to have spent months drinking it, leading to big improvements in his health. The New York Times called it “the most joyless new technology to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS.” In 2017, a thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur, Serge Faguet, published a series of controversial blog posts on the technology platform Hacker Noon, claiming that he had spent $200,000 on biohacking to try to improve his mood and energy level. The result was that he had become “calmer, thinner, extroverted, healthier & happier.” He detailed his procedure: three hours before bed, he begins to block blue light with special glasses, and he tracks his sleep with an Oura smart ring, a product that registers a user’s health information; he fasts intermittently throughout the week; he has an intense daily gym routine; he meditates regularly and practices not lying about anything; he takes more than two dozen drugs and supplements daily, including antidepressants, a growth hormone, an estrogen blocker, and lithium, a drug frequently used to treat bipolar disorder; and he uses a hearing aid, despite having normal hearing. The posts were panned as “the embodiment of Silicon Valley’s toxic machiavellian bro culture,” according to the Guardian, but Faguet’s thousands

of mostly male readers applauded his efforts, particularly when he noted his increased sex drive. Perhaps the most recognizable of Silicon Valley’s biohackers is Jack Dorsey, until late 2021 the chief executive officer of both the social media giant Twitter and the financial payments service provider Square. Dorsey, who looks like the antithesis of an executive, with a long, scraggly beard and nose ring, has spoken openly about his unusual routines. He believes in intermittent fasting, which can take several different forms, including one known as “16/8”—fasting every day for fourteen to sixteen hours and restricting one’s daily eating window to eight to ten hours. Dorsey’s practice involves eating one meal a day, typically dinner. He starts his day with a drink he calls “salt juice,” a mixture of Himalayan salt, water, and lemon juice that has questionable benefits. He takes ice baths several times a day, a process sometimes used by athletes to reduce inflammation. Though the practice can reportedly repair muscles, studies examining its benefits are mixed, research shows. Tony had never been extreme about his own biohacking, but he had certainly run experiments on himself and gone on what some friends described as “exercise benders,” climbing three peaks in southern California in just one day. Once he tried to limit himself to four hours of sleep a day. Another time he went on a twenty-six-day diet, progressing through the alphabet on each day. On the letter A day, he could eat apples, anchovies, and asparagus; by the time he reached the letter Z, he was nearly fasting. His experimentation continued, including with drugs, where he added ketamine to the mix in late 2019, going farther than he had before. At the time, mind-altering drugs such as psychedelics were experiencing something of a renaissance. Decades after the government had banned the drugs in the 1960s, researchers were discovering that ecstasy, mushrooms, and ketamine could be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. The author Michael Pollan discovered their beneficial properties while writing his 2018 book about LSD and mushrooms, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. “What was missing from my life?” asked Pollan, who is in his fifties. “Nothing I could think of—until, that is, word

of the new research into psychedelics began to find its way to me, making me wonder if perhaps I had failed to recognize the potential of these molecules as a tool for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.” Ketamine, used in medical procedures, is generally regarded as a dissociative anesthetic. Recreationally, it is snorted or injected. In small doses, however, it can operate like a psychedelic drug, and patients who take it often feel as though they have some kind of profound understanding of reality under its influence, according to the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. David Feifel. Dr. Feifel developed the world’s first ketamine infusion program for psychiatric disorders more than a decade ago and uses it to treat patients with severe depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder at his San Diego clinic. He has found that it can produce an almost immediate effect, one that can last for months, even though the drug stays in a patient’s body less than twentyfour hours. “It blows the other treatments out of the water,” he said. Taken in high doses, a process that users sometimes call “going to K-land” or a “K-hole,” ketamine can cause disorientation and even temporary paralysis. Doing it illegally, he says, is “fraught with danger.” In 2018, twenty-eight-year-old Aaron Traywick, a well-known biohacker, drowned in a flotation tank filled with body-temperature salt water used for sensory deprivation and deep relaxation. A relative told the New York Times that he had likely taken ketamine, some of which was later found in his pants pocket, and lost consciousness. Traywick believed that people should be able to design and self-administer unapproved treatments. Months before his death, he had stood in front of an audience at an annual biohacker conference, removed his suit pants, and injected himself in the thigh with a treatment he had devised that he claimed cured herpes. He had broadcast the controversial stunt on Facebook. “You would not be here today—if polio, malaria, if these diseases were still in place without self-experimentation,” he had told the audience. “You are in your right to self-experiment. It is your right, and it is your body.” Ketamine was the drug that landed Tony in rehab in February 2020, and in the early days after he left, Williams and other friends in Park City tried to keep him away from it. He grudgingly went along with them. But he drank Fernet and occasionally took ecstasy. He wasn’t fully sober, as someone who had just

left a treatment program should be. He refused to talk in depth about his use of any drug; more often than not, he would hand a friend one of his favorite books to explain his thinking about most subjects. Long before articles began examining the effects of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, Tony was experiencing it firsthand, and early. The handful of people around him couldn’t make up for his normal daily existence, in which he had regularly interacted with dozens of people, including coworkers, many of whom lived next to him in the Airstream park in Las Vegas. By early April, he had devised a solution: he would buy a fleet of tour buses in Park City to shuttle people back and forth from Las Vegas. He dispatched Mimi Pham, his longtime personal assistant, to help handle the details. Soon he owned several large buses and had hired a company to supply drivers. His personal driver, Steve Moroney, came to town to help him. Tony wasn’t the first tech entrepreneur to discover Utah. Like the biohacking trend, Silicon Valley had already arrived first in the form of the Summit Series, an invitation-only series of events for entrepreneurs, artists, and wealthy elites that counted Tony among its audience. Summit Series founders had organized the purchase of an entire mountain a ninety-minute drive away from Park City, in Eden, Utah, for $40 million from owners in financial distress. Powder Mountain Resort would develop high-end ski resort homes marketed to Summit’s elite members, curating a community from its rosters. “The folks that are here aren’t just here to have a second home in the mountains,” Powder Mountain CEO Gary Derck told the Wall Street Journal in 2019. “They’re also here to connect their family to other like-minded families and basically constantly better themselves and the world and their own particular initiatives.” Tony was starting to have other ideas for Park City as well. As he spent more time in the small town, cradled in the volcanic rock of the Wasatch Mountains, all he saw were possibilities.

CHAPTER THREE COLLISIONS

Park City, April and May 2020 Las Vegas, 2011–2013

No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future. —Tony Hsieh

In the darkness of the desert night, Tony Hsieh gazed across the pulsing mass of

human bodies and lights known as Black Rock City. It was 2011, his first year at Burning Man, which had become a rite of passage for every techie in Silicon Valley. Tens of thousands of people, who adopt “Burner” names and dress in costumes, build a temporary village in the middle of the desert known as “the Playa,” where they live in makeshift yurts, domes, and campers. DJs play throbbing music as dancers etch their feet through the sand. The minieconomy runs on gifting items—no money is allowed and there is no expectation of receiving anything in return. The festival started in San Francisco in 1986, when its founders burned a wooden effigy on Baker Beach, and was later moved to the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. The tech community soon followed. In 1998, a startup called Google put a Burning Man stick figure onto its now-iconic search engine, a message that Google employees were headed for the desert. It was the first-ever “Google Doodle,” which would become a regular feature. Soon executives from Facebook, Twitter, and venture capital firms also descended on the festival,

arriving on private jets, hiring chefs to serve tasting menus, and sleeping in luxury RVs. Some saw it as a betrayal of Burning Man’s free community ethos. Still, the festival became intertwined with the tech community. As the billionaire Elon Musk told a reporter for Vox in 2014, Burning Man is Silicon Valley, “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.” Despite being a near billionaire, Tony stayed low profile as usual, joining the party with the humble masses on the Playa. He was instantly in love. Like an underground rave, Burning Man triggered what he referred to as a “hive switch,” a term coined by a social psychologist: a body of people working together for the greater good rather than their own self-interest. “When you experience it, it is pure awe,” he said later in an interview with Playboy, “like when you see something in nature that’s bigger than yourself.” At Burning Man, people gathered with no schedules, talking and sharing meals and riding bikes around the trippy art sculptures that lit up the desert. Burning Man’s stated values matched everything Tony had come to believe in: inclusion, civil responsibility, gifting, and communal effort. Perhaps because his own strict upbringing had lacked wonder and fun, Tony was attracted to activities that allowed him to view the world from a more innocent, childlike perspective. His friends likened him to Tom Hanks’s character in the 1980s movie Big: a kid trapped in an adult’s body. Nothing enabled Tony to feel small again more than Burning Man and its outsized, nearly overwhelming grassroots grandeur. The festival “ignited a light in him and altered the course of his life,” the organization later wrote about Tony. That first year, 2011, Tony wore his usual shorts and T-shirt. He watched the Burners float past him in scanty sequined attire and science fiction–inspired headdresses adorned with tentacles. He stood out as a plain-clothed newcomer late one August night as he came across Phil Plastina’s art car. “Art car” is Burning Man vernacular for a vehicle transformed into a mobile sculpture, such as a fire-spewing rhinoceros or a dinosaur, that moves around the Playa like a parade float. In Tony’s first year, the art cars would have been astounding and impressive, a collection of glowing and unusual vehicles moving improbably throughout the middle of nowhere. “Gluing a few tchotchkes on your car or covering it in glo-sticks does not an art car make,” Burning Man has declared.

“Your car must be approved by our Department of Mutant Vehicles and you must have a DMV sticker in order to drive it.” Plastina’s art car, however, was in another realm altogether. A longtime Burner, Plastina had been driving from Santa Cruz to the Nevada festival for so long that he remembered when it had been dominated by beefy guys with guns and “Mad Max types.” By 2011, he had fallen on hard luck. The financial crisis had wiped out his construction business, almost causing him and his brother to lose their beachfront home in Santa Cruz. To save it, they had repossessed other houses for the banks, he recalled later. The job paid $10,000 a house but was heartbreaking. He had to force families and their children to leave, often in only a few hours. “We were cleaning out their books with photos in them, little dressers— everything. We were the devil,” said Plastina, whose gruff accent reveals his Queens, New York, upbringing. Plastina quit the job, and with the money he had saved—about $200,000— he spent the next two years building the largest, most outlandish art car that anyone at Burning Man had ever seen. He wanted to create something positive from all his heart-wrenching work. With the help of some friends in California, he constructed a massive enclosed stage on top of a flatbed truck, which looked like a spaceship rising high above the ground. They welded giant pieces of metal together to create the stage, then took the type of reflective material used for greenhouses and stuck it around the outside of the stage, so that when dozens of neon lines are turned on, the reflection of the lights makes it seem as though you can reach your hand right through the panel. A jack in the shape of a Burning Man stick figure could raise and lower the entire metal stage at the press of a button—the art car’s crowning jewel. A second truck carried electronics, speakers, a sound system engineer, and DJs. Plastina had recently formed an electronic dance music group called the Dancetronauts, and together, dressed in elaborate white space suits, they gyrated inside the art car to the music. Tony saw Plastina’s art car for the first time during its debut event, and it was a knockout sensation. Thousands of people gathered around to watch, dancing

and screaming under the desert stars, nothing else around for miles and miles. Tony was drawn to the crowd as if the art car’s flashing neon lights were pulling him in. When Plastina climbed down carefully from the vehicle after the first set, Tony stood there, staring at him with intense interest, his eyes gleaming with admiration. He introduced himself, but the name meant nothing to Plastina. “Hey, I want you in Vegas,” Tony said. Plastina laughed. “We’re not for sale, man,” he told Tony. “Look, I’m Tony Hsieh, I run Zappos, the shoe company, and I’m developing Las Vegas, and we need to have this in Las Vegas,” Tony continued in his characteristic style of wasting no time on pleasantries. Anyone else might have come across as a spoiled rich kid, but Tony was so earnest in his appreciation of beautiful things that made him happy and that might bring others joy that his selfless intent always seemed to shine through. “How much is it going to cost? A million dollars? Two million?” he probed. Plastina brushed him off and climbed back onto his spaceship. But Tony wouldn’t give up. After another round of dancing, one of the Dancetronauts went over to Plastina and whispered into his ear, “There are some people who want to talk to you.” A line of people, producers, and event organizers who were attending Burning Man wanted him to bring the art car to their own events. The Dancestronauts would ultimately draw a niche following, playing at tech parties across Silicon Valley. At the front of the line was Tony, waiting to speak with Plastina again. He was vibrating with excitement and blurted out, “I want you in Vegas at any cost.” Plastina quickly learned a key lesson about Tony: behind his quiet demeanor, he was powerfully convincing with both words and money. His childlike idealism and his sheer faith in everything working out made it hard for others to say no. He paid for the California-based Dancetronauts to perform in Las Vegas three times, priming Plastina for his bigger pitch: he offered to pay for Plastina to move to Las Vegas, including his housing and food, in exchange for performing only one night a month at the “First Friday” downtown arts festival. Plastina eventually agreed. He relocated to Las Vegas, upending his life to join the

growing congregation of Tony Hsieh. Tony became an honorary Dancetronaut himself, donning a white space suit and sometimes performing on the art car along with the other dancers. Tony’s magnetism drew in Plastina, but there was something more than that about his excitement. It was like watching your own ambition reflected in Tony, so sure was he that you could live up to anything you strove to become. Plastina had never meant to stake his career on the Dancetronauts. It was basically an extracurricular activity that was fun on weekends sometimes and at Burning Man. Tony immediately recognized the group’s, and Plastina’s, potential. It was a trick he played: you thought you were following his vision, but really you were following your own. “I never meant to do this, ever,” Plastina said a decade later. “I gave up my company, I sold my home. I moved down here for Tony.” Tony was obsessed with what he called “collisions”: the act of people—maybe strangers, maybe friends—randomly meeting to form bonds and partnerships but mostly to come up with great ideas or business projects, such as the one he forged with Plastina. He didn’t actually believe in bad ideas; ideas that weren’t fully formed simply hadn’t benefited yet from the right collision. Often, he acted as a secret matchmaker, orchestrating collisions between people he had decided should meet by inviting them to a happy hour or a party so that they could run into each other “by accident.” His friends usually enjoyed the happy “accidents,” only grumbling sometimes about Tony’s enthusiasm for a clearly terrible idea. It was exactly the way Tony planned to build his own minicity, downtown Las Vegas, and how, a decade later, he planned to tackle another one: Park City, Utah. Las Vegas evokes a mirage, a casino town that shines brightly out of nowhere in the black Nevada desert at nighttime. A series of entrepreneurs built the modern Las Vegas Strip, erecting bigger and bigger resorts filled with craps tables, noisy slot machines, booming nightclubs, and Cirque du Soleil shows. Before the pandemic began, about 42 million people from around the world flocked to the city every year, despite its oppressive heat.

The city’s tourism boosters struck gold in 2003 when they launched a campaign that would become legend and made permissiveness its motto: “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” And most of what happened in Vegas stayed on the Strip, compared to downtown. Even before relocating Zappos to the Vegas area, Tony had grown to love the city. Starting around 1999, he had become fascinated by poker, first playing in card rooms in California and later taking weekend trips to Las Vegas. At crowded tables of mostly tourists, he discovered how to master the game through math and outdo his less astute rivals. But the thrill of winning money waned, and he became more interested in making friends with other players. “I realized that once I had learned the basics of poker, I wasn’t really building anything by spending endless hours in casinos playing the game,” he later wrote in Delivering Happiness. “I realized that I needed to be doing something more fulfilling…. It was time for me to change tables.” About six miles north of the Strip, downtown Las Vegas in 2011 was a collection of old, classic casinos, such as the Golden Nugget, that nodded to the town’s Wild West roots with a grittier vibe, when Tony arrived. Along the major thoroughfare is the Fremont Street Experience, a pedestrian-only tourist attraction, with an overhead light show, zip-lining, live music, and cheap shops. Beyond that area, crossing over into East Fremont Street, downtown had crumbled. Sex workers and homeless people had settled in. Residents knew to avoid the area. One of the only businesses on East Fremont Street was a weathered old hotel and casino called the Gold Spike. Across the street was a run-down motel, once the site of one of Las Vegas’s deadliest bombings. “Most tourists never see downtown Las Vegas,” the New York Times wrote in 2012. The 2008 financial crisis had ravaged the entire city, and it had become “ground zero for the Great Recession,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, with some of the highest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the country. In that broken-down, desolate side of Las Vegas, baking under the relentless desert sun, Tony saw only promise. He was first introduced in 2009 to the downtown area by one of the locals, a man named Michael Cornthwaite, who had recently opened one of the few new businesses in the struggling neighborhood, a classy bar called Downtown Cocktail Room that served craft

cocktails amid low lighting and leather chairs. Cornthwaite had moved to Las Vegas more than a decade earlier from Chicago and asked the locals where to hang out. Their answer was a depressing chain of bars where people sat at a row of video-gambling screens and didn’t talk to each other. Cornthwaite took that as a challenge. He wanted to open something better. Tony walked the empty blocks of downtown Las Vegas, always asking “What if?” of his close friends and business partners: Cornthwaite; his wife, Jennifer; Fred Mossler, who was still helping run Zappos; and his soon-to-be-wife, Meghan. It was several years after Tony had moved Zappos to nearby Henderson, Nevada, and more than a decade after his brief foray into poker playing. “What if this was an event space?” he would ask. “What if this bar had a speaking series that took place in the back?” “What if, what if, what if…” In 2012, Tony, who was living in a house in the suburbs, moved into the Ogden, a luxury tower in downtown Las Vegas. Late at night, he and his friends would stand around eating kabobs from the only nearby restaurant, brainstorming. Tony scrawled ideas down on sticky notes, posting them around his apartment, desk, and computer monitor, perfect squares of possibilities. He had a wall filled with thoughts about how to change his adopted hometown. He sometimes invited friends or visitors to post their own notes. He wanted to reshape Las Vegas into his own Silicon Valley. He imagined the empty streets filled with talented entrepreneurs and their thriving startups, cool stores for visitors, and art everywhere to look at. One of the things that attracted him to downtown Las Vegas most was that unlike in many other cities, Tony saw the business owners working together, lifting each other up: a new kind of community. “The fact that people were really rolling up their sleeves and trying their best to create business and the community—he loved that,” said Jennifer Cornthwaite later. Tony fueled his ideas with the writings of intellectuals, and for downtown Vegas, he turned to the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. It clearly explained the benefits of urban living, and Tony referenced it often when describing his plans for downtown Las Vegas. In it, the author, Edward Glaeser, an urbanist

and Harvard University economics professor, argued that successful cities attract smart entrepreneurial people in part by being urban playgrounds. Echoing one of Tony’s key tenets, Glaeser wrote that “human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist.” Tony called Glaeser at his Harvard office after reading his book, so thrilled with it that he offered to have his father, Richard Hsieh, translate it into Mandarin. Glaeser, meanwhile, had had to Google “Tony Hsieh” and “Zappos” before they spoke. Tony asked Glaeser some detailed questions, such as what level of urban density is the most desirable, Glaeser recalled. (The answer to that question, Glaeser says, varies depending on the place and the person.) Tony was most excited to connect with someone who agreed with him so fully. Sometimes his ideas seemed so strange to the average person that he needed validation. “I just seemed to give him some scientific support for his own viewpoint,” said Glaeser. At Tony’s request, Glaeser made a three-day pilgrimage to Las Vegas in 2012, just before any real development took off. Tony took him on a tour and invited him to speak at Zappos. Glaeser found Tony to be intelligent and remarkably humble but focused less on the details of making his vision a reality. “How are your pedestrian pathways designed; the weather; making sure people are going to have a good walking experience—he was less engaged with things like that,” he recalled. Tony had already decided that moving Zappos to downtown Las Vegas would help create the sort of communal living and work situation that he hoped to achieve. Rather than working on a company campus that excluded outsiders, such as Apple’s in Silicon Valley and Nike’s outside Portland, Oregon, Zappos’ 1,200 employees would live and spend money right where they worked. The company would rent the empty former City Hall building downtown, a 1970sera brown behemoth with a horizontal panel of windows lining the very top and the back. To convince city officials to approve the many complicated details of the plan, more than a dozen Zappos employees showed up at a Las Vegas City Council meeting in 2011 as a flash mob. Wearing light blue company shirts and waving blue and white pom-poms, they streamed into the front of the room facing the

row of city officials. As the startled council looked on, they began to perform a minutes-long choreographed dance, bending and dipping and waving their hands. Orchestrating the event hadn’t been hard. At that point, Zappos operated almost like a high school, with various groups for employees’ interests, including a dance club. The city council ultimately approved Zappos’ move into the building in 2012. At the time of the vote, then councilman Bob Coffin likened the project to the investments that the tycoon Howard Hughes had made in the city during a recession in 1967. “It is eerily similar to me that someone is coming into town who believes in this town, who wasn’t here, stuck in the old ways, and sees something here that others didn’t,” he said. Born in Texas, in 1905, Hughes had turned an inheritance from his father into an even bigger $2 billion fortune, through producing Hollywood films, speculating in real estate, and starting an airline, among other entrepreneurial ventures. A famous aviator himself, Hughes became a recluse later in life as symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder—in particular, a fear of germs— made him avoid human contact. He arrived in Las Vegas in 1966 before dawn on a train in his pajamas and checked into a penthouse suite of the Desert Inn on the Las Vegas Strip. From its confines, he began making big purchases in Vegas, motivated by a desire to be the largest single property owner in the city. Hughes bought six casinos, enough to capture one-third of the annual revenue on the Strip—swiftly buying out Mafia owners and shifting the Strip away from organized crime and into an American vacation destination. He also bought nearly all of the remaining undeveloped land in Las Vegas, an old airport terminal, and a TV station. He left Las Vegas four years later, in 1970, having never ventured out of the Desert Inn. Tony convinced dozens of entrepreneurs to leave Silicon Valley and other areas across the country as part of an ambitious goal to recruit ten thousand new residents to downtown Las Vegas in five years. The entrepreneurs could take advantage of $50 million of seed money Tony was putting aside, part of his $350 million plan for the area, which now had a formal name: Downtown Project. And it had a headline-grabbing goal: to build “the most community-focused

large city in the world.” Tony came up with a new reporting metric to measure a business’s positive impact on its surroundings: return on community, or ROC. Ultimately, Downtown Project would create more than 1,500 jobs, including 130 at tech startups, and make more than 60 small-business investments. Over the ensuing decade, it would create more than $200 million in economic output. Tony bought the Gold Spike casino and gave it a full renovation. He had the motel that was the former bombing site torn down. He ordered more than a dozen forty-foot shipping containers from Long Beach, California, and workers stacked them in a rough circle across sixty acres, forming the basis of a completely new kind of development called Container Park. Inside the metal containers, bars and restaurants opened, as well as a playground with a giant treehouse right in the middle. Parents could watch their children play while sipping wine. The number of strollers outside the bars became one of the chief metrics the executives running Container Park used to measure its success. “There was a lot of exuberance around that time, a lot of hopefulness, and a lot of big plans,” Doug McPhail, a former director of Container Park, said later. Before he met Tony for lunch the first time, his colleagues warned him: he may just sit there, not speaking, or he may get up and leave without warning. In the end, Tony was perfectly normal, even chatty, when they met. Tony also infused downtown Las Vegas with the whimsical, cartoonish art he had seen on the Playa at Burning Man. Though much of the art there is built for the festival, collectors and museums often buy it afterward to take offsite. Fergusons, a new cluster of art galleries and shops, features a massive stack of trucks curling in a circle toward the sky. Nearby, a towering, bright pink flamingo stands in the middle of a parking lot at one point used for a free, ongoing speaker series. A dog day care business featuring a giant yellow fire hydrant outside opened. In front of Container Park, Tony installed his pièce de résistance, a forty-foot metal praying mantis trucked in from Burning Man. On most nights, employees of Container Park awaken the large, bug-eyed insect with a drum circle, inviting members of the crowd to take part. Soon the two metal antennas sticking out of the mantis’s head shoot plumes of fire into the air in short, loud blasts, startling the visitors gathered around it. Some people clap and some laugh, while others

are stunned into silence by the unusual spectacle. It is a surprising sight, even for Las Vegas. Always looking for a close group of people to surround himself with, Tony took over two apartments in the Ogden, the luxury tower into which he had moved, one of the only nice buildings to live in in the area. The Ogden faces an empty parking lot, but at night, some residents stepping out onto their balconies have a clear view of the lights of the Strip. Tony convinced friends and Zappos employees to move into his new building with him. Fred Mossler, his wife, Meghan, and their new baby joined him, as did many others. Eventually Tony would combine three large penthouse suites on the twenty-third floor. Plants filled one entire room to replicate a jungle. The “movie room” featured an expensive flat-screen TV. Energy drinks, including his favorite, Red Bull, were stationed throughout the space. He rented fifty additional apartments in the building, all of them filled with his friends, visitors, and coworkers. One friend who lived there, Mimi Pham, had a markedly strong influence over Tony. With long black hair and a dragon tattoo on her right shoulder, Pham, who had met Tony at a shoe conference in 2005, had proven herself indispensable to every facet of Tony’s life as his personal assistant. She got his meals and bought his clothes. She controlled his credit cards, and the two at one point shared an address on their driver’s licenses. She doled out his tickets to Burning Man every year, a big responsibility and also an honor. Tony couldn’t get through a day without Pham helping to organize some detail. When he ordered a last-minute, elaborate party, other Las Vegas employees would balk. But Pham would insist. She excelled at getting things done. With an investment from the Downtown Project, she opened a media production studio. Even though they weren’t a couple, she was extremely possessive of their special relationship. Tony’s close friends knew not to mess with her. One friend compared her to a cat: “She’d be like the nicest kitty and then swipe you and cut your hand. And then she would just sit there, licking her paw.” When Tony decided to tell a select few friends that he was going to rehab, one of the first he told was Pham.

Another friend who moved into the Ogden for a time was Suzie Baleson, a twenty-seven-year-old Texan who had recently quit her job as an accountant with the international consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to work with Tony’s development fund in Las Vegas. Several of Tony’s friends thought he might have a crush on Baleson, with her long blond hair and athletic body, but they weren’t dating. Tony had girlfriends on and off, but at thirty-eight, he’d had no longterm commitments. Because of his unique ability to make everyone feel singularly special, women and men often hung around him. At Zappos, the company kept a file folder on his known stalkers. Being a friend of Tony’s meant learning to tolerate a lot of personality types, often in a good way—you met people you never would otherwise as a result of all the collisions. Tony wasn’t discerning about who he chose to be his friend, and he sometimes trusted people too easily. “Tony collects people,” one of his friends told the magazine Wired. “You almost don’t even realize you’re being collected.” Tony’s interest in people often shifted like the seasons, but in a way that seemed to keep most people happy. Someone might be “in season,” getting the lion’s share of his attention, and then be out of season several months later, even though Tony still kept him or her close, inviting that person to events or parties or weekend trips. Though he might not spend every day with the friend anymore, he still found ways to connect and make him or her feel special. In that way, he accumulated an astonishing number of people who cared deeply about him and who turned to him for inspiration. Still, for some people that approach to friendship created an intense longing. They missed the days and months when his spotlight had shone on them exclusively. Some friends spent years trying to regain his full interest. Some of Tony’s friends hoped that Baleson’s season wouldn’t last long. They found her to be something of a braggart, and she sometimes seemed to exaggerate her connections or accomplishments. She often talked about Deepak Chopra, the famous Indian American author and motivational speaker, whom she described as her mentor. “One can only imagine what sitting and chatting with Deepak for hours has been—it’s beyond,” she said in an interview for a podcast focused on female entrepreneurs. Even her descriptions of her after-

college status as an international accountant, traveling through Europe and Asia to restructure companies, seemed inflated to some friends for one so young. She described Tony as a mentor, explaining in the podcast that “the most important thing he taught me was to surround myself with good people.” In 2013, after more than a year in Las Vegas, Baleson moved to New York City to start her own business, a health and wellness company called Wellthily. But like most people who collided with Tony, they stayed in touch. In a photo of the two of them on the subway in 2016, Baleson is smiling at the camera, her head resting on Tony’s cheek. In the spring of 2020, Baleson was still living in the West Village in New York, the US epicenter of the worsening coronavirus pandemic, when she heard about Tony’s plans in Park City. New York City residents were fleeing en masse. Baleson had earlier parted ways with her business partner and renamed her company the Wellth Collective. It had a grandiose, vague goal: “produce fitness and wellness-focused events around the world to introduce our tribe to the best in all things wellth,” according to her website. The business, however, was somewhat reliant on travel, so it stalled as the pandemic unfolded. Baleson, single and thirty-five, had no reason to stay in New York. She became one of an eclectic mix of friends and long-ago acquaintances that Tony began to assemble in Park City in the spring of 2020. Some moved there; others came for long visits. The group had few similarities except for their love of Tony and their lack of ties holding them back from joining him. Tony was beginning to formulate a plan for Park City, one that had a twopronged approach. First, he wanted to somehow help prop up the businesses that were suffering from Covid-19 shutdowns. Second, he wanted to create an environment where his friends could come and hang out without worrying about the threat of the pandemic, which, in only a month, had already completely upended the way the world lived. Tony wasn’t particularly worried about the virus, but, always attuned to his friends’ needs, he knew that some people would be more concerned about it than others.

To fulfill the latter goal, he decided to buy dozens of residential properties across town and turn them into Airbnbs. He already had shuttle buses to ferry people from Las Vegas to Park City, and now his friends would have a place to stay while they were there. He planned to turn over the properties to his friends, who could lease them out for some of the rental profits, with Tony taking a cut. Though tourism had come to a dead halt because of the pandemic—indeed, Airbnb itself was trying to raise private equity to stay afloat—Tony bet that it would eventually turn around. (It did, and Airbnb went public in December 2020, proving that it could navigate the pandemic.) On the face of it, the plan didn’t seem so unusual; at the start of Tony’s development of downtown Las Vegas, even more bizarre ideas had been tossed around. The details weren’t ironed out, but Tony rarely concentrated on those. He typically relied on trusted friends and employees at Zappos, or in downtown Las Vegas, to carry out his plans for him. He was the visionary. Park City, with its neat rows of homey restaurants and retail shops such as Patagonia along Main Street, could not have been more different from downtown Las Vegas when Tony first took an interest in the area in 2011. Park City, in some ways, looks like Aspen, Vail, or any other American ski town: polished and neat, with few ragged edges. The pandemic, though, had changed the landscape, placing the city nearly on the same wobbly economic footing that downtown Las Vegas had been on a decade earlier. When Tony arrived in the spring of 2020, he thought it seemed just as needy. The ski season had ended abruptly, and now the summer season was threatened as well. In early April, the organizers of the Tour of Utah, a bicycle race that passes through downtown Park City and draws thousands of onlookers, canceled the event. Next came the shutdown of what is known as the Silly Market, an outdoor festival filled with artists, entertainers, and food stands that typically takes place in the summer and fall. In 2019, the Silly Market had drawn nearly two hundred thousand visitors. The head of Park City’s visitor center acknowledged that the city’s tourism could be in “limbo” that summer. Baleson and another Las Vegas friend of Tony’s, Justin Weniger, began helping Tony with a quasi-business operation that everyone started calling “10X.”

Weniger, a baseball cap–wearing event planner, had previously been at the helm of one of Tony’s largest parties, an annual musical festival called Life Is Beautiful in the streets of downtown Las Vegas, which attracted more than 100,000 attendees in the early fall. Weniger, who speaks quickly, often mumbling, had helped organize the annual event for years but seemed to travel on the outskirts of Tony’s main group of friends, never quite earning full admittance for reasons that are unclear. His status at Life Is Beautiful was thrown into limbo in early 2020 in part because of a possible sale of the event to Rolling Stone magazine. Life Is Beautiful looked likely to be canceled that year because of the pandemic, and Weniger was eager to help out with Tony’s new business plans. In addition to the separate, Airbnb portion of the business, the 10X scheme worked like this: Park City residents bought $10 monthly memberships that granted them access on a designated Sunday to unlimited food and drinks at a set list of local restaurants. Tony picked up the entire tab, supporting the local businesses in the process. The cost was offset—although not by much—by the $10 memberships. The reason it was called 10X was that anyone who participated would theoretically get ten times the value of every dollar spent. Tony had tapped a local event organizer, Shaun Kimball, to work with Baleson and Weniger. Kimball, a surfer in his late thirties who lived part-time in Newport Beach, California, had met Tony several years earlier on a crowded day at Park City’s No Name Saloon, a rustic bar on Main Street featuring an antler chandelier and sparkling white lights hanging from the ceiling. The bar was packed, and Kimball and his date couldn’t find anywhere to sit. Tony had observed their dilemma and invited them to join his table. Kimball posted an advertisement on Facebook: Utah friends, anyone that knows me, knows I always GO BIG, for my next act, some will say “its too good to be true.” Think Sundance in the Summer. You have the unique opportunity to participate in something truly amazing! Let me introduce you to ‘The 10X-Experience.’

As many as a thousand people, mostly locals, purchased tickets. Covid restrictions were beginning to loosen, and more people were visiting Main Street again. Some of Tony’s friends were skeptical—and slightly confused—when he pitched 10X to them. How could a business make a profit from a customer who ate $100 in sushi and drank $50 in cocktails but paid only $10? The Airbnb portion of the plan also didn’t add up. For locals, the membership plan didn’t make much sense either, but the benefits were clear; Tony was subsidizing their flailing businesses. Tana Toly, whose family owns Red Banjo Pizza, the oldest business in Park City, had no idea who Tony was when she was pitched to participate, nor did she immediately know about his involvement in the plan. Her no-frills pizza joint with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, founded by her grandparents in 1962, has remained mostly unchanged through Park City’s evolution into a luxury destination. The idea, local business owners were told, was that 10X would lose money at first, but increased membership pricing over time, from $10 to $100 to $1,000 or more, would eventually bring in a profit. The business would expand into other cities. Membership would also include experiences such as fly fishing, golfing, and horseback riding and eventually lodging. “In all honesty it just—a lot of it didn’t make total sense,” Toly admitted. She agreed to participate anyway. Businesses had been shuttered for nearly two months, and their owners were desperate. Even as Park City reopened in the spring and summer of 2020, event cancellations and the continued lack of tourism in general meant far fewer customers than normal. Some of the business owners approached Kimball in tears, thanking the 10X organizers for the help. He accepted the gratitude on behalf of Tony, who rarely made a personal appearance at the Sunday events. At Tekila, a two-story Mexican restaurant, Tony’s 10X crew rented the entire restaurant for five weeks straight, from 5:00 p.m. until the bar closed, with Tony paying the bill. Members of his group piled onto the wide patio overlooking Main Street almost every night, drinking pitchers of margaritas and racking up

tabs in the thousands of dollars. Most of the businesses had outdoor locations, and it was summer, so they weren’t actively encouraging people to flout Covid rules. Tony Hsieh was a mystery to Tekila’s owner, J. C. Martinez, who met his strange new benefactor only once or twice, always in a crowd, and never for long. All Martinez knew was that Tony Hsieh was a godsend to his business. It seemed like his whole mission, Martinez said later, was to “spread a lot of love all over.”

CHAPTER FOUR DELIVERING HAPPINESS

Las Vegas, 2010

If happiness is everyone’s ultimate goal, wouldn’t it be great if we could change the world and get everyone and every business thinking in that context and that framework? —Tony Hsieh

In 2009, Tony Hsieh retreated to Lake Tahoe from Las Vegas with his longtime

friend Jenn Lim, whom he called his “backup brain.” In just eight days, they wrote the intertwined stories of Tony’s entrepreneurial life and Zappos’ bumpy rise to success. In a humorous, down-to-earth style, Tony told the story he’d been telling in pieces for years on the public speaking circuit. The pair, who had met in their twenties at Tony’s party loft in San Francisco, had flourished under pressure together before. They had summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 2002, reaching the 19,300-foot peak at sunrise after several days of hiking. Lim consulted for Zappos, including on workplace culture projects. Along the way, she had become a trusted member of Tony’s inner circle. In Tahoe, they worked on the book in twenty-four-hour stints with short naps, struggling to stay awake. They guzzled Red Bull and Tony’s favorite drink at the time, vodka. “We tried coffee. And alcohol. And then coffee and alcohol,” Tony told Footwear News in an interview. Lim added, “We actually put coffee beans in a vodka bottle.”

Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list in June 2010 and stayed on the list for twenty-eight consecutive weeks. Tony laid out how Zappos’ purpose had evolved from building the largest shoe selection online in the startup days to a loftier goal by 2009: delivering happiness to the world. Thousands of entrepreneurs and business leaders, hungry for a fresh start after the 2008 financial crisis and the long recession that followed, read about Zappos’ ten core values, including what would become the most famous on the list, “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness.” With the help of the book’s publication, Tony Hsieh evolved into a happiness guru and Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters into a home for his apostles. Zappos had reached $1 billion in annual sales, so Tony’s take that happiness leads to worker productivity and profits, not the other way around, carried new weight. “So, in terms of this book, how is all this ‘happiness’ delivered? Just like everything else Hsieh has done: successfully,” a reviewer for Inc. wrote. A Wall Street Journal review noted, “It is hard not to like a CEO who, without a trace of irony, says that his corporate mission has become ‘delivering happiness to the world.’ ” Inside Zappos, a world of pure positivity had been years in the making, starting with recruitment practices. “We only hire happy people and we try to keep them happy,” Alfred Lin, the chief operating officer who left in 2010, once said. “Our philosophy is you can’t have happy customers without having happy employees, and you can’t have happy employees without having a company where people are inspired by the culture.” This radical approach was working. For seven years in a row, Zappos was named one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Entry-level employees starting in the call center could rise to senior manager level within five to seven years thanks to a formal path Zappos had developed for moving up the ladder. The company required workers to take a four-week new-hire training course that averaged 160 hours and had additional hours of training for employees in the company’s “core curriculum.” Classes included “The Science of Happiness.”

The starting pay at Zappos’ call center, known as the Customer Loyalty Team, in 2010 was about $11, above Nevada’s $8.25 minimum wage, and the company paid 100 percent of workers’ health care insurance premiums. The starting pay has since increased to $15.75 hourly, compared to the state’s $8.75 for companies that provide medical benefits. Zappos was proving that shoes could be sold online at the same time as it was introducing its unusual culture of fun to the world. Getting a Zappos job became nearly impossible. Even before Delivering Happiness was published, the growing company had hired only 250 people from a pool of 25,000 applicants in one year. Prospective employees were picked up from the Las Vegas airport in Zappos’ airport shuttle, and a job seeker was immediately disqualified if the driver reported that he or she was rude. An interviewee’s technical skills and more subjective evaluation as a “culture fit” weighed equally in the hiring decision. “Job interviews took place in a room set up as a talk show set,” according to one case study by organizational behavior researchers. “Recruiters gave candidates creative tasks such as coming up with a design for Steve Madden shoes, and asked such questions as ‘On a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you?’ ” The application forms included a shoe-themed maze and a crossword puzzle. The cartoonish vibe of the process obscured a possible hazard: the culture-fit question became a filter, one that appeared to favor the young, cheerful, and tattooed. Tony noted that his staff listed dog day care as their top request for the new Las Vegas campus—even more than child day care. Tony’s injection of playfulness into corporate life might not seem unusual today. Tech companies across Silicon Valley are known, if not lampooned, for their open-air offices featuring Ping-Pong tables, nap rooms, free meals, gyms, and beer and kombucha on tap. Such amenities might brighten the day or make employees’ work life more luxurious. But it also has the effect of employees’ staying in the office longer and working more hours. As a Google employee, for example, if you can do your laundry, take dance classes, and eat a gourmet dinner all on the Googleplex campus, why go home? Tony took a different spin on companies’ growing movement to make their offices “fun” and pushed it further. His vision was less about freebies and

creature comforts (and getting employees to work nonstop) and more about embracing individuality and human connection as employee perks. He was trying to build a lifestyle. The company policy mandated employees’ spending social time together. He introduced family picnics and all-hands happy hours that took place on a regular basis. Zappos encouraged managers to spend 10 to 20 percent of their time with team members outside the office, including at the ubiquitous gatherings at local bars and outings to local events. The ten core values included “Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit” and “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication.” Tony even got himself approved by the county to officiate at employees’ weddings. “A lot of companies talk about work-life balance,” he told the New York Times. “We’re more about work-life integration. At the end of the day, it’s life.” Though Tony’s friends and employees never quite understood where his obsession came from, Zappos’ new mission of delivering happiness was a composite of everything he had spent years working toward. Early on, he had thought that Zappos’ mission could be “to inspire and be inspired,” but others around him had wondered how a business could achieve that every day. It seemed more like a personal goal, something a human could strive for, not a forprofit venture. So he had begun to think more about the joy the company wanted to send in every box of shoes to customers: delivering happiness. But Tony was also a shrewd businessperson, and he did not lose his drive for financial success. All of the warm feelings and camaraderie in the workplace culture were meant to lead to profits as well. Tony had realized years earlier at LinkExchange that investing in customer service, rooted in worker happiness, could be the key to growing the business. He had amplified that approach at Zappos, making it a core mission. It was, in fact, another of the reasons Jeff Bezos at Amazon wanted to buy the company in 2009. “I get all weak-kneed when I see a customer-obsessed company, and Zappos is certainly that,” he said in the internal video to Zappos employees when Amazon purchased the company in 2009. Every employee, no matter what his or her role, had to learn to answer phone calls from customers. Customer Loyalty Team members weren’t judged on how quickly they could get off the phone or how much they could upsell a customer.

Instead, Tony developed a new metric called Personal Service Level (PSL), which measured how well the employee connected with a customer. Zappos wasn’t a shoe company, Tony liked to say; it was a service company selling shoes. He fielded phone calls himself during the holiday rush, an annual two-week period at the end of the year known as “Holiday Helper,” in which every employee spends ten hours on the phone. Sitting at his desk among his coworkers, Tony never introduced himself to customers but enjoyed getting into long conversations about obscure topics with them. A customer in Florida called in and mentioned that he planted Christmas trees and raised cows. Soon Tony was in a deep conversation about how the customer had to castrate his cows. Another time, Tony answered the phone with a typical greeting: “Hi, welcome to Zappos, can I help you?” The customer replied, “Do you have any shoes that are like fall?” Without pausing, Tony patiently queried, “Do you mean like the season? Do you mean brown?” Before he could get to the bottom of it, the customer threw a curveball: “Do you know anything about quantum dynamics?” At that point, a customer service agent at another company might have dodged the question and stuck to the script or simply hung up. But Tony got excited. Quantum dynamics, which describes energy at the atomic and subatomic levels, was something that he had studied casually. His curious mind frequently led him to research topics that had nothing to do with business. The customer had reached probably the only person at Zappos who would have known anything about it. Tony never mentioned that he was the CEO, even though they spoke for close to an hour. Tony was the rare top executive who didn’t care about titles, endearing himself to employees, who could also see that he authentically enjoyed being silly. It wasn’t a gimmick. He loved board games, puns, dancing, and putting on magic shows. Most people thought he had the worst taste in music because he liked only songs that were upbeat, such as Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” any time of the year, or electronic dance music. He was constantly getting up to mischief and playing small tricks; he knew the entire secret menu at the fast-food chain In-N-Out Burger and claimed to be the only person to have

ordered the now-discontinued “100 by 100” burger—one hundred patties stacked together. He was also fond of robots and in 2013 was introduced through a friend to Alexandria “Ali” Bevilacqua, a twenty-seven-year-old actress and Las Vegas native who played a robot in the Blue Man Group. The first time they hung out together, Tony invited her to ride Razor scooters with him around his penthouse apartments at the Ogden. The two started dating shortly thereafter. Later, Tony decided he wanted to visit Santa Claus during the Christmas season, so he and Bevilacqua, along with Fred Mossler and another friend, joined a line filled with children and their parents waiting to tell the joyful man their holiday wishes. Spying a nearby playground, Tony and Bevilacqua, a small woman with short blond hair, left Mossler to stand in line while they pushed each other on the swings and took turns on the slide until it was time to see Santa. “He really didn’t care what people thought,” Bevilacqua said later. “It was like ‘I’m going to have fun, and I’m going to do this hilarious thing.’ ” Inside and outside work, Tony’s thoughtfulness and generosity were unparalleled. He was the first to buy tickets to dance recitals or plays featuring his friends’ children or donate to a school fundraiser. He remembered the music, movies, and bands each friend liked and introduced them to their favorite celebrities when they passed through Las Vegas. When his friend Michael Cornthwaite’s wife, Jennifer, was in labor at home with their daughter in 2013, Tony went directly from the plane after landing from Italy to be the first person to visit their new baby. Jamie Naughton, Zappos’ longtime chief of staff, was having trouble getting out of a bad marriage in the early aughts. With no hesitation, Tony moved her, her baby daughter, and her mother into his own house in Henderson, Nevada, for several months. He was hyperaware of what those around him needed. If anyone, even a lowlevel Zappos employee, wanted time with Tony, he personally handed over his cell phone to the person and instructed him or her to put the appointment on his calendar. At Burning Man, he noticed a woman in his group shivering and gave her a furry Technicolor jacket from his own stash to wear, making a new friend in the process.

At Zappos, his generosity came partly in the form of parties. They weren’t just any parties, though; they were full-fledged events orchestrated over months, designed to give every worker an unforgettable experience, one he or she might not have had otherwise. Tony wanted to see what would happen when different people collided among the music and lights and other details. Zappos spent millions of dollars a year on the parties, “family picnics,” and happy hours and employed an entire team of planners—the fungineers—to design them. The company regularly took over nightclubs and other venues across Las Vegas. Employees joked that “Party with your peers” was the unofficial eleventh core value at Zappos. Though Tony wasn’t often involved in the planning, he stationed himself at the door to greet people when they arrived. In 2015, Zappos rented out an open-air stage at the LIGHT nightclub at the Mandalay Bay hotel on the Strip. As music pulsed and lights flashed over the crowd, the Dancetronauts, along with acrobats from Cirque du Soleil, all dressed in space suits, flew over the massive crowd of screaming, cheering employees. At another point in the festivities, a haunting meditational song filled the giant space, and lit candles flickered along walkways. All at once, a procession of break dancers dressed as monks filed onstage from both doors, chanting to the audience. The next year, for Zappos’ annual vendor appreciation party, the theme was “Untamed Circus.” More than 2,500 people poured into Drai’s Beachclub and Nightclub at the Cromwell on the Strip, a 35,000-square-foot space with multiple roof decks. Zappos had turned the venue into an old-timey traveling band of oddities with an impressive array of clowns, stilt walkers, and ballerinas flitting around among the guests. Lion tamers and fire breathers performed for the retail industry crowd. A giant red-paneled disco ball spun as the crowds danced and mingled; guests were served unlimited drinks from multiple bars and ate alcohol-infused cotton candy. At one point Tony stood onstage, attempting to juggle circus rings. At one Zappos holiday party, a paintball warehouse was turned into an endof-the-world scene, with zombies hidden around every corner, and a New York DJ, Jason Smith, who was regularly hired for Zappos’ parties, organized sound effects, such as a plane crashing, from the top of a fake army tank. When

attendees walked into the warehouse from the parking lot, they walked by a pretend CNN newscast about the end of the world playing on the side of the building. At another party, Tony dressed up as Morpheus in the movie The Matrix and handed out red and blue pills (really jelly beans) to attendees. Smith, the DJ, was used to playing much tamer company parties and nightclubs in New York City. At Zappos, the work that went into the parties was beyond anything he had ever seen before. “They would make this really magical experience and transform the whole club,” he said later. “It was surreal.” Taking care of others acted as a powerful salve to Tony. If his friends were happy, he was happy, too. He was like a mirror, reflecting those around him. “So if I am around an introverted person that is really awkward,” he explained to the New York Times in 2011. “But if I am around an extroverted person I will be whoever they are times point-5.” Tony’s employees and friends couldn’t reciprocate his lavish gifts of time and money, and Tony expected nothing in return. He had an odd relationship with money. He didn’t seem to take it seriously, but he also didn’t flaunt it. Money would come and go. He used it only as a means to an end, and if his friends could benefit from it, why not? His friends still found ways to show their devotion. For Tony’s fortieth birthday in 2013, a group of people got matching tattoos of small circles— pixels, a nerdy computer joke—in his honor, surprising him at his party later in the night. That stunt prompted questions from the local media about whether Tony was running a cult instead of a company, a half-joking question that had followed him since the release of Delivering Happiness in 2010. On The Colbert Report in 2011, Stephen Colbert asked Tony directly, “Is this a cult? Are you, dear leader, father of a cult? Do you have child brides? How much control do you have over these people?” Tony, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, his hair shaved close to his head, chuckled and quickly moved the conversation back to Zappos’ ten core values. Tony wasn’t a cult leader, but it was true that he had attracted a legion of devoted followers who not only admired his business acumen but also his inherent goodness and ability to lift others up.

But Tony did a terrible job taking care of himself and tuning in to his own needs. Often he ignored them altogether. Devout people pleasers such as Tony generally worry that if they prioritize their own desires, they will ultimately end up alone. Why would anyone choose to stay? One friend compared Tony to the children’s story The Giving Tree, in which a tree gives and gives to the boy she loves, never receiving anything in return, until there is nothing left of her. Tony’s pursuit of happiness starting in the mid-2000s helped usher the burgeoning tech world into a broader movement that had been brewing in America for a few years already: positive psychology. Psychology as a science had focused on treating conditions such as depression and anxiety as described in a diagnostic manual. In the late 1990s, the psychologist Martin Seligman argued that that wasn’t enough. Instead of focusing only on problems, psychology could also suggest how to live a good life—happy, healthy, meaningful—which, he argued, could be studied scientifically, too. By looking at geniuses and society’s most accomplished members, psychologists could discover “the roots of a positive life,” as he commented in his 1998 speech as president of the American Psychological Association. It wasn’t an entirely new concept, as psychologists had been discussing a more humanistic and holistic approach to psychology going back to the mid-twentieth century. But in 2002, he went on to publish Authentic Happiness, which became a best seller. “Ideally psychology should be able to help document what kind of families result in the healthiest children, what work environments support the greatest satisfaction among workers, and what policies result in the strongest civic commitment,” he wrote. In the following decade, positive psychology took off among academics. Meanwhile, self-help books and consulting services by untrained gurus and life coaches also proliferated, fueled by the new scientific interest, offering the masses what the author, journalist, and activist Barbara Ehrenreich called “pop positive thinking,” the linking of positive thoughts with good outcomes in life, in her critique of the field, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

The lines between science and pop culture became blurred, at least from the consumer’s perspective. The meaning of happiness remained up for debate. Pleasure, enjoyment, positivity, gratitude, purpose, well-being, and virtue, plucked from Western and Eastern philosophies, blended into a cultural movement. Positive psychologists tried to distance themselves from the pop culture of self-help but at the same time embraced methods echoing life coaching and motivation, including publishing books aimed at a general audience with “you” and “your” in the title and marketing to corporations interested in worker productivity. Simply being happy wasn’t the sole goal, Ehrenreich noted; it was about happiness leading to improved health and success. “Happy, or positive, people—however that is measured—do seem to be more successful at work,” she wrote. “They are more likely to get a second interview while job hunting, get positive evaluations from superiors, resist burnout, and advance up the career ladder. But this probably reflects little more than corporate bias in favor of a positive attitude and against ‘negative’ people.” In his journey into that world, Tony had discovered The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, published in 2006, often recommending it to friends and in media interviews. The book argues that happiness can’t be achieved by looking only outside oneself for fulfillment. Nor does it come only from within through a mindful, detached state of being. Instead, it “comes from between,” from connections between yourself and others, in love and in work. Tony might have been shy, but he never stopped wanting to connect with people. He saw himself as someone who could spread that philosophy. With Delivering Happiness, he could start from Zappos and launch a pay-it-forward happiness chain that could make the entire world happy. In doing so, he thought, he could be happy, too. Tony dedicated the final chapter of his 2010 book to the concept of happiness, including graphs and charts that revealed his analytical mind in motion. In particular, he was fascinated by the idea that achieving a longtime goal or winning the lottery didn’t provide lasting, sustainable happiness. He acknowledged that deeply human problem, but he didn’t question whether the pursuit of happiness should, in fact, be the end goal. “The question for you to

ask yourself is whether what you think you want to pursue will actually get you the happiness you think it will get you,” he posited. Tony believed that his brand of happiness could create the best business conditions. Workers could come as themselves and be accepted. Customers would be respected as individual humans with their own joy and pain, as well. Lim, with the help of Tony, spun off Delivering Happiness into a consulting firm—what she and Tony called “a movement,” capitalizing on happiness’s moment in the corporate spotlight. Lim became CEO and Chief Happiness Officer. The consulting team would grow to include positions such as CoachSultant & Win-Win-Win Collaborations Booster, Culture Orchestrator, Global Happiness Navigator, and Happiness Owl. For years to come, Tony and Lim would relentlessly promote the book and its message, decorating a tour bus with a smiley face that they drove across the country, taking dozens of friends with them. They were accelerating a trend across the United States, including on Silicon Valley’s sunshine-soaked tech campuses. Companies had begun to embrace integrating the concept of happiness into the corporate structure, including more companies adding a “chief happiness officer” role. One of Google’s first engineers, Chade-Meng Tan, took the title Jolly Good Fellow. He developed a mindfulness course for Google employees and wrote a book in 2012 about emotional intelligence called Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). Tan began his speeches by asking the audience to do a thought exercise: “Imagine two human beings. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, just wish for those two human beings to be happy. That’s all.” Early on, in 2003, the now-common chief happiness officer role appeared as a marketing stunt. McDonald’s named its mascot clown, Ronald McDonald, “Chief Happiness Officer” to generate some silly news stories. Today, the title has become accepted as a professional role at tech companies and other businesses for people who lead human resources or problem solving for customers. By 2014, there were so many happiness officers that the New Republic called it “the latest, creepiest job in corporate America.”

Nonetheless, Tony’s brand stood out. It seemed authentic and full of hope. Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters became an optimism mecca of sorts. Tony always promoted transparency—he published his daily email and meeting log online for anyone to see—and he threw open the doors to anyone to tour Zappos. Thousands of business leaders and entrepreneurs from retail companies, banks, and software providers made trips there, hoping to learn from Tony Hsieh, the man who was bringing workplace happiness to the masses. One of them was Tony Gareri, who in 2010 walked the halls of the sprawling Las Vegas Market, a home furnishings trade show during which tens of thousands of retailers and suppliers browsing rugs, sofas, and bedroom sets typically fill up the expo center. Gareri was representing Roma Moulding, the Toronto-based picture frame company his father had founded in 1984. But that year, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the trade show was nearly empty. At a dinner with others in the industry, a woman handed him a copy of Delivering Happiness, which he finished on the five-hour flight home, reading the last lines with skepticism and a little curiosity. Maybe it’s a Vegas thing—good publicity, he thought. Back home, Gareri looked up Tony Hsieh and Zappos online, and on a whim, he put his name on a waiting list to attend a three-day boot camp at Zappos to learn all about the company’s culture. The next day, Zappos called about an opening, and a week later, Gareri stepped onto a Zappos shuttle at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport with other eager campers who’d just arrived. The days were an endless series of talks by quirky employees, tours of wackily decorated offices, and a field trip to downtown Las Vegas, to which Zappos planned to move its headquarters from the suburb of Henderson. During a steak dinner at Tony’s home, Gareri made sure to grab the seat across from the guru. He was now a changed man, wanting to institute a happiness culture at his twenty-six-year-old company. Initially, Tony told him that it wasn’t possible. “You should shut down the company, go across the street, and reopen the company,” he remembered Tony telling him, warning that a culture overhaul is a gargantuan task. If Gareri did try to instigate change from within, Tony suggested, it would be difficult and take a wholehearted

commitment. That was enough for Gareri. “I needed to hear from him it was possible,” he said. Gareri knew that his company’s culture had become toxic, a reality that had become clear to him while he was touring Zapposland. Roma Moulding’s products were high quality, but Gareri had mentally checked out, waiting to decide whether to stay or go. Tony Hsieh gave him an answer and a newfound commitment to positive leadership. Gareri got his father and other company executives to agree to try a Zapposlike culture revolution at the family-owned company. Starting with an admission to employees that the company had failed to put them first, he had begun to consider how the company could “blur the line between work and play.” Roma Moulding started holding all-hands meetings, like Zappos’ famous gatherings, with Gareri talking to employees with the zeal of a motivational speaker, that have continued for a decade and counting. Roma began promoting public tours to show off its own workplace culture as its business rebounded and thrived. “Company cultures develop over time,” said Gareri, who also launched a public speaking career. “It’s not a three-month, one-year strategy. It’s truly—as Tony stated—a five-minimum-to-lifetime strategy. The more love and the more attention you give it, I think it continues to pay dividends.” Happiness, though, can have a darker side. Psychologists have found that focusing on happiness can have the paradoxical effect of making people less happy by creating higher expectations. In one experiment, a group of people viewed a two-minute video clip previously proven to induce positive emotions about a female figure skater winning a gold medal and celebrating with her coach as the crowd cheers. Before watching the positive video, some participants read a made-up news article emphasizing the importance of happiness in life; others read an article that, instead of happiness, wrote about the importance of using “accurate judgment” in life. The group who read the article on happiness reported being less happy while watching the joyful video. “These findings are consistent with the idea that valuing happiness leads to less happiness by setting people up for disappointment,” the researchers

concluded. Self-help books promote “a mindset to maximize happiness,” they wrote, when, in fact, people might be more helped by the approach of the philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1873: Mill said that happy people are those whose minds are focused “on some object other than their own happiness.” In a separate study, researchers concluded that the pursuit of happiness can actually make people feel lonelier, because Western notions of happiness focus more on one’s own feelings and do not take those of friends and strangers into account, which could possibly damage social connections with others. Daniel Horowitz, a historian at Smith College, wrote about the rise of positive psychology and happiness studies in his book Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America. He traced how the positive psychology movement became big business in the 2000s, fueled in particular by the spread of messaging on social media and the popularity of TED Talk videos that feature snappy how-to-live-the-good-life content from witty, sometimes dramatic experts. Among the most popular TED Talks is “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in 2004, which, as Horowitz noted, has been viewed almost 20 million times online. Meanwhile, tech companies and corporations as big as Walmart began hiring happiness coaches preaching themes similar to Tony’s company-culture manifesto. Horowitz noted that the movement has attracted “a world of serial searchers” for life enhancement. Horowitz pointed to a landmark work published by the social psychologist Philip Brickman in the 1970s. Brickman and a colleague published a paper stating that people can get stuck walking on a “hedonic treadmill,” a futile search for long-lasting happiness. In fact, boosts in positive emotions as a result of good fortune or life events are only temporary. People adapt and soon return to their emotional baselines. The thrill wears off. Unfortunately, Brickman committed suicide at the age of thirtyeight by jumping off an apartment building in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In an obituary, fellow psychologists wrote : The best way off the hedonic treadmill, according to Phil’s writings, is commitment—the almost magical mechanism that converts the inevitable pain and dissatisfaction in life into purpose and meaningful-ness. Unfortunately, commitments can be very fragile…. His writings reveal deep

feelings for the phenomena he studied; perhaps he had too much feeling and too much insight. These two things together are the mainsprings of unique creative achievement, but they are also the elements of tragedy.

Some research has linked the extreme valuing of happiness to an increased risk of developing mania as part of bipolar disorder and depression, and high levels of positive emotions can be associated with risky behaviors including alcohol and drug use. The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, known worldwide for his happiness research, in a surprising 2018 interview said he had become convinced that people don’t want to be happy—they’re interested in life satisfaction, constructed by the memories of our lives and the accomplishments of our goals, rather than day-to-day happiness. “The question of whether society should intervene so that people will be happier is very controversial, but whether society should strive for people to suffer less—that’s widely accepted,” he said, adding later “in general, if you want to reduce suffering, mental health is a good place to start—because the extent of illness is enormous and the intensity of the distress doesn’t allow for any talk of happiness.” In his own quest for peace and joyfulness, Tony struggled quietly. He suffered from significant social anxiety, the unrelenting feeling of being watched and judged by the people around him, and also, likely, depression. Although he had never received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability associated with difficulties in communication and social interaction, he speculated to some of his close friends that he was somewhere on the spectrum. It was easy to see why he thought so. In conversation, he often skipped small talk and asked something direct instead, such as “What would it take to reach your full potential?” Despite his limitless generosity, he was missing a level of empathy common in most people—and he knew it. He approached the problem as he had those of downtown Las Vegas and Zappos: by studying, reading books and articles about humans and their desires. He was brilliant—he could do complex mathematical equations in his

head, and he told people that his mind was always working eight seconds ahead of everyone else’s. Unbeknownst to even some of his closest friends, Tony suffered from facial blindness, also undiagnosed, which sometimes made it difficult to identify the people around him. In an August 2010 essay, the New Yorker writer Oliver Sacks wrote devastatingly about the way his own inability to recognize faces and even familiar places had contributed to a lifetime of frustrating interactions: “On several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.” It’s unclear how severe Tony’s affliction was because he told so few people about it. He once complained to a close friend that he might not recognize his own mother if she walked by him unannounced. Tony developed workarounds by recognizing the voices of close friends or by asking a select group of people to help guide him through particularly difficult events with a lot of people. When someone entered a room, he might distract the person by offering him or her something—such as a meal—so he could leave the room and listen as the new person talked with others. Most of his friends assumed he was absent-minded or had memory problems because of his very busy lifestyle. In one example of what was likely Tony’s inability to recognize faces, Phil Plastina, the head of the Dancetronauts, who by that time knew Tony well, sat next to him at a bar for more than two hours one night in Las Vegas. Even though Tony turned to look at him several times, he never said anything, treating him like a stranger. Finally Plastina, who had been talking to someone else, took Tony’s arm and said hello. Tony greeted him as if he had just arrived. Each of Tony’s health problems was an obstacle, standing in the way of the kind of life he wanted for himself, one filled with all different kinds of people and events. He refused to talk openly about any of his issues, despite the number of friends who surrounded him. He took Adderall, a medication generally associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Xanax for his social anxiety. He took Ambien to help him sleep. But that wasn’t enough. Earlier, when he had lived in San Francisco, he had discovered the pleasing effects of alcohol, specifically Grey Goose vodka, at the parties he had hosted at

his loft during the years after the LinkExchange sale. Alcohol was like a lubricant, enabling him to have the types of conversations and moments he wanted with the people around him. (It should not have been mixed with medications such as Adderall and Xanax, but he didn’t appear to suffer negative effects from doing so.) By 2010, what had been occasional drinking grew into a nightly ritual. Through the parties and events he threw at Zappos, he seamlessly infused it into the culture there as well. Though alcohol-heavy workplaces have often led to problems for companies, it seemed to work for the most part at Zappos, where so much prominence was already placed on “fun.” It wouldn’t be odd to see the CEO do a shot in the middle of the day or at a meeting. His employees worshipped him, and they joined in. Drinking became a part of who Tony was, a feature of his character that everyone around him accepted, like his deep desire to have fun or his relentless determination to always be on time for everything, down to the minute. To a few close friends, Tony admitted why he thought he needed so much alcohol in his life. He said he felt that he couldn’t talk to people properly if he was sober. In other words, he had trouble forming connections, the friendships he cared so deeply about. Sometimes his friends would broach the subject with him, as in 2013, when his then girlfriend, Ali Bevilacqua, asked him, “What’s up with the drinking? Why do you have to drink every night?” “I have to drink,” he replied. “It’s the only way I can live in the now. It’s the only way I can get out of my head.” Nothing cemented his drinking lifestyle more than the three-and-a-halfmonth book tour for Delivering Happiness, a cross-country road trip in 2010 on a large bus featuring friends he had collected over the years and whom he had invited to join him. The bus, colored light turquoise with the book’s logo and a big, winking smiley face, stopped at music festivals, bars, truck stops, and more. On board, the bus had a full-time bartender, and it was a never-ending party, celebrating his successful book. The group that followed Tony carried bright yellow HAPPINESS X-ING AHEAD signs wherever they went. Starting in Las Vegas, the bus drove more than three thousand miles across the country, stopping for sack races in Colorado, a happy

hour with local residents in Omaha, Nebraska, and hula-hooping in Rhode Island. In New Orleans, the tour bus drove through the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood still devastated after Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures in 2005. Flooded-out houses were still marked with X’s and numbers spray-painted by emergency workers who had recorded how many people or pets had been rescued or died. Tony’s bus, usually filled with music and conversation, was silent as it pulled into the ward. Even years after the hurricane, the damage was startling to observe. Tony was emphatic about the group’s visit, and he partnered with a nonprofit to spend two days repairing and rebuilding houses. He worked alongside everyone else. Other companies might have publicized that sort of “human” move by their CEO, but it would never even occur to Tony. At the South by Southwest festival in Austin, the bus caught up with the actor and investor Ashton Kutcher, who later joined the bus trip for a stretch, partying with everyone on board. “Nobody in the bus had a personal agenda that they were trying to fill,” Kutcher told Tony and Jenn Lim in a later interview. The pair often interviewed people for video postings online during the tour. “I think everybody’s agenda was just to give and share happiness.” In New York City, Zappos employees rode in fifteen pedicabs through Times Square, waving HAPPINESS X-ING AHEAD signs and passing them out to tourists waiting to board tour buses or purchase cheap theater tickets. With big grins and shouts of glee, they shouted “Happiness!” or “Happiness crossing!” to mildly confused passersby on the sidewalks. “But are you happy?” a bystander shouted at the miniature parade. No one seemed to hear or bothered to respond as the procession carried on.

PART II

CHAPTER FIVE THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Park City, May and June 2020 Las Vegas, 2012–2016

I think of my role more as being like the architect of the greenhouse, where under the right conditions, the plants will flourish and thrive on their own. —Tony Hsieh

In Park City, a blanket of wintertime snow hides a small lake on Aspen Springs

Drive that disappears into the white landscape on the main highway into the ski resort town. But in springtime, the valley meadows thaw out, revealing verdant pastures traced by a few rusty fences and groves of trees. The sparkling pond reflects sunlight through the cathedral windows of what became known by Tony Hsieh and his friends as the Ranch. Aspen Springs Drive, a residential road, passes the pond before carving through trees up the mountainside. The trees cloak luxury homes that are close enough to be considered part of a neighborhood but far enough apart that their residents can mostly forget about other people. Realtors marketed the house at 2636 Aspen Springs Drive—a nine-bedroom, thirteen-bathroom house on seventeen acres of land that also includes a horse corral, a tennis court, an indoor swimming pool, and waterfront lounge areas on a sandy beach with mountains in the distance—as Crescent Ranch. Sold for about $7 million in 2016, only four years later, the house was listed for $14.9 million in the rush for big houses and distant neighbors during the pandemic.

In late spring 2020, Tony toured the house and was immediately enamored. The house features tall windows, overlooking the private lake, the mountains in the background. Members of his entourage explored like kids, bouncing through the different rooms. Tony and his crew made the decision to buy it almost immediately. He offered to pay nearly $16 million, a million dollars over the asking price, if the sellers would not return home. They agreed. Soon after, the sellers’ real estate agent returned as movers were packing up the family’s belongings. By then Tony had already placed hundreds of candles around the house. Lately, he had developed a fixation with fire. He “explained to me that the candles were a symbol of what life was like in a simpler time,” the real estate agent said later. Buying the Ranch was Tony’s biggest step in what appeared to be a period of renewal in his life, despite the social distancing and doomsday atmosphere of the pandemic. Postrehab, he had embarked on a digital detox in an attempt to find clarity, turning off his two cell phones and answering only important emails related to his work at Zappos. He was still the CEO, but he was increasingly dropping out of online meetings. When he did show up, he often seemed unfocused, as though he were paying attention to something else. If any of his friends wanted to reach him, they had to email one of his assistants. Despite being somewhat absent from work and hard to track down for friends, Tony seemed to be in the best shape of his life in early spring 2020. He wasn’t drinking much and had even given up smoking American Spirit cigarettes for the most part, a habit he loved. He had made a pact with his Las Vegas friend Justin Weniger to stop taking ketamine, and staying off the drug seemed to be helping. After he left rehab in late February 2020, Tony lived in the $4 million woodframe house on Empire Avenue that he had initially planned for a vacation rental. The house was directly across from the ski slopes of Park City Mountain. In the spring of 2020, skiing was shut down because of the pandemic. But almost every day, Tony walked out of his house, crossed the massive, empty parking lot of the resort lodge, and picked one of the network of trails that weaves across the shuttered ski slopes, ascending the mountain.

The trails are strenuous, made all the harder by Park City’s nearly seventhousand-foot elevation, with hikes that can reach ten thousand feet. The high altitude can cause dizziness, headaches, or even an upset stomach in some people, especially those used to living at lower elevations, such as Las Vegas. One of the more popular paths up Park City Mountain is the Armstrong Trail, a series of switchbacks on rocky terrain that passes through groves of aspen and pine trees, before eventually giving way to a panoramic view of Park City. At the cluster of boulders at the top, hikers can look out across the entire valley, the white letters PC carved into a hillside in the distance. But the view is achieved only after nearly four miles of straight uphill hiking, and assuming that one walks at a fast clip, the endeavor could take three hours or more. In the spring, the weather in Park City can be fickle, 70 degrees one day and 38 and snowing the next, with stretches of crusty snow lining parts of the trails shadowed by towering pine trees, making them even more treacherous to walk. Weniger, a longtime trail runner and mountain biker, was a reliable companion on those hikes, but few of Tony’s other visitors could keep up with him. Some dropped out of a hike before ever making it a third of the way up. On those long walks, Tony practiced a sort of heavy-breathing technique that he had read about in a book called The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter and that was supposed to boost his endurance. Back at home, he lowered himself into icy baths at least four times a week, remaining five minutes or more, a method of reducing body inflammation and healing muscle aches. He also spent a long time stretching. Almost every day, he made soup. It was one of his favorite foods, and he hardly ever used a recipe, enjoying the act of throwing random ingredients and leftovers together to see what might work. When Tony’s longtime driver, Steve Moroney, who hadn’t seen him for a month or more, came to pick him up at the Empire Avenue house in the early spring of 2020, Tony was standing in the kitchen wearing only sweats, his shirt off, drinking a glass of water. He was completely toned, his abs glistening. “Wow,” Moroney said. “You’ve really been working out!” Even when Tony had been on an exercise binge in the past—climbing California mountains or

deciding to run a marathon—he had still usually had a little belly. Moroney jokingly poked Tony’s flat stomach. Like all of Tony’s employees, Moroney’s standing with his boss was more of a close friend than a paid worker, and he had been driving Tony and his entourage around since the Delivering Happiness tour bus a decade earlier. He viewed Tony as family. Tony smiled at Moroney and described his near-daily hikes. Moroney, and others who saw Tony at the time, assumed that his new fitness routine meant he was better. He looked so good, so healthy, and there didn’t seem to be drugs around. But other longtime friends such as Tyler Williams, his right-hand man and close friend at Zappos, saw something else when they watched him leave to hike miles up those mountains. They observed early signs of the manic behavior that he had displayed months earlier in Las Vegas, before rehab. Though drugs seemed to be out of the equation for now, he talked intensely about his big visions for Park City and 10X—not always coherently— while at the same time philosophizing about living a life free of constraints such as money and time. He didn’t want to think about Zappos or even wear shoes. Some of his new visions seemed to be instigated by his recent insecurity about what he had achieved in his career, compared with other chief executive officers. He didn’t often compare himself to others, at least publicly, so that was a new phenomenon. In late May 2020, he had watched with rapt attention as the billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX had launched two astronauts into space for the first time. Something shifted in Tony in that moment, and he seemed to question his whole approach to management, particularly developing people and urging them to learn through reading books on their own path. Though he wasn’t necessarily discarding his overall quest for happiness, he wondered if he had taken the wrong way to get there. Maybe he shouldn’t have been working at such a long, slow game, focused on building up the people around him to achieve greatness. Instead, and with an egotistical tone that was also unlike him, he wondered aloud if he had been doing it all wrong. Had he missed an opportunity to do something really big that could change humankind? He had to fix it—he had to fix everything right now. What exactly he had to fix was unclear to those around him.

That change in tone also accompanied his inexplicable new buying spree, starting with the Ranch. He was already talking about investing in other properties as part of his 10X plan. That was also very out of character since, until recently, he had lived in a small Aistream trailer, still preferred fast food, and, despite working at a shoe company, wore only black Asics. Williams and others kept quiet about their suspicions about Tony’s behavior because they initially didn’t see any clear evidence that something was wrong. Despite his career-long focus on healthy relationships, which was a corporate value at Zappos, he had been hard to talk to about anything serious. He had walled off parts of himself and hated confrontation. It was part of the reason why getting him into rehab earlier in 2020 had been so challenging: his friends knew that he would react negatively to any questions, possibly telling them to leave Park City. They didn’t want to leave. They were worried. Something was brewing. By 2012 in Las Vegas, Tony had cemented his stardom with his success at Zappos and the publication of Delivering Happiness, but it wasn’t enough to keep him still. He was an innovator, always seeking the next radical idea, the next promising discovery, while disdaining taking the easy route. His obsession with cities hadn’t been quelled by his decision to personally invest $350 million into the one where he lived. He began repeating a research conclusion that would become a mantra: when a city’s population doubles in size, productivity increases by 15 percent. Corporations, though, get bogged down in bureaucracy and leave innovation behind while growing. “Cities have stood the test of time,” he said. “They’re selforganized. The mayor of a city doesn’t actually tell its residents what to do or where to live.” Tony’s thinking seemed inspired by researchers such as the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, who applied scientific equations to the study of cities. His and others’ work had found that as a city doubled in size, economic measures such as income, number of patents granted, and GDP went up by 15 percent—but so did the darker side of the equation, with a 15 percent rise in

negative factors such as crime, traffic congestion, and certain diseases including AIDS. But ever a devotee of positivity, Tony focused on the good side of the equation as the foundation for his riskiest move yet. Tony considered himself to be a “futurist,” someone who studies and predicts what will happen a dozen years from now, or even fifty or a hundred years. He found that more than three-quarters of the businesses on Fortune magazine’s first list of the five hundred biggest companies in the United States in 1955 had since failed. Zappos needed to ensure its survival in the long term. Tony had already rethought the traditional office and workday, even the role of the customer and the manager-employee relationship. Now he was eyeing something grander, questioning traditional hierarchy—as in workers managed by bosses overseen by more bosses—which dated back to the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. It felt nothing like the freewheeling office that was Zappos. There was also Tony’s role as CEO, a job that by 2012 he had held for more than a decade but didn’t actually love. Unlike other business executives, who enjoy the power of overseeing a global enterprise, who work their whole careers to get to that point, he didn’t like the unmanageable stress that came with it, and he especially didn’t like telling people what to do. That was why he always recommended books or TED Talks to get his viewpoint across to someone. Often he would spend his mornings scouring the internet for interesting articles and information and then send them to the right people at the right time, usually when he wanted them to think about a new idea. Those missives were affectionately known as Tony’s “data drops.” “I think of my role more as being like the architect of the greenhouse, where under the right conditions, the plants will flourish and thrive on their own,” he once said. Not only was he uncomfortable with the job personally, he questioned the role of CEO at any company—he found it to be a flawed title that caused nepotism and put the company at risk for relying so much on one person. Instead he wondered how he could give more authority to the loyal employees he’d fostered for years. Eager to find a better way, he read about theories of self-management, which essentially does away with the typical company structure. It appealed to his desire for the next iteration of Zappos.

In October 2012, he traveled to Lost Pines, a resort about twenty-five miles outside Austin, Texas, the liberal tech hub of the South. He was giving a talk at the annual Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, part of a movement started by Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey, where a group of about two hundred corporate leaders gathered each year. Americans weren’t happy with the corporate greed that had been revealed during the 2008 financial crisis. Conscious Capitalism offered an answer by emphasizing a higher purpose alongside profits. Tony’s presentation of Zappos’ values and his interest in reviving downtown Las Vegas fit right in. In the rotating cast of wealthy do-gooders laying out their plans, Tony paid attention when it was Brian Robertson’s turn onstage. Robertson, with a goatee and a kind demeanor, has described himself as having a rebellious streak, questioning the status quo and authority from his school days into his professional life. His life-changing invention, the reason he had been invited to speak at the conference, had come after he had nearly crashed a plane. He was flying solo with only twenty hours of training completed when a low-voltage light on his instrument dashboard turned on midflight. But Robertson ignored it because his other instruments, including the altimeter, appeared normal. He ended up flying through a storm and nearly losing control. He later thought about how humans in the workplace are a company’s sensors and a lone worker can sometimes be ignored. “How do I build an organization where everybody gets to bring all of their wisdom, all of their gifts, all of their talents, and there’s no risk that we outvote somebody that has some critical insight?” he asked at one TED Talk. To the Texas crowd, he described the ability of his system of self-management for companies, which he had named holacracy, to flatten the hierarchy and ensure that all workers are heard. Robertson noticed Tony in the audience because he wore a ratty T-shirt among the upscale crowd. He didn’t know who Tony was, but he could feel him listening intently. Tony approached him immediately after the talk. “He came up to me and started just peppering me with questions, like really curious, a little skeptical,” Robertson remembered. “I gave him all the answers I could.”

Tony shared his favorite stat: “Research shows that every time the size of a city doubles, innovation or productivity per resident increases by 15 percent, but when companies get bigger, innovation or productivity per employee generally goes down.” He added, “So, I’m interested in how we can create organizations that are more like cities and less like bureaucratic corporations.” Robertson said he thought he could help. Holacracy is a form of self-management in which instead of a team of people reporting to a boss, who then reports to another boss, as in a traditional hierarchy, there are groups of largely self-managed teams. Workers fill “roles” within “circles.” The circles are fluid; an employee can hold multiple roles. The traditional one-on-one meetings with a manager are replaced with “tactical meetings” “where all members of the circle are accountable to each other.” Problems are called “tensions,” and a tension is defined as “a gap between what is and what could be.” The way holacracy spells it out, tensions are sensed intuitively by the body, rather than recognized only by the mind. Each circle holds governance meetings to “process” the tensions felt by circle members. The name holacracy was inspired by the journalist and critic Arthur Koestler’s 1967 philosophical psychology book The Ghost in the Machine, which explores the relationship between human consciousness and the physical body. Humans, Koestler said, are like “holons,” things that are simultaneously independent and part of something bigger, connected by what is known as a holarchy. “It captured the spirit we were looking for—governance of and by the organizational holarchy,” Robertson blogged as part of the history of holacracy; “through the people, but not of or for the people.” After chatting at the conference, Robertson accepted Tony’s invitation to visit Zappos in Las Vegas and talk about how holacracy could be implemented there. Then, in late 2013, Zappos began rolling out the new management structure. Tony expected a full transition to take as long as five years, with a basic framework in place within one year. He announced the change to holacracy at Zappos’ quarterly all-hands meeting in November 2013. The event also included a Lion King performance and an employee climbing into a container of tarantulas for a $250 gift card.

Internally, Tony liked to tell people that Zappos was small enough to withstand the massive management overhaul that he was proposing, big enough to matter as the world watched, and strong enough to go through the pain. On March 24, 2015, at 3:18 p.m., Tony hit “Send” on a 4,500-word email that would, for better or worse, make Zappos famous yet again. He instructed his employees to take thirty minutes to read the email. Zappos was shifting entirely to self-management, using the holacracy system, and as of April 30, there would effectively be no bosses. The company would become a “Teal organization,” a concept introduced by the self-management guru Frederic Laloux, who wrote Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Laloux created an overview of different business organizations inspired by levels of human consciousness through evolution. “Red” is “impulsive,” with predatory leadership such as exists in street gangs; “orange” is “achiever,” with goal-oriented leadership such as that of charter schools; and “green” is “pluralistic,” with a focus on consensus building and values, such as Southwest Airlines. “Teal” is “evolutionary.” A Teal organization has creativity and future potential, and “decisions are informed not only by the rational mind, but also by the wisdom of emotions, intuition, and aesthetics.” The announcement was like an earthquake that shook Zappos and its employees, who had grown used to their company’s zany, everything-goes culture. Although it encouraged self-reliance, transparency, and autonomy, the holacracy structure was rigid, particularly at first. It came with a lot of processes and rules. As one executive put it, “It was like learning to write with your left hand.” Some people broke down crying when they read Tony’s email. At one of the leadership team’s first meetings about integrating holacracy, with Robertson in attendance as the “facilitator,” some of the executives were so shaken and upset that they opened a bottle of Grey Goose vodka to pass around,I taking shots while he was talking. Tony’s email had also included a fateful offer: the company would give any employee who didn’t want to deal with self-management a severance of three months’ pay. Those with at least four years’ experience would get one month’s pay for every year at Zappos. The offer didn’t spell it out, but employees who

chose to stay would implicitly be buying into holacracy. That was the tactic Tony often used quietly to persuade people to adopt his unusual plans, including in downtown Las Vegas, where entrepreneurs who accepted his investment money were also essentially signing off on his vision for the city. “Like all the bold steps we’ve done in the past, it feels a little scary, but it also feels like exactly the type of thing that only a company such as Zappos would dare to attempt at this scale,” Tony’s email said. “With our core values and culture as the foundation for everything we do, I’m personally excited about all the potential creativity and energy of our employees that are just waiting for the right environment and structure to be unlocked and unleashed. I can’t wait to see how we reinvent ourselves, and I can’t wait to see what unfolds next.” In early May 2015, Zappos reported that 14 percent of its workers—about 210 of its 1,500 people—had taken the buyout offer and left the company. That number increased to 18 percent by January 2016. Tony felt frustrated that the media reports on the departures didn’t focus on the other side of the equation: 82 percent of the employees had stayed committed to Zappos. If any other company had made that offer, he argued, the retention rate would have been much lower. In 2015, the nonprofit arm of billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group invited Tony to speak at a small retreat on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. Branson, who has founded more than four hundred businesses worldwide, bought the seventy-acre, uninhabited circle of rain forest in the 1970s, turning it into his family home and a private getaway. Among celebrities and business executives, it’s considered an honor to be invited, and sometimes attendees would come as part of a small conference or other event. As Branson observed in a 2014 YouTube video produced by Virgin, “The most extraordinary people come to Necker.” He and Tony had crossed paths before, including when Branson had visited Tony in Las Vegas, touring Zappos and his other developments. Tony, his hair shaved at the sides and styled into a tall mohawk, spoke about holacracy, detailing his efforts at Zappos. Afterward, he fielded questions from

other attendees about the practice. By now he was an accomplished speaker and practiced at hiding any social anxiety he might have been feeling. Soon a woman about his age, with long blond hair, standing in the back, began dominating the conversation, asking smart, open-minded questions about holacracy in a way that Tony had never heard before. He had been used to getting pointed questions from other business executives who missed the point of his new management system entirely. “I love you,” Tony thought as the woman spoke, although he didn’t say it out loud. Afterward, as Tony stood around speaking to attendees, he was introduced to Jewel, who had skyrocketed to fame as a homeless folksinger in the 1990s with songs such as “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “You Were Meant for Me.” It was as though she and Tony spoke a secret language and she could translate his holacracy plans in a way that real people would understand. Growing up in the backwoods of Alaska, Jewel Kilcher had relied on nature and the beauty of her surroundings to help her escape a tumultuous childhood, including an abusive father. She had ridden her horse frequently, and after she left home at only fifteen, she worked hard to remain true to those roots, even as she toured the world as a musician who had unexpectedly found fame. She immediately saw that Tony was trying to build the company through holacracy like “a natural, living breathing organism,” she later explained after Tony invited her to speak at a Zappos company event. Holacracy was all about “circles” of operation, and Jewel saw the body as a great metaphor: the kidney, liver, and spleen, all acting independently but still operating within the larger body system. “They’re imprinted with the code, which is the values of the company,” she explained. Because nature had been evolving and learning since the beginning of creation, to build a human system similar to it would be the most efficient and effective if a company cared about longevity, she reasoned, which Tony clearly did. Jewel didn’t think about things such as “org charts.” Jewel had spent more than a decade working on mental health issues affecting at-risk youth through her nonprofit, the Inspiring Children Foundation, and had expanded that work to helping school districts and companies. Tony was fascinated by her use of nature as a role model for grit and resilience. In 2016, he asked her to design a program at Zappos that would encourage employees to deal

with stress and mental health and help turn them into resilient, self-starting entrepreneurs, which they would need to fit in the new holacracy system. Alone and adrift at only fifteen, Jewel had herself struggled with mental health problems. Like Tony, Jewel is an introvert, but she had realized that her tactic of hiding in plain sight to keep herself safe was limiting her ability to experience connection and joy. She had set out to correct that by being vulnerable when she sang. She forced herself to maintain eye contact and be very honest about herself and her flaws. She found that the strategy worked: the feeling of connection was exhilarating and radical, and she knew she had stumbled onto something important. While she had been homeless, she had begun to study her anxiety and experiment with different techniques to help overcome it, including writing. She called her journal “The Happiness Project” and later wrote her own best-selling book, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. Every time she wrote something down, she felt her anxiety lessen. Tony and Tyler Williams worked with Jewel to develop an online portal at Zappos called “Whole Human,” filled with mental health resources, one that could be used at other companies across the country. Jewel and her team created ten pillars of high-performance living, including emotional fitness, calm mind, physical fitness, and community and connection. They came up with dozens of tools to help employees when they felt overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed, including meditation and other mindfulness techniques. As part of her work with Zappos, Jewel moved temporarily to Las Vegas, where the Inspiring Children Foundation is based. She became one of dozens of musicians and movie stars who flowed through the Airstream trailer park in downtown Las Vegas. Tony had moved there from the nearby Ogden apartment building in 2014 and now lived with thirty other friends spread out among twenty of the bullet-shaped metal trailers, along with tiny houses measuring only several hundred square feet. The semiplanned community, which Tony referred to as “an urban version of Burning Man” and sometimes as the “world’s largest living room,” had a pool, a barbecue, and a campfire going every night. Five cats lived there, as did fifteen dogs and Tony’s alpaca, Marley. Tony loved llamas and alpacas because they looked so silly. He also owned a small terrier mix, Blizzy, short for Blizzard,

which he had spontaneously adopted at a Zappos pet event and whose stature in Tony’s life warranted the establishment of Blizzy’s own Instagram account. Sarah Jessica Parker posed with Blizzy for his feed, as did Britney Spears. Jewel had been hanging out there one Sunday around 2017 for an informal weekly brunch Tony regularly held when two local musicians, a beat boxer and a rapper, also wandered in. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes there would be a high school kid playing a piano or a sixty-five-year-old playing the drums. Soon Jewel and the three musicians performed together for Tony and his friends, producing several new songs together on the spot. It was the sort of ultimate “collision” that Tony had always hoped for, and it was how Jewel was used to seeing him, quietly content and radiating positive energy from a perch nearby. But as they worked with Tony at Zappos, Jewel and her team realized that there might be another reason he wanted them there: he was also struggling and clearly wanted to learn some coping mechanisms for his mental health issues from them. He was under so much pressure to perform for his employees and customers and even his friends. Jewel’s team sensed that Tony was suffering from social anxiety, which he had told few people about, and they thought he had a sensitive personality. The latter attribute meant he would be hypersensitive to large groups of people and energy, a problem for Tony, who had built his life around being in groups. He hadn’t learned how to manage that, or the constant stress of his life, in a healthy way. Working nonstop and traveling all the time— on business and road trips—were ways of self-medicating, as was his drinking. By 2015, Tony’s alcoholic beverage of choice had switched to the Italian liqueur Fernet, a weedy, herbal-tasting liquid that Tony liked to joke was his “Chinese medicine.” He liked to pretend that it actually was medicine, a clear distraction from his reliance on alcohol, telling people it was a liqueur soaked in fourteen herbs and spices, that it was a digestive and helped with nausea. Don’t judge it for sixty seconds, he would tell people. Allow it to coat your stomach like medicine. His friends would laugh along and gamely try the bitter liquid. When Tyler Williams was asked in 2019 by a Medium writer about the things he wished someone had told him about Zappos when he first started the job, he said the amount of Fernet he would be drinking. “I wish someone had told me to build up my tolerance because seriously—we drink a lot of it,” he said.

Williams was the rare friend who could keep up with Tony’s 24/7 lifestyle. He believed in Tony and the work they were doing at Zappos, and he didn’t have any kids. His wife, however, put her foot down about living in the Airstream trailer park and also declined a job offer from Tony. On some days, Tony drank throughout the day, but it wasn’t obvious even to some of the people closest to him. During meetings throughout the day or at a Zappos event, he would have a shot here and a shot there, but there were different people attending the meetings, who saw him having only one or two shots at a time. When evening rolled around and the parties began, he would have several more shots or drinks over the course of the night. By the end of the day, he might have consumed as many as eighteen shots or drinks, and he was small. Despite the dozens of people around him all the time, very few of them— maybe none of them—would have witnessed the entirety of that consumption because they weren’t with him all day long. Williams, who was about fifty pounds heavier than Tony, once tried to keep up with him shot for shot on a trip to Santa Fe. He passed out. Tony easily explained away any concerns about his drinking, although there were very few people who tried to talk to him about it because of how resistant he was to any personal confrontation. He also seemed to have it under control. As a way of convincing his friends that he didn’t have a problem, he took up smoking and said he would quit in six months to show them that he could give up anything he wanted. But when the six months ended, he extended that time frame to a year because, he said, smoking was “meditative” for him. He continued to smoke, and his friends stopped asking about it. Once, not long after Delivering Happiness was published, a longtime friend who didn’t see him regularly became concerned about his drinking. In a brief moment when the two were alone together, the friend asked him point-blank to give it up. Tony was quiet for a moment. Then he took the friend’s hands and said, “I have a doctor, and he says I’m fine. If he ever tells me I’m not, I promise you I’ll quit.” A later court filing describing Tony’s mental health issues during his lifetime seemed to indicate that Tony had consulted a medical professional on the matter, saying that “he understood the negative health effects associated

with the prolonged use of alcohol and the prescription medication he was taking.” Tony’s ex-girlfriend Ali Bevilacqua, meanwhile, tried to gently convince Tony to cut back on his drinking in a way she hoped he would be receptive to. Tony could be very stubborn, and he really didn’t believe that anything was wrong. There was a subtle art to convincing him of things. Bevilacqua had moved next to Tony in the Airstream trailer park in 2018 when they were dating, and in the mornings, they had taken turns making each other breakfast. It was usually his most sober time of day. She would tell him, “I like you best when you’re sober. Do you really need to drink?” Tony would shrug off the question. The problem was, he didn’t like himself sober. While Jewel was working with him at Zappos, Tony never outwardly asked her or her team for help with whatever he was struggling with, although he queried Jewel for book recommendations about mental health. He tried to take up meditation. When Jewel and her team held longer, deeper retreats or workshops in which Zappos employees had to discuss their personal struggles, he was conveniently not around. When it came time for him to fully fund the “Whole Human” project, he declined, despite all the work put in by Jewel and her team to develop a prototype for the program. It’s possible that Zappos just didn’t have the funding. But Tony never explained why. Tony’s avoidance of discussing his own problems publicly isn’t unique to him. The stigma around mental illness has existed for centuries. We have a history of locking people away in psychiatric hospitals, diagnosing people with schizophrenia, for example, while also categorizing them as ones to be feared and avoided. In the 1960s, society took a new approach: designed to deinstitutionalize the system and release people from deplorable conditions, a wave of hospital closures brought people back into communities. But outpatient treatment and community services have been underfunded and frequently ignored by political leaders. Many Americans, particularly racial and ethnic minority groups, have limited access to care, a crisis that worsened during the

isolation and job losses brought about by the pandemic. Meanwhile, the news media and entertainment often portray those with mental illness as violent, unpredictable, and worthy of being blamed for their condition. The lingering bias that prevents people from getting help has been an ongoing, decades-long fight by advocates, who work to increase access to care in a broken, underfunded public system. In recent years, the push to destigmatize mental health has gained steam with big celebrities taking up the cause or speaking publicly about their experiences. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry launched a series on Apple TV+ devoted to the topic featuring celebrities such as Lady Gaga and other famous people. Kanye West, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, has publicly described his manic episodes, telling David Letterman in 2019, “You see everything. You feel the government is putting chips in your head. You feel you’re being recorded. You feel all of these things.” In the business world, where a company’s stock price flickers on just a few words from a CEO, mental health remains a taboo topic that is rarely discussed. Founders are synonymous with their companies; a public image of stability is crucial as they pitch for venture capital funding and make the rounds at networking events. Even those who are privileged to be able to afford the priciest private psychiatric care and have access to it fear the consequences from investors and customers, who demand a steady projection of confidence and infallibility in trying to grow a company. One Sunday morning in 2017, Tesla founder Elon Musk tweeted to his followers—around 17 million at the time, now 60 million—about the reality of his life: “The reality is great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress. Don’t think people want to hear about the last two.” In response, a Twitter user asked Musk if he had bipolar disorder. Musk replied, “Yeah,” followed by a second answer: “Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.” When another follower said that a lot of fellow founders would want to hear about how he’s dealt with the lows and stress, Musk responded, “I’m sure there are better answers than what I do, which is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.”

In 2021, Musk, while hosting Saturday Night Live, opened up further, announcing for the first time in his opening monologue that he had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Unhooking an entrepreneur’s identity from the roller coaster of work is what Jerry Colonna, an executive coach, focuses on accomplishing with a blend of Buddhism and introspection. Colonna earned a reputation as the person “who makes founders cry” and promotes what he calls the “art of growing up.” That involves radical self-inquiry, a process of a person confronting what they’d rather not see. Being a better human—in other words, growing up—is “hard because we’re scared,” he said. “Tony wrote a book on happiness,” he said. “I wish he was aiming for contentment…. I am enough. I am enough just as I am.” Dr. Michael Freeman, a psychiatrist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, noticed a pattern among the founders of smaller companies he interacted with in his career in Silicon Valley, which included his own entrepreneurial pursuits. Those company founders didn’t sleep much. Some took imprudent risks and alienated their employees and colleagues, often blowing up their relationships. They had chosen a less stable professional life with long work hours and a high chance of failure. They were also often charismatic, bold, creative, and interesting to be around. The links between artistic creativity—that of poets, musicians, and painters —and mental health had already been explored, including in the book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison. Dr. Freeman coauthored a study that continued the theme, and posed a similar question: “Are entrepreneurs touched with fire?” What the researchers found surprised them. Nearly half of the study’s entrepreneurs self-reported having at least one mental health condition, while one-third of people in a comparison group reported having a condition. Half of the entrepreneurs who reported having no mental health conditions said they had a close family member with one, compared to one-quarter of the nonentrepreneurs. Across the United States, one in five people experiences a mental health condition each year. One in twenty experiences a serious mental illness such as

schizophrenia or severe depression and bipolar disorder. In Dr. Freeman’s study, entrepreneurs were twice as likely to have depression, three times more likely to have a substance use disorder, six times as likely to have ADHD, and eleven times as likely to have bipolar disorder as were nonentrepreneurs. In 2013, Aaron Swartz, a pioneer in online activism who created RSS when he was fourteen years old and cofounded Reddit, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six. He had written about depression in his blog. “I feel ashamed to have an illness,” he wrote. “(It sounds absurd, but there still is an enormous stigma around being sick.) I don’t want to use being ill as an excuse. (Although I sometimes wonder how much more productive I’d be if I wasn’t so sick.)” He wasn’t the only one; there was a rash of suicides among entrepreneurs at the time. Dr. Freeman noted that many of the genetically inherited personality traits that are crucial for entrepreneurial success, such as risk and creativity, can overlap with mental health conditions like bipolar disorder and ADHD, when taken to the extreme or tested in stressful environments. Entrepreneurs, he said, “can be quite vulnerable.” Early June 2020, when Tony toured his new nine-bedroom mansion in Park City, should have been a hopeful time. The pandemic appeared to be winding down, with cities across the country tentatively reopening heading into the summer. Tony had been out of rehab and living in his new mountain town for more than three months. The plans for 10X seemed to be taking off. He was in the best shape of his life and had managed to stay off ketamine. But lately it seemed as though he was losing his way again. Ali Bevilacqua, who was living in Los Angeles, had flown to visit him in Park City and had joined him and the rest of his friends for the tour of the new mansion, the Ranch. The two had broken up in 2014, in part because of Tony’s alcoholism, and then gotten back together in 2018 for about a year. The last time Bevilacqua had seen Tony had been about six months prior at her own family’s Christmas gathering in 2019, which he had attended in the past, even when they weren’t

dating. He had been acting strangely at the time, but she hadn’t thought too much of it—there had been a lot of people there, and she was used to his awkwardness in groups where he didn’t know many people. That was during the months he had been taking ketamine, but Bevilacqua said later that she hadn’t known he was using drugs. During her visit to Park City, though, Tony was not acting like himself. He told people that he had developed psychic abilities while living in Utah and could levitate. While Bevilacqua was there, he refused to eat or sleep and was paranoid and talking fast but not making much sense. He had taken a marker and scribbled over his entire body. On a boat ride with a group of people around nearby Deer Creek Reservoir, he sat huddled in a corner under a blanket. Bevilacqua had rifled through his things and found a vial of white powder: ketamine. In a conference on the balcony of the Empire Avenue house—it was too soon to move into the Ranch, on the other side of Park City—Bevilacqua and Tony’s other friends whispered about what they should do. Nobody knew, but everyone was worried. Bevilacqua eventually had to fly home. Several weeks later, in late June 2020, Tony and his friends in Park City piled into Tony’s main tour bus on their way to the unincorporated town of Bigfork, Montana, and the Flathead Lake Lodge, a family-owned, two-thousand-acre dude ranch. With sailing on Flathead Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the West, horseback riding, and hiking, the lodge was a perfect getaway for the group, and Tony tried to go once a year for a week. Tony’s previous trips to Flathead Lake had been healthy and restorative, so his friends believed that taking him there would be a good opportunity to isolate him from some of his visitors, who were clearly supplying him with drugs. They thought the fresh air and change of scenery might help him. The drive to Bigfork from Park City is almost seven hundred miles, winding through forests and mountain passes and through the state of Idaho. Steve Moroney, Tony’s longtime driver, would be piloting. A group of friends joined them on the bus, including Justin Weniger and Tyler Williams. They planned to drive straight from Park City to Montana overnight, roughly nine hours or more, and stay at the dude ranch through the Fourth of July.

In a normal year, Bigfork is known for its Independence Day celebration, with myriad fireworks stands around town and a big parade winding through its main streets. Though the parade was canceled in 2020, Tony and his friends knew that the dude ranch organized its own private fireworks display on the lake. They could lie on their backs on the grass, watching the sky slowly get dark, the mountains in the distance, fireworks exploding in rainbows all around them. I. Zappos said that people who attended the meeting do not recall a bottle of vodka being passed around.

CHAPTER SIX A CREATIVE SOLUTION

Park City, June 2020 Las Vegas, 2013–2019

There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. —Tony Hsieh, quoting The Matrix

In the darkened room where he was napping, Steve Moroney was shaken awake.

Tony’s longtime driver opened his eyes groggily to see his boss standing next to his bed, antsy. It was late June 2020, and the crew had arrived in Montana only hours earlier to enjoy the Fourth of July there as a way to try to help Tony. After the long overnight drive from Park City, Moroney had been planning to take a substantial nap. What he hadn’t known at the time, since he sat with headphones on in front of a curtain while driving so as not to be distracted, was that Tony had ingested a large number of psychedelic mushrooms while en route. Tony had boarded the bus in Park City wearing only pajama pants. He had brought no luggage, except for a box of crayons. The tour bus was fifty-five feet long, and Tony had his own small room. He retreated there with the drugs that were somehow already on board. As the group arrived in Montana in the morning, the mushrooms kicked in. Tony screamed to his friends, “Everybody get off the bus!” and then began pacing up and down the aisles, shouting that there was an active shooter and crouching down between the seats to hide from the dangerous gunman. By that

time Moroney had parked the bus at the Flathead Lake Lodge and gone to get a ride to his hotel nearby so he could sleep. Tony’s worried friends filed off the bus and decided to take turns going back in to check on him. Tony started to throw things around, trying to destroy the interior. The bus, which he had bought for about $2 million before he had moved to Park City, was one of his most prized possessions. At one point, he shouted that his friends should join him in a suicide pact. Dying, he explained, was the best way to transcend human consciousness. He would burn the bus down, he told them, so they could all die together. Of course he had no way to do it, but his friends were distraught. He was having a full-fledged breakdown, and he had never acted like this before. After several hours, he finally calmed down enough that he went to go find Moroney, leaving his friends at the lodge. “Steve-O,” Tony said. “I need you to wake up. I have a very important meeting, the most important of my career.” Moroney sat up slowly as Tony relayed that they had to drive, right that minute, to go see Jeff Bezos, the founder and then chief executive officer of Amazon, for a meeting in Las Vegas. It was unclear why Bezos, who lives in Seattle, where Amazon is based, would be in Las Vegas, especially during the pandemic. Tony apologized to Moroney. He was not usually demanding, and he cared deeply about his employees, particularly his longtime driver. The two had a special bond. He knew that Moroney needed sleep after the drive from Park City —but this was an urgent matter. Moroney agreed to drive Tony the roughly fifteen hours it would take to get to Las Vegas, even though he had just driven all the way to Montana from Park City. He would end up driving more than 1,500 miles in two days. But first he went to look for a cup of coffee. While Moroney got ready at his hotel near Flathead Lake Lodge, Tony disappeared. Soon after, in Los Angeles, Ali Bevilacqua, Tony’s ex-girlfriend, answered a FaceTime call and saw on her screen that Tony was huddled alone. He was back on the tour bus. Right away she knew something was wrong. Tony spoke quickly again, saying that he was playing a game. He had texted several friends and offered to pay them handsomely if they could locate him.

“I’ll give you a million dollars if you can find me,” he told Bevilacqua, who had no interest in his money. It was clear that Tony was not himself. Bevilacqua knew exactly where he was from an app that allowed them to share their locations, and she knew about his annual trip to Montana. She immediately called Tony’s private travel agent and had him book her onto a private jet there. It was hours after Tony had awakened Moroney when the driver finally started off with him. They left his friends, including Justin Weniger and Tyler Williams, who were aware of the change in plans, behind in Montana. Weniger would take a later flight back, while Williams and his wife stayed on for several more days. Instead of driving to Las Vegas, Tony directed Moroney to the nearest local airport, Kalispell, about half an hour away from the dude ranch. There they picked up Bevilacqua, and they also picked up another friend who had “won” the $1 million reward for guessing Tony’s location. And that friend had brought something for Tony: more drugs. By 2019 in Las Vegas, Tony’s drinking had increased enough that more of his close friends became concerned. He moved up evening bar meetups to the afternoon or even late morning. His face was puffy, and the whites of his eyes had turned a yellow hue. In 2016, he had gone through a stretch of working out and running, earning praise from his friends, but that period had ended. Now, at forty-five years old, he was hardly exercising and was not paying attention to what he ate. The last five years had been challenging not only at Zappos but also at his downtown Las Vegas development project. Each problem represented a fissure, an accumulation of growing cracks in the fortress of happiness he had spent years building around himself and his friends and employees. Tony had enticed roughly three hundred entrepreneurs to participate in the Downtown Project with investments from his commitment to spend $350 million, including a $50 million Vegas Tech Fund, $50 million on small businesses, and $50 million for arts and culture, health care, and education projects. His vision for Las Vegas was a continuation of what he had written

about in Delivering Happiness: a new kind of Silicon Valley, one of joyfulness and community, that truly might help save the world. He wanted talented entrepreneurs who could fulfill that mission to relocate to the Nevada desert with him. One of the first to move to Las Vegas was Jody Sherman, the cofounder and CEO of Ecomom, a website for healthy kids’ products. Despite already having a network in Los Angeles, Sherman was attracted to Tony’s vision for the area and Zappos’ early success in online retailing. The Vegas Tech Fund was among the investors in Ecomom’s $4 million fundraising round in late 2011, when Sherman relocated the company to Las Vegas. Much in alignment with Tony’s beliefs, Sherman’s vision for Ecomom included giving back. For Ecomom, that included an initiative to provide food to hungry children. Just over a year later, in February 2013, Sherman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was forty-seven. It was revealed that the company had burned through millions of dollars from investors. The company management and board of directors, having uncovered the financial problems, shut Ecomom down. “He was always very optimistic,” Rob Skaggs, Sherman’s brother-in-law, who worked for Ecomom in Las Vegas, said later. “There weren’t signs that he was depressed or that he needed serious help that I could see.” The tech community mourned the beloved entrepreneur and called for a public mental health discussion on the pressures in startup life, including the high expectations to be—and appear—successful. The following year, 2014, two other people associated with the Downtown Project in Las Vegas died by suicide. One was a young employee; the other was a barbershop owner with a store inside Container Park. What leads a person to suicide is complex; the emotional pain that feels unbearable can have many sources, some unknowable from the outside. But the close-together deaths of those three men, who were closely attached to Tony and his Downtown Project, raised questions, most notably: If Tony’s declared vision was one of happiness and community, how could those entrepreneurs have felt so alone?

The suicides were “a jarring moment of flesh-and-bone reality” for the downtown Las Vegas community, Vox wrote. Meanwhile, questions emerged about how the Downtown Project was managing its investments. A high-profile win crumbled quickly in 2014. Jen McCabe, who led hardware investments for Tony’s tech fund, had launched a manufacturing company, Factorli, in Las Vegas with a $10 million investment from the fund. Her company was even mentioned by President Barack Obama in a speech about the importance of American manufacturing to boosting job creation. In an interview with Vox in 2014, McCabe described how she had been inspired by Tony. He had told her to spend three months doing nothing but writing down her startup ideas in a notebook. “I just trusted Tony,” she said. “He looked at me seriously and unblinkingly, and when he laser-focuses in, when he speaks in that way, you absolutely know it’ll work out.” Two months after Obama had mentioned McCabe, Factorli shut down. Downtown Project leaders, by some accounts, had simply lost interest in the company, and other businesses there were closing. One of the Downtown Project’s successes, a robotics startup called Romotive, had decided to move away from Las Vegas to Silicon Valley. Tony had picked up detractors: some Las Vegas residents bristled at the assumption that the city didn’t have any arts and culture and that Tony Hsieh was going to swoop in and enlighten them. Others saw the redevelopment along East Fremont as an insular hipster-ville without consideration for the lowerincome neighborhoods that had been there before Tony’s arrival. The area was written up in Vegas tourism guides. But how many locals who weren’t part of Tony’s clique spent much time there? The facades of some of the shuttered businesses Tony had purchased were painted with brightly colored, funky murals even as the buildings remained unused. Back in 2011, as Tony had been conceptualizing the Downtown Project, Brian “Paco” Álvarez, a Las Vegas native, cultural anthropologist, and wellknown supporter of the local arts scene, had given Tony a tour of the small downtown arts district and its galleries. Two years later, Zappos had recruited Álvarez, convincing him to leave his government job as a curator of archives for

the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, to manage art and goods for a Zappos gift shop, Z’Boutique, which sold company swag. He wished that the city had been more critical of Tony’s decisionmaking for the downtown area, rather than blindly offering support. “Do you need to invest $100,000 in a flower shop when there are ten other flower shops in the area?” he asked later. “Do you really need to invest in a donut shop that sells three- or fourdollar donuts with bacon on it in a neighborhood where the average income… is $32,000 a year?” Phil Plastina, Tony’s friend from the Dancetronauts who had also moved to Las Vegas, questioned him about that very aspect of his plans, telling Tony that he might have misjudged the kind of customers who would come to downtown Las Vegas and support the new companies. Plastina knew that some of the entrepreneurs were having trouble, and he could tell that they had no idea what they were doing. Some were blindly following Tony’s vision. “Listen, man,” Plastina said to Tony one day in 2014. “There’s something called ‘demographic’ that you’re not paying attention to. These people that come here, they’re from Middle America, they have NASCAR hats, and they drink. This is not the person that’s going to buy glass art on a Friday night.” “This is an experiment,” Tony explained. “It’s a pretty fucking expensive experiment,” Plastina retorted. He did not care what Tony thought of him. “Well, I have the money to see what happens here,” Tony replied. That sort of thinking was common for Tony, who had always viewed money as a way to try new things, not as a status symbol. In what seemed like a retreat, Downtown Project stopped using its muchtouted “return on community” metric. In a firmly worded public statement, Tony reminded the public that his business venture was not a charity, nor could it solve all of Las Vegas’s problems, writing: There are a lot of people that seem to expect us to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city (for example, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health)…. Downtown Project is a startup entrepreneurial venture that happens to also have good intentions…. We found that when we used the word ‘Community,’ there were a lot of groups that suddenly expected us to donate money to them or invest in them just because they lived in the community or

because it was for a good cause.

The Downtown Project would shift away from a focus on “community” as a measure of success and instead turn to “Collisions, Co-Learning, and Connectedness,” also known as “the 3 Cs.” Tony had once again fit a real-world problem into a theoretical equation. In September 2014, to cut costs, Downtown Project laid off thirty people to cut costs, about 10 percent of its employees, in what the Las Vegas Weekly called a “bloodletting.” David Gould, a University of Iowa academic who had moved to Las Vegas and was Downtown Project’s “director of imagination,” declared in a public resignation letter written to Tony that the layoffs could be blamed on “a collage of decadence, greed, and missing leadership.” Throughout the turmoil and the scrutiny by the press, Tony remained coldly matter-of-fact. He seemed to be working to keep it all quiet or at least avoid it; Vox noted that there had been no large-scale supportive gatherings held or community resources established for the entrepreneurs in the wake of the suicides. When the Review-Journal asked him about the shutdown of Factorli, once one of the Downtown Project’s prized investments, Tony was clearly impatient with having to acknowledge what was going wrong. He wrote in response, uninterested in discussing a postmortem, even for an entrepreneur whom he had supposedly inspired, “I’m not on the board of Factorli and just like the vast majority of other investments, I’m not close enough to them to know the details.” Related to the deaths, he told Vox, “Suicides happen anywhere. Look at the stats. It’s harder for people who are really good students in school. Then they move in to this, where there is no instruction manual, and you have to be MacGyver on your own.” Behind the scenes, Tony’s close friends could tell that the problems at Downtown Project, especially the suicides, had affected him, but he just didn’t know how to express it. He didn’t want to talk about them in any depth. At Zappos, he was dealing with another potential crisis. His leadership team was divided on whether holacracy was working or not. He faced particularly

strong opposition from his chief operating officer, Arun Rajan. Rajan was focused on trying to run Zappos’ bread-and-butter business, the e-commerce platform, and had little patience with Tony’s management experiments or his happiness goals. Holacracy had had some successes since Zappos had officially rolled it out in 2014, perhaps notably overcoming groupthink bias, the goal of allowing individual opinions to count. In one example, Zappos employees wanted to bring their dogs to work. Under the old management structure, Zappos’ human resources director would have unilaterally made the decision and had declined several times in the past because she was allergic. Holacracy didn’t have a rule about dogs, so employees started bringing them in. Soon the employees who were opposed to dogs in the office brought up a “tension”—a holacracy term—to broker a peace deal. Through meetings guided by the new process, the employees agreed that the dogs could stay, as long as they used certain elevators and were approved beforehand. Whether holacracy boosted Zappos’ profits was less clear. Zappos’ customer service department—the hallmark of Tony’s “Delivering Happiness” mission— was suffering, with call center employees skipping out on shifts they didn’t want and not enough resources being allocated to the team. Even as holacracy aimed to wipe out bureaucracy, meetings in each “circle” were overwhelmed by processes, with a long list of steps that a facilitator had to go through after someone brought up a “tension”: an “amend and clarify round,” an “objection round,” “clarification of the tension and reactions,” and finally the “closing round.” The biggest problem for Zappos wasn’t actually the meetings, though; it was the lack of accountability. If someone went against a policy, for example, it was often unclear whose job it was to reprimand or fire that person. Even if Tony had wanted to (which he didn’t), it would not have been easy for him to walk away from holacracy. Zappos had become the face of this new kind of management practice. Indeed, business leaders from around the world flocked to Las Vegas to learn about it. The publishing platform Medium, one of the other high-profile companies to adopt the new system, had given it up by 2016, saying that it was “difficult to coordinate efforts at scale.” Medium had also had trouble recruiting, which the

company blamed in part on the public perception of holacracy, with media headlines such as “What Happened When This Major Company Got Rid of All Its Bosses” and “Here’s How Zappos’ Wacky Self-Management System Works.” On the hunt for a solution to solve the problems holacracy was creating, Tony read another book on company structure called Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization, this time by an author who calls himself “an enemy of holacracy” but believes strongly in “decentralized decision making.” Niels Pflaeging, a German management consultant, has staked his two-decade career on typical hierarchical structures at companies not working in today’s complex market. In Pflaeging’s decentralized approach to management, small teams of people, rather than a Csuite of executives, run the company, enabling true innovation to take place in smaller, less process-driven teams. But unlike holacracy’s systems, with all of the meetings that Pflaeging, who counsels companies around the world, believes perpetuates command and control instead of overcoming it, his approach requires overhauling the company in favor of autonomous teams without the bureaucracy. “For an organization that wants to produce happiness, it’s interesting Tony got hooked on such a technocratic, flawed thing,” he said. Hoping to make peace with his executives while also convincing them to stick with his management structure, Tony flew his leadership team to Berlin to meet with Pflaeging in late 2017, putting everyone up in suites at Das Stue, a five-star luxury hotel in the center of the city. He paid for the entire trip out of pocket, including every decadent meal, often ordered from the hotel. He encouraged his executives to bring their spouses, also paid for by him. In return, Tony wanted his team to keep an open mind and read yet another book, a giant, complicated tome called The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, by former McKinsey & Company consultant Eric Beinhocker. In many thousands of words, the book details the complications of markets and how companies need to be able to adapt. Pflaeging found the whole visit slightly odd. He usually held workshops in conference rooms or offices; Tony’s crew wanted him to come to their hotel suite. That was a normal practice for Tony; often at large events where he didn’t

know many people, he could stave off his social anxiety by renting a hotel suite and inviting groups there instead. At Das Stue, however, the suite had an open bathroom in the room where Pflaeging held his workshops, making it more awkward than usual. In fact, in Pflaeging’s view, Tony and his employees didn’t seem to want to leave the hotel at all. Pflaeging recalled that at one point he had to convince them to go to another (nice) restaurant nearby. They ordered in Fernet. Pflaeging didn’t like it. It was clear to him that at least some of the executives were frustrated with holacracy and trying to find a way out. “They wanted to move away from it silently,” he noted. Tony did ultimately change Zappos’ approach to holacracy. He kept parts and added other features, most notably a term he invented, market-based dynamics (MBD), which he had already been working on before the Berlin trip. He had derived the concept from The Origin of Wealth. Using market-based dynamics, each “circle”—at one point there were about five hundred at Zappos—ran like an autonomous small business, like a department in a typical company. The circles interacted with one another as they would with businesses outside of Zappos. Like small startups, they invested in their own projects and came up with their own budgets. At the same time, they were collectively responsible for delivering a profit for Amazon. For example, Zappos’ IT department was its own circle and could charge for its goods and services if an employee needed a new laptop or help with software. But if someone within Zappos wanted to start an IT circle, he or she could do so, thus creating competition and accountability for the service. Tony wanted everything to be transparent, including each circle’s budget. He also wanted to organize Zappos into a number of different “startups” to help drive innovation. “If every circle by the end of 2020 increases revenue by 5% more than what it is now, without increasing expenses, that’s $100 million to the bottom line for the company,” he explained at a conference in 2019. “That’s very doable for everyone.” Zappos was careful to note in an internal Q&A that “MBD is a layer we are building on top of Holacracy (not instead of Holacracy).”

Whether holacracy—or market-based dynamics—was a success by the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 depended on who at Zappos you talked to. In some circles, it worked smoothly, and the decentralized approach to management that Tony had sought had been achieved. Other circles, such as customer service, weren’t using it at all. Market-based dynamics had been implemented at less than half of the company’s units. Some employees, particularly new hires, loved it. Others wished that Zappos had never changed at all. Meanwhile, Amazon had started to exert more pressure on Tony and Zappos’ executives. By 2019, a decade had passed since Amazon had purchased Zappos, and its executives had been patient. As Jeff Bezos had promised, the company had largely left Zappos, and Tony, alone, a rare move that signaled his approval of Tony. Amazon had, in fact, learned from Zappos and its management experiments. At one point, Amazon executives had had preliminary discussions about integrating parts of holacracy into some of their other divisions. They seemed, on the whole, supportive. Still, Tony worried about what he and other Zappos executives referred to as “Amazon creep,” the tech behemoth increasingly getting involved in Zappos’ business. Tony wanted to protect his employees from Amazon’s famously aggressive work culture and its layers of bureaucracy. Tony and his team were careful to call Amazon only if they really needed something. Sometimes even a simple question could turn into a conference call with half a dozen Amazon executives. Tony reported to Jeff Wilke, then the head of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business and one of Bezos’s top lieutenants at the time. Wilke, then fifty-three, was widely seen as a successor to Bezos and the second most important person at Amazon. An email from him could be panic inducing—he dashed one off to his team anytime there was a shipping defect. He signed his emails with his initials, JAW. The two, however, had a good relationship, and Wilke appreciated Tony as a business management visionary, often tolerating the antics he played in Zappos’

internal reports to Amazon. Tony would sometimes try to avoid discussing dry business metrics by stuffing Zappos’ updates with all the different management experiments the company was running. Within the next two years, Wilke wanted Zappos to meet a series of business goals that had nothing to do with its culture or its management experiments. Rather, Tony would need to increase Zappos’ profits and its customer base. It was a goal for all of Amazon’s autonomous units; after a decade under the much larger conglomerate, Zappos should be meeting certain profit targets. It was now a “mature” company in Amazon’s view, and it was falling short. Zappos was profitable, but it was hitting only about 30 percent of those targets and had no clear plan for improvement. In typical fashion, Tony tried to think of ways he could meet the new business goals in a creative way, rather than just by selling more shoes. He started thinking about branching out into other business lines that could make Zappos more efficient and productive—basically saving money to make money. He needed the next $1 billion idea. To try to help boost his productivity, his solution was to hack sleep. In other words, he didn’t sleep very much at all. He believed that rest should be measured by sleep cycles, not by hours, and he calculated that a person has five sleep cycles lasting about ninety minutes each in a seven-and-a-half-hour time period. As a workaround, he would sleep only six hours, or four and a half, representing four or three sleep cycles, at night and take a twenty-minute nap in the afternoon or evening, which he considered another sleep cycle. “You’re tired so you can go straight into REM sleep and kind of hack it that way,” he told a blogger for the shared office space company WeWork in 2019. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults get at least seven hours of sleep a night.) Tony purchased the Oura smart ring, popular in Silicon Valley, to “optimize” his sleep, allowing his concerned friends to access the data. They found that some nights he wasn’t getting even four hours of sleep, more like two or three. In 2019, worried about that trend and his increased alcohol use, some of his friends attempted to help him. Garrett Miller, a longtime Zappos employee and close friend, gave up alcohol himself in an effort to inspire Tony to do the same.

Each night, he would try to get Tony to return to his Airstream trailer earlier than usual to encourage him to sleep. It was nearly impossible, though; Miller couldn’t be around him all the time, and with Tony’s entourage large and growing, he was always surrounded by people who wanted to meet him or musicians and movie stars passing through Las Vegas, as well as employees or friends out to party. At Zappos, Tony had long before integrated alcohol into the very fabric of the company, and there was no easy way to extricate himself. He had even built a bar called 1999, for the year Zappos was founded, near the lobby of the company’s headquarters building, which also now housed a games arcade. Tony’s close circle of friends had shifted over the years, and stalwarts such as Alfred Lin, Fred Mossler, and Jenn Lim were no longer around as much. Mossler had left Zappos in 2016 to start his own high-end shoe company with his wife, Meghan, called Ross and Snow; they also had several investments around town, including the popular downtown Las Vegas eatery Nacho Daddy. Lin had left Zappos around the time Delivering Happiness had been published in 2010 to become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley, the banner firm that had long before funded LinkExchange. Even Phil Plastina, the head of the Dancetronauts, had stopped visiting the Airstream trailer park as much, as he was unfamiliar with the new, mostly younger group of Tony fans, a mix of Zappos employees and people Tony had met around Las Vegas. Tony’s longtime preoccupation with youth and surrounding himself with fun people had turned into something of an obsession. He began hanging out with a seventeen-year-old former waitress, Juliette Bajak, at the Airstream trailer park. Even though he explained to concerned friends that he was just mentoring her, it seemed like a strange friendship, even for Tony.I Many of the people around Tony just assumed that it was normal for him to drink so much—hadn’t he always? He tolerated alcohol well. He rarely appeared intoxicated and could have the same conversation at midnight that he had at 3:00 p.m. His energy and charisma also swept away most people’s concerns. Tony’s fans latched onto his public persona, while his real self faded. In the last decade, he had become a sort of business god, known for his big ideas, eccentric lifestyle, and happiness mantra, and any character flaws weren’t worth

noting, or examining, by the people feeding off his wealth and energy. He was intensely idolized, and he was also beginning to believe in his own greatness. At Cirque Lodge, the rehab facility that Tony briefly attended in early 2020, that sort of dichotomy is common. The team of therapists and program leaders there are used to seeing clients such as business leaders, actors, social media influencers, and other public figures who work nonstop building companies or competing as high-profile athletes. The thought of slowing down feels like a threat. They are very smart, but they also have large egos. They rely on teams of friends or assistants to do everything for them; no one has ever told them no. When they have missed events or exhibited unusual behavior, their entourages have covered for them. “They’re insulated from a lot of the consequences that would hit the average person early” in an addiction cycle, said Aaron Olson, one of the therapists at Cirque Lodge. The rehab facility’s high-powered clients, despite being surrounded by legions of employees and assistants, suffer from “an incredible loneliness,” another Cirque Lodge therapist, Brian Tease, explained. “The public doesn’t understand the shame, and this loneliness, that they have. In the end, what they really want is to be connected.” High-profile clients also face another hurdle to treatment, because they don’t want to let down dozens of people who are dependent on them, whether those people are employees of a company, bandmates of a musician about to go on tour, or teammates of a professional athlete. Then there’s another, more troubling and amorphous, layer around them. “You get a lot of people riding on coattails,” Keith Fierman, Cirque Lodge’s intervention specialist, pointed out. Fierman keeps a Civil War–era ball and chain in his office at Cirque Lodge to symbolize alcoholism and addiction. When Richard Losee, Cirque Lodge’s founder, first decided more than twenty years ago to transition his new wellness facility into a rehab clinic, he’d had no formal psychological training. One of the questions he had thought about the most in those first few years was: When is someone an addict? There seemed to be no definitive answer, and it’s one that society continues to struggle with, particularly when it comes to so-called functional alcoholics, a term some of Tony’s friends used to describe him.

In her book, Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic: Professional Views and Personal Insights, the therapist Sarah Allen Benton cited research estimating that the majority of people struggling with alcohol abuse are actually high functioning. Today, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and other organizations don’t even use the terms high-functioning alcoholic and alcoholic at all. The broad category is instead called alcohol use disorder (AUD), and patients are given a mild, moderate, or severe diagnosis based on a list of eleven symptoms, not on how much they are actually drinking. For example, its website asks whether you have “had times when you ended up drinking more, or longer, than you intended” or “spent a lot of time drinking.” Answering yes to just two of the eleven questions means a person has a mild form of AUD. Many people who abuse alcohol are what society might consider “functional,” but they are privately, and quietly, ruining various areas of their lives. “How do we know they’re ‘functional’?” pondered Dr. George Koob, the director of the NIAAA. “They may be functional in the sense that they go to work every day, but are they making other wise decisions?” The therapists at Cirque Lodge say that their clients often don’t exhibit the classic signs of addiction touted in pop culture. Some haven’t even been in trouble, never having received warnings for public endangerment or driving under the influence. Instead, in family pictures, it’s often the addict who looks the healthiest. Everyone around him or her, meanwhile, suffers from the fallout of the loved one’s disease. One therapist at Cirque Lodge, Francine Miller, said that her father had died of alcoholism when she was only seventeen. He had never missed a day of work in his life. Cirque Lodge founder Richard Losee, who received his drug and rehabilitation certificate from the University of Utah, said he had found his best answer to the question of what constitutes an addict from one of his mentors in the field, who told him about a simple gauge: the addict doesn’t know how or when he or she is going to stop. Other specialists say a person is an addict if his or her life has become unmanageable. (NIAAA’s Alcohol Use Disorder spectrum questions are aimed at sussing out both these descriptions.)

One thing specialists seem to agree on is that every kind of alcohol or drug abuse is self-medication. As Fierman put it, it is covering up a larger problem that often hasn’t been diagnosed. “You’re uncomfortable in your own skin,” he said. In the latter half of 2019, Tony made a surprising proclamation to some of his friends. He had been looking for alternatives to alcohol and the medications he had been taking—Adderall and Xanax—to help his social anxiety and depression. He thought he had found a solution: he would cut back on drinking and ingest psychedelic mushrooms and ketamine instead. Tony had recently tried ketamine at Burning Man with Tyler Williams, who was always game to experiment with his good friend, and he had enjoyed the intense feeling of happiness and spirituality that came with it. Ketamine, typically used by veterinarians on animals or during medical procedures, can cause mental detachment, almost as though a person is outside his or her own body, staring down. It can spark silliness. It can dull pain. Mushrooms are similar and can spark euphoria and happiness. But both ketamine and mushrooms can also cause panic and hallucinations, particularly if taken in large amounts or over a long duration of time. The friends who knew how much of a problem alcohol had become for Tony were confused by his decision. He still took ecstasy on weekends sometimes and had done so at Burning Man, but otherwise he was not a habitual drug user. They were also relieved, though. Maybe he would really give up drinking, and his health would improve. In late 2019, as proof that he was moving in the right direction, Tony showed some of his friends a TED Talk by Dr. Rick Doblin, the cofounder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Dr. Doblin has crusaded against the criminalization of LSD and ecstasy by the US government almost since he was eighteen and experimenting with the drugs himself. He is well known in the field of psychedelics. Early in his career, Dr. Doblin found that MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, in conjunction with intensive therapy, can be used to treat post-

traumatic stress disorder in war veterans and survivors of sexual assault, and he spent more than three decades gathering enough testing data to prove his controversial point. In April 2019 in Vancouver, Dr. Doblin, in the midst of his third phase of clinical trials, spoke about the promising results not only for sufferers of posttraumatic stress disorder but also social anxiety, substance abuse, and alcoholism. “Psychedelics are really just tools, and whether their outcomes are beneficial or harmful depends on how they’re used,” he told an audience that was clearly engaged and receptive, laughing at his occasional joke (LSD “let me have a spiritual connection that unfortunately my Bar Mitzvah did not produce”) and clapping eagerly after he relayed his success in clinical trials. What Dr. Doblin made clear in his TED Talk, however, is that psychedelics should be administered in a clinical setting as part of treatment that includes therapy with professionals. He also made another important distinction that Tony failed to convey to his friends. Rather than encouraging “microdosing,” the en vogue practice, especially among the tech community, of consuming small amounts of drugs regularly, Dr. Doblin advised just the opposite: in his opinion, patients would benefit the most from taking several large “macro” doses of LSD or MDMA in a formal treatment setting with the oversight of a medical professional. Then they would stop using the drugs completely afterward. He believes that his approach addresses the root causes of a patient’s problem, while microdosing is usually used more for inspiration. “We’d rather not get people thinking they need a daily drug,” he said in a question-and-answer session following his TED Talk. Indeed, ketamine is the most addictive of the psychedelic drugs, he said later. If you take it without therapy, you just keep needing more and more of it. When it wears off, it can be disorienting. When a user takes too much of the drug, “they can get this sense they’re in touch with higher spiritual realms” and don’t spend time coming out of that state, he said. Tony was already using ketamine when he invited Dr. Doblin to Las Vegas in September 2019, but he had a lot of questions for the doctor about its use and how it could help him access different areas of the brain. He began talking to Dr.

Doblin and his team about his making a large donation to MAPS (which never came through). Dr. Doblin observed that Tony was constantly surrounded by a large group of people but also very shy. “It seemed like he was covering it up by always having people there,” he said. Several months passed, and then Tony again reached out, this time in February 2020, on the cusp of the pandemic. His mannerisms had changed. He seemed desperate, almost manic, Dr. Doblin thought. Tony told Dr. Doblin that he needed his help. He wanted him to create a study that he could participate in, in which ketamine could be taken legally to spark creativity. It would be a new use for the drug. He believed that it was helping him come up with new ideas, but his friends were worried because he was taking so much, Dr. Doblin recalled. Dr. Doblin knew right away that what Tony was suggesting wouldn’t work. He explained that it would take months to organize a study, and testing would be a massive barrier. How do you define “creativity,” for example? He reminded Tony about the decades he had spent trying to create his own drug and therapy regime, which was still not available for use. He explained to Tony the myriad government agencies that regulated drug studies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Dr. Doblin believed that Tony had gained genuine insights from ketamine that were helpful, but he was obviously taking too much. During that call, he said, Tony was “trying to find a way to justify what he was doing.” By that time, February 2020, it had become clear to Tony’s friends that his drug use was worse than his alcohol use. Tony told people that he was in a simulation created by artificial intelligence, as in The Matrix. By taking ketamine, he said, he could defeat the simulation to save humanity. Tony believed that ketamine could make him grow taller or change his body into different shapes. At a wedding he officiated at in early February 2020, he twisted his body into yoga poses as if to prove his point. Soon afterward, he went to Cirque Lodge in Park City for his short stint in rehab, never returning to Las Vegas, his home of nearly two decades.

In late June 2020, more than four months after his stay at Cirque Lodge, he arrived back in Park City in a limo with Ali Bevilacqua. The trip to Montana had been planned for a week; Tony had been there less than twenty-four hours. There had been no important meeting with Jeff Bezos. It seemed that Tony had made it up just to get Moroney to drive him to the Kalispell airport, part of his breakdown. Moroney had picked up Bevilacqua and another of Tony’s Las Vegas friends, at the Montana airport. Many of Tony’s close friends knew by that point that the friend was Tony’s ketamine supplier, and they had sought to keep him away from Tony. Moroney, however, may not have been aware until that night. On the drive back to Park City, they stopped for dinner at yet another person’s place in Salt Lake City. At the house, there was a giant container of pills: crushed-up psilocybin, or psychedelic mushrooms. Tony, only just coming off his trip from the large quantity of mushrooms he took on the way to Montana, grabbed a handful of the pills—about twenty capsules. There were so many in his hand that Bevilacqua was mostly joking when she asked, “You’re not going to take all those, are you?” Tony turned to her. He had never in his life been an angry person, only in a rare argument with a close friend, and until recently, he had almost never showed frustration, either. It was as if the drugs or his worsening mental health were exacerbating his worst traits. “Don’t you ever tell me what to do, or I’ll never take you anywhere again,” he told Bevilacqua. He shoved the pills into his mouth and swallowed them all. A normal dose might have been one or two capsules. Moroney had already left Salt Lake City to once again try to get some sleep, this time back at his hotel in Park City. So Bevilacqua and Tony rode alone the half hour back to Tony’s wood-frame house on Empire Avenue in Park City in a hired limousine. As they drove, the effect of the large dosage of pills was beginning to take hold, and Tony talked nonstop, as if words couldn’t pour out of him fast enough. He was no longer the quiet observer. Bevilacqua, beginning to panic about the situation, couldn’t interrupt his stream-of-consciousness ramblings.

When they arrived back at the house close to midnight, the only person there was Juliette Bajak, who had moved to Park City to work as Tony’s personal assistant. Bajak was older now, but she was the seventeen-year-old Tony had befriended in Las Vegas, and Bevilacqua knew her through him. Tony, clearly out of it, started to scream, and Bajak and Bevilacqua retreated to Bajak’s room. They didn’t sleep. Tony’s manic behavior progressed rapidly. Soon Bevilacqua and Bajak could hear him throwing furniture, dishes, and glassware around the house in a fullblown breakdown. Frantically, Bevilacqua tried calling and texting Justin Weniger and Suzie Baleson, but it was the middle of the night, and it was unclear if Weniger had yet made it back to Park City from Montana. Neither answered. Bevilacqua finally called Moroney, waking him up at his nearby hotel. “If we try to leave, he’s going to hurt us,” she said urgently into the phone. In the bedroom, with the door locked, Bevilacqua and Bajak were trapped, with a man they didn’t recognize, their beloved Tony, destroying the house around them. Moroney and another driver went to the house to try to help, but there was little they could do. Tony was in a state no one had seen him in before. Finally, early in the morning of June 30, Weniger and Baleson arrived at the Empire Avenue house to help run interference with another friend. While Tony was preoccupied on the second-floor balcony, Bevilacqua and Bajak emerged from the bedroom and quickly ran toward the front door. As they hurried through the house, they saw the damage—furniture knocked over, massive dents and breaks in the walls. It seemed impossible that one person could have done it all. Tony had recently started taking cold showers instead of baths, believing that each shower shaved off one hour of sleep he needed. He had left his cold shower running all night, and the stairs had turned into a gushing waterfall that was nearly impossible to traverse. They made it outside and scampered through several yards to reach the street, and another friend took them to a hotel. Bevilacqua flew straight back to Los Angeles. Someone had called the police and told a dispatcher that Tony was “threatening to hurt himself,” according to a later report from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. Five police officers and a fire truck responded to the

scene. They found Tony on the patio of the house and were able to convince him to get into a waiting ambulance. Several of Tony’s friends, including Suzie Baleson, talked to the officers. It was morning now, around 8:00 a.m. At that point, the friends weren’t concerned just about Tony’s health but about his reputation. What if the media found out about it? It would be a disaster not just for him but for Zappos, Amazon, and Las Vegas. Tony’s friends helped persuade police officers to take Tony to the hospital rather than arrest him. That move ended up being a point of contention among some of Tony’s friends who believed that an arrest might have provided a much-needed wake-up call. At the very least, Tony should have been shown the destruction he had caused in broad daylight, in case he didn’t remember. Instead, the house was cleaned, and soon afterward Tony moved to his new mansion, the Ranch. Later that night, hours after Tony had been taken to the hospital on June 30, Weniger called the police again, hoping that an officer could at least help keep Tony at the hospital. If he is released, Weniger told the dispatcher, “it will be a problem.” Tony left the hospital soon after. I. People familiar with Juliette Bajak said that she also viewed the relationship as platonic and Tony as her mentor.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE FAMILY BUSINESS

Park City, July 2020 Marin County, California, 1970–1990

People may not remember exactly what you did or what you said, but they always remember how you made them feel. That’s what matters most. —Tony Hsieh, quoting Maya Angelou

“Local Boy Has Got What It Takes!” read a December 1987 headline in the San

Rafael News, a local newspaper for the Marin County bedroom community. A grainy black-and-white photo featured a young Tony standing alone outside a post office, with bangs on his forehead and a poised smile, selling his latest business product. A ninth grader at the time, he had dozens of homemade graphic buttons for sale, pinned to boards for showing passersby. Tony had launched a business with a $100 loan from his parents, Richard and Judy Hsieh, for a button-making machine. Kids mailed him photos to be turned into pins, and Tony mailed them back, for $1 each. Customers found him through a listing in a marketing book, Free Stuff for Kids. What caught the local reporter’s attention, though, wasn’t the fact that Tony had racked up mail-order customers; it was that he was giving the profits to charity and wanted to contribute to a holiday party for his mother’s patients at a dialysis clinic in one of her earlier workplaces. He ended up raising $50. In the article, Judy Hsieh told the reporter that she wasn’t sure what Tony would grow up to be. “But whatever it is,” she said, “he can do it.”

Richard and Judy Hsieh were exacting parents who wanted Tony and his two younger brothers to excel. The Hsiehs had left Taiwan and enrolled in a US university in the late 1960s, a decade when thousands of people arrived in the United States newly eligible under the historic Immigration and Naturalization Act. Before the 1965 law, the immigration system used country-of-origin quotas that banned or severely limited arrivals from Asian countries. In the early 1960s, less than 1 percent of the US population was Asian (compared to about 7 percent today). Then President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty, signed into law a new policy eliminating the quota system. It set a cap of 290,000 annual visas, 120,000 for the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 for the Eastern. The new system had preferences for reuniting families and bringing educated, skilled immigrants to the United States. With the door now open to Asians, students from Taiwan, including Richard and Judy, enrolled in graduate programs in the United States in search of better opportunities and an escape from oppression in their homeland, which was under martial law. The Hsiehs arrived at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign during the height of Vietnam War–era political activism, including a nine-thousand-person demonstration at the university in 1969. Among the many groups being formed, Taiwanese students created the Taiwan Study Group to discuss the culture of the country on campus. Richard, a tall, slender, gregarious man with a wide smile, graduated with a doctoral degree in chemical engineering. That December, Richard and Judy had their first child, a son named Anthony, whom they called Tony. Judy, more reserved than her husband, with long hair and a petite frame, graduated from Illinois with a master’s degree in social work. She would later earn a doctorate in clinical psychology at California School of Professional Psychology Berkeley/Alameda in San Francisco. Richard accepted a position at Chevron in the San Francisco Bay Area, decades before Silicon Valley’s rise would make Marin County a sun-dappled playground for the rich and nearly inaccessible to the middle class. The Hsiehs lived in a two-story, 1960s-style house halfway up a steep hill in the San Rafael community of Lucas Valley, then a working-class neighborhood

filled with families. The community was tight-knit, and the dozens of kids living there had free range of the streets and the dirt trails that wound into the nearby hills. Richard and Judy and their sons were known by the neighbors for their kindness. Though they kept to themselves somewhat, Richard always stopped to speak with anyone on the street and knew everyone’s name. They hired a local babysitter, a teenager across the street. “They were so superfriendly,” recalled Gloria Lightner, one of the neighbors, who still lives next door to the Hsieh’s old house. Lightner knew that Tony and his younger brothers, Andy and Dave, would receive a world-class education when they were older, because anytime she ran into Richard Hsieh, he would pepper Lightner with questions about the quality of the local high school, Terra Linda. Lightner had kids just a few years older than the Hsieh boys. Later, when Tony sold LinkExchange to Microsoft in 1998, the whole neighborhood celebrated. In Delivering Happiness, Tony called Richard and Judy “your typical Asian American parents” who, along with other Asian parents in the community, had high expectations for their three children. That included getting into a prestigious college, preferably Harvard; in adulthood, being called “doctor,” whether through medical school or a PhD program; and learning to play musical instruments. The Hsiehs socialized with other Asian families in Marin County at potlucks, where parents would brag about their kids. “That was just part of the Asian culture: The accomplishments of the children were the trophies that many parents defined their own success and status by,” Tony wrote in Delivering Happiness. “We were the ultimate scorecard.” In middle school, Tony studied piano, violin, trumpet, and French horn and was expected to practice each for thirty minutes every weekday and one hour per day on weekends. To cut back on that rigorous schedule, he sometimes played tape recordings of himself practicing early in the morning, so his parents would think he was practicing while in fact he was still in bed.

“I always fantasized about making money because to me, money meant that later on in life I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted,” he wrote in Delivering Happiness. “The idea of one day running my own company also meant that I could be creative and eventually live life on my own terms.” Richard and Judy decided against sending the boys to Terra Linda and instead enrolled them at the Branson School, a renowned private college prep school for families living in the wealthy enclaves north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The wooded campus in the small community of Ross was a twentyminute drive south on Highway 101 from Tony’s house. Though the campus, with its manicured lawns and pale yellow buildings, isn’t immediately impressive, it sits at the base of Mount Tamalpais, part of Marin County’s lush nature preserves filled with redwoods and headlands overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Today, Branson charges students $52,800 a year. Tony, who spoke Mandarin Chinese at home, studied Japanese, Spanish, French, Latin, fencing, jazz piano, and drawing, and he also joined the chess club and electronics club. He ran the light board at theater productions, turning that into a paying job operating a spotlight at a community theater. He got another paying gig at $6 an hour, testing video games such as Indiana Jones and Maniac Mansion for Lucasfilm, part of Star Wars creator George Lucas’s media empire. Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch property was just a fifteen-minute drive from the Hsiehs’ home. Despite his rigorous schoolwork, Tony was often silly, performing magic tricks, writing a Shakespearean sonnet in Morse code for a class assignment, and using the computer lab’s dial-up system to call paid hotlines. He also launched small businesses, with varying degrees of success: an earthworm farm, which failed when the worms escaped into the yard (the Delivering Happiness bus visited a worm farm in honor of the childhood venture), manufacturing and selling a magic tricks kit, and his early button business, which received hundreds of mail orders a month, an early prototype of online retail. All of those adventures became part of Tony’s hero’s journey. But underneath the quirky anecdotes, the pressure his parents imposed on him to achieve brought disappointment and loneliness. His childhood was not filled with much fun or freedom. He told some friends that his first memory was of

learning how to swim as a three-year-old by jumping off a high dive at a local pool, which must have been a terrifying experience for such a young child. He missed his last dance in eighth grade because he was taking the SAT the next morning, years before students typically do in high school as a requirement for applying to college. The loss stayed with him many years later. In his senior yearbook, most of the graduating students had a personal page filled with photos and shout-outs to friends and family; Tony’s was only a white page with doodles and random musings in black ink. When the New York Times asked him for one of his childhood highlights, Tony recounted a seemingly inconsequential moment when some trick-ortreaters had shown up at his house on Halloween. Later in life, many of Tony’s friends believed that his childlike perspective and his obsession with parties and having fun were the results of missing out on so much while he was growing up. He pursued money early in life for the freedom it could bring him. It also had a side benefit: though he might not have become a doctor or a lawyer, no one—including his parents—could deny he’d achieved something big. And after becoming wealthy, he gave much of his fortune away, invested in the dreams of others and even an entire city, for the freedom he thought it could bestow on others. What deeper emotional impact his upbringing might have had remained one of his secrets. Asian Americans are less likely than white people to use available mental health services, according to studies, even though they must often deal with high cultural expectations for academic success and careers and for fulfilling family obligations. The pressure of the myth of the “model minority”—the harmful stereotype of Asian Americans as a monolithic group with the same experiences who are all “nice,” rule followers, and highly successful—can also take a toll on mental health. As an adult, Tony alternated between ignoring his Asian American heritage and making fun of it, sometimes awkwardly. He called Fernet his “Chinese medicine,” and referred to the bus that took him and friends on trips as “the Orient Express.” At one Zappos all-hands meeting, held at the Kà Theatre at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Tony stood onstage as the lights dimmed and pop music filled the

cavernous room, which is typically used for Cirque du Soleil shows. Richard Hsieh came onstage in a full-body monkey suit. “It’s the Chinese Year of the Monkey!” Tony yelled. Richard was helping Tony announce the grand opening of Zappos’ office in China, and the Chinese New Year had taken place the previous week. (Other Zappos executives also wore monkey costumes.) People who didn’t know Tony well assumed that he was close with his parents, who sometimes took starring roles in his life. His mother, Judy, despite being educated in social work and psychology, managed a pan-Asian restaurant, Venture Frogs, that Tony opened in the Don Lee building on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco after the 1998 sale of LinkExchange. The restaurant served noodles and dumplings with Silicon Valley references in the dish names, such as Palm Pad Thai and Founders’ Ahi Tuna. After Tony moved to Las Vegas, his parents would visit from their home in Silicon Valley, often speaking Mandarin Chinese with their son. They attended Zappos parties, and even Judy, who is more reserved than Richard, would dance and gamely wear disco clothing. Richard, who is more outgoing, often made jokes and texted separately with Tony’s friends as a way of keeping up with his son. Tony felt loyal to his family, but he did not frequently confide in them. He also truly trusted only a select group of Las Vegas friends, even though he had dozens of people around him. His family continued to have a hold on him deep into adulthood, even though they didn’t play an outsized role in his daily life. He worried about making a good impression when they visited. Each year, the Hsieh family typically traveled to Mexico or Hawaii for Thanksgiving. During the trip, Judy Hsieh would schedule an hour of beach time for herself with each of her sons individually, a move that Tony later told a friend was “very awkward.” Even with his parents far away in the Bay Area when Tony was an adult, he worried that his mother would somehow find out that he smoked, a habit he knew she hated. By the time he was in his thirties, Tony had realized that the typical American family setup was not going to work for him. As backup for his distaste for marriage, he liked to repeat the popular assumption: that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. “I’m not opposed to the idea of marriage,” he told the

New York Times in 2012 when it interviewed him for its “Dating Profiles of High-Tech, High-Worth Bachelors” feature. “But statistically, if half of all marriages end in divorce, and of the ones that remain married many are unhappily married, the odds are stacked against you.” Tony did want to have deep, meaningful relationships; he just chose the option of having multiple connections simultaneously. The closest description of this is polyamory: having loving, intentional relationships with multiple people at the same time. The practice has become more mainstream in the last several years; Willow Smith, the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, for example, recently said she is polyamorous. “I think it’s pretty hard to find one partner and call it a day,” Tony told Playboy. “Using the analogy of friends, why not find just one friend and call it a day? The answer is because you get a different type of connection, different conversations, different experiences with different friends. I would say the same thing is true on the dating side.” Tony’s long-term relationships didn’t always overlap, and typically only one of his relationships at a time was serious. He often kept an ex-girlfriend tightly in his orbit long after a breakup. He had distinct levels of friendships, which he kept track of almost like a CEO evaluating an org chart (although he hated org charts): some good friends might not be long-term lovers but were snuggle buddies with no sex involved. Like the businessperson he was, Tony negotiated the terms of a relationship with a prospective partner in advance, making sure that whatever level the two would operate on, both parties agreed to beforehand. Of course, some partners bristled at the arrangement—some women wanted more than Tony would give; committed girlfriends found it hard to watch him flirt with other women. Tony’s magnetic joy, though, meant that most people accepted the deal, just to be near him. By the summer of 2019, however, his pursuit of multiple relationships seemed to be isolating him. He was then forty-five, and many of his friends were married with children or at least had stable partners, and they couldn’t keep up with his round-the-clock gatherings, often with new groups of younger friends. He had fallen out of touch with some longtime friends, including Nick Swinmurn, who had given Tony the idea of Zappos two decades earlier. The last time Swinmurn had seen Tony was in 2019, and Tony had asked him to rate his

own happiness—a question he asked Swinmurn and other friends occasionally over the years. Tony seemed confused when Swinmurn answered that he was happy. Tony said that the majority of married people he had surveyed weren’t happy. “He told me that his friends kept getting younger and younger,” Swinmurn later wrote. “He seemed excited about this.” Possibly as an attempt to keep up with his friends, Tony began talking about having a child of his own, even offering to act as a “surrogate father” to one of his ex-girlfriends’ children. But when it came time to watch the child on a trip to Hawaii, he let other friends take on most of the responsibility. In 2019, he embarked on a relationship, one of his last, with a married Zappos employee whom he fell for deeply. But the executive ultimately broke up with him, deciding instead to focus on her husband and children. She would later, however, help Doherty get Tony to rehab in Utah by flying to Park City with him. Despondent over their breakup, Tony later in the fall of 2019 showed up at Ali Bevilacqua’s house in Pasadena and told her that if she wanted to get back together for the long term, he would like that. She told him she would think about it. After his psychotic break in Montana in late June 2020, Tony discovered that Tyler Williams, his longtime friend, had secretly been texting his drug supplier, begging him not to deliver more ketamine or mushrooms to Tony. Williams had even offered half of everything he owned in return for the supplier to stop. When Tony discovered the text messages, he flew into a rage. He yelled at Williams and then told him he was not welcome back in Park City. It was the very thing that all of Tony’s friends feared the most, and now it had happened to arguably the person with whom Tony was the closest. Everyone else around Tony witnessed his outburst or they heard about it later, and they knew that Williams had been banished. It was a warning shot. While he was still in Montana, Williams called Richard Hsieh. Williams told him about the bus episode, explaining that Tony clearly needed help. Soon after, Tony trashed the Empire Avenue house, trapping Bevilacqua and Juliette Bajak

inside. Tony’s parents learned of that incident as well from another friend who called after it happened. Tony’s parents, now in their seventies, hadn’t seen him since February 2020, when they had begun quarantining in the Bay Area due to the Covid-19 pandemic. California, among the states with the strictest Covid precautions, had advised travelers against leaving the state. But the Hsiehs, who were very concerned after Williams’s call and the house incident, had to act. In early July, they flew to Park City, along with Tony’s younger brothers, Andy and Dave, to see the situation for themselves. Tony had calmed down somewhat from his breakdown a week earlier but was still not himself. He again had friends flying into Park City, but there was no mention of the June incidents by anyone around him. His closest gatekeepers, Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger, didn’t say anything to the visitors. Baleson was starting to plan a big 10X party for later that month. The closest Tony came to acknowledging that anything was amiss after being released from the hospital was when he told one guest, angrily, that a rumor was going around that he was taking too much ketamine. He felt deeply betrayed, particularly after discovering Williams’s texts. Tony couldn’t see that his friends were trying to help him. Instead, he seemed to suddenly feel resentful of his decades of generosity. He had given everything he had to his friends, and now he felt that they were all turning against him. The visitors in early July 2020 also didn’t notice a big difference in Tony’s behavior. Though he seemed a little on edge, his mood didn’t seem out of the ordinary. But Richard and Judy Hsieh noticed. First of all, they saw that Tony had lost a significant amount of weight since February. He was acting slightly unhinged, climbing stairway railings to take photos and walking around barefoot. He chain-smoked constantly, even though he knew his mom didn’t like it. Normally he would never have smoked in front of his parents. One day, Tony announced to his parents and brothers that he was forming a new family business, one that would aim to improve their relationships with one another. The nature of the business was unclear. One of his brothers would be chief executive officer; the other would be chief operating officer.

At a private meeting, Tony asked his family to come up with ideas for how to raise a lot of money in three weeks. To save your son’s life, he said. He left the room while everyone else worked on the assignment. The others waited several hours for Tony to return, but he never reappeared. A couple of days later, Tony asked his mom a question: Did she want to be his friend or his family member? If she chose to be a nonjudgmental friend, he’d be open about his life. If she picked family, he would keep some secrets. Judy Hsieh, a trained psychologist, told her son she would be his friend, and in return, he told her about his drug use. She asked him to get professional help. Tony promptly turned the request into a negotiation, just as he had when Doherty had wanted him to go to rehab earlier in 2020. For every minute he went to therapy, Tony told his mom, she would have to agree to be immersed in an ice bath in exchange. It was clearly an impossible demand. The next day, Judy Hsieh tried again. She pointed out to Tony his problems with memory and attention, a direct confrontation that sparked uncharacteristic anger in Tony. He told her that she wasn’t his friend anymore and that the family was wasting its time. Then he stormed out of the house. The episode divided the Hsieh family. Tony cut off his parents, telling his friends and assistants not to respond to them. The Hsiehs tried anyway. They asked for the people in his group to schedule regular FaceTime meetings with their son. Tony’s assistants refused to respond. Dave Hsieh, the youngest brother, also went back home to Las Vegas. Dave Hsieh abhorred wealth and money and lived humbly with his girlfriend, preferring to stay out of Tony’s and Andy’s business plans over the years. Andy Hsieh, however, returned to Park City ten days later, ostensibly to watch over Tony for the family. Tony agreed to pay Andy $1 million to stay. Unlike Tony, Andy, who was younger by three years, had struggled since college to make a name for himself, always living in the shadow of his older brother’s astounding success. He’d gotten bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering from Stanford and then worked for a couple years as a consultant at McKenna, which appears to be a specialty food marketing company in San Francisco.

Soon after, he had left to take a general role at Zappos and moved with the company to Las Vegas. His LinkedIn profile still says he is a director there, nineteen years after joining in 2002. But he actually left the company more than a decade ago under circumstances that have never been established. There’s suspicion that there was tension between the brothers at Zappos. The reason for his departure seems to have been kept a closely guarded secret. Andy Hsieh tried his hand at launching his own startup, called Lux Delux, in 2011. It started off as an invitation-only membership platform, connecting the wealthy to high-end properties and clubs around the world, said David Louie, his former business partner, who is now a home mortgage consultant at Wells Fargo. Louie wasn’t exactly sure who was funding the business but said that the whole Hsieh family seemed to be involved in some capacity, although he met Tony only briefly. The family flew him first class to London and other work locations on a private jet, an experience that Louie hadn’t had before. “It was just the craziest being connected to them,” he recalled. “They are such a smart family.” Lux Delux, however, was hard to scale, and Louie sensed that Andy Hsieh and his family wanted a change in direction. So in 2013, Lux Delux abruptly transitioned its business model to food delivery. Andy Hsieh and Louie created an app that let users order meals from their phone, hoping to capitalize on the wave of similar apps such as Seamless and Grubhub, which were gaining traction across the country. Andy Hsieh and Louie focused Lux Delux in an area the Hsieh family knew well because of Tony: Las Vegas. Louie commuted back and forth from his family’s home in San Francisco, all expenses paid. He and Andy Hsieh planned to entice restaurants around Las Vegas by promising them increased sales by allowing users to order their meals on the app with free delivery. (Lux Delux would take a percentage of a business’s sales.) Ultimately they hoped to sign up many of the 150 restaurants then in downtown Las Vegas. But Andy Hsieh couldn’t get Lux Delux as a food app to take off, either. Louie eventually got tired of commuting from San Francisco and wanted to spend more time with his two children. He said that when he left around 2016, the business was still operational, and he doesn’t know what happened after

that. By 2017, though, it appeared to have been wound down. Louie’s impression of Andy Hsieh was only positive: “supernice, superloyal, superhardworking,” he said. “Just really good people, all of them.” As with the rest of his family, Tony wasn’t close with Andy, who was more talkative and social than he was. When he went out in Las Vegas with Tony and his friends, it was always mildly awkward because no one knew him. Usually he wasn’t around, though. In 2019, Andy Hsieh again filed paperwork to start a new business, this one a computer technology consulting firm called Sweet Hall, located in Silicon Valley. He listed his parents’ address in the incorporation papers. But it’s unclear if the business ever took off. Unmarried and without immediate family, Andy seemed to have nothing to prevent him from staying in Park City.

CHAPTER EIGHT UTOPIA

Park City, July 2020–August 2020

The wiser course is to think of others also when pursuing our own happiness. —Dalai Lama

Tony Hsieh spent his whole career trying to solve for happiness. How could he

lift up employees, empowering them to be their best selves? How could he create the ultimate, joyful workplace, where everyone would want to go? How could he deconstruct the very concept of a company so that there would be no confines at all? How could he create a city—downtown Las Vegas—where people would live and work in harmony, all within one square mile? In the summer of 2020, Tony had an even bigger, monumental goal, one that would render his prior accomplishments narrow, even inconsequential. That new achievement would finally, once and for all, spread happiness to everyone he knew and loved, as well as to billions of people whom he had never met. From his new home base in Park City, he wanted to create world peace. It sounded unbelievable, especially because philosophers, activists, lawmakers, and many others have tried unsuccessfully for decades, if not centuries, to achieve that very goal. But Tony was serious. He would start by designing a model community in the small mountain town to show the rest of the world how it could be done. He would fill it with thinkers, artists, and scientists, who could help him build this new kind of

utopia. The world’s intellectuals would be free to run experiments, funded by him and his team, with the ultimate goal of achieving world peace. He dispatched one of his employees to begin researching what it would take to form a new nation and how to set up governance for it. As with all of his previous big plans—the development of downtown Las Vegas, the culture and holacracy implementation at Zappos—Tony’s vision was unfocused. He was only beginning to work out the details. But this would be his life-defining project, the culmination of decades spent trying to unlock the human spirit. He labeled an orange sticky note “World Peace,” with a drawing of the peace symbol, and stuck it to a wall at the Ranch. The multimillion-dollar, 25,000square-foot mansion had become the epicenter of Tony and his employees and friends. Another sticky note gave a date for implementing Tony’s vision: New Year’s Eve, 2020. Surrounding those notes, Tony scribbled in black marker on nearly three dozen others, usually just one or two words, themes really, for how the group could solve world peace: “NATURE” “QUANTUM PHYSICS” “MIND” “BODY” “SOUL” “POLITICS” The walls, windows, and doors of the Ranch were covered in thousands of other sticky notes unrelated to world peace, constellations of yellow, green, and blue. Tony had always loved using sticky notes, but this was a far more elaborate, disconcerting display. Some were arranged in long lines, large squares, or other shapes, such as hexagons. Others appeared haphazardly placed, as if written quickly and immediately posted to the wall. Not all the handwriting was the same.

The notes described the new plans Tony and his employees had for Park City, some of which were loosely tied to his new vision. The 10X project had all but fizzled. Giving away alcohol for a fee—the price of the monthly membership—didn’t comport with Utah’s alcohol laws, which the organizers, in their rush to launch 10X, had learned only after the fact. Tony’s earlier plan to buy properties and lease them as Airbnbs had also shifted. The properties would instead be used to build a sort of compound where all the new intellectuals moving to and living in the community, as well as all the employees working on his new projects, could stay. By August 2020, Tony had bought nine houses around Park City, and sticky notes recorded more than a dozen other properties he hoped to buy for tens of millions of dollars. Some of the sticky notes briefly described plans for convincing homeowners who hadn’t listed their properties to sell. One of Tony’s newest plans, part of his world peace vision, was to launch a TED Talk–style speaker series, funding new perspectives from people around the world and streaming their talks live on the platform Twitch. One of the first to film a video for the project was Dr. Pravir Malik, a former Zappos employee, who had headed up the organizational sciences team when he was at the company. Dr. Malik, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a separate interest in light and how studying the properties of light can translate into running an organization. He has written ten books on the subject of light. At Zappos, Tony was keenly interested in Dr. Malik’s theories and usually met with him once a month to discuss his ideas and how they could be applied to companies. Tony encouraged Dr. Malik to distill his research on light into six maxims that all companies could use. Employees struggling with their managers should form a sphere of light around themselves and invite their boss into it, for example. “The employee’s sphere engulfs the manager so that the manager is reseen in light,” Dr. Malik wrote in Forbes. “Visualize light flowing in and out of the manager. Such a re-seeing has to continue until the employee feels something in themself has shifted.” When Tony reached out to Dr. Malik in 2020, Dr. Malik didn’t relocate to Park City but decided to leave Zappos to focus full-time on the new streaming idea and other research work. “He wanted meaningful, deep content that could

impact the situation around the world,” he explained about Tony’s invitation. He said he had been paid very well for his contract, more than he had been making at Zappos. Tony also invited a Utah sculptor, Gary Lee Price, to make a TED Talk–style video in early August 2020. Tony had been walking through the Mountain Trails Gallery on Park City’s Main Street one day and fallen in love with one of Price’s pieces, a large bronze sculpture of Mark Twain sitting on a bench. He sent employees to purchase the statue for about $50,000 in cash and later moved it to the deck of the Ranch, overlooking the lake. Tony reached out to Price, who told him the story of another piece he was working on, a 305-foot-tall monument called Statue of Responsibility, showing two hands intertwined. The piece is based on the 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning by the late author and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Frankl wrote that freedom should be balanced with responsibility and the Statue of Liberty should “be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” Tony’s crew filmed Price with a six-foot version of Statue of Responsibility near the lake at the Ranch, talking about his journey. (The real statue will be housed in California when it’s finished.) Price, who was also interested in world peace, was fascinated by and enamored of Tony’s earnestness in bringing about a seemingly impossible worldwide change. “It absolutely came from the heart,” said Price, who had researched Tony’s work developing downtown Las Vegas and his mission to spread happiness. “It all seemed congruent.” Price’s wife, Leesa Clark-Price, was not as easily impressed as her husband. Though she admired Tony and his generosity, she noticed nitrous oxide cartridges scattered around the property and witnessed him, his employees, and his friends inhaling it. Her own son had struggled with drug addiction, and she recognized the signs. When the Prices left after a two-day visit to the Ranch in early August 2020, Tony begged them to “bring a teepee and move onto the property,” Leesa ClarkPrice recalled. “They loved the idea of creating unique experiences.” One of Tony’s assistants later called to ask if she and Price could help them station his sculptures around Park City for a citywide scavenger hunt that would also include treasure boxes and magic. She said she would look into it.

To carry out his new plans, Tony needed more people to join him in Park City. As usual, he wanted to surround himself with an army of trusted friends, ready to assemble the necessary puzzle pieces to make his vision complete. The former collection of visitors in Park City, the ones who had gathered around him after rehab in February 2020, had largely dissipated after his June breakdowns. Only Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger had stayed on. Ali Bevilacqua, Tony’s ex-girlfriend, had visited one last time after he had trapped her in the Empire Avenue house, trying once more to help him. But it had been almost impossible to find time alone with Tony among all his guests, and when she had, he had talked nonstop and refused to listen. Finally, she had tried to be mean to get through to him, telling him that he wasn’t acting like himself and he needed help. She had thrown water at him. The two had screamed at each other. Gone was the dorky boyfriend who had played silly games with her around Las Vegas, dressing up and taking pictures and playing his favorite board games. One time they had been in Mexico for vacation and had laughed so hard while hanging out at the beach that Tony had dubbed it “the beach of endless laughter.” Bevilacqua believed that Tony had been truly happy during those times. He wasn’t now. Tony did end up quieting long enough to listen to Bevilacqua one last time. “But I had to leave him,” she said later. It was the only thing she could do. Tyler Williams had also been excommunicated after Tony had blown up at him. Tony had exiled his parents, and others who had visited in the winter and spring of 2020 also stopped showing up. Tony called and texted more friends from different cities and stages of life. Others came invited by someone else in the group. It was deep into the pandemic now, and some people were tired of quarantining wherever they were and eager for something new. Each new arrival laid his or her claim to Tony: through tales of epic parties attended together, intimate conversations, or because they were longtime friends. Some had been in the latest iteration of Tony’s inner circle in Las Vegas; others reappeared after having moved to other cities and starting families. They were a mix of former Zappos employees, ex-girlfriends, artists, and drifters. Their

connection, tenuous as it might have been, opened the gates to Tony’s slice of Park City—and to his fortune. The hodgepodge collection of Tony’s followers had one thing in common: their utter devotion to him. Tony paid many of them handsomely, sometimes double their previous salaries, or in the form of huge commissions or subsidized rent, to join him on his journey. Michelle D’Attilio, a former girlfriend in Las Vegas who ran Tony’s social media accounts, relocated to Park City from Michigan. Daniel Park Elmhorst, a musician who had once lived in the Airstream park with Tony and competed on America’s Got Talent in 2012, also arrived. Elmhorst, who goes by the name Daniel Park, now called a van his home and played music gigs on the road. A longtime friend, Victoria Recaño, an Inside Edition reporter, moved her family and young children to Park City from Los Angeles, renting a house nearby. Janice Lopez, an interior designer and childhood friend of Tony, had moved to Utah years earlier. Before that, she had cofounded and designed Airstream Park in Las Vegas. In Utah, she lived about seventy-five miles from Park City and showed up often, sometimes spending the night. Two newcomers soon ended up with outsized roles. Rachael Brown, another former girlfriend and an early, influential Zappos executive, moved into the Ranch with Tony. She had begun working as a customer service agent at Zappos in 2005, one of the company’s earliest employees, but had quickly moved up to training roles and become a confidante of Tony’s. She had been organizing Zappos’ all-hands events, the giant parties Tony loved, before leaving the company. A cellist, Brown had trained at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon School of Music in Pittsburgh and played part-time with two groups in Las Vegas that had brought classical music with a twist to the Strip: David Perrico’s Pop Strings Orchestra and Nina Di Gregorio’s Bella Electric Strings ensemble. Despite living in Vegas for her music, she had been missing from Tony’s inner circle for years. In Park City, she somehow emerged again, always by his side. Later, one of Tony’s employees, Anthony Hebert, described her as Tony’s “soul mate.” Brown hosted Tony and his friends at the house she had purchased in New London, Connecticut, more than two thousand miles away. The group drove

buses across the country to get there in the summer of 2020, avoiding flying because of Covid. Tony preferred to travel by bus anyway. Brown’s $1.3 million house is a stately property abutting the Thames River on the wealthy side of town. The well-manicured home has a rectangular pool set in a wide backyard patio overlooking the water. An attached shed holds pool equipment and beach chairs. The house is only fifteen minutes away from the smaller seaside village of Niantic, Connecticut, where Brown grew up, and her parents still live nearby, in a much less opulent neighborhood. She still planned to spend most of her time in Park City. One of Brown’s housemates at the Ranch, another newcomer, was a fortysomething cannabis entrepreneur and influencer named Don Calder, who runs a popular Instagram page, The High Society. His nickname in Park City became “Don Nipton”; before moving to be with Tony in the summer of 2020, Calder had tried to revitalize a tiny town on the California side of the Mojave Desert called Nipton. Nipton, about an hour south of Las Vegas off Interstate 15, is miles from anything, an eighty-acre plot of land with temperatures that can soar past 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The town, which is like a real-life Schitt’s Creek, has been owned for the last three decades by a California couple, Roxanne Lang and the late Jerry Freeman, who fell in love with it while prospecting for gold in the nearby mountains. Freeman bought it for about $200,000 on a lark in 1985, and he and his wife refurbished the small hotel and trading post on the property, added a grove of eucalyptus trees for some shade, and built five tiny cabins for tourists. In 2017, the year after Freeman died, Lang sold Nipton in a seller financing deal to American Green, an over-the-counter cannabis company, which wanted to build a “cannabis oasis” and make the town famous. American Green sent Don Calder to live at its new property. Calder, tanned, with a wide forehead, and from Florida, heard about American Green’s plans. He wanted to get involved and emailed the company out of the blue one night. He started organizing events, such as wellness retreats and a “sound bath” class, a meditative experience in which an attendee is “bathed” in sound.

American Green brought in art from Burning Man, including a giant circle of shopping carts, an eerie sight in the middle of the desert. The company built several tall teepees on the property, hoping to attract social media influencers looking for a good photo backdrop. Calder met Tony when he was living in Nipton in 2018; Tony and his friends sometimes drove from Las Vegas in buses and stayed for a night or two. During one visit, as Tony and his friends ate at Nipton’s small restaurant, the kitchen staff struggled to keep up with the orders. Without anyone’s asking, Tony walked behind the counter, rolled up his sleeves, and started washing the dishes stacked in the sink. That story about Tony is often repeated by the locals in Nipton, who revered him; they were less fond of Calder. Even though he lived in the town, which has a population of only twenty-five, they found him to be standoffish unless he needed something, such as to bum a cigarette. He often didn’t turn up for barbecues. He smoked pot and took mushrooms. Calder did, however, bring in a lot of visitors, increasing business, said Shawn Prophet, who worked with him at American Green during the time Calder lived there. “He turned the whole place around,” Prophet said later of Calder’s work in Nipton. But then the pandemic hit in March 2020, and the cannabis retreats and other events in Nipton ground to a halt, along with the rest of the world. American Green had already missed payments to Lang for the financing she had provided to run the town. She tried to work with the company for months but was ultimately forced to foreclose. Eventually she put the town up for sale again. The restaurant and hotel closed because of the pandemic. The teepee coverings were ripped by the wind. Tourists still came through, but nothing was open. Calder tried to convince Tony to buy the town, but a deal never came together. About an hour away in Tony’s former home of Las Vegas, the economy had cratered as the casinos had shut down in the spring of 2020, and even after they reopened in early June, fewer tourists arrived. The unemployment rate in the metro area continued to be one of the highest in the United States throughout 2020, with out-of-work casino staff waiting in long lines for food. Down on its

luck, with a lot of people suffering, Las Vegas wasn’t an appealing place in which to start over. By the summer of 2020, Calder had left Nipton and joined Tony in Park City. Anyone in Tony’s entourage who brought in business or a project to help with his vision was paid a commission, ultimately funded by Tony’s fortune, estimated years earlier at about $840 million.I As she had for much of the last seventeen years, Mimi Pham took care of the details behind the scenes, although she did not move to Park City. In 2020, Tony was paying her a huge sum to be his personal manager: $30,000 per month, or $360,000 a year. In Park City, Pham was in charge of formalizing new business deals, and she took a 10 percent commission on them, further increasing her income from Tony’s ventures. For example, when Tony retrofitted his luxury buses for $3.68 million, she claimed $368,000. Suzie Baleson handled some of the contracts through her business, the Wellth Collective, enabling her to collect commissions, and a string of sticky notes posted on one door of the Ranch confirmed that process. A contract would start with the Wellth Collective, move to two other employees for initial approval, and then eventually move to Tony for final approval. Baleson, who called herself Tony’s business manager, moved her brother and sister-in-law to Park City as well, and her sister-in-law was also employed by Tony. Connie Yeh, a cousin of Tony, was charged with transferring the money for the contracts, while Puoy Premsrirut, a Las Vegas attorney, typically drew up the necessary documents. Premsrirut, a friend of Tony, and Yeh had also worked with Tony on the Downtown Project in Las Vegas. Weniger, meanwhile, now referred to himself as Tony’s “bodyguard,” ostensibly protecting Tony from others around him. As an organizer of the Life Is Beautiful music festival, he had also been tasked with developing several music projects.

Many of the group’s plans were documented in daily online schedules kept by more than a dozen new employees and assistants hired by Tony, among them Anthony Hebert, Elizabeth Pezzello, and Brett Gorman. Pezzello, a former competitive swimmer and Miss New York USA contestant, had followed Baleson to Park City as one of Tony’s assistants. Though she had briefly worked as an executive assistant at the cloud storage company Dropbox in San Francisco, her last job had been as a YMCA swim instructor in Florida. Her fiancé, Brett Gorman, an investment manager in New York and graduate of Bowdoin College, tagged along. Gorman has a dog and loves to play golf, according to a series of sticky notes describing him at the Ranch: “Super athletic, healthy, have sense of urgency, hospitality focused” and “Love to make people laugh.” Pezzello’s Instagram feed shows the courtship of the sun-kissed couple, both in their early thirties, over several years in New York, San Francisco, and Naples, Florida, where Pezzello is from: Pezzello, with long blond hair and flawless makeup, posing on the beach or on the ski slopes; Gorman, with a wide smile and an unshaven face, standing by her side or carrying her on his shoulders. Later the two would start a “vitamin-infused hydration therapy” business in Naples, delivering vitamins intravenously into people’s arms. In Park City, Gorman was assigned to write the group’s newsletter, Blizzy Ranch Daily News, named for Tony’s dog. For that job and several others, such as coordinating visitors, he was paid nearly $500,000 a year. The glossy newsletter provided weather and dining reports, with one issue chronicling a twenty-course sushi night “for the history books” that had included fish flown in from around the world and prepared by a local chef. “According to sources close to the Blizzy Ranch Daily News, there were rumors of crying babies falling asleep to the smoothness of Chef Ben’s fish slice,” the newsletter reported. Gorman sometimes added a line to his schedules: “Just trying to help/ensure Tony and Rachael have a great day!” Tony’s brother Andy was quickly swept up into the group’s plans. Because he was a member of the Hsieh family, he was automatically accepted into the group, even though many of the others had never met him. He was assigned to line up a helicopter charter between Las Vegas and Park City and meet with tequila

suppliers for a business he was planning, among other tasks outlined in the schedules. Some of the employees, including the house’s main chef, began reporting to him, and he would send them on errands for Tony. Tony’s generosity had always been overwhelming, but in Las Vegas, his true friends had rarely taken advantage of it. None of Tony’s longtime friends, the ones who had learned over many years how to tell Tony no to some of his most audacious and impractical ideas, who knew how to let him down gently, and who would never exploit him, such as the Mosslers, the Cornthwaites, Garrett Miller or Ryan Doherty in Las Vegas, and Alfred Lin in San Francisco, were involved in the Park City plans. Instead, the new group of people didn’t just expect his generosity, they adapted their whole lives to it. One string of green sticky notes in the Ranch spelled out “Tony’s staff [whose] happiness depends on him.” The list included Andy, along with Baleson, Weniger, and Pezzello. It wasn’t clear who had written it. As the group around him coalesced, Tony embarked on another hack, curious about what his body could live without. How little could he eat or drink? Could he stop urinating? How much oxygen did his body really need? Where would full control of one’s body, defying nature, ultimately lead? He was using a new drug, one that he believed could help him achieve his vision for world peace. Nitrous oxide, he decided, could perhaps spread happiness more effectively to everyone, helping him on his journey there. I.  The origin of this oft-repeated estimate of Tony’s fortune remains unclear. Estimates in news reports fluctuate from $780 million to “close to a billion,” with sources unclear. In December 2021, a preliminary estimate showed his fortune valued at around $500 million.

PART III

CHAPTER NINE GOOD AND EVIL RECONCILED

Park City, Summer 2020

Into this pervading genius we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. —Benjamin Paul Blood, philosopher and nitrous oxide user, in 1874

The sound of running water with the faint singing of grasshoppers is audible as

the documentary begins with a black screen. The sun edges out from behind an eerie dark planet, its bright light gradually overtaking the scene, as though it is opening a door into Tony’s mind. As rainbow-colored amoebalike forms explode across the screen, the calm voice of a self-assured guru begins to speak. “A revolution is happening within our hearts and on Earth to elevate us beyond illusions, fantasies, and social masks,” the man says. “We are looking outside ourselves for fulfillment when the power to change is the inner journey.” The title emerges in white letters, “THE NITROUS OXYGEN ADVANTAGE,” followed by “THE SECRET OF THE MAGIC BOX” and an explosion of small white hearts. Tony doesn’t appear in the video, nor do any of his friends or employees, but he paid for its production in the summer and fall of 2020. For the next thirty-five minutes, Tony’s friend the Inside Edition reporter Victoria Recaño uses her soothing, trained voice to pull viewers through a galaxy of New Age images—flowers, mountains, and people hugging, crying, and meditating flash onto the screen—as she describes the properties and origins of a

mystical drug, nitrous oxide. Inhaling the gas can alleviate depression and suffering and free humans from conventional thinking, she says. Recaño was under contract through Suzie Baleson’s business, Wellth Collective, to work on video projects for Tony in Park City, including one with a mutual friend, the singer Paula Abdul. At times it feels as if the viewer is actually taking part in the video, flying through the farthest reaches of outer space, swimming through shimmering underwater caves, and running through the dark woods, as on a brief drug trip. The words “We must save our world” appear with images of modern horrors of war, floods, riots. CONSCIOUS LOVE flashes on the screen, followed by INFINITE ABUNDANCE, and COMPLETE SOUL-FREEDOM. The video often feels promotional, arguing in favor of the use of nitrous oxide. “A lot of times on this little journey that you started, it gets really lonely,” says one unidentified young woman in the video. At another point, Recaño wonders, “To what extent are scientific beliefs conducive to human happiness?” It’s not until the end that she issues a sort of disclaimer: “It is important to emphasize that we are not advocating the use of general anesthetics as psychedelic drugs; rather, we’re suggesting that the current description of cognitive effects of commonly used anesthetics is likely incomplete.” Tony had used nitrous oxide occasionally in the past, at Burning Man and a few parties. The drug had become more popular across Silicon Valley and among tech entrepreneurs looking for a new kind of high. Tony had also become curious about using the gas for his latest body hack: he was trying to see how much oxygen his body could live without, with thoughts of scaling Mount Everest. He eventually linked the inhalant with his new mission of helping create world peace and produced three videos on the drug, “The Nitrous Oxygen Advantage” being the longest and most polished. Ultimately, Tony envisioned new arrivals in Park City, from friends and employees to intellectuals, watching them. Nitrous oxide—discovered two centuries ago and also known as laughing gas, hippie crack, noz, and whippets—produces euphoria and sometimes leads to

hallucinations in its pure form. The high rushes in in less than ten seconds; it fades away in a minute or two. To keep it going, a user must quickly inhale another shot. The gas, administered through a mask, is sometimes used for medical procedures or dentist visits, to manage patients’ pain and ward off their anxiety. Lower concentrations of nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen—25 or 50 percent— have been shown to alleviate the symptoms of treatment-resistant severe depression and labor pain. Nitrous oxide isn’t addictive the way opioids or other drugs are, but its recreational use still carries risks. One pure hit can cause a calm, relaxed feeling, while a higher dose of two or more hits can make a person disassociate from his or her surroundings. Tony’s group liked whippets, a popular method of using nitrous oxide recreationally. Small cartridges are huffed through reusable commercial-grade cans used in restaurants for making whipped cream, similar to the refrigerated cans you might buy in a grocery store. The cartridges look like metal cylindrical bullets and fit into the palm of a hand. A user puts the spout of the whipped cream canister into his or her mouth and depresses the nozzle slightly, releasing a quick stream of gas. Nitrous oxide has a long history of experimental use, with many people reporting a mystical, even religious, high from the gas. Perhaps best known among this group was the American philosopher and psychologist William James, born in New York City in 1842. James, who went on to become a Harvard professor, felt that the gas whisked him into another world, a shift in consciousness that, like a dream, slipped slightly out of his grasp once he was sober. “Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists,” he once wrote. He uttered or wrote streams of thought; in fact, he first used the term stream of consciousness while high on nitrous oxide. He recorded his nonsensical thoughts on paper: What’s a mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment… Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes!

But—what escapes, WHAT escapes?

As Tony’s video “The Nitrous Oxygen Advantage” details, nitrous oxide profoundly influenced James’s thinking. In 1874, James, who suffered from bouts of depression, wondered whether nitrous oxide could unlock “the Secret of Being” after being introduced to the gas by another philosopher. In the decades since, nitrous oxide has been embraced by the counterculture in the United States. In 1975, Rolling Stone profiled a group of nitrous-loving anarchists organized as the East Bay Chemical Philosophy Symposium, with the phrase “New hope for the silly 70’s.” The dozen members of the Berkeley, California–based group consumed 500,000 quarts of nitrous oxide between 1968 and 1970, according to the report, and were “trying to turn people on to it.” In the 1980s, the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose cult built a compound on an Oregon ranch known as Rajneeshpuram, had a special dental room at his house. His dentist, a follower brought over from India, administered nitrous oxide and wrote down the meandering thoughts of Rajneesh, later known as Osho. He called the dental chamber “Noah’s Ark,” as heavy rains and floods left him isolated at his home. Rajneesh’s thoughts while high were later published as three books: Notes of a Madman, Books I Have Loved, and Glimpses of a Golden Childhood. He bragged of this work to his followers. “It must be absolutely unprecedented, because people are so afraid of the dental chair and the dentist, but I have enjoyed so much,” he said in a recorded series of his talks to the group. “I can experience whatever is happening, even under a high dose of laughing gas. It was a beautiful time.” Infamously, in 1984, his followers committed the largest US bioterrorism attack, poisoning more than 750 people in the small city of The Dalles by contaminating salad bars with salmonella. The FBI learned that they had been the source of the attack after investigating the cult for other crimes. In the 1990s, law enforcement scrambled to deal with a new phenomenon: drug-fueled raves, such as the kind Tony had once attended. Kids high on ecstasy sucked on pacifiers, while others held balloons filled with nitrous oxide at parties

that could draw tens of thousands of people to warehouses in seedier parts of cities. In 1992, three people died inside a pickup truck in the Los Angeles area after leaving the valve of an eighty-pound nitrous oxide tank open while huffing nitrous oxide from balloons. Fliers for raves were scattered in the cab of the pickup truck. The drug became so popular that decade that in 1998 a video game developer released a spaceship racing game called N2O: Nitrous Oxide, with promotions that declared, “Get ready to go higher, faster than you’ve ever gone before” and “Never trip alone, always use 2 player mode.” Figures wearing gas masks make an appearance, paired with techno music from the band the Crystal Method. Still, nitrous oxide wasn’t taken seriously as a harmful drug. The 1990s also brought the rise of Burning Man, so loved by Tony. Nitrous oxide cartridges are a frequent sighting around Black Rock City. One online nitrous oxide supplier offered an attendee discount for purchases: “Whipped cream and Burning Man?” the offer read. “Our nitrous oxide whipped cream chargers are the best quality and we have lots of inquires [sic] about delivering. We can typically get your N2O chargers delivered into a California or Nevada address within 2 business days, and we are excited to offer a number of exclusive deals especially for those customers.” The use of laughing gas as a recreational drug has been on the rise in the last two decades, particularly between 2014 and 2019, according to a study of federal data. The reason 2014 was a turning point is unclear. Investigators pulled mentions of nitrous oxide from emergency room and Food and Drug Administration reports, but the drug isn’t tracked specifically. In a survey of drug users from more than twenty-five countries, about 13 percent reported having huffed nitrous oxide in the last year, according to the annual Global Drug Survey released in January 2021, a rate that had doubled since 2015. Nitrous oxide use ranked higher than the use of heroin (1.3 percent) and meth (4.6 percent) but less than that of MDMA (38 percent) and LSD (21 percent). The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have promoted the increase of nitrous oxide use, experts say. Drug overdose deaths surged by 30 percent in 2020 during the pandemic, preliminary federal data show.

Chronic nitrous oxide use can have devastating consequences. Nitrous oxide robs the body of vitamin B12, leading, in some cases, to spinal degeneration, weakness, numbness, and loss of bodily control. Inhaling too much can cause asphyxiation and lead to accidental injuries from tripping and falling. Tony was aware of the side effects as he started using nitrous oxide more heavily, and he wanted his friends to know about them, too. As always, he wanted them to come to a conclusion about a new viewpoint of his on their own. The other two, shorter videos he produced on nitrous oxide, both untitled, focused more on concerns people might have about using the drug. “How does it affect your health?” reads an interlude in one video. A different narrator from Recaño explains that the use of nitrous oxide can lead to a vitamin B12 deficiency and a host of other health problems, such as negative effects on a user’s immune system. The pandemic had made it hard for Tony to procure ketamine, which is often obtained illegally from veterinary clinics or other medical offices. Psychedelic mushrooms had also become harder to buy. But Tony and his friends quickly found that nitrous oxide was easy to get. At first, in the summer of 2020, they bought whipped cream canisters from local grocery or convenience stores. Tony would send his drivers or several of his new Park City employees to make nitrous oxide runs. Soon he was huffing it all day long, as many as fifty cartridges in twenty-four hours, making little effort to hide his habit. Spent cartridges littered his home in Park City among the candles and Post-it notes. Mimi Pham jokingly called Tony’s huffing canister his “gun.” As the group’s intake increased, they began ordering it easily online. One of their preferred vendors was Whip-It!, owned by San Francisco–based United Brands, which sells whipped cream cartridges on its website and through Amazon. Any user, without any identification or age requirement, can buy a pack of 24, 50, or 100. A case of 600 cartridges retails for about $500. United Brands had been in trouble twice for failing to attach health warnings to its cartridges. In October 2020, as Tony and his inner circle were buying thousands of Whip-It! chargers from United Brands online, the company was

ordered to pay a $50,000 civil judgment in San Mateo, California. The district attorney there alleged that United Brands had sold nitrous oxide cartridges online without verifying that the purchaser was not a minor and that the company had failed to attach the proper health warnings to the cartridges even after it had been ordered to do so five years prior. The action came after the Department of Homeland Security had identified United Brands as a seller of nitrous oxide in smoke shops across San Diego. Nitrous oxide isn’t a controlled substance such as ecstasy or heroin, so the Food and Drug Administration—not the Drug Enforcement Agency—oversees it at the federal level under its authority to crack down on “misbranding” of products. Some states, including Utah, have passed laws that deem it illegal to sell or use it for recreational highs or require a person to be at least eighteen or twenty-one years of age to buy it. But the fact that nitrous oxide can be obtained legally makes it very difficult for law enforcement to bring criminal charges. Utah law, for example, says that a person is guilty of nitrous oxide abuse when he or she possesses it with “the intent to breathe, inhale or ingest it for the purpose of causing a condition of intoxication.” Despite attempts by law enforcement to crack down, it’s still a popular drug in Silicon Valley, where it’s largely viewed as harmless. In downtown San Francisco, Dr. Paul Abramson, a family medicine and addiction specialist, sees patients, especially those who work in the tech industry, at his medical clinic who show signs of nitrous oxide use. They arrive suffering from the neurological symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency. “I’ve gotten to the point where I see that, and I say, ‘How much nitrous are you using?’ ” he said. Some people using nitrous oxide show up for help from Dr. Abramson after being told by someone close to them, or even an employer, that they should see a doctor. Nitrous oxide, like ketamine, is a dissociative drug, making it “especially difficult for people to identify that they have a problem,” Dr. Abramson explained. “It’s very hard for them to see themselves from the outside and get help.” In Dr. Abramson’s view, rather than criminalizing the gas, there should be more education in the medical community, including greater symptom awareness, which could lead more doctors to intervene and provide treatment.

At home in the Bay Area, Richard and Judy Hsieh had been worried about their son since they had left Park City in early July 2020. Trying to talk to Tony hadn’t helped. Now they needed a more serious plan. They contacted two of Tony’s former business partners and closest friends, Fred Mossler in Las Vegas and Alfred Lin in the San Francisco Bay Area, to discuss and form a plan. They also got Tyler Williams involved, and he agreed to travel back from Las Vegas to Park City for the effort. The group found a private interventionist in Los Angeles who is an experienced drug and alcohol specialist, Dr. Elisa Hallerman, whose team, according to her website, “is exceptionally skilled at engaging in personal crisis management with the utmost discretion.” Tony’s parents hoped that the doctor’s eclectic background would help convince him to speak with her. A former Hollywood talent agent, she is also a lawyer and developed what she calls “Soulbriety,” the philosophy of soul-centered healing. She is herself a recovering alcoholic. “If we were to reframe addiction as a crisis of meaning with existential and spiritual implications, could soul inform the recovery process? The answer is a resounding YES and then some!” Dr. Hallerman wrote on her website. The Hsiehs also began gathering evidence of Tony’s psychosis. They wrote a statement, later provided to police, outlining the interactions they had had with him during the July visit, including how he had asked his mom to take ice baths in exchange for his spending time in rehab. Ultimately, they hoped to convince a judge to award conservatorship—the legal process of placing a court-appointed guardian in control of Tony and his assets—to the family. Conservatorship has perhaps become best known in recent years because of the high-profile struggles of the performer Britney Spears, whose father held the controversial position of guardian of her roughly $60 million estate for thirteen years. She was freed from conservatorship in November 2021. Often, conservators are appointed for the elderly or those with developmental disabilities. The process is typically a last resort both for the courts and for family members, because it is incredibly invasive.

The Hsiehs hoped that Dr. Hallerman could convince Tony to be evaluated by a psychologist in Utah who would quickly recognize his precarious mental state and place him on a temporary psychiatric hold. During that time, the Hsiehs could file the legal paperwork needed to take control of his life and get him the help he needed. In early August 2020, Dr. Hallerman flew to Salt Lake City and drove a rental car to Park City. She also enlisted a Summit County deputy sheriff she knew, Jon Evans. Because Tony lived in Park City and not Summit County, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office didn’t have jurisdiction over his address. Sometimes, however, deputy sheriffs freelance as security guards or do other offduty work; in this case, Evans wasn’t being paid. In the weeks since the Hsiehs had left in early July, Tony had grown increasingly paranoid, a symptom of his drug use and his mental health breakdowns. He worried that Williams would suddenly show up at the house and try to take him back to Las Vegas. He was even more insistent that his parents stop interfering. As part of his paranoia, Tony hired a local security company, Kane LLC, to staff the Ranch, stationing more than two dozen guards around the property and developing an elaborate security plan that included drones and cameras. He hired court reporters from another local firm, CitiCourt, to follow him around, typing notes on all his conversations with anyone who came through the house. Dr. Hallerman arrived at the Ranch on a beautiful, sunny, hot summer day. Two sculptures had been installed in the yard, a giant orange-and-purple octopus that appeared to be coming out of the ground and a tall, blooming yellow flower. Tony had imported Burning Man to his new property, just as he had taken parts of it to Las Vegas. The sculptures stood out amid the natural landscape and muted-tone houses in the high-end neighborhood, and neighbors had noted their arrival. With security personnel stationed in front of the mansion making it impossible for her to approach the house, Dr. Hallerman began questioning guests coming and going through the gates. She was aggressive, according to some people who witnessed her approach, asking them what they were doing,

why they were there, and did they know what was happening inside? A man was dying, she told them. One of the people she spoke to was Tony’s ex-girlfriend, Michelle D’Attilio, who had recently moved to Park City to work for him. Startled by the direct approach of the apparent stranger outside, D’Attilio went back inside the house and told everyone, including Tony, what was happening. She warned them to stay away from the person outside. Meanwhile, Justin Weniger told Tony’s friends at the Ranch that he had the situation under control and had hired his own private doctor to help get Tony healthy. Jon Evans, the Summit County deputy sheriff, took Dr. Hallerman, along with Tyler Williams, to the police department and conveyed her message to the officers there: a man was living in a residence in town who was using an incredible amount of drugs, and he needed help right away. Dr. Hallerman showed an officer, Sergeant Jay Randall, a statement from Tony’s parents describing their son’s troubling behavior lately, including the ice baths and confused speech. Randall reviewed the letter and agreed that it was worth checking on Tony. Dr. Hallerman wanted to go along, but Randall told her that wouldn’t be allowed. The police found Tony at his property across the street from the Ranch, a sixbedroom house inexplicably called “truffle shuffle” by Tony’s Park City employees. Tony came out, apparently lucid. The officers told Tony that his parents were concerned about him and wanted the police to check on him. It was the worst possible thing to say to Tony, who at that moment was intent on banishing his parents from his life. Tony assured the police that there was nothing to worry about. After speaking to him, the police agreed, deciding that he wasn’t a danger to himself or others. They left less than half an hour after they had arrived. Back at the police station, Sergeant Randall found Dr. Hallerman, along with Williams, waiting for him. Refusing to give up even as the mission was falling apart, Dr. Hallerman asked to speak to the sergeant privately. He refused, concerned that he was being manipulated and uncertain about the group’s motives, especially because they declined to put him in touch with

Tony’s parents. The Hallerman group, meanwhile, found the police to be uncooperative and out of their league, unable to deal with the delicate situation. Randall wrote in a later report about the incident, “I do not play that game.” The intervention failed.

CHAPTER TEN SAVE YOUR SOUL

Park City, August and September 2020

Now, who will save your souls? If you won’t save your own?

In

—Jewel

mid-August 2020, Jewel arrived in Utah to visit Tony with the board president of the Inspiring Children Foundation, Ryan Wolfington, and another employee. They had planned to stay only a night in between other events that summer. An assistant of Tony’s had called to invite them, ostensibly because Tony wanted to see Jewel. Dozens of guests came and went on a daily basis that July and August, and sometimes Tony’s mansion swelled with people. His employees, trying to maintain control of his schedule, meticulously wrote visitors’ names on sticky notes organized in columns stuck to the walls of the mansion. Some visitors were friends of Tony; others were friends of the growing entourage around him. Some people had been brought in to work on one of his myriad business development projects. Often guests were milling around who didn’t know one another, perplexed by one another’s purposes, almost “like a murder mystery party,” Leesa Clark-Price, the sculptor’s wife, had observed during her visit earlier that month. The roster included an array of actors such as David Arquette and public figures such as the former Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Plame, who

was there to give a talk on nuclear weapons. Fresh off a plane or chartered bus, guests had to check in with the security personnel stationed in front of the Ranch, part of Tony’s paranoia that his parents or unwanted others would somehow get onto the property. New visitors were expected to sign in, and a Polaroid picture was usually taken of them and hung on the wall, like a museum of mug shots. Their cell phones were collected by the staff. Outsiders were required to sign nondisclosure agreements, for reasons that were often unclear to them. The guests’ visits were usually handled by Suzie Baleson and Elizabeth Pezzello, but Puoy Premsrirut, the Las Vegas attorney who also now worked in Park City, sometimes handled the legal agreements. At the Ranch, security guards checked that each new arrival was “registered,” meaning that he or she had been invited by Tony or another group member. The new arrivals were then given a rapid Covid test at a station out front—though some guests later learned that the swabs had been tested only for antibodies, not actual infections. The process, recalled one guest, was “very Great Gatsby”: opulent but with strict, strange protocols. A handful of court reporters were often there, following Tony and his guests around, transcribing their conversations. One time, for no apparent reason, they showed up dressed like characters from a medieval king’s court. One of them, in a striped jester costume with a big, floppy hat, sat in a corner and smiled at guests as they arrived. A month and a half had passed since Tony’s late-June breakdown and hospital stay; his family’s failed intervention attempt had taken place about two weeks earlier. No one had talked to him about either incident, and some of his new friends who had since moved to Park City hadn’t heard about either one. But his mental state wasn’t improving. In recent weeks, Tony had developed a deeper fascination with fire. He liked fooling around with it and performing magic tricks. Fire was burning in the house all the time. Candles were sometimes perched dangerously on his bedspread, and he kept a small fire ring in his bedroom that shot flames into the air without any barrier. When Jewel and her crew walked into the Ranch in mid-August, they were astounded. The house was dirty, with hundreds of candles dripping wax onto

furniture, carpet, and countertops. Blizzy’s droppings were scattered throughout the property, some covered in candle wax. Signs instructed visitors not to clean up the trash outside, particularly outside Tony’s bedroom. At one point, Tony had told a visitor that to teach the world not to produce so much trash, it was better not to throw trash away at all. Showers and sinks ran constantly, unattended; the group was trying to mimic the sound of waterfalls. The house couldn’t be cleaned because it was “nature.” But that didn’t stop brightly colored sticky notes lining the walls, the glass doors leading to the backyard, and the windows; the group was now using them to communicate instead of texting or sending emails. Jewel and her team arrived during an unusual period of inactivity, with few other guests around. Baleson, Pezzello, and Rachael Brown greeted them at different times and introduced themselves, gushing thank-yous for visiting. But they had strange, blank smiles on their faces, as if they knew the situation was bad. Jewel and Wolfington immediately became uneasy. Jewel knew Tony’s group of friends from Las Vegas, but she didn’t see them around, nor did she recognize any of the new people. She inquired after Tony and was told that he was outside meditating in the “spa.” When Jewel walked out of the house, she found Tony sitting on a lawn chair in a corner by the small lake, wearing just his boxers. He was skinnier than she had ever seen him—emaciated. He was surrounded by whippet canisters. He lifted his thin arms to show her the inside of a small box, where he had inexplicably scribbled some barely legible numbers in columns. That, he told her, was the algorithm for world peace. “I’m going to start a new country,” he proclaimed. He had stopped sleeping, he continued, because he had “hacked” sleep and his body no longer needed it. Jewel was so stunned that she only listened. She was the first visitor to clearly see, or at least admit, what was really happening. Many of the other visitors hadn’t known Tony that well, and sometimes the property was cleaner than it was during Jewel’s visit. But the sticky notes, the trash, even the random people wandering the mansion—they were all part of the vision of a man deep in the throes of psychosis. Tony’s latest idea, his goal to achieve world peace, wasn’t just

impossible, it was the manic plan of a person who urgently needed help. Tony was in trouble. Jewel decided to extend her trip. Familiar with mental health problems, Jewel had observed people combine them with drug or alcohol abuse to try to cover up their problems. As a child, she and her parents, who were also musicians, had performed in bars together around her hometown of Homer, Alaska. There she had frequently seen adults shutting out their lives by drinking. After her mother had left the family, her father, a Vietnam War veteran, had also struggled with alcohol, the only coping mechanism he knew, she later wrote in her book, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. He had sometimes beaten her and her brothers. The experience had taught her that people inherit an emotional language, and unless someone teaches them a new one, they are powerless over the one they have learned. “I saw that no one outran their suffering; they only piled new pain upon their original pain,” she wrote. “I saw the pain pile up into insurmountable mountains, and I saw the price people paid who buried all that pain, and along with it their hope, joy, and chance at happiness. All because they were trying to outrun the pain rather than walk through it and heal.” At Tony’s mansion, Jewel began asking the people around her, “What are you doing here?” “What is your purpose?” No one had a good answer. Most troubling—aside from the odd smiles and the appalling state of the property— was the apparent lack of concern about Tony’s condition. Most of the people treated it as though it were normal, almost seeming to celebrate him. Tony had told his new employees that he was in a creative metamorphosis and would emerge soon. The last stage of the metamorphosis would be sobriety. The one glimmer of hope Jewel found was Tony’s brother Andy. She hadn’t met him before that trip, but he seemed to be the only person to show compassion for Tony and his situation. He told Jewel and Wolfington privately that he was worried, but he didn’t know what to do. His family had already attempted an intervention and failed. Afterward, Tony had banished his parents from the property and refused to talk to them again. To Jewel and her team, Andy seemed to be in a tough situation. He wanted to stay close enough to help his brother but also not be banned by Tony for speaking out too strongly, as had happened with Tyler Williams.

At one point, Baleson tried to explain the group’s business plans to Jewel’s team. She told them that if they wrote “$1 million” or “$2 million” on a sticky note and pasted it on the wall, Tony would be sure to fund whatever project they wanted to work on. Baleson said she ran each new sticky note by Tony in the evening. Wolfington interpreted that as a bribe to ignore what they were seeing. “I’m not taking a cent from Tony in this condition,” Jewel told her team after hearing about the conversation. One night, Jewel played a private concert inside the Ranch in a cleaner upstairs area that her team had believed would be just for Tony and his friends. But some of Tony’s employees had invited neighbors and other Park City locals —an attempt to make valuable connections across the wealthy city—so the event unexpectedly turned into a miniconcert. She sang her classics “You Were Meant for Me” and “Who Will Save Your Soul,” a song she had started to write when she was only sixteen, a lost teenager in Alaska searching for a real home. In the audience, Park City’s wealthy residents and city developers clapped and sang along with her. Tony didn’t make an appearance. Instead, he remained alone in his darkened bedroom at the bottom of the house, lit candles all around him. Among the crowd was Teri Orr, the longtime Park City resident, arts leader, and former newspaper editor. In a newspaper column later recounting the party, Orr said she had heard Jewel sing “Who Will Save Your Soul” before, “But from the first notes that night there was something different. She was singing the song as a cross between a prayer and a plea.” The next day, Tony sat in a corner of the living room on a mattress with Rachael Brown and Justin Weniger, surrounded by candles. Some of the guests called it “the glowing room.” The floor was covered by an inch or two of nitrous oxide canisters. A performance coach, Branden Collinsworth, also sat with them. He had been invited to town by Baleson, who wanted to work with him on several wellness initiatives in Park City. Collinsworth knew Tony from downtown Las Vegas; he had opened a gym as part of Tony’s early development there. Like Jewel, Collinsworth had been shocked by the state of the Ranch and by Tony’s condition when he arrived.

He had run into Tony earlier in his visit to Park City, and Tony had remembered him from Las Vegas. “I’d love for you to come here,” Tony said. Before Collinsworth could answer, Tony had swooped in with what had become a common question for newcomers: “How much did you make in your highestgrossing year? I can double that, but you have to move here.” Tony’s standard contract offer to new employees was double their best salary, but the staffers typically had to rent their accommodations from Tony, thus ensuring that he recouped some of the money. (Although sometimes the rent was also subsidized.) Collinsworth declined. He had only just arrived, but he knew he wasn’t moving to Park City. When he went to visit Tony privately, with Weniger and Brown also in his room, he thought he had an idea for how to help Tony. His father is a biowarfare expert who lives in the Amazon jungle of Peru, and Collinsworth began to tell Tony about the sacred medicine men of that country and how a visit there might help him get healthy. Collinsworth offered to play some of their tribal music, known as Icaros, for him. Tony demanded marijuana, so Brown went to get it and a Bluetooth speaker. As Tony smoked his joint, first insect noises, then rough whistling, and finally the sound of a man chanting filled the room—the South American sacred tribal music. When he was done smoking, he asked Brown for nitrous oxide, inhaling a new canister about every thirty seconds, one after the other after the other. Each time, he threw the empty canister somewhere in the room, and Brown brought him another one. Collinsworth sat by the window at a distance from Tony, worried that Tony might inadvertently throw one of the chargers at him. After each nitrous oxide hit, Tony would roll on his bed, wriggling and writhing ecstatically, and sometimes he would get up and perform a “spirit dance.” But he did not look happy; he looked extremely disturbed. “That was fun,” he proclaimed after the music ended. He turned to Collinsworth and asked if he could come back every day and play the music

again. Collinsworth said no. He wanted to focus on Tony’s wellness and possibly organize a trip to Peru to help heal him. From the outside of the Ranch, Jewel had walked up to the window where Tony and Collinsworth were talking and where Tony had placed a surfboard, which acted as a ramp into the room. He didn’t like to use the door. “This is really sad,” she observed. “This is incredibly sad.” She walked to the backyard and sat on the grass near the small lake with Weniger, who had left the room earlier. Soon Collinsworth joined them. “That’s some heavy shit, man,” he said. Weniger agreed, “It’s absolutely insane.” He described how he had tried to get Tony off ketamine and how the bus trip to Montana had ruined everything. He didn’t say anything about the recent failed intervention attempt by Tony’s family that had taken place less than two weeks earlier. “He is going to die,” Jewel said bluntly. It wasn’t the first time she had spoken those difficult words during that trip. She had been warning everyone at the Ranch who she thought might help, including Tony’s security staff and his brother. Before Jewel left, she told the head of security, Shawn Kane, “If he kills himself and everyone else in there from a huge fire, you can’t say you were not warned.” Guests continued to arrive at the Ranch, and meeting after meeting chipped away at Tony’s fortune, at least on paper. Tony’s vision had been to solve world peace, but his dozens of side business plans and deals often had no relation to his broader goal. One August afternoon, Mark Evensvold, a fiftysomething director of business development for the popular Las Vegas chain of restaurants Nacho Daddy, visited Park City. Tony had invested in the Nacho Daddy business along with one of its other owners, Fred Mossler. Evensvold had been warned by friends in Las Vegas that Tony was sick and that his extravagant business plans were covering up more serious issues. Still he went to Utah and sat with Tony on the lakeside beach.

As a court reporter listened in, Evensvold pitched that he bring his skills to Park City. Tony didn’t need much convincing, agreeing to pay Evensvold $450,000 a year to operate the bars set up in various rooms in the Ranch, along with whatever else he wanted to do, under a project manager title. “Everyone is a project manager, and then you just work on whatever you feel like,” he said. As a signing bonus, Tony said, he would give up some of his investor equity in Nacho Daddy, of which he held 25 percent. Under the deal, Evensvold would take 20 percent, leaving Tony with 5 percent. Tony rambled on as they ironed out the deal. Another new obsession of Tony’s that came up in the meeting was the concept of time and how in today’s society, people are forced to go from one moment to another constantly. In addition to world peace, he wanted to somehow achieve a state of “timelessness.” “You’re either living in this world, which has no time, no money in terms of what happens here,” he told Evensvold. “But for anything that touches time or money or shoes is, like, not my world, so I don’t care. I’m fine.” Evensvold memorialized the terms of their agreement on a sticky note. On August 24, 2020, a story appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, only several hundred words. “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Retires,” the headline read. The article contained little additional information, only a confirmation from a Zappos spokeswoman on the newspaper’s scoop. After his two decades at the helm of Zappos, forging through the dot-com bust, moving to and nearly taking over downtown Las Vegas, running one of the highest-profile management experiments on Earth, and rethinking the workplace around fun, collaboration, and happiness, no public company announcement went out about Tony Hsieh’s retirement. No Zappos or Amazon executive gave an interview as reporters around the world jumped on the story, although Amazon later put out a brief statement. The short Review-Journal story said only that Zappos’ chief operating officer, Kedar Deshpande, would take over immediately as CEO. The newspaper instead

quoted Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman: “He’s a modest person. He’s not a braggart, but he loves to do things that are different and challenging. When everyone is swimming downstream, he is swimming upstream.” A longer follow-up story in the same newspaper two days later noted the $18 million in properties that Tony had purchased in Park City in the first half of the year, reporting that it was unclear what his plans were for the mountain town. The story quoted a spokesperson for the Downtown Project, since renamed DTP Companies, who said that Tony was “disconnecting” from tech for a bit and “just doing his retirement thing.” Tony had grown frustrated with Amazon since the company had issued the directive in 2019 about his needing to increase Zappos’ profits. Tony didn’t care that much about the numbers; he didn’t really want to sell shoes. His goal was creating happiness. Before the pandemic, he had been asking his leadership team to think about the high performers at Zappos who might succeed him. Still, he had tried to come up with the next billion-dollar idea to help drive Zappos’ growth, but he hadn’t found it by the time the pandemic hit. Then he had moved to Park City. In the first weeks after his short stint in rehab in early 2020, when he was still doing somewhat well, he had seemed a lot like his old self at work, directing Zappos’ Covid response remotely with the same confidence he’d used to display. But in the early summer of 2020, he was again missing more Zappos meetings and falling behind on his work. Because of the digital detox he had embarked on, he wasn’t responding to much email, either. On a call with Jeff Wilke, the top Amazon executive Tony reported to, Tony proclaimed that he had made a groundbreaking discovery. He had solved the “traveling salesman problem”: Given a list of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? The question is infamously hard to answer. Believed to have been formulated in the 1800s, it is one of the most important unsolved theories in efforts to improve business optimization and logistics. It has vexed company executives and mathematical experts for more than a century, particularly those who are focused on logistics. The question has so many challenges: how to visit each city

only once, for example. Some computer scientists have come close, deriving algorithms that seemed to find the best answer. But no one has yet to solve it. Amazon, too, had employees working on the problem, and Wilke passed Tony over to the group. Once he was on the phone with them, though, it became clear that he didn’t really have a solution. He wasn’t making much sense at all. When the Amazon team questioned him in detail, Tony said they wouldn’t understand. He had solved the problem in another language. Wilke got back on the phone with Tony. He told him he needed to take a break. Take two months off, he said, and get yourself together. Tony wasn’t on official leave, but Amazon wasn’t going to wait forever. He needed to improve his leadership. Tony missed the informal deadline. In fact, he never really tried to meet it. Though he wasn’t technically forced out, Tony complained to some close friends that “retirement” had not been his idea, it had been Wilke’s—and he would not have chosen to leave. On a series of sticky notes posted at the Ranch, someone had written the name of Deshpande, Zappos’ new CEO, and added it to the list of people who were excommunicated from the group. Tyler Williams was also included. If not for Covid, the party for Tony’s retirement would have been epic. Instead, the company held a tribute to Tony during its virtual all-hands meeting in early September 2020. Deshpande sent out a short email to Zappos employees, announcing that Tony had decided to retire. “We want to thank Tony for his 20 years of work on behalf of Zappos customers and employees and wish him well in his next chapter,” the terse note read. “As always, we are focused on wowing customers and the 10 core values that drive us every day.” Tony didn’t send out an email of his own, and Amazon provided the same statement to some reporters. Having worked at Zappos since 2011, Deshpande was a fan of Tony’s, having even visited him twice in Park City. But no one could be Tony, and Deshpande was far more serious than his famous predecessor. As chief operating officer, replacing Arun Rajan, who had defected to the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods in 2019, Deshpande had been trying to run the core of Zappos, its e-commerce platform. He often didn’t have time for the Zappos parties or the trips. With

two daughters at home, he would sometimes fly to wherever Tony was for two hours, ask him for more resources, and fly back to Las Vegas. Soon Deshpande emailed Zappos’ 1,500 employees again. The email stated that employees in several divisions would be offered a buyout. Zappos would pay a month of full pay for every year that they had been with the company, with a minimum of twelve weeks’ pay for employees who’d been there less than three years. The eligible divisions, clearly part of Tony’s quirky leadership, included Brand Aura/Storytelling, Disrupt, Evolutionary Organization, New World Pioneers, and something called Sexy Infrastructure. Deshpande knew that Zappos was a company of Tony loyalists, and he wanted people to leave if they felt they couldn’t stay on without him. Deshpande also had a lot of work to do. From a business standpoint, the company was in chaos. Market-based dynamics was only halfway implemented, but the bigger problem was all the smaller, random businesses that had sprung up within the company through holacracy and did not add to the bottom line. Executives had identified more than a hundred company initiatives, and many needed to be defunded. The customer service division was struggling. Overall, Zappos was still not meeting its Amazon-mandated growth metrics. Deshpande told executives that Zappos was going to “get back to basics,” and focus on the e-commerce platform of selling shoes and customer service. But his email to employees and the buyout offer were badly bungled. Zappos’ senior leaders, who reported to Tony, hadn’t been told in advance. When the email did go out, it was unclear to some people whether the affected employees were being forced to take the buyout—were they losing their jobs? Some employees later got calls saying that their jobs were safe. Others didn’t. Zappos employees, still working remotely through the pandemic, took the offer hard. To many of them, it felt as though Deshpande was trying to get rid of Tony’s people—that he was cleaning house. In one sign of that, Tyler Williams’s group of dozens of employees, the “brand experiments” division running Tony’s pet projects, lost most of its employees to buyouts. Williams, however, stayed on. Tony had created a family at Zappos. Some employees believed that Deshpande was destroying the family.

Tony, who was aware of the offer at Zappos, recruited even more friends and employees to Park City, including Jamie Naughton, his chief of staff, who had worked at Zappos since 2004, and John Bunch, the senior director of business development, who had helped lead the holacracy rollout. After a few weeks, about three hundred Zappos employees, about 20 percent of the company, had taken the buyout offer, more than had left after holacracy had been introduced in 2014. In Park City, the small police department practices “community policing,” a collaborative effort between officers and the town they oversee to solve problems. In ski towns such as Park City, officials sometimes refer to this as “resort policing,” which often means that officers are more likely to give someone who breaks the rules a pass, especially if they’re not a habitual offender. The goal is to keep the peace and maintain good relationships. In some communities, it’s about building trust with police as a tool for addressing crime; in places like Park City, it can come off as policing for the privileged. In 2017, Park City was ranked as the second wealthiest small urban community in the country, according to US Census data. More than 70 percent of the homes were second residences. The town’s nickname is “party city,” meaning that there is plenty of opportunity for leeway from community policing. Each year, the annual Sundance Film Festival draws a glitzy entourage of hundreds of A-listers, all of whom stay in second homes, swanky hotel rooms, or lavishly furnished Airbnbs. The ski season brings tens of thousands of tourists eager to have fun both on and off the slopes. In a town full of wealthy residents who are constantly throwing parties, it’s hard to stand out. By early September 2020, though, Tony and his entourage were heavily testing the Park City Police Department’s patience. At Tony’s mansion, a raucous party “had been going on for 40 days straight,” one neighbor told the police department in a complaint. Tour buses and RVs lined the residential street, and music often blared late into the night, with dozens of people milling about the eighteen-acre property.

One night in early September, officers arrived at the Ranch to find dozens of lit candles scattered across the lawn and picnic tables, flickering dangerously close to trees and other brush. Glowing Tiki torches lined the walkway and the path around the small lake. A large, log-burning grill flung embers into the wind. In the middle of the backyard, two giant wicker hot-air balloon baskets were improbably set up. As part of their new business plans, Tony and his group wanted to build a hot-air balloon monopoly, snapping up smaller companies across the country and expanding the business into Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. In the backyard of the Ranch, guests were trying to recreate Burning Man, with a small wooden effigy burning nearby. The fire from the hot-air balloon baskets was visible to Tony’s neighbors and from the street. Music blared, and dozens of guests and employees of Tony milled around the property. Park City has very long, dry summers, and although the weather was growing colder, the fire hazard was particularly bad in the summer of 2020. The Park City Fire District had recently mandated that residents be allowed to use only barbecues or charcoal briquets—no open flames. So when one of Tony’s neighbors saw the flying embers from the hot-air balloons and some smoke, they called the police. A passing motorcyclist saw a shot of fire and, concerned about its origin, also called in. At the Ranch, police officers were given the runaround. Shawn Kane, the head of security, promised that he would deal with officers. Puoy Premsrirut also spoke to the police, claiming to be Tony’s personal attorney but admitting that she didn’t have a license to practice in Utah. “I’m applying for one,” she assured them. When Andy Hsieh came out, he refused to give the officers his information, not even his full name. Tony never came out. The officers left the group with a warning, but the next night, September 8, they were called once again by another neighbor complaining about the noise. This time when Park City police officers arrived at the Ranch on a windy, uncharacteristically cold night, they insisted on speaking to Tony and if not to him, then to someone else who would be held responsible on Tony’s behalf. Brushing past Kane’s security team, they walked down the driveway to the

massive entryway of the Ranch, a black and stone-columned affair with a red British telephone booth stationed beside the front door. Directly inside, a whiteboard showed the faces and names of guests; as the police officers stood there, visitors came and went, checking out with security to board one of the tour buses waiting at the front of the property to go back to Las Vegas or wherever else they had come from. At one point, Brett Gorman appeared in a tie-dyed shirt and shorts to let his dog outside. “If you need to arrest the dog, feel free, I’ll get a better sleep,” he joked. For more than twenty minutes, the officers waited outside, in the entryway. Tony never appeared. Instead, Andy Hsieh and Don Calder, another of Tony’s housemates at the Ranch, finally stepped out of the glass front door, followed by Kane. “We’re looking for Tony, the homeowner,” one of the officers, Corey Allinson, said. Again the police couldn’t get a straight answer. Calder, wearing a thin long-sleeved shirt and baggy pants, told them that Tony was asleep, and besides, the house was owned by an LLC and Tony wasn’t involved at all; it was actually owned by Mimi Pham and another member of their group. Because Pham didn’t live in Park City, she wasn’t always at the Ranch, but she helped orchestrate Tony’s life from behind the scenes. “We were under the impression that Tony was the responsible party for the home,” Allinson pressed. “We were here twice last night for noise complaints and called again tonight. We keep going through Kane, and it’s not fixing the problem. We want to know who’s in charge.” Andy Hsieh, his black hair to his shoulders and wearing a white bandana around his neck, stood looking at the officers guardedly. He quibbled with Allinson about Tony’s role, questioning him about what it meant to be the “responsible party.” “What is the nature of the complaint?” he demanded at one point during the fifteen-minute conversation. “We only had one person singing karaoke.” Allinson again explained that the officers had been called multiple times before. “Okay, but we’re just talking about tonight,” Andy said. “There was literally one person with his guitar. We could have him sing for you and you can judge

for yourself. This is harassment now.” “We don’t come here because we have nothing to do,” the other officer, Leslie Welker, said. “We literally have one guy singing acoustic guitar—it’s not even plugged in,” Andy Hsieh retorted. “It’s literally absurd.” (He was referring to the musician Daniel Park, who sang and played guitar wherever he went.) Andy started to say that he was speaking only about the current complaint, but Allinson interrupted him, telling him sternly, “I’m not—I’m talking about how it didn’t work out last night, too.” He continued, “We’re not here to say we’re giving you a ticket. When we have a problem, who can we call but security? We’re community oriented. We just want to have civil conversations. “This whole deflecting around Tony, he’s not the responsible party—that’s fine, but we need a responsible party,” he concluded. Someone had called Premsrirut, who showed up, looking disheveled, having just woken up. She described the litany of neighbor complaints as “unwarranted.” “A little noise here and there,” she countered. The officers finally wrote down the names of Calder and Premsrirut and left yet again without citing the property. Now the police department was on high alert, however, and its officers were frustrated. Internally, they emailed about all the incidents that had stacked up, noting from local property records the number of purchases in Park City that Tony had made since March: nine. The officers worried that Park City’s council members might start asking questions. After one of the incidents in September, a group of officers and fire officials left the Ranch and gathered in the street to discuss the problems at the property. Welker told a member of the fire department that Andy Hsieh was clearly obfuscating what was going on. “He’s the brother of the knot head that owns this place,” Welker said. Another member of the fire department offered this description of Tony to the group: “He’s a little eccentric, a little off his rocker, spending money hand over fist. He has all this crazy stuff going on.” Rumors about drug use at the Ranch had reached the police department, although it wasn’t on display when they visited the property, and they didn’t go inside. Still, one Park City police

officer in an undated text message asked another, “I wonder if DEA Vegas knows about this guy,” referring to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Around sunrise one September morning, as neighbor complaints reached a crescendo, Chief of Police Wade Carpenter decided to make a surprise visit to the Ranch, accompanied by a fire official. They asked a neighboring ranch owner for permission to walk through an adjacent field and up to Tony’s small lake on the back side of the mansion. The chief had heard that many mornings, Tony cooked breakfast outside on an open flame, a concern given the nearby hayfields, which could catch fire during the drought. That morning, smoke drifted off two or three firepits, rolling across the pond and across the canyon, visible as Carpenter approached. There were no flames, though, and no Tony; just the remnants of some overnight activities. One unidentified man floated on the lake in a kayak. In the backyard, the chief asked to speak to Tony, but he got the standard response: “Tony’s not here.” City leaders wanted an end to the complaints from neighbors. Some had appealed directly to the mayor and other elected officials to intervene. Local politicians had begun quietly organizing challenges to the incumbent mayor, Andy Beerman, and city council members for the 2021 election. The goings-on at the Ranch added fuel to the political gossip around town. Tony’s arrival had held promise; he was someone who might underwrite City Hall’s cultural ambitions. But locals traded rumors of a darker side at the Ranch as some of them were hired for Tony’s various projects, such as catering parties or procuring supplies throughout the day and night. “We intentionally wanted to see what was going on early in the morning,” Carpenter said later, referring to the fire hazard. Though Carpenter’s stealthy visit didn’t result in a ticket, it got the attention of Tony’s employees. Within a day or two, Carpenter was back at the Ranch for a meeting with them, led by Premsrirut, along with Kane and other members of the household whom the chief didn’t recognize. Tony never made an appearance. The chief ticked through the list of fire and noise complaints. “This is not a Burning Man community,” he admonished the group, warning them about the open flames, heating lamps, and other fire hazards, along with the noise complaints. “That’s not going to take place here.” He noticed the

hundreds of sticky notes on a board with various names, which he was told helped track Tony’s visitors to his various Park City homes. As far as Carpenter was concerned, the police had done their job, looking out for the immediate health and safety of the community. Tony could do as he chose with his own life, in his own home. “Adults are going to be adults, and people have their own free agency and make their own choices,” he commented later. After the meeting with the police, Tony’s team members gathered to discuss who would be named the responsible party in the event the police ever returned. At first no one volunteered. Mimi Pham, who acted as a long-distance house manager and joined the meeting by video, refused to volunteer, saying that she did not want to go jail again for Tony. She was referring to her arrest after an ecstasy drug bust nearly twenty years earlier, before she had met Tony. Someone else would have to step up, she told the group. The team appointed the young assistant, Gorman, who was making almost $500,000 a year, in part to publish the Blizzy Ranch Daily News. In response to the meeting, Tony’s team made a sticky-note list of fire hazards that gave a “negative vibe”: “open flame, fireworks, candles, tiki torch.” Another list outlined a “positive vibe”: “residential barbecues.” A sound level above 55 decibels was a negative vibe; below was a positive vibe. The group couldn’t completely stop burning fire—Tony’s obsession persisted. Instead, they planned to put in place a number of “mitigation tools” to help with the noise and open flames. They planned to hire a fire expert to be at the house all day and night, overseeing the group’s use of it. A guard would walk the perimeter of the property and monitor the sound levels morning, noon, and night, working with Gorman to make sure the noise was at an appropriate level. The monthly cost of the two new employees would be more than $100,000. Just one night after the police meeting at the Ranch, one of Tony’s neighbors called the department, saying he couldn’t sleep for fear that the propane heaters burning at the Ranch would spark a forest fire. Once again, the police showed up. “What are they up to here?” one of the officers at the scene asked Officer

Welker, who had once again been called out to the Ranch, the third time in a week. “Whatever the hell they want,” she replied angrily. This time, the police forwarded the resulting incident report for “illegal burning” to the city attorney to potentially issue a citation. Soon after, the cold weather drove the parties inside and the neighbors stopped calling. By the fall of 2020, Tony had become like an apparition, frequently holed up in his bedroom or flitting through the crowds of people at his mansion without stopping to talk. Sometimes he stood behind doors or partitions and observed a scene rather than interacting with anyone. He still spoke to his “core” group and the people who lived at the Ranch, such as Rachael Brown and Don Calder, but he rarely held meetings with guests or other employees. His entourage was steadily taking over his life and standing in for him when he wasn’t around. With Tony an elusive figure around the house, the group had solidified. No one had specific jobs or titles, but Andy Hsieh and Calder had risen to positions equivalent to leadership. Together, the two were trying to start a tequila business funded by Tony. Calder was now considered part of the “chief of staff team,” along with Brown, Andy, Suzie Baleson, and Elizabeth Pezzello. Calder had several tasks assigned to him, some vague and some specific, including security and bringing in art. Pezzello, meanwhile, was in charge of all of Tony’s outside communication, and she and her fiancé, Gorman, drove a Jaguar SUV they parked at the top of the Ranch’s driveway, while Baleson drove a two-year-old Audi. Soon Tony discovered about $500,000 in expenses that were unaccounted for. He asked Mimi Pham to step in and monitor spending. Andy Hsieh was involved in a lot of the overall planning, orchestrating dozens of new employees and contractors. He was also in line for the same 10 percent commissions available to Tony’s other employees. He helped convince an old friend, Tony Lee, a financial adviser and former banker, to join the team in Park City. Lee had long ago helped save Zappos after the dot-com bust by providing financing while he was at Wells Fargo, but he had long resisted efforts

to get him to work for Tony. This time, Tony wanted him to manage the finances of his Park City ventures and scrutinize potential investments. Andy and another of Tony’s employees competed to convince Lee to work for him, to get the 10 percent commission. Lee eventually accepted the double salary offer of $1.5 million—of which Andy Hsieh would get $150,000. At the Ranch, Andy often carried small liquor bottles in his pocket, handing out shots to employees and guests. He stored dozens of boxes of nitrous oxide canisters, ordered online from Whip-It!, stacked neatly on the shelves in his room at the Ranch, which was called “the treehouse” by the group. His sweatshirts hung on hangers nearby. Brown acted almost like a spiritual adviser, recommending books to other employees to read. One she recommended, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, urges readers to journey into their subconsciousness and listen to their internal voices. “You do hear it when it talks, don’t you?” the book’s author, Michael A. Singer, asked in the first chapter. “Make it say ‘hello’ right now. Say it over and over a few times. Now shout it inside! Can you hear yourself saying ‘hello’ inside? Of course you can. There is a voice talking.” One pyramid of sticky notes described the group as THE CLAN OF THE WOLF HEART above Tony’s name, in all caps. “Intelligent wisdom,” read one sticky note in the cluster. “Do Not Silence,” read another. “Power of Inner Voice.” “Forgive and Encourage.” “Create spiritual boundaries.” “Master yourself!” That set of sticky notes and another grouping appeared to be based on decks of oracle cards from the Australian spiritual teacher Alana Fairchild. Fairchild says she connects with the Universal Divine Mother through a “unique divine feminine energy work modality called The Kuan Yin Transmission,” according to her website, which shows a picture of a middle-aged woman in flowing clothing half smiling with her eyes closed. Tony reached out to her twice to speak about his desire for world peace, inviting her to visit Utah to help accomplish the goal, Fairchild said later. “I would have liked to have known him

better, and learn about his plans, and I may have been able to help him in some way, but none of those things eventuated.” Still, Tony was a fan of hers and bought decks of her oracle cards, about which Fairchild explains in a video on her website that “each deck is its own spiritual practice.” The sticky notes described Tony and his group as “Earth Warriors, healers and transformation leaders”: “New way of Thinking Loving Being” “Our time has come!”

Blizzy, Tony’s dog, whom Brown and Tony referred to as a “spiritual guide,” had become almost a mythical figure for the group. The glass wall at the end of the dining room at the Ranch featured photos of Blizzy posing with celebrities. Everything carried Blizzy’s name, including the newsletter that Brett Gorman produced, which also gave updates on the small terrier mix: “Blizzy had dog food for his first meal and decided to have chicken and rice on the side,” read one story after Blizzy had returned from a trip with Tony. The group conceptualized a new property development called the Blizzy Hotel and Ice Bar. Soon most of the group referred to the mansion on Aspen Springs Drive as Blizzy Ranch. They planned to set up a livestream of the dog, to be called the “Blizzy Cam.” Though some people treat their pets like children, Tony’s devotion to Blizzy was on another level entirely. Blizzy was his only dependent, his one constant, having been enmeshed in his life for the last five years. He had adopted Blizzy, who was now more than ten years old and had been sick and half blind for some time. One day, the dog disappeared. The group went searching for him around the Ranch but couldn’t find him. They assumed that he had gone off by himself to die. Tony was devastated. He and his employees began planning a special memorial befitting an animal of such stature.

Jewel continued to worry about Tony after she left, and she couldn’t reach him. From Aspen, where she was staying for the summer, she sent him a two-page typed letter, alternating between serious concern and tough love. “I need to be clear,” she wrote. “You sound like a crazy person when you are talking and no one seems to be telling you. Its because you are also very smart. And they are used to you being eccentric. What you are saying isn’t smart. Its mental. And very smart people see through you and know the difference. Your brilliance for creating connections is killed by the fantasy world you are living in. You can’t even connect with me or anyone who comes to the house. It’s sad. I find it incredibly sad, and I don’t think this is your time to die.” She continued, “You need to ask yourself one question: do you want to die this year or next—Are you done helping the world? If you can die and not feel like you have failed, then I cannot stop you from slipping further into your selfmade fantasy world until your organs fail. But if you have any hint that it would be an embarrassing waste of human talent to let yourself die in your underwear and on a ranch surrounded by 25 security guards and staff because your ego wouldn’t let you see you need help, then let’s turn this around before there is no coming back. “Please get grounded,” she wrote in conclusion. “If you want to save the planet, come back to earth and get to work in a way that will make a difference. “I say this with love, and as possibly the only person in your circle who is not on your payroll.” Jewel worried that if she mailed the letter, someone in Tony’s group would intercept it. She didn’t trust anyone in Park City, but at least she and her team knew Justin Weniger, having worked with him previously in his role organizing the annual Life Is Beautiful music festival in Las Vegas. When she had visited, Weniger kept assuring Jewel and her team that he was trying to help and that he was sticking by Tony to keep him safe from the others. Jewel’s team sent the letter to him in Park City, with strict instructions to hand deliver it to Tony privately, when no one was around. Jewel’s letter ended up posted at the Ranch for all to see, on a window looking out into the backyard of the property. Someone arranged blue and pink sticky notes all around it and scrawled lines from the letter in bubbly

handwriting. “I don’t think you’re well…” was written on one. “It was great seeing you!” said another and “I am going to be blunt.” The group was mocking it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE CULT OF TONY HSIEH

Park City, August–October 2020

Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you. —Tony Hsieh

It was November 2010, and Tony was on his Delivering Happiness bus tour,

stopped in Los Angeles. His skin glowed, and his eyes were clear; his black hair was shaved close to his head. His body was a normal weight, and he wore his trademark T-shirt and jeans. He was surrounded by a small group of friends and employees, all of them relaxed and happy. In one corner of the large bus, a twoman band called Rabbit! had set up to play. Ashton, the guitar player, wore a furry hat that looked like a bear’s head. Devin, who sang, held a small orangeand-white keyboard in the shape of a grinning cat. The keys were the cat’s teeth, and pressing them produced a “meow” sound. “We hope you enjoy the meowsic,” Devin told Tony and his friends, who sat around the duo inside the bus. Tony loved the band, which was like a cross between the children’s musician Raffi and the comedy team Flight of the Conchords, because their lyrics were always positive and upbeat. Happy. He later used their songs for Zappos’ customer service hold music. That day, Rabbit! played a silly, catchy song called “Possibility” that Tony had actually helped write after Ashton had texted him, at a loss for a specific lyric: We can go swimming on the moon

We could live inside a big balloon Plant a garden underneath the sea We could give our love and still be free Everything’s a possibility, when everything’s a possibility.

Tony held a rattle in the shape of a bee—a baby’s toy—shaking it as the musicians sang on the Delivering Happiness tour bus, smiling his mischievous grin, the one that meant he was happy. Everyone around him shook rattles, too, laughing and swaying to the music. That memory of Tony is one that Mark Guadagnoli can still see clearly, as if it had happened the week before instead of a decade earlier. Dr. Guadagnoli, a longtime professor of neuroscience at the Kerk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had been on the bus with his two children, who referred to Tony as their uncle. They all ended up in a video of the production by Rabbit! Tony somehow always engineered moments like these—spontaneous minutes or hours of joy that would evaporate into the humdrum of everyday life but would always be remembered. In the summer of 2020, Dr. Guadagnoli became one of several of Tony’s friends outside Park City who say they called the local police, trying to get them to help Tony, as word of his worsening condition spread among his friends in Las Vegas. Several of Tony’s friends had visited and found the situation very upsetting. Dr. Guadagnoli had met Tony through Fred Mossler in the early 2000s. Mossler and Guadagnoli’s sons were friends and had competed in a math competition together. At an introductory lunch with Mossler, Tony, and Alfred Lin, Dr. Guadagnoli told the group about his universal learning theory: if you studied or practiced something a certain way, you could learn things three or four times faster. Tony, keenly interested in his ideas, had promptly offered him a job. At Zappos, then still located in Henderson, Nevada, Tony charged Dr. Guadagnoli with creating what was then known as Zappos University, an organization that would teach other companies about Zappos’ culture and happiness mission, as well as fun classes, such as yoga and photography, for

employees. Guadagnoli sat with Tony, Mossler, and Lin in an area of the company known as “executive row.” Tony hated that name; it was far too corporate. When Tony was grumbling about it one day, Dr. Guadagnoli suggested, “Let’s call it ‘monkey row’ instead.” Tony thought it was a great idea. Dr. Guadagnoli and another employee had netting strung above the row of desks and filled it with stuffed monkeys and other creatures. Tony later added more decorations, so it looked like a jungle. As a result, he bestowed the title of “head zookeeper” on Dr. Guadagnoli. Dr. Guadagnoli stayed at Zappos only a couple of years before returning to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but he remained friends with Tony over the ensuing two decades. He occasionally did favors for him—coming up with metrics to measure the Downtown Project’s success, working on the holacracy integration—but he never charged Tony. He believed that a person should just naturally help his or her friends, unlike some of the people he observed around Tony. In mid-August 2020, ten years after the Delivering Happiness bus tour, Dr. Guadagnoli was living in the same house in Henderson, Nevada, when he called the Park City Police Department, around the time Jewel was visiting the Ranch. He hadn’t physically seen Tony in months, but he knew something was very wrong with his old friend. The problems had started in the spring. When Dr. Guadagnoli had texted Tony to say hi, as was normal, he had received responses that increasingly didn’t sound like Tony. After two decades of messaging his friend, the new replies sounded as though they were from an imposter, and Dr. Guadagnoli began to suspect they had been written by Tony’s new assistant, Elizabeth Pezzello. Tony, about to embark on his digital detox, had introduced the two of them over text so Pezzello could arrange a visit to Park City for Dr. Guadagnoli. Because he had been separately texting her, he recognized the cadence in her replies from “Tony.” Every time Dr. Guadagnoli tried to plan his trip to Park City, he was told by the assistants that Tony was suddenly out of town. But he knew his friend would never be so flaky. He planned multiple trips, each one canceled at the last

minute. He thought about just showing up without warning but shied away after other friends of Tony’s in Las Vegas described confronting a “security force” at the Ranch that would likely block him. He considered contacting Tony’s brother, Andy Hsieh, whom he had worked with at Zappos nearly two decades earlier. But mutual friends of Tony told him that Andy Hsieh might not help, because they weren’t sure if “he was part of the group,” he recalled later. Finally, from the bedroom office of his home in Henderson in August 2020, he called the Park City Police Department and implored officers there to make what’s known as a welfare check on Tony. Welfare or wellness checks are initiated by family members or friends of a loved one who are concerned about their well-being: an elderly relative is living alone and can’t be reached; a parent is worried about an adult child. In other cases, loved ones are concerned that a person might be hurt by or hurt themselves or others. This is part of the routine work of the police force. No federal laws govern how a police officer should respond to a welfare check request. Across the country, each police department handles them differently, explained Ron Bruno, a retired longtime police officer in Salt Lake City, who is now the executive director of CIT International, an advocacy organization for best practices in crisis response. The organization assists communities to develop programs to reform police response, including teaching certain patrol officers how to make welfare checks and respond to mental health calls. Some police departments train every officer how to respond; others seek volunteers from among their ranks. Responding to a call relies heavily on the discretion of the officer who is dispatched, said Bruno. If someone has called in because he or she can’t reach a friend or family member, one officer might undertake an extensive search of the premises, such as checking the mailbox for stacked-up mail or looking in windows, while another might knock on the door and leave if no one answers. In recent years, some agencies have been considering building civilian task forces to handle the calls instead. In early 2021, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in Park City became among the first in Utah to launch a mobile crisis outreach team for psychiatric calls, putting the onus of response into the hands

of trained mental health experts rather than deputies at the agency. Although deputy sheriffs go through training to handle the calls, “we’re not the appropriate professionals to deal with a mental health crisis,” said Lieutenant Andrew Wright at the sheriff’s office. “Our role is to protect the public.” The sheriff’s office had been limited to two options: taking a person to a mental health crisis unit at a hospital for a forced stay or to jail if there had been a criminal violation. The new team connected those in crisis with trained professionals who could stabilize people on-site and direct them to outpatient mental health resources. A similar pilot program offered in New York City in 2021 reduced hospitalizations, early data showed. Even if Summit County’s new team had been in place, Tony’s properties fell under Park City police jurisdiction, so the sheriff’s office would not have responded to any calls. When Dr. Guadagnoli reached the Park City Police Department in August, he told an officer that he wanted them to perform a wellness check on a friend who lived there. The officer, whose name he wrote down and subsequently lost, first asked him a series of questions about himself before turning to Tony’s situation. Dr. Guadagnoli filled him in on his concerns, including that the people around Tony might not be helping him, and the officer agreed that the police department would do a wellness check, he recalled later. The officer promised to call Dr. Guadagnoli back in an hour, after it was done. Dr. Guadagnoli asked for his cell phone number so he could reach him more easily, but the officer said to call the main dispatch line instead. Still, Dr. Guadagnoli thought he might finally get some answers about what was going on with Tony. An hour passed, then two. After three hours, Dr. Guadagnoli called the dispatch line again. When he was patched through to the officer, he learned that he had not visited the house in search of Tony. “I know somebody at the house, and they told me everything is fine,” the officer told Dr. Guadagnoli, he recalled later. Unbeknownst to Dr. Guadagnoli, the officer had called Suzie Baleson, who didn’t live with Tony, but told him that Tony was going through some life changes and didn’t want to be contacted, according to Park City police. Baleson

assured the officer that Tony was fine and under the care of a doctor. He would be happy to meet with the police, she added. On the call, Dr. Guadagnoli’s frustration was mounting. “Let me get this straight,” he told the officer. “You called somebody to talk to them about Tony instead of going there?” “I know the person,” the officer explained, “and I trust them, and they said everything is fine.” The officer didn’t give Baleson’s name. Irritated and concerned, Dr. Guadagnoli hung up to plan his next move. “That’s when things got very weird,” he said later. Shortly after he hung up with the police department, Dr. Guadagnoli got a text from one of Tony’s assistants in Park City. Suddenly, after weeks of trying to schedule something without success, Tony wanted to see him, and he was free that very weekend, the assistant wrote. “Great,” Dr. Guadagnoli typed back, ignoring the coincidence. “I’ll be there Friday.” Immediately the assistant texted that they would send a bus to drive Dr. Guadagnoli to Park City. He declined, not wanting to ride a bus with a lot of people during the pandemic, and said he preferred to fly. The assistant assured him that it would be a private bus that they would send to Las Vegas. They were insistent. (The group also took that strange approach with others who tried to visit Park City, regardless if the person was a longtime acquaintance of Tony or a newcomer.) Dr. Guadagnoli had no idea why they would pressure him to take a private bus, but the whole episode made him very concerned that something nefarious was going on. It seemed clear to him that there was some kind of communication between the police and the people in the house. He certainly wasn’t getting onto a bus alone at that point. It was starting to sound as though he himself might be in danger somehow. He stopped texting with Tony’s assistant and called his personal attorney, outlining the events that had just transpired. His lawyer advised him, for his own personal safety, to stop engaging with the group. So he did. The Park City police did end up going to check on Tony, according to the police department. Much as he had done during his parents’ intervention attempt two weeks earlier, Tony assured officers he was fine. With his brother,

Andy Hsieh, and his head of security, Shawn Kane, by his side, he complained about the police constantly checking on him and asked for privacy. The Park City Police Department never told Dr. Guadagnoli that they had talked to Tony. As he spoke about the incident almost a year later, Dr. Guadagnoli said he felt physically ill recalling the series of events, and was sickened to learn the police department had never followed up with him. He felt he had never reached Tony. By the end of the summer of 2020, Suzie Baleson was getting frustrated with the attempts by outside friends to try to reach Tony through the police. She explained to two of Tony’s friends who were visiting from Las Vegas that the calls created more work for her. Every time someone called the police, she had to go over to the Ranch if she wasn’t already there—she was living in one of Tony’s rental properties nearby—and clean up the nitrous oxide canisters and trash. She also had to make sure that Tony was dressed, as he was usually just in his underwear now. Meanwhile, Baleson was angling for projects with Park City leaders. Park City mayor Andy Beerman had heard earlier in the year that Tony had moved to town and was buying up properties across the city. Some of the business owners had told him about the 10X plan and how Tony was floating them. Especially in the midst of a global pandemic, a wealthy benefactor such as Tony could be a godsend to the small town. Mayor Beerman, who oversees a liberal town in a conservative state, took office in 2018 after serving as a city councilor. A skilled rock climber, he had planned to summit Mount Aconcagua in Argentina if he didn’t win. He and his wife, Thea, have lived in Park City since the 1990s and once operated the Treasure Mountain Inn on Main Street. Tall, with a shock of blond hair falling over his forehead, he is a longtime “Parkite,” as the locals call themselves. In Park City, the city manager actually runs the town, with the police department reporting to them. The mayor oversees the city council and the mayoralty is a part-time position, although it often becomes full-time work. The

police department and other city agencies report to the city manager, who keeps the mayor and his office in the loop on important events. At around the time Mayor Beerman heard about Tony in the summer of 2020, he was under fire after City Hall had subsidized artists to paint several murals including the words BLACK LIVES MATTER across Main Street. Soon after, vandals painted over the BLACK and the fist that served as the dot of the i in one of the three-hundred-foot-long murals, sparking polarizing, heated debates among community members during the ensuing days. One of Park City’s deputy city managers, Sarah Pearce, had been introduced to Mimi Pham by a Sundance Film Festival contact and wrote to her in late July, “We are thrilled to learn of Tony’s interest in Park City and welcome an opportunity to engage with him. Mayor Andy Beerman is particularly interested in connecting.” Tony’s group began inviting Mayor Beerman to the Ranch, but he demurred. “He’s an enigma, and I’m playing a little hard to get,” Mayor Beerman wrote Pearce about Tony. “They’ve been trying to get me to attend parties, and I want a sit-down.” By the start of the fall, Baleson was working with the mayor on the wellness initiative that would get residents together to practice yoga at the town’s wide, grassy square off Main Street. The community classes would be a mix of power yoga and something known as a “Wellth Session,” named for Baleson’s Wellth Collective. The classes would combine meditation and healing music and be led by Branden Collinsworth, the performance coach who had been in town in August 2020, at the same time as Jewel. Mayor Beerman was enthusiastic about Baleson’s plans. After a tour of the Ranch with his wife, Thea, he emailed Baleson in late September, thanking her for the tour and the visit. Clearly the Ranch had been cleaned beforehand. “It was nice to meet everyone and learn more about what you’re doing,” he wrote. “I’m excited by all [the] new and positive energy in such a crazy time. Your ‘stoke’ reminds us of why we are so lucky to live here.” Mayor Beerman invited Baleson to a fundraiser for his friend Congressman Ben McAdams, and Baleson promised that she and Justin Weniger would attend and contribute. He also invited her to his house for dinner with him and his

wife. Baleson, meanwhile, called Mayor Beerman “very inspiring” and “an agent of change as both a citizen and mayor” in an email to him. Baleson and Weniger did attend the fundraiser for McAdams but do not appear to have made a donation to his campaign. “We are all so grateful to be in a town led by people who care so much and put their heart into what they do,” Baleson wrote to Mayor Beerman. “Thank you for spending so much time with us.” In private meetings about the group’s business development plans in the late summer and early fall of 2020, Tony was often incoherent, detailing ideas that increasingly made little sense or agreeing to pay for other of the group’s outlandish plans with no vetting. He was paranoid and spoke quickly. He thought his parents were watching him and feared that Tyler Williams was going to show up at the door. Sometimes, usually when he wasn’t doing nitrous oxide, Tony was sharp, like his old self. But those moments were becoming fewer and farther between. He still refused to sleep, and he continued to lose weight. Tony had spent his whole life giving, often receiving nothing in return but love and friendship. It had worked for years, because he had usually been surrounded by true friends, people who truly loved him. Now his generosity took a darker, more sinister turn: he was being thoroughly exploited. The plans detailed on sticky notes no longer had much to do with world peace, or if they did, the connection was a tenuous one. They also included ideas to supply Tony and his entourage with more alcohol and drugs, at a time when he clearly was using too much of both. Across Tony’s fleet of buses, the group wanted to design a drone that could fly between the seats, carrying Fernet to passengers. Psychedelic mushrooms were harder to buy during the pandemic, so they researched how to grow and cultivate them at the Ranch using Uncle Ben’s instant rice as a bed. Their other ideas included procuring gold somehow, and in fact they had hidden gold throughout the grounds of the Ranch. The group wanted to set up a livestream of a goldfish in a bowl being fed. In India, they found a commune

that seemed to operate with like-minded ideas about spirituality and drugs, marking it for a possible partnership. They targeted a geothermal site in Joshua Tree National Park in southern California for future growth. They made lists and lists of movie stars and directors who might somehow want to help build a movie studio: Keira Knightley? Jerry Seinfeld? Tony had told some visitors that rather than just continue with his digital detox on his own, the whole group would go completely offline. No one would be able to reach them. Inside the Ranch, the group installed mirrors everywhere and built a giant iguana exhibit, ostensibly to replace Blizzy. After disappearing earlier in the fall, Blizzy came back one day, sick and skinny, wandering in during the special memorial that the group was holding for him. Tony and Rachael Brown were thrilled. At least some of the people around Tony seemed to realize how sick he had become. At one point, the group, at the direction of Justin Weniger, had tried hiring an in-house doctor for Tony. But, much as Jewel had, the doctor had warned that if Tony didn’t stop taking drugs and improve his physical condition, he would die within months. Tony declined to follow his advice. The doctor quit. Some members of the group, most notably those who had known him a long time, were caught up in Tony’s charisma, and due to that and their devotion to him, they almost didn’t seem to be able to realize the severity of the situation, particularly as he continued to claim that he didn’t have a problem. His moments of clarity helped convince them that he was okay. This was a person they had idolized for so long and put on a pedestal. Tony kept reminding some of his friends that the last phase of his “metamorphosis” in Park City involved sobriety and they would have to wait only until he reached that stage. Others, such as some of the new assistants and employees who hadn’t known Tony previously, seemed to believe that everything around them was normal—it didn’t, after all, sound much different to them than the stories they had heard about his early years in Las Vegas, including the sticky notes. Everyone feared to some extent being exiled from the group, as Tyler Williams, Ryan Doherty, and even Tony’s parents had been. Andy Hsieh’s

presence helped normalize everything. If Tony’s brother was there, surely everything must be okay? Tony used a rating system, tallied on sticky notes around the Ranch under each individual’s name, to show who was in favor at the moment. No one wanted to fall short. There were scores for consistency, authority, and stress. “Job offer on hold for any new people until Mimi gives a score of 100,” one sticky note read. The groups closest to Tony made several attempts to try to help him, but each one was stymied by infighting among its members or by Tony’s psychosis and drug addiction. No one really knew the best way to get through to him. One morning in the late summer of 2020, Tony told Don Calder, who was living with him at the Ranch, that he needed to go to the hospital. But as Calder, Andy Hsieh, and the others sat in the waiting room, they suddenly saw Tony run out of a room, down the stairs, and out the front door. He had been fairly lucid going in, but once outside, he complained that the wait had been too long and he could design a far better hospital than the one they were at. He started listing all the design flaws of the building. He demanded that the group take a photo in front of the hospital and then take him home. Meanwhile, Suzie Baleson believed that she could help get Tony back on track in a holistic way. She had decided to turn the ground floor of the Ranch into a wellness center with yoga teachers and meditation sessions, much like a smaller, more targeted version of what she was planning for Park City with Mayor Beerman. She tapped Collinsworth, the performance coach, who agreed to help plan the center for a consulting fee, not the outrageous salary Tony had earlier offered. He commuted from Las Vegas instead of moving to Park City. He began hiring high-end fitness instructors from around the country and organizing equipment: Pelotons, kettlebell sets, and an air compression device to help with blood circulation that cost nearly $1,000. The costs stacked up, and the total price of the wellness center might have approached $1 million. Because the organizer of each of Tony’s development projects received at least a 10 percent commission, Baleson was in line to collect as much as $100,000.

But then, just as the project was nearing completion after many weeks, it fell apart. Mimi Pham, still concerned about the roughly $500,000 in unexplained expenses, found out about the project and was angry that Baleson would receive the commission instead of her. The wellness center, an attempt to help Tony, was abruptly canceled. Baleson and Pham often butted heads as they vied to be in charge of Tony’s projects and the funding of them. One sticky note at the Ranch under “Tony want” advised, “Don’t piss off Mimi”; another under “Suzie need” said, “Don’t piss off Suzie.” Pham, who had worked closely with Tony for much longer than Baleson had, told Tony that he would have to pay a “disloyalty penalty” of $30,000 for every day that Baleson remained on Tony’s properties. She began invoicing Tony for the additional money in mid-September 2020. After eight weeks, he owed her $1.8 million. He ended up paying $420,000 for the right to keep Baleson involved in his plans. Pham had her own ambitions during the summer and fall of 2020. In July, during the same week Tony’s parents witnessed their son’s manic behavior, Tony struck a $10 million movie deal on a Post-it note with Pham’s boyfriend, Roberto Grande. Along with Tony’s recent obsession over live video streaming, he wanted to invest in documentary filmmaking. He asked for a meeting with the leaders of a respected company in Los Angeles, XTR, founded by Bryn Mooser, whom he’d met at a downtown Las Vegas event years earlier. Mooser’s previous producing work included two films that had received Academy Award nominations for best short documentary. “Lifeboat” in 2018 had profiled volunteers saving North African migrants escaping from Libya by sea; “Body Team 12,” released in 2015, followed a Liberian Red Cross worker tasked with collecting bodies during the Ebola outbreak. Mooser and another XTR rep went to Park City to meet with Tony, Pham, and Grande to talk about the future of documentaries and how Tony could invest. Ultimately, Tony agreed to spend $10 million to support various films,

along with the launch of a new streaming service, Documentary Plus. The deal was sketched out on a sticky note, including a $1 million commission to be paid to Grande. Tony didn’t know Roberto Grande well. Grande was a lawyer who had moved into entertainment marketing in Los Angeles, including cofounding a small firm in 2014 called Tier Zero Agency that offered “forward strategy and innovation” as well as some small-time movie producing. But a friend of Pham was a friend of Tony. Tony extended his trust in Pham to her boyfriend and also spoke about him heading up other projects in Park City. Pham and Grande would later file a lawsuit over the XTR deal, involving the Hsieh family. Tony’s family said later in court filings that she had “seriously overstated” her boyfriend’s experience in the entertainment industry. By the fall of 2020, the investment agreement between Tony, Pham, and Grande had increased to $17.5 million—in turn increasing Grande’s 10 percent commission to $1.75 million. “Tony is one of the most visionary entrepreneurs of our time and we’re thrilled to have his big ideas and passion at the table alongside us,” Mooser said in October 2020 when announcing the deal to the website Deadline. XTR and Mooser were unaware of his declining health and never had direct contact with him after the initial meeting. According to the Hsieh family, XTR held up its end of the investment agreement, while Pham and Grande provided few actual services, which the couple deny. Tony had already spent tens of millions of dollars on real estate and investments in the roughly six months he had lived in Park City. By comparison, in Las Vegas, he had committed $200 million of his $350 million Downtown Project to real estate and urban development, and that amount was expected to last several years. In Park City, Tony’s spending quickly escalated, with Post-it notes showing tens of millions of dollars more on contracts, hiring, and business ideas. For every new project proposed, it seemed, a new LLC was created and added to a complex web of companies associated with Tony’s name. In October 2020, no longer the CEO of Zappos, Tony bought the elevenstory Zappos headquarters in downtown Las Vegas—the former City Hall building—for $65 million from an ownership group that included other Las

Vegas developers. They had bought the building from the city in 2012 for $18 million and leased it to Zappos. Among the owners was Andrew Donner, who also managed real estate for the Downtown Project and was a longtime friend of Tony. “Tony is one infectious guy,” Donner once said. “I’m a believer.” The property had been listed for sale since at least April 2019, with no listing price. Tony paid nearly four times the price of the 2012 deal, and it’s unclear why he agreed to spend that much. He told his friends in Park City that he wanted to buy the property essentially to stick it to Amazon. He was still upset over his breakup with the company, unable to see his own role in the situation. If he owned the property, Amazon couldn’t really get rid of him; he would be the landlord of Zappos. That sort of vindictive behavior—buying a building to get back at someone—was unlike Tony, who wouldn’t have considered a move like that even a year earlier. The investment, on the one hand, could be viewed as a safe bet with a tenant such as Zappos, a successful company so intertwined with the building and with Las Vegas. But on the other hand, the US office building market was flailing in 2020 given the large number of employees working from home during the pandemic and companies suddenly reevaluating how much physical office space they really needed. Still, Tony’s $65 million deal was signed on October 20. By that time, he was almost entirely disconnected from his family and close friends in Las Vegas. Some of his friends who had moved to Park City but didn’t live at the Ranch had trouble seeing him. Tony had long since stopped answering texts or emails, and Pezzello, who was in charge of his communications, often failed to do so on his behalf. At one point during the summer of 2020, Pham, increasingly frustrated with the situation and with Baleson, had insisted that Tony show up to regular FaceTime calls with her. He didn’t often make those. She finally cut off the group’s credit cards, which were funded by Tony, but still the spending continued. Even Tony’s driver, Steve Moroney, who was still in Park City to work for Tony, had been shut out. He was living at the DoubleTree hotel, still being paid but with nothing to do. As the weather turned cooler in October and the peak of the stunning fall foliage passed, Tony’s group planned the kind of childlike events they thought

would make him happy: pajama nights, comedy nights, and family sushi nights. There was a week of activities for Halloween, including pumpkin carving and trick-or-treating. They planned to build Tony a soup bar. Tony had always loved soup.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE SHED

Park City, October 2020 New London, Connecticut, November 2020

I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. —James Baldwin

Andy Hsieh pounded on the door of the pool shed, trying to rouse his brother.

It was freezing outside in the middle of November 2020 in New London, Connecticut, and the backyard of the house at 500 Pequot Avenue was dark, the rectangular pool covered. The residential street abutting the Thames River was silent. Tony had locked himself into the three-hundred-square-foot shed attached to the house with only a thin blanket and a propane space heater to keep him warm. He nestled among a jumble of lawn chairs, beach floaties, and pool toys, his whippets lying next to him. He lit a candle. The Hsieh brothers, along with Daniel Park, Elizabeth Pezzello, and Brett Gorman, were staying at Rachael Brown’s house, leaving for Hawaii in the early morning of Wednesday, November 18. The Mercedes vans hired to take them to a nearby airport were waiting outside on the dimly lit street. A private jet stood by to fly the group to Maui. Tony had not wanted to go to Hawaii, an odd departure for him. Hawaii was one of his favorite places, and he usually went several times a year. But when

Pezzello and Gorman had pitched the trip in Park City in the fall of 2020 with a cute PowerPoint presentation explaining why a group trip would be a good idea, Tony had been skeptical. He had asked them how much it would cost. He, of course, would be paying. About $250,000, they told him. Possibly this was another attempt, however expensive, to get Tony out of Park City, where he might start to recover in a different environment. But whatever the reason Pezzello and Gorman wanted to go, Tony told them no. The discussion might have ended there, but then Brown had taken up the case, telling Tony that she wanted to go and that they all needed a break from Park City. Grudgingly, Tony had agreed. Because of his resistance, the previous day at Brown’s house had been tense. Brown and Tony had bickered nonstop until finally, late at night, their annoyance at each other had erupted into a full-blown fight. Brown was also annoyed about the state of her house. She preferred it clean and was upset that Tony left candles, trash, and nitrous oxide canisters everywhere he went. The New London Fire Department had been called in the middle of the night earlier that week in mid-November 2020 when a fire alarm had gone off, triggering an automatic call for help from Brown’s security system. Eight firefighters, including the battalion chief, two fire engines, and an ambulance had been dispatched to Brown’s house—a typical but very resource-intensive response. At the door, one of Tony’s employees traveling with the group had assured them the alarm had been due to a cooking accident and they didn’t need assistance. Then, within an hour, the alarm had gone off again. This time the firefighters had insisted on going inside, despite the group imploring them not to investigate. In the basement, firefighters had found “a slight smoke condition,” they later wrote in a report of the incident. Light smoke had filled the air. There was melted plastic on the stove top and cardboard that was hot to the touch. Firefighters had noted an unattended candle in “an unsafe location.” They had put it out. As the homeowner, Brown had been forced to deal with the situation in the middle of the night. She had worked with the firefighters to cool all the hot objects in a bucket of water.

All of that might have been tolerated at the Ranch in Park City, but this was Brown’s personal space. Finally, as night fell on Tuesday, November 17, she ordered Tony out of her house. Tony told Brown that the beach wasn’t part of her property, and she couldn’t make him leave. So he wandered outside the fence from Brown’s backyard to the small beach abutting the wide Thames River. At night, it would have been almost pitch black, the moon a thin sliver in the sky. Andy Hsieh and Brett Gorman tried to mediate the fight. One of them suggested that Tony stay in the shed for a few hours until it was time to go to Hawaii. Tony sometimes used it as a space in which to meditate. At about 3:30 a.m., after Tony had been in the shed for several hours, Andy Hsieh went to check on his brother for the last time. Tony told him that he needed five more minutes before they left for the airport. Andy Hsieh agreed and went back into the house. Soon he came outside again with Gorman and began walking across the yard toward the shed. Suddenly a strange hissing noise filled the darkness, like a valve releasing pressure. A nearby carbon monoxide alarm started beeping. They ran to the wooden structure and tried to pull the door open but found it locked. They needed a key code they didn’t have. They yelled for Tony, but he didn’t answer. Andy Hsieh dashed back into Brown’s house, trying to find a heavy object to help get inside. Smoke poured through the cracks in the shed door. Next door, one of the neighbors on Pequot Avenue, Patricia Richardson, woke up when she heard screaming outside. “Tony!” her neighbors yelled. “Tony! Tony!” A month earlier, in late October 2020, Tony had decided he wanted to fly to Alaska. A friend of his, Brock Pierce, was campaigning for US president in the upcoming national election as an independent, and Tony told his employees in Park City that he wanted to go help him. Pierce is a former child actor, appearing in both Mighty Ducks films in the 1990s and starring alongside Sinbad in First Kid, where he played the rebellious thirteen-year-old son of the president. Later in life, Pierce had invested heavily in Bitcoin and

cryptocurrencies, appearing at one point on Forbes’ list of Cryptocurrency’s Wealthiest People, with an estimated fortune of $1 billion. Pierce had met Tony years earlier and had sometimes visited him in Las Vegas. The two shared a love of Burning Man. After moving to Puerto Rico, Pierce had aspired to help the US territory recover from a debt crisis and the damage caused by Hurricane Maria. A 2018 Rolling Stone profile took a more whimsical view of his plans, saying he wanted to build a “Burning Man Utopia,” a characterization Mr. Pierce disagrees with. Much as Tony had done in Las Vegas with entrepreneurs, Pierce enticed crypto startups to move to the Caribbean island. “In nearly 10 full days together, I rarely saw him sleep in a bed or eat a full meal,” the Rolling Stone reporter observed of Pierce. “He crashed on random couches, in the back seat of cars, on tables at bars. He gave away necklaces, bracelets, food, money, time, tequila, you name it.” He and Tony, Pierce said later, were kindred spirits, “visionary pioneer types.” “We don’t see the world for what it is, but what it can be,” he observed. They also seemed to share the same childlike optimism about the people around them. Pierce told Rolling Stone that he didn’t know some of the people he invited to join his business ventures. “If you are making that effort, I’m gonna trust you,” he said. Pierce’s quixotic campaign, in the midst of the contentious race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, barely made headlines. Later Pierce explained that he had run as “an exploratory mission to understand the mechanics of our political system.” With his shoulder-length blond hair tucked under a trucker’s hat, Pierce based his campaign on a platform of crypto, criticism of the two-party system, greater use by government of technology, universal basic income, single-payer health care, and the legalization of marijuana. He drove a tour bus through Iowa and to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and across the country to New York City. “I’d start by pardoning and expunging every person in our criminal justice system for nonviolent cannabis-related crimes,” he said in one campaign video on Instagram.

Tony heard what Pierce was up to and told him on a phone call in the fall of 2020, “I want to come see that.” In October, he and several members of his Park City group flew to Anchorage, where Pierce was in town for a few days. They followed him on the campaign trail, where he was pulling eighteen-hour days meeting with locals and legislators. Pierce said that Tony and his group hadn’t technically helped him campaign and had been more of a distraction than anything else. Along the way, Tony’s group took hits of nitrous oxide, even in public at a restaurant. At one point, Tony visited a rabbi at a nearby synagogue for reasons that were unclear. Pierce didn’t think that Tony’s drug use was the cause of the problems he was facing, but the result. Instead, he thought, Tony wasn’t “grounded.” “People like Tony, they’re surrounded by people who are generally lying to them because everyone wants something,” he said later. “So you start to become disassociated from reality. I deal with this as well. It’s very easy to be disconnected when you’re not grounded. He didn’t have a clear vision of what his next thing would be.” Riding on a bus with his entourage and Pierce one day, Tony stood up and proclaimed that he would give them all $1 million each. It didn’t sound like his normal generosity, though. It sounded more like the stunt he had pulled in Montana, when, high on mushrooms, he had texted his friends and offered them a $1 million reward for finding him. In Alaska, some of his employees looked pleased at the offer. Pierce brushed it off. “Aww, man, I don’t need your money,” he said, laughing. Tony, though, kept a straight face. The visit lasted only a few days, and then Pierce headed to New York. He knew he would see Tony soon, though; he had just invited the group to his fortieth birthday party in Puerto Rico, in a few weeks’ time. Since Jewel had left the Ranch in August 2020, she and her team had stayed in touch with Andy Hsieh. Calling quietly from his room or an empty bus, Andy Hsieh secretly delivered updates on Tony. As experts on mental health, Jewel and

her team wanted to help the Hsieh family try to figure out what to do about their son. Jewel’s team decided to revive the efforts the Hsiehs had gone through over the summer to initiate a conservatorship. The new plan relied heavily on getting Tony to a hospital under the guise of another issue, at which time a mental health professional could evaluate him. They hoped that the issue would arise organically, because Tony typically refused any medical help at all. Because he always walked around barefoot, maybe he would step on a piece of glass, cut himself, and need to get treated, for example. As in the Hsiehs’ plan from early August, when they had attempted the intervention that had failed, Jewel’s team counted on putting Tony on a temporary psychiatric hold, at which point the family could file paperwork for a conservatorship and Tony could get the treatment he so clearly needed. It was hard to pin Tony down, though, in the fall of 2020. He suddenly seemed to always want to travel, as if he knew there was a plan to intervene. During the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic emerging across the United States, Tony’s group flew mostly on private jets, lessening the risk somewhat. After the Alaska trip, they planned to fly from Park City to Rachael Brown’s house in New London, Connecticut, then to Pierce’s house in Puerto Rico and then back to New London in mid-November. From there, they would go to Hawaii. Tony usually went somewhere warm such as Hawaii for his annual Thanksgiving trip with his family, but he still wasn’t speaking to his parents. Andy Hsieh, Park, Pezzello, Gorman, and Anthony Hebert flew to Connecticut and then Puerto Rico in early November. The rest of the group stayed behind in Park City. In another last-ditch effort to help him, Don Calder, Tony’s housemate at the Ranch, had recently convinced him to try another biohacking regime called NAD therapy. The expensive therapy, not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, involves intravenously receiving nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), a compound found in living cells. The treatment is supposed to help drug and alcohol users especially, because their natural level of NAD is depleted. Tony had begun the therapy just before he left Park City, so the group hired a traveling nurse to go with him and continue providing the IV infusions.

As he was leaving Park City for the last time, to go to the airport, Tony FaceTimed Calder and his childhood friend Janice Lopez. Lopez, devastated by Tony’s deterioration, had been unsure of what to do and how to help him. In recent weeks, Tony had become suspicious of some of the people around him. He had hired the court reporters to make sure he had records of what was happening. Tony Lee, the former banker who had been brought on over the summer in Park City by Andy Hsieh, had been reviewing Tony’s myriad new deals: the hot-air balloon business, the Zappos headquarters deal, the leasing of the tour buses, and the recent plans to procure gold. Andy also asked Lee to help identify and remove people in Tony’s inner circle who were taking advantage of him. It’s unclear if anyone was removed. It still didn’t seem like enough. At some point, the group had actually moved Tony out of the Ranch and into his mansion across the street, the “truffle shuffle,” to try to get him away from some of the employees and contractors he had hired. During the FaceTime call, a strange look came over Tony’s face. Then he warned Calder and Lopez, “Don’t trust anyone here.” In Puerto Rico, Pierce—known locally as “Mr. Bitcoin”—planned a big celebration for his birthday in mid-November, with dozens of friends, some of whom had also flown in. Tony didn’t make it to the party, though. He had been in San Juan only a couple days before Blizzy, who always traveled with him, grew even sicker than he had been in the previous months. He and his group cut their trip short and returned to the East Coast instead. Once back at Brown’s house in New London, one of the assistants took Blizzy to a nearby vet, where he had to be put down. Tony was despondent. He believed he had lost his one true partner. Earlier in 2020, he had interpreted his friends’ efforts to help him as abandonment after his years of giving to them. Now, as his mental health struggles and drug issues reached another peak, he seemed to feel there was no one left who loved him. The group buried Blizzy in Brown’s backyard and placed a stack of white rocks on top of the grave and an arch decorated with fake flowers between the rectangular swimming pool and a neighbor’s fence.

In Las Vegas, Phil Plastina was among the group of Tony’s longtime friends who hadn’t seen him during the pandemic. For most of 2020, Plastina and his Dancetronauts group had been sidelined as all their performance venues were shut down. Burning Man organizers canceled that year’s event. Plastina’s art car, the one with the electric siding and the jack that lifted the stage into the air, had been parked outside his house in the Las Vegas suburbs, unused. Consumed by his own situation, Plastina knew that Tony was living in Park City but hadn’t been able to visit him. One of the last times Tony had texted him had been on July 4, 2020, only a few days after his breakdown at the Empire Avenue house. Plastina had had no idea that Tony was struggling or that he had just been in the hospital. Tony hadn’t told anyone. “When are you able to travel?” Tony texted Plastina. “We are throwing a big $1 million Covid safe party tomorrow 10 a.m. to midnight in Park City across multiple venues if you’re able to make it here tonight or tomorrow morning! Do you guys want to perform?” It was very common for Tony to text friends shortly before a party or trip, hoping to whisk them away at the last minute. “Oh geez, that sounds amazing,” Plastina texted back, although he demurred, as he was visiting relatives in Florida. He texted Tony a selfie by the pool. In response, Tony sent Plastina a giant spreadsheet detailing his plans for the earlier Airbnb scheme that had since gone nowhere. It was one of the last times Plastina heard from him. Months later, in mid-November 2020, Plastina received a startling call from a mutual friend. “Tony is in trouble,” the caller, another old friend of Tony, told him. He explained what he knew about Tony’s mental state and his heavy drug use. Not knowing that Tony was actually in Connecticut, Plastina’s friend advised him to go to Park City right away. “He needs to see a familiar face,” the caller said. Plastina immediately texted Tony and waited. No response. He texted a different number he had for him. Still no response. He tried Tony’s email address. He sent several more emails. Tony had never in his life been unreachable to his friends. Plastina never heard back from him.

From Brown’s house in New London around the same time, Andy Hsieh frantically called Jewel’s team in Las Vegas. Tony was extremely paranoid, he told them, and was acting self-destructive. The group, after leaving Puerto Rico early, would be in Connecticut for a few days in mid-November 2020. It would be the opportunity to implement their plan to get Tony real help. Jewel’s team had been in touch with a doctor she knew, Blaise Aguirre. Dr. Aguirre is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, a nationally recognized Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital outside Boston. Dr. Aguirre, who typically works with highly suicidal patients, is a friend of Jewel. The two had spoken on a virtual mental health panel hosted by Time magazine three months earlier, in August 2020, just before Jewel had visited the Ranch for the first time, and they also knew each other from other events. Dr. Aguirre hadn’t met Tony, but he knew that Jewel was very worried about him and agreed to help as a favor to her. He is often asked to intervene in similar situations, when a patient seems to have lost touch with reality or is possibly suicidal. Jewel’s team thought that Dr. Aguirre could go to New London, Connecticut, and use his expertise to talk to Tony at Brown’s house, to help calm him down. He could then facilitate Tony getting to a hospital nearby, where an emergency room physician could place him on a temporary psychiatric hold. Dr. Aguirre couldn’t do that himself because of his out-of-state medical license. While Tony was in the hospital, the family could file for conservatorship. The Hsiehs had much of the paperwork ready and were working with Jewel’s board president, Ryan Wolfington, to find an attorney. “The brother was beside himself,” Dr. Aguirre recalled later. Andy Hsieh believed that Tony was deteriorating quickly and was very concerned about him. Soon after, in the early morning of November 18, 2020, Tony’s employees took turns checking on him in the shed. He had moved out there around midnight after fighting with Brown all day. The Mercedes vans were scheduled to drive him and his entourage to the airport several hours later, around 3:30 a.m.

Through the shed door, Tony requested that items be brought to him: water, pizza, cigarettes, a protein shake, more whippets. The employees, primarily Brett Gorman and Anthony Hebert, went back and forth constantly throughout the night, padding across the dark lawn from the house, taking Tony the food and water and drugs he wanted. Each time they checked on him, they wrote the time on a sticky note and posted it on the shed door. Sometimes, for reasons that are unclear, he locked the door after they left. A New London police report would later note the apparent normality of the strange scene: employees being asked in the middle of an East Coast winter night to deliver items to their wealthy benefactor who was staying in a storage shed. “There appears to be no concerns between Hsieh and his employees,” the report said. Tony used the propane space heater in the shed despite the objections of some of his employees. The space heater, two large, round coils attached to the propane tank with a hose, was clearly intended for outdoor use only. At one point, Anthony Hebert noticed a candle burning near Tony’s blanket. The blanket looked charred and was smoldering. “You’re going to smoke yourself out,” he warned Tony about inhaling the fumes. “That’s poison.” “It’s poisonous, but I used it to light a fire,” Tony replied. He did extinguish the candle, though. Around 3:15 a.m., Tony peered out of the shed. No one was around. For several minutes, he was alone in Brown’s backyard—all of his employees were inside the house. He wheeled the propane heater out of the shed, perhaps finally acknowledging that it was a danger to use inside. But the long hose of a pool cleaner that was also in the shed had become wrapped around the outside of the propane heater, making it hard to maneuver. As he opened the door of the shed, wisps of smoke drifted into the air, and it appeared that a small fire was burning behind him. Tony tried to close the door of the shed, but the pool hose prevented it. So he dragged the propane heater back inside. Once he was back inside the shed, the door clicked. Tony had locked it again. To get in, someone would need the code. Later, rescue officials would say he had been “barricaded” behind the door.

Andy pounded on the door several minutes later and told him it was time to leave for Hawaii. He didn’t see any smoke, possibly because Tony had shut the door tightly. Tony told his brother that he needed five more minutes. Andy and Gorman were again walking toward the shed after giving Tony the time he requested when they heard the hissing noise from across the yard around 3:30 a.m. Now smoke was pouring out of the cracks around the door. They raced to get into the shed. They called Tony’s name over and over, but he didn’t respond. From inside the house, Hebert smelled burning plastic and ran outside. He tried to pull open the shed door himself, but this time, the handle came off. From inside the structure, he could hear groaning noises. Tony still wasn’t responding to the group’s calls. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Pezzello, who had been inside the kitchen getting ready for the Hawaii trip, heard Andy Hsieh calling his brother’s name outside and then saw him run into the house, looking for something to pry open the door of the shed with. She called 911. “911. What’s the location of your emergency?” the dispatcher asked her. Pezzello, who hadn’t yet been outside, sounded calm as she gave the address and explained the problem: “We need help as soon as possible. Someone is locked in a room with a fire.” “There’s a fire?” “Yes.” “500 Pequot Avenue, and they’re trapped in a building?” Suddenly there was a burst of commotion on the line as inside the house, Pezzello called for Brown and asked her for the code to the storage shed. Because everyone there except Brown was an infrequent visitor, no one else knew how to operate the lock. “We really need help,” Pezzello told Brown as the dispatcher listened in. “Tony’s locked in there.” Shouting erupted in the background. The dispatcher interrupted the exchange: “Where in the building are they? Where—” “We just need you to come quickly,” Pezzello interrupted, her voice rising with panic.

“They’re on their way,” the dispatcher assured her, but Pezzello had turned away from the phone and was shouting the code of the storage shed door to everyone outside. “Is it 514?” the dispatcher asked, confused. He thought Pezzello was calling out the address of the house. “No, no, no, 500 Pequot!” Pezzello shouted into the phone. “Can you get the other people out of the house?” the dispatcher asked, his voice intensifying as well. The situation was quickly becoming desperate. He asked, “So how many people are trapped?” “It’s a storage unit outside of the house,” Pezzello replied. Outside, Tony’s employees and his brother pushed the numbers of the code over and over, but the door still wouldn’t open. Police later found that the right code might have opened the door, but it was hard to tell with so much damage to the shed. The group might have entered it incorrectly in their rush to get to Tony. Pezzello again shouted the code to the group trying to get inside the shed: “1014! 1014! 1014!” “500 Pequot Avenue, structure fire, report of a person trapped,” the 911 dispatcher said, speaking to rescue units in the background. “Tony!” someone screamed in the background of the 911 call. And then: “Get the shovel!” “They’re on their way,” the dispatcher reassured Pezzello, who was still on the line. He asked her name. “Elizabeth,” she told him and spelled her last name. Still on the phone, she walked down to the basement on the ground level, where sticky notes covered the surfaces like wallpaper. The shed and the basement shared a wall with a window facing into the basement, although it did not provide a view into the shed. It faced only Sheetrock. Pezzello shouted to the others, “Can we go through this way?” and then “Guys, there’s a window, there’s a window here!” Daniel Park, who had run downstairs, found a brick and threw it at the window, breaking the glass and the Sheetrock. Fire shot into the basement. Park found a fire extinguisher nearby and sprayed it over the flames, mostly putting them out. Still, he couldn’t see Tony through the smoke.

A chorus of voices screamed, “Tony! Tony! Tony!” There was complete chaos now. “Elizabeth,” the dispatcher asked sternly on the 911 call, over the din in the house. “The person barricaded themselves?” “Yes,” she said, frantically. “Yes, yes, yes.” “Why did they barricade themselves? Are they trying to harm themselves?” “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” “How old is the person?” “Um, about forty-five years old,” she said, missing Tony’s age by a year. “Please hurry up, please hurry up,” she implored desperately. “This is urgent, this is really urgent.” She broke down and started to cry, wailing into the phone. “This is so bad, oh, my God.” Within minutes, the New London fire and police departments had arrived at the house. They descended on the scene, quickly taking charge. They bashed in the door of the shed using special tools that weren’t available to Tony’s employees and kicked a propane heater out of the way to reach him. He was lying on his back, his right arm draped over his chest. He was surrounded by whippet chargers and small bottles of Fernet. A charred plastic bag of sticky notes lay nearby. The fire in the shed was not devastating, and the firefighters put it out quickly. Soon, Vernon Skau, the fire marshal, would take pictures of everything inside: the propane heater, the candle wax, and the whippets. The shed was charred, many of the items still smoldering. Tony was unconscious but not badly burned. The firefighters quickly pulled him out. He was loaded into an ambulance and transported to the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, just minutes from Brown’s house. Andy Hsieh jumped into the ambulance with him. Soon after, a helicopter flew Tony to the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, about sixty-five miles away from New London. In the days that followed, some of Tony’s friends in Las Vegas heard what had happened, but it hadn’t yet been made public that the former Zappos CEO had

been involved in a fire. Even though Tony remained unconscious, many of his friends expected him to recover, in part because he hadn’t been badly burned. Mark Guadagnoli, the longtime friend who had tried to initiate a welfare check with the police in Park City over the summer, heard that Tony’s condition had improved from critical to stable and for the first time felt hope. He thought that maybe the fire would finally be the wake-up call that Tony needed to get better. He would be extricated from the hangers-on around him. “He’s going to be forced into recovering,” he thought. Other Las Vegas friends thought the fire was a fake story, made up by Tony’s entourage in Park City. They believed that Tony had actually overdosed and the group was covering it up. At Brown’s house in New London and in Park City, Tony’s followers continued, unabated, with their plans. One entry from Hebert’s schedule noted, “Cleaned after the fire, dealing with police and fire department…. Priorities this week: getting a quote on wrapping the tree on the patio with LED lights, would really add to the space.” For nine days, Tony lay in a hospital bed at the Connecticut Burn Center at Bridgeport Hospital. He had been hooked up to a ventilator, and he appeared to be sleeping. His injuries were not severe. He was still for the first time in years. His family—Richard and Judy and his brothers, Andy and Dave— surrounded him, but no one else was there. They kept vigil during his long sleep. The smoke, soot, and fire had caused a cerebral edema, in which the brain swells, causing pressure. Brain edema can sometimes be treated, but it can also cause irreversible damage. Tony Hsieh, the beloved man who had tried so hard to bring happiness to everyone around him, would never wake up the same. On the ninth day, November 27, 2020, Richard and Judy Hsieh opted to remove the ventilator. Tony was gone.

EPILOGUE

In the end, it turns out that we’re all taking different paths in pursuit of the same goal: happiness. —Tony Hsieh

Forty-nine days after Tony’s death, the Hsieh family held a private Buddhist

ceremony for their oldest son. Tony was also Buddhist, a fact not many people knew about him. He wasn’t devout. But he ended Delivering Happiness with a quote from Buddha: “Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” In Samsara, or the cycle of reincarnation, a person goes through an intermediate stage between death and life. While waiting for rebirth, a person’s spirit can be frightened by apparitions that slow down the path to enlightenment. People pray for their loved ones to realize what’s not real and move on to their next place in the universe, a transition that can take up to fortynine days in some Buddhist traditions. For Tony, that day of rebirth was January 15, 2021. On that day, with the pandemic still ongoing, the Hsiehs held the memorial online. Tony’s mom, Judy Hsieh, performed a traditional Chinese dance for her son, who had always loved to dance. She also sang a song from The Phantom of the Opera, “Think of Me.” She is not a formally trained singer, but her prerecorded rendition was haunting. Tony’s cousins spoke, as did his best friends from high school and other close friends from over the years. Judy Hsieh was the only immediate family member

to do so. She hadn’t seen Tony alive and in person since early July 2020, six months earlier. At the memorial, she kept referring to him lovingly as “my boy.” From around the world, memorials poured in during the days and weeks after Tony’s death. Hundreds of Tony’s friends, politicians, business leaders, actors, and an endless number of fans wanted to honor the beloved entrepreneur through videos, songs, letters, and social media posts. It was a collective outpouring of grief that connected loved ones from all different backgrounds with a new, shared mission: remembering Tony. He would have been proud of the synergy, even though he had hated being the center of attention. His death was publicly announced the day he passed away, November 27, 2020, in a public statement by Zappos CEO Kedar Deshpande. “The world has lost a tremendous visionary and an incredible human being,” he wrote. He offered few details about how the forty-six-year-old had died. On Instagram, Amazon’s then chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, wrote, “The world lost you way too soon.” “I treasure every conversation I ever had with Tony Hsieh,” former president Bill Clinton, who had met Tony years earlier at a speaking engagement, tweeted. He had immediately reached out to the Hsieh family after Tony’s death to offer his condolences and later also spoke at the family’s private memorial. “He was fascinating, brilliant, and inspiring, and his unwavering efforts to spread happiness—and enthusiasm for mentoring young entrepreneurs—touched countless lives for the better,” he wrote. Ivanka Trump, fresh off her father’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, offered her praise of Tony, sharing photos of them together over the years, including on the Delivering Happiness tour bus. In one, Tony is stiffly dressed in a suit and tie, his hair cut short, standing in front of the White House with Ivanka, wearing a half smile. In another, he grins from the middle of a group of people, including Ivanka and her husband and former White House adviser, Jared Kushner, in what looks like a casino. “Tony was a deeply original thinker always challenging me to reject conformity & follow my heart,” she wrote. Many of the hundreds of messages received by the Hsieh family came from Tony’s fans who didn’t know him personally. They often began, “I’ll never meet Tony, but he’s had a major impact on my life,” as Alfred Lin, Tony’s longtime

business partner and good friend, recalled in his own public letter to Tony. “As you watch the world turn from above and debug some metaphysical anomaly that you’ve just observed, I hope you also notice the impact you’ve had on so many lives,” Lin wrote. Fred Mossler, who had been friends with Tony for more than two decades, recalled the unusual way Tony had viewed his business rivals in an interview about his friend’s death with an industry trade publication, Footwear News. If the competition copied Zappos’ model of free shipping, Tony believed that could only be a good thing. “It was never about what was best for Zappos,” Mossler said. “It was about what was best for the human condition.” In his tribute, Tony’s former business partner Nick Swinmurn described Tony’s odd practice of rating his friends’ happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 and wrote briefly about how he had drifted apart from his old friend in recent years because of their different lifestyles. “He was a complex puzzle,” he wrote, “much too complicated for me to completely understand, which I felt was exactly how he wanted it.” In Las Vegas, on East Fremont Street, a board appeared outside one of the Burning Man art sculptures Tony had imported, the tower of twisted semitrucks in front of the Fergusons Downtown art complex. On it, people posted dozens of sticky notes with messages remembering Tony, checkering the board with faded neon squares: “Will do my best to continue spreading empathy and delivering happiness now that you won’t be around physically.” “Your obsession with post its always annoyed me but your inspiration could never be contained to one idea (which I love).”

In front of the Downtown Cocktail Room, where Tony’s plans for Las Vegas had begun to percolate a decade earlier, the Cornthwaites, who had long before introduced Tony to downtown Las Vegas, hung a poster of his grinning face and one of his favorite questions: “What if?” Zappos also unfurled giant wraps over two sides of its downtown office tower with a photo of Tony and the words “THANK YOU, TONY.” Internally, Zappos, whose employees were still working remotely, held an online memorial,

including a video curated from thousands of hours of footage of their chief executive officer that the company had collected over the years. Tony’s name and photo appeared along the downtown section of Las Vegas’s Fremont Street lined with old casinos and tourist attractions. Months into 2021, many of the businesses and street signs still featured remembrances for Tony: painted portraits of his likeness, silly llama drawings, or his most inspiring quotes on billboards: “No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future.” A petition appeared online calling for a street to be named after him. But Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, a longtime fan of Tony, didn’t like that idea. At a city council meeting just days after his death, she told the public that his memory shouldn’t be confined to a boring roadway. Instead, his ethereal being should be celebrated through naming a park after him or through a public artwork, such as a piece of sculpture that moves. “A street is so perpendicular and horizontal, that’s so un-Tony,” she said in a radio interview. (As of September 2021, a memorial had not yet been established.) Several months after his death, one of Tony’s longtime friends told us about a dream they’d had about him, one of those dreams that is so clear that it appears to be happening in real life. In it, Tony was checking on his friend, and he asked about everything that had happened since he left. As usual, even in death, he was more concerned about everyone else than about himself. The friend talked about how Tony had died and how all his friends had been so devastated—and still hadn’t recovered. They described the gaping hole that all of them walked around with, that would never be filled. Still, Tony was laughing in the dream—that infectious laugh of his—and he hugged his friend. He appeared happy. On December 1, 2020, Jewel turned on the camera and stared at the lens. She wore a colorful shirt and a cowboy hat, a piece of fabric patterned with flowers and animals draped behind her. She held her guitar. “Hey, it’s Jewel here,” she said. She smiled, but there was sadness behind the smile, her eyes tinged with red. The hat was the same one she had worn when she

had played the private concert at the Ranch in Park City several months earlier. She told the audience on Instagram that she had sat for a while before pressing “Record,” trying to find the right words to describe her good friend Tony Hsieh and her feelings about his death. “For somebody who writes for a living, and is fairly verbose, I didn’t really know what to say,” she said. She paused. “I don’t think anyone knows what to say at times like this.” The world didn’t yet know about Jewel’s efforts to save Tony and how close she had come to reaching him. Perhaps if he had entered the shed in New London, Connecticut, one night later or delayed his trip to Hawaii for some reason, the doctor whom Jewel and her team had recruited might have been able to convince him to go to a hospital. The Hsieh family could have finally intervened successfully. Instead, in her elegy, she recounted how she had met Tony on Necker Island in 2015 and how she had been riveted by him and his ideas for holacracy. “That’s never happened at a company that I’m aware of,” she said. She described his great ability to empower everyone, even her. “And I’m a folksinger!” Tony had once posed a question to Jewel that he liked to ask people: “What’s your definition of success?” Jewel couldn’t recall her own answer, but she remembered Tony’s. “His answer was the willingness to lose it all. “I guess that’s what it really takes—because you have to put your whole heart into something you believe,” she told her audience. “To believe with that much conviction is a rare gift—to give yourself to it. That really is a beautiful definition and that really is how I think of Tony—very brave.” She began to sing a rendition of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” her deep, soulful voice emanating from the screen. After a few minutes, she stopped in midlyric. Her eyes filled with tears, some streamed down her face, and she had to pause for several moments before continuing with her elegy. Before she turned the camera off, she spoke to her friend for the last time: “Tony, may you be over the rainbow with the bluebirds, and your worries far behind.”

In New London, Connecticut, the fire and police departments immediately launched an investigation into the shed fire. The fire department was overwhelmed with worldwide media attention once the news broke that Tony had been the unidentified man pulled from the shed and that he had died in a nearby hospital. The attention was so intense, with reporters camping out at Rachael Brown’s house at 500 Pequot Avenue and Fire Chief Thomas Curcio fielding dozens of calls weekly, an enormous number for a small department, that the fire officials organized a meeting with New London’s mayor. They discussed not only how to handle the constant requests for information but also how to proceed carefully with their examination into what had caused the fire. No one famous had ever died so publicly in New London before. City, police, and fire officials all agreed that their internal inquiry would be no different from the many others they had conducted over the years, regardless of Tony’s stature. There would be no leaks to the media, no preference given to any party as information was uncovered. Vernon Skau, the longtime fire marshal, remembered thinking he had wished that that much attention would be bestowed on the many problems city officials faced in the poorer neighborhoods of New London. Skau headed up the joint investigation, an effort that would take the better part of two months and fill a thick binder. All fires are similar, he said, but each examination comes with different details, twists and turns that will reveal themselves over time. “Every fire investigation—you have a different flavor,” he said later. On the night of the November fire, he and members of the police and fire departments had taken dozens of pictures of the inside of the shed and everything that could have caused it: the whippets, the Tiki torch fluid, the candle and its wax, the propane heater, and Tony’s cigarettes. The shed was filled with so much beach equipment and other house junk that it was hard to sort through the wreckage. One photo showed a jumble of paint cans and rollers, fold-up beach chairs, and stacks of soda boxes, much of it charred from the fire. In another, a ball of extension cords and foam rollers for the pool crisscrossed a smoke-stained white blanket. One of the photos would

end up framed for a time at the fire station, where photos of some of New London’s most famous fires hang on the walls. Skau and his team spent the next six weeks analyzing the many shed photos, trying to find the potential cause. He returned once more to the house at 500 Pequot Avenue to examine it, as well as to study the door-locking system that Tony’s employees couldn’t get to work. He walked around the outside of the building, noticing every detail. He analyzed grainy footage from Rachael Brown’s home camera system, which faced the yard and the shed, to piece together the last few hours of Tony Hsieh’s life. He and his team saw the multiple trips that Tony’s employees had made to take him nitrous oxide, pizza, and water, and he saw the wisps of smoke escape the shed when Tony had opened the door around 3:15 a.m., what looked like a small fire burning behind him. He couldn’t tell what was fueling it. He watched as Tony dragged the propane tank with the vacuum hose wrapped around it outside the shed and then back inside, his last moments in the outside world, alone. It was hard to tell from the videos if Tony had been acting strangely in any way. (Investigators never figured out why Tony had dragged the heater outside and then back in.) Skau heard the door lock behind Tony for the last time. In partnership with the police department, the New London Fire Department had interviewed everyone at the scene, taking detailed statements from all of Tony’s employees who had been there. Only Andy Hsieh’s statement was missing; he had jumped into the ambulance with Tony directly after the fire, and Skau felt they already had enough witnesses. Skau had thought the Mercedes vans outside of the house at 500 Pequot Avenue were bizarre, but the employees who had been waiting inside the vehicles carried the same expressions he was used to seeing after an emergency: disbelief and shock. When interviewed, Anthony Hebert told police that Tony was retired because of mental health concerns and a “midlife crisis,” although he said he was not aware if Tony had been diagnosed with anything. He said that Tony had been “distraught” over the death of Blizzy three days earlier.

That was a familiar theme; the nurse who had recently been traveling with Tony to give him the NAD infusions also noted that he had been depressed over the death of Blizzy, as did Brett Gorman. Tony had been “despondent,” Gorman told police. By the end of January 2021, Skau and his team were ready to release their findings. Already, the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had ruled the death an accident following an autopsy, saying that Tony had died of complications of smoke inhalation. The office declined to release the autopsy or specify why it believed that the death had been an accident. In dozens of interviews with Tony’s close friends for this book, very few believed that Tony would have intentionally hurt himself. The New London fire and police departments released witness reports, videos, photos, 911 calls, and incident notes from the scene. Together, the records painted a heartbreaking, detailed picture of Tony’s last hours, including his friends’ and brother’s last attempts to save him. Over and over, they had tried to get into the shed but couldn’t reach him. But Skau ultimately couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of the fire, in part because there were so many objects in the shed that could have caused it. The joint report was inconclusive. Skau wrote that it was possible that the heater had come into contact with some sort of combustible, such as a piece of paper, that would have started a fire. Then that fire would have heated the propane tank, triggering a release valve, causing gas to rush—likely the hissing noise Andy Hsieh and Brett Gorman had heard when they were walking across the lawn to the shed. Possibly that was why Tony had tried to roll the propane heater out of the shed earlier in the night. Still, there seemed to have been a small fire burning in the shed already, so Skau wrote that there was a “low possibility” that the portable heater had caused the fire. Another option was that Tony’s cigarettes or marijuana—a pipe was also found in the shed—could have caused it, but the report concluded that that was also unlikely. “A lighted cigarette will only occasionally set fire to dry fuel,” it read. Having observed several candles in the shed, Skau wrote that it was possible that using them in an improper way could have started the fire. The candles

“could not be eliminated as a cause of this fire,” he concluded. The report noted all the objects around Tony, including Fernet bottles and whippets, which led investigators to believe that he might have been “impaired or intoxicated” at the time of the fire. “It is possible that carelessness, or even an intentional act by Hsieh could have started this fire,” Skau wrote. There wasn’t enough evidence to state that conclusively, though. At a press conference at the end of January 2021, Skau, Chief Curcio, and Captain Brian Wright from the New London Police Department fielded dozens of questions from reporters about their findings. Many asked about Tony’s mental state at the time and what had led him to be in the shed. Officials hewed closely to the findings in their report. The police and fire departments had determined that it was not a criminal act —that none of Tony’s employees, or Tony himself, was to blame. Skau said that there were no other state or local agencies looking into the events of that night, as far as the New London Fire Department knew. At the time of this writing in September 2021, there were still no government agencies examining the fire or the events leading up to it in Park City, Utah, or New London, Connecticut. Skau was asked at the news conference whether the fatal fire could have been avoided. “Any situation such as this,” he replied, “things can be prevented.” The battle over Tony’s fortune began swiftly afterward. Tony died without a will, a startling fact that was revealed in court filings in Las Vegas just a few days after his death. He had left no plan for his vast estate, which had become convoluted in the last year of his life as he had spent money rapidly in Park City, often through dozens of other friends, employees, and contractors. Many of the contracts were written on the thousands of multicolored sticky notes stuck to the walls and windows and doors of the Ranch, many signed like contracts. Tens of millions of dollars in real estate—the houses and other properties in Park City and Las Vegas—were shuffled among limited liability companies and held by shell companies. The transcripts produced by the court

reporters held more verbal contracts initiated by Tony, sometimes as he was clearly not in the right state of mind. All of that would have to be unwound. “You’re going to have to look at each specific sticky note and decide if it’s a contract—is it binding?” one attorney, Justin H. Brown, who deals with estate planning, told us in December 2020. “Was he in the correct state of mind—did he have the capacity to even enter a contract?” At the heart of Tony’s estate resolution was one crucial question: How much was he actually worth? No one seemed to know, not even those closest to him. What was known was that Tony had earned $32 million from the 1998 sale of LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million. He had then catapulted further with the $1.2 billion all-stock deal to sell Zappos to Amazon in 2009. He had owned Zappos shares along with an interest in his venture fund Venture Frogs, which also owned shares in Zappos after investing in the company long ago. Estimates of Tony’s fortune have varied over the years,I with some journalists using $840 million as his net worth. Some friends estimated that the figure was likely much higher because he had a number of other investments, some undisclosed, including a stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Tony hadn’t lived an opulent lifestyle, at least not before moving to Park City. But he had committed to spending huge sums of his fortune, such as the $350 million promised to downtown Las Vegas. His mission to spread happiness often manifested itself in spending on others, a pattern throughout his life. In Utah, he had bought about $70 million in real estate. Wealthy elites were scrambling to leave crowded coastal cities in the pandemic for spots such as Utah’s mountain towns, driving up prices. And Tony hadn’t been afraid to spend even more to get what he wanted, particularly in his diminished state. He had been running through his cash on hand. Within days of his death, Tony’s father, Richard Hsieh, and brother Andy Hsieh were appointed special administrators and legal representatives of Tony’s estate, by a judge in Las Vegas. The judge found that Tony’s personal and business affairs “require immediate attention to prevent loss to the estate,” the court records disclosed. As part of their legal team, the Hsiehs hired Vivien Thoreen, a Los Angeles attorney who also represented Jamie Spears, the father of superstar Britney

Spears, in the #FreeBritney movement over her conservatorship. They began the process of trying to untangle Tony’s estate right away, traveling to Park City. They asked friends and employees staying at the Ranch and Tony’s other properties to leave. The move by the court to appoint Andy Hsieh in charge of his brother’s assets was intensely controversial among some of Tony’s close friends. Andy Hsieh had lived at the Ranch with Tony, directing dozens of contractors and employees, eventually rising to become part of Tony’s “core” group. He had been forming his own business, a tequila company, funded ostensibly by his brother, while Tony had clearly been deteriorating. All of that had taken place after his own family’s failed intervention attempt in August 2020, when Tony had exiled his parents and agreed to pay Andy $1 million to stay, despite his persistent abuse of nitrous oxide. Andy Hsieh had himself stored whippets for Tony in his room. He had worked to keep Park City Police Department officers off the property. Years before, he hadn’t spent much time around Tony and his old group of friends. But Andy Hsieh had also quietly remained in touch with Jewel and her team, a fact not many around him knew, keeping her up to date on Tony and trying to form a plan with her to save him. Of the many people around Tony in August 2020, he appeared to Jewel’s team to be the one with the most compassion. Andy Hsieh had told some of Tony’s friends and employees that he stayed close to his brother to make sure he was safe. In early 2021, Mimi Pham sued Richard and Andy Hsieh as the administrators of Tony’s estate who now controlled Tony’s businesses and filed claims for payments with the estate. As Tony’s longtime assistant, she claimed that she was owed more than $90 million from various ventures remaining from her long friendship with Tony. That included an estimated $75 million for what she said was the anticipated profit from documentary movie streaming deals. She claimed another $7.5 million from a project in Park City to revamp an old lodge. To mount the legal fight, she hired the high-profile Las Vegas legal team of David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, known in part for their high-profile criminal defense work representing wealthy and famous clients who get into trouble in Las Vegas, such as Paris Hilton and Bruno Mars. Chesnoff was part of

the legal team of the real estate heir Robert Durst during his 2021 murder trial. (He was convicted of murder.) Some close friends of Tony’s thought that Pham’s filings were heartless, particularly given the timing. She wanted access to items from a warehouse of Tony’s, including Burning Man supplies, furniture, two golf carts, artwork, and bicycles. Many of the belongings had sentimental value. But some of Tony’s friends questioned why Pham would take legal action, forcing Tony’s family to respond so soon after the tragedy. In court filings, Pham emphasized her closeness to Tony over Andy and the Hsieh family, contrasting her intimacy to the icier relationship between Tony and his father and brother, as she described it. In court filings, her attorneys pointed out that Andy Hsieh had moved to Park City with his brother, but “that is not an indication of a familial bond as he was offered a $1,000,000 annual salary in exchange for said move.” Tony’s family shot back, describing Tony’s physical and mental decline over the months before he died and the way the estrangement of close friends and family had left him vulnerable in the end. Pham and her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, were among those who had exploited him, the family claimed. During that time, Tony’s health had become so poor that a health care provider had said he wouldn’t have longer than six months to live without an intervention. In court, the Hsieh family noted that it had been obvious to Pham and her boyfriend that Tony was “physically and mentally unwell, and that he was in no condition to consider, let alone approve, significant investments or contracts for investments. Witnesses who saw Tony at this time describe him as having lost a tremendous amount of weight. Witnesses describe a belief that Tony’s death was imminent.” Pham and Grande have denied the family’s claims about them in court. Meanwhile, others from Tony’s past also came forward claiming the estate owed them money. An artist named Toshie McSwain filed a claim for $40,000 for a prototype for a sculpture of a brain that was to have been built and installed on a ceiling. Mark Evensvold, the restaurant manager from Las Vegas who had agreed to manage Tony’s in-house bars in Park City, filed a claim for $12.5 million, citing his sticky-note contract. Tony Lee, the old family friend

convinced by Andy Hsieh to leave Fort Worth for Park City to work for Tony in the last months of his life, filed a nearly $6.9 million lawsuit after he was notified that he would no longer be paid by the Hsiehs. In court filings, Lee argued that Andy Hsieh had picked out Lee and other people around Tony as “scapegoats,” while Andy Hsieh actually conducted much of the acts that he has accused others of. That included, according to Mr. Lee’s filings, that Andy Hsieh plied his brother with alcohol despite knowing he suffered from cirrhosis, “arranged for the purchase of thousands of canisters of nitrous oxide at an alarming rate,” and asked Lee to “divert millions of dollars from Tony Hsieh’s holdings to Andy himself.” Suzie Baleson, through her company, filed a nearly $8.8 million claim, saying she was owed for services on Tony’s projects including a “magic castle” in Park City that involved performers and live streaming. By December 2021, the Hsieh family had come up with a preliminary estimate for the remaining value of Tony’s fortune: about $500 million. Tony’s entourage in Park City scattered, many of them continuing their lives as if nothing had happened. Justin Weniger went back to Las Vegas to help plan the Life Is Beautiful music festival in September 2021, in which he and Baleson organized a group meditation session at the start of the event, led by Deepak Chopra, in honor of Tony. Otherwise, there were few public tributes of Tony at the biggest public celebration in downtown Las Vegas since his passing. Rachael Brown stayed in her New London, Connecticut home where Tony had tragically been trapped in the shed. Don Calder moved back to Los Angeles to operate a T-shirt company. Anthony Hebert’s whereabouts are unknown. Daniel Park continues to tour and play music. Elizabeth Pezzello and Brett Gorman got married in Park City but moved back to Naples, Florida, to open a business called Vitamin Bar Naples, which delivers vitamins to customers intravenously. An Instagram post from March 2021 shows the couple smiling in matching white T-shirts, holding a sign for their new business. Tony did not leave a will and also appeared not to have used other planning techniques often employed by the wealthy to shelter their heirs from having to pay steep federal estate taxes, such as moving assets into trusts. The Hsiehs told a judge that they would need to raise cash to pay a looming tax bill, possibly by liquidating the estate’s stocks or obtaining a loan. They also filed notices in court

saying that dozens of Tony’s properties in Las Vegas could be put up for sale, including undeveloped lots and more thriving downtown assets such as Container Park. The move set off a controversy in Las Vegas, even though the Hsiehs vowed they weren’t looking to dismantle Tony’s legacy there. “Tony Hsieh’s Family to Sell Off Much of Las Vegas Real Estate Empire,” a headline in the Las Vegas Review-Journal read in February 2021. But some people in downtown Las Vegas welcomed the idea of new owners bringing more diverse ideas to the city’s future who would be like a “Tony Hsieh 2.0,” said Las Vegas councilwoman Olivia Diaz. “His fingerprints will always be on that part of town,” she remarked. On a beautiful evening in May 2021, a crowd of people surrounded Tony’s praying mantis sculpture in front of Container Park, clapping and cheering as the insect blasted fire from its antennae. Inside the development, kids happily tore through the tree house playground as their parents sipped wine at nearby tables; a guitarist tuned his instrument, gearing up to play a concert at one end of the park. Tourists and locals filled the walkways, restaurants, and nearby candy shop. It was exactly as Tony had hoped. At a nearby restaurant, someone had scribbled in big letters across several windows: WE LOVE TONY. In Delivering Happiness, Tony described a magic trick he had once taught himself: how to take a coin and make it seem as though it could dissolve into a piece of rubber. He had always been fond of magic tricks, basking in the amazement of his audience when pulling off a seemingly impossible feat. In the end, he brought joy to people around him while performing his most challenging sleight of hand: throughout his life, he kept up the appearances of eternal hope and infallible optimism, even as he suffered privately from mental health and substance abuse issues. When we began reporting on Tony in the fall of 2020, we kept hearing a similar description of Tony’s life story from the people we spoke to, many of whom said they had seen and interacted with Tony regularly over many years.

The story line was a simple one: there had been nothing wrong with Tony until the fall of 2019, when he had begun taking ketamine. Many months of research into his life revealed how Tony, who had poured his life into experiences for other people, ultimately felt alone. He had severe social anxiety. He drank alcohol to diminish it, turning it into another quirk of his personality and part of his giving to others through parties and Zappos events. He struggled with facial blindness, and so he learned to recognize friends’ voices and relied on a select few to guide him. He wondered if he had some form of autism but was never diagnosed. It’s not surprising that few people really knew this other side of Tony and the many issues with which he struggled. Tony was many things to many people: the party organizer; the audacious entrepreneur; the humble boss; the investor in other people’s dreams; the quirky neighbor in an Airstream trailer park, living with his pet alpaca. His audience was eager to believe in that picture. When the Hsieh family filed court documents as part of his estate battle in 2021, it was the first time anyone had publicly acknowledged that Tony had drunk as a coping mechanism, even though his heavy daily drinking had been well known by his friends and colleagues. “Tony’s mind moved at an incredible speed, and Tony described using alcohol as a social lubricant to alleviate his social anxiety and to allow him to better communicate and make deeper connections to the people around him,” the Hsieh family’s attorneys wrote. But the gulf between how people viewed Tony and his private struggles exposes a much greater societal problem: the taboo surrounding mental health problems and addiction. Both issues are still discussed in whispers, willfully ignored, unacknowledged even when they are in plain view. Without a dialogue surrounding addiction and mental illness, those who are suffering must do so alone, hiding their problems and putting on happy faces. They use drugs and alcohol to mask their pain and anxiety. Tony embodied that lonely struggle. After the tennis player Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open in the spring of 2021 to focus on her mental health, she wrote in an essay for Time that she had been struck by the outpouring of messages she had received. “It has become apparent to me that literally everyone either suffers from issues related to their mental health or knows someone who does,” she wrote.

People who are suffering don’t make it easy for others to help them, and Tony was the epitome of that problem. He was skilled at explaining away concerns and shied away from confrontation and criticism. He continued to perform at a high level. Even when his good friend Jewel brought a mental health program to Zappos, he still managed to avoid the conversation. He normalized first his heavy drinking and later his drug use, his coping mechanisms to deal with the people around him. He handed friends books and showed them TED Talks to explain himself. Even if anyone had thought to question his drinking, it was an even farther leap to wonder why he needed so much alcohol: What was the underlying issue? As the therapists at Cirque Lodge say, drug or alcohol abuse is always covering up another issue. Tony didn’t invite that kind of examination from even his closest friends, and certainly his adoring fans, particularly later in his life, wouldn’t have examined any problems. His character, full of so many contradictions—awkward but exceedingly fun, unfailingly generous but lacking empathy—was so unusual anyway that it was even easier to explain away any inconsistencies. As Ali Bevilacqua, Tony’s ex-girlfriend, put it, “People give a lot of excuses in a room for people who are geniuses and eccentrics.” Tech founders such as Tony are even more susceptible to this sort of toxic idolization complex because Silicon Valley doesn’t just accept strangeness from its titans, it expects and celebrates it. But some of the same traits—mania, magnetism, and almost singular focus—that can catapult leaders to stardom can ultimately spell their downfall. In recent years, countless tech CEOs have been exalted only to suffer a steep downfall, Travis Kalanick at Uber, Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, and Adam Neumann at WeWork among them. In each of these cases, the executives were later revealed to have presided over ruthless cultures or to have behaved recklessly, if not potentially criminally. Tony, who led with a sense of purpose, doesn’t fit into this narrative, but he was put onto a pedestal in a similar way, only to come crashing down later. His death exposes the pitfalls of putting so much blind faith in our leaders, no matter how inspiring they may be, and the vast disparity between the public persona and private life of celebrity, a status Tony had achieved by the end of his life.

Additionally, the tech community has embraced biohacking, experimenting with ways to push one’s body beyond human limits, to operate like a machine, by using ice baths, fasting, changing sleep patterns, microdosing LSD. It can quickly spiral out of control, as Tony’s last years illustrated. The idea of solving one’s own health problems without therapy or traditional medication can mask deeper struggles. Tony ignored his own self-care even as he worked so hard to spread happiness to those around him. We may never know exactly where that desire came from or how it originated. Did his strict childhood make him crave anything lighthearted and fun? Was he an extreme people pleaser, unable to stop himself from giving? Was he so scared of what he might find inside himself that he refused to look inward? We have asked ourselves, and others, these very questions over these many months. Tony—whether trotting through the office in his T-shirt and black Asics sneakers or going out with friends with a mohawk and sequined jacket—always valued each person’s inherent “weirdness” and individuality. In many ways, his values, his fast-paced curiosity, and his appetite for risk kept him open to the world—to other people, new ideas, and a hopeful future. If we had a similar culture around mental health, one of acceptance and openness, maybe Tony could have found healing. If admitting one’s pain wasn’t stigmatized, if we acknowledged our common internal struggles, maybe the people around Tony could have recognized the warning signs. Maybe Tony could have put down the magic tricks and stepped off the stage. In August 2021, I (Kirsten Grind) called the customer service line at Zappos for the very first time. I had bought a pair of Cobian flip-flops earlier in the summer to wear when I took my dog swimming at the beach near my house in the San Francisco Bay Area. But after only a few weeks with my new shoes, one of the flip-flops disappeared. I knew the culprit immediately: my dog, a two-year-old chocolate lab named Charlie. He will eat and chew on anything. Out of curiosity, I called Zappos’ customer service line to see if they could do anything and see what kind of service I might receive.

The first automated prompt asked me if I would like to press five to hear a joke before proceeding. Of course I did! “What do ghosts eat for supper?” “Spookghetti!” A cheery customer service representative came on the line immediately after and introduced herself as Hallie. I explained to her what had happened: my dog had literally eaten my flip-flop. Hallie started laughing. “Oh, no, little pup, I’m so sorry,” she sympathized. It took us many minutes to find my account, as I had listed it under an old email address, and Hallie stood by patiently until I finally found my confirmation email. “We will figure it out!” she exclaimed at one point. Once we had accessed my order, Hallie told me she would investigate what Zappos could do. “While we’re looking, how’s your day going?” she asked as though she were speaking to a friend. I told her it was fine, that the weather in the Bay Area was unfortunately cooler than I would have liked for summer, 65 degrees and cloudy. “I’m working in Las Vegas,” Hallie told me, where “it’s very hot.” The day had flown by, though, “talking to some great customers,” she continued. “It’s been a pretty good day if I do say so myself.” Later she told me she was working at home in her pajamas and slippers. “It’s so great, I love it,” she added. After almost no time at all and no holding, she told me that Zappos would send me a new pair of $31 flip-flops for free. When she checked on the delivery date, about a week from when we were speaking, she said, “Let me see if I can get that quicker.” In return, she asked if I could please send my extra flip-flop—the one Charlie hadn’t eaten—to Soles4Souls, an organization that Zappos partners with to donate shoes and clothing. She sent an email to me with the link, signed with her name, and told me that Zappos would pay for the shipping. “What’s your dog’s name?” she asked before I hung up, and soon we were talking about her own pet, who had unfortunately passed away in 2020 after a decade together. Now it was my turn to sympathize. “Have a great night with Charlie,” she said to end the call. “Give him lots of kisses for me!”

A year had passed since Tony had stepped down from Zappos and more than two decades since he had redefined the meaning of customer service. Zappos was still fulfilling his mission. The call was almost textbook what Tony would have asked from his customer loyalty team and echoed dozens of stories Katherine Sayre and I had read and heard about Zappos’ customer service as we reported this book. Hallie’s Personal Service Level, the metric Tony employed to judge personal connection, was off the charts. Even the joke of the day, which Tony had launched at Zappos years earlier, having often called 976-JOKE during his childhood, was still in place. Tony liked to say that Zappos wasn’t a shoe company—it was a service company that sold shoes. That was clearly still true. But among Tony’s close friends and even at Zappos, there has been a realization that the search for happiness shouldn’t just be that—a relentless quest to cultivate joy all around you. The path starts inward. It is built on confronting our human struggles with the help of trusted people who are on journeys that parallel ours. Zappos’ management is still trying to maintain the happy workplace that Tony had established, although it has paused holacracy and market-based dynamics as it has focused more heavily on what it has always done: selling shoes. In the summer of 2021, with temperatures soaring in Las Vegas, the company launched a program to deliver air conditioners to workers whose units had failed. Most Zappos employees were still working from home because of the pandemic, so it was particularly important that they be able to do their jobs comfortably. It was a small gesture but exactly the sort of thing Tony would have done to help his workforce be happy. Some aspects of workplace culture are changing at Zappos, though. Following Tony’s death, executives realized that employees need to focus on their own needs first before those of others, something Tony was never able to do for himself. The company is therefore encouraging its employees to think about health and wellness. It is focused more now on what some executives are calling “the whole human,” much like Jewel’s prior work there: encouraging things such as taking mental health days and limiting work hours. Parties and happy hours have died down anyway because of the pandemic.

In December 2021, Zappos employees were again facing a management transition, when Kedar Deshpande said he would step down after only a year at the helm of Zappos to take the CEO role at Groupon. In an internal email to Zappos employees he wrote, “One of the things Tony instilled in me and strived to instill in every employee, was the importance of Delivering WOW—not only while at Zappos, but anywhere our futures may lead us.” Deshpande said he would carry on the tradition. Tony ended his own book with a wish. He hoped to bring the reader happiness, to have it passed on to others, even one day to get the entire world moving in that direction. “I don’t have all the answers,” he wrote. “But hopefully I’ve succeeded in getting you to start asking yourself the right questions.” I. We found various reports ranging from $780 million to nearly $1 billion as Tony’s net worth, though the figure used most recently was $840 million.

APPENDIX MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, calling 911 might be necessary; callers should notify operators that it is a psychiatric emergency and ask for police officers trained in crisis prevention and psychiatric emergencies, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It connects people to a nearby crisis center, which can provide counseling and referrals to mental health care. Call 1800-273-TALK (8255) or 1-888-628-9454 en español. Crisis Text Line connects with a trained crisis counselor twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Text 741741 in the United States and Canada. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration offers an information line to connect to local treatment: 1-800-662-HELP (4357). The National Institute of Mental Health also recommends speaking with a primary care practitioner about mental health to discuss concerns and get referrals for further treatment. The National Alliance on Mental Illness is a nonprofit mental health organization that includes more than six hundred local groups and forty-eight state organizations working in communities, supporting people with mental health concerns and their friends and families. More information, including a

live chat with a specialist, can be found at www.nami.org or by calling the helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book is a monumental challenge, and it would have been impossible

in this case without the help of Tony Hsieh’s many friends and loved ones. We talked to dozens of them over the course of this reporting, but a handful of his close friends went above and beyond, spending hours and hours with us to make sure we clearly understood Tony’s thinking and his actions over the years, especially because we didn’t have the ability to ask him ourselves. Some of them spoke despite the threat of legal action and other circumstances that put them at personal risk. You know who you are, and we can’t thank you enough for all your help, and patience, over many months. This book originated out of our investigative reporting for the Wall Street Journal about the circumstances surrounding Tony Hsieh’s death, and would not have been possible without that foundation. We’d like to thank our trusted editors, Brad Reagan and Liz Rappaport, for their extensive work on those stories, and for initially understanding the importance of Tony’s life and death. We have a masterful enterprise editing team at the WSJ led by Matthew Rose and Tammy Audi, and we were lucky enough to work with Sam Enriquez and Dan Kelly, who helped polish our narratives in two of our longer stories, as well as Ethan Smith in Exchange. Other editors to thank: Jamie Heller, for her exuberance and unwavering support; Jason Dean, one of the hardest-working editors we know; and our executive editor, Matt Murray, a strong supporter of this kind of work. Some of our WSJ colleagues helped us along the way, including Bob Hagerty, who worked with us on our first story after Tony died, and Kate King, who was on the ground in Connecticut. Others who gave us great advice, or listened to various quandaries related to book reporting, include

Erich Schwartzel, Greg Zuckerman, Jennifer Levitz, Colin Barr, Eliot Brown, and Tripp Mickle. We could not have found a better home for this book than Simon & Schuster and in our editor, Stephanie Frerich. Stephanie’s enthusiasm for Tony’s story and clear vision for the narrative helped us immensely, as did her deft edits and questions, which always improved our writing significantly, and helped us sharpen our framing throughout the story. Her editorial assistant, Emily Simonson, has been hugely helpful throughout, explaining details large and small. Our copyediting manager, Jessica Chin, and our lawyer, Jeff Miller, also provided much-needed assistance. Thank you also to Michael Nagin, cover designer; Erika Genova, interior designer; and Alicia Brancato, production manager. This book might not have happened at all without the keen eyes of our agent, Todd Shuster at Aevitas Creative. He and another editor, Daniella Cohen, were hugely helpful in initially shaping the format of the book, and pushing us to figure out the best way to lay out Tony’s story. Allison Warren at Aevitas was fast and proactive about selling movie and documentary rights, and we look forward to Tony’s story being shared again in new ways. From Kirsten: There is no way I could have taken on a project like this while raising two small children without the full support of a heroic partner like my husband, Steve Grind. He patiently took care of the kids on weekends and nights for months as we wrote and reported this book, all while starting a new job. He listened to me talk about Tony and his story nonstop and had great advice on how to handle different aspects of the book. Thank you endlessly, Steve. The last time I wrote a book I didn’t have kids, and my two sons, Ellis and Wesley, had to sacrifice a lot of mom time over the months we put this together. They were very patient, and also excited about the prospect of their mom writing a book, even though it wouldn’t have pictures. Our pandemic dog, Charlie, actually appears in this book, and was a trusted—if not somewhat annoying—companion during the long days when everyone was back at work and school except me. I have some really good friends who are amazing journalists and who helped enormously through this process, in particular

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, who continually goes above and beyond to support me in anything I take on, and will take a panicked phone call day or night despite her own small children. My former editor at the WSJ, now at the New York Times, David Enrich, was a wise counsel on this project, especially early on. Sue Craig listened to me time and again rattle on about various aspects of this story and always has sage advice. Other longtime friends whom I love dearly and always help me, even from afar: Kimmy Torch, Kelly Kennedy, and Karen Johnson. Even though we were separated by the pandemic, my WSJ row mates and fellow Alcatraz swimmers Georgia Wells and Bob McMillan in San Francisco still managed to offer counsel and support, even when I bailed on our last swim—sorry again! Last but certainly not least, my parents, Pat Orsini and Klaus Meinhard, are always so supportive of me in whatever I take on, and are always so proud of my career accomplishments. My sisters, Sonja Revilla and Iman Rosario, are always there to encourage me, even when we can’t all be together. From Katherine: Thank you to my parents, Barbara and Jon Lindenmayer and Alan and Terri Sayre, for your love and encouragement. A special thanks to Terri for helping me get started on my best professional adventures. Mom, you taught me empathy, a gift in life and in journalism. I am grateful for a family of past editors and reporting colleagues whom I’ve learned much from, in particular my investigative pals Manuel Torres, Jonathan Bullington, and Rich Webster. To everyone from the former NOLA newsroom, all of your endeavors continue to inspire me. You have all given me a life lesson in resiliency. I’m in awe of the amazing fact-checking skills of Mandy Tust and Sara Sneath, who spent many hours backing me up on this book. My family of friends, in New Orleans and beyond, whom I have missed dearly in recent years, have been there for me across the miles through the writing process. Chelsea Brasted’s steady faith in me, and her joyful spirit, were invaluable. Sara Brownlee is a true best friend—thank you for always listening, even when it felt like Groundhog Day. Thanks most of all to my husband, Mike Joe, the best dog-dad to Sandy and Ziggy, whose love and support, in so many ways, have carried me all the way.

More from the Authors

The Lost Bank

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

© NICOLE MERCADO

Kirsten Grind is an enterprise reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she has worked since 2012. She has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation for her coverage of the financial crisis, and a Loeb Award for her coverage of the downfall of a famous bond fund manager. Her first book, The Lost Bank, about the collapse of Washington Mutual during the financial crisis, was named the best investigative book of 2012 by the Investigative Reporters & Editors association. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. @KirstenGrind

© ERICH SCHWARTZEL

Katherine Sayre is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, where she has worked since 2019. As the gambling reporter, she writes about the Las Vegas Strip, the rise of betting on sports in the US, and the global casino industry. Before joining the Journal, she was a lead reporter for the Times-Picayune’s investigative team in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her reporting on failures in the state’s mental health care system won a national prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists. In reporting stints around the South, she has covered courts, crime, real estate, and Gulf Coast communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She lives in Los Angeles. @KatherineSayre SimonandSchuster.com @simonbooks www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Kirsten-Grind www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Katherine-Sayre

Also by Kirsten Grind The Lost Bank

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NOTES

Many people spoke to us on background only, not for attribution, because of

confidentiality agreements, ongoing litigation, or other reasons preventing them from speaking on the record. Other sources of information are noted below. Prologue: “A Freak Accident” As a kid, he pretended: Greg Smith, “Curcio Takes the Reins at New London Fire Department,” The Day, September 12, 2018, https://www.theday.com/article/20180912/NWS01/180919805. at an official ceremony: Ibid. “He’s barricaded”: Lee Hawkins, “Before Tony Hsieh’s Death, Firefighters Rushed to Burning Home with Trapped Man,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-tonyhsiehs-death-firefighters-rushed-to-burning-home-with-trapped-man-11606691000. Curcio moved on: Interviews with Chief Thomas Curcio, May 2021 and September 2021. Soon Curcio’s phone lit up: Ibid. Naomi Osaka: Naomi Osaka, “Naomi Osaka: ‘It’s O.K. Not to Be O.K.,’ ” Time, July 8, 2021, https://time.com/6077128/naomi-osaka-essay-tokyo-olympics/. Simone Biles: Alice Park, “How the Tokyo Olympics Changed the Conversation About Mental Health,” Time, August 8, 2021, https://time.com/6088078/mental-health-olympics-simone-biles/.

Chapter 1: “A Very Optimistic, Innocent Time” Cirque Lodge charges most patients: Interviews with Cirque Lodge staff, May 2021 and September 2021. about $64,000 a month: Ibid. Big-name former clients: Claudia Wallace, “Rehab for the Rich and Famous,” Fortune, October 20, 2009, https://archive.fortune.com/2009/10/16/news/companies/cirque_lodge.fortune/index.htm. Called the Laundry Room: “Legend of the Laundry Room,” The Laundry Room, https://www.laundryroomlv.com. “A fake protest”: Reyhan Harmanci, “Interested in the Jejune Institute? It’s Too Late,” New York Times, April 21, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/us/22bcculture.html. would also have just ended: “2020 Sundance Film Festival Schedule,” Sundance Institute, https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/2020-sundance-features-announced. Beck and Losee early on: Interview with Dave Beck, May 2020. Oracle’s business is not exciting: “1970s: Defying Conventional Wisdom,” Oracle, May 2007, https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/profit/p27anniv-timeline-151918.pdf. was bringing in: Reuters, “Company Reports; Oracle Corp. (ORCL, NMM),” New York Times, June 23, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/23/business/company-reports-oracle-corp-orclnnm.html. The $40,000 salary: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 30. His parents, Richard and Judy: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 8. he wanted to build something: Ibid., 10. no one was tracking: Ibid., 31. Richard Hsieh told him: Ibid., 37. only about 3 percent: “Americans Going Online… Explosive Growth, Uncertain Destinations,” Pew Research Center, October 16, 1995, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americansgoing-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/. Oracle became one: “1970s: Defying Conventional Wisdom,” Oracle. Demand for the stock: Adam Lashinsky, “Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web,” CNN Money, July 25, 2005, https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/. the first one had launched: Ryan Singel, “Oct. 27, 1994: Web Gives Birth to Banner Ads,” Wired, October 27, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/10/1027hotwired-banner-ads/. When an important: Julia Angwin, “Internet World Is a Stage / Startups Hope to Catch Eyes at the Largest Web-Users Convention,” SFGATE, March 12, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Internet-World-Is-a-Stage-Startups-hope-to-2849478.php. A San Francisco Focus: Author and title unknown, San Francisco Focus, August 1997. Named for: “Yahoo History—Complete History of the Yahoo Search Engine,” History Computer, July 15, 2021, https://history-computer.com/software/yahoo-history-complete-history-of-the-yahoosearch-engine/. Yang wanted to buy: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 42. Sometimes parties took place: David Garber, “Meet the Renegade DJ Crew Who Helped Bring Rave Culture to the West Coast,” Vice, October 18, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x88gq/wickedsan-fransisco-anniversary-feature. The warehouse was massive: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 78. “As someone who is”: Ibid., 79.

Hundreds of people: Julia Angwin, “Where Wuppies Gather / DrinkExchange Draws Hundreds Every Month,” SFGATE, September 6, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Where-WuppiesGather-DrinkExchange-draws-2808693.php. One clunky online invitation: “NOTE: DrinkExchange on October 30!!!,” DrinkExchange, October 11, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/19991011095757/http://www.drinkexchange.com:80/sanfran/. a financial crisis in Russia: “IPOs Roar Back to Life,” CNN Money, December 1, 1998, https://money.cnn.com/1998/12/01/investing/ipo/. sparked in part: Peter Delevett, “Partovi Twins Quietly Emerge as Top Silicon Valley Angel Investors,” Mercury News, March 7, 2014, https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/03/07/partovi-twins-quietlyemerge-as-top-silicon-valley-angel-investors/. paid $265 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 49. “Against the backdrop”: Paulette Thomas, “Rewriting the Rules,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2000, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB958491110748477546. eBay, the online auction site: Aaron Lucchetti, “eBay IPO, Priced at $18, Breaks a Long Dry Spell,” Wall Street Journal, September 24, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB906553299573701000. He would have earned: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 49.

Chapter 2: Treasure Mountain Park City nearly disappeared: Tina Stahlke Lewis, “How Park City Survived the Ghost Town Years of the 1950s,” Park City Magazine, December 8, 2018, https://www.parkcitymag.com/arts-andculture/2018/12/how-park-city-survived-the-ghost-town-years-of-the-1950s. that become biking routes: “Open Space & Trails,” Park City, https://www.parkcity.org/about-us/bus-bikewalk/open-space-trails. like those of other: “Mining Towns in the Western United States,” Western Mining History, https://westernmininghistory.com/map/. The town was home: Alison Butz, “Park City’s History,” Historic Park City Utah, October 13, 2010, https://historicparkcityutah.com/news/park-citys-history. survived big fires: Jami Balls, “History of Park City,” History to Go, https://historytogo.utah.gov/historypark-city/. catastrophic mine collapses: Tom Clyde, “Tom Clyde: The Second Daly West Mine Disaster,” Park Record, May 15, 2015, https://www.parkrecord.com/opinion/letters/tom-clyde-the-second-daly-west-minedisaster/. were boarded up: Lewis, “How Park City Survived the Ghost Town Years of the 1950s.” appeared in a guidebook: Ibid. 1,150 people still lived there: “Park City History Timeline,” Park City Museum, https://parkcityhistory.org/park-city-historic-timeline/. set on a new course: “Dying Mining Town to Become Ski Resort,” New York Times, April 15, 1963, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/04/15/102285644.html?pageNumber=98. Treasure Mountain ski resort: Shontai M. Pohl, “The Way We Were: Treasure Mountain Inn,” Park Record, June 9, 2015, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city/the-way-we-were-treasuremountain-inn/. about 8,400 people: “Park City city, Utah,” United States Census Bureau, https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?g=1600000US4958070. More than 100,000 people: Bubba Brown, “Sundance 2019 Dipped Slightly but Still Brought In $182.5 Million and More than 120K Attendees,” Park Record, May 31, 2019, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/sundance-2019-dipped-slightly-but-still-brought-in-182-5-millionand-more-than-120k-attendees/. walk the press line: Tiffini Porter, “Park City’s Beloved George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center Celebrates 20 Years,” Park City Magazine, December 15, 2017, https://www.parkcitymag.com/artsand-culture/2017/12/stage-of-many-players. current booming industry: Jeff Dempsey, “Park City Area Real Estate Had a Banner Year in 2020,” Park Record, February 14, 2021, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city-area-real-estate-had-a-banneryear-in-2020/. reported the first known: Bubba Brown, “First Known Instance of Coronavirus Community Spread in Summit County Discovered (Updated),” Park Record, March 14, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/officials-announce-first-instance-of-coronavirus-communityspread-in-summit-county/. In the following days: “Declarations/Announcements,” Park City, https://www.parkcity.org/government/covid-19/declarations-announcements.

foresaw an economic crisis: Leia Larsen and Tony Semerad, “With Sales Taxes Down Sharply Due to COVID-19, Utah Cities Face Painful Budget Choices,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 8, 2020, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/08/with-sales-taxes-down/. arts and culture district: Sean Higgins, “Park City Council to Revisit Arts and Culture District Funding This Week,” KPCW, February 24, 2021, https://www.kpcw.org/post/park-city-council-revisit-arts-andculture-district-funding-week. thrown into question: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Funding for Arts District Questioned amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” Park Record, December 23, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city/park-cityfunding-for-arts-district-questioned-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/. 1000 Van Ness Avenue: Cindy, “The Don Lee Building,” Art and Architecture, June 20, 2013, https://www.artandarchitecture-sf.com/the-don-lee-building.html. originally designed: “National Register #01001179: Don Lee Building,” NoeHill in San Francisco, https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/nat2001001179.asp. Developers were converting: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 55–56. the group eventually owned: Ibid., 56. OpenTable: “OpenTable Dines Out on $10 Million,” OpenTable, January 8, 2000, https://press.opentable.com/news-releases/news-release-details/opentable-dines-out-10-million/. a native of England: Nathan Mollat, “Dragons FC Soccer Swoops into Burlingame,” San Mateo Daily Journal, December 9, 2014. unable to find: “Who We Are,” Zappos, https://www.zappos.com/about/who-we-are. Tony would later recount: Tony Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-i-did-itzapposs-ceo-on-going-to-extremes-for-customers. offered up some statistics: Jay Yarow, “The Zappos Founder Just Told Us All Kinds of Crazy Stories— Here’s the Surprisingly Candid Interview,” Insider, November 28, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-swinmurn-zappos-rnkd-2011-11. wearing board shorts: Katie Abel, “A Friendship for the Ages: Fred Mossler + the OG Zappos Crew Share Untold Tales About the Incredible Tony Hsieh.” Footwear News, December 21, 2020, https://footwearnews.com/2020/business/retail/tony-hsieh-zappos-friends-legacy-1203085996/. Tony urged Swinmurn: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 58. found Fred Mossler: Abel, “A Friendship for the Ages.” spent eight years: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 60. once Venture Frogs agreed: “Zappos.com, World’s Largest Shoe Store, Receives $1.1 Million in Financing,” PR Newswire, January 19, 2000. he quit: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 61. “Owning the loft”: Ibid., 77. “wasn’t just dumb luck”: Ibid., 89. Tony emailed Zappos staff: Ibid., 94. a round of layoffs: Ibid., 95. faster shipping methods: “20 Years, 20 Milestones: How Zappos Grew Out of Just Shoes,” Zappos, June 5, 2019, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/zappos-20th-birthday. live there rent-free: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 97. before selling the loft: Ibid., 115. posted $70 million: Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers.”

Zappos would give them: “20 Years, 20 Milestones: How Zappos Grew Out of Just Shoes.” Amazon would launch: Jason Del Rey, “The Making of Amazon Prime, the Internet’s Most Successful and Devastating Membership Program,” Vox, May 3, 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/3/18511544/amazon-prime-oral-history-jeff-bezos-one-dayshipping. it had become difficult: Hsieh, “How I Did It.” New hires were offered: Katie Canales, “Tony Hsieh, the Late Former CEO of Zappos, Famously Pioneered the Concept of Paying New, Unhappy Employees $2,000 to Quit in Order to Maintain a Happy, Productive Workforce,” Insider, November 30, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-paid-new-workers-to-quit-the-offer-2020-11. toy cars racing: Rice Sport Management, “Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Featured on 20/20,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfp9LHFIXfI. “We really want”: CBS Sunday Morning, “From 2010: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, November 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSHG3EU1EZ4. $635 million: Sarah Lacy, “What Everyone Made from the Zappos Sale,” TechCrunch, July 27, 2009, https://social.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/what-everyone-made-from-the-zappos-sale/. “an e-commerce powerhouse”: Tony Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos,” Inc., June 1, 2010, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html. Some early investors: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 210. “Tony’s social experiments”: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” “The board wanted me”: Ibid. relied on revolving credit: Ibid. had unsuccessfully approached Zappos: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 212. launched its own competitor: Alistair Barr, “Amazon to Close Fashion Website endless.com,” Reuters, September 18, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-amazon-endlessidUKBRE88H1DF20120918. an encounter he described: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” In the video: 07272009july, “Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. “In 20 years”: Matt Rosoff, “Tony Hsieh: Don’t Rule Out a Zappos Airline,” Insider, September 28, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/in-20-years-there-could-be-a-zappos-airline-2011-9. he had invented: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 94. His wife had taken: Yitzi Weiner, “Why Zappos Has a Chief Fungineer,” Authority Magazine, January 31, 2019, https://medium.com/authority-magazine/why-zappos-has-a-chief-fungineer-e1bfa283d011. statistics showed: Motoko Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. So Williams made: Michael Gaskell, “Tyler Williams—Zappos! Core Values,” YouTube, January 24, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uevQ0LYMBo. Called “Porta Parties”: “Meet Porta Party, the World’s Most Reimagined Outhouse,” Zappos, https://www.zappos.com/portaparty. Tony asked him: The Employees of Zappos.com and Dagostino, The Power of WOW, 95. the people who succeed: Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success & Happiness (Lake Dallas, TX: Success Books, 2013). The book outlines: Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, Stealing Fire (New York: Dey Street Books, 2017).

called biohacking: Sigal Samuel, “How Biohackers Are Trying to Upgrade Their Brains, Their Bodies— and Human Nature,” Vox, November 15, 2019, https://www.vox.com/futureperfect/2019/6/25/18682583/biohacking-transhumanism-human-augmentation-genetic-engineeringcrispr. One biohacker described: Ibid. Biohacking started gaining popularity: Roc Morin, “The Man Who Would Make Food Obsolete,” Atlantic, April 28, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-who-wouldmake-eating-obsolete/361058/. described it as tasting “rancid”: Keith A. Spencer, “What Soylent Tells Us about Silicon Valley,” Salon, May 28, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/05/28/what-soylent-tells-us-about-silicon-valley/. raised over $70 million: Craig Giammona, “Soylent Rolls Out Its Drinks to More 7-Eleven Stores, Touting Them as Fast Food,” Hartford Courant, February 5, 2018, https://www.courant.com/la-fi-tn-soylent20180205-story.html. “the most joyless”: Farhad Manjoo, “The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable,” New York Times, May 28, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylentrevolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html. “calmer, thinner, extroverted:” Stefanie Marsh, “Extreme Biohacking: The Tech Guru Who Spent $250,000 Trying to Live for Ever,” Guardian, September 21, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/21/extreme-biohacking-tech-guru-who-spent250000-trying-to-live-for-ever-serge-faguet. He detailed his procedure: Serge Faguet, “I’m 32 and Spent $200k on Biohacking. Became Calmer, Thinner, Extroverted, Healthier & Happier,” Hacker Noon, September 24, 2017, https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-became-calmer-thinner-extrovertedhealthier-happier-2a2e846ae113. a drug frequently used: “Lithium for Bipolar Disorder,” WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/bipolardisorder/guide/bipolar-disorder-lithium. “the embodiment of”: Marsh, “Extreme Biohacking.” own annual conference: “8th Annual Biohacking Conference,” Upgrade Labs, https://biohackingconference.com/. the antithesis of an executive: Kirsten Grind and Georgia Wells, “Twitter’s Jack Dorsey: A Hands-Off CEO in a Time of Turmoil,” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/twittersjack-dorsey-a-hands-off-ceo-in-a-time-of-turmoil-11603822774. Dorsey’s practice involves: Molly Longman, “Twitter’s CEO Only Eats One Meal per Day,” Refinery29, January 22, 2020, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/01/9265628/twitter-jack-dorseyintermittent-fasting-one-meal-per-day. He starts his day: Julia Naftulin, “Jack Dorsey Drinks a Concoction Called ‘Salt Juice’ Every Morning, but There’s No Proof It Does Anything Beneficial for Most People,” Insider, May 6, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/why-jack-dorsey-drinks-salt-juice-every-morning-2019-5. He takes ice baths: Grind and Wells, “Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.” its benefits are mixed: Allison Torres Burtka, “Do Ice Baths Work? Why Most People Can Skip the Cold Post-workout Soak, According to Athletic Trainers,” Insider, April 15, 2021, https://www.insider.com/ice-bath. Another time he went: Kirsten Grind, James R. Hagerty, and Katherine Sayre, “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, December 6,

2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-andextreme-behavior-11607264719. The author Michael Pollan discovered: Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (New York: Penguin, 2018). “What was missing”: Ibid., 7. drowned in a flotation tank: Amber Tong, “ ‘Biohacker’ Traywick Accidentally Drowned, Official Confirms,” Endpoints News, July 2, 2018, https://endpts.com/biohacker-traywick-accidentallydrowned-bloomberg/. A relative told: Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Death of a Biohacker,” New York Times, May 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/style/biohacker-death-aaron-traywick.html. Months before his death: Facebook Live video, News2Share, https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/? ref=watch_permalink&v=1668713259903223. Summit Series founders had organized: Paul Lewis, “Welcome to Powder Mountain—a Utopian Club for the Millennial Elite,” Guardian, March 16, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/powder-mountain-ski-resort-summit-eliteclub-rich-millennials. owners in financial distress: Leigh Kamping-Carder, “In Utah, These Entrepreneurs Are Creating Their Own Version of Eden,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/inutah-these-entrepreneurs-are-creating-their-own-version-of-eden-11568905597. “The folks that are here”: Ibid.

Chapter 3: Collisions The festival started: “Welcome to the Burning Man Timeline,” Burning Man, https://burningman.org/timeline/. a startup called Google: “Doodles,” Google, https://www.google.com/doodles/about. “If you haven’t been”: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” Vox, April 3, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/4/3/11625260/at-hbos-silicon-valley-premiere-elonmusk-is-pissed. a term coined by: Jillian D’Onfro, “How Zappos CEO’s Obsession with Raving Helped Him Create a Billion-Dollar Company,” Insider, October 31, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-whyzappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-was-obsessed-with-raving-2014-10. “When you experience it”: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” April 16, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20150829011059/https://www.playboy.com/playground/view/playboyinterview-tony-hsieh-zappos?page=4. “ignited a light”: “Tony Hsieh’s Legacy Reminds Us All of the Importance of Community,” Burning Man Project, December 10, 2020, https://journal.burningman.org/2020/12/news/global-news/tonyhsieh-legacy/. “Gluing a few tchotchkes”: “Art Cars on the Playa,” Burning Man, https://burningman.org/culture/history/art-history/perspectives-on-playa-art/art-cars-on-the-playa/. “What Happens Here”: “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, https://www.lvcva.com/destination-marketing/advertising-campaigns/what-happens-here-stays-here/. fascinated by poker: “What Poker Taught Tony Hsieh About Business,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/what-poker-taught-tony-hsieh-about-business. later taking weekend trips: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 68. “I realized that once”: Ibid., 69. “Most tourists never see”: Timothy Pratt, “What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas,” New York Times Magazine, October 19, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/what-happens-inbrooklyn-moves-to-vegas.html. The 2008 financial crisis: Caitlyn Belcher, “How We Stack Up: Financial Experts Weigh in on Las Vegas’ Recovery,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 26, 2016, https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/specialfeatures/neon-rebirth/how-we-stack-up-financial-experts-weigh-in-on-las-vegas-recovery/. “human collaboration is the central”: Edward L. Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human (London: Pan Books, 2012), 15. Bob Coffin likened the project: Dave Toplikar, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal Bringing Zappos Downtown,” Las Vegas Sun, February 1, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/01/las-vegas-city-council-approves-final-deal-bringin/. before dawn on a train: “Howard Hughes,” Online Nevada Encyclopedia, https://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/howard-hughes. checked into a penthouse suite: Mary Manning, “Howard Hughes: A Revolutionary Recluse,” Las Vegas Sun, May 15, 2008, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/may/15/how-vegas-went-mob-corporate/. “the largest single property owner”: Stefan Al, The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 151. Hughes bought six casinos: “The History of Gaming in Nevada, 1864–1931,” Nevada Resort Association, https://www.nevadaresorts.org/about/history/.

having never ventured out: Tim O’Reiley, “Howard Hughes Changed Vegas,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 28, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/uncategorized/howard-hughes-changed-vegas/. Tony convinced dozens: Aimee Groth, “Five Years in, Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project Is Hardly Any Closer to Being a Real City,” Quartz, January 4, 2017, https://qz.com/875086/five-years-in-tonyhsiehs-downtown-project-is-hardly-any-closer-to-being-a-real-city/. ten thousand new residents: Pratt, “What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas.” it had a headline-grabbing goal: Ibid. Tony came up with: Erica Breunlin, “Zappos CEO Seeks ‘Return on Community,’ ” BizTimes, April 22, 2013, https://biztimes.com/zappos-ceo-seeks-return-on-community/. Downtown Project would create: Figures provided by DTP companies. Tony bought the Gold Spike: Benjamin Spillman, “Downtown Project Buys Gold Spike, Casino to Close on Sunday,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 12, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinosgaming/downtown-project-buys-gold-spike-casino-to-close-on-sunday/. The number of strollers: Kindra Cooper, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on the Evolution of a Billion-Dollar, Mission-Driven Brand,” CCW Digital, July 3, 2019, https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/customer-experience/articles/tony-hsieh-ccw-vegasdowntown-project. Before he met Tony: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. Plants filled one: Sarah Feldberg, “At Home with Tony Hsieh: Post-its, Llamas and an Indoor Jungle,” Las Vegas Weekly, October 2, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2014/oct/02/home-tony-hsieh-postits-llamas-and-indoor-jungle/#/0. Energy drinks: Aimee Groth, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Incredible Apartment in Las Vegas,” Insider, October 2, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-apartment-las-vegas-20129. He rented fifty: Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune, January 23, 2012, https://fortune.com/2012/01/23/tony-hsiehs-new-350-million-startup/. had proven herself indispensable: Court records filed by attorneys representing Mimi Pham in Las Vegas say that Pham was Tony’s assistant, “right hand person,” and friend for seventeen years before his death, including their sharing an address on their driver’s licenses, his using Pham’s number as his main phone number, and having utilities in her name. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, A-21-828090-C, Eighth District Court of Nevada. With an investment: Nolan Lister, “Film Studio to Spotlight Downtown,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 24, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/film-studio-to-spotlightdowntown/. quit her job: “From International Accountant to Wellth Expert with Suzie Baleson,” Blair Badenhop, March 4, 2018, https://blairbadenhop.com/podcast/international-accountant-to-wellth-expert-withsuzie-baleson/. “Tony collects people”: Sara Corbett, “How Zappos’ CEO Turned Las Vegas into a Startup Fantasyland,” Wired, January 21, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/01/zappos-tony-hsieh-las-vegas/. whom she described: Deepak Chopra said in a statement that Suzie Baleson had been a friend for close to a decade. “We have a friendship and have worked together,” he said. “One can only imagine”: “From International Accountant to Wellth Expert with Suzie Baleson.”

Even her account: Ibid. In a photo: michael_atmore, “Village People,” Instagram, October 14, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BLi6ubHjz7_/. “produce fitness and wellness-focused events”: Wellth Collective, https://wellthcollective.com/. Airbnb itself: Kirsten Grind, Jean Eaglesham, and Preetika Rana, “Airbnb’s Coronavirus Crisis: Burning Cash, Angry Hosts and an Uncertain Future,” Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnbs-coronavirus-crisis-burning-cash-angry-hosts-and-an-uncertainfuture-11586365860. Airbnb went public: Noor Zainab Hussain and Joshua Franklin, “Airbnb Valuation Surges Past $100 Billion in Biggest U.S. IPO of 2020,” Reuters, December 10, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/airbnb-ipo-idUSKBN28K261. canceled the event: Jay Hamburger, “Tour of Utah, a Big Summertime Event in Park City, Canceled amid Spread of Coronavirus,” Park Record, April 7, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/tour-of-utaha-big-summertime-event-in-park-city-canceled-amid-spread-of-coronavirus/. Next came the shutdown: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Approves Return of Silly Market After 2020 Coronavirus Cancellation,” Park Record, May 1, 2021, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/parkcity/park-city-approves-return-of-silly-market-after-2020-coronavirus-cancellation/. could be in “limbo”: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Summer Tourism Seen in ‘Limbo’ Caused by Coronavirus,” Park Record, April 3, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city-summertourism-seen-in-limbo-caused-by-coronavirus/. bringing back sales tax revenues: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Economy Roared as Coronavirus Raged, City Hall Numbers Show,” Park Record, September 7, 2021, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/parkcity/park-city-economy-roared-as-coronavirus-raged-city-hall-numbers-show/. began helping Tony with: People familiar with Justin Weniger and Suzie Baleson said that they had not been running the 10X project. an annual music festival: Justin Weniger said that Life Is Beautiful is “a community revitalization project aimed at shifting the focus from the problems of our community to the possibility of our community.” never quite earning: Justin Weniger said that he had separated from some of the people in Tony’s inner circle “for a variety of reasons” but that he and Tony had always been “very, very close.” a possible sale: Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Rolling Stone magazine, did not return a request for comment. Weniger was eager: Justin Weniger said he had had “zero interest” in Tony’s Park City business plans. “Utah friends, anyone”: Shaun Kimball, Facebook, July 24, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/shaundiego/posts/10156931155041626.

Chapter 4: Delivering Happiness “backup brain”: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), xv. In just eight days: Motoko Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 9, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. at Tony’s party loft: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 106. they worked on the book: Katie Abel, “Reading Tony Hsieh,” Footwear News, June 1, 2010, https://footwearnews.com/2010/business/news/reading-tony-hsieh-76614/. “We tried coffee”: Ibid. Zappos had reached $1 billion: Jeremy Twitchell, “From Upstart to $1 Billion Behemoth, Zappos Marks 10 Years,” Las Vegas Sun, June 16, 2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jun/16/upstart-1billion-behemoth-zappos-marks-10-year-an/. “So, in terms of this book”: Jack Covert, “Review: ‘Delivering’ Happiness,” Inc., July 1, 2010, https://www.inc.com/articles/2010/07/book-review-delivering-happiness.html. “It is hard not to like”: Paul B. Carroll, “Getting a Foothold Online,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704002104575290742364322212. “We only hire happy people”: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely, and Laura Winig, “Zappos.Com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture,” Harvard Business School Case Study no. 6100015, June 27, 2011. Zappos was named: “100 Best Companies to Work For: Zappos.com,” Fortune, 2015, https://fortune.com/best-companies/2015/zappos-com/. within five to seven years: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 197. averaged 160 hours: According to Zappos. The starting pay: According to Zappos. had hired only 250 people: Tony Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-i-did-itzapposs-ceo-on-going-to-extremes-for-customers. “Job interviews took place”: Noah Askin, Gianpiero Petriglieri, and Joanna Lockard, “Tony Hsieh at Zappos: Structure, Culture and Change,” INSEAD, August 26, 2016, 7. The application forms included: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely, and Laura Winig, “Zappos.Com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture,” Harvard Business School 9-610–015 (June 27, 2011). his staff listed dog day care: Stephen J. Dubner, “PLAYBACK (2015): Could the Next Brooklyn Be… Las Vegas?! (Ep. 205),” produced by Greg Rosalsky, Freakonomics, December 6, 2020, https://freakonomics.com/podcast/playback-tony-hsieh/. if you can do your laundry: nodesireusername, “Google’s HQ—Googleplex, CA,” YouTube, March 25, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sOtjBDPQdU. Zappos encouraged managers: Kai Ryssdal, “Zappos CEO on Corporate Culture and ‘Happiness,’ ” Marketplace, August 19, 2010, https://www.marketplace.org/2010/08/19/zappos-ceo-corporateculture-and-happiness/. “A lot of companies talk”: David Gelles, “At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,” New York Times, July 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-selling-shoes-and-a-vision.html.

another of the reasons: 07272009july, “Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. A customer in Florida: Jennie Bell, “Zappos Employees Reveal What Customers Really Call Them About,” Footwear News, May 6, 2019, https://footwearnews.com/2019/business/retail/zapposcustomer-service-stories-calls-1202778070/. “Party with your peers”: Derek Noel, “Driving Company Culture with a Little Bit of Luck,” Zappos, March 24, 2016, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/driving-company-culture-with-a-little-bit-ofluck. The next year: Julianna Young, “Come One, Come All: Annual Vendor Party Runs Away with the ‘Untamed Circus,’ ” Zappos, August 25, 2016, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/untamedcircus. Drai’s Beachclub and Nightclub: Drai’s Beachclub and Nightclub, https://draisgroup.com/las-vegas/. “So if I am around”: Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?” “Is this a cult?”: “Tony Hsieh,” The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, aired August 1, 2011, https://www.cc.com/video/mqbxt0/the-colbert-report-tony-hsieh. “Ideally psychology:” Martin Seligman, “The American Psychological Association 1998 Annual Report President’s Address,” American Psychologist 54, no. 8 (August 1999): 537–68. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.8.537. “pop positive thinking”: Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 168. Eastern philosophies: Daniel Horowitz, Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 104. Cultural movement: Ibid, 7. Positive psychologists tried: Ibid., 148. embraced methods echoing: Ibid. including publishing books: Ibid., 149. it was about happiness leading: Ibid., 158. “Happy, or positive, people”: Ibid., 159. The book argues: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 272–73. “comes from between”: Ibid. achieving a longtime goal: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 231. winning the lottery: Some research has connected winning the lottery with increased overall life satisfaction. See, e.g., Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, and David Cesarini, “Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being,” Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2018, https://doi.org/10.3386/w24667. “The question for you to ask”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 231. Lim, with the help of Tony: Jenn Lim, “How to Achieve (and Keep) a Great Company Culture,” Inc., October 21, 2015, https://www.inc.com/jenn-lim/how-to-achieve-and-keep-a-great-workculture.html. spun off Delivering Happiness: Sindy, “Keeping 2011 SXSW Happy,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/keeping-2011-sxsw-happy. The consulting team would grow: “Meet the Team,” Delivering Happiness, https://www.deliveringhappiness.com/meet-the-team.

Jolly Good Fellow: Steve Lohr, “Hey, Who’s He? With Gwyneth? The Google Guy,” New York Times, September 1, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01google.html. He developed a mindfulness course: “About,” Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, https://siyli.org/about/. “Imagine two human beings”: Carolyn Gregoire, “Google’s ‘Jolly Good Fellow’ on the Power of Emotional Intelligence,” HuffPost, September 29, 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/googlesjolly-good-fellow_n_3975944. McDonald’s named its mascot clown: Stefano Hatfield, “Lovin’ Every Minute? Not Likely,” Guardian, September 3, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/sep/03/comment. “the latest, creepiest job”: Josh Kovensky, “Chief Happiness Officer Is the Latest, Creepiest Job in Corporate America,” New Republic, July 22, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118804/happiness-officers-are-spreading-across-america-why-its-bad. can have the paradoxical effect: Iris B. Mauss et al., “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11, no. 4 (August 2011): 807–15, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010. In one experiment: Ibid. In a separate study: Iris B. Mauss et al., “The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be Lonely,” Emotion 12, no. 5 (October 2012): 908–12, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025299. Daniel Horowitz, a historian: Horowitz, Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America. Ibid., 274. “hedonic treadmill”: Jennifer Senior, “Happiness Won’t Save You: Philip Brickman Was an Expert in the Psychology of Happiness, but He Couldn’t Make His Own Pain Go Away,” New York Times, November 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/happiness-depression-suicidepsychology.html. Brickman committed suicide: “Professor’s Death Is Termed Suicide,” Detroit Free Press, May 16, 1982. “The best way off”: C. B. Wortman and D. Coates, “Obituary: Philip Brickman (1943–1982),” American Psychologist 40, no. 9 (1985), 1051–52, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092212. Some research has linked: Brett Q. Ford, Iris B. Mauss, and June Gruber, “Valuing Happiness Is Associated with Bipolar Disorder,” Emotion 15, no. 2 (April 2015): 211–22, https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000048. and depression: Brett Q. Ford et al., “Desperately Seeking Happiness: Valuing Happiness Is Associated with Symptoms and Diagnosis of Depression,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33, no. 10 (December 2014): 890–905, https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.10.890. high levels of positive emotions: June Gruber, Iris B. Mauss, and Maya Tamir, “A Dark Side of Happiness? How, When, and Why Happiness Is Not Always Good,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (May 2011): 222–23, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611406927. said he had become convinced: Amir Mandel, “Why Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman Gave Up on Happiness,” Haaretz, October 7, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israelnews/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-nobel-prize-winner-daniel-kahneman-gave-up-on-happiness1.6528513. He suffered from: A court filing by the Hsieh family in Las Vegas in August 2021 said, “Despite his professional successes, Tony struggled with significant social anxiety.” Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada,

August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). a developmental disability associated: “Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD),” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 25, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/facts.html. Oliver Sacks wrote devastatingly: Oliver Sacks, “Face-Blind,” New Yorker, August 23, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/face-blind. He took Adderall: A Las Vegas court filing filed by the Hsieh family in August 2021 described the medications Tony had taken. Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). a medication generally associated: “Adderall—Uses, Side Effects, and More,” WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-63163/adderall-oral/details. It should not: “Dangers of Mixing Adderall and Alcohol,” Healthline, February 4, 2019, https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/adderall-and-alcohol. a cross-country road trip: “Delivering Happiness Bus Tour—Tour Map,” Delivering Happiness Bus, September 24, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100924043821/http://deliveringhappinessbus.com/tour. Starting in Las Vegas: “Delivering Happiness Bus Tour—City Stops and Dates,” Delivering Happiness Bus, September 24, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100924005133/http://www.deliveringhappinessbus.com/stops. sack races in Colorado: “Happy Wrap” (video), Delivering Happiness Bus, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/happy-wrap. a happy hour: Jeff Slobotski, “Behind the Scenes of the Delivering Happiness Bus Tour,” Silicon Prairie News, September 7, 2010, https://siliconprairienews.com/2010/09/behind-the-scenes-of-thedelivering-happiness-bus-tour/. hula-hooping in Rhode Island: “Happy Wrap.” caught up with the actor: Amy, “Delivering Happiness with Ashton Kutcher,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/delivering-happiness-with-ashton-kutcher. in a later interview: DeliveringHappiness, “Delivering Happiness with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore —Part One,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-K0r5821Kw. Zappos employees rode: DeliveringHappiness, “Delivering Happiness in Times Square,” YouTube, September 9, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFQL3Yj8QZk.

Chapter 5: The Ghost in the Machine Sold for about $7 million: “2636 Aspen Springs Dr, Park City, UT 84060,” Zillow, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2636-Aspen-Springs-Dr-Park-City-UT-84060/68846639_zpid/. was listed for $14.9 million: Ibid. He offered to pay: Kirsten Grind, James R. Hagerty, and Katherine Sayre, “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-and-extremebehavior-11607264719. “explained to me”: Ibid. lived in the $4 million: “1422 Empire Ave, Park City, UT 84060,” Zillow, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1422-Empire-Ave-Park-City-UT-84060/89095788_zpid/. trails that can reach: “Open Space & Trails,” Park City, https://www.parkcity.org/about-us/bus-bikewalk/open-space-trails. On those long walks: Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter (New York: William Morrow, 2016). SpaceX had launched two astronauts: Andy Pasztor, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts into Orbit,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-triesagain-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001. He began repeating: Adrienne Burke, “Why Zappos CEO Hsieh Wants to Enable More Collisions in Vegas,” Forbes, November 15, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2013/11/15/whyzappos-ceo-hsieh-wants-to-enable-more-collisions-in-vegas/. “Cities have stood”: Wharton School, “Tony Hsieh | 2016 Wharton People Analytics Conference,” YouTube, June 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81uYlpLzuJY. Tony’s thinking seemed inspired: “Video: Watch Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Talk on Urban Renewal in Santa Fe,” Santa Fe Institute, September 30, 2014, https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/hsiehtalk-announce. Geoffrey West: Luis M. A. Bettencourt et al., “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 17 (April 24, 2007): 7301–06, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0610172104. His and others’ work: Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, “A Unified Theory of Urban Living,” Nature, October 21, 2010, https://www.nature.com/articles/467912a. as a city doubled in size: Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times, December 17, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html. a 15 percent rise: Ibid. crime, traffic congestion: Bettencourt and West, “A Unified Theory of Urban Living.” more than three-quarters: Zack Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on Getting Rid of Managers: What I Wish I’d Done Differently,” CNBC, September 13, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/13/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-the-thing-i-regret-about-getting-rid-ofmanagers.html. “I think of my role”: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 131.

about two hundred corporate leaders: Conscious Capitalism, “A Look at the 2019 CEO Summit,” https://www.consciouscapitalism.org/story/2019-ceo-summit. Conscious Capitalism offered an answer: Rachel Emma Silverman, “At ‘Conscious Capitalism’ Gathering, CEOs Say Business Isn’t Bad,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-conscious-capitalism-gathering-ceos-say-business-isnt-bad1477408088. as having a rebellious streak: HolacracyOne, “Brian Robertson’s Personal Journey with Holacracy®—at Zappos’ All Hands,” YouTube, April 1, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vstsmA_cc7o. after he had nearly crashed: TEDx Talks, “Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management | Brian Robertson | TEDxGrandRapids,” YouTube, July 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=tJxfJGo-vkI. with only twenty hours: TEDx Talks, “Why Not Ditch Bosses and Distribute Power: Brian Robertson at TEDxDrexelU,” YouTube, June 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-8AOccyj4. “How do I build”: TEDx Talks, “Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management.” “Research shows”: Brian J. Robertson, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), 15. Holacracy is a form: Holacracy, https://www.holacracy.org. “where all members”: Davi Gabriel da Silva, “Holacracy: Quick Beginner’s Guide,” Target Teal, March 1, 2017, https://targetteal.com/en/blog/holacracy-quick-beginners-guide/. Problems are called “tensions”: Chris Cowan, “Holacracy® Basics: Understanding Tensions,” Holacracy, May 25, 2018, https://blog.holacracy.org/holacracy-basics-understanding-tensions-98fc3c032acf. Each circle holds governance meetings: “Governance Meetings,” Holacracy, https://www.holacracy.org/governance-meetings. The Ghost in the Machine: Steve Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy,” Forbes, January 15, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-andholacracy/. things that are simultaneously independent: Kurt C. Stange, “A Science of Connectedness,” Annals of Family Medicine 7, no. 5 (September 2009): 387–95, https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.990. known as a holarchy: Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy.” “It captured the spirit”: Brian Robertson, “History of Holacracy®,” Holacracy, July 28, 2014, https://blog.holacracy.org/history-of-holacracy-c7a8489f8eca. He announced the change: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Is Going Holacratic: No Job Titles, No Managers, No Hierarchy,” Quartz, December 30, 2013, https://qz.com/161210/zappos-is-going-holacratic-no-jobtitles-no-managers-no-hierarchy/. The event also included: Ibid. a 4,500-word email: Tony Hsieh, “CEO Letter: A Teal Organization,” Zappos, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/a-teal-organization. Laloux created an overview: Frederic Laloux, “Reinventing Organizations,” Excerpt and Summaries, Change Factory, March 2014, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/uploads/2/1/9/8/21988088/140305_laloux_reinventing_ organizations.pdf. wisdom of emotions: Ibid. “Like all the bold steps”: Hsieh, “CEO Letter.” In early May 2015: Rachel Emma Silverman, “At Zappos, Some Employees Find Offer to Leave Too Good to Refuse,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-zappos-some-

employees-find-offer-to-leave-too-good-to-refuse-1431047917. That number increased: Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on Getting Rid of Managers.” Tony felt frustrated: Gregory Ferenstein, “The Zappos Exodus Wasn’t About Holacracy, Says Tony Hsieh,” Fast Company, January 19, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3055657/the-zappos-exoduswasnt-about-holacracy-says-tony-hsieh. founded more than four hundred: According to a spokeswoman for Virgin. “The most extraordinary people”: VirginLimitedEdition, “Richard Branson’s Story of Necker Island,” YouTube, April 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STCqSXCbbcw. He and Tony had crossed paths: Richard Branson, “Tony Hsieh Remembered,” Virgin, November 30, 2020, https://virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/tony-hsieh-remembered. “I love you,” Tony thought: Inspiringchildren, “Tony Hsieh & Jewel Conversation @Zappos All Hands,” YouTube, February 15, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_8e5BNBwA. Jewel Kilcher had relied: Jewel, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2015). after Tony invited her: Inspiringchildren, “Tony Hsieh & Jewel Conversation @Zappos All Hands.” Jewel had herself struggled: Jewel, “My Life’s Work Has Not Been About Music. It Has Been About Solving for Pain,” Vogue, May 27, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/jewel-mental-health. “an urban version of Burning Man”: Noah Kulwin, “Tony Hsieh Wants Us to Forget the Zappos Drama and Behold the ‘Rainforest,’ ” Vox, May 18, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11698856/zappos-tony-hsieh-holocracy-video-code-commerce. “world’s largest living room”: Alan Snel, “Different Sites in Downtown Las Vegas Both Feature Airstream Trailers,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 3, 2015, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/different-sites-in-downtown-las-vegas-both-featureairstream-trailers/. Five cats lived there: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 94. he had spontaneously adopted: Ibid., p. 97. Sarah Jessica Parker posed: Ibid. Tony was suffering from: A filing by the Hsieh family in August 2021 in a Las Vegas court confirms that Tony suffered from “significant social anxiety.” When Tyler Williams was asked: Yitzi Weiner, “Why Zappos Has a Chief Fung-ineer,” Authority Magazine, January 31, 2019, https://medium.com/authority-magazine/why-zappos-has-a-chieffungineer-e1bfa283d011. have limited access to care: Azza Altiraifi and Nicole Rapfogel, “Mental Health Care Was Severely Inequitable, Then Came the Coronavirus Crisis,” Center for American Progress, September 10, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/disability/reports/2020/09/10/490221/mental-health-careseverely-inequitable-came-coronavirus-crisis/. as violent, unpredictable: Julio Arboleda-Flórez and Heather Stuart, “From Sin to Science: Fighting the Stigmatization of Mental Illnesses,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 57, no. 8 (August 2012): 457–63, https://doi.org/10.1177/070674371205700803. Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry launched: Mary Louise Kelly, Elena Burnett, and Courtney Dorning, “Oprah and Prince Harry on Mental Health, Therapy and Their New TV Series,” NPR, May 21, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999229547/-this-is-a-service-to-the-world-oprah-and-princeharry-on-new-mental-health-seri.

“You see everything”: Kanye West on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, Netflix, aired May 31, 2019. around 17 million at the time: Michael Sheetz, “Elon Musk Asked His Twitter Followers for Tesla Feedback—Here’s What They Said,” CNBC, December 26, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/26/elon-musk-asked-his-twitter-followers-for-tesla-feedback--hereswhat-they-said.html. “The reality is great highs”: Elon Musk, Twitter, July 30, 2017, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/891710778205626368. while hosting Saturday Night Live: Rebecca Elliott and John Jurgensen, “Elon Musk on ‘SNL’ Says He Has Asperger’s, Jokes About Dogecoin,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-quips-about-his-aspergers-to-kick-off-snl-host-gig11620534790. a study that continued: Michael A. Freeman et al., “The Prevalence and Co-Occurrence of Psychiatric Conditions Among Entrepreneurs and Their Families,” Small Business Economics 53, no. 2 (August 2019): 323–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-0059-8. “Are entrepreneurs touched”: Michael A. Freeman, Sheri L. Johnson, Paige J. Staudenmaier, and Mackenzie R. Zisser, “Are Entrepreneurs ‘Touched with Fire?’ ” Pre-Publication Manuscript, April 17, 2015, https://www.michaelafreemanmd.com/Research_files/Are%20Entrepreneurs%20Touched%20with%2 0Fire%20(pre-pub%20n)%204-17-15.pdf. one in five people experiences: “You Are Not Alone,” National Alliance on Mental Illness, 2020, https://www.nami.org/NAMI/media/NAMIMedia/Infographics/NAMI_YouAreNotAlone_2020_FINAL.pdf. committed suicide: “RSS Creator Aaron Swartz Dead at 26,” Harvard Magazine, January 14, 2013, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/rss-creator-aaron-swartz-dead-at-26. “I feel ashamed”: Aaron Swartz, “Sick,” Raw Thought, November 27, 2007, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick. He told people: According to a Las Vegas court filing by the Hsieh family in August 2021. Though the parade: “Kalispell, Bigfork Fourth of July Parades Canceled,” Daily Inter Lake, June 2, 2020, https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2020/jun/02/kalispell-bigfork-fourth-of-july-parades-6/.

Chapter 6: A Creative Solution Tony had enticed: Aimee Groth, “Five Years In, Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project Is Hardly Any Closer to Being a Real City,” Quartz, January 5, 2017, https://qz.com/875086/five-years-in-tony-hsiehsdowntown-project-is-hardly-any-closer-to-being-a-real-city/. commitment to spend $350 million: “$350M Investment,” DTP Companies, https://dtplv.com/breakdown/. One of the first to move: Jennifer Robison, “With Boom Over, Las Vegas Enters Era of Normal,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 28, 2012, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/with-boomover-las-vegas-enters-era-of-normal/. The Vegas Tech Fund: Alyson Shontell, “A Grave Financial Error Sank a Startup and Contributed to Its Founder’s Suicide,” Insider, April 24, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/jody-sherman-ecomomand-a-grave-financial-error-2013-4. For Ecomom, that included: “Ecomom and David Arquette Help Fight Hunger in the U.S.,” Ecomom, May 30, 2012, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ecomom-and-david-arquette-help-fighthunger-in-the-us-155701935.html. Sherman died: Andrea Chang, “After Jody Sherman Death, Tech Community Seeks Dialogue on Suicide,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-feb01-la-fi-tn-jody-sherman-death-20130201-story.html. the company had burned: Shontell, “A Grave Financial Error Sank a Startup and Contributed to Its Founder’s Suicide.” shut Ecomom down: Sarah Lacy, “Ecomom Is Liquidating and Shutting Down; Investors Are Stunned,” Pando, February 14, 2013, https://pandodaily.com/2013/02/15/ecomom-is-liquidating-and-shuttingdown-investors-are-stunned. a public mental health discussion: Chang, “After Jody Sherman Death, Tech Community Seeks Dialogue on Suicide.” the pressures: Patrick Clark, “After Suicide of Jody Sherman, a Call to Talk About the Emotional Strain of Life at Startups,” Observer, January 31, 2013, https://observer.com/2013/01/after-suicide-of-jodysherman-a-call-to-talk-about-the-emotional-strain-of-life-at-startups/. died by suicide: One of the suicides was listed as an apparent suicide. See Nellie Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?,” Vox, October 1, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/11631452/the-downtown-project-suicides-can-the-pursuit-ofhappiness-kill-you. “a jarring moment”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?” had launched a manufacturing company: Ingrid Lunden, “Tony Hsieh, Vegas Tech Fund Put $10M into Factorli, a Factory for US Hardware Startups,” TechCrunch, May 21, 2014, https://social.techcrunch.com/2014/05/21/tony-hsieh-vegas-tech-fund-put-10m-into-factorli-afactory-for-us-hardware-startups/. Her company was even mentioned: “Remarks by the President at the White House Maker Faire,” The White House, June 18, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2014/06/18/remarks-president-white-house-maker-faire. “I just trusted Tony”: Nellie Bowles, “Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project,” Vox, September 30, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/11631412/factorli-an-early-casualty-ofthe-las-vegas-downtown-project.

Factorli shut down: Alan Snel, “Downtown Tech Manufacturer Factorli Closes,” Las Vegas ReviewJournal, August 12, 2014, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtown-tech-manufacturerfactorli-closes/. and other businesses there were closing: Bowles, “Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project.” had decided to move away: Joe Schoenmann, “Joe Downtown: Is Romotive’s Departure a Sign of the Future?,” Las Vegas Weekly, March 20, 2013, https://lasvegasweekly.com/column/joedowntown/2013/mar/20/joe-downtown-vegastechfunds-romotive-silicon-valle/. Tony had picked up detractors: Leah Meisterlin, “Antipublic Urbanism: Las Vegas and the Downtown Project,” Avery Review, http://averyreview.com/issues/3/antipublic-urbanism. without consideration: Joe Schoenmann, “Joe Downtown: Gentrification or Positive Progress? The Great Downtown Debate,” Las Vegas Sun, June 20, 2013, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jun/20/joedowntown-not-everyone-embracing-downtown-proje/. Downtown Project stopped using: Joe Schoenmann, “Joe Downtown: Hsieh Says Downtown Project Not a Charity, Can’t Solve Every Community Problem,” Las Vegas Sun, February 7, 2014, https://vegasinc.lasvegassun.com/business/2014/feb/07/joe-downtown-hsieh-says-downtown-projectnot-chari/. There are a lot: “Downtown Project: Collisions, Co-Learning, Connectness,” Evernote, February 7, 2014, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/sh/66aed622-6730-4009-86b02d2ffe7ea26f/0fca9f01d630275220b4caea45a4bb41. and instead turn to: Ibid. Downtown Project laid off: Alan Snel, “Downtown Project Lays Off 30 Workers; Hsieh Role Unchanged,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 30, 2014, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtownproject-lays-off-30-workers-hsieh-role-unchanged/. called a “bloodletting”: Las Vegas Weekly Staff, “ ‘Bloodletting’ at Downtown Project with Massive Layoffs,” Las Vegas Weekly, September 30, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-seeit/2014/sep/30/breaking-bloodletting-downtown-project-layoffs/. “a collage of decadence”: Las Vegas Weekly Staff, “An Open Letter to Tony Hsieh from Former DTPer David Gould,” Las Vegas Weekly, September 29, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-seeit/2014/sep/30/david-gould-letter-resignation-tony-hsieh-DTP/. Vox noted that: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?” “I’m not on the board”: Snel, “Downtown Tech Manufacturer Factorli Closes.” “Suicides happen anywhere”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?” skipping out on shifts: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019). Zappos said that for a short time in 2015, the challenge had been “having enough team members available during certain windows to fill them,” not workers’ skipping shifts. not enough resources: Bethany Tomasian, “Q&A with John Bunch: Holacracy Helps Zappos Swing from Job Ladder to Job Jungle Gym,” Workforce.com, March 29, 2019, https://workforce.com/news/qawith-john-bunch-holacracy-helps-zappos-swing-from-job-ladder-to-job-jungle-gym. meetings in each “circle”: Virginia Heffernan, “Meet Is Murder,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/meet-is-murder.html. had given it up: Andy Doyle, “Management and Organization at Medium,” Medium, March 4, 2016, https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9.

which the company blamed: Ibid. “If every circle”: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Has Quietly Backed Away from Holacracy,” Yahoo! Quartz, January 29, 2020, https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacracy090102533.html. Amazon’s famously aggressive: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruisingworkplace.html. he dashed one off: Ben Bergman, “Former Amazon Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke on Why He Left, Unionization and ‘Nomadland,’ ” GeekWire, May 3, 2021, https://dot.la/jeff-wilke-2652855402.html. “You’re tired”: Patti Greco, “What Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Does All Day,” WeWork, September 17, 2019, https://www.wework.com/ideas/professional-development/management-leadership/what-doeszappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-do-all-day. at least seven hours of sleep: “Sleep and Sleep Disorders: Data and Statistics,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 2, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html. Tony had long before: Zappos said that the company has a drug-and alcohol-use policy that prohibits illegal drug use in the workplace and requires that alcohol consumption in company offices or at work-related events be done responsibly. He had even built: The Employees of Zappos.com and Dagostino, The Power of WOW, 49. At Cirque Lodge: During the author Kirsten Grind’s visit to Cirque Lodge in May 2021, Cirque provided several therapists for her to speak with about the facility and drug and alcohol addiction in general. its website asks: “Understanding Alcohol Use Disorder,” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, April 2021, https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Alcohol_Use_Disorder_0.pdf. “Psychedelics are really”: Rick Doblin, “The Future of Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy,” TED2019, April 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_doblin_the_future_of_psychedelic_assisted_psychotherapy. rather than arrest him: Weniger said, “Clearly, neither Suzie or I could have any influence in directing law enforcement or medical personnel.” He said that he and Baleson had worked with police “to build a profile of who Tony was and how he was thinking and what the best potential tactic in approaching him might be.” Instead, the house was cleaned: Some parties involved dispute that the house was cleaned.

Chapter 7: The Family Business read a December 1987 headline: Cinda Becker, “Local Boy Has Got What It Takes!,” San Rafael News, December 1, 1987. Tony had launched: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 13. Tony mailed them back: Ibid., 13. Customers found him: Ibid. What caught the local reporter’s: Becker, “Local Boy Has Got What It Takes!” enrolled in a US university: The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed that Chuan-Kang Hsieh, known as Richard, enrolled in 1969, and Shiao-Ling Lee Hsieh, known as Judy, enrolled in 1968. The registrations did not include their names Richard and Judy. that banned or severely limited: D’Vera Cohn, “How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History,” Pew Research Center, September 30, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2015/09/30/how-u-s-immigration-laws-and-rules-have-changed-through-history/. In the early 1960s: Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts About Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/. signed into law: “Signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act, October 3, 1965,” LBJ Presidential Library, https://www.lbjlibrary.org/object/text/signing-immigration-and-nationality-act-10-03-1965. It set a cap: “Overturning Exclusion, Limiting Immigration,” United States House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/APA/Historical-Essays/Exclusion-toInclusion/Overturning-Exclusion-Limiting-Immigration/. The new system had preferences: Ibid. students from Taiwan: Kevin O’Neil, “Brain Drain and Gain: The Case of Taiwan,” Migration Policy Institute, September 1, 2003, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/brain-drain-and-gain-casetaiwan. a nine-thousand-person demonstration: “Student Life at Illinois: 1960–1969,” Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois, https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/researcheducation/timeline/1960-1969/. Taiwanese students created: Salvatore De Sando, “Illini Everywhere: Taiwanese Illini, Since 1922,” Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois, February 28, 2018, https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/taiwanese-illini/. a doctoral degree in chemical engineering: The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed that Chuan-Kang Hsieh had earned a master’s of science in chemical engineering in June 1971 and a doctor of philosophy in chemical engineering in June 1973. He had been known as Richard, though the university did not have the name Richard on file. a master’s degree in social work: The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed that Shiao-Ling Lee Hsieh had earned a master’s in social work in 1971. She had been known as Judy, but the university did not have the name Judy registered. She would later earn: “Qualifications,” Dr. Judy Hsieh, http://www.drjudyhsieh.com/qualifications.html. “your typical Asian American parents”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 7. being called “doctor”: Ibid., 9.

learning to play musical instruments: ABC News, “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness,’ ” YouTube, August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OBZFVwu1s. The Hsiehs socialized: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 8. “That was just part”: Ibid. studied piano, violin: Ibid., 9. played tape recordings: “From 2010: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” Sunday Morning, CBS, https://www.cbs.com/shows/cbs-sundaymorning/video/FKDsNLkN8DgpY6XUIa_yrCgegIpzFdod/from-2010-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh/. “I always fantasized”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 10. Today, Branson charges: “Admissions FAQ,” The Branson School, https://www.branson.org/admissions/faq. studied Japanese, Spanish, French: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 18. he also joined: Ibid., 18–19. He got another paying gig: Ibid., 20. using the computer lab’s dial-up system: Ibid., 16. an earthworm farm: SBN Staff, “Zappos’ Tony Hsieh on the Role of Fun in a Company’s Success,” Smart Business Network, April 1, 2015, https://www.sbnonline.com/article/zappos-tony-hsieh-on-the-roleof-fun-in-a-companys-success/. the Delivering Happiness bus visited: Amy, “On a Worm Farm… Where It All Began,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/on-a-worm-farm-where-it-all-began. a magic tricks kit: James R. Hagerty, “Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Dies at 46 from Injuries Connected to House Fire,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-dies-at-46-11606572300. received hundreds of mail orders: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 14. He missed his last dance: Motoko Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 9, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. In his senior yearbook: The Branson School, http://gencat.eloquentsystems.com/branson_permalink.html?key=382. When the New York Times asked: Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?” Asian Americans are less likely: Michael S. Spencer et al., “Discrimination and Mental Health–Related Service Use in a National Study of Asian Americans,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 12 (December 2010): 2410–17, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.176321. high cultural expectations: Koko Nishi, “Mental Health Among Asian-Americans,” American Psychological Association, 2012, https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asianamerican/article-mental-health. the myth of the “model minority”: Connie Hanzhang Jin, “6 Charts That Dismantle the Trope of Asian Americans as a Model Minority,” NPR, May 25, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/999874296/6-charts-that-dismantle-the-trope-of-asian-americansas-a-model-minority. Tony stood onstage: Aimee Groth, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (New York: Touchstone, 2017), 213. managed a pan-Asian restaurant: GraceAnn Walden, “Venture Frogs Leaps on the Scene,” SFGATE, April 12, 2000, https://www.sfgate.com/insidescoop/article/Venture-Frogs-Leaps-on-the-Scene2764663.php.

with Silicon Valley references: “Venture Frogs Restaurant,” Venture Frogs, https://web.archive.org/web/20010211030141/http://www.vfrogs.com/restaurant/press_release.html. “I’m not opposed”: Alex Williams, “Dating Profiles of High-Tech, High-Worth Bachelors,” New York Times, June 7, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/06/07/fashion/20120607BACHELOR-ETTES/s/20120607-BACHELOR-slide-Z2XQ.html. Willow Smith: “Willow Smith Opens Up About Being Polyamorous,” BBC News, April 29, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-56852099. “I think it’s pretty hard”: David Hockman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20150829011059/https://www.playboy.com/playground/view/playboyinterview-tony-hsieh-zappos?page=4. The last time: Nick Swinmurn, “RIP Tony,” Medium, November 28, 2020, https://nickswinmurn.medium.com/rip-tony-6e99695ae3de. Tony seemed confused: Ibid. Tony agreed to pay Andy: Attorneys for Mimi Pham have stated this $1 million agreement in court records. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh, and Andrew Hsieh, No. A-21-828090-C. He’d gotten bachelor’s and master’s: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhsi3h/. Andy Hsieh tried: Jessica Guynn, “Facebook IPO Fuels Bay Area Spending Boom,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2012, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-may-17-la-fi-facebook-boom20120517-story.html. So in 2013: Kristy Totten, “Lux Delux Now Delivering Meals by Bicycle,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 3, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/lux-delux-now-delivering-meals-bybicycle/.

Chapter 8: Utopia “The wiser course”: “A Human Approach to World Peace,” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, https://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/a-human-approach-to-world-peace. He dispatched: According to schedules viewed by the authors. “The employee’s sphere”: Pravir Malik, “Forbes Articles on Light,” Medium, November 13, 2020, https://pravirmalik.medium.com/forbes-articles-on-light-ef3e8f469fc8. Frankl wrote: “Statue of Responsibility,” Statue of Responsibility Foundation, 2021, https://www.statueofresponsibility.com/. Daniel Park Elmhorst: “I Tried Out for America’s Got Talent!,” Daniel Park Music, January 15, 2012, http://www.danielparkmusic.com/news/2012/01/15/americas-got-talent. Victoria Recaño: “Victoria Recaño,” Inside Edition, https://www.insideedition.com/bios/victoria-recano. she had cofounded and designed: Janice Lopez, application to the Weber County Ogden Valley Planning Commission, June 25, 2019, http://www.webercountyutah.gov/agenda_files/G4%20%20OVPC%20Packet%20to%20County%20C ommission.pdf. Rachael Brown: Michael Boley, “Meet The Women Who’ve Changed Zappos History,” Zappos, March 5, 2019, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/womens-history-zappos. A cellist, Brown had trained: John Katsilometes, “Vegas Musician Owns House at Center of Tony Hsieh Incident,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 29, 2020. https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/kats/vegas-musician-ownshouse-at-center-of-tony-hsieh-incident-2195958/. Tony’s “soul mate”: Rick Lessard, “OCME Says Smoke Inhalation from New London Fire Killed Zappos Founder,” FOX61, November 30, 2020, https://www.fox61.com/article/news/local/man-dies-as-aresult-of-new-london-fire/520-28ae7356-d2f5-4cf4-992e-c93f67818536. the house she had purchased: Some people interviewed by the authors said Tony had purchased the house for Brown and transferred the title to her. Brown’s $1.3 million house: Taylor Hartz, “What Happened Nov. 18 at 500 Pequot Avenue?,” The Day, October 10, 2021, https://www.theday.com/article/20201205/NWS01/201209647. her parents still live nearby: Property records of Rachael’s parents, Lynn and Jean Brown. a real-life Schitt’s Creek: Kirsten Grind, “Schitt’s Creek, but in Real Life: Owner Tries Selling California Desert Town,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/schitts-creek-but-inreal-life-owner-tries-selling-california-desert-town-11622126653. which wanted to build: Derek Hawkins, “Cannabis Company Aims to Turn California Ghost Town into an Oasis for Weed Lovers,” Washington Post, August 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/08/cannabis-company-aims-toturn-california-ghost-town-into-an-oasis-for-weed-lovers/. He wanted to get involved: “Don Knight—Cannabis Connoisseur and Entrepreneur,” Pfeiffer Law, September 26, 2018, https://www.pfeifferlaw.com/entertainment-law-blog/don-knight-cannabisconnoisseur-and-entrepreneur. estimated years earlier: Peter Holley, “Why This CEO Is Worth Almost $1 Billion but Lives in a Trailer Park,” Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theswitch/wp/2015/07/21/why-a-ceo-worth-840-million-lives-in-a-trailer-park-with-his-pet-alpaca/.

$30,000 per month: The family of Tony Hsieh claimed in court filings that Pham’s compensation had increased to that amount in 2020 after she had previously been paid a $9,000 monthly fee. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, n.d. when Tony wanted to retrofit: Pham filed a claim against Tony Hsieh’s estate through one of her companies, Baby Monster LLC, related to the bus retrofitting contract. See In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Creditor’s Claim, Baby Monster LLC, March 3, 2021, Case No. P-20-105105-E, Eighth Judicial District Court, Clark County, Nevada. her business: “What We Do,” Wellth Collective, 2017, https://wellthcollective.com/get-wellthy/. who called herself: Emails obtained from city officials in Park City describe Suzie Baleson as Tony Hsieh’s business manager, and she said the same to others in Park City; a spokesperson for Baleson disputes that she held that role. now referred to himself: Weniger disputed in fact-checking that he had referred to himself as Tony’s bodyguard. As an organizer: Justin Weniger 3rd, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-weniger-16472a10/. a former competitive swimmer: “USMS Individual Meet Results for Elizabeth M Pezzello (11 Swims),” U.S. Masters Swimming, https://www.usms.org/comp/meets/indresults.php?SwimmerID=071YZ. Miss New York USA contestant: Elizabeth Pezzello, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/leeza_piza/? hl=en. she had briefly worked: Elizabeth Pezzello, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-pezzello5ba07aa7/. an investment manager: Brett Gorman, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-gorman9a9a443b/. For that job and several others: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. The glossy newsletter: We reviewed newsletters produced by Gorman. Tony’s brother Andy: Grind and Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers.”

Chapter 9: Good and Evil Reconciled Into this pervading genius: Quoted in Adam Green, “Oh Excellent Air Bag”: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920 (Cambridge, UK: PDR Press, 2016), 89. The sound of running water: The video “The Nitrous Oxygen Advantage” was viewed by the authors. uses her soothing, trained voice: Much of Victora Recaño’s script was copied directly from Dmitri Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” Atlantic, May 1996, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/. discovered two centuries ago: Mark A. Gillman, “Mini-review: A Brief History of Nitrous Oxide (N2O) Use in Neuropsychiatry,” Current Drug Research Reviews 11, no. 1 (February 26, 2019): 12–20, https://doi.org/10.2174/1874473711666181008163107. sometimes leads to hallucinations: Matthew Mo Kin Kwok, Jane de Lemos, and Mazen Sharaf, “DrugInduced Psychosis and Neurological Effects Following Nitrous Oxide Misuse: A Case Report,” British Columbia Medical Journal 61, no. 10 (December 2019): 385–87, https://bcmj.org/articles/druginduced-psychosis-and-neurological-effects-following-nitrous-oxide-misuse-case-report. it fades away: James P. Zacny et al., “Time Course of Effects of Brief Inhalations of Nitrous Oxide in Normal Volunteers,” Addiction 89, no. 7 (July 1994): 831–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.13600443.1994.tb00986.x. alleviate the symptoms: Jim Dryden, “Laughing Gas Relieves Symptoms in People with TreatmentResistant Depression,” Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, June 9, 2021, https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/laughing-gas-relieves-symptoms-in-people-with-treatment-resistantdepression/. and labor pain: Shawn Collins et al., “Nitrous Oxide for the Management of Labor Analgesia,” AANA Journal 86, no. 1 (February 2018): 72–80, https://www.aana.com/docs/default-source/aana-journalweb-documents-1/journal-course-6-nitrous-oxide-for-the-management-of-labor-anesthesia-february2018.pdf?sfvrsn=442d42b1_6. One pure hit can cause: Jan van Amsterdam, Ton Nabben, and Wim van den Brink, “Recreational Nitrous Oxide Use: Prevalence and Risks,” Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 73, no. 3 (December 2015): 790–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yrtph.2015.10.017. can make a person disassociate: “Nitrous Oxide,” Alcohol and Drug Foundation, https://adf.org.au/drugfacts/nitrous-oxide/. William James: Jane S. Moon, Catherine M. Kuza, and Manisha S. Desai, “William James, Nitrous Oxide, and the Anaesthetic Revelation,” Journal of Anesthesia History 4, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janh.2017.10.012. who went on to become: “William James,” Department of Psychology, Harvard University, https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/william-james. “Nevertheless, the sense”: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Digireads.com Publishing, 2011), 213. he first used the term: “Stream of Consciousness,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/stream-of-consciousness. while high on nitrous oxide: Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher.” “What’s a mistake”: Quoted in Adam Green, “Oh Excellent Air Bag”: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920. profoundly influenced James’s thinking: Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher.”

who suffered from bouts: Peter Gibbon, “The Thinker Who Believed in Doing,” Humanities 39, no. 1 (Winter 2018), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/winter/feature/the-thinker-who-believed-indoing-0. wondered whether nitrous oxide: Moon et al., “William James, Nitrous Oxide, and the Anaesthetic Revelation.” after being introduced: Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher.” Rolling Stone profiled: Robin Green, “Nitrous Oxide: After Acid, Wha’? Researches Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide and Its Respiration,” Rolling Stone, July 3, 1975, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nitrous-oxide-234197/. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: William E. Schmidt, “U.S. Indicts Oregon Guru and Says He Tried to Flee Country,” New York Times, October 29, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/29/us/us-indictsoregon-guru-and-says-he-tried-to-flee-country.html. Rajneeshpuram: Hugh Urban “Rajneeshpuram Was More than a Utopia in the Desert. It Was a Mirror of the Time,” Humanities 39, no. 2 (Spring 2018), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/spring/feature/rajneeshpuram-was-more-utopia-desert-it-wasmirror. had a special dental room: Swami Devageet, Osho: The First Buddha in the Dental Chair: Amusing Anecdotes by His Personal Dentist (Boulder, CO: Sammasati Publishing, 2013). “His dentist, a follower”: Ibid. wrote down the meandering thoughts: Rusty King, “Minisode 3: Noah’s Ark,” Building Utopia: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, January 20, 2019, https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9idWlsZGluZ3V0b3BpYXBvZGNhc3QubGlic3lu LmNvbS9yc3M? sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwiQ4uWmxZjzAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&hl=en; Devageet, Osho the First Buddha in the Dental Chair. He called the dental chamber: Devageet, Osho the First Buddha in the Dental Chair. published as three books: King, “Minisode 3: Noah’s Ark.” “It must be absolutely unprecedented”: King, “Minisode 3: Noah’s Ark.” in 1984, his followers committed: Scott Keyes, “A Strange but True Tale of Voter Fraud and Bioterrorism,” Atlantic, June 10, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/a-strange-but-truetale-of-voter-fraud-and-bioterrorism/372445/. poisoning more than 750 people: Ibid. The FBI learned: “Rajneeshee Bioterror Attack,” Homeland Security Digital Library, https://www.hsdl.org/c/tl/rajneeshee-bioterror-attack/. law enforcement scrambled: “Information Bulletin—Raves,” National Drug Intelligence Center, Department of Justice, April 2001, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/656/656t.htm#History. three people died: Michael Connelly, “Deaths of 3 Men, Source of Gas Tanks Investigated,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-10-me-3490-story.html. Fliers for raves: Ibid. in 1998 a video game developer: “Video Game: Sony PlayStation N2O: Nitrous Oxide,” Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/video-game-sony-playstation-n2o-nitrousoxide/LAFuj8dleUwHMg. with promotions that declared: Michael Colton, “To Some Critics, N2O’s Not a Gas; Ads for Video Game Featuring Nitrous Oxide Evoke Drug Culture,” Washington Post, June 18, 1998,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/nitro.htm. Figures wearing gas masks: Vysethedetermined2, “N2O: Nitrous Oxide Game Sample—Playstation,” YouTube, December 18, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohp3Ix_KWww. One online nitrous oxide supplier: “Burning Man Festival Customer Information,” CreamRight, https://web.archive.org/web/20160226213245/http://www.creamright.com/category/burning-mandiscounts.html. “Whipped cream and Burning Man?”: Ibid. The use of laughing gas: Ezra Marcus, “Nitrous Nation,” New York Times, February 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/style/nitrous-oxide-whippets-tony-hsieh.html. particularly between 2014 and 2019: Mathias B. Forrester, “Nitrous Oxide Misuse Reported to Two United States Data Systems During 2000–2019,” Journal of Addictive Diseases 39, no. 1 (December 1, 2020): 46–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/10550887.2020.1813361. according to the annual Global Drug Survey: A. R. Winstock et al., “Global Drug Survey 2020 Psychedelics Key Findings Report,” Global Drug Survey, 2021, https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wpcontent/uploads/2021/03/GDS2020-Psychedelics-report.pdf. Nitrous oxide use ranked: Adam Winstock, “Global Drug Survey 2020 Key Findings Report, Executive Summary,” Global Drug Survey, 2021, https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wpcontent/uploads/2021/01/GDS2020-Executive-Summary.pdf. experts say: Marcus, “Nitrous Nation,.” Drug overdose deaths surged: “Drug Overdose Deaths in the U.S. Up 30% in 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 14, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20210714.htm. Nitrous oxide robs the body: John Williamson, Saif Huda, and Dinesh Damodaran, “Nitrous Oxide Myelopathy with Functional Vitamin B12 Deficiency,” BMJ Case Reports 12, no. 2 (February 2019): e227439, https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2018-227439. spinal degeneration: Stephen Keddie et al., “No Laughing Matter: Subacute Degeneration of the Spinal Cord Due to Nitrous Oxide Inhalation,” Journal of Neurology 265, no. 5 (May 2018): 1089–95, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-018-8801-3. weakness, numbness: Alexander G. Thompson et al., “Whippits, Nitrous Oxide and the Dangers of Legal Highs,” Practical Neurology 15, no. 3 (June 2015): 207–09, https://doi.org/10.1136/practneurol-2014001071. loss of bodily control: “Nitrous Oxide,” Alcohol and Drug Foundation, October 6, 2021, https://adf.org.au/drug-facts/nitrous-oxide/. can cause asphyxiation: Charles L. Winek, Wagdy W. Wahba, and Leon Rozin, “Accidental Death by Nitrous Oxide Inhalation,” Forensic Science International 73, no. 2 (May 1995): 139–41, https://doi.org/10.1016/0379-0738(95)01729-3. lead to accidental injuries: Forrester, “Nitrous Oxide Misuse Reported to Two United States Data Systems During 2000–2019.” Mimi Pham jokingly called: This is a claim made by Tony Hsieh’s family in court filings. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh, and Andrew Hsieh, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaints and Demand for Jury Trial, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, No. A-21-828090-C, August 23, 2021. Attorneys for Pham have denied this in a court filing. sells whipped cream cartridges: Whip-It!, https://whipit.com/.

through Amazon: A spokeswoman for Amazon said, “Nitrous oxide is commonly used to create whipped cream and other foods, and is sold by many major retailers. Unfortunately, like many products, it can be misused. Our detail pages clearly notify customers that the products are intended only for food preparation and our Conditions of Use limit shopping on Amazon to customers 18 and older.” See also “Whip-It!,” Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/A4F0C69E-1F26-45AD-A0B348EE90619E5F. A case of 600 cartridges: “Whip-It! Elite 100 Pack, Case of 600: Industrial & Scientific,” Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/Whip-Elite-100-Pack-Case/dp/B092MSP6W8?ref_=ast_sto_dp. the company was ordered: “Nitrous Oxide Distributor to Pay Civil Penalty for Failure to Verify Age and Provide Health Warnings,” Office of the District Attorney County of San Diego, October 21, 2020, https://www.sdcda.org/content/office/newsroom/tempDownloads/45cf8e42-ed1a-4677-b3a710220f515b33_Nitrous%20Oxide%20Whip%20it%20News%20Release%2010-21-2020.pdf. had identified United Brands: Ken Stone, “Nitrous Oxide Seller Whip-It! to Pay $50K for Not Warning Minors, SD DA Says,” Times of San Diego, October 21, 2020, https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2020/10/21/nitrous-oxide-seller-whip-it-to-pay-50k-for-notwarning-minors-sd-da-says/. under its authority: “Authorities Charge Four Individuals and Shut Down Businesses Across SoCal That Allegedly Sold Nitrous Oxide as Recreational Drug,” United States Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, March 22, 2013, https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/authorities-charge-fourindividuals-and-shut-down-businesses-across-socal-allegedly. Utah law: Section 76-10-107.5, Utah Code, https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter10/76-10S107.5.html. “is exceptionally skilled”: “Welcome,” RMA, https://www.drhallerman.com. She is herself: Ruby Warrington, “Elisa Hallerman Offers the Newest Trend in Recovery: The Personalized Rehab Manager,” Observer, July 31, 2014, https://observer.com/2014/07/elisa-hallerman-offers-thenewest-trend-in-recovery-the-personalized-rehab-manager/. “If we were to reframe”: “Welcome,” RMA. He was suspended: Ellen Gamerman, “As Britney Spears’s Father Is Suspended from Conservatorship, Supporters Target Larger Reform,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-britney-spearss-father-is-suspended-from-conservatorship-supporterstarget-larger-reform-11633020435. is typically a last resort: Spencer Bokat-Lindell, “Britney Spears and the Last Resort of Mental Health Care,” New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/britneyspears-conservatorship.html. In early August: This account of the intervention attempt is based on interviews with many of the parties involved or people who knew about the intervention, public records from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, and video and police reports viewed by the authors. The Park City Police Department declined to release records related to the intervention. The police found Tony: The sale of the house had not been finalized at the time police arrived. A limited liability company associated with Tony Hsieh, 2635 Aspen Springs LLC, purchased the house at 2635 Aspen Springs Drive in a sale that was recorded in Summit County, Utah, records on October 21, 2020. The seller signed the sale agreement on October 15, 2020, according to county records. It’s not clear what arrangement was made for Tony to move in prior to the sale closing.

Chapter 10: Save Your Soul Showers and sinks ran: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. the algorithm for world peace: Ibid. Jewel had observed: David Konow, “Jewel Reveals How She Learned to Combat Anxiety, PTSD,” The Fix, April 4, 2017, https://www.thefix.com/jewel-reveals-how-she-learned-combat-anxiety-ptsd. she later wrote: Jewel, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016). “I saw that no one”: Ibid., 25. Baleson said she ran: This process was confirmed by a series of sticky notes in a photo viewed by the authors. “But from the first notes”: Teri Orr, “Teri Orr: One Shoe, Two Shoes—Red Shoe, No Shoes,” Park Record, December 11, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/opinion/teri-orr-one-shoe-two-shoes-red-shoe-noshoes/. He didn’t say anything: Justin Weniger said it wouldn’t have been his place to talk about the intervention to Jewel and others. sat with Tony: This interaction between Mark Evensvold and Tony is based on a court reporter’s transcript of the meeting, filed as part of Evensvold’s claim against Tony’s estate. See In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Creditor’s Claim, Mark Evensvold, Eighth Judicial District Nevada, P-20-105105-E, June 1, 2021. Evensvold would take: Mark Evensvold’s legal claim asks for 20 percent of Tony’s share in Nacho Daddy; the transcript of their meeting says Evensvold agreed to take 20 percent and leave Tony with 5 percent. On August 24, 2020: Bailey Schulz and Richard N. Velotta, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Retires,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 24, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-champion-of-downtown-las-vegasretires-2102935/. The short Review-Journal story: Ibid. A longer follow-up story: Eli Segall, “Ex–Zappos Chief Tony Hsieh on Homebuying Spree in Utah,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 28, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/ex-zappos-chieftony-hsieh-on-homebuying-spree-in-utah-2107177/. “traveling salesman problem”: Erica Klarreich, “Computer Scientists Find New Shortcuts for Infamous Traveling Salesman Problem,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/2013/01/traveling-salesman-problem/. Some computer scientists: Ibid. the company held a tribute: It’s unclear if Tony himself made an appearance during the tribute. a minimum of twelve weeks’ pay: Details from Zappos. Zappos’ senior leaders: Zappos said that senior leadership had been told in advance, and it was not true that select employees had been receiving calls. took the offer hard: Zappos disagreed with the description of employees’ reaction to the offer. trying to get rid of: Zappos said that that had not been the intent of the buyout offer. In 2017, Park City: Lee Davidson, “Park City Is Now the Nation’s 2nd Wealthiest Small Urban Area, with Average Incomes $27,000 More than in Salt Lake City,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 6, 2017, https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/12/07/park-city-is-now-the-nations-2nd-wealthiest-smallurban-area-with-average-incomes-27000-more-than-in-salt-lake-city/.

told the police department: The Park City Police Department released some records and video related to incidents at Tony’s properties in Park City through a Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA) request but declined to release all of them. One night in early September: Park City Police Department reports. The Park City Fire District: Katija Collins, “Park City Bans the Use of Fireworks and Open Fires,” FOX13, July 22, 2020, https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/park-city-bans-the-use-offireworks-and-open-fires. she didn’t have a license: In a statement, Puoy Premsrirut said that Utah counsel had also been engaged to “address any issues, citations, or if matters escalated.” When Andy Hsieh came out: Park City Police Department reports. This time: Park City Police Department video of the incident. After one of the incidents: Ibid. they didn’t go inside: According to the records and video released by the Park City Police Department. which could catch fire: Carter Williams, “Most of Utah Is Now in an ‘Extreme’ Drought,” KSL.com, September 18, 2020, https://www.ksl.com/article/50018933/most-of-utah-is-now-in-an-extremedrought. “This is not a Burning Man community”: Interview with Police Chief Wade Carpenter, September 2021. an ecstasy drug bust: San Mateo County, California, court records show that Mimi Pham was arrested after her boyfriend sold MDMA pills to an undercover police officer in Redwood City on January 16, 2001. According to court records, she was a passenger in the car, while her boyfriend, the driver, made the transaction. She later pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance. She was sentenced to four months, to be served in a work furlough program, and was credited for three days already served, according to a judge’s order. In 2016, the conviction was dismissed under California expungement law, according to court records. See The State of California v. Jennifer Michelle Pham, Superior Court for the County of San Mateo, Docket Number SC48966. Just one night after: Park City Police Department reports. the police showed up: Park City Police Department video. the police forwarded: Park City Police Department email records. Tony Lee: Tony Lee’s account of events in the summer and fall of 2020 were laid out in a lawsuit filed by his company, Pelagic LLC, after Tony’s death. See Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A-21-833547-C. competed to convince: Ibid. He stored dozens of boxes: Photos of the Ranch viewed by the authors and interviews with people familiar with the nitrous supply. nitrous oxide: Mr. Lee later said in court filings that Andy Hsieh arranged for the purchase of nitrous oxide for his brother. “Plaintiff/Counter-Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss PCVI LLC’s Counterclaim,” Pelagic LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, October 11, 2021. stacked neatly on the shelves: Photos of the Ranch viewed by the authors. urges readers to journey: Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (New York: New Harbinger Publications, 2007). according to her website: “About Alana,” Alana Fairchild, https://alanafairchild.com/about-alana/. Jewel’s team sent: Justin Weniger confirmed that Jewel had sent him the letter but said he didn’t know who at the Ranch had posted it.

Chapter 11: The Cult of Tony Hsieh “a high number of calls”: Sawyer D’Argonne, “Summit County Sheriff’s Office to Launch Second Mental Health Response Team,” Summit Daily, September 1, 2020, https://www.summitdaily.com/news/summit-county-sheriffs-office-to-launch-second-mental-healthresponse-team/. A similar pilot program: “NYC’s Non-Police Mental Health Pilot Increasing Rate of Those Getting Aid, Data Show,” NBC New York, July 22, 2021, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nycs-nonpolice-mental-health-pilot-increasing-rate-of-those-getting-aid-data-show/3165520/. the officer had called: In an interview, Police Chief Wade Carpenter said that the officer had found Suzie Baleson to be listed as involved in a prior incident. according to Park City police: Summit County Sheriff’s Office records confirm parts of Dr. Guadagnoli’s account, stating in dispatch summary that the officer was told by someone close to Tony that everything was fine and “he is on a business call right now.” Park City Police Department declined to release the police report of the incident. Suzie Baleson was getting: In a statement to the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2021, Suzie Baleson said, “The allegations about me are shameful and without a scintilla of truth.” She also said in the statement that “it has been unbearable to witness the exchange of gossip, innuendo and outright lies after Tony’s untimely passing.” had told him about the 10X plan: Mayor Andy Beerman said he knew little about the 10X program, but he did hear from several restaurant owners that Tony and his entourage were patronizing and supporting local restaurants. he had planned to summit: Jane Gendron, “From the Crag to City Hall: One-on-One with Mayor Andy Beerman,” Park City Magazine, June 18, 2018, https://www.parkcitymag.com/news-andprofiles/2018/06/from-the-crag-to-city-hall. operated the Treasure Mountain Inn: Sean Higgins, “Park City Mayor Andy Beerman Says He Intends to Run for Second Term,” KPCW, April 30, 2021, https://www.kpcw.org/post/park-city-mayor-andybeerman-says-he-intends-run-second-term. subsidized artists to paint: Jay Hamburger, “Artists Paint Giant Black Lives Matter Mural on Main Street (Updated),” Park Record, July 7, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/artists-paint-giant-blacklives-matter-mural-on-main-street/. Soon after, vandals: Jay Hamburger, “Black Lives Matter Mural Vandalized, Triggering Discourse and Vow to Repair Damage (Updated),” Park Record, July 10, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/blacklives-matter-mural-on-main-street-apparently-vandalized/. but he demurred: Mayor Beerman said, “I was not interested in parties or social invites and declined several invites.” was working with the mayor: Mayor Beerman said that the wellness initiative had been “discussed, never pursued.” Mayor Beerman invited Baleson: Mayor Beerman said that Baleson had expressed an interest in becoming more involved in politics and he had invited her along with a hundred other people to the fundraiser. Their other ideas included: According to photos of sticky notes viewed by the authors. Some members of the group: In the fall of 2021, nearly a year after Tony’s death, some friends and employees still believed that his drug abuse and mental health issues had been “overblown.”

Tony used a rating system: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. “disloyalty penalty”: Attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh recount this “disloyalty penalty” in a court filing. Attorneys for Pham have generally denied the Hsiehs’ claims in court. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A-21-828090-C, August 23, 2021. He ended up paying: Attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh recounted that “disloyalty penalty” in a court filing. Attorneys for Pham have generally denied the Hsiehs’ claims in court. See ibid. He asked for a meeting: The events around the Bryn Mooser meeting are recounted in a court filing by attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh, who are being sued by Mimi Pham. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021, 20. Mooser’s previous producing work: “Bryn Mooser,” IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1666274/. Tony agreed to spend: Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021. Tony extended his trust in Pham: According to attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh. See ibid. Pham and Grande would later file: Mimi Pham, Roberto Grande, and their company, Mr. Taken, filed a lawsuit in 2021 against Richard and Andy Hsieh as the administrators of Tony’s estate who held control of Tony’s businesses after his death. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada. in turn increasing: The financial terms of the deal are described in court filings by Richard and Andy Hsieh. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021. “Tony is one”: Peter White, “Non-Fiction Studio XTR Secures $17.5M Investment from Ex–Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to Bolster Doc Plans,” Deadline, October 7, 2020, https://deadline.com/2020/10/xtr-175m-investment-former-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-1234592707/. while Pham and Grande provided: According to attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021, 25. Tony bought the eleven-story: Eli Segall and Subrina Hudson, “Zappos’ New Landlord Is a Familiar Face,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 22, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-newlandlord-is-a-familiar-face-2158031/. They had bought the building: According to the deed of sale recorded in Clark County, Nevada, on April 3, 2012. “Tony is one infectious guy”: Caitlin McGarry, “Nevadan at Work: Developer Has No Doubt Downtown Will Thrive,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 26, 2012,

https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/nevadan-at-work-developer-has-no-doubtdowntown-will-thrive/. The property had been listed: Eli Segall, “Zappos Office Building for Sale in Downtown Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 2, 2019, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-office-buildingfor-sale-in-downtown-las-vegas-1631589/. Tony paid nearly four times: Dave Toplikar, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal Bringing Zappos Downtown,” Las Vegas Sun, February 1, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/01/las-vegas-city-council-approves-final-deal-bringin/. it’s unclear why: In 2012, Zappos said it was undertaking a $40 million renovation of the building. Benjamin Spillman, “Zappos Renovating Old City Hall for Future Use,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 14, 2012, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/zappos-renovating-old-city-hallfor-future-use/. Tony’s group planned: According to photos of sticky notes viewed by the authors.

Chapter 12: The Shed The Shed: The details of the shed fire and the hours leading up to it are based in large part on dozens of incident reports, videos, and photos released by the New London Police and Fire Departments in 2021 as part of their investigation into the November 18, 2020 fire, as well as the report itself. The authors also talked through each detail with members of the New London Fire and Police Departments who were on the scene and who contributed to the later report on the fire’s causes. Other sources are noted in the narrative or in the endnotes. “I have always felt”: Maria Popova, “A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe,” Literary Affairs, https://literaryaffairs.net/a-lifeline-for-the-hour-of-despair/. the moon a thin sliver: “Waxing Crescent on 17 November 2020 Tuesday,” Lunaf.com, https://lunaf.com/lunarcalendar/2020/11/17/#:~:text=Waxing%20Crescent%20is%20the%20lunar%20phase%20on%2017%2 0November%202020%2C%20Tuesday%20. Pierce had invested heavily: Neil Strauss, “Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency,” Rolling Stone, July 26, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/brock-pierce-hippie-kingof-cryptocurrency-700213/. took a more whimsical view: Ibid. Tony heard what Pierce: Interview with Brock Pierce, March 2021. not approved by: Jake Harper, “Addiction Clinics Market Unproven Infusion Treatments to Desperate Patients,” NPR, August 22, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2019/08/22/741115178/addiction-clinics-market-unproven-infusion-treatments-to-desperatepatients. The treatment is supposed: “NAD Therapy,” Addiction Center, https://www.addictioncenter.com/treatment/nad-therapy/. had been reviewing: Tony Lee’s account of events in the summer and fall of 2020 was laid out in a lawsuit filed by his company, Pelagic LLC, after Tony’s Hsieh’s death. See Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A-21833547-C. known locally as “Mr. Bitcoin”: Strauss, “Brock Pierce.” took Blizzy to a nearby vet: Schedules of Tony Hsieh’s employees in Park City and elsewhere viewed by the authors. “When are you able to travel?”: Text message viewed by the authors. “Tony is in trouble”: Kirsten Grind, James R. Hagerty, and Katherine Sayre, “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-and-extremebehavior-11607264719. The door clicked: The New London Fire Department as part of its investigation reviewed security camera footage around the property and wrote about it in their later report. “barricaded”: Lee Hawkins, “Before Tony Hsieh’s Death, Firefighters Rushed to Burning Home with Trapped Man,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-tonyhsiehs-death-firefighters-rushed-to-burning-home-with-trapped-man-11606691000. She called 911: Recording of 911 call released by New London Police and Fire Departments.

The smoke, soot, and fire: A report from the New London Police Department states, “Investigator Pellamargio reported the deceased had brain edema from the actual fire from the hot gases, soot, and was placed on a vent. The deceased was extubated at the request of the family.” in which the brain swells: Beth Roybal, “Brain Swelling,” WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/brain/brainswelling-brain-edema-intracranial-pressure. On the ninth day: A New London Police Department report states that the “deceased was extubated at the request of the family.” Sources have told the authors that the decision would have been made by Richard and Judy Hsieh. Tony was gone: It’s unclear how much time elapsed between Tony’s being taken off the ventilator and the time he died.

Epilogue a transition that can take: “Death and the Afterlife: How Buddhist Funerals Reflect Beliefs about the Afterlife,” BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zyhmk2p/revision/4. “The world has lost”: Matthew S. Schwartz, “Tony Hsieh, Former Zappos CEO, Dies at 46,” NPR, November 28, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/939697651/tony-hsieh-former-zappos-ceodies-at-46. “The world lost you”: Jeff Bezos, “The world lost you way too soon @downtowntony. Your curiosity, vision, and relentless focus on customers leave an indelible mark. You will be missed by so many, Tony. Rest In Peace,” Instagram, November 28, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIJYUQhHzLq/. “I treasure every conversation”: Bill Clinton, Twitter, November 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/1333578663380520961?lang=en. offered her praise of Tony: Ivanka Trump, Twitter, November 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. “I’ll never meet Tony”: Alfred Lin, “My Final Letter to Tony Hsieh,” Forbes, Dec-ember 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/12/01/my-final-letter-to-tony-hsieh-by-alfred-lin/? sh=107d8d44239b. “As you watch the world turn”: Ibid. “It was never about”: Katie Abel, “A Friendship for the Ages: Fred Mossler + the OG Zappos Crew Share Untold Tales About the Incredible Tony Hsieh,” Footwear News, December 21, 2020, https://footwearnews.com/2020/business/retail/tony-hsieh-zappos-friends-legacy-1203085996/. “He was a complex puzzle”: Nick Swinmurn, “RIP Tony,” Medium, November 28, 2020, https://nickswinmurn.medium.com/rip-tony-6e99695ae3de. Zappos also unfurled: Mick Akers, “Zappos Remembers Longtime CEO Tony Hsieh with Massive Building Wraps,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 5, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/zappos-remembers-longtime-ceotony-hsieh-with-massive-building-wraps-2242847/. A petition appeared online: “Honor Tony Hsieh’s Legacy with a Memorial Art Installation in Las Vegas!,” Change.org, https://www.change.org/p/honor-tony-hsieh-s-legacy-with-a-memorial-art-installation-inlas-vegas. his memory shouldn’t be confined: Caroline Bleakley, “Mayor Goodman Said Hsieh Talked of Plans to Bring a 747 to Downtown Las Vegas,” KLAS, December 2, 2020, https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/mayor-goodman-said-hsieh-talked-of-plans-to-bring-a747-to-downtown-las-vegas/. “A street is so perpendicular”: Morty, “M&C Talk to Mayor Carolyn Goodman on the Passing of Tony Hsieh,” 96.3 KKLZ, December 1, 2020, https://963kklz.com/2020/12/01/mc-talk-to-mayor-carolyngoodman-on-the-passing-of-tony-hsieh/. Jewel turned on the camera: Jewel, “Elegy for Tony Hsieh,” Instagram, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQ_i8bnZIu/?hl=en. The world didn’t yet know: Jewel’s letter to Tony in Park City was first reported by Forbes in early December 2020 and the details of her intervention attempt by the Wall Street Journal in March 2021. told us in: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Sorting Out Tony Hsieh’s Estate, from LLCs to Thousands of Sticky Notes,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2020,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorting-out-tony-hsiehs-estate-from-llcs-to-thousands-of-sticky-notes11607715492. Tony had earned $32 million: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 49. $1.2 billion all-stock deal: “Amazon Closes Zappos Deal, Ends Up Paying $1.2 Billion,” TechCrunch, November 2, 2009, https://social.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/amazon-closes-zappos-deal-ends-uppaying-1-2-billion/. with some journalists using: Peter Holley, “Why This CEO Is Worth Almost $1 Billion but Lives in a Trailer Park,” Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theswitch/wp/2015/07/21/why-a-ceo-worth-840-million-lives-in-a-trailer-park-with-his-pet-alpaca/. Within days of his death: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20-105105-E, Order Granting Application for Appointment of Special Administrator, for Issuance of Letters of Special Administration with General Powers, December 4, 2020. “require immediate attention”: Ibid., 1. agreed to pay Andy $1 million: Attorneys for Mimi Pham have stated this $1 million agreement in court records. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh, and Andrew Hsieh, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, No. A-21-828090-C, January 20, 2021. Mimi Pham sued Richard and Andy Hsieh: Ibid. owed more than $90 million: Mimi Pham and her associated companies, Rove and Whim LLC, Baby Monster LLC, and Mr. Taken LLC, filed claims against Tony Hsieh’s estate in 2021 for more than $90 million. See In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20105105-E. an estimated $75 million: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20-105105-E, Creditor’s Claim, Mr. Taken LLC, March 3, 2021. another $7.5 million: Ibid. They were part: Charles V. Bagli, “Robert Durst Found Guilty of Murder After Decades of Suspicion,” New York Times, September 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/us/robert-durstmurder-trial.html. “She wanted access”: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20-105105-E, Creditor’s Claim, Jennifer Pham, March 3, 2021. “that is not an indication”: Mr. Taken v. Pickled Entertainment LLC., Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Verified Complaint for Injunctive Relief and Damages, and Plaintiff’s Demand for Jury Trial,” A-21-829006-C, February 5, 2021. Tony’s family shot back: Mr. Taken v. Pickled Entertainment LLC and Pickled Investments LLC v. Thirdparty Defendants Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Counterclaims and Third Party Claims, A21-829006-C, May 25, 2021. “he wouldn’t have longer”: Ibid. physically and mentally: Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Toshie McSwain: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, TMLabs dba wigcraft.vegas, P-20-105105-E, June 22, 2021. Mark Evensvold: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, Mark Evensvold, P-20-105105-E, June 1, 2021.

Tony Lee: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, Pelagic LLC, P-20-105105-E, June 22, 2021. In court filings: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Plaintiff/CounterDefendant’s Motion to Dismiss PCVI LLC’s Counterclaim, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A21-833547-C. Suzie Baleson, through her company: In the matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, The Wellth Collective LLC, P-20-105105-E, November, 11, 2021. Daniel Park continues: Daniel Park, “Night 1 at @descendonbend,” Instagram, September 10, 2021, www.instagram.com/p/CTpdlFCpmnv. An Instagram post: Vitamin Bar Naples, “The Vitamin Bar Naples is proud to serve,” Instagram, March 11, 2021, www.instagram.com/p/CMR6eDggqbN. The Hsiehs told a judge: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Ex Parte Petition to Transfer the Estate Accounts, All Personal Accounts, and Wholly Owned Entity Accounts of Anthony Hsieh Held at Morgan Stanley and Other Financial Institutions to Different Financial Institutions of the Co–Special Administrators’ Choice, Authorizing Liquidation of Stocks and Securities and/or Obtaining Loants to Pay Federal Estate Tax, P-20-105105-E, July 29, 2021. including undeveloped lots: Eli Segall, “Tony Hsieh’s Family to Sell Off Much of Las Vegas Real Estate Empire,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 17, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/tony-hsiehs-family-to-sell-off-much-of-las-vegas-real-estateempire-2283365/. “Tony Hsieh’s Family”: Ibid. “Tony Hsieh 2.0”: Eli Segall and Shea Johnson, “Downtown Sell Off: Family of Tony Hsieh Looks to Unload His Vast Holdings,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 13, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/tony-hsieh-property-sell-off-couldenergize-downtown-las-vegas-2300617/. Tony’s mind moved: Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). “It has become apparent to me”: Naomi Osaka, “Naomi Osaka: ‘It’s O.K. Not to Be O.K.,’ ” Time, July 8, 2021, https://time.com/6077128/naomi-osaka-essay-tokyo-olympics/. Even the joke of the day: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 48. “I don’t have all the answers”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 240.

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For Grandad, “bula bula” —David

For 嬤嬤 —Angel

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild. —Mary Karr

PROLOGUE

Elizabeth Pezzello had been getting ready to leave shortly after 3 a.m. when she realized something was wrong. Dressed in sportswear, her blond ponytail swinging behind her, she and a half dozen others milled about the house, preparing to depart for an airport a few miles away on Connecticut’s southern shore, where a private jet was waiting for them. A light wind had been blowing in from the river across New London on the frigid November evening, and lines of manicured lawns had stiffened in the cold. Few clouds obscured the sky over Long Island Sound to the south, leaving the rows of homes along Pequot Avenue exposed to the night air. In just a few hours, the sun would climb above the industrial smokestacks across the river in Groton, illuminating the waterfront view afforded to the tony homes of the seashore. Outside the home at 500 Pequot Avenue, three vehicles idled, waiting for the party to emerge. But the most important person of the group, the person paying for everyone’s salaries, the private jet, and the chauffeurs, still wasn’t up. A few days earlier, his dog, a fluffy white mutt named Blizzy, had died suddenly, and he had been in a depressive spiral since. For much of the evening, the man had been inhaling laughing gas from a whipped-cream canister, as if drinking from a water bottle, and after an argument with his former girlfriend, Rachael, she had ordered him out of the house until they left for the airport. He could have retreated to one of the vehicles, even a hotel nearby where other members of his staff were staying. But in his stupor, he had insisted on a storage shed attached to the home. Those in the house had relented, bowing again to his irrational demands, which had become common behavior for him. In the shed, he was exposed to the cold.

Like many people the man surrounded himself with, Elizabeth had only met him a few months before. He had spent tens of millions of dollars on mansions in the Utah ski-resort town Park City to house a growing orbit of followers, many lured by the promise of riches. Elizabeth was one of them, and had worked her way into his inner circle. As his assistant, she now controlled his schedule and much of his communication, including contact with old friends; some had tried unsuccessfully to get in touch after hearing troubling stories about the man. Elizabeth was one of the few people responsible for spending Tony’s money, and had found a role for her fiancé, Brett, who had taken to doing whatever their boss told him to do in return for a handsome salary. Together, they had convinced the man to pay for the group to go on a Hawaiian getaway, starting with the private jet waiting for them this morning. The tagalongs that evening hadn’t been limited to new arrivals in the man’s life. Along with Rachael, there was his brother, Andy, who had been by his side almost every day for the past few months. Two years younger, Andy was by every definition a counterweight to his brother: outgoing, fasttalking, gregarious, and with a hint of arrogance. He had worked for his brother at one point years ago, before an unsuccessful attempt to launch his own tech startup. But as the man amassed an almost billion-dollar fortune and became a best-selling author, Andy lived in his shadow, and until recently the brothers hadn’t had much of a relationship. Andy was sleeping inside the house while Brett stayed up to check on the man. They had communicated by writing messages on Post-it notes and sticking them outside the shed door. Responding to the man’s demands, Brett had brought him laughing gas, marijuana, a lighter, pizza, a blanket, and candles. Lots of candles. It had been no easy task. The man had been lying on the concrete surrounded by naked flames. At one point another assistant had found the blanket covering him starting to burn from contact with a candle, and told the man to extinguish it. The assistant had opened the shed door a short time later to see him lighting a Ziploc bag on fire. “You’re going to smoke yourself out,” the assistant had said. “That’s poison.” The man had incoherently mumbled back. At one point, the assistant had found a propane space heater and dragged it into the shed, placing it inside the door.

Now with everyone ready to leave, a more terrifying scene had begun to unfold. A carbon monoxide alarm was shrieking. Smoke was billowing from the cracks in the door frame. And the door was locked. Elizabeth dialed 911. “What’s the location of your emergency?” an operator’s voice crackled over the phone. “500 Pequot Avenue,” Elizabeth responded calmly. “We need help as soon as possible, someone’s locked in a room with a fire.” “There’s a fire?” “Yes.” “Where in the room are they?” the operator said. “Where in the building are they?” “It’s a house, it’s a house.” “How many people are trapped?” “Just one.” In the background, muffled shouts were becoming clearer. Elizabeth turned away from the phone and called out, “Rachael, Rachael, they really need help; is there a code to the storage room?” referring to the lock on the door. A moment later Elizabeth yelled to someone else in the house, “Tenfourteen!” “Elizabeth, has the person barricaded themself?” the operator said. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she replied. The cloud of smoke was inundating the shed, growing in size with every second that passed. Elizabeth could hear repeated thudding in the distance; someone was trying to break open the door. “Why did they barricade themself? Are they trying to harm themself?” the operator said. Elizabeth was losing her composure. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” “How old is the person?” About forty-five years old, she said, and added, “Please hurry up, this is urgent, this is really urgent … this is so bad.” Fire sirens were already wailing through the streets of New London, piercing the silence over the hamlet, when another call came into the dispatch office. It was from another woman at the house. “There’s a person barricaded,” the woman said into the phone. “We can’t get in.”

She told the operator she was a nurse who had been traveling with the trapped man, and she’d been responsible for administering an IV drip to him. She said they were supposed to leave for a flight in a few minutes. “We are not getting a response from him,” she told the operator, her words rushing out. “Who is he?” the operator said. The woman paused. “Um, his name is Tony.”

More than a week would pass before the townspeople of New London—and then the world—would learn the identity of the man trapped within the shed outside a nondescript home in a Connecticut town. When firefighters charged into the cloud of smoke and flames engulfing the shed, they found him lying faceup on a filthy blanket with his right arm across his chest, surrounded by singed pool equipment and camping chairs, unresponsive and without a pulse. The sight was an unrecognizable departure from the public image of Tony Hsieh. For years, Tony had been the face of Zappos, America’s most popular online shoe seller, and had become the shining example of an unconventional business leader who cared more about helping others find happiness—especially his own employees—than profit margins or meeting quarterly earnings forecasts. He wasn’t a household name like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos—arguably his equals in intellect, business acumen, and willingness to take risks—but he was one of the most consequential tech leaders of our time. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, he had graduated from Harvard in the 1990s before selling his first company to Microsoft for $265 million at the age of twentyfour. He then invested in and later took over as CEO at Zappos, where he played an integral role in writing the first rule books of e-commerce by introducing free shipping and a no-questions-asked return policy long before consumers were comfortable with buying things online. His costly, customer-focused risks were validated when Bezos himself led Amazon’s charge to buy Zappos for $1.2 billion in 2009. “Zappos is a company I have long admired,” Bezos said at the time. “I’ve seen a lot of companies and I have never seen a company with a culture like Zappos.”

But being a tech leader was merely his conduit. What made Tony Hsieh a rare icon was his stated desire to advance the human condition. Countless people from Silicon Valley to New York and Las Vegas had serendipitous meetings with Tony, often over shots of his signature drink, the digestif Fernet-Branca, that led to life-changing experiences. Whether he was sporting a mohawk or a shaved head, Tony’s image was plastered across magazine profiles, on documentaries, and on television during talks with Oprah and Barbara Walters. His stoic expression—sometimes broken by a cautious smile framed by dimples—was synonymous with the image of a genius focused on inspiring others. Through a best-selling autobiography, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony devised a revolutionary way to run corporations—by focusing on your employees and ensuring they are happy, you’ll have happy customers, and then your profits will soar. The book described his own search to understand how the science of happiness could be applied to improving the lives of employees, and how, by focusing on other people’s happiness, you might just increase your own. A New York Times bestseller, it propelled Tony to the global speaking circuit. He toured the late-night TV shows espousing a template for achieving happiness, shared the stage with Bill Clinton, and befriended celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Richard Branson, and the singer Jewel. Having achieved the height of American success, Tony then plowed his fortune—almost half a billion dollars—into building a downtown Las Vegas neighborhood that he would develop into an entrepreneur’s utopia, from where he envisioned more success stories like Zappos would grow. Starting in 2012, stories of his unrivaled generosity and miracle-making trickled from his new community. There was Natalie Young, a chef who had been in recovery when a chance encounter with Tony at a bar ended with him agreeing to give her the money to start a restaurant. Rehan Choudhry, a talent booker at one of the Las Vegas casinos, had always wanted to run his own music festival, a dream that became a thirty-thousand-person reality after meeting Tony. And there was Maggie Hsu, who watched Tony give a talk at Harvard Business School when she was earning her MBA, then coldemailed him for career advice. He convinced her to come to Las Vegas and she eventually became his chief of staff. Newspapers and magazines dubbed him everything from “Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas” to tone-deaf

descriptions such as “a young Buddha,” with the text run alongside photos of him wearing his signature Mona Lisa smile. His story also defied what it meant to be an Asian man in America, and he eluded stereotypes placed on him by society. From an early age, Tony wanted to be seen as something more than a quiet Asian brainiac with thick glasses. In an era when Asian men were depicted in popular culture as geeks who loved mathematics and were rarely seen in the C-suites of public companies, let alone Silicon Valley startups, Tony broke through with his life story and entered the pop culture psyche—a dynamic captured time and again through his career. There’s a photo taken at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, a year before Zappos was sold to Amazon. Bill Gates is standing in front of a cascade of brown boxes, flanked by six individuals, one of whom is Tony. Everyone else is white—executives and CEOs from Sears, eBay, Barnes & Noble—and wearing suits. Tony, meanwhile, appears years, even decades younger, relaxed in jeans and an untucked shirt. He looks unfazed by his company. In another photo, he is seen on a casino floor, making a face at the camera next to a grinning Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who is eating a hot dog. “He wasn’t just a tech entrepreneur who became cool, he was an Asian male who became cool,” said Jen Louie, a former colleague of Tony’s at Zappos. “He broke through the bamboo ceiling.” Renown and riches never seemed to cloud Tony’s desire to be a man of the people, either. Since coming into boundless wealth at such an early age, money had empowered his brilliant ideas and let him build companies, and then an entire neighborhood, from the ground up. Rather than live in a sprawling mansion in San Francisco, in a Manhattan penthouse, or on a Caribbean island alongside other corporate leaders, Tony built a trailer park in his Las Vegas neighborhood, choosing to live alongside friends, a pet alpaca, and his dog. Just as Peter Pan had found limitless wonderment in Neverland—no rules, judgment, or fear of growing up—Tony embodied what it meant to live with unlimited freedom long into adulthood. His childlike curiosity also illustrated how, in a world where business leaders followed bullet points and their guidance, Tony provided a model of how to throw away the corporate script to show the world that, beyond profit margins and earnings reports, companies—and communities—could

thrive on happiness. He was a figure for a millennial generation in search of an alternative to the mantra of living to work. But beneath his public message of happiness, his private search for inner peace remained out of reach, and at some point he drifted from the figurative mooring posts of the communities he had built. After a series of public relations hiccups, tragedies—including three suicides within his Las Vegas community—and internal issues with his style of management at Zappos, Tony became less visible as the face of the company and in his neighborhood. His increasing use of recreational drugs—whether fistfuls of psilocybin mushrooms at his trailer park or MDMA at the Burning Man festival—rarely alarmed those he kept close. Instead, they shrugged it off as something he did to expand his thinking, and to smooth and then deepen his connections with others. In turn, he retreated deeper into his trailer park, where those present seemed to orbit around his cult of personality. In the months before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the United States in 2020, Tony was introduced to ketamine, the popular party drug typically used to tranquilize horses, and it uncorked long-held insecurities and breaks with reality that led him to act in ways that some saw aligned with psychosis. He started to claim that he devised an algorithm to bring about world peace, that he figured out how to cure COVID-19, and that he no longer had to urinate because his body could recycle water. After months of drug use caused his behavior to spill into his public life in Las Vegas, Tony’s friends persuaded him to check into a rehab facility in Park City. It was the first of multiple failed attempts to get Tony sober, including botched interventions and attempts by his family to install a conservatorship. Each of these efforts was disrupted by a growing faction of people that were on Tony’s payroll, some who enabled his continued drug use and others who indulged in his delusions. After leaving rehab, he didn’t return to Las Vegas, and instead stayed in Park City, Utah, the ritzy mountain ski town, where he invited a cast of people to join him. While they lived large in the elaborate mansions he often paid for, some of them struck multimillion-dollar deals with a man descending further toward a fatal end. By the time he arrived in Connecticut with a small contingent of these followers, Tony had cut ties with most of his old friends and members of his family until he’d wandered so far from reality that he was left surrounded only by people on his payroll.

On that cold November night, Tony’s friends and family, even the firefighters who saved him, were optimistic that he would survive. After he was pulled from the shed, his body had, remarkably, not been burned in the fire, save for some damaged tissue on his shoulder. Most of the heat had been concentrated above him after the propane tank had caught fire and sent a whoosh of ignited gas through the shed. But what they hadn’t immediately considered was the extent of internal damage Tony had sustained inhaling a cloud of carbon monoxide, starving his organs and finally his brain of oxygen. Even if he had survived, he would never have been the same. On November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, Tony’s family turned off his life support at Bridgeport Hospital. News of his death flooded the internet, with thousands of messages and memories posted by people from Bill Clinton to Ivanka Trump to Jeff Bezos, offering a public mourning not seen for a business leader since the passing of Steve Jobs a decade before. The sight of his awkward smile—shared thousands of times across social media, in newspapers, and on television—crystallized his image of an uncommonly beloved tech entrepreneur, one who had changed the lives of countless people, from business leaders to workers in his call center, and strangers he’d met at the bar. As the tributes flowed in, we were working as business reporters for Forbes when a number of obvious questions quickly emerged for us. Angel had covered the lives of billionaires for years, and David had a focus on investigating tech companies. We were immediately perplexed by how a certifiable tech leader—the beloved face of a beloved brand, no less—had died in a fire in a nondescript New England town, of all places. Were there suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident? Was it a suicide? Why hadn’t anyone been able to help him, and what had led Tony to this fate? It was hard to stomach the contrast of Tony’s mantra of happiness with the tragedy of him dying alone, surrounded by flames. A week after his death, we published the first article that documented in detail how Tony, a man of boundless wealth and resources, had met such an unexpected and tragic end, describing how a COVID-era spiral with drugs had untethered him from reality, and how he was surrounded by people who

had done more to enable him than help him. It included a message from the singer Jewel, a close friend of Tony’s who had visited him in Park City and prophesied his fate in a letter, warning him: “The people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself.” But we kept speaking to more people who had known Tony—from Park City, from Las Vegas, and then as far back as his childhood—who led us to believe that his story was more than an oft-told rise-and-fall tale, or that of an eccentric billionaire who’d once again flown too close to the sun. For Angel, born to Chinese parents who fled the turmoil of communism and gave up everything for her and her two sisters to move to the United States and chase the elusive American dream, she understood what it meant to be on the receiving end of those sacrifices—and the pressures to succeed because of it. She also came into Tony’s story with a deep understanding of the stereotypes that are often placed on Asian Americans, and what it takes —and costs—to break those assumptions. And David, who’d cut his teeth as a police reporter in Australia and had covered humanity in its best and worst forms, was immediately drawn to seek an understanding of the dynamic between Tony and those around him. He’d traveled widely before arriving in the United States and took a broader, more cynical view of Tony’s effort to manufacture a world for people largely based on financial incentives. By the end of his life, Tony had fallen victim to the trappings linked to American success, leaving little room for happiness. Together, we found that Tony’s story exploited some uncomfortable truths about the opposing goals of wealth and happiness. It highlighted how one person’s generosity can motivate greed in others, and how those with good intentions can stray from their moral center when the promise of riches appears. And finally, it touched on how inner peace can remain out of reach as long as there is enough money to obscure the dangers of mental health problems and addiction. Our reporting took us first to Connecticut, then Las Vegas, New York, Park City, and then San Francisco, from where we sourced police reports, school yearbooks, court documents, photos, and financial records. Across hundreds of hours of interviews, we spoke to more than 150 people to reveal a never-before-seen look at how Tony Hsieh had changed the lives of others through every chapter of his own. Since he was a boy, we found,

Tony had been running from the life that was expected of him, and searching for the life he dreamed of. “There was some prototype in his head that he desperately wanted to achieve,” a childhood friend of his told us. In the pages that follow, we’ve sought to document how a boy of genius intellect, born a first-generation misfit—intellectually, emotionally, and racially—searched for his place in a world where success and happiness were not supposed to be mutually exclusive goals for someone who looked like him. We’ve detailed the tragedy of a man who craved companionship and human connection coming into wealth that he was not equipped to handle, distorting his relationships with friends, family, and himself. And, above all else, we’ve tried to illustrate a cautionary tale of how a brilliant man could destroy himself over time, armed with wealth that fostered his own worst impulses and those of people around him. In the end, were those surrounding him blind to, or complicit with, his own self-destruction until it was too late? Starting with the night of the fire, we found more questions than answers.

Andy was standing by as firefighters pulled Tony’s unconscious body from the wreckage of the shed. Above him, two floodlights fixed to the roof of the house shone through the white smoke blowing around the home, illuminating the scene below. Guided by his flashlight, a firefighter walked into the house to assess the damage from the fire in the attached shed. A police officer watched as paramedics secured Tony in the stretcher. When he was a boy, Andy had helped his brother launch one of his first entrepreneurial endeavors, selling custom-made buttons through the classified ads in a boys’ magazine. When the workload had become too great, Andy recruited their younger brother, David, to help out. It wouldn’t be the last time the younger brothers worked for the golden Hsieh child, but as they grew up, their relationship was distant at best. At one point, Andy had become estranged entirely from Tony. David, meanwhile, had lived modestly, eschewing any notion that his brother was a billionaire. Outside of scheduled, stage-managed events, the brothers didn’t spend time together later in life.

It was a familial relationship that few understood. So when Andy had arrived in Park City months before, it came as a surprise to some who knew he hadn’t had much of a relationship with Tony for years. There were murmurs that he was returning to take advantage of Tony during a low point. But unlike David, who had largely stayed clear of Park City and Tony, here was Andy, by his brother’s side. Andy repeatedly asserted that he was there on behalf of the family to make sure people weren’t taking advantage of his brother. After all, it was Andy who had provided updates to family and friends like Jewel, and had discussed potentially arranging a conservatorship for his brother. At times he had told these people he was at a loss for what to do. Privately, Andy had also negotiated for his brother to pay him a $1 million salary. He had asked for millions more in a series of proposed business deals. And like others, he quickly found himself doing what he could to stay in his brother’s good graces, which, among other things, meant satisfying demands for more laughing gas. It further muddied the dynamic between the two brothers. What had driven Andy to reenter Tony’s life after nearly a decade? Why hadn’t they spoken for so long? And what had brought Andy to be with his brother on that fateful night? Was it concern for his brother’s well-being? Or had he assumed an obedient role alongside the countless followers chasing Tony’s riches? As fire crews hosed down the shed, Andy walked into the light, stopping a few feet from the stretcher. Wearing a backpack and a hooded puffer jacket, Andy stared for a moment at his brother’s unconscious body lying before him. Then, without looking away, he slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a mobile phone. As paramedics pushed the stretcher away, Andy held up the phone in front of his brother’s body and started filming.

CHAPTER 1

THE GOLDEN CHILD

Tony would have been the first to admit that as a child he was obsessed with one thing: making money. Though his family was comfortably middleclass—his father, Richard, worked at Chevron, and his mother, Judy, was a psychologist—he understood early on that money equaled liberation. “To me,” he later recalled of his childhood, “money meant that later on in life I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted.” In his early years, this took form as a mildly successful string of garage sales, and then some failed ventures—including the sale of Christmas cards to neighbors one year—before he joined the workforce as a newspaper boy. His route would begin and end at the same address: 28 Coast Oak Way, Mont Marin, the two-story house where Tony and his two younger brothers grew up. About twenty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the sliver of brick and weatherboard homes of Mont Marin were within the sunny enclave of the city of San Rafael, an eternal snapshot of Americana. The Hsiehs, one of the few Asian families in the suburb, lived in a house toward the bottom of the sloping street, surrounded by the rolling greenery of Marinwood and Lucas Valley. Two palm trees stood to one side of the black driveway, swaying tall above the home’s terracotta-tiled roof. Tony—a slight boy with aviator-framed glasses that seemed more suited for a geriatric and took up a third of his tiny face—would pedal through the quiet, winding streets of Mont Marin, past well-groomed front lawns. As he hurled copies of the local newspaper, his haphazard fencing of bangs would flutter in the wind. It was the mid-1980s, and across the headlines was talk of the burgeoning technology industry that was slowly but surely stretching across

the region, from the hills of San Francisco down to the Peninsula and across the expanse of the South Bay. The semiconductor industry had already laid down its roots in the region a decade before, while soon-to-be tech giants like Apple and Oracle were just in their infancy. As one historian put it, the area was encountering its “Big Bang” moment, the fateful turn of events that gave rise to the personal computer and video gaming industries. Venture capital started percolating from the gold mines that those industries became, and that started to lay the very foundations that would cause the explosion of Big Tech. The types of people who were finding success in Silicon Valley were by definition optimistic and thought outside the box. As it turned out, the boy riding around the streets just north of the Valley was unwittingly learning on his paper route that he already had the DNA for the type of success the headlines wrote about. After adding up his pay, he realized that he was making about $2 an hour. As Tony pedaled around the neighborhood, he realized that he could make the job more favorable. Then he had an epiphany. What if, he thought, he started his own newspaper? That way, he would be the sole beneficiary of the venture, as opposed to what he reasoned was child labor exploitation by the local paper. He quit the paper route, and the first major phase of his entrepreneurial streak began. He created The Gobbler, twenty pages of stories, word puzzles, and jokes that Tony drew and wrote out himself. Priced at $5 each, Tony had expected that his friends would become his first subscribers. “P.S.: Subscribe to the GOBBLER!” Tony wrote in a middle school classmate’s yearbook, viewing a sentimental tradition as an opportunity to conduct business. His parents seemed mildly amused by their son’s claim that the newsletter would sell a hundred copies. They were probably even more surprised when, after his first issue, he secured his first advertisement sale from his barber, who agreed to pay $20 for a full-page ad in the second issue. But he managed to only sell two copies of the second issue, bringing The Gobbler’s total circulation to six copies. After failing to recoup costs and find more ad buyers, Tony ended the business. Even so, with one failure behind him, he realized that he had made his own money through an idea that he had formed, so his curiosity sent him back to the drawing board.

With his younger brother Andy, who was a little less shy but equally small-framed, Tony would spend much of his time poring over Boys’ Life, a monthly magazine (an offshoot of the Boy Scouts of America) focused on the great outdoors. Though the boys in the pages didn’t look like him, it provided a perfect escape. In one issue from 1984, a headline on the cover read, “How Computers Opened a Window on a New World for One Eagle Scout.” His favorite part of the magazine was always the classified ads section, which he saw as a catalog of all the “fantastic things that I never even knew existed but knew I had to have one day,” he later wrote. One day, he saw an item that struck the money-obsessed chord in him: a button-making kit for $50. Seeing the promise of profits flash before his eyes, he convinced his parents to “loan” him money to buy the machine, which could convert any photo or piece of paper into a pin-on button. Then he took out an ad himself in another book called Free Stuff for Kids. In his advertisement, he offered to make buttons for customers for $1 plus a selfaddressed stamped envelope. After doing the math, he calculated he would earn 75 cents on every button sold. To his parents’ surprise, he paid them back within a month and was soon working four to five hours during the weekend to keep up with the orders. Eventually he bought a more automated button-making machine for $300. Through middle school, he made $200 a month—a hefty sum for a teenager in the eighties. The success spawned a tradition of Tony inviting his two younger brothers to be part of his businesses. When Tony graduated, he passed the button-making business to Andy, who then passed it on to their younger brother, Dave. It also seeded another element of his future. “I learned,” he wrote later, “that it was possible to run a successful business by mail order, without any face-to-face interaction.”

Thinking up ways to make money often had more to do with Tony trying to think his way out of the limitations of childhood than it did with becoming an entrepreneur. His parents fostered his efforts, sometimes unintentionally. For his ninth birthday, Tony asked for a crate of earthworms, with the ambition of becoming the world’s largest worm seller. The idea—born out of a book that Tony had read about how, when cut in two, both halves of a

worm will regenerate, thereby doubling the number of worms at hand—was light on economic modeling, like whether demand would meet supply. Still, Richard and Judy were encouraging, and drove him to Sonoma to what claimed to be America’s biggest worm farm. There they bought a box of mud that was guaranteed to have at least a hundred earthworms squirming within. If he cut them all in half, his product inventory would double. But operating under the ill-conceived notion that feeding the worms raw egg would make them stronger, Tony drowned the dirt in yolk, provided to him by his mother. That attracted birds to the box—a worm’s worst nightmare. The next day, when he went to check on the box, not a single worm remained. Richard and Judy were also there to indulge Tony’s garage sales, which only ended when their cache of house junk was exhausted, prompting their boy to convince other friends to hold garage sales at their homes. His parents also listened to his plan to go door-to-door selling Christmas cards to his neighbors after seeing an advertisement in Boys’ Life during summer vacation. Given that it was August, his next-door neighbor—and first potential customer—told him to come back later in the year. Richard Hsieh, tall, lanky, and soft-spoken, was a chemical engineer at Chevron who had secured a reputation in his predominantly white neighborhood in Marin County as friendly and welcoming. Kathy Barrass, one of the Hsiehs’ neighbors who lived across the street, recalled a conversation with Richard outside her home on Coast Oak Way in which she shared with him that she and her husband had always wanted to visit China. “Richard told me to stay right where I was, and he ran back inside their house,” she said. Richard came back out with a travel brochure for China and instructed Kathy to call the number on the flyer. Three weeks later, Kathy and her husband were off on a seven-city tour across China, traveling by boat and plane from Shanghai to Beijing. Judy Hsieh, a child psychologist, was the kind of mother who would make breakfast and pack lunch bags for Tony and his two younger brothers every morning. The lunches were “insanely healthy,” one childhood friend recalled, adding that Tony apparently didn’t like them much either—he would often try to trade his lunches for one of his friends’ chocolate-frosted Ho Hos. She could also be strict at times, like many mothers, and Tony’s childhood friends often found themselves intimidated by Judy’s presence,

despite her petite stature. “I got the feeling that she always thought I was never quite good enough for Tony,” the friend said. Of the two, Richard was the more gregarious and social parent, and many of Tony’s friends later on in life found themselves on the receiving end of his FaceTime calls. But while they may have differed in communication styles, Richard and Judy, both immigrants from Taiwan, had one core goal in common: they had high expectations for their sons. They were “your typical Asian American parents,” Tony later said, a title that came with a demanding curriculum and strict confines, both in school and at home. They expected their sons to strive for immense intellect and to have a disciplined work ethic, the kind of progeny who would either become a doctor or get a PhD. The latter was an endeavor they both understood well: Richard earned his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Judy waited until after the birth of their third and last son, David, to get her PhD in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology. Their demands on their children stemmed from a much larger phenomenon affecting a new generation of Asian American children. Richard and Judy had been two among millions of people who arrived in America as part of a massive brain drain from China, prompted by the events that followed World War II. Shortly after Japan surrendered to the Allied powers, General Tsai Lee and Peggy Lee gave birth to Judy, born Shiao-Ling Lee, on December 10, 1945, on the southern coast of China in what is today known as Guangdong Province. Two years later, on December 7, 1947, Chuan-Kang Hsieh, or Richard, was born. Richard and Judy entered a world emerging from the horrors of global warfare, only to grow up in a country where national trepidation would continue. Two opposing factions within China—the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang—had resumed the final phase of their own decadeslong civil war, and the Communists took over mainland China in 1949 to establish the People’s Republic of China. The Kuomintang leadership and its loyalists, meanwhile, retreated to the island of Taiwan and built their own government. In their teens, Richard and Judy independently found their way to Taiwan, where they would both end up at National Taiwan University (NTU), a prestigious institution in Taipei from which they had an arm’s-

length view of the tragedies occurring on the mainland. While China endured famine, censorship, violence, and death under Chairman Mao Zedong, the citizens of Taiwan escaped the consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. America, meanwhile, recognized Taiwan as a legitimate government, as that meshed with the U.S. agenda to hinder the communists’ growing power. As the tension between the two Chinese factions continued, Taiwanese intellectuals who wanted to explore and advance their livelihoods felt there was only one place to turn to: Mei Guo, the Mandarin name for America, which translates literally to “beautiful country.” Such an opportunity was typically afforded to the best and brightest students from National Taiwan University who were accepted to graduate degree programs in the United States. That journey from NTU figured in the life stories of prominent Taiwanese like Ang Lee, the famed film director, and Min Kao, the cofounder of Garmin. Many graduates went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which had a robust program for international Chinese students dating back to the early 1900s. When Richard and Judy arrived in the Urbana-Champaign region at the end of the 1960s, there were three Chinese restaurants, one Asian supermarket, and not much else to welcome the Chinese students. But what the town lacked in accommodations for its Chinese arrivals, it made up for in its role as a gateway toward the American dream of purported success and freedom—an image as ubiquitous here as at other elite schools like Harvard or Yale. Richard immigrated in 1969, a year after graduating from NTU with a degree in chemical engineering, to pursue his master’s and PhD in the same field. Judy, meanwhile, had graduated from NTU a year earlier but would also end up at UIUC, enrolling in the master’s program for social work. It was a lonely endeavor for each of them, crossing an ocean and leaving family, friends, and everything else behind. But once at UIUC, the reality of their experience was a country and society reeling from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Race relations were still tense. More often than not, Asian students found themselves striving to fade into the background, to draw less attention to themselves. Like attracts like, and at UIUC Richard and Judy crossed paths and then fell in love. They both received their master’s degrees in 1971 in their respective fields, but Richard continued to pursue his PhD at the university.

He became a member of Phi Lambda Upsilon, a chemistry honor society, as well as the American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 1973, after Richard and Judy married, Richard published his dissertation with the esteemed Charles Eckert as his thesis advisor. Titled “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions,” his research received funding from the National Science Foundation and from the U.S. Army Research Office in Durham, North Carolina. “No man works alone,” Richard wrote in the acknowledgments section of his dissertation. “The deepest thanks are due to Dr. C. A. Eckert, not only for his encouragement, advice and assistance, but also for the corrections of poor English, bad grammar, false reasoning and obscurity in the manuscript.” He continued, “I must recognize my debt and gratitude to my parents who encouraged and supported their dearest son to pursue his higher education across the Pacific Ocean, and my wife Judy, whose patience and endurance made this work possible.” A few months later, on December 12, 1973, the young couple welcomed Anthony Chia-Hua Hsieh to the world in Urbana, Illinois. With the seeds of their family sown, they were determined to make something of themselves in the foreign but free, generous though sometimes unforgiving, land of America. And just as Richard’s parents pushed him to leave his home and his family behind in order to make what was then a fifty-hour flight halfway around the world to pursue his education, he and Judy would push their children to be the best they could be. Their new home was a place of opportunity and prosperity, and as long as you worked hard, seemingly anything could be accomplished. Two years later, Tony’s brother Andrew Chia-Pei Hsieh was born. Their younger brother, David, would arrive seven years later. One of Tony’s only memories of Illinois was catching fireflies in jars. “In my mind, I had invented it and no one else had done it before,” he later said. When Tony turned five, Richard got a job as an engineer at Chevron on the other side of the country, in Marin County, California. Richard and Judy packed up once more and moved the family out West.

Given everything they had endured, Richard and Judy shared a prescription for their children’s lives: nothing short of excellence. In practice, this meant an unusual amount of pressure and work, both in school and outside of it. Tony consistently wrestled with these constraints, and made frequent attempts to control his childhood on his own terms. Among the expectations outlined for him was a requirement for musical excellence, in the name of being well-rounded. Each weekday, if school was in session, he was expected to practice playing his instruments for two hours—thirty minutes each for the piano, violin, trumpet, and French horn. On weekends and during the summer months, Tony was required to practice each instrument for an hour. With four hours supposed to be dedicated to musical progress, this drastically cut into his summer vacation. So Tony came up with a risky scheme that would disappoint his parents and bring punishment if they ever found out. But on the slim chance that the plan succeeded, Tony would have more precious time to enjoy the kind of summer vacation he wanted. He decided to take the chance. One summer day during middle school, Tony sat in his room and recorded himself playing his instruments. He played hour-long sessions for each instrument, hitting “stop” on the tape recorder once he was done. Then the next morning, as the sun was rising, Tony climbed out of bed and tiptoed down the staircase, mindful not to wake his parents. Entering the sitting room clutching the tape recorder, he walked over to the piano, placed the recorder above the keys, and hit “play.” The sound of his own keystrokes lilted throughout the house. Perhaps the recording would stir his parents awake ever so slightly, only for them to fall back asleep with the warm satisfaction that their son was downstairs, practicing like they had instructed, like he’d said he would. Once the hour-long piano recording finished, Tony trudged back upstairs to his room and, behind a locked door, proceeded to play the recording of his own violin playing. Instead of spending those hours improving a skill that he knew would never become his life’s work, Tony instead spent the time reading issues of Boys’ Life. The ruse was a gamble, and it paid off. Kathy Barrass remembered hearing the bright notes of the violin and piano floating out into the street from the Hsiehs’ home during her daily strolls around the neighborhood. In retrospect, perhaps she had been an early, and unwitting, observer of Tony’s ingenuity. It was yet another

discovery: that besides having money, thinking outside the box—which meant defying his parents’ instructions, in this instance—could also allow him to define himself.

CHAPTER 2

WIDE AWAKE

Dixie Elementary School was a public school sandwiched between the fields of Lucas Valley Preserve and Sleepy Hollow. Renamed Miller Creek Elementary School District decades later due to the former name’s ties to the old South and Confederate states, the school was just a five-minute drive from the Hsiehs’ home on Coast Oak Way. Every morning at the school started with a Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. From Tony’s first day, it was clear he was unlike the others in his classroom. “There was all this buzz about the new kid, the wunderkind,” said Spencer Garfinkel, a former classmate of Tony’s. On the first day of school that Monday, he was a first grader. By Tuesday, Tony had jumped to the second grade, putting him in the same year as Spencer. “Literally, it wasn’t a week. It took a day,” Spencer said. Years later, Tony would say how skipping this grade made him feel different and singled out, even more so than he may have already felt, being one of very few Asians in the neighborhood. Tony’s last name was foreign enough that his elementary school soccer coach had trouble spelling out his name in writing when going over plays on a chalkboard. After a few failed tries, he quickly became “Tony H.” Richard and Judy very quickly identified the other few Chinese families in the neighborhood. “Somehow my parents managed to find all ten of them,” Tony later wrote. The families built a community within a community, coming together often in comfort and familiarity. Speaking with one another in fast and expressive Mandarin, the families would make a point of celebrating traditional holidays like Chinese New Year together, taking turns hosting potluck lunches and dinners at their homes. The kids

would play and watch television in one room, while the parents, in another room, gossiped and bragged about their children’s accomplishments. Tables and counters would groan under the weight of platters and bowls filled with fried and sticky rice, long noodles, and glistening braised pork. Kumquats and oranges would dot the house, the bright orange colors a symbol for gold and prosperity. The kids, Tony included, would have to bow to the parents in order to receive red envelopes, filled with $1 bills, $5 bills, even $20 bills at times. For dessert, sometimes there would be xing ren tofu, a traditional Chinese soft almond tofu. “But it was the Betty Crocker version, which was just Jell-O, flavored with almond extract, I think,” recalled one childhood friend of Tony’s. “It had canned fruit with it.” The gatherings were never anything fancy, but they were significant in other ways, particularly for the children. “It was cool to get together because it was one of the few times where we would see so many Asian people together in the same place.” Richard and Judy made sure that Tony, and later on his two younger brothers, Andy and Dave, attended Chinese school in the late afternoons on weekdays and on weekends so they could keep in touch with their native language and roots. The brothers were only allowed to watch television one hour a week and had to get straight As—anything less would be a badge of shame. One friend of Tony’s recalled watching him cry in elementary school because he received less than an A on a paper in French class. “He was inconsolable,” he said. “I don’t think it was necessarily even obvious to me how seriously he took academics because sometimes he could come off as somewhat cavalier about it.” Around the time that Tony entered Miller Creek Middle School, Judy would drive Tony and another one of his friends, Eric Liu, to the local library in the summertime for reading clubs. Aside from Boys’ Life, Tony also devoured a book series called The Three Investigators, which followed three teenage boys as they solved crimes and mysteries. In the series, the headquarters for the three boys was a damaged thirty-foot trailer in a junkyard. The idea that a trailer could have everything that the boys needed to solve their investigations—a small laboratory, an office and a desk, a typewriter, books—became a concept that Tony replicated later on in his life.

In sixth grade, his first year of middle school, Tony was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” The yearbook page that commemorated this superlative pictured Tony in his thick glasses with a messy bowl haircut, a zip-up sweater, and an awkward smile—most likely the forced response to a photographer’s command. He was never athletic and, as Tony H., never grew into soccer. “But he could kick your ass in ping-pong,” said David Padover, another childhood friend of Tony’s who, despite remembering his lack of athletic prowess, also remembered his sense of adventure very early on. “One of the things I remember doing with Tony was exploring in the hills up on Lucas Valley and the waters of Miller Creek,” said Padover, who lived about two miles away from the Hsiehs. They would bike to each other’s house and ride up and down the streets, sometimes going all the way to the base of the valley to hike up the hill. They stopped by creeks and used nets to catch small fish. “We would take all sorts of stuff up there so we could spend as much time hiking as we wanted,” he recalled. “One time, we found an alligator lizard and a bunch of field mice. We decided to take the mice home and raise them and sell them as pets.” Peers knew Tony as the child prodigy of Lucas Valley. But there were glimpses early on that he was more than just a studious and bookish boy wonder. The tape recording of him practicing instruments was just the beginning of a pattern of behavior. One of his friends recalled that as Tony entered the first stages of puberty, he secretly borrowed The “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Boys from the local library, a book that would have been considered contraband in his household. “I don’t know how he managed to do it, but it was like a big score for us,” recalled one of Tony’s childhood friends. “We were going through it half horrified and half fascinated.” For Halloween one year in middle school, Tony showed up to school as Sherlock Holmes in an outfit so elaborate that it surprised his classmates, who more or less knew him as the Asian brainiac. “I remember thinking, wow, his family went all out for this. With the cape, the shawl, and the eyeglasses. He was Sherlock Holmes, literally out of England,” said Spencer Garfinkel. His parents’ involvement in the costume was also noticeable to Garfinkel. “I’m not sure if that was the Chinese immigrant family wanting to come and fit in,” he said. Another year, Tony went a step further and dressed up as a girl. The outfit was so convincing that one of the

teachers did not realize it was a costume. “It was unbelievable,” Spencer recalled. “We were all lined up as contestants for the costume contest, and Ms. Troy, who was one of the judges, pointed at Tony and said, ‘But what’s that girl dressed up as?’” He added, “You don’t expect it from the computer whiz or math geek, but he had that goofy side. You’d never assume it, and then all of a sudden he’d come up with a costume or something and it’s like wow, where did that come from?” Few were able to glimpse the inner workings of Tony’s adolescent mind, but those spurts of expression indicated Tony’s curiosity for creativity and desire to break from tradition and conformity. This would come out in his writing as well, in a few poems he penned during middle school. In one called “Teeth,” he gave the reader vivid metaphors to chew on:

In another poem, aptly called “TOOMUCHTODONESS,” he writes with exasperation about his messy room and all the tasks at hand:

But one poem seemed particularly haunted. Written about a nightmare in which Tony is running away from a menacing octopus, it’s typed inside a drawing of the eight-limbed mollusk with large, soulless eyes.

Though Tony was barely a teenager when he wrote it, the poem was more telling than he could have known.

Nestled in a neighborhood of gated houses with long driveways, and hidden behind an imposing and carefully manicured hedge, is the Branson School, a prestigious private college preparatory school in Marin County. Once called “an enclave within an enclave within an enclave,” it is a high school unlike most, in which its $50,000-a-year tuition marks it as one of the most expensive high schools in the country. Today, the student parking lot is dotted with sports cars, and the school’s students are the daughters and sons

of California royalty, often going on to become part of that group themselves. One alum is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco turned governor of California. Just next door is the Lagunitas Country Club, the oldest private tennis and swim club in the county, which is also well known for its exclusivity. If an invitation is extended, one enters through the two pillared Branson Gates into a sprawling campus nestled within a lush valley, complete with a small creek that runs through the school grounds. Branson has always had a reputation for being a school that is strictly for the privileged elite. It is situated in the small town of Ross, where the median household income for the 2,300 residents is over $220,000 and the median home value is around $2 million as of 2019. It is one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Bay Area. But Tony didn’t live in Ross—he lived in Mont Marin, a thirty-minute drive away, where the households earn a third of what they do in Ross and the median home value is less than half. Most of his peers at Miller Creek Middle School went on to Terra Linda High School, a public school in the neighborhood. But for some parents— certainly for Richard and Judy—Terra Linda wasn’t enough. So, after a series of tests and interviews, Tony became one of four students in his class at Miller Creek who were admitted to Branson in 1987, earning seats among the eighty coveted spots. Tony got in not because of any favors from the family name but because he was academically competitive. And to Richard and Judy, Branson was the best of the best—100 percent of its students went to college after graduating. It was a feeder to the American dream. So, every morning starting in August 1987, Tony made the trek to the other side of town, into another world. He would either be driven by his parents or carpool with Eric Liu, his longtime friend who often attended the Chinese family gatherings and who had also been admitted to Branson. They would hop on the 101 freeway for just over three miles, then exit into central San Rafael, driving past the Jack in the Box on Second Street and the McDonald’s on Fourth. After winding through a series of turns, as the roads became better paved and the trees leafier, they would pass the nearly century-old St. Anselm Church. For another half mile on Fernhill Avenue, the journey took them past grand estates—homes with American flags waving on poles outside and gardeners out front. Finally, they would get to

the Branson gates, which were easy to miss unless you knew to look for them. Driving through the grounds, they’d pass students playing Frisbee on the lawn, or plotting which Grateful Dead shows they were going to go to next. As they pulled up in their modest family vehicles, Tony and Eric would get out of the car, take a glance at the rows of Volkswagen Beetle convertibles and red BMWs in the parking lot, and be reminded daily that they were from somewhere else. At a new school in a new neighborhood where none of the other students knew him as the whiz kid who skipped a grade, this could have been an opportunity for Tony to reinvent himself—but that didn’t happen. “I remember thinking that the first day of high school really didn’t feel that different from the last day of middle school,” Tony wrote. “I guess in my head, I had thought that suddenly I would feel older and more mature, that somehow life would suddenly be different now that I was in high school.” The same factors that isolated him from most of the other kids remained at Branson, only now they were exacerbated by an immense wealth gap, textured with teenage insecurities. While many other students went to Europe for the summer or Lake Tahoe every weekend in the winter, Tony worked multiple jobs during high school. He became a video tester for Lucasfilm for $6 an hour and started a computer programming gig that paid $15 per hour. He was still one of very few Asians in a very white school. At lunch, according to a former teacher at the Branson School who taught there during this time, it was not unusual for students of minority ethnicities to sit together at the same table, though Asian students were more integrated than Black students. Tony was still physically smaller than his peers, still a full year behind in growth spurts. His intelligence continued to burst through. In geometry his first year at Branson, he picked up concepts at such a breakneck pace that his teacher created a different set of problems specifically tailored for Tony. He still excelled. “I don’t often use the word brilliant, but he was brilliant,” his teacher later said. She also observed a level of restraint from Tony that she surmised was a direct response to a deep, innate desire to fit in. Though he knew the answers to every question and problem she posed to the class, he rarely volunteered his hand. “I just really got the feeling from Tony that he wanted the respect and admiration and to be accepted by his classmates,”

she recalled. “He didn’t want to do anything that would make them go, ‘Oh, there’s that brilliant kid. What is he even doing in our class?’” Tony spent his lunch hours and oftentimes his after-school hours in the computer lab, hidden in the library. He picked up the programming language Pascal and eventually became so adept at it that he taught it for a summer course. It was clear to those who paid attention, though, that Tony was not immune to the usual mischievous teenage antics. In fact, he sometimes led them. With a few other regulars at the lab, Tony figured out that the computer lab phone could make long-distance calls and they wouldn’t have to pay. So he had an idea—to call 976-SEXY, which ended up being a phone sex operator. The first time he called, the woman on the other line quickly caught on and asked what year he was born. “Twenty-one years ago!” Tony cried, before hanging up. He and his friends continued making calls to the number for the next few weeks for their amusement— before the teacher inquired about a phone bill that listed three hundred calls in the past month to that number. David Padover, who had also gotten into Branson, found himself in the computer lab as well during his freshman year, but it was not to pick up Pascal. Due to his social anxiety, he had found the cafeteria too intimidating a place to eat lunch. Instead, he preferred the quiet of the computer lab. He and Tony remained friends for the first year at Branson as one of four students from Miller Creek Middle School. But during their sophomore year, drama that had occurred during middle school followed them into high school. While at Miller Creek, a group of teenage boys used to bully David and call him names. While Tony didn’t take part, he did witness it. One day years later at Branson, when the two of them were in the school office together, David saw that Tony had drawn a comic about him. “I was stupid and dumb in this comic,” David later recalled of the caricature. “And everything I did didn’t work out.” There were striking similarities between the comic and what David endured in middle school. Though Tony tried to downplay the comic, he couldn’t explain why he had drawn it, and David ended the friendship. They never saw much of each other again at Branson or for the rest of their lives, even though both of their families remained in Northern California. Despite how hurt he remembered feeling after the incident, David later regretted ending their friendship over the comic. “I

knew a Tony that many people never met,” he later recalled. “But I never got to meet and experience the Tony that so many people got to know.” Tony continued thinking outside the box, which occasionally afforded him a different set of rules. Some of his teachers allowed him to not attend classes as long as he continued to ace tests. “As for homework, I tried my best to find creative ways around actually doing any hard work,” he later wrote. But even the hard work was too easy for him, so he invented ways to further challenge himself. One time, for an assignment that involved writing a Shakespearean sonnet, Tony submitted his paper in Morse code. “Depending on the teacher’s mood, I knew I was either going to get an A or an F. Luckily, my teacher decided to give me an ‘A++++++++++++.’” He was on the fencing team and joined the chess club and electronics club. He was voted into the Cum Laude Society, a group that honored “excellence in classroom achievement and other pursuits.” He also participated in mock trial, spending a few hours every Friday from January to March his junior year practicing debating with the rest of the team. Eric Liu was on the team as well—his last name misspelled in the yearbook photo of the mock trial club. “Branson’s prosecution was represented by Tony Hsieh, Eric Lui, and Mike Michaud and was able to convict Terra Linda’s Pat Haines of manslaughter,” reads the caption. His teammates are wearing blazers and collared shirts in the photograph. Tony is wearing a white T-shirt that reads “Dick’s Island.” Once, during his junior year, Tony drove by himself for two days from San Rafael to Mexico and back just to catch an eclipse. “I remember he came back with a Señor Frog’s T-shirt,” laughed one of his childhood friends, in reference to the Mexican-themed restaurant chain. “I can’t believe somehow his parents let him. But that’s just an amazing thing for a high schooler to do at the time.” Very rarely did Tony get in trouble, but he was suspended for one day after he was found with another student’s lunch card, a debit card for the school cafeteria, in his pocket. Summoned before a disciplinary committee, Tony provided what seemed like an unsatisfactory answer: it must have been an accident. Years later, Tony would claim this to be another important moment of his teenage years. “I walked away from that experience with the lesson that sometimes the truth alone isn’t enough,” he said. “And that presentation of the truth was just as important as the truth.”

As tradition goes, every senior is given their own page in the yearbook. Most students picked a series of photographs that represented the highlights of their eighteen or so years of life, such as photos of themselves as kids, shots of their pets, or pictures with friends at parties or pep rallies. Tony’s, however, was filled with mysterious-looking doodles, drawings, quotes, and inside jokes. It looked more like an invitation to an Acid Test party from the Merry Pranksters than a yearbook page. “It was very unusual,” said David. Tony wrote out his Chinese name in bold. There were references to fictional characters, including Indiana Jones and Angus “Mac” MacGyver, the dashing American TV hero who eschewed violence and instead used unconventional methods to solve conflicts and problems. Rather than a gun, MacGyver carried a Swiss Army knife. Tony drew a self-portrait of him doing a magic trick. And amid all the doodles and scrawls, he wrote a quote from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” “He had this pretty intense energy about him,” said his former geometry teacher. “Like he had deep thoughts in his head and he was grasping things at a really high level even back then.”

Perhaps Tony’s most impactful extracurricular at Branson was theater tech, a role that required him to toil behind the scenes to ensure a successful production for plays and musicals. The job entailed being in the theater auditorium after school and during lunch hours, fiddling with lights, tinkering with props, and finding camaraderie with other similarly onstageaverse students. Through theater tech, Tony met Janice Lopez, a Filipino girl with wide-set eyes who was on financial aid at Branson. Like Tony, she got into the school on intelligence and wits alone, and could also be painfully shy.

Together they took theater tech jobs operating the spotlight, which meant ensuring that the audience was focusing on the right character at the right time, whether that was at the student playing Danny Zuko in Grease or

the one playing Emily Webb in Our Town. Though the audience could not see Tony, they were being commanded by his light. “There was something alluring about being involved in something where the sole purpose was to create an experience and emotional journey for people,” he later wrote about his time in theater production. “Then to have nothing but memories left afterward to hold onto.” Sometimes he and Janice would sit shoulder to shoulder for hours in a cramped, six-by-twelve-foot control booth, watching the stories play out in front of them. Together they became comfortable in each other’s silence. It was a comfort they would find again twenty years later.

CHAPTER 3

THE BET

On a fall day in 1991, Jon Greenman was among hundreds of new students arriving for the first time at Harvard to start life among a new class of highachieving, and often wealthy, young minds. With a thick mat of brown hair and a nervous grin, Jon led his parents to the third floor of Canaday Hall A, one of a cluster of buildings that formed a giant question mark when seen from up above, where he’d be staying for freshman year. It was immediately clear that going to Harvard didn’t mean you were signing up for prestigious living quarters. Unlike other Harvard buildings, identified by Neoclassical trim and colonial-style columns, the Canaday buildings are boxy brick structures reminiscent of drab government housing built in the 1970s. Directly across the street, the booming toll of the Memorial Church bells shook Jon’s bedroom window at the stroke of every hour. Jon’s bedroom, part of a four-bedroom suite, barely had enough space for his belongings. Among his roommates were Sanjay Madan, a quiet boy with deep-set eyes and thick brows, and Jose Soto, a chatty young kid who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Amid the throng of students leading their wide-eyed parents around the campus, Jon ran into a tall, stick-thin Asian boy who was moving into the room across the hall. He introduced himself as Tony, and he, like Jon, was awkward and shy. They’d make fast friends, Jon figured. Tony, it turned out, had a room to himself. Jon decided he’d be spending most of his time there because Tony had two things that no one else did: a TV and video games. As residents of the third floor of Canaday A, Jose, Sanjay, Jon, and Tony became good friends. They also ventured upstairs and befriended

some of the girls who lived on the fourth floor, including Jill Wheeler and Kami Hayashi, and a few other guys below them on the second floor. Going to Harvard had not been Tony’s first choice. He had been accepted into every elite university he applied to: Brown; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; MIT; Princeton; Cornell; Yale; and Harvard. His original plan was to go to Brown because it had an advertising major, which Tony thought seemed more relevant to the business world than any of the majors offered by the other colleges. But Tony’s parents, Richard and Judy, had a plan for their son’s future that did not involve the liberal arts bent of Brown. While they had hoped he would become a medical doctor, they could settle for a computer science degree at Harvard, the global symbol of prestige and success. Over four centuries, the university had educated eight U.S. presidents, over a hundred Olympians, and nearly eighty Nobel laureates, which “yielded the most prestigious bragging rights” for Asian American parents, Tony later wrote. After everything Richard and Judy had sacrificed to achieve the American dream, sending their son to Harvard guaranteed a life of wealth and success, they thought. Choosing Harvard over Brown, however, would be one of the final times Tony capitulated to his parents’ demands. The TV was the first thing Tony bought when he moved into Canaday. No longer did he have to adhere to the one-hour-per-week rule of his childhood; in his new space he could watch his favorite shows whenever he wanted, for hours on end. It was the first in a long line of small freedoms that allowed him to make his own rules and shape his own environment. In addition to the desk, chair, and twin-sized bed that took up most of the space, he decked out his room with a hot pot, a computer, and a printer—all prized items for freshmen at the time. He owned a video game collection unmatched in the dorm; working as an intern at Lucasfilm had provided him with consoles and games that weren’t even available in stores. For dorm mates like Jon, it was these things that first drew people into Tony’s orbit. Then, organically, his room became the center of the universe for their group of friends. The main feature of his bedroom wall was a poster of Tony’s favorite idol, Angus “Mac” MacGyver, played on TV by Richard Dean Anderson. With a clean-cut face framed by a blond mullet, MacGyver had a geniuslevel intellect and could speak five languages, in addition to being

proficient in sign language and having mastered Morse code. With an extraordinary grasp of applied physics and engineering, he could defuse a bomb using a paper clip. In one episode, he made a magnifying glass out of a hairpin and wine to read the names of spies. The poster was the first image Tony’s friends saw as they walked into his broom-cupboard-sized room. Soon, photos of Tony with his friends adorned the walls. His room was right near one of the staircases that served as the only access to the dorm’s upper floors, and his door was always open, unless he was asleep, which seemed to rarely be the case—his friends knew they could find him awake and up for a chat deep into the night. Between marathon evenings of Bomberman—the Japanese strategic maze game on his Nintendo console—they crammed into his tiny room, sometimes a dozen at a time, and stayed up all night watching television or attempting to study. The longer they debated philosophy or each other’s romances, the higher the pizza boxes piled alongside buckets of buffalo wings. No matter what was going on in the lives of this group of friends, Tony and his room became the place to connect with one another. He was always there, listening, taking it all in. “There was a core group of about fifteen of us, and we were inseparable,” Tony wrote later. Like Tony, who was studying computer science, and Jon, who majored in astrophysics, the circle of friends in Canaday A had come to Harvard as the highest-graded students in their schools, achievements they had not reached by going to high school parties or rummaging through their parents’ alcohol cabinets. With Harvard’s enormous tuition fees, pressure from their families to succeed, and the crushing workload, alcohol did not meaningfully factor into the social equation of Tony’s group, nor did they express much curiosity about its ability to lubricate their experiences. In one candid photograph Tony is sitting on the ground, his arms around his knees, surrounded by friends. Cans of Coca-Cola, Sprite, Pepsi, and Canada Dry ginger ale line the window sills behind them—no alcohol in sight. There may have been a few beers at the events they did attend, though none recall stumbling home from a PBR-soaked college party. But even without the excuse of a hangover, the near-constant stream of people coming in and out of Tony’s room provided ample distractions from actually going to class. He arranged his schedule so that he had classes from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, leaving open

Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was problematic because he preferred to stay up late and sleep in, meaning that he would choose to stay awake for thirtytwo hours in a row and then sleep for sixteen hours straight. Sometimes he would cut class and instead watch reruns of the soap opera Days of Our Lives in his room. While Tony did have a small circle of friends at the Branson School, he confided in Jon that there were times he had felt excluded from the popular crowd there. “He did feel some desire for inclusion,” Jon said. “And he was very eager to have people happy when they were with him.” By the end of the first semester, Tony realized that he had created something special. Just before Harvard broke for the winter holidays, when everyone was preparing to go home to see their families, Tony wrote a card and distributed a scanned copy to each of his friends. In jagged handwriting, Tony scribbled on the front: “Yes, it’s a xerox. Yes it’s cheap. Yes, it’s a form letter. But it’s something I want to say to all of you so…” Inside, his message continued: A little over three months ago, we hadn’t even met. Call it luck, call it fate … Whatever brought us together, I feel very lucky to have you all as such good friends. Quite simply, you guys light up my life. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as happy with college as I am now (although my grades would probably be a bit better). Because of you guys, I haven’t even really felt homesick yet. Amazing what 90 or so days can do, huh? In any case, I just wanted to say thanks to all of you, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all that jazz. Oh, and one last thing … I hope that each of you invites me to your wedding, because I want to be there when the people dearest to me are having one of the happiest days of their lives. Alright, enough of this sentimental stuff … on with the presents! Tony

It took all of one semester for Tony to realize that what he really wanted to do was spend more time with his friends and less time doing work, while still getting good grades. Instead of using his intellect to study hard, he invested more time in trying to figure out how to hack his Ivy League education. Like in high school, he enrolled in subjects that were the most flexible in terms of the work required: linguistics, sign language, and Mandarin (which he already spoke fluently with his parents). During his senior year, he took a course called The Bible and Its Interpretation that met all his needs: there wasn’t any homework to be graded on, so he never had to go to class. “The bad news was that my grade in the class was going to be based on what I got on the final exam, which I was completely unprepared for, since I had never opened up any of the textbooks we were supposed to have been reading throughout the semester,” he wrote later. Two weeks before the final exam, the professor announced to the class that they would have to write a few paragraphs about five topics selected at random from a list of ninety possible topics discussed during the semester. Realizing that it was humanly impossible to do all the readings in two weeks, Tony posted a message on one of the electronic news groups on the Harvard network to see if any of the several hundred students enrolled in the class wanted to do a virtual study group—a revolutionary idea at the time, given that nothing was done virtually and the internet was still an infant concept. For those who wanted to participate, Tony would assign them three topics to research and they would have to email their findings to him. Once collected, he would compile the responses in a binder, and those who contributed could purchase the study materials for $20. “If we get enough people on the ’Net together, then each person will only have to do a few identifications,” he wrote on the harvard.general message board. Tony’s idea garnered enough attention to warrant a story in The Crimson, the student-run newspaper at Harvard. “Senior Forms ‘Bible’ Study Group On ’Net,” the headline read. Only forty people had responded to Tony’s message, according to the story, but it was enough to cover all the topics. Some students opted out of joining the group “out of concern that participating might somehow violate Harvard’s rules of academic honesty.” But a teaching fellow quoted in the story said, “I wouldn’t see anything different between this and students getting together in a room and working

together.” Another student quoted said, “I think some people who use harvard.general might learn from this in the future.” By slacking off, Tony had invented a new means of learning. “They say that necessity is the mother of invention,” he wrote later. “Without ever opening up a book or doing any writing myself, I ended up with the most comprehensive study guide that had ever been created.” In his memoir, published almost two decades later, Tony was intent on driving the idea that he aced Harvard by barely trying. But it was clear to his college friends that he put in more effort than he let on. During his sophomore year, he was one of three people on Harvard’s computer programming team that won first place in the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, beating 600 teams from around the world. “Programmers Win Contest,” a story from The Crimson read. “It was a really close contest,” Tony told the reporter. “We were pretty much neck-and-neck with Stanford. If we hadn’t got the last problem we would have lost.” A photo taken at the contest shows Tony standing between his two teammates, Craig Silverstein and Derrick Bass. They had just won $10,000. Having gone through a series of growth spurts, he towered over his companions, wearing a gray Harvard sweater, his eyes lit above a huge smile. He is gripping a trophy emblazoned with “1993 World Champions.” Seeing the photo years later, Craig was struck by Tony’s height; he had forgotten that Tony was taller than him. He recalled that they had barely slept in the weeks leading up to the competition. But the extraordinary achievement proved to be an early indication of the futures awaiting both men. After he graduated from Harvard, Craig was accepted to a PhD program at Stanford, where he worked alongside two other doctoral students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The students were working on a concept called a “search engine,” which sought to find a way to connect the millions of documents on the internet to a central hub that could be searched. When they dropped out of Stanford to start their company, Google, Craig followed them and was their first hire, a career move that would make him hundreds of millions of dollars.

What Tony omitted from his memoir was his connection to New York during this time. He makes no mention of his regular trips to Manhattan, which initially began as visits to see Alex Hsu, a friend from Branson who was studying information technology at New York University. One of the first things that drew him to the city was how different Alex’s college experience was from his own. Unlike Harvard’s campus, which is largely siloed in Cambridge away from the bustle of Boston, NYU blended seamlessly into the urban jungle of Manhattan, which fascinated Tony. There seemed to be no clear end to the campus and the beginning of the outside world. Instead, its student housing, libraries, and classrooms were interconnected with the world they existed within, sharing bars, parks, restaurants, offices, and apartment buildings with the citizens of New York. Such a connection provided a two-way laboratory that allowed NYU students to integrate and apply their experience to the surrounding metropolis, while the city could pull from the pipeline of educated individuals and the business and innovation they brought with them. It was a phenomenon that would stick with him for years. Tony’s visits to New York became so frequent that he found himself part of an entirely new circle of friends. Much of his time was spent hanging at Alex’s apartment at Zeckendorf Towers, which loomed above Union Square. The apartment served as a gathering place for Alex’s friends, including his girlfriend, Mei Lawn, and another young woman named Ying Liu, who was also a student at NYU. Ying had befriended Alex after they realized they were both Taiwanese. The four of them would stay up all night playing the card game Spades, surrounded by Chinese takeout boxes of chicken or shrimp and broccoli with hot chili sauce on the side. Other nights, they went to Broadway shows or the NYU students took Tony to dorm parties across the campus. Like at Harvard, this group of friends was similarly studious and uninterested in alcohol and getting drunk. Ying, who didn’t drink, noticed Tony took pains to reveal little about himself when he met strangers at the gatherings. When asked where he was visiting from, Tony’s response rarely changed. “I’m from a small school in Boston,” he would say. He seemed adamant about leading people to believe he was an unexceptional wallflower. “Without Harvard, he became like everybody else,” Ying said. “In fact, he was probably more invisible.”

Doe-eyed with a heart-shaped face that belied her commanding demeanor, Ying initially had found Tony to be painfully shy and quiet. But as they spent more time together, his introversion transformed into an intense curiosity, and during their moments alone he peppered her incessantly with questions. Ying had a nurturing and protective personality and found herself mothering Tony. Pour the noodles here, she would say, or Don’t throw that on the counter, put it in the trash. “I always felt like I had to take care of him,” she later recalled. They also shared a mutual curiosity about intimacy, as well as a lack of experience. Tony had yet to kiss a girl, and Ying had spent much of her teenage years changing schools between Taiwan, Indonesia, and Pennsylvania and New York, never staying anywhere long enough to start a relationship. She hadn’t even held a boy’s hand at that point, let alone kissed one, so she had few answers for Tony when he asked what girls like to do. One night, Ying, Tony, Alex, and his girlfriend were talking about sex, and out of curiosity, the group decided to watch a pornographic video. After a few minutes, Ying announced she was afraid of having sex in the future because of how painful it looked for the woman. The others burst out laughing at her naïveté. Ying recalled mostly assuming a big-sister role to Tony. She felt like they were on the same level and were both interested in trying to figure out why people behave in the ways they do. Sometimes she noticed how he would fixate on the smallest observations in wonderment. Other times she would accuse him of being childish—she often found his pranks immature. But as Tony’s visits to New York became more frequent, their mutual friends wondered whether Tony’s interest in Ying was perhaps driven by something else, maybe romance. While Tony was at Harvard, Richard took a job in Hong Kong and moved there with Judy and Dave, so Tony used summer break to visit them. Upon learning that Tony was heading to Hong Kong, Ying mentioned that she too was planning on going to Asia during the summer to see her father, though she would be going to Taiwan. She was somewhat surprised when he promptly invited himself to come and see her. It wasn’t too much trouble, he insisted, as Taipei is only a two-hour flight from Hong Kong. Ying gently pushed back: she had nowhere for him to stay. Her father lived

with few means in a minuscule apartment in a run-down part of the city. There was only enough room for a tiny bathroom and a double bed, which Ying shared with her father when she visited. Tony did not seem to care, so Ying relented and asked her father to book Tony a hotel near his apartment. The morning after Tony arrived, he met Ying at her father’s apartment building. The elevator violently shook on the way up. The stench of urine filled the cabin—someone had relieved themselves in the corner. “He was okay with it,” Ying said. “So I was okay with it.” Standing in the studio apartment with Ying, her father, and her brother, Tony mentioned that his first night in Taipei had been quite an experience. Ying asked him what happened. At around midnight, he explained, there was a knock at the door. A woman was standing there, offering a massage. When he declined, she clarified, saying that what she was really offering was a “happy service.” Ying turned to her father. “What did you do?” “Oh my God,” her father said. “I think I booked a love hotel.” As they laughed, Ying realized that the initial embarrassment that had made her hesitant about inviting Tony to her hometown was unnecessary. Tony, unlike many of her other NYU friends, did not come from wealth. Ying felt a quiet comfort knowing that Tony did not seem to be bothered by her family’s living quarters. “I wasn’t ashamed,” Ying said. But Tony’s ability to put Ying at ease was overshadowed by his reluctance to communicate his own feelings, and she was never quite able to truly understand him. While she didn’t press him, or even really ask, she sensed there was a disconnect between Tony and his own family. Even when they became closer, he never spoke about his parents. She only learned years later that Tony had two younger brothers. One day on a bus during their trip in Taipei, Ying noticed Tony looking at her with his wide eyes. “Why are you suddenly speaking English to me?” he said. In New York, Tony and Ying always spoke in Mandarin with their friends, in a way that felt almost like a secret code. In Taiwan, she had switched. Tony’s fascination with human behavior applied to her too, she realized. Ying never asked Tony how he felt about her, but some, including Alex, always thought that Tony had romantic feelings for her. Sometime after the

Taipei trip, Ying got a boyfriend, and Tony’s visits to New York became less frequent. “When I was single, he was very close to me,” she later said. “When I got a boyfriend, he drifted away.”

Tony’s jaunt in Taipei was one of many experiences that opened him up to the realities of the world, far from his sheltered suburban childhood. At Harvard he threw himself into opportunities outside of school. He earned a certificate in mixology at the Harvard Bartending School and started bartending at weddings and other catered events. He visited a friend’s farm and learned how to milk cows. He held several computer programming internships as a student, working at Harvard Student Agencies, Spinnaker Software, and Microsoft. For another internship at BBN, a subsidiary of the military contractor Raytheon, which developed technology that eventually became the backbone of the internet, Tony had to undergo a background check to earn a security clearance with the federal government. One summer he joined the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit organization of volunteers who patrolled the streets of Boston wearing red berets and making citizen’s arrests. Initially founded in New York City in the 1970s to combat rising crime in the subway system, the organization had more than a hundred chapters in cities across the world. He spent a summer patrolling the Boston train system and sidewalks, and was given the code name “Secret,” he wrote later. “I learned later that one of the other gang members had originally wanted to name me ‘Ancient Chinese Secret.’” One of his most formative experiences occurred during a trip to the hospital. David Camacho, who lived in his dorm, had cut his finger, and Tony and Jose volunteered to take him to the emergency room. As the boys sat in the waiting room, a mentally unstable patient was shouting and making a commotion. The patient approached and began flicking them with blood from a festering wound. Tony was traumatized, not least by the fear of contracting AIDS or other bloodborne diseases. He took the experience to his creative writing class, where he wrote about the episode for an assignment. Jon recalled that Tony’s essay went into vivid detail about his encounter. “We were living in a bit of a cocoon,”

Jon said later. “He just wanted to highlight that there was another world out there.”

Tony may have been breaking loose from the shackles of childhood and beginning to understand the ways of the world, but he also missed being an entrepreneur. So in his junior year he came up with an ambitious plan: he would take over the late-night food joint in his dormitory, Quincy House, a student enterprise traditionally run by seniors. Unlike his past endeavors, such as button-making or newspaper delivery, which were motivated by Tony’s desire to make money, with the Quincy House Grille Tony had a different aim. With its foosball table, pinball machines, and proximity to their rooms, the Grille could be another hub for Tony to orchestrate connections between his friends. He discussed the idea with Sanjay, who agreed to partner with Tony. Later, at a dorm party, Tony met another student named Alfred Lin and told him about his idea. While Alfred would come to devise his own way to contribute to the business, it would be the first of several money-making ideas that Tony would share with the two young men. In order to manage the Quincy House Grille, potential student owners had to bid for ownership. Tony figured that since he was a junior and all the other bidders were seniors, he could afford to outbid all of them, as he had two years to cover the cost and even run up potential profits. So his plan was to top the highest bid by $1. It worked, and Tony and Sanjay took over the restaurant, meaning they did everything from deciding the menu and getting the ingredients to setting prices and cooking the food. For the first few months Tony took the subway to the nearest McDonald’s every day, where he negotiated with the manager there to sell him one hundred frozen McDonald’s hamburger patties and buns for a dollar each. Tony and Sanjay would then sell them at Quincy for $3. But the real money was in pizzas, which could be made at a cost of $2 and sold for $10 before toppings. So they spent $2,000 on a pizza oven and reopened the Grille as a pizza shop. Considering other ways to attract customers, Tony thought about why his dorm room was most often the preferred gathering spot for his friends. He called Alex in New York and

asked whether his mother, a successful television producer in Taiwan, might want to invest a couple of thousand dollars into the business. She said yes, and Tony spent the money on a new television. He then spent nights recording music videos on MTV and episodes of Melrose Place, the popular soap opera set in West Hollywood. Whenever commercials came on, he paused the recording, ensuring that his customers could enjoy uninterrupted viewing the next day (this was three years before TiVo was invented). Since their conversation at the dorm party, Alfred Lin had been thinking about his own plans for the Quincy House Grille. Each night, almost without fail, Alfred arrived at the cash register with an order for a large pizza, something that didn’t strike Tony as odd—Alfred had a voracious appetite, and Tony had given him the nicknames “Trash Compactor” and “Monster” due to his habit of finishing his friends’ leftovers at the local late-night Chinese restaurant. But some nights Alfred would return to Tony for a second pizza. Tony soon learned that Alfred—the future chief finance and operating officer of one of his companies—had started a pizza arbitrage business, selling pies by the slice to his roommates upstairs for a profit. The new pizza menu combined with nonstop music videos and TV shows made the Quincy House Grille into a real business venture with healthy profits; they paid off the pizza oven in three months. Had Harvard kept subsidizing employee wages at student-run enterprises, and had burglars not broken in and stolen more than $2,000 from the registers, Tony and Sanjay could have made some real money from it, and Alex’s mother could have recouped her investment. But it wouldn’t be the last time she invested in one of the boys’ half-baked ideas.

On graduation day in the spring of 1995, Tony and his friends gathered on the lawn, dressed in black commencement caps and gowns. Tony and Sanjay had graduated summa cum laude, among the group with the highest grades in their class. Jon Greenman, who had completed an internship with NASA during his studies, graduated magna cum laude. A photograph taken on that day shows Tony with ten of his friends. Half of Sanjay’s face is obscured by Jill Wheeler’s graduation cap, while Tony is standing tall

above his friends, staring unsmiling into the lens. The lack of expression on his face belied the overwhelming excitement he felt for an unknown future. That excitement was evident to his classmates, who saw through his introversion to a young man who was full of adventure and curiosity and was destined for greater things, even among a class of Harvard graduates. They agreed that it would be Tony who bound them together in the years ahead. “At the time, we were surrounded by all these people who we expected to go on and do great things,” Jill, who would go on to work in government in Washington, D.C., later told friends. “We were so worried that we would lose each other as life went on.” So they made a bet: If Tony became a millionaire within ten years of graduation, they would all go on a cruise and Tony would pay for everyone’s trip. If a decade passed and Tony still hadn’t become a millionaire, they would still go on a cruise, but everyone else would pool money to pay for it. Tony had already done the calculations. “To me, it seemed like a winwin situation,” he wrote later. “Either I would be a millionaire or I would get a free cruise. Either way, I would be happy.”

CHAPTER 4

LINKEXCHANGE

It was a weekday, and Tony and Sanjay were again lounging by the pool during a very long lunch break at their new condo in San Mateo, California. They had landed jobs right after college as software engineers at Oracle, the high-flying enterprise software behemoth at the heart of Silicon Valley. Led by the brash Bronx-born contrarian and playboy billionaire Larry Ellison, Oracle, which at the time was the world’s largest maker of data management software, was a keystone in Silicon Valley. Comparing their $40,000 salaries to what their other Harvard classmates would be earning, Tony and Sanjay learned they would be making a lot more money than the rest of them. “I felt that I’d succeeded,” Tony said. Aside from the pizzazz of working at a flashy company, the job checked Tony’s only requirements: it paid well and required very little effort. Tony was assigned to test software for bugs and ensure that it worked after updates, a process known as regression testing. Each day it took him five minutes to set up a test and three hours to wait for it to finish. Then he would repeat the process two more times and his day would end. But instead of waiting for the tests to end, Tony walked the few blocks back to his apartment, took a long lunch, napped, and then went to the pool with Sanjay if he was home. It did not take long for Tony to realize that his initial requirements did not equal fulfillment. He also became acutely aware of how the languor he was experiencing starkly contrasted with what was happening outside Oracle. The year 1995, business magazine Fast Company declared, was “The Year Everything Changed.” Silicon Valley was brimming with innovation. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and those who understood its

potential were finding multimillion-dollar ideas everywhere they looked. In January, a young Stanford graduate called Jerry Yang had registered the website domain Yahoo.com for a database he’d been building that sorted internet pages in a hierarchical order, making them easier to find, and thus launching the first popular search engine. Two months later, as Tony was finishing his last semester at Harvard, a man named Craig Newmark started an email distribution list to his friends to highlight local events happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. This grew into Craigslist—a national online classified-advertising website that would one day strip newspapers and magazines of a vital revenue stream and change the media business model forever. Then in April, the online dating website Match.com launched, opening introductions for millions of people to meet virtually, shifting the millennia-old method of courtship online. And by July, as Tony was toiling away at Oracle, a young investment banker named Jeff Bezos launched a small online bookstore called Amazon.com out of his garage in Seattle. Companies that were preparing society for the twenty-first century and that would one day change the world—the way we learn, meet, buy, sell— were popping up left and right, many within a few miles of where Tony lived. And because California prohibited—and continues to prohibit— companies from baking noncompete clauses into contracts, any employee could quit and immediately create a rival startup. And yet here were Tony and Sanjay—who graduated at the top of their class at Harvard— completely disengaged and bored, languishing around the pool. Making easy money at a big-name company, it turned out, didn’t align with Tony’s vision of being in control of his own destiny and creating his own rules. To combat their ennui, Tony and Sanjay began toying with ideas for a side business. They landed on a website design project. Sanjay was a gifted graphic designer and programmer but was even more introverted than Tony, so he focused on designing and coding the sites. Tony, despite all his fears and insecurities when it came to talking to strangers, assumed the role of salesman. To the surprise of both, their new venture, which they named Internet Market Solutions, seemed to take off. After the local chamber of commerce agreed to let them design its website for free, other small businesses signed up. A local mall paid them $2,000. Tony’s lunch breaks got longer. So did Sanjay’s nights, as he stayed up coding once his workday was done. After

five months the two had realized they weren’t going to build this company from their cubicles at Oracle, and something had to give. Tony walked past his manager’s office three times before he mustered the courage to quit. “Wow! You must be joining another startup,” his manager said to him. “How exciting for you.” Tony thought of his two-man operation working from the living room. Within a week, however, they learned a crucial lesson: neither of them was actually interested in web design. Tony wondered whether quitting Oracle had been a good idea; his father, Richard, made it clear that he did not think Internet Marketing Solutions would ever be a success. So they went back to the drawing board and on a weekend in March 1996 came up with the idea of LinkExchange. By building websites for local businesses, Tony and Sanjay learned that the only option for advertising online was to buy ads from tech behemoths like Yahoo or Netscape, which at a cost of as much as $10,000 a month was cost prohibitive. Just as Tony had crowdsourced study materials for his virtual Bible study group and then packaged the information into neat binders and sold it, LinkExchange enlisted small businesses to display banner ads for other companies on their websites for free. With hundreds of small business websites, LinkExchange could then sell packages of banner ads across these sites to larger companies that would pay to advertise within the LinkExchange-enlisted websites. This was achieved with a credit system: every time a visitor viewed a small business website and viewed the banner ad, the small business owner would earn half a credit that could be exchanged to display their own ad across the LinkExchange network. So if a business had a thousand views on its website, it could display an ad five hundred times across the network of other websites. LinkExchange would keep the other half of each credit to build out its own advertising inventory to sell to large clients. LinkExchange rapidly developed traction, and Tony and Sanjay soon found that their workload had become overwhelming. So they started calling up their friends. Among their first hires were Tony’s childhood friends Alex Hsu, who had just finished at NYU, and Eric Liu, who had just graduated from UC Berkeley. Anytime a Harvard friend visited San Francisco, Tony would try to convince them to stay and work at LinkExchange. When Hadi Partovi, a

Harvard friend Tony knew through the computer programming team, was offered a role, he declined because he was already working at Microsoft. But he offered up his twin brother, Ali, who he claimed was so similar to him that they sometimes switched places for job interviews. Ali was hired as the third partner for LinkExchange in August. Tony and Sanjay needed money to pay their new employees, so Tony turned to the only investor who knew his track record—Alex Hsu’s mother. Despite losing $2,000 in his pizza business at Harvard, she was open to hearing another pitch from him. This time she agreed to provide a $200,000 seed investment. Five months after they started in Tony and Sanjay’s living room, LinkExchange had grown into an office on Second Street, in San Francisco’s South of Market district, with fifteen employees. Looking around, Tony could see that with every new hire, he was recreating the magic of his Harvard dorm room. LinkExchange was becoming a hub for all his friends to be in one place. If everyone got along and had fun, he figured, they would work hard, play hard, and succeed. And like at Harvard, they often slept where they worked; employees recall Tony and Sanjay sleeping on a cot set up in the conference room. Outsiders were starting to notice that the formula was paying off. “Any time of the day or night, somebody would pick up the phone,” said Ariel Poler, a Silicon Valley veteran who had founded an internet company and served on several boards for other tech startups. Ali had reached out to Ariel, and after a meeting the three partners—Tony, Sanjay, and Ali—they asked him to be a part of LinkExchange. “I remember being blown away by how active and energetic, how smart they were,” Ariel said. He soon became chairman of LinkExchange.

Other Silicon Valley moneymakers were taking notice, too. Shortly before Poler signed on as chairman, Tony and Sanjay received a call from a man named Lenny Barshack. A former Wall Street executive, Barshack had spent ten years working for Salomon Brothers and New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg before deciding to leave finance for a chance to capitalize on the dot-com boom in the mid-1990s. He started an email

directory company called Bigfoot, which eventually became a holding company for several internet companies. Barshack wanted a meeting, so they went to a steakhouse in San Francisco. The pair of twenty-two-yearolds listened as Lenny, sipping a Kahlúa cocktail, made his offer: $1 million in cash to acquire LinkExchange and add it to Bigfoot’s portfolio. Tony, with his mop of hair, and Sanjay, with his dark bushy eyebrows, tried not to flinch. It was a life-changing amount of money. They told Lenny they needed a few days to think about it. Within twenty-four hours, Tony and Sanjay replied with a counteroffer of $2 million, so they could each walk away with $1 million. “I have read somewhere that you’re in your best negotiating position if you don’t care what the outcome is and you’re not afraid to walk away,” Tony said. “I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime,” Lenny responded, declining to meet their price. “But I’ve also lost a lot of money when I decided to bet the farm instead of taking money off the table. I wish you the best of luck.” Four months after Barshack’s offer, Ariel introduced Tony, Sanjay, and Ali to Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo. Jerry’s company had become the embodiment of the dot-com boom, its logo emblazoned on the homepage of millions of internet surfers, pre-Google. Yang had just led Yahoo through an initial public offering in April 1996, at a whopping $1 billion valuation—an extraordinary size at the time. Yang also had more in common with Hsieh than most other Silicon Valley founders at the time: they were both Taiwanese and at the helm of tech companies in an industry where the majority of C-suite-level executives were white. The three LinkExchange partners assumed Jerry wanted to broker an advertising deal between Yahoo and LinkExchange. But Yang didn’t want to negotiate a contract; he wanted to buy LinkExchange, for $20 million (the figure Tony cited in his memoir; according to Ali, it was actually $25 million). For the second time, Tony was doing everything he could not to flinch. The three founders informed their employees, still a tight-knit group of friends, of the offer, and for several nerve-racking days they considered their options. Tony understood that if they said yes to the deal, he would never have to work another day of his life. He then made a list of all the things he would buy with the money: a condo in San Francisco, a bigscreen TV, a computer. Maybe some long weekends in Miami or Las Vegas. But ultimately, he realized, he would likely use the money to start another

company because he loved the process of building and growing a venture. Why sell a company he was already excited about, only to start another company to be excited about? In the end, he and the other founders turned down Yahoo’s offer. It was a seminal decision he would cite over and over again to underpin his assertion that chasing profits had never been his game, that it was always about passion and purpose. “There will never be another 1997,” Tony said during a company meeting, announcing that the Yahoo deal was not happening. His voice trembled as he looked around at the familiar faces of his homegrown company and realized he saw relief. This was not a moment of failure. It was time to continue building. Yang, meanwhile, was dismayed by the failed acquisition and complained about it during a Yahoo board meeting, which caught the attention of one of his board members, Michael Moritz, a famed investor at the storied venture firm Sequoia Capital. Moritz, a British former journalist whose short-cropped hair and frameless glasses made him look more like a professor of capitalist theory than a venture capitalist, was known for being introspective and proper. Days after meeting the three founders at the LinkExchange office on Second Street, Sequoia invested $2.75 million in LinkExchange, bringing invaluable cachet and credibility to the company. Before this point, the only outside investor they had was Alex’s mother. Shortly after, Tony approached Alfred Lin, his Harvard classmate, who after graduating had decided to get a PhD in statistics at Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. Tony had wanted to work with Alfred on a business ever since they graduated and had pitched to Alfred everything from a joint Subway sandwich franchise to LinkExchange when he and Sanjay first thought of the idea in March 1996. But Alfred was cautious as well as obedient—he did not want to anger his parents and drop out of grad school to go into what seemed like a very nascent idea with Tony. He had been intrigued enough, however, to join LinkExchange part-time while he was enrolled in his PhD program. Now with backing from Moritz, he was entirely onboard and joined the company full-time as vice president of finance.

Over the next year and a half, the company spun into overdrive. They opened sales offices in New York and Chicago, and expanded to additional floors in their building on Second Street. The three founders ensured that they were accessible to the workers, eschewing corner offices and choosing instead to sit in the pit with the rest of the rank-and-file employees. All three had a computer science background, but they played slightly different roles. None was officially given the chief executive officer title. “We didn’t really have a CEO,” said Poler. “We just had the three guys splitting things. They were always a group to me.” Ali took charge of business development strategy, while Sanjay, still painfully introverted, remained behind the scenes as head of product. Tony, described by early LinkExchangers as genuine and authentic in more intimate settings, was not necessarily a natural choice for a leader, and he was uncomfortable with public speaking. Kevin Ascher, an early employee, recalled seeing one of Tony’s speeches during a company meeting. “He was shuffling his feet. Not making eye contact and staring at the ground,” he said. “He had his hands in his pockets the whole time.” But while Tony lacked presence in the spotlight, he went out of his way to ensure that everyone felt included. “Tony instantly made me feel welcomed and comfortable,” said Susan Cooney, one of LinkExchange’s first female employees. “It was all those small interactions. They would all be walking out the door and it would be all guys and Tony would say to me, ‘Hey, Susan, come join us, we’re going to grab a bite to eat.’” Tony’s words were few, which made anything he said seem more important. “Tony was the most visible founder,” said Skye Pillsbury, a public relations employee at LinkExchange. “People just had a respect for Tony. He was a kind person, he always seemed fair, and when he spoke you wanted to hear what he had to say.” Public speaking and building out the story around himself and the company was a skill that he wanted to improve, Skye recalled. “After we met with a journalist, he would always ask me, ‘How did I do? Was it a good meeting?’ He really wanted to parse it out afterwards, and he was very open to any advice and guidance that I had for him.” So while there was no official CEO, to Sequoia and the rest of the board, “Tony was their darling,” Susan Cooney said. This was particularly evident from his ability to humanize LinkExchange’s corporate entrants. Moritz, who had joined the board, was

not necessarily an ideal culture fit—buttoned-up and twenty years older than the majority of employees—but he understood founders and also knew when to crack a smile. Shortly after Michael joined the board, the company asked him to come to the offices for the “initiation meeting,” a monthly event at LinkExchange where new employees would be tricked into wearing suits and ties for what they thought was a formal event, when in reality it was a practical joke—an idea of Tony’s. During this meeting, Moritz and the new hires stood at the front of the room. Then, under Tony’s direction, someone broke out a boom box and started blasting Los Del Rio’s “Macarena.” Everyone in the room started clapping and cheering as Michael Moritz was forced to cross his arms and sway his hips in front of the entire company. Tony looked around at all the laughing faces in the room with feelings of contentment and happiness. I can’t believe this is real, Tony thought. Outside of hazing new hires, LinkExchange started other traditions like happy hours at the local Irish dive bar, called Kate O’Brien’s. Another staple event was DrinkExchange, a monthly party hosted at different venues for tech employees from all over Silicon Valley, who were required to buy two drinks and give one away—a play on the credit system at LinkExchange. “Where Wuppies Gather: DrinkExchange Draws Hundreds Every Month,” read a 1997 headline from the San Francisco Chronicle. A play on “yuppie,” the word “wuppie” was reserved for flashy young professionals who made their fortunes on the web. “Last month, 400 revelers—mostly people in their 20s who work for Internet startups— congregated at Backflip in the Tenderloin,” the Chronicle article stated. “A line snaked out into the street and the wait at the bar was so long that people snuck in beers from the outside.” Many of those who worked at LinkExchange during this time recalled a fast-paced and exciting culture. “It still goes down as my favorite work experience for my whole career,” said Kevin Ascher. “It was magical, and it was just fun. Everyone liked each other, and it was as much a social life as it was a work life.” Tony started to drink more at LinkExchange. Having lived mostly a life of sobriety, he was now twenty-three years old and willing to embrace libations. Michael Bayle, one of the employees who organized DrinkExchange, remembered Tony being one of the biggest supporters of the event, even with his “Asian flush”—a reaction to alcohol that typically

affects people of Asian descent (because of a missing enzyme that processes alcohol in the body) and which turns people’s faces red while speeding up their heart rate and inducing headaches and nausea. “He would turn super red within seconds of any beer,” Bayle said. Skye Pillsbury also recalled Tony’s enthusiasm during one press tour trip, when he bought everyone tequila shots. “I actually remembered being really surprised because I didn’t picture him as a guy who would stay up until 1 a.m. drinking tequila shots,” she said. She recalled him being giggly and funny that night. “I remember feeling that he was more himself, like he came out of his shell after drinking.”

To those who saw and worked with Tony during this time, he seemed like a natural leader who was still learning but had all the potential to be great. To former Harvard classmates whom Tony had hired to help out at LinkExchange, he remained the mischievous and curious friend with wild ideas. In the summer of 1998, Tony organized an impromptu trip to Yosemite, and went to the camping store near the LinkExchange office to buy everyone tents. In addition to Sanjay and Alex Hsu, other college friends including Jill Wheeler and Kami Hayashi joined them. Packed into Tony’s mother’s minivan, they left after work and arrived at Yosemite after dark, complicating the process of setting up the tents. No one remembered to bring flashlights, but of course Tony kept night-vision goggles in his mother’s minivan. Once they finished setting up one of the newly purchased tents, they realized yet another mistake: they would not be able to fit inside because Tony had bought ones meant for kids. The party ended up sleeping in the van. Tony was also in charge of groceries for the trip, which to him meant a bag of potatoes, hot dogs, and beer. The plan was to cut open the beer cans and cook the potatoes inside. But cooking potatoes on a campfire took longer than expected, so they ended up eating cold hot dogs. Just as the group thought not much else could go wrong, the minivan’s brakes overheated on the drive home and stopped working as they wound through Yosemite Valley. Counting the mishaps and hijinks, the trip made for yet

another typical adventure with Tony. It was the fairy tale that Tony had envisioned for himself and his friends all along. But even fairy tales have an ending. Tony’s time at LinkExchange was soon marred by internal politics and drama that led to lessons learned. In 1997, as the dot-com era was in full swing, Ali had started discussions with Viaweb, a newer startup led by Paul Graham (who would later launch the storied startup accelerator Y Combinator), about merging their businesses. Just as the discussions were starting to finalize, Jerry Yang came knocking again. He offered $125 million for Yahoo to buy LinkExchange. It was a lot of money, and enough to do away with any previous hesitations Tony, Ali, and Sanjay might have had. They said yes to Yahoo, signed a term sheet, and agreed to cut off talks with Viaweb. Days before signing the final agreement, Ali met Jerry Yang—the “undisputed king of internet at the time,” Ali later recalled—for drinks. In Ali’s excitement, he suggested to Yang that Yahoo should also think about acquiring Viaweb to make Yahoo’s search engine a powerhouse. “Our guys looked at them,” Yang responded. “We weren’t that impressed with their people.” Ali, an excitable twenty-five-year-old, his confidence boosted by alcohol as well as the looming prospect of more wealth than he had ever imagined, challenged Yang. “Jerry, your guys are wrong,” he said. “The Viaweb team is amazing. Their engineers are probably better than yours.” Then Ali added, “They are hands down better than us.” “Interesting,” Yang replied. A few days later, after news of the Yahoo acquisition had already filtered through the LinkExchange halls, exciting employees of every rank, the founders received a devastating call. The $125 million deal was off. LinkExchange chairman Poler, who knew Jerry Yang personally, remembered that Yahoo had claimed there was “an issue with a pooling of interest or accounting problems,” he said. But in fact, with the help of Ali, Yang realized there was a better deal out there. A few weeks later, a new headline blared through the press and across the internet: Yahoo was buying Viaweb for $49 million. LinkExchange soon realized that they needed a backup cash reserve, in case their revenue suddenly disappeared. An initial public offering (IPO), which could generate much-needed cash while paying out to investors like Sequoia that were seeking high-yield returns, seemed the most obvious

resolution. That was until the Russian financial crisis hit in August 1998, creating a cascading effect on economies worldwide that suddenly erased the possibility of an IPO. The other solution would be to seek an emergency round of funding or an acquisition. To prepare the company for a big exit, LinkExchange’s board decided to bring in a new chief executive officer named Mark Bozzini. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for a board to bring in a more seasoned CEO to a company in which the founders were very inexperienced business-wise. But according to several former LinkExchangers, hiring Mark—who was the chief executive at Pete’s Brewing Company before joining and did not have relevant experience in tech—was not a good move from the beginning. “Things did not go well with the CEO,” said Ariel Poler. “Not a happy thing. I don’t think it was a good cultural fit.” “I would not describe him as someone who was beloved,” Skye said. It felt like “outsiders coming in to make us look ready for the next step. Tony didn’t sound like a talking-points founder. Mark was the opposite.” Meanwhile, according to one former LinkExchanger, there were employees who wanted to invest in the company ahead of the acquisition so they could make money by selling shares when the company was worth more. Tony and Sanjay were pushing for this plan, but other leaders shot the idea down. “Tony and Sanjay were doing their darndest to keep the culture together, and I believe they both struggled,” according to the employee. Now in three cities with hundreds of employees, Tony started seeing unfamiliar faces in the office. “At the time, I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing. If anything, not recognizing people due to our hypergrowth made things even more exciting,” he later said. “But looking back, it should have been a huge warning sign for what was to come.” Tony never said whether there were specific employees who were hired or certain events that happened that led to his feelings of ill will toward the LinkExchange culture. Instead, he described it as a death by a thousand cuts. “Drop by drop, day by day, any single drop or bad hire was bearable and not that big a deal,” Tony said. “But in the aggregate, it was torture.” Somehow along the way, Tony felt he had lost control of the culture and direction of LinkExchange. Toward the end of 1998, Tony became disengaged. One morning he found himself pressing the snooze button on the alarm clock six times

before coming to a harsh realization: the last time he’d pressed the snooze button that many times was when he was running software tests at Oracle. His detachment was felt throughout the company. “When Mark came in, you just saw less of Tony,” Pillsbury recalled. Despite Tony’s personal withdrawal, the board was still searching for funding that could help it survive a potential economic crisis but realized that LinkExchange remained an attractive asset with solid financials. In the end, Microsoft came to LinkExchange with the highest offer. Hadi, the twin brother of Ali, who worked at Microsoft, sent a message to Microsoft’s chief executive at the time, Steve Ballmer, vouching for LinkExchange. As part of the deal, Microsoft wanted all three founding partners—Tony, Sanjay, and Ali—to stay at LinkExchange for another twelve months. In most acquisitions, the board of directors has a say in such requests. But in this instance, in another vote of confidence, Michael Moritz turned to the three founders during a board meeting and said, “Look, guys, it’s your company. Whatever you want to do.” After some deliberation, they decided to go through with the sale, which garnered mixed feelings. At the time, Microsoft was seen as “the evil empire” by many in Silicon Valley. The company was in the midst of major antitrust investigations launched by the U.S. government and was largely viewed as a bully to competitors. There was also a sense that Yahoo could have been a better fit as a parent company. “Yahoo was more our culture,” said Skye. “Being acquired by Microsoft felt like being acquired by corporate America. It wasn’t the acquisition or exit that a lot of us pictured.” The exit negotiations left a deep impact on Tony. It was his first experience in true corporate America—the dog-eat-dog kind of dealmaking that was unforgiving toward empathetic leaders who cared more about changing the world and helping employees and small business owners than just a big, cash-positive heavy exit strategy. “Without getting into too much detail (and to protect the guilty), it was an education to me in human behavior and character,” he later wrote. “Large amounts of money have a strange way of getting people’s true colors to come out. I observed the greed of certain people who had joined the company right before the acquisition trying to negotiate side contracts for themselves at the risk and expense of everyone else in the company. There was a lot of drama as

people started fighting and trying to maximize the financial outcome only for themselves.” According to Steve Valenzuela, the chief financial officer of LinkExchange who was brought in right before the acquisition to work with Alfred Lin and prepare the company for an IPO, the negotiations started at noon on a Sunday in Redmond, Washington, at Microsoft’s headquarters. Microsoft first punted over a price tag of $120 million, which Valenzuela said was “totally unacceptable.” After six hours of back-and- forth in the board room, Valenzuela finally got Microsoft to $250 million. He then negotiated an additional $15 million to go toward key employees of the company for retention purposes—which Tony and Sanjay then took to the LinkExchange board for approval. Tony also encouraged executives to give up some of their equity to give back to employees who did not have as much stock, including some lowerlevel employees. This was not well received by all the executives at LinkExchange. “It was pretty unusual at the time,” Valenzuela said, who gave up some of his own equity, per Tony’s suggestion. As for the financial outcome for Tony, he would be set for life. If he agreed to stay for the full year after the acquisition, his take-home would be $40 million in Microsoft stock. If he didn’t, he would still take home roughly $32 million. A few weeks later, in early November 1998, Tony and Sanjay found themselves at lunch together at a restaurant close to LinkExchange. As they were about to finish eating, Tony got a call. It was Alfred. He had just heard from Steve, who was closing the deal at Microsoft’s headquarters. “Well, I guess the deal closed,” Tony said to Sanjay. They stared at each other— Tony with the same mop of hair, Sanjay with the same thick brows. Except this time they weren’t staring at each other in shock, as they had after Lenny Barshack made his offer. It was in apathy and relief—relief that this was finally over. “I guess we should probably walk back to the office then,” Tony said to Sanjay. “Okay,” he replied. Shortly after, Tony found himself making a list similar to the one he’d made when they got the first offer from Jerry Yang. This time, however, the list was not about all the things he would buy with his newfound wealth. It was a list of the happiest periods in his life. He realized that none of those moments involved money. All of them included building businesses and

experiences. “Being creative and inventive made me happy,” he said. “Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy.” Tony left LinkExchange before a year passed. Though he left about $8 million behind, his stake was still worth $32 million—an eye-watering sum for a twenty-five-year-old. Shortly after, he took his friends from Harvard and a few others on a cruise. A bet is a bet, and Tony had become a millionaire within three years of graduating. But while surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy. What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered. Such questions guide the lives of many, only now Tony had more money than most would ever see in a lifetime. “If you hate someone, give them a winning lottery ticket and announce it to the world,” his childhood friend Alex Hsu later said. “Having so much financial success in your twenties and early thirties comes with a different set of challenges that most people will never have to face.”

CHAPTER 5

RAVING

Their heads swayed in unison, their minds and bodies seemingly connected by the bass line thundering through the warehouse, as green laser beams cut through the darkness. Black light illuminated the neon-hued objects and artworks that soared above their heads and decorated the walls, while the acrid smell of fog machines and sweat filled their nostrils. Thousands of faces looked forward, as if possessed by a higher power, their eyes transfixed on the DJ commanding the space at the end of the room. With every tweak of the track, every bass drop, every brush with the person next to him, Tony was experiencing an epiphany. For the first time, his body and mind were connected to a group of unknown people through techno. “The steady wordless electronic beats were the unifying heartbeats that synchronized the crowd,” Tony later wrote of the night in early 1999. “It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness, the same way a flock of birds might seem like a single entity instead of a collection of individual birds. Everyone in the warehouse had a shared purpose. We were all contributors to the collective rave experience.” In what seemed like a single moment in time at a run-down warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of the Bay Area, Tony let go of all the logic and rationale that had guided his life to that point and instead found himself being swept by a sense of spirituality. Not a religious feeling, but a connection to those around him. The experience would prove life changing, like an undiscovered power had been unlocked in his mind. “I had awakened,” he wrote later. “I had been transformed.”

The rave scene in San Francisco had been sparked in the early 1990s, partly driven by self-professed computer geeks who arrived in San Francisco as open-minded, sexually liberated, optimistic young people. “They not only created Internet communities around rave culture; they nurtured and participated in the dot-com boom itself,” wrote one journalist. Fueled by acid and MDMA (Ecstasy), the Bay Area was awash in party drugs, with raves popping up in abandoned warehouses all over. To avoid authorities trying to shut the events down in a game of Whac-A-Mole, organizers used clandestine methods to issue times, dates, and locations to attendees by handing out rave flyers at company events or college campuses. One reveler recounted that for one such rave, known as Eon, attendees were told to call the number on a flyer. A voice on the other end of the line provided the next step: Go to the donut shop on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley and find the two men sitting in a corner with a cash box and hand over five dollars. Then the men would write instructions and an address on a piece of paper, revealing the secret location. “Some rave club owners and promoters sell specialty items to dancers in a way that arguably promotes MDMA use,” read a notice from the National Drug Intelligence Center at the time. “They provide bottled water and sports drinks to manage hyperthermia and dehydration; pacifiers to prevent involuntary teeth clenching; and menthol nasal inhalers, and chemical lights, and neon glow sticks, necklaces, and bracelets to enhance the effects of MDMA.” Tony tried MDMA for the first time in 1999, the same year he went to his first warehouse rave, and not long after he became a millionaire at twenty-five years of age. “The drug was transformative for us to a certain degree,” said a close friend of Tony’s who had known him for years and was present when Tony first tried the drug. “It kind of consumed our lives for a little bit.” The experience of taking MDMA can be cathartic, and by coupling that with raving, Tony was connecting to a side of himself he hadn’t tapped into previously. The most common effects of the substance are to give users a heightened sense of awareness, well-being, empathy, and transcendence. The chemicals release a rush of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine that medical practitioners say provide “optimal conditions for engaging in processing of difficult or traumatic material.” Later in life, he’d deflect reporters’ questions about potential drug use, but acknowledged that it was part of the scene. Unlike

the Tony of yesteryear, who’d remained quiet around strangers and stuck close to his circle, during the warehouse raves he found himself opening up and meeting strangers in a euphoric state and felt his walls come down. “At raves, it was part of the culture and considered perfectly normal to approach strangers and strike up a conversation,” he later said. This was a practice that he took beyond the warehouse raves. “I learned to feel comfortable starting conversations with complete strangers no matter where I was or who they were.” Tony also began to experiment with acid. After he tried it, “he would just try to do it himself just to explore who he was,” a friend said.

While the raves were a defining feature of Tony’s newfound freedom after his LinkExchange windfall, he and his friends were building their next idea. One day during the winter, Tony had been driving around San Francisco in his modest Acura Integra when he saw that AMC Theaters was opening a new complex at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, an ornate building in the center of town. Upon closer inspection he learned that the building, which had formerly been a Cadillac showroom, had just been converted into a flashy mixed-use residential and retail space. Tony saw what it could become, with its high ceilings, tall windows, and architecture that mixed Renaissance Italy with idealized Spanish colonial style, and he convinced Alfred, Sanjay, Eric Liu, and Alex Hsu to buy residential condos in the building alongside him. He also bought a handful of other apartments to convince other friends to move in. He and Alfred started an investment firm called Venture Frogs—a name chosen after one of their friends dared them to name the firm after her pet frog—with a mandate to invest in companies with great founders and great ideas. They convinced Sanjay, Alex Hsu, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Ariel Poler, and other former LinkExchangers to back the firm. Together, they raised $27 million. Venture Frogs would be headquartered in one of the loft apartments at 1000 Van Ness, and they took over two retail spaces adjacent to the lobby. In one of the spaces would be the Venture Frogs Incubator—an office space their portfolio companies could work from, with the hope that the companies’ teams would collide and germinate new ideas. Eric, who

founded a web design company that Venture Frogs invested in, worked in the incubator. There were days when they never left the building because there simply was no need—the commute from home to work was a short elevator ride. The other retail space would be the Venture Frogs Restaurant, which Tony gave to his parents, Richard and Judy, to manage with the goal of feeding the founders and other employees working out of the incubator. It would go through several iterations, including noodle dishes and boba. At one point its menu had a tech industry theme, with cocktails named after venture funds on Sand Hill Road, the famous street in Palo Alto where all the biggest firms like Kleiner Perkins and Accel were located. The dishes, meanwhile, were named after tech companies, like SoftBank Chicken Satay and Cisco Chinese Chicken Salad. More than a decade before Adam Neumann, the Israeli entrepreneur and marketing spin doctor who blurred the lines between work, play, and other parts of life with the ethos of the co-working venture WeWork and its residential arm WeLive, Tony fused those elements together at 1000 Van Ness, just as he had done at Harvard. Once they moved into the building, Tony and his friends owned 20 percent of its apartments—technically registered to a separate address, 151 Alice B. Toklas Place, because the complex was so large—and had 40 percent of the seats on the board of the building’s homeowners’ association. “We could create our own adult version of a college dorm and build our own community,” he wrote later. “It was an opportunity for us to create our own world. It was perfect.” But at Harvard, he and his friends had been connected by an underlying thread: they were all naturally gifted intellectuals. They would stay up all night together, to be sure, but it was not to party—it was to watch movies, play cards or video games, and order takeout. Until now, he had spent his life on a strict path first laid out by his parents and then guided by his own intelligence and ambition, and there hadn’t been time or the environment for him to truly let loose. The adventurous and experience-creating side of him that dared to take out The “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Boys from the local library or drive all the way to Mexico by himself to watch an eclipse was about to enter a new phase. “I think all the growing up that we all did, in high school and college and post-college, a lot of that was delayed for him,” said a close childhood friend.

While he already lived in a 1,400-square-foot loft on the seventh floor, there was a sprawling 3,500-square-foot penthouse on the floor above: unit 810. Seeing the open space in his new figurative dorm, Tony knew exactly what to do with it. He purchased the loft and decided that the space would be used to “architect our parties and gatherings,” as he later said. It quickly became the central hub for socializing, partying, and after-hours debauchery. With two bedrooms, a contraband indoor hot tub, a setup for a deejay to spin, and a living room so large that it would look empty even if a hundred people were in there, it became an epic party spot for his growing circle of friends (much to the chagrin of his neighbors). Club BIO, as it became known because the unit number looked like the letters B-I-O, was part of Tony’s grand vision to re-create elements of the TV shows Friends and Melrose Place: all of his friends living, working, and partying in close proximity. Tony was enamored with the idea of creating an enclosed world for him and his friends within a single city block. “I wanted 810 to become our tribe’s own private version of Central Perk,” he later wrote, referring to the famous coffee shop in Friends. “I envisioned our friends gathering in 810 on Sundays for champagne brunches. I envisioned 810 as being the afterparty meet-up spot after a night out at a club, bar, or rave.” Victoria Recano first met Tony and Alfred when she arrived at 1000 Van Ness to interview them for a piece on ZDTV, a cable channel that focused on computers, technology, and the internet. She’d been skimming news stories looking for a lead and had come across an article that detailed how Tony and Alfred, after the success of LinkExchange, had launched a new startup incubator in the former Cadillac building. It was Tony’s first oncamera interview, and he appeared terribly nervous. She thought it was intriguing that his parents were managing the restaurant in the building, and interviewed them, too. Once the cameras were off, Tony mentioned they were having a party at their place at 1000 Van Ness and that Victoria should come. In her early twenties, Victoria, who had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri, still considered herself both conservative and pretty innocent— she hadn’t ever been drunk—but she had arrived in San Francisco only recently and didn’t know many people. So she agreed, and brought along a friend of hers named Tom. When they walked into the party in Club BIO, the first thing they noticed was the

hot tub in the living room. Tom thought it was awesome. Victoria thought it was gross. Walking farther into the space, Tony showed her over to a table, where there was a gigantic bowl of punch and other drinks. “Let me make you something and you can try it,” he said to her, adding that if she didn’t like it, she didn’t have to drink it. “I had a couple of sips and that was that,” Victoria recalled. Looking around at the party, she saw a group of people having fun. She and Tom attended a few other parties at Club BIO, but often left early enough to avoid the wildness of the wee hours. Another new entrant to Tony’s life during this era was a man named James Henrikson. The two met on a camping trip in 1998 when Tony’s childhood friend Eric Liu brought along James, whom he knew from UC Berkeley, where they had been fraternity brothers. “It was not what you thought of when you think of Greek life,” said James. “It was more a bunch of guys with no money going on ski trips with no girls.” James studied biology, physics, and chemistry at Berkeley, then moved to Hawaii with his girlfriend for a year to study for the MCAT with the intention to go to medical school. After a year in the Aloha State, he decided he did not want ten more years of school. So he went back to San Francisco and, after a year of little income, started working three jobs: options trading for a brokerage firm, lab work at UC San Francisco, and retail management at the clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch. After getting back in touch with Eric, who was still at LinkExchange right around the time of the acquisition, James found himself making s’mores around a campfire next to Tony. “When I got there, I didn’t know who Tony was,” James said. “When I left, we were best friends.” The two connected over a love for meeting new people. But while Tony was initially shy around strangers, James was extroverted in comparison, which made him a perfect companion for Tony. The two started hanging out together and soon became inseparable. Though James lived only a few blocks away, Tony asked him to move to 1000 Van Ness. “You need to move in with me,” Tony said to him. “I’m tired of walking back and forth.” James moved into the building shortly thereafter. San Francisco was the bedrock of two social undercurrents that peaked in 1999: the lavish dot-com era and rave culture. The dot-com bubble had been frothing for a few years by now, and startup companies that had zero track record and no path to profitability were still somehow either getting venture funding or going public in the markets. Whether the companies

were celebrating an IPO or a new product, tech startups became notorious for spending excessively on massive soirees. “Dot-Com Party Madness” was one headline from the online publication Salon. “Forget about return on investment. Bay Area tech companies spend $1 million a month on food, drink and music in exchange for ‘buzz.’ … In any given week, technology companies throw 15 to 20 parties in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Tony and James became regulars on the circuit. Shortly after Marc Benioff launched Salesforce.com in 1999, a company that would propel him into the billionaire ranks and make him the self-appointed benefactor-in-chief of San Francisco in decades to come, he threw a party to commemorate the company’s founding. “The company had 200 customers by then but still minuscule revenues and no profits,” read a CNN story at the time. “That didn’t stop Benioff from wanting to throw the best launch party ever.” Benioff rented the entire Regency Theater in San Francisco for a 2,000person event headlined by the B-52s, whose hit “Love Shack” could send even the most introverted software engineers into a hip sway. “It’s simply become part of the way we do business,” Craigslist’s Craig Newmark told a reporter at the time. Tony dove deep into his new social life and picked up new interests. He found a group of people to start playing poker with, and another set of friends who partied much more than his Harvard and LinkExchange friends. He reconnected with high school friends who since their time at Branson had met new people, who were now brought into the sphere. Tony relished it. “As our group grew, I realized that forming new friendships and deepening the connections within our burgeoning tribe was bringing both a sense of stability and a sense of excitement about the future for all of us,” he wrote later. “The connectedness we felt was making all of us happier, and we realized it was something that we had all missed from our college days.” On nights at Club BIO, friends recalled as much as $10,000 being spent on alcohol, only to have it run out before midnight. DJ Solomon, the local deejay for the Golden State Warriors, the Bay Area’s NBA team, would occasionally be seen spinning a record in a corner, amid enough fog machines to cause a fire hazard. At one point, one of the rooms in the penthouse earned the nickname “the penalty box”; it was a room full of

mattresses. “Let’s just say they kind of liked to explore the boundaries,” said the friend. On a weekly basis, Tony and his group were attending warehouse raves or going to nightclubs. Some friends recalled what felt like endless nights at 1015 Folsom, a nondescript building in a then-seedy part of San Francisco’s South of Market. On any given Friday, two chaotic dance floors were illuminated with strobe lights and lasers flickering around the windowless club, piercing the faux fog. The floor would be covered with sweat, spilled drinks, and empty beer cans. As bouncers bottlenecked the line snaking from the entrance doors out on the sidewalk, Tony and his friends were getting lost in the rhythm of techno inside. Their nights ultimately continued with a thirty-minute pilgrimage back to Club BIO, where the party would live on. But as the partying intensified and the spontaneous afterparties ultimately wound up at 1000 Van Ness, college friends like Alfred and Sanjay often skipped the Club BIO nights, preferring to go back to their own apartments instead. Some were in serious relationships; most were simply disinterested in this new lifestyle. Where they left holes, Tony found people to fill in the gaps. Tony would think, “‘I like partying with this person, and I shall absorb her into the orbit,’” said a close childhood friend. “Which is just really different from what kind of drove the earlier groups.”

By day, away from the raves and drug experimentation, Tony was still reserved, shy, and thoughtful. He often slept in one of the rooms at Club BIO, but when he needed quiet or solitude, particularly when he wanted to read, he’d hang out in the lobby of the building or go to Unit 706, where his younger brother, Andy Hsieh, had moved. That unit “was a more controlled environment,” said James. “[Unit] 706 was basically Andy, and quiet. It was kind of like Tony’s bat cave.” One night in 1999, Tony met a woman named Eva Lee during a group dinner. Small and slight, she was similarly introverted and kept to herself. For a while, their friendship was platonic—but it was clear Tony took a liking to her. After learning that she was a huge fan of Star Trek, Tony took

her to see Star Trek: The Experience, a themed attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton, despite his having a fever. Tony finally worked up the courage to ask Eva out around nine months after they met, and even then, he found a roundabout way to do it. Instead of outright asking her, Tony gave her a CD for the single “Sometimes” by Britney Spears, who had just released her debut album in January. Sometimes I run, Sometimes I hide. Sometimes I’m scared of you. But all I wanna do is to hold you tight. Britney’s sweet and gentle croon, it seemed, was enough to sway Eva. They started dating shortly after, and Tony saw in her someone he could connect with. He took her to her first rave. Eva went with Tony and his family back to Branson to attend his younger brother Dave’s high school graduation. Eventually Eva moved into 1000 Van Ness with Tony and started working for the Venture Frogs Restaurant as the assistant manager. One event they attended together as a couple was the wedding of Victoria, the news reporter, and her friend-turned-husband Tom. There’s a photo of the just-married couple with a group of friends, including Tony and Eva. Tony, looking like another version of himself—out of character in a black suit, tie, and a crisp white shirt—has a slight smile on his face. Tucked behind him is Eva, wearing a black dress, her head tilted toward the lens. At first glance, they look like they could have been the next couple in the group to tie the knot.

Amid the parties, raves, and relationships, Tony was still running a $27 million fund with Alfred at the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999. Though Alfred was rarely seen at the afterparties or clubs, he was the one being photographed next to Tony in news clippings about Venture Frogs. In one photograph for the San Francisco Chronicle, the two are smiling and looking at each other—Alfred in thick glasses and a blue button-down tucked into khakis, and Tony in a black-and-white checkered collared shirt, unbuttoned and untucked.

Their investment philosophy was to make small angel investments— anywhere from $100,000 to $3 million—in a lot of internet companies. Then after a few months, during which the companies would ideally be working out of the Venture Frogs Incubator and eating from the Venture Frogs Restaurant, they would get the bigger venture firms like Sequoia and Accel to invest as well. In their first year, they invested in twenty-seven companies, including AskJeeves, OpenTable, Tellme Networks, Entango, NeoPlanet, and Fusion. But it quickly turned out that they were better at leading companies than investing in them, and not all of their investments were well thought-out. In 1999 there was a frenzy to buy internet website addresses when people realized that often-used words generated vast internet traffic. Many of the domain names, as they are known, were sold through auctions. For example, www.business.com was sold for $7.5 million to a company called eCompanies, while Bank of America paid $3 million to own the domain www.loans.com. Tony decided he wanted to buy www.drugs.com, and won with a bid for $823,456, a number he chose because it was Alex Hsu’s cellphone number. “We hope to be partnering with Drugstore.com and PlanetRx and other online pharmacies,” Tony said at the time, though the mischievous side of him simply enjoyed the idea of owning drugs.com. They never got around to it, and sold the domain within two years. Tony also decided to purchase www.bbq.com and asked Alex to repurpose it to sell grills, along with two other former Harvard classmates who were now working at Venture Frogs. “I was coming to work every morning being like, wait, what am I doing with my life?” Alex said. One day, as Tony and Alfred walked into their Venture Frogs office— which was still in the one-bedroom loft—Tony saw a blinking red light on his voice message machine. The voicemail was from a man named Nick Swinmurn. He had recently bought the domain name www.shoesite.com and set up a website, he said, and wanted to create the largest online shoe store in the world. Tony’s immediate thought was that it made for a ridiculous premise for an internet company: There’s no way people would be willing to buy shoes online without trying them on first. Then the disembodied voice started citing data points, which piqued Tony’s interest. Footwear is a $40 billion industry in the United States. Catalog sales make up $2 billion. It is likely that e-commerce will continue to grow. And it is

likely that people will continue to wear shoes in the foreseeable future. Soon after, Tony invited Nick to an informal meeting at the Venture Frogs office. Nick, who had just graduated from college a few years earlier, showed up wearing shorts and a T-shirt, which made Tony like him even more. The idea behind ShoeSite, Nick told Tony, had grown out of his frustration with buying footwear in stores. What if there was a single place online where people could search for exactly the shoe they want, in exactly the right size, and have it show up on their doorstep in a few days? Repeating his voicemail pitch, Nick told Tony that 5 percent of sales in the $40 billion footwear industry were already conducted through paper mailorder catalogs. The numbers not only disproved Tony’s initial reaction that people wouldn’t buy shoes without trying them on but also made him realize the opportunity was massive. Though Nick’s pitch hyped ShoeSite as a tech-driven company, its origins were laughably archaic. Nick would go to a nearby shoe store, take photos of their inventory, and put it up on the website. When a customer purchased shoes from shoesite.com, Nick would go back to the store, buy it, and ship it out himself. And he’d started getting customers. The theory worked—people were willing to buy shoes online. Now he just had to refine it and make it scalable and profitable. At the moment, he’d only raised $150,000 from friends and family, and Nick wanted Venture Frogs to be his first outside investor. Hearing Nick’s pitch and story, they were intrigued. But on a call later, Alfred asked a simple question: “Do you have any experience in the footwear industry?”

CHAPTER 6

THE SHOE GUY

Fred Mossler was surrounded by boxes in a stockroom when he noticed the light on his desk phone blinking. Probably another voicemail from a vendor, he figured. As the regional men’s shoe buyer for Nordstrom, he had spent the last eight years working his way up through the ranks of the retailer. He was good at what he did, and until that moment before he picked up the phone to listen to the message, he had what he figured was a pretty easygoing, well-to-do life. After graduating from Southern Oregon University in 1990 with a business degree, Fred had headed north to Seattle for a job at Nordstrom’s headquarters. It was still an old-school shop nearing its centennial at that point, and the retailer still required all of its employees—including the fourth-generation Nordstrom family members— to work the shop floor before moving into corporate roles. From selling shoes, Fred had since moved with the company from Seattle to Sacramento, then to Hawaii—where he met his second wife—and now back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’d grown up in the 1960s and 1970s. At six foot four, with the look of a Northern California surfer and a thick shock of hair that framed a face some would say resembled the movie star Nicolas Cage’s, he had recently become a father to a baby boy, and he and his wife were planning out their future; they had just put a deposit down on a house in San Francisco. It had taken him hard work to get to this point, but now, in his early thirties, life’s promises were opening up before him. The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as Nick Swinmurn. He was a recruiter for a new internet startup that was selling shoes online, and he was looking for someone with experience in shoes. He

did not immediately offer that he was also the CEO and primary employee of this company, ShoeSite. What he did say was that his startup was going to be revolutionary: the destination for online shoe shopping. Nick couldn’t have known he was leaving a message for someone who also harbored a sense of entrepreneurialism, something that hadn’t been satisfied by dealing with vendors for Nordstrom. Back at Southern Oregon University, Fred had come up with a range of ways to make money and create things, like hosting a baseball card show, or hiring a dance instructor to put on lessons for students. So while he now had a mortgage and a family to support, there seemed no harm in calling Nick back. A few days later, in June 1999, Fred met with Nick at Fourth Street Bar and Grill to hear his pitch. The concept had already been proven, Nick told him; people were buying shoes unseen from his website. He began reeling off the metrics about the size of the current retail market, customers’ willingness to buy shoes through catalogs, and so on. He had interested investors, but the problem was they wouldn’t commit until Nick had hired someone with retail buying experience—a “shoe guy.” Fred told him that it sounded like an interesting prospect, but he was hesitant: his life commitments were currently supported by a well-paying and stable job at Nordstrom. Nick suggested another meeting, this time with investors. What the heck, Fred figured, and agreed.

When Nick had last spoken to Tony and Alfred, they had given him some advice. First, he should consider renaming the company. ShoeSite was too generic and too limiting, Tony had said. What if he wanted to expand to selling other categories of merchandise? After some thinking, Nick came back to them with a new name: Zapos, from zapatos, the Spanish word for shoes. Tony said he should put an extra “p” in it, to avoid people mispronouncing it as “ZAY-poes.” Thus in July 1999 was born a name that would stick with them forever. Nick also had found a solution to their other piece of advice. By coldcalling Nordstrom he’d found a potential “shoe guy.” On an afternoon in July, Nick, Fred, Tony, and Alfred met over lunch at Mel’s, a casual diner chain a block away from Venture Frogs. Sitting down over turkey

sandwiches and chicken noodle soup, they began to talk business. Since Nick had last seen Tony and Alfred, Zappos had more than proven that people were willing to buy shoes online. They were averaging about $2,000 worth of orders weekly, and the numbers were increasing, fast. If Fred decided to join, they felt they could convince shoe brands to start shipping from their own warehouses directly to customers, meaning they wouldn’t have to worry about running a warehouse on their own. At the end of the meal, they found themselves in a stalemate: Fred would join only if Venture Frogs invested, and Tony and Alfred would invest only if Fred was in. “Nick and Fred were exactly the type of people we were looking to invest in,” Tony later wrote. “We didn’t know if the shoe idea would work or not, but they were clearly passionate and willing to place big bets.” They invested $500,000 in seed capital into Zappos. Fred quit his Nordstrom job a week later. For the next few months, Nick and Fred hustled, traveling to as many shoe conferences as possible to sign footwear brands to Zappos.com. At their first conference in Las Vegas, they approached eighty brands. Only three agreed to do business with them. Because this was a nascent business in the still-nascent industry of e-commerce, no question they received was too trivial for them to address—Who is your shipping carrier? How do you plan to handle returns? What is an email? How do I make an email for myself? Every two weeks, Tony and Alfred checked in on Zappos, as they did with every other company in their portfolio. But Tony found himself checking in with Zappos more and more, offering as much technical advice as he could. And despite his nonstop social calendar and two dozen other companies to think about, he was starting to miss the grind, the highs and lows of being part of a burgeoning startup. He wanted to start building again.

Anticipation hung in the air in December 1999. It was the last month of the millennium, and the invisible threat of Y2K—the shorthand term for the year 2000—was upon humankind. It was also the holidays, and Tony’s birthday was coming up. For months, Tony had been planning two massive

parties at Club BIO—one for his twenty-sixth birthday on December 12, and another party for New Year’s Eve. These were potentially the last parties that Club BIO would host. The week before his birthday party, Sequoia told Tony and Alfred that they were not willing to invest in Zappos. Tony and Alfred had wrongly assumed it was a no-brainer—after all, they had turned Sequoia’s $2.7 million investment in LinkExchange into a $68.3 million exit (once the firm sold the Microsoft shares it received in the acquisition). But there were now even more signs that the economy was going to turn, so venture firms were less bullish than before, and they wanted to see more progress and growth before investing. Sequoia suggested they reach out again in several months. But this was problematic: Zappos was days away from running out of cash. Tony and Alfred had a decision to make. Providing a second round of capital to Zappos was technically against their investment philosophy. It would also prevent them from investing in another company. But they liked the team’s passion and drive—and they believed in Nick and Fred. So they decided to invest in another round, under the condition that Zappos move into the Venture Frogs Incubator. This would save Zappos money on rent, and it would also allow Tony to be more involved, as he lived right upstairs. However, the incubator space was under construction at the time. “I have my birthday party this weekend, and a New Year’s party in two weeks,” Tony said to Alfred. “Let’s have them move into my loft right after New Year’s. We’ll convert it into an office until the incubator offices are ready downstairs.” “Sounds good,” Alfred replied. Tony then called Fred to deliver the news—they were going to provide three to four months’ worth of funding. However, Tony was going to be much more involved, and they would have to move into his loft. They accepted his terms. The parties were a resounding success. Tony planned for them to have an underground warehouse feel to them, which meant thumping electronic music, dancing, fog machines, and a huge amount of alcohol. At the New Year’s Eve party, after most of the partygoers had left by 3 a.m., Tony decided to turn on all the fog machines at full blast to fill the entire Club BIO with fog. Then an alarm started shrieking—he had set off the smoke alarms for the entire building. Firefighters showed up and, after realizing it

was all a fluke and the person who was responsible was a shy, goofy young Asian man, they laughed it off and wished Tony a happy new year. A chance encounter with an anonymous blond woman shortly after that episode had an impact on Tony that night: “Isn’t this amazing? You created all of this,” Tony later recalled the woman saying in his memoir. I looked over to see who it was, but it was someone I didn’t recognize. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, and was also leaning out the window to marvel at the flashing lights of the fire trucks below. “Yeah, they were pretty nice about it. I was worried that they would be mad at me, especially since it’s New Year’s,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. I mean all of this,” she said. She turned and gestured toward the rest of the people that were still at the party. “You could have done anything you wanted and you chose to create an experience that people will remember forever.” She gazed into my eyes. I could still hear the music in the background, but the rest of the world seemed to disappear. I had no idea who this girl was, but somehow the universe had brought us together for a single moment in time that I would remember forever. “Envision, create, and believe in your own universe and the universe will form around you,” she said softly. “Just like what you did tonight.” Her words convinced Tony he no longer wanted to just be a passive investor in Zappos. He wanted to be deeply involved in creating something again. And while the parties he was architecting were great, he found himself yearning for something more. He was addicted to the art of building a company from the ground up. So Tony decided that with the new year, he was going to go all in on Zappos.

A long, hard road lay ahead. The new millennium brought forth a dose of skepticism and higher interest rates that prompted the market to crash. All

the optimism and hope that had been building behind tech companies imploded in April 2000 as the stock market cratered. Capital immediately dried up, and many tech startups whose entire business models depended on external funding for free services—including some of Venture Frogs’ portfolio companies—soon went bankrupt. Though a few Venture Frogs companies moved into the incubator office, and others had presented small exits when they were sold or went public, most of them failed to secure additional funding from the bigger venture firms. With Zappos becoming the primary bright spot in their portfolio—and even that was relatively dim —Tony and Alfred decided to use what was left in the fund to invest again in Zappos. “Our decision to focus on (Zappos.com) is that it seemed like a much bigger opportunity,” he later said. They tried to raise a second fund from new and existing investors, but no one wanted to park their money in a tech-focused fund. They continued calling Sequoia to invest in Zappos, but the larger venture capital firm remained disinterested. Tony had already begun to personally fund Zappos, but as the year dragged on, he became chief executive officer of Zappos. Nick and Fred were still intimately involved in steering the ship, but it was clear they were now depending on Tony to see the company through. “Right now, because we are unprofitable with very limited cash, we are in a race against time,” Tony wrote in an email to the company in October 2000. “Once we get to profitability, then we will be able to think longer-term and bigger picture, and fantasize more about how to rule the world.” The path to profitability for Zappos, first and foremost, meant cutting expenses wherever possible. They laid off nearly half of their forty employees, and those remaining had to take pay cuts. Zappos’s headquarters moved from Club BIO to the Venture Frogs Incubator in the lobby of 1000 Van Ness, and Tony put five beds into Unit 810 to start housing Zapponians for free, including Nick. The other three condos that Tony owned in the building also started to house Zappos employees for free. Less than three years before, he’d been a newly minted multimillionaire. Now, with four condos, the retail space in 1000 Van Ness, other property investments, his dabbling in day trading and poker, and his lavish spending at parties and bars (where he most often paid the tab for others), on top of his personally funding Zappos every three to four months, he watched the numbers in his bank account dwindle.

In one of his last-ditch attempts to raise money, he tried to get Alex Hsu and his mother to invest in Zappos. “Listen, I know everything’s going belly-up,” Tony said. “But there’s one company I want you to invest in. I’m sure it will do well.” “Tony, there’s just no way,” Alex said. There seemed to be no other way out for Zappos, so Tony sold nearly all his properties in the Bay Area for less than what he’d paid for them. Eventually, all that remained were two properties, including Unit 810. Tony and Alfred also sold all the domains that Venture Frogs had bought, including drugs.com, to fund Zappos. “That’s right, Venture Frogs, a startup incubator run by Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, is in the process of selling its domain name drugs.com to an undisclosed buyer,” Wired reported in 2001 about the sale. “Instead, the company will focus on building out Zappos.com, its e-commerce site that sells more than 100 brands of shoes.” It became clear to Tony that the company needed a deus ex machina— an unexpected miracle in a hopeless situation. They had tightened the company’s belt as far as possible in order to cut costs. Tony, meanwhile, had more or less poured his entire net worth into the company. If they did not come up with another solution quickly, everything they built would be lost. “The situation was dire,” Tony recalled later. “Everything I was involved in was running out of money. The restaurant, the incubator, Zappos and myself personally.” One weekday afternoon, Tony and Fred were having a drink at the bar in Venture Frogs Restaurant. They were feeling downtrodden and rudderless. Over a beer (Fred’s) and a Grey Goose and soda (Tony’s), Fred helped Tony realize that their initial business plan of not having their own inventory of shoes to sell from was not going to work. If they were going to make it through, they needed their own warehouse. They also needed to somehow convince shoe brands to sell to them; at the time, brands like Skechers or Nike only sold their shoes to third-party vendors that had brickand-mortar stores. Zappos was supposed to be purely online. So they devised a plan. They would hire more employees who had experience managing and buying shoe inventory. Their headquarters at 1000 Van Ness would become a hybrid office space and warehouse to store inventory. They would buy a small, cheap brick-and-mortar shoe store to create the illusion of having a physical location for shoe brands. In the

meantime, they would use their office address and hope that shoe brands would not ask to tour their “store.” They would also need to update the Zappos software for these changes. Doing the math, they calculated that their new plan would cost about $2 million. “Where are we going to get the money?” Fred asked. “I’ll worry about that part,” Tony replied. “Just assume that if you can convince a brand to sell to us, then we’ll have the money to pay for the inventory for that brand.” Fred had recently been thinking about the leap he’d taken leaving Nordstrom. Seated behind Tony in the apartment/office space at 1000 Van Ness, Fred had been awestruck by him on a daily basis, and had come to trust him. One afternoon, Tony had swiveled around in his chair and asked, “What would make Zappos better?” Fred had been drowning in the monotony of trying to manually register Zappos’s hundred-plus vendors into the online portal and uploading their products to the website, and he told Tony that if there was some kind of portal where these vendors could log in and submit their products themselves, then Fred could focus on actually running the business. Tony had swiveled back without a word. “Three hours later, he turned around and said, ‘Something like this?’” Fred recalled. Lo and behold, the Zappos extranet had been born—a portal that would come to define the company’s success and be used by thousands of vendors. While they had been talking at the Venture Frogs bar, Tony had come to another decision. He was going to sell everything in his name at fire-sale prices, including Unit 810, and put all the money back into Zappos. He did not want to give up on his dream of a Central Perk for him and his tribe, but right now he had a more important dream to achieve. Friends would have to wait.

Tony would sell a total of eleven properties and pour almost $6 million of his own money into the business before the plan worked. In 2000, Zappos’s gross sales were $1.6 million. By the end of 2001, sales had quadrupled to $8.6 million. To get there, they first turned the reception area of their office into a small shoe store in lieu of an actual separate brick-and-mortar

location. Soon after, Fred found a small shoe store in a town two hours north of San Francisco that was looking for a buyer, and by chance there was an abandoned building across the street. They bought both, and turned the latter into Zappos’s first official warehouse. Tony worked side by side with the engineers to rewrite the website code so that it could handle the new business model of selling both inventoried products as well as products that could be shipped directly by shoe brands. Fred, meanwhile, also delivered, signing on more and more shoe brands to Zappos. But the company was still not profitable. As much as they were making, they were spending just as much to buy the inventory and cover the added costs. Eventually, Tony decided they needed a warehouse located somewhere in the middle of the country; shipping times from California to the East Coast were simply too long. They settled on Kentucky, near a distribution center with close proximity to carriers. But the process of setting up the new warehouse was fraught with problems. While driving inventory from California to Kentucky, one of the semitrailer trucks got into a major accident and flipped over. Around $500,000 worth of shoes, or 20 percent of their inventory, was now scattered on the side of a highway. Separately, it came to light that the warehouse logistics company they were working with to get the Kentucky warehouse up and running had oversold its capabilities—they had never worked with products that had as much variance as shoes did (colors, sizes, widths, brands). Entire swaths of Zappos’s inventory languished outside of the warehouse, unsorted and uncataloged—which meant it couldn’t be sold because it hadn’t been logged into the system.

By the middle of 2002, Zappos was once again strapped for cash. The company had about two months left of funds before it would go out of business. Tony was also nearly out of cash, too. The future of Zappos and Tony’s fiscal health now depended on the sale of Unit 810, which Tony had overpaid for and was now proving to be impossible to sell without taking a huge loss in a down market. The efforts to sell the property had coincided with a long-scheduled trip to Tanzania, where Tony planned to scale Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest

peak in Africa. For the three-week journey, he would be joined by a young woman named Jenn Lim, whom he had met at his twenty-sixth- birthday bash in the apartment he was now trying to sell. They’d become fast friends, and after Jenn was laid off from her internet consulting job, she and Tony thought the adventure would be a great chance to get away. Though the trip couldn’t have come at a worse time, considering the logistics mishaps and the cash drain, Tony had figured there was nothing he could do to help solve either of those issues by staying. But ten thousand miles from San Francisco, he found those problems weighing on him. Neither Tony nor Jenn was all that athletic, and neither took great pleasure from physical activity. On their first day of the hike they found themselves walking through a rainforest downpour only to then head up into a cooler climate that left them shivering in their drenched clothes. Collapsing in his tent, Tony struggled to stay both awake and asleep. In the darkness, his phone was ringing, which was weird: there wasn’t supposed to be reception on the mountain. His real estate agent was on the end of the line giving him the news he wanted to hear: they had found a buyer and Unit 810 had sold. “Zappos was saved,” Tony recalled later. But it turned out to be no more than a vivid dream, and when he awoke, there were still four more days of hiking ahead. When he and Jenn returned to San Francisco, Tony’s real estate agent told him there had in fact been an offer on the unit, but the buyer backed out because their fortune teller had told them the apartment had bad feng shui. Tony instructed the agent to drop the price to 40 percent below what he had paid for the condo. Shortly after, he found a buyer. “As your friend and financial adviser, I’m advising you not to do it,” said Alfred. He had since left Tony’s immediate orbit and started working for Tellme Networks, a telephone tech company that Venture Frogs had invested in, as vice president of business development. But Alfred still looked out for Tony’s blind spots. “It may pay off in the long run, but it’s not worth the risk.” Tony and Alfred were two very different people, however. Alfred had always been more careful and deliberate. Tony, meanwhile, had always been willing to risk it all for an idea. He accepted the offer on the apartment. Now the company had at least half a year of runway. Tony rolled up his sleeves and got to work at the warehouse. It had been his idea to open up a

warehouse in Kentucky, so he felt it was his problem to solve. Tony ended up spending five months there, cleaning up the mess as well as building an entirely new warehouse system that they decided to call WHISKY, an acronym for Warehouse Inventory System in Kentucky. They stopped working with their previous warehouse logistics partner and, despite not having any background in warehouse operations, somehow built a system within a fifty-thousand-square-foot space that could work for Zappos. By the end of 2002, the company had nearly quadrupled its revenue to $32 million. Tony’s bets had paid off. “Everyone could feel it,” Tony later said. “We were at a turning point for the company.”

By now, Tony and Fred were inseparable. Both were obsessed with the company and its potential, and they talked about its future and prospects at every opportunity, whether it was at the Venture Frogs Restaurant or Mel’s Diner, the spot where it had all started. After a series of lunches, they decided that they didn’t want Zappos to be just about selling shoes. It needed to have a bigger purpose than taking as much market share in the shoe category as possible. Reflecting on their journey over the last few years, there was an underlying theme beneath it all—they had always chosen the route that would improve the experience for the customer, even if it was hard or incurred short-term losses. If they followed that edict for all of their operating decisions, could it keep customers coming back, and pay back tenfold? They decided that Zappos as a brand would be about providing the very best customer service. Full stop. The first decision they made was to remove Zappos’s practice of allowing shoe brands to send products directly to customers. They realized that the best customer service came when all the inventory was processed in their own warehouse systems. Though this would wipe out about 25 percent of sales on Zappos.com, they bet that it would improve the Zappos experience in the long term. And they were right: in 2003, the company ended with $70 million in gross sales. The next year, in keeping with Zappos’s newfound purpose, Tony and Fred discussed their own customer service department. It was hard to find competent workers in this industry in San Francisco—the

workforce in the Bay Area catered more to Silicon Valley tech companies. The majority of workers were trained as engineers, sales representatives, or marketing consultants; working at a call center was not what the average San Franciscan saw as a promising career trajectory. They needed to move the company to a place where hospitality and customer service were priorities. They also decided that instead of building out a satellite call center, they needed to move the whole company. Customer service was not going to be an afterthought for Zappos. It was its entire business model. So, after weeks of deliberating between various cities, from Phoenix to Portland to Des Moines, they landed on Henderson, a suburban town just south of the city limits of Las Vegas. Though it wasn’t the cheapest place to build a company, it was more affordable than San Francisco. There was no state income tax in Nevada. And its proximity to Vegas—a city built on nightlife and hospitality—meant that employees in the area typically worked for one of two industries that hinged on the experiences of their customers. Above all, Tony believed that Las Vegas would be the happiest option for his employees. So in 2004, Tony sent out an email to the ninety Zapponians that the company was moving to Sin City. Seventy employees agreed to make the move. Tony had made yet another decision that would change the course of the company. This time it would change the course of Tony’s life, too.

CHAPTER 7

THE TRIFECTA

Mark Guadagnoli was one of the first parents to arrive at the elementary school math competition that afternoon in 2006. His six-year-old son had a knack for numbers, and Mark was quietly confident that he might even win. Scanning the auditorium, Mark saw a tall lanky man sitting on his own, and decided to go over and introduce himself. Looking up with a genial smile, the man said his name was Fred, then pointed at his own son, the tall half– Pacific Islander boy towering above all the other students. In his early forties, with a Mediterranean face and a subtle Texan twang, Mark exchanged pleasantries with Fred as they watched the number of child contestants onstage dwindle. By the end of the competition, it was just their sons left standing. The final problem was an impossible equation, and Mark was sure there was no chance either boy knew the answer. Fred’s son, Kalei, passed on the question. Mark’s son, Max, was up by one point; because he wouldn’t lose any points if he too passed on the question, all he had to do was pass, and he’d win the competition. Mark sighed heavily as Max attempted the problem, provided the wrong answer, and lost his lead. Then, to Fred and Mark’s bewilderment, the two boys looked at each other and embraced in a bear hug, Max disappearing into Kalei’s arms. “What Max knew was that if he answered the question wrong, he would be deducted points, and he and Kalei would tie,” Mark said. “So they both won.” Mark invited Fred and his family over for dinner to celebrate a few days later. Over homemade pizza, Fred became fascinated by Mark’s backstory. Mark was a tenured kinesiology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and recently he had been helping struggling athletes reinvent their

game through a type of talk therapy he had created. He explained that he had been working with a kicker on UNLV’s football team who’d had a stellar freshman year but was now a train wreck, making only half of his field goals, and the coaches were at a loss for what to do. Aware of Mark’s work, they asked if he could try and turn this young man’s future around. When Mark arrived at training, the kicker set up the ball on a small stand and repeatedly nailed the shot between the posts from forty yards out. But when Mark simulated a real game by holding the ball in place for the kicker, the ball went spinning far away. Mark began working with the player and after two months the kicker was making 85 percent of the goals. “Hey, I’ve got a friend,” Fred said. “I think he’d be really interested in talking to you.”

The year before, Mark had emerged as a minor celebrity in academic circles after co-authoring a study on the science of learning. Under an unmemorable title, the Challenge Point Framework, his paper claimed to have discovered a revolutionary hack: by undertaking a customized challenge, an individual could change their thinking to learn a task three to four times quicker than if they followed a conventional curriculum. The root cause of failure in elite athletes, for example, often lay in training regimes that either didn’t challenge them enough or pushed them too far beyond their limits. In essence, Mark’s research provided a scientific backbone to a philosophical conundrum: How much is too little, or too much, and where is the sweet spot? In the case of the UNLV kicker, Mark found that the kicker did no mental preparation before taking a shot, and the presence of Mark holding the ball in place made him so nervous that it became overwhelming. After several weeks, the kicker became comfortable with Mark standing nearby and then ultimately holding the ball. He later broke the career goal record for the regional conference and ended his senior year on the list of top potential draft picks in the nation, signing a free-agent contract with the St. Louis Rams. In the years after Mark’s paper was released, more than a hundred subsequent studies cited his research, testing the framework out on

overworked surgeons, burned-out PhD students, and more struggling athletes, each of whom saw astounding results. Mark had since been hired to consult for USA Track and Field and for the PGA Tour. Seated at an American-style restaurant a few minutes’ walk from the Zappos headquarters, Tony was listening with intense curiosity as Mark retold his story. Alfred was also there, having joined Zappos in 2005 as chairman and chief operating officer, and he had questions too. Fred sat back and watched his introduction unfold. At Zappos, Tony explained, he was trying to figure out ways to improve the orientation program for new hires. Could the Challenge Point Framework be applied to corporate executives, employees, and entire companies, creating a workforce that learned and then performed multiple times faster, better, more effectively? It hadn’t been done before, Mark said, but he couldn’t see why not. When the group stood up to leave, Tony suggested Mark join them back at the Zappos office for a tour. At the front entrance, Fred opened the glass door for Mark, and Tony walked in alongside him. Looking up at Mark, Tony said, “Would you come work for Zappos?” Beyond being a tech company, Mark had little idea what Zappos did, nor what roles the three men in front of him held. But after spending an hour at lunch with these guys, he felt a synergy between them that he’d never encountered, and whatever they had in mind, he was sure it would be worth the risk. “I’d love to join,” Mark replied.

On his first day, Mark was shown his seat in a row of cubicles shared with Fred, Alfred, and Tony. His first task would be to build on the orientation program for new employees using elements of his Challenge Point Framework. They had been looking for a way to get new hires engaged that didn’t involve sitting through hours of lectures. The end result was a program that focused on employees’ motivations. For instance, an offer to pay employees to leave the company during orientation tested whether they were committed. The program also required that everyone from new executives to entry-level employees spend time working in the call center before they started their official roles—a practice that had proven successful for Fred during his time at Nordstrom.

But Mark’s work quickly expanded beyond its initial purview. Tony often complained that their cubicle was referred to as “executive row,” so Mark took to calling it “monkey row” and decorated the space to illustrate the point with a series of nets to the ceiling from which stuffed animals and plants hung. Once Tony added some more plants to make it feel like a jungle, the ceiling was barely visible. Multiple times a day, Tony would spin around in his chair and toss out an idea that Mark would frantically scribble down and then try to figure out how to execute. One day, Tony told Mark he wanted a Zappos University. When Mark asked what that was, Tony replied, “We don’t know; we’d like for you to tell us.” Building on the orientation program, and the company’s existing curriculum around customer service, culture, and warehouse operations, Mark launched Zappos University by expanding it to an inhouse professional development program that could teach employees new skills—regardless of whether they applied that skill to their job—from yoga classes to playing golf. It also involved other initiatives that would pay employees to do community service, or volunteer at a local soup kitchen during work hours. Another pillar of Zappos University was Zappos Insights, which provided consultations to other companies on how to improve their corporate culture. Over three-day “camps,” executives from other companies would learn how Zappos managed HR, how to give their employees more impetus to focus on customer service, and how to achieve a “wow” factor. On the final day, attendees went to Zappos’s legendary quarterly all-hands meetings, led by musicians and rousing speeches—years before concert-style corporate gatherings were made famous by WeWork and its enigmatic CEO, Adam Neumann. To try to keep up with Tony’s cascade of ideas, Mark devised a system in which he wrote all of Tony’s suggestions on a whiteboard and asked Tony to rank them by urgency. But no matter how hard he tried, he could never remain as calm as Fred, who seemed to have an intuitive system for mentally sifting through Tony’s ideas and deciding whether it was possible to execute them. Alfred, meanwhile, would punch away at his computer, ensuring that execution lay within the bounds of fiscal responsibility. “[Tony] comes up with ideas, brilliant ideas, sometimes crazy ideas, sometimes crazy, brilliant, all different variations,” Mark said later. “But his ideas were much more interesting to him than execution. I mean, he wanted

the execution to happen; he just didn’t want to have to be the guy who made it happen.” Watching Fred, Alfred, and Tony, Mark realized that the three men together were a trifecta—each parlaying their skills into a Venn diagram of effective leadership—unlike any other he’d encountered. Within the company, the trio were known as “FAT,” and each played integral roles to support the others. Without one of them, the Zappos flywheel could stop spinning. “If you take anyone out of that mix,” Mark said, “it’s nothing like it is.”

Zappos had clearly proven that buying shoes online without first trying them on was something that customers could embrace—and its success was helping to build the foundation blocks of a nascent e-commerce industry. By 2004, the year Zappos moved to Henderson, eBay was operating in dozens of countries and making $800 million a quarter while shaping the world of online auctions for new and used goods. It had expanded into car sales and even sold a private jet on its platform. It was also building an arsenal of tools and features to offer the ideal online marketplace. It acquired the payment processing company PayPal for $1.5 billion, and bought Rent.com, America’s largest real estate leasing site, for $415 million. It even took a 25 percent stake in Craigslist, which had since expanded its online classifieds far beyond San Francisco. The other e-commerce giant fighting for ground was Amazon, which had moved beyond just selling books and established a vast portfolio of music, videos, and consumer electronics. By the end of 2004, Amazon’s largest sales category was no longer books but electronic gadgets. Amazon also started allowing third parties to sell on its site, which vastly expanded the number of products it offered, pushing Amazon further in the direction of becoming an “everything store” and changing the instruments of consumerism. Buyers were becoming more and more comfortable with the idea of shopping online rather than in malls. But selling clothing through computers was more of a challenge for Amazon because customers weren’t ready to abandon storefront changing rooms. Zappos, which had generated

$70 million in sales the previous year, would make a fine crown jewel to propel Amazon’s clothing venture. But when Jeff Bezos flew to see Tony in 2005, meeting him in a conference room at a DoubleTree hotel a few blocks from the Henderson headquarters to discuss buying Zappos, the answer was a hard no. “I realized that to Amazon, we were just a leading shoe company,” Tony wrote later. “That was why we told Jeff that we weren’t interested in selling at any price. I felt like we were just getting started.” In an era when the drab offices of the 1990s were standard, business attire was limited to crisp shirts and blazers, and co-working companies like WeWork had not yet ushered in the beautification of office spaces with plants, open-plan offices, and free coffee and beer, Zappos was different. As opposed to the top-down management that guided corporate giants of the previous century, Tony turned to egalitarianism to devise Zappos’s core values by sending a company-wide email asking employees to submit what they thought should guide the company and represent its culture. After a year of workshopping the submissions, Zappos’s company policies looked more like the list of rules for a summer camp than a corporate policy: “Create fun and a little weirdness”; “Build a positive team and family spirit”; “Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded”; “Be humble”; and, finally, its number one policy, “Deliver WOW through service.” Zappos was first a customer service-oriented company, a shoe seller second—an ethos its new values set in stone. Rather than marketing a product heavily to drive sales, Tony believed that extraordinary customer service would lead to a critical mass of return customers, lowering marketing costs and widening profit margins. Workers in the Zappos call center were encouraged to spend more time, not less, talking to customers and getting to know them, while going far beyond what any customer could expect from a company help line; the record for the longest customer service call was ten and a half hours. During one weekend in Los Angeles when Tony and a few of his friends got back to their hotel after a night out, they tried to order pizza through room service and found that the kitchen had closed. As a joke, one of his friends decided to call the Zappos customer service line to see if the rep could help in this situation. Incredibly, the Zappos rep found the five closest pizza shops to their hotel that were still open at that time.

To double down on the customer service emphasis, Tony became obsessed with the happiness of his own employees, which he believed would translate to happy customers. So he vowed to make Zappos among the best places to work in the world. It paid 100 percent of its employees’ health insurance premiums and invested in professional development courses. Individuality was treasured and encouraged: employees brought their home and personal lives with them to the office, filling every inch of their cubicle walls with personal photos, notes, cards, Silly String, or whatever else most represented them. Beyond monkey row, plants hung from the ceiling throughout the office like a greenhouse, a style of which Tony was the architect. The company was also growing at such a pace that Tony and Fred could no longer interview new hires for culture fits, and so they devised a secondary interview process for new hires, who would be judged against the company’s core values. To weed out those who made it through but still weren’t in it for passion, the company built on Mark’s orientation program and went from offering new hires $100 to quit Zappos within their first few weeks to as much as $5,000. Growing sales coupled with the move to Henderson, for which seventy employees and their families uprooted their lives from San Francisco, validated that Tony’s model was working. For Chris Peake, one of the Zapponians who agreed to move to Henderson, it was an easy decision. He had worked at Lombardi Sports, an athletic apparel company, in San Francisco just down the street from Zappos’s previous office at 1000 Van Ness for over a decade before quitting to join Tony and Fred as an assistant buyer in 2003. He was thirty years old at the time with a newborn, and it had been surprisingly easy to convince his wife to move the family to Henderson. The prospect of Nevada excited the Peakes, and his new role invigorated him in a way that Lombardi had not. In his first year, Chris received an assignment from Fred, his new manager, that made him realize he was working for a unique company. During one of their regular check-ins, Fred reached into a box full of books that was lying on the floor inside the office, picked up one, and handed it to Chris. “Read this by Wednesday,” he said curtly. The book was called The Fred Factor—which made Chris think that Fred was having him read his autobiography. The book was in fact written by motivational speaker Mark

Sanborn, who retold the true story of a postman named Fred who saw real purpose and passion in his job. “Where others see delivering mail as monotonous drudgery, Fred sees an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those he serves,” the book’s cover summarized. Through Fred’s story, Sanborn teaches readers four principles that will bring creativity and inspiration to life and work: make a difference every day, no matter how small; build strong relationships for more success; create value for others without spending money; and constantly reinvent the self. The following Wednesday, the book was discussed at the weekly Zappos roundtable meeting, which consisted of all the Zappos managers and buyers. “I just get goosebumps thinking about it,” Chris later recalled. “When was the last time I read a book? When was the last time someone told me to learn a job besides the job?” That’s when Chris realized Zappos was not just focused on him as an employee but “also focused on me becoming the best version of myself,” he said later. Tony and Fred were intent on making sure that employees bought into the customer-service-centric ethos of Zappos. Having their employees read the same books they were reading, like The Fred Factor, was one method of cultivating this idea. If the company was sold to Amazon, Zappos would become just another brand of the growing conglomerate, and everything Tony had worked for in this company would be lost. Besides, Zappos had big plans: it saw itself as more of a company like Virgin, which owned music labels, airlines, and a spaceflight venture. Zappos was already considering an airline. By Tony’s calculation, Zappos was going to do just fine on its own: it was on track to generate $1 billion in revenue by 2010.

It may have seemed, to those looking in, that Tony had it pretty good. His company was soaring; it was influencing other tech companies with its maniacal focus on corporate culture, and it was being sought out as an acquisition target by the bigger players. He had happy employees like Chris Peake, and customers who were leaving rave reviews on Zappos’s website. And he was surrounded by longtime friends every day, Fred and Alfred among them, who knew his every whim and ambition—people who could sense when to indulge him and when to say no. But Tony had been

searching for something more than good business mantras and lessons. Something deeper, perhaps closer to the meaning of life, or inner peace. Something that would give everything he did purpose. Something he had been searching for since he was a boy. What he found was the science of happiness. Psychological treatment for mental health had largely focused on healing people with mental health issues by abating anxiety, depression, and other symptoms. But Tony was intrigued by an emerging concept called positive psychology, with the stated goal of reinforcing sustained happiness. Among his required readings was the 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by social scientist Jonathan Haidt, who drew on ancient teachings from India, China, and the Mediterranean and reinterpreted readings from the Bible, the Koran, and Confucius to establish a series of philosophies and questions that could lead one to sustained happiness. At its climax, the book answers what Haidt sees as the meaning of life, and therefore happiness. I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, “What is the purpose of life?”Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. Tony went further and studied the story of Tal Ben-Shahar, who wrote a book called Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. Ben-Shahar was a lecturer at Harvard who had launched a class

on positive psychology in 2002. It was a nascent concept, and only eight students signed up; two dropped out. In the class Ben-Shahar sought to answer what he “believed to be the question of questions: how can we help ourselves and others—individuals, communities, and society—become happier?” Two years after he started the course, it became the most popular class at Harvard when 855 students enrolled. The popularity of his curriculum led Ben-Shahar to believe that he was tapping into a deep desire within the American psyche for happiness. Americans, citizens of the richest and most powerful country on earth, had earned great material prosperity as the decades went on. But in the meantime, rates of depression had soared: in the early 2000s they were ten times higher than they had been in the 1960s. Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading scholar in the field of positive psychology, Ben-Shahar posed this question: “If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy?” In Happier, Ben-Shahar laid out a series of findings that conclude with meditations, asking the reader to consider things like balancing self-interest and benevolence, temporary highs, and patience, before concluding: One of the common barriers to happiness is the false expectation that one thing—a book or a teacher, a princess or a knight, an accomplishment, a prize, or a revelation—will bring us eternal bliss. While all these things can contribute to our well-being, at best they form a small part of the mosaic of a happy life. The fairytale notion of happiness—the belief that something would carry us to the happily ever after—inevitably leads to disappointment. A happy—or happier—life is rarely shaped by some extraordinary life-changing event; rather, it is shaped incrementally, experience by experience, moment by moment. To realize, to make real, life’s potential for the ultimate currency, we must first accept that “this is it”—that all there is to life is the day-to-day, the ordinary, the details of the mosaic. We are living a happy life when we derive pleasure and meaning while spending time with our loved ones, or learning something new, or engaging in a project at work. The more our days are filled with these experiences, the happier we become. This is all there is to it.

What Tony came to see through his research was that, for most people, “achieving their goal in life, whatever it was—whether it was making money, getting married, or running faster—would not actually bring them sustained happiness,” he wrote later. He pointed to research on lottery winners, whose happiness levels may have spiked with the new wealth but a year later had reverted to where they had been before. “And yet, many people have spent their entire lives pursuing what they thought would make them happy.” He drew on concepts like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which determines that once the requirements of survival—things like water and food—are met, humans can achieve happiness by first pursuing security and safety, then family and a sense of belonging, a sense of self-esteem and respect within a community, until self-actualization is reached, meaning the display of creativity, acceptance of facts, self-sufficiency, and morality. A more distilled version of happiness could be attributed to three experiences: pleasure, a sense experienced for short periods of time; passion, when peak performance meets peak engagement, and sense of time is lost; and finally, a higher purpose, or the sense of being a part of something bigger than oneself. Taking it a step further Tony realized that there were parallels between happiness achieved by oneself—pleasure, passion, and purpose—that could be applied to Zappos, and every company in the world: profits, passion, and purpose. Tony ultimately concluded that happiness was about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness to others, and being part of something bigger than yourself. Using these four principles, Tony surmised that they all applied to leading his company. He could give perceived control to Zappos call-center workers by offering pay bumps every time they learned a new skill offered by Zappos, giving them the impression they were in control of their own pay. Previously, entry-level employees in the merchandising department could only be promoted after eighteen months, but to give a sense of perceived progress, he implemented a rule that gave three mini-promotions over the same time period, even though at the end they would reach the same level of seniority in the company. He believed that Zappos’s emphasis on company culture met the requirements of a sense of connectedness, and that Zappos’s vision—which was changed in 2009 to “delivering happiness in the world”—met the

conditions of his fourth principle of happiness: being part of a higher purpose. He wrote later: “Whether it’s the happiness that customers feel when they receive the perfect pair of shoes or the perfect outfit … or the happiness that employees feel from being part of a culture whose values match their own personal values—the thing that ties all of these things together is happiness.” Not until later would these philosophies define him to the world. But when Tony’s obsession with happiness began, few had the foresight to ask: What was he looking for?

If Tony was building his own mantra, he was going to live and lead by it too. It was something that Mark saw time and again. Zappos off-site meetings were known to get rowdy, and libations were a staple of the events. On the final evening of a seminar held at a small hotel in Mesquite, at the edge of Nevada’s border with Utah, Zappos employees were milling about a lounge in the lobby. Whoever had booked the accommodation appeared to have found one of the only hotels in the state that didn’t have a bar. But no matter—someone had fetched a few cases of Bud Light to appease the group. As the night was nearing its end, Mark was sitting on a couch opposite Tony watching the group mingle and talk. One employee staggered over and paused to inspect a case of beer before fishing out a bottle. As they watched the employee weave diagonally through the lobby, Tony noticed a grand piano standing silently across the room. Without saying a word, he stood up and walked over to it, then sat down in front of the keys. Mark had by now become accustomed to Tony’s ability to surprise. One time during a presentation to Zappos employees, Mark had told a joke and then laughed as he delivered the punchline. At the end of the presentation, Tony approached him and, looking directly at him without expression, said, “Next time when you tell the joke, it would be funnier if you didn’t laugh,” and then walked off without saying a word. Mark burst out laughing. He later learned that Tony had been studying the art of comedy to work on his own public speaking. Another time in the Zappos office, Mark had told Tony he was trying to figure out a way to change Zappos’s external

messaging to reflect how its customers talk about the company. Tony, typing away, appeared to ignore him. Mark continued, saying that perhaps there was a way to go through the company’s customer emails and find out what they were saying about the company. Turning to face Mark, Tony said, “Here’s the frequency of the top ten words that people are saying.” In the time Mark had been talking, Tony had written a programming script to scan through thousands of emails. Now, though, watching Tony’s fingers glide up and down the piano keyboard was something else. “He started playing some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard,” Mark said. The space hummed with a warm timbre, as the keystrokes flowed seamlessly from Tony’s memory. Against the backdrop of the lobby’s bland decor, it was as if someone were filling the room with color. Tony had been so absorbed that by the time he stopped and looked up, the group had thinned out until it was just Mark and another executive. The employee who’d fished out another Bud Light had long called it a night and disappeared into the elevator. After cleaning up, Mark was standing shoulder to shoulder with Tony when the elevator chimed and the doors opened. As they walked in, they looked down to see shards of a smashed Bud Light bottle strewn across the floor. Beer was everywhere. They were quiet while the elevator shuttled them upstairs; when it came to a halt, Mark stepped off. He returned to the elevator a minute later with a trashcan and towel he’d fetched from his suite. But when the doors opened again, he was surprised to see Tony, on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Mark knelt down beside him, and the two men cleaned in silence.

While Tony was doing everything he could to upend corporate culture and build Zappos into an anti-corporate establishment, the corporate shadow of Amazon continued to grow. In 2007, it launched its own online shoe and handbag site, Endless.com, selling brands like Ben Sherman and Bruno Magli. Under images of shoes and notices of promotions, within an information box titled “Our Promise to You,” the website shouted what amounted to a direct challenge to Zappos: free overnight shipping, free

return shipping, 365-day returns, and a 110 percent price protection guarantee—phrases it mirrored from the Zappos website. “For Bezos and Amazon, the irresistible temptation was Zappos.com,” wrote Brad Stone, a journalist who profiled Jeff Bezos in his book, The Everything Store. “In many ways, Zappos was the Bizarro World version of Amazon; everything was slightly similar but completely different. Hsieh, like Bezos, nurtured a quirky internal culture and frequently talked about it in public to reinforce the Zappos brand in customers’ minds. But he took it even further.” Despite Amazon’s efforts, Zappos kept jumping from success to success. After almost a decade of Zappos trying to get Nike, the athletic apparel giant finally agreed to sell on the company’s platform, bringing huge credibility. New Balance also signed on as a footwear partner. Revenue soared, and Zappos made $100 million in sales in a single month. Despite increasing revenue in recent years, Zappos had still been losing money as marketing, logistics, and sales costs rose alongside the company’s growth. But by the end of 2007, it had $840 million revenue for the year and, for the first time, a profit. The next year, it was on track to hit $1 billion in annual sales, two years before its initial timeline. Tony saw this as further validation that his bet on culture and customer service had trumped concerns of generating sales by traditional means. Still, the bean counters on his board weren’t convinced, and viewed such endeavors as Tony’s “social experiments.” Venture capitalists look for returns of many multiples of their initial investment, and typically achieve this by pushing startups to focus on maximizing sales and then go for an initial public offering, at which point the VCs can sell their shares in the company at a higher price. Things like company culture are secondary to making money. When the 2008 financial crisis hit in September, every bank—and investor—in the country was looking for ways to tighten their belts. A few weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Sequoia held a meeting with its portfolio companies to convey a straightforward message: cut expenses and get to profitability as soon as possible. While Zappos was profitable, it was still growing and had to cut expenses, which meant that it would need to fire employees.

On November 6, Tony sent a company-wide email announcing that Zappos was laying off 8 percent of its workforce, about 100 employees. While such a move seemed to fly in the face of Zappos values like “Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit,” Tony took pains to point out that they would take care of the departing employees with exceptional benefits— costs that would drive the company’s expenses higher for the year, rather than lower. “Because we are being proactive instead of reactive about it, we are able to take care of our employees and offer them more than the standard 2 weeks’ severance (or no severance) that most other companies are giving. We are offering to pay each laid-off employee through the end of the year (about 2 months).” Long-term employees would be given a little more, and health care benefits would be paid for another six months. While the move garnered some positive media attention—“Zappos became a model of how to nurture employees in good times and bad,” read one article in Fortune—the company was facing an even greater threat. At the time, Zappos had a revolving $100 million asset-backed line of credit that it used to purchase its thousands of shoes and apparel items. But the loan was contingent on the company meeting revenue and profit targets, and if any of those targets were missed, the lender could theoretically recall the loan and cork Zappos’s access to more inventory. Considering the credit crisis, there weren’t lenders lining up to give the company another $100 million. In other words, the company needed a more stable source of money, and the current board was unwilling to give it. If he didn’t act, Tony would likely be replaced as CEO and his “social experiments” would all but be abandoned. With Zappos facing a dwindling number of bad options, one solution would be to find new investors to buy out Sequoia and existing shareholders, which would cost about $200 million. When word got out that Zappos was looking for new investors, Jeff Bezos came calling again. Tony flew to Seattle in April 2009 and met with Bezos at Amazon’s headquarters. Tony stuck to his typical presentation notes, focusing on Zappos’s corporate culture and how that translated to good customer service and therefore sales. As he concluded the presentation, Tony turned to the science of happiness and its role at Zappos. Jeff interrupted. “Did you know that people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy?” he said. Tony clicked to the next slide, and

the very words Jeff had just uttered appeared on the screen. “Yes,” Tony said, “but apparently you are very good at predicting PowerPoint slides.” While Tony had reservations about the gulf between Amazon’s approach to customer service—providing the lowest prices—and the Zappos mantra of making personal connections with customers using oldschool phone calls, he left Seattle convinced that it was the best option. With the money from selling itself to Amazon, Zappos would be able to buy out its board and install a new group of believers. Part of Bezos’s pitch to Tony had been that Zappos was onto something with its focus on employee culture and customer happiness. Amazon had already started mirroring Zappos’s overnight shipping and free returns at Endless.com. But Amazon was about twenty-five times Zappos’s size. What if some of Zappos’s teachings were implemented at Amazon? They would have twenty-five times more impact there. Tony was seemingly more than aware of this opportunity. But he was thinking bigger. What if, by infecting Amazon with Zappos’s policies, those precepts could then be adopted by other conglomerates, and then change the lives of millions of workers? On July 22, Tony sent an email to his employees, announcing that Zappos was being bought by Amazon. With Amazon as a partner, Tony said, Zappos would remain unchanged, its culture untouched, but it would achieve its goal of delivering happiness to customers, employees, and vendors faster. It’s definitely an emotional day for me. The feelings I’m experiencing are similar to what I felt in college on graduation day: excitement about the future mixed with fond memories of the past. The last 10 years were an incredible ride, and I’m excited about what we will accomplish together over the next 10 years as we continue to grow Zappos! He included a message from Michael Moritz that sounded more like a dismissal: “You are now free to let your imagination roam—and to contemplate initiatives and undertakings that today, in our more constrained setting, we could not take on.” (Tony later took a parting shot in his book: “Unlike our former board of directors, our new management committee

seems to understand the importance of our culture—the ‘social experiments’—to our long-term success.”) In addition to assuring employees that their jobs would be unaffected, Tony also stressed that neither he, Fred, nor Alfred would leave the company. “We believe that we are at the very beginning of what’s possible for Zappos and are very excited about the future.” The deal ultimately closed in October 2009, at a value of $1.2 billion, making it Amazon’s largest acquisition at the time. Once again, Zappos had hung on by the skin of its teeth by doubling down on an unhinged commitment to disrupting corporate culture. As if to prove that it would keep to its core culture and values, the company threw a wedding-themed company holiday party to commemorate the “marriage” between Zappos and Amazon. “Most people came dressed as either brides or grooms,” read a descriptor for a video from the holiday party uploaded by Zappos. “There were bachelorette and bachelor parties (complete with semi-clothed strippers) and Elvises marrying people. You HAD to be there!” But just as Mark Guadagnoli and Chris Peake had noticed, as had other employees, old friends, and any entrepreneur who had visited the Henderson office, the implementation of Tony’s vision was by no means a single person’s achievement. Rather, it was a joint effort that involved the other two men who sat beside him in monkey row. Alfred, in particular, had been keeping Tony’s chaos under control since college. “Tony didn’t mind throwing a thousand plates in the air and juggling a ton of balls,” Chris Peake said later. “Alfred was then really good at saying, okay, cool, let’s take away all those plates except for this one or that one, and you focus on this stuff.” Jeff Bezos noticed it too. “You’re in such great hands with Fred, Alfred, and Tony,” Bezos said in a video to Zappos employees to announce the acquisition. “That’s a really big deal. I’ve seen a lot of leaders of companies too, and I haven’t seen people better than those three.”

CHAPTER 8

DELIVERING HAPPINESS

One afternoon in the fall of 2009, Tony was gliding around a kitchen island on a scooter, trying his best to avoid the dozen people milling about his mansion in the Southern Highlands neighborhood of Las Vegas. Papers were scattered across the floors and counters, like in a crazed academic’s office. He looked up as a woman named Holly McNamara, blond with the affect of someone who was quick to laugh, ambled into the kitchen. It was her birthday, and she had plans to go out for dinner with Tony and some friends. She watched with bewilderment as he zoomed past. “What are you doing?” she asked. “And who are all these people?” “I’m writing a book!” Tony yelled, like a kid during recess. Holly had been introduced to Tony by one of his poker friends a few years before, and he had since opened his world to her. Though she lived in San Diego, her job as a structural engineer often brought her to Vegas during the housing boom, and he would invite her to group dinners at Yellowtail in the Bellagio or to Korean barbecue joints off the Strip with confidants like Fred and Alfred. If there was someone that Holly didn’t know at the dinner table, Tony always took the time to introduce her. “This is my friend Holly,” Tony would say. “She’s friends with us now.” Holly had become such a part of this new community that Vegas started to feel like a second home, and she would often stay at Tony’s mansion. “We’re putting the chapters together,” Tony said. He pointed to a woman with shoulder-length hair, who looked up and smiled. “This is Jenn. She’s my editor,” he said. It was Jenn Lim, who had grown so close to Tony since they hiked Mount Kilimanjaro seven years before that some referred

to her as his girlfriend. To each other, they were partners. “Holly, why don’t you write a passage for the book?” Tony said. He was pretty famous now. After Amazon announced it was buying Zappos, curiosity around the wunderkind chief executive—who had introduced the world to free shipping and zany corporate culture—had become unmanageable. There were no longer enough hours in the day to answer the thousands of emails from fans, admirers, customers, and entrepreneurs seeking his advice or direction. The days of obsessively answering every inquiry at LinkExchange were long gone. With his newfound popularity, Tony realized that a book would provide a single channel to share the lessons he’d learned and his philosophies. Called Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, the book would become a gospel of his accomplishments and failures, from his backyard worm farm to Zappos. An autobiographical self-help memoir and corporate handbook rolled into one, the story would start with his childhood in Marin County, discuss his pizza business at Harvard University, show how he built LinkExchange, and then provide a riveting account of saving Zappos—success he’d achieved by believing in himself and his team. Beyond his life story, Tony would also use the book to espouse his study of the science of happiness. It would outline the four core principles that he believed underpinned the road to happiness: perceived control of one’s destiny, perceived perception of progress, connectedness with others, and being a part of something bigger than yourself. It was a template he believed could make people, companies, and the world happier. The treatise would conclude with the most important lesson he’d learned during his thirty-six years: that “by concentrating on the happiness of those around you, you can dramatically increase your own.” With help from Jenn, he had already written most of the book. The two had hunkered down in a cabin at Northern California’s Lake Tahoe and written the manuscript in two weeks, fueled by coffee beans soaked in vodka and Excedrin, an over-the-counter migraine medicine. “I found the most effective technique was taking Excedrin when I didn’t have a headache because there’s actually a lot of caffeine in Excedrin,” he told a reporter. Now Tony’s confidants, friends, and advisors had been arriving at the mansion to push the draft of the memoir through a round of edits. What

Holly was witnessing was the final effort to get the book done. But despite the chaos and looming deadline, Tony was still going to make time to celebrate Holly’s birthday that weekend. She felt buoyant being at the center of his world.

A few months later, Holly and Tony were getting into the back of a car in front of the Palms Casino Resort. It was the end of a long evening. An Amazon executive had been in town to meet Tony for dinner, and Tony had invited Holly and her friend along to join them for drinks once business had been discussed. For Holly, the night had been a distraction from the fact that she was now unemployed. She’d long contemplated a move away from engineering before finally following through on it, and Tony was now encouraging her to chase her newfound passion for being a nightlife concierge in Las Vegas. But after days of meetings and networking, she was growing increasingly frustrated with an industry that felt so different from construction and engineering. As the car pulled away from the Palms, Holly was curious to know the outcome of Tony’s discussion with the Amazon executive, Peter Krawiec, the vice president of worldwide corporate development. But before she could ask, Tony turned to her in his seat and began peppering her with questions: “So, your new business, you’re moving to Vegas? Where are you going to live? What do you actually want for your future? How much money do you need to live every month? Are you worried?” As the car rolled through the shimmering lights of Las Vegas, Holly struggled to come up with answers. Where is this going? she thought. Is this an interview? Before long, they were pulling up to Tony’s home. As they stepped out, Tony turned to her again. “I have a proposition for you,” he said. He was getting ready to embark on a press tour to drum up interest in his book, and he needed help managing his calendar, answering emails, and handling booking arrangements as well as managing the distribution and press campaign for Delivering Happiness. Jenn was leading the team, but they needed more assistance. Most importantly, he needed someone he could trust. This person would have access to everything from his address book to his

American Express Black Card. Why not help me out, while you get your concierge business off the ground? Tony suggested. He offered her $3,000 a month, less than she was used to making, but the offer came with a free room in his mansion and a front-row seat to his whirlwind life. He technically already had two personal assistants, one at Zappos, and another named Mimi Pham, who managed his affairs outside of the company. But the Zappos assistant was about to go on maternity leave. And Mimi, petite, sharp-chinned, with a huge grin, was “never around,” he said. Holly had met Mimi a few years earlier during a pool party on Memorial Day weekend at the Southern Highlands house. Holly remembered Mimi being a friendly and bubbly presence. She also recalled thinking she must be close to Tony, because her clothes, purses, shoes, and other belongings were scattered around Tony’s house. Though she seemed to be an infrequent presence in Vegas, Mimi had a permanent room there. She likely worked for him, Holly thought, but what she did exactly was a mystery. The two women had become friendly enough that Mimi invited Holly and her friend to crash at her apartment in Los Angeles one weekend. During the stay, Holly asked Mimi what exactly she did for Tony. Mimi explained she did “whatever Tony needed,” from planning trips to house chores. As if as an afterthought, she added, “Don’t tell Tony that I have this apartment in LA.” Why? Holly asked. “Tony just doesn’t need to know that I have this apartment,” Mimi said. “How does he not know? Don’t you live in his house?” Holly asked. “Well, yeah. But he just doesn’t need to know.” “What does Tony think you’re doing in LA, then?” “He thinks I’m sleeping at friends’ places.” It struck Holly and her friend Kimberly Schleifer as odd. Why would Mimi want to hide from Tony the fact that she lived in a humble unit off Santa Monica Boulevard? After all, most of her belongings were in Tony’s mansion. “She was always so mysterious and secretive,” Kimberly recalled. Unbeknownst to Holly and Kimberly, Mimi’s role in Tony’s life was undefined by design, much like the role of a consigliere. People often cycled in and out of Tony’s life, but Mimi had remained a constant presence

from the moment she met him at a shoe conference years before. They had initially bonded over a common feeling of being misunderstood by their Asian parents. But Tony came to rely on her to manage his life. She proved efficient at juggling tasks ranging from mundane to the seemingly impossible—from organizing housework and buying his meals to booking itineraries and screening people for meetings. Ahead of music festivals and parties, Tony and his friends knew that Mimi was the go-to person to arrange recreational drugs. (She had previously had a brush with the law after a drug-related incident: in 2001, she was arrested in Northern California when her boyfriend sold MDMA to an undercover police officer. She was a passenger in the car during the transaction and pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance. The conviction was expunged in 2016.) “I think the reason why Tony trusted her a lot and that she stayed around for so long is because she played her cards right,” Joey Vanas, an ex-boyfriend of Mimi’s who would also join Holly on the book’s press tour, said later. When Tony had bad news to give, it was Mimi who most often delivered the message—distancing him from decisions that would upset those around him. Most importantly, Mimi had maintained her role in Tony’s life by guarding her territory. She was possessive of her tasks and her access to Tony’s world, which included his schedule, his house (they shared an address on their driver’s licenses at one point), and his bank accounts. “She has a very direct manner,” said Joey. “A lot of people’s impressions were that Mimi was always trying to leverage to have more power.” While Tony’s offer to Holly seemed like a genuine effort to help her during a tough time, her role as personal assistant on the book’s press tour would directly conflict with Mimi’s responsibilities, something that was sure to complicate her relationship with Mimi. When Holly arrived at the Southern Highlands house at the start of 2010 and moved into a room filled with Mimi’s things, she asked Tony whether they could make some more room for her own belongings. “Just ask her to clean it up,” Tony said. With those few words, Holly’s collision course with Mimi was charted. When Holly called to ask if Mimi could move her stuff out of the room, Mimi stated adamantly that her belongings were there to stay, and accused

Holly of trying to replace her. As the conversation derailed, Mimi said something to Holly that gave her a sense of what she was walking into: “Tony is all I have.” A day later, Mimi flew to Vegas. When she entered the house, she briefly met Patricia McHale, who had recently become Tony’s other assistant at Holly’s suggestion. That day, as Patricia tended to the hummingbird feeders and misters in the backyard, Tony and Mimi walked outside. Mimi was crying, and Tony looked guilty. “She was telling him something that made him feel bad,” Patricia said later. “She wouldn’t stop crying.”

The press tour started in March 2010, three months before the book was to be released, with Tony crisscrossing the country to meet with reporters. One of those stops included South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual film, technology, and arts festival in Austin, Texas, that had earned a spot on the event calendars of the tech glitterati. “I’m outside South by Southwest with Tony Hsieh from Zappos, and he’s got a new book coming out in June,” said tech journalist Frank Gruber during a video interview in front of the Delivering Happiness coach, an old school bus painted gray with the words DELIVERING HAPPINESS in bold. A large yellow smiley face was plastered on the side. Inside, it looked like a typical party bus—no rows of seats, just benches lining the perimeter around a central dance floor. With blacked-out windows and green LED lights dangling from the ceiling, the school bus could become a mobile nightclub at the flick of a switch. “It’s empty now ’cause it’s in the middle of the day, and we don’t really start drinking until what—3 p.m., 4 p.m.?” Tony said to the journalist, grinning. As Gruber and the camera crew followed Tony into the bus, they found Jenn Lim tidying up. “Last night we had about fifty people on this bus, so it was pretty crazy.” A rolling thunderclap of events and interviews ensued across the country. The bus appeared at some events, but Tony was most often flying to interviews. Despite being a certified multimillionaire, he made a point of flying Southwest Airlines, the low-cost airline that only offered economy-

class seats. During one flight, as Tony and Holly were boarding the plane, another passenger looked up from his seat, saw Tony in his Zappos T-shirt, and said, “Hey, my daughter works at Zappos!” Tony smiled. “Oh, really? That’s great,” he said. “Do you work at Zappos?” the man asked, not realizing he was talking to its chief executive. “Yeah, I do!” Tony replied with a grin. The press tour culminated in three book launch events in June, held in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York City—each an opportunity for Tony to hold court and hobnob with other celebrities. There were sponsors at the launch parties such as cancer support nonprofit Livestrong as well as vodka brand Grey Goose, Coors Light beer, and Red Bull energy drinks. Among the stars at the New York event was Ivanka Trump. The year before, Tony had appeared as a guest judge on The Apprentice, the reality show hosted by Ivanka’s real estate mogul father, Donald Trump, and their friendship had since grown. The New York event was only the latest photo opportunity for the pair: shortly before his Apprentice appearance, Ivanka and Tony had been photographed in front of the White House, where Tony had been invited to meet Barack Obama for a meeting about rebuilding the recessiondevastated economy along with other young entrepreneurs, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Standing next to a broadly grinning Ivanka, Tony looks unrecognizable at first glance: it was one of the few times he had been photographed wearing a suit and tie. It was Tony, Ivanka later said, who showed her the power of social media, and how it could be used “to push your company’s core values and core beliefs in a personal way.” Years later, in 2017, after her father had been elected U.S. president, Tony provided an editorial review for her 2017 self-help book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success. “The advice is spot-on for everyone, not just women,” he wrote. At the New York book party, Tony was holding a drink while trying to shuffle into position for a photo alongside Ivanka and Jenn Lim at the book party, when his new publicist, Christine Peake (no relation to Chris Peake), ran over to interrupt. She had met Tony a few weeks prior at an event in Vegas, after being introduced by a mutual friend who thought Tony could use her public relations services. In one of their first conversations, Christine confided in

Tony that she had brought her teenage son as her plus-one to the event in hopes that he might spot Tony Hawk, the pro skateboarder, who was also in attendance. Moments later, Christine spotted the two Tonys chatting. Unexpectedly, Tony Hsieh waved Christine and her son over to them and introduced her son to the skateboarder. Touched by this unusual show of kindness from a celebrity, Christine offered her public relations services to Tony—and he accepted. She had been watching him at the New York event to ensure that he and those around him looked good; pictures are forever, especially on the red carpet, so no lipstick on teeth, no holding handbags, no smoking, and no alcohol. To style the photo, Christine quickly took Ivanka’s jacket. She then went to grab Tony’s drink and was met with slight resistance before he gave it up. “It was a bit of tug-of-war,” she later recalled. Once the camera flashed, a member of Tony’s team approached Christine and scolded her. “You don’t take away his drink, ever,” the person yelled. Tony was one of the most humble clients Christine had ever worked with, but as a new entrant to his world, she had just learned the cardinal rule: never separate him from alcohol, his social lubricant. “At that moment, well, we’ve established we’ve got a drinking problem,” Christine later said.

At one point, Tony and Holly had mailed out advance copies of Delivering Happiness to friends and celebrities. Among them was the rapper Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent. Tony wrote a note on 50 Cent’s copy and used two quarters to draw smiley faces. As Holly started laughing, Tony giggled, “Do you think he’s going to find this funny?” His media tour had been going well—so well that by the end of June, buzz around Delivering Happiness had driven the book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. In July, Tony briefly left the media tour to attend a political fundraiser for Nevada senator Harry Reid in Las Vegas. President Barack Obama was also in attendance. Photos from the event show the three men in blazers, deep in conversation. Tony, true to form, was the only one without a tie. At the event, Tony gave a copy of his book to Reggie Love, President Obama’s

aide, in hopes that he would pass it along to the president. Ten days later, Reggie wrote to Tony, “I was unable to get the President to read your book, b/c I’ve been glued to it.” He continued, “If you ever have time to connect or chat, my phone is always on and my door is always open.” He ended with a PS: “I’ll now also be sure to pass along your book.” With accolades coming from everywhere, Tony thought that perhaps it was time to take the promotion of his book to the next level. He decided to take an entourage on another tour. This one would be a three-month, twenty-three-city bus tour across the country to promote the book. This time the vehicle would be a new and improved Delivering Happiness bus. They would hold events and book readings in universities, at company offices, and with charitable organizations. It could deliver Tony’s template of happiness to the masses. As if to drive the rock star theme home, he purchased a tour bus from the Dave Matthews Band and wrapped it with his Delivering Happiness sign and yellow winky faces—a logo that had become synonymous with his brand. A tour on the scale Tony was thinking would typically take months, even a year, to plan. But he wanted to launch by the end of the summer. So he turned to Joey Vanas, Mimi’s ex-boyfriend and an event producer who had overseen Zappos’s corporate events for years—including the vendor parties and the wedding-themed party celebrating the Amazon acquisition —and had most recently helped Tony pull off the whirlwind of press events around the book. Joey had two and a half months to figure out the logistics of a massive nationwide bus tour. During the first meeting to organize the tour, Joey could see the nervous excitement of those around him. Tony addressed the members of his new entourage in the living room of his Southern Highlands home—Jenn, Mimi, Holly, and several others, each keen to prove themselves to the Tony Hsieh —then gave the floor to those gathered. Tony listened as people came up with ideas on where to visit and what to do in each location. Some proposals made a lot of sense, and others had great intentions. But by Joey’s account, there were too many ideas being thrown out and not enough decision-making from Tony. “I just had a sinking feeling. We’re going to end up way overcommitted, underprepared, with a hodgepodge team,” Joey said. The only way to continue, Joey thought, would be to temper his own expectations for the tour, realizing that it was likely going to be chaotic; if

so, it was better to run with it instead of fighting against it. In other words, Joey later said, “I remember thinking we’re fucked.”

Angela Morabito was among the younger members of the bus tour group. An impressionable college graduate from Arizona State University, she had recently been hired by a small marketing firm called Digital Royalty, which Tony had invested in and had hired to do marketing for the book tour. Angela had already worked on some earlier Delivering Happiness events, but she was eager to impress Tony. Her boss had told her that Tony thought she was not talkative enough, and Angela took that to mean that her boss valued partying stamina over work ethic, especially if the client was Tony. She wasn’t much of a partier, but the last thing Angela wanted to be labeled was “the not-fun one” while working for one of the world’s most successful business figures. One night in August, the Delivering Happiness team gathered for a group dinner at Pink Taco at the Hard Rock Hotel. After many drinks, Tony asked everyone to huddle in one of the private rooms inside the casino. Sitting around a purple velvet gambling table, what was supposed to be a kickoff meeting quickly devolved into something more bizarre. It started when Tony abandoned formalities and dared someone in the meeting to fit themselves inside a Delivering Happiness sports bag. Eleen Hsu, whose title on the team was “Project Specialist Supreme,” got in the bag, and the group started carrying her down the hall. The group headed outside to the Delivering Happiness tour bus and went inside. Next came Tony’s second idea: What if we passed a vodka shot from mouth to mouth in a row? In theory, the shot would have gone from Tony to Jenn to Angela and down the line. The idea sounded gross, but Angela felt that keeping up with these antics was part of the job, so she tried to catch the shot in her mouth as it dribbled from Jenn’s. She failed, as the vodka shot was mostly saliva. Right after, Angela turned to her boss, Amy Jo Martin, who was also on the bus. “I remember looking at Amy’s face,” Angela later recalled. “I didn’t know if it was disappointment, anger, or jealousy.” The bus tour hadn’t even started, but Angela figured it was time to look for another job.

The Delivering Happiness bus departed Vegas in August. At each stop, Tony was typically committed to several engagements. “We were overcommitted and always playing catch-up when we would get somewhere that we didn’t have proper time to prep for,” Joey recalled. While the purpose of the bus tour was to promote Tony’s book, Tony did not actually travel with the bus for the majority of the tour. For the most part, he and Jenn would fly into a city, meet up with the bus, attend the speaking engagements, and then party hard with the crew. Tony and Jenn would then head back to the airport, either to return to Vegas or to go to some other non-book-related engagement. “And then it was just a bunch of hungover people rushing to get from here to there after all the disorganization and stress from the weekend,” Joey recalled. If Joey asked why they’d drunk so much the previous night, they would often remind him that it had been Tony feeding them shots. To add to the growing headaches, they had to find a new bus driver, twice. The first driver kept stopping for smoke breaks, while the second driver was a wild card. “He was a tough Aussie who you would want on your Armageddon team,” Joey said later. “He was running people off the road, flipping people off. And he was driving what was supposed to be the happiest bus!” With Tony’s missing leadership creating a vacuum, petty arguments snowballed into seemingly insurmountable conflicts. During the first weeks of the tour, the crew would eat meals together and hang out during breaks. But as the bus journeyed on, the Delivering Happiness workers kept to themselves whenever they could. Mimi, who was also flying in and out of some cities and held the title “Little Miss Sunshine,” was helping to program the tour. She was central to the complaints of several people on the bus, Joey said later, who took issue with her demands. “Everybody complained about Mimi,” he said. No one was more bitter about Mimi’s presence than Holly. The tension between the two women was palpable. Mimi had assumed many of the duties that Holly, whose title was “Life Managing Director,” believed she was responsible for, and Holly was increasingly incensed about the minimization of her role. She had raised complaints to Tony and Jenn at the beginning of the bus tour, but they were mostly ignored. Her breaking point came during their fourth stop, in Chicago. Normally Holly would meet the

public relations team prior to interviews, conduct sound checks, and make sure Tony had his outfit sorted. But when they arrived in Chicago and Holly went to speak with Tony to prepare him for an interview, Tony dismissed her: “Mimi has it, it’s done.” It might have been a subtle comment, but Holly felt slighted. She had left a stable career and had been giving her new concierge venture a red-hot go in Las Vegas. Tony had made what seemed a goodwill offer to help her during a hard time, but now this tour was consuming her life, and she felt not only ostracized from Tony’s world and without a clear purpose on the bus but isolated from him too. In tears, Holly called Patricia, the friend she had convinced Tony to hire as an assistant. “I was told Tony would take time to talk with me, which never happened,” Holly said. Patricia, who was back at Tony’s Southern Highlands mansion to look after his affairs while he was on tour, was alarmed, fearing that Holly was on the edge of slipping into depression, and sent Jenn an email: It’s human nature to want to help people whenever we can … and we’re supposed to be delivering happiness.This is a confusing time for Holly and she really needs support right now … she’s not feeling part of this team, for more than one reason. I’m sure at this point it’s an accumulation of more than one thing. I hope you might help her move through this difficult time on the three month journey you are all on. Jenn quickly responded and checked in on Holly, to little avail. The fight between Mimi and Holly was an issue that could only be resolved by one person: Tony. After all, the two women were jockeying for his support. They were also fighting for their livelihoods. Both women’s entire worlds revolved around him, from their jobs to their rooms at his mansion. But he refused to enter the fray, seemingly hoping that they would resolve the conflict on their own, which only made it worse. “He was off-loading the conflict, effectively,” Joey said later. Their fight was just one episode from the Delivering Happiness bus tour, Joey later concluded, that highlighted the downside of Tony’s hands-off management style, and how it could bring out people’s worst instincts. It was also something that would have far greater consequences one day in the future, when Tony would oversee an

entire neighborhood underpinned by his mantra of happiness. “The bus tour for me was the microcosm for pretty much all that happened later on in downtown Vegas,” said Joey.

At one point, Tony finally made an effort to resolve the conflicts. In October, around the halfway point of the bus tour, the crew was staying in Miami for a few days. He noticed the team’s energy was low. As he prepared to leave the bus again with Jenn, he sent an email, reminding those on the bus tour that they were promoting a book that focused on the importance of culture. “This email is meant as a Step 1 for our core values exercise to do over the next few days while Jenn and I are away from the bus,” he started. His email, sent to everyone on the tour, instructed everyone to make four lists. The first list would be names of people “that you enjoy connecting with,” Tony wrote, while the second would be “a list of people or types of people that annoy you.” From these two lists, Tony instructed, the writer should try to understand what values they had in common with people in the first list, and what was missing in the second list. The third was a list of the happiest moments in the writer’s life, and the fourth the least happiest. “The happiness usually comes from one or more of your values being expressed,” he explained. “Write down what those values are next to each moment” on the third list, he instructed. “Get ready for step 2!” he wrote at the end of the email. Tony never sent the second part of the exercise. It seemed he moved on to something else, and the crew continued to fend for themselves. At the last stop in Seattle in November, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, Holly brought up the battle against Mimi with Tony once more. “I’ve been mustering up the energy to talk to you about this, but what’s going on? One day I’m doing everything,” she said. “Then all of a sudden I’m doing nothing. Did I do something wrong?” “No, no, you did nothing wrong,” Tony said. “Well, what’s going on?” “I don’t want to talk about it,” Tony replied.

To outsiders, the Delivering Happiness bus tour looked like the embodiment of joy. The bus crew had filmed a rap music video, which received coverage from TechCrunch. At the center of the video is an enigmatic young woman, Laura Lombardi, whose title was “The Happiness Fairy.” Her lyrics are catchy and the video looks happy, with clips showing children lunging forward in potato-sack races, or the crew riding bikes around Times Square brandishing signs with the yellow winky face logo. And by quantifiable measures, the book and the bus tour were a success. Tony had given his presentation espousing his life story and the science of happiness to packed rooms and auditoriums across the country. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-seven weeks straight. It reached the USA Today bestseller list, staying there for nine weeks, and was among the top ten Amazon bestsellers for June and July 2010. But the Delivering Happiness rap video presented a misleading image of a group of young, energetic crew members having the time of their lives, when they were actually miserable. The book’s presence on the bestseller lists was also phony. Tony used ResultSource, a company that helps authors buy their way to the top of these lists by taking bulk buys and breaking them up to look like individual purchases, circumventing safeguards used by the lists to prevent this. Asked by a reporter later about his work with ResultSource, Tony gave a written response, polished with spin: “At many of those events, people paid to come watch me speak and receive an autographed copy of my book. ResultSource managed the speaking, book ordering, and distribution of the books for us during the tour. We’re excited that the book has continued to do well over the years since the launch, and are also excited that the paperback version of the book will be coming out next month!” Most of the bus crew members came on tour with lofty expectations— reinforced by the literal message of “Delivering Happiness”—only to have them unfulfilled. Angela, the young college graduate from Digital Royalty, quit after they stopped in Chicago. Laura Lombardi had hopes of hosting Zappos.TV—a series of Zappos videos uploaded onto YouTube—after her role in making the rap video, but it never happened. Holly’s role, meanwhile, dissipated as soon as the tour ended. Tony introduced Holly to several of his lieutenants in Las Vegas and Zappos to

try and find a new position for her, but nothing came to fruition. A few months later, Tony told Holly he needed all the rooms at the Southern Highlands mansion for Zappos and other events, and gave her two weeks to move out of the mansion. While she remained an acquaintance of Tony’s, their friendship never recovered. She eventually moved back to her hometown in Massachusetts and got into local politics. Over the years, her experience on the tour often came to mind. “Tony would invite people into his world and give someone the earth, moon, and stars and sun without realizing how the other person might perceive it,” Holly later mused. “It might have been my bad for having certain expectations, but the lack of structure, the lack of confrontation and communication—it became very negative. It was almost like the opposite of Delivering Happiness.” Holly was given access to Tony’s world but couldn’t get what she—and many others after her—would want and come to expect: access to Tony himself. There was one other thing that she sometimes thought about, and discussed with her friend Patricia, as she watched Tony’s world from afar. After Patricia had seen Mimi crying in the backyard in the summer of 2010, Mimi kept coming and going from the Southern Highlands mansion. One day before the start of the bus tour, Mimi called Patricia and asked her to go into one of the spare rooms in the house to throw some documents away. The room, decorated in a rock-and-roll theme with a guitar on display, was technically a guest room, though Mimi had taken over the closet. As Patricia walked into the room, she noticed a trash bag that already had some papers in it. Mimi asked her to put the rest of the documents scattered on the floor of the closet into the same trash bag and discard them. As Patricia put the papers in the trash bag, she noticed they were Tony’s bank statements, bills, and other financial records. With the bag in hand, she went to find Holly, who was working in Tony’s library, a room with fifteenfoot ceilings, walls lined with book-filled shelves, and a scattering of empty Grey Goose vodka bottles. Patricia told Holly what Mimi had asked her to do and said that something felt off. So the two women sat on the ground and started looking through the documents. Mimi had full access to Tony’s accounts, so it was not unusual for her to sign documents or checks for Tony. However, Holly recalled seeing duplicates of certain transactions. For example, there would be a check to a landscaper for several thousand

dollars. Below that, there would be a check of the same amount written out to Mimi, and the memo line for that check would say “landscaping”—as if she were reimbursing herself for a service that had already been paid directly to the vendor. By her estimate, there were hundreds of thousanddollar checks written to Mimi. They never threw away the documents. Instead, they hid them in a corner of the library.

CHAPTER 9

THE NEW PROJECT

Tyler Williams was at a crossroads. It was the spring of 2011 and he had moved to Las Vegas three years before, with a dream of making it big in the music industry—only to have it taken away when his band’s label became victim to a corporate takeover. He had been on the move around the West Coast for nearly a decade, working one construction job to the next to support his passion. He’d also been working to pay his wife’s medical bills. After years of life on the road, Tyler was ready for some semblance of stability. The son of a Pentecostal Christian youth pastor, Tyler had grown up in an idyllic town in southern Oregon, before moving with his family to Anchorage, Alaska, when he was twelve. The outdoors had afforded him a life of creation and wonderment, and he had watched his father build water balloon catapults as an activity director for a Bible camp. Tyler had learned early on about the power of empathy when his mother started a foster home for Alaska Native youths, and the family adopted four children and became the legal guardian of four others. As a singer in the church band, his mother also ensured that music was a major pillar of their lives, and Tyler found himself more focused on his high school band than his studies. He also found himself focused on a girl named Elissa, whom he started dating. After graduating, the couple traveled south, got married at the age of twenty-one, and moved to Seattle. But their honeymoon period hadn’t lasted. Elissa started experiencing intense symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, and she struggled to get out of bed in the mornings, her joints too stiff to move. Some days, Tyler would

draw her a hot bath, then carry her into the tub to bend her legs and arms as she cried in pain. Saddled with medical bills, the couple were just getting by when Tyler got a call in 2007 that had the potential to change their fortunes: his friend was looking for a drummer to join a Las Vegas–based band. A place where Elton John or the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir could be playing on any given night, Vegas was the place where Tyler might finally turn his music dream into reality. Plus, the warm climate might help Elissa’s condition. While the band had gained some recognition and toured the country, it was dropped by its label within a year. But the couple was determined to stay in their newfound city; Elissa’s symptoms had improved immensely. Tyler was looking for other jobs when Elissa started working as a Monster Energy girl, passing out samples of the energy drink along the Strip, at conferences, and in offices, including those belonging to a tech company called Zappos. She was amazed. It was unlike any office she had seen before: employees were parading around the office in costumes amid a tangle of plants hung from the ceiling. It was all a bit weird—just like Tyler. Upon Elissa’s urging, Tyler found himself Googling the search terms “Zappos” and “Tony Hsieh.” None of the web pages that he found had anything to do with selling shoes. What he found instead was that Tony and Zappos were well on their way to becoming part of tech industry folklore. Though still soft-spoken and slightly awkward, Tony had become the perfect host for the onslaught of visitors and camera crews coming to Henderson to capture the nontraditional corporate culture of Zappos. While other tech companies like Google and Facebook were developing the “golden handcuffs” of Silicon Valley—above-market salaries and extraordinary employee benefits like onsite gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and free food, making it impossible for workers to leave—Zappos already had most of these things, and it also offered a different benefit: a place for misfits to find purpose and a home. “When you have the little Z’s on people’s cheeks, you can understand why people would say, ‘Oh, it feels a little cult-like,’” commented a journalist who visited the company with a camera crew in 2010 on Bald and Blue Day, an annual event where Zapponians shaved their heads, dyed their hair blue, or had “Zappos” or “Z” painted in blue on their bodies to show

company spirit. “You mean, that’s not normal?” Tony had answered with a smile. From costume parades to Superhero Week, it was not unusual to see a Zapponian walking around the office in a full-body Spider-Man suit or a male employee in a barmaid outfit. Loud cheers erupted in the middle of the day as employees gathered around a set of cubicles to watch two toy cars race down a miniature track. Employees recited legendary stories from the Fourth of July barbecues and New Year’s Eve parties that Tony would host at his home in Southern Highlands every year. There were workout rooms and areas where employees could go lie down and take a nap. There was an open bar with whiskey, vodka, and beer. Balloons, streamers, and Silly String hung from the ceiling year-round, giving the sense of a perpetual, never-ending office party. “It was pure happiness,” said Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas. Tony, meanwhile, rarely strayed from his uniform: a black Zappos Tshirt or a Zappos hoodie, jeans, and black Donald J. Pliner slip-ons. Journalists would come to Henderson, follow Tony around, and leave perplexed by his idiosyncrasies. “At times, Mr. Hsieh came across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times. “That can intimidate those who are not accustomed to his watchful style.” Antonia Dodge, who was working at Zappos as a personality assessor, told the reporter that Tony had a form of social phobia. “But he gallantly walks over it by not letting it stop him and always pursues social situations,” she said. “And second, he lubricates with tons of vodka.” Tony’s romantic life was a quandary as well. “For all of Mr. Hsieh’s emphasis on the importance of relationships, his romantic life remains a mystery,” the reporter wrote. “I don’t usually define dating or not dating, together or not together,” Tony told the New York Times. “I prefer to use the term ‘hang out.’ And I hang out with a lot of people, guys and girls. I don’t really have this one person I am dating right now. I am hanging out with multiple people, and some people I hang out with more than others.” While Tony may have seemed out of place, the company he built was even more so. The Zappos culture—fun, weird, and referred to by Barbara Walters as Tony’s “social experiment”—was also off-putting for some,

especially for buttoned-up corporate America. But in a post-recession world in which tech companies seemed to have all the answers to society’s problems, a new generation of young workers without technical coding skills looked away from big tech firms in Silicon Valley and instead to Zappos, with its lack of formality and an emphasis on hiring around culture, not resumes. Its core business was selling shoes online, but that seemed to be the last thing that came to mind when people thought of Zappos and Tony Hsieh. The news segments and talk show interviews—from Tony explaining Zappos’s core values of staying humble and embracing weirdness to B-roll of pranks being pulled in the office—mythologized Tony and his stated purpose of creating happiness for customers and employees. They also became recruiting tools for the company: Tony was sending out smoke signals to people looking for more in their lives. Tony could show them the way. The more Tyler learned about Zappos, the more he became intrigued by Tony’s way of talking about his business, as if his workforce were a true community of like-minded individuals, bonded and built upon a core set of values. Then he saw one statistic that caught his eye: at the time, the company claimed that Zappos was harder to get into than Harvard. Tyler, who never went to college, felt compelled to apply.

Tyler didn’t know it yet, but he was about to enter Tony’s world as it entered a new chapter that would expand far beyond Zappos. For all the hullabaloo about the successful leadership synergy at the top of Zappos between Tony, Fred, and Alfred Lin, it didn’t last long after Amazon bought the company. A year after the sale, Alfred departed and took a role at Sequoia alongside his mentor Michael Moritz, where he would end up steering investments into companies like DoorDash, Instacart, and Reddit. (In 2012, he joined the board of Airbnb.) With Alfred gone, there were rumblings that Tony and Fred were working on something massive. “They were actually very, very explicit about the fact that they had this secret project,” recalled Chris Peake, the Zappos employee who reported to Fred.

Tony and Fred had been inspired by an economist named Edward Glaeser, whose book Triumph of the City unpacked how urban metropolises like Athens, London, Tokyo, and Singapore have historically fostered humans’ leaps forward. Cities “spur innovation by facilitating face-to-face interaction, they attract talent and sharpen it through competition, they encourage entrepreneurship and they allow for social and economic mobility,” read a New York Times review of the book. Glaeser’s theory posits that when cities increase in size, the productivity and innovation of each resident increase. But when companies increase in size, the opposite happens—with more bureaucracy and red tape, each employee actually becomes less productive and creative. With this in mind, Tony and Fred had embarked on a new kind of project, one that would be centered around making Las Vegas a hotbed for innovation. Perhaps Sin City could become the next Silicon Valley. An opportunity had emerged in 2009, when Tony was introduced to Oscar Goodman, the infamous mob-lawyer-turned-mayor of Las Vegas, who had preceded his wife, Carolyn, before she was elected in 2011. Decades earlier, Oscar had been a fixture of downtown Las Vegas, north of the modern Strip, when it was a glitzy playground for Hollywood royalty, vagabonds, and the mafia alike, an escape from the rigidity of the nation’s metropolises. But the area had become a forgotten corner of America and fallen to crime and poverty once the corporate mega-casinos started emerging from the desert floor along Las Vegas Boulevard in the 1990s. Some efforts had been made to bring the downtown area back to its former glory, including the construction of a gigantic canopy made of 50 million LED lights that featured mesmerizing visual displays over the neighborhood’s main vein, Fremont Street. Under Oscar’s tenure, the city had doubled down and embarked on a head-spinning number of projects, acquiring sixty acres of land west and south of Fremont Street. The famed architect Frank Gehry was hired to design a world-class brain disease research center, a crumpled metal structure that looked as though it had been crushed by a giant fist. Plans were drafted for a performing arts center, and construction began on the area’s first green space, Symphony Park. A cluster of antiques stores and furniture wholesalers south of Fremont Street became known as the Arts District, attracting hip locals to new bars. By 2008, construction on the five-million-square-foot showroom complex

World Market was completed, attracting hospitality conventions. Finally, Oscar vowed to build a new City Hall to anchor his newly modern neighborhood. But the one thing missing was a large company to bring jobs to the area. So when a shrewd local real estate dealmaker named Andrew Donner told Oscar about a tech company called Zappos that was interested in moving to the area, he realized the company could move into the old City Hall building—a semicircular structure built in the 1970s that had recently undergone renovations—and complete his downtown puzzle. His hunch was confirmed when he toured Zappos’s Henderson office soon after. “It was unlike any business I had ever seen,” Oscar later recalled. “I didn’t know what they did. Apparently, they were selling shoes over the telephone.” In 2010, Zappos announced that it would be moving to downtown Las Vegas and would take over the old City Hall building when the council moved out in 2012. (After lengthy negotiations, Andrew Donner’s company, Resort Gaming Group, closed on the acquisition of the property in the summer of 2012, ultimately paying $18 million, and Zappos’s parent Amazon committed to a fifteen-year lease.) It came as a surprise to some. Why move hundreds of employees out of suburbia to a rough part of town? Despite the development over the past decade, the neighborhood was still pockmarked by boarded-up properties, run-down motels, and empty lots. Although it explained why Tony and Fred had been spending less time on Zappos affairs recently—they had been making trips downtown to take clandestine meetings at a bar and there were rumors of plans for employee housing and charter schools for the children of Zapponians—but it still wasn’t clear what was behind the announcement. What Zapponians could assume, however, was that Tony and Fred thought big, and whatever secret project they were working on was going to be a whole lot more than simply moving the company headquarters again. Away from Vegas, Tony and Fred had been touring the famed campuses of Google, Nike, and Apple. Tony found them beautiful. At Nike’s headquarters in Portland, he loved the running track that bordered one of its buildings, as well as an on-site pub in another building. “We need one of those,” Tony said. But he also found the campuses incredibly insular, and with “golden handcuff” perks, there was little reason for employees to

leave; these companies had essentially built fortresses. At the Googleplex in San Mateo, there was no need for a Google employee to buy lunch at a local restaurant—thereby contributing to the local economy—or to integrate with the community when everything was provided. Instead of looking at company campuses, Tony had been thinking about his visits to New York University when he was at college. What he liked most about NYU was that there were no clear lines for where the campus ended and city life began. “The more we thought about it, the more we thought maybe we should actually turn this whole idea inside-out,” Tony later said during a presentation at a tech sustainability conference. “What if instead of just investing in ourselves, we invested in the community and the ecosystem?”

Whatever they were planning, it was going to be people like Tyler Williams who would one day ensure its reality. Though he could not have foreseen what awaited him after entering Tony’s world. Applying for a role at Zappos seemed a long shot, Tyler thought, but he had tried, succeeded, and failed more than once in life. He saw an option to apply with a video cover letter—so he got to work, creating a catchy beat that spelled out Zappos’s ten core cultural values. To perform the song in the video, he cloned himself seven times, creating a full band of Tylers with mohawks. Five versions of him played instruments, from the drums to maracas, while the other two fiddled with a Rubik’s cube and snapped to the rhythm. The Tyler with the guitar crooned: It’s a family that loves to play. It’s a place that I’d like to go someday. Throw all my insecurities away and be honest in the things I’d say. You can be a little weird if you’re humble. Grow and learn while having fun. Creating open-minded sense of adventure. Train for a marathon. Determined to run. Yes it’s true. Yes it’s true. Za-a-a-ppos. Where they embrace the change with a click.

Za-a-a-ppos. They create a masterpiece, Out of only a wish. The music video not only secured him the job but became a Zappos legend. He started at the call center, as most other Zappos employees had before him. Even though he applied for the position of events and audiovisual technician, he was happy to work his way up in the company. A few months after his start date, the company hosted its annual costume contest on Halloween. Tyler made a centaur costume so elaborate that his managers told him to take the day off the phones to walk around the office and make people laugh. At one point, he made his way past a glass-walled conference room in which Tony was filming a video interview. The interviewer and Tony laughed as the centaur ambled through the camera frame, emphasizing Tony’s point that Zappos embraced fun and weirdness in the office. Later that day, when Tyler was on his way back to his desk, Tony caught up with him. “What are you doing tonight?” Tony said to Tyler. There was a Halloween parade that night in downtown Las Vegas, and Zappos had submitted a float for it. “Would you like to come?” Tyler, who had never spoken to the CEO before, stumbled through an explanation that he too would be downtown that evening, but he couldn’t accept the invitation because he had a show to play that night with the Beau Hodges Band, a new part country, part rock, part blues band that Tyler had joined. Tony, who didn’t have a costume on, asked where they were playing. Tyler told him that it would be at an outdoor stage far removed from the main street and well after the Halloween parade ended. Tony nodded with a smile and walked off. Tyler wondered whether he had just missed the opportunity of a lifetime. That night, the Beau Hodges Band started playing to about five people on an empty street. Tyler and his four bandmates treated the show as a rehearsal. But thirty minutes into their set, they heard some honks and saw a caravan of large vehicles driving toward the stage. A red double-decker, a school bus painted in an Alice in Wonderland theme, the Delivering Happiness tour bus, and a Zappos parade float pulled up, and close to sixty people poured out of the vehicles to dance to the Beau Hodges Band. Tyler saw Tony watching from the top of the open double-decker bus, smiling

down at the Zapponians swaying to the music. As Tyler watched Tony and the scene before him, he started to understand the magic behind his boss. “Tony instilled in me that night what ‘wow’ really means,” Tyler later remarked. “It’s about making someone feel really special.”

Such enchantment was about to take hold in downtown Las Vegas. At the start of 2012, Tony and Fred announced during a company all-hands meeting that they were finally moving the Zappos headquarters into the former Las Vegas City Hall building in the Fremont East district. The move would happen in phases, with the first task at hand being to convert the jail cells on the second floor into either conference rooms or a speakeasy. But they saved the biggest announcement for last. They would be embarking on an entirely new venture: a $350 million investment, most of which would be privately funded by Tony, to revitalize Fremont East, a long-decaying corner of Las Vegas, and turn it into a mecca for technology, culture, and community. Tony called it “the city as a startup”—as if it were possible to apply the “move fast and break things” ideology of Facebook and other high-flying tech startups to an entire metropolis. His fourteen hundred employees weren’t just moving offices. They were going to rebuild their own slice of Las Vegas. “How many opportunities in a lifetime do you have to help shape the future of a major city?” he stated during one of his talks. The project, led by Tony and ten of his most trusted lieutenants, including Fred, Tony’s cousin Connie Yeh, and her husband, Don Welch, would be named the Downtown Project, with the new Zappos headquarters serving as an anchor to the community. The $350 million would be distributed across four categories: $50 million to attract small business owners to open up restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, and more in Fremont East; another $50 million on art and cultural projects, including an art museum and new live music venues; $50 million to invest in tech startups, on the condition they move to downtown Vegas, just as Tony had required his portfolio companies to move into the Venture Frogs incubator in San Francisco; and finally, $200 million to buy up land and buildings downtown and build residential high-rises to house the entire vision.

Underpinning the Downtown Project were three central goals. The first was to make downtown Vegas the most community-focused city in the world. The second was to provide everything one of its citizens would need to live, work, and play within walking distance. Third, Tony wanted to make downtown Vegas the co-learning and co-working capital of the world. These goals were not only lofty; some were simply unquantifiable. How do you measure whether a city is focused on its community? And how do you define and determine what makes a co-learning capital of the world? To address this, Tony invented new metrics to decide which companies and ventures the Downtown Project would invest in. Instead of maximizing return on investment (ROI)—a common measure in business to assess profitability—he said he would only invest in businesses and projects that focused on maximizing long-term return on community (ROC). Like Zappos’s reputation for hiring employees based on whether they aligned with its culture, the logic was now being applied to entire companies: the definition of the Downtown Project “community” seemed largely dependent on whether a company would simply fit in with the neighborhood Tony was creating. Another metric he would use to determine where his capital went was return on luck (ROL), a phrase borrowed from Jim Collins in his book Great by Choice, which meant he would invest based on whether a business or project would encourage more serendipitous collisions among strangers, bringing new ideas to light. All this meant that even if a business could make Tony and the Downtown Project a lot of money, but it was not good for the community, then he wouldn’t invest. “This is part of the reason why we don’t have outside investors and we’re not working with traditional building developers or land developers,” Tony quipped later. No outside investors also meant another consequence (or perhaps an advantage, in Tony’s eyes): despite the overwhelming emphasis on giving back and focusing on the community, Tony would ultimately have full control of the entire venture. Zapponians were sold. “This was way bigger than just the campus,” recalled Chris Peake. “We felt like this could go down in history books as something that Tony Hsieh, Fred Mossler, and Zappos did to recharge cities.” Since Tony had so much of his personal money on the line, onlookers wondered what motivated him to do this. “Some speculate it’s ego, a desire

to remake downtown in his image—his personal Hsiehville,” wrote the Las Vegas Sun in 2012. “But others say Hsieh looks like a young Buddha, hinting that some Eastern religious ethic accounts for what can be viewed as a selfless endeavor. Still, others say he can’t pass on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help remake the urban center of a city known around the world.”

CHAPTER 10

THE DESERT TECH UTOPIA

Like other locals of downtown Las Vegas, Natalie Young had heard that there was a rich guy walking around the neighborhood. Rumor had it he was going to spend millions of dollars to transform the area. But she was wary of this new arrival, Tony Hsieh. He was always surrounded by an entourage, like some hotshot. The last thing downtown needed was a moneyed tech bro to gentrify the neighborhood and break open the tightknit group of locals who spent their nights at the Downtown Cocktail Room. But on a fall night in 2011, Natalie’s life changed. She had been reluctant to go out that evening. Actually, she wasn’t much of a night owl at all. She’d been in recovery for more than a decade, and going to bars with friends wasn’t her idea of a good time. But after months of unemployment, she’d relented and agreed to go check out the new Thai restaurant downtown. After one thing led to another, she was now seated in a booth with her girlfriends in the dim light of the Downtown Cocktail Room. She had been a cook since she could remember, a career she pursued at the insistence of her father. When she was younger, she had gone astray with the wrong crowd in her hometown, Aurora, Colorado, but after multiple stints in rehab she got sober in her late thirties, and landed a job as a broiler cook at Eiffel Tower Restaurant in the Paris Hotel. Standing in front of a superheated cooker preparing rib-eye, rabbit, veal, and Dover sole for ten hours a day was grueling, adding to the pressures of working for a fine-dining establishment on the Strip. But the discipline held her life in place, and she channeled her energy into her work. After being promoted to

sous-chef, she was recruited by the Hard Rock Casino to work as a room chef at one of its restaurants. After a decade in Las Vegas, though, she was beginning to feel that it was time to move on. She was thinking of moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the pace was slow and the food was good. Whether Natalie was in the kitchen or outside, rarely was she in anything but Dickies trousers and Chuck Taylors. She had a round face with a full-bodied grin, but her expression could darken in an instant, with the seriousness of someone who knows what happens when a line is crossed. Her last job in Vegas leading a kitchen had ended acrimoniously and left a bad taste in her mouth, marring a successful run as a chef in the Strip’s casinos: after being lured with a big paycheck to open a new restaurant, she had set up the business only to be replaced by someone being paid less. Had she done some due diligence, she would have learned that the employer had a history of shady business practices. “I was going to either commit suicide or homicide … seriously,” she said later. While plotting her exit from Vegas, she spent most days at the downtown neighborhood’s only cafe, the Beat Coffeehouse, a beloved spot on the corner of Fremont and Sixth Street where customers were encouraged to bring in their own vinyls to play on the store’s record player. That, and dogs were allowed; it was Natalie’s idea of a perfect place to pass the time in an otherwise run-down part of town. She was close with the owners of the Beat, married couple Michael and Jennifer Cornthwaite, the latter of whom she’d gotten to know when she was working in the casinos. The couple also owned the Downtown Cocktail Room. It had been Michael’s dream to build a bar downtown for years, one that didn’t rely on slot machines or cable TV to draw patrons, and in 2007 he’d made it a reality. Housed at the bottom of a windowless brick building on Las Vegas Boulevard, a few steps south of Fremont Street, it had the feel of a Prohibition-era speakeasy, with an inconspicuous entrance in an alleyway several feet from the boulevard. After ringing the doorbell, patrons passed through heavy curtains that concealed the intimate space within. A long polished-concrete bar extended away from the entrance, opening up to a low-slung room dotted with candlelit tables. Beyond the main floor space an even smaller room was filled with booths, where Natalie was now sitting, sipping on a Coke.

Michael slid into the booth and sat next to her. “Are you set on Santa Fe?” he said. “Yeah, I’m pretty set,” she responded. “Is there anything that can change your mind?” “I don’t really, you know, see what’s next here.” “Well, what if you could have your own restaurant?” “You’re stupid,” she said. “I don’t have any money.” “What if you don’t need any?” Someone approached the table. “Hey, Michael, Tony’s here.” Before leaving to greet his new arrival, Michael turned to Natalie and looked at her seriously. “Don’t leave.” She hung around for a little while longer before going to find Michael to say goodbye. When she found him, he asked her to follow him to a table where Tony was sitting with his party. “Hey, Tony, how’s it going?” she said. “I’m Natalie.” “I know who you are,” Tony responded. “What size restaurant do you want?”

Understanding how blighted corners of cities transform into “cool” neighborhoods—the study of gentrification—has been the focus of urban planners for decades. Williamsburg, a former manufacturing neighborhood in Brooklyn, was once a cluster of run-down warehouses and home to an insular sect of Orthodox Jews and Italian immigrants. Over a decade, the neighborhood became unrecognizable. Now countless high-rise towers line the East River and offer residences with panoramic views of Manhattan; at street level are boutique stores and overpriced coffee shops. Despite scarce parkland, it is the kind of neighborhood where new one-bedroom apartments often start at $4,000 per month and young New York elites go to be seen. Most who study these urban transformations agree that they typically occur as a series of clear and predictable events. In 1979, an MIT professor named Phillip Clay published one of the first comprehensive studies of gentrification called Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, which laid out four

stages in which neighborhoods transform from poor, run-down areas into enclaves for the upper class. While some modern factors can affect how gentrification occurs, the study remains true for many cities. According to Clay, who became the chancellor of MIT, the first indication that change is afoot is the arrival of artists in search of cheaper housing or members of LGBTQ communities seeking safe spaces to move into. These people begin renovating individual spaces. A music and arts scene inevitably builds around them, breathing fresh air into local bars or developing new ones. Street art will begin to mask blighted buildings and add light to dark alleyways. Next, vacancies drop and foot traffic spikes with the arrival of more residents, attracting middle-income earners, who begin buying up more properties from the original residents and pricing them out of the neighborhood. With more money, the properties are renovated and the allure of the neighborhood improves. As eyesores start to disappear behind new facades and trees are planted in front of trendy cafes, corporate and public money begins to flow in, growing the demand for boutique storefronts, Starbucks, and hotel chains. Roads and streets are improved, and new parks are built. Public institutions like universities and hospitals are built. A modern twist on Clay’s model would include the arrival of hipsters and moneyed millennials. By stage four, the artists that catalyzed the change in the area have themselves been priced out of the neighborhood, to make way for a solid upper class who move into flashy new condo buildings that fill the remaining vacant lots or are built on land where the old homes once stood. The original residents have long been forgotten, pushed farther away as surrounding neighborhoods have similarly been boosted, in a continuous cycle. In March 2010, as Tony basked in the success of the Amazon sale and prepared to promote his memoir, the downtown neighborhood of Las Vegas was very much on the cusp of Clay’s first stage. Tony had loved the urban vibe of San Francisco with its sense of “cool.” Living and working in Henderson amid the banality of suburbia had left him wondering if there was any place that felt anything like San Francisco in Las Vegas. He was told that there was one bar north of the city called the Downtown Cocktail

Room. Walking into the sultry space, Tony felt it was exactly what he’d been looking for. But it was in Michael Cornthwaite, the bar’s owner, that Tony found an enthusiastic guide to lay out an idea for downtown that he’d been dreaming about for years. Michael’s vision had been shared by Mayor Oscar Goodman, who had vowed to invest in the area, promising to improve the roads and streets. The city had plans for an arts center nearby, and construction on a park had begun. And a newer, younger, cooler crowd had started coming to the area as new bars—Beauty Bar, Vanguard, and the Griffin—opened along Fremont Street. While those watering holes supported a blooming nightlife on the block, they did little to brighten Fremont Street during the day, which was still pockmarked with run-down storefronts. A pawn shop stood at one end and a sex shop at the other. In the middle of the block was a take-out spot that sold Philly cheesesteaks, which occasionally came with a viewing of cockroaches. Other establishments did little to attract the type of crowd that Michael’s bar did. Just north was the Gold Spike casino, which advertised “sexy blackjack” and “$1 shots.” Its gaming floor was filled with cigarette smoke and penny slot machines, and attracted a tough clientele; gang members had once robbed the place at gunpoint. Another time a woman was shot by her husband in the parking lot. East along the next block, opposite the Beat, on the corner of Sixth Street and Fremont, was the El Cortez casino, a place where one might see someone being kicked out of the venue instead of enjoying a pleasant evening of roulette. For another five blocks, the only respite from empty car lots and run-down motels was an old dive bar on the corner of Tenth Street called Atomic Liquors—a name it earned during the 1950s, when its patrons could stand on its roof and watch the nuclear bomb tests to the north send mushroom clouds bulging above the desert. But if there was one more reason to see the neighborhood as a diamond in the rough, a burgeoning grunge rock music scene was what stitched the place together. Just a block from Atomic Liquors was one more venue, called the Bunkhouse, a saloon-style bar that, locals declared, was where one could experience the “real Vegas.” The bar looked like it was falling apart, adding to its allure. Inside the peach stucco walls was an open floor space soaked with years’ worth of beer, with a foot-high stage at one end and a long bar at the other. On the walls hung aged posters of Roy Rogers

and John Wayne, and a stuffed stag head. When the bar was full and a band was playing, there would often be headbangers down at the front. “Downtown is a happening scene, there’s a revolution down there and it’s great to be a part of it,” Tony DiVincenzo, a bass guitar player with the local band Lazy Stars, told a reporter after a gig at the Bunkhouse. “You know, musically, artistically, spiritually, man. It’s awesome.” Among the scene’s most die-hard fans was James Woodbridge, a philosophy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who had realized that the energy of the Bunkhouse could be expanded to a festival that signed bands like the Lazy Stars to play at the downtown bars and showcase the neighborhood. Realizing this vision, he co-founded the Neon Reverb festival in 2008, mostly by using his own savings. The festival only drew around fifty people in its first year, but by the time Michael took Tony to see the festival in the fall of 2010, there was a Red Bull–branded party bus shuttling hundreds of fans from the Bunkhouse to Beauty Bar to the Downtown Cocktail Room. “Here we had this amazing thing where the whole area was activated,” Woodbridge said. Save for the El Cortez and Michael’s businesses, Tony and the Downtown Project would eventually own all of these properties and businesses. They would also pour money into the Neon Reverb festival. As Tony came and went from downtown, he learned that his own Zappos staff had been frequenting the bars independently of him. Tony saw that downtown Las Vegas was ripe for reinvention, like the Sixth Street district in Austin, Texas. The artists were already here, and so were the bars. And with so many vacant lots, there was plenty of space to create. Fred introduced Tony to Andrew Donner, the real estate developer who owned some properties in the neighborhood and knew who owned what. On tours around the area, ideas were flowing for Tony as he walked from block to block. One day, as they approached the corner of Stewart Street and Sixth Street, in front of the old City Hall building, Tony turned to Andrew and pointed at a dusty lot. “Can we build a ski slope right here?” By Clay’s reckoning, the process of gentrification can take years, often more than a decade. By the time Zappos announced in December 2010 that it was moving into the former City Hall building, Tony’s vision for the neighborhood was unfurling by the day. And if Tony was going to be the

primary catalyst behind the transformation of Downtown, he wasn’t going to wait decades to see how his investment would pay off. In 2011 Tony went to the Burning Man festival for the first time and had seen how a vibrant community could be built seemingly in an instant. The festival, held every September in the Nevada desert, draws almost a hundred thousand revelers, who essentially build a self-sustaining city with its own neighborhoods and infrastructure that exist for a week before disappearing overnight again. People sleep in elaborate “camps,” complete with arts projects, musical performances, and fire-breathing sculptures that distract from the intermittent dust storms and heat waves. “Citizens,” as attendees of the event are known, exchange items rather than pay for goods in currency. To convince people to move to a neighborhood in Las Vegas, away from the Strip, Tony would first need to attract artists, creatives, and small business owners to make the neighborhood cool. Then he envisioned building an element of Silicon Valley in the neighborhood, where innovators and technologists could come, create, and invent, without fear of failure. To sweeten the arrival—and supercharge the development—new citizens would have a place to stay, sometimes for months at a time, for free. At the time, there was only one residential building that could seem appealing to young millennials and tech workers arriving in the run-down neighborhood. The Ogden was a 248-unit luxury condominium building that towered above the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Ogden Avenue, virtually a halfway point between the former City Hall building to the north and Fremont Street to the south. From a distance, the white facade of the building stood as one of the most visible markers of downtown. The building had recently been pulled out of bankruptcy, which it had endured thanks to poor sales following the Great Recession, and when Tony moved there in May 2011, it was only 20 percent occupied. Tony’s condo, twentythree stories above the street, was in fact several apartments connected together, with views looking south toward the Strip and north toward the valley. Walking through closets or obscure doors could lead to another apartment, where surprises abounded; one room was designed to look like a dark jungle, with plants covering the walls and hanging from the ceiling, illuminated by purple light. Fred moved into a neighboring apartment, in an

arrangement not dissimilar to Tony’s fiefdom at 1000 Van Ness in San Francisco, where all his work colleagues and friends had moved in while he oversaw Venture Frogs. Only Tony would scale the experience of living at 1000 Van Ness exponentially: within a year, the Downtown Project had leased eighty units in the building. Beyond the Ogden, part of the Downtown Project’s plan was to buy as many of the surrounding apartment blocks as possible, freshen them up with renovations, and then install new residents who belonged to the growing community. When the Downtown Project was announced in January 2012, Andrew Donner had by then been leading a real estate acquisition campaign that would grow to forty-five acres of land and buildings mostly surrounding Fremont Street. Once the buildings were acquired, the Downtown Project contractors would move in and renovate the properties. They purchased the single-story motels that lined Fremont Street—formerly places that charged by the hour and served as locations for prostitution and shelter for drug addicts—and boarded them up. In front they installed new neon signage, illuminating the names of hotels and motels along Fremont Street that had last seen their glory days in the 1960s: the Western, the Ambassador, Fergusons, the Star View Motel, the Las Vegas Motel, and the Fremont Motel. The Downtown Project would eventually oversee a residential real estate portfolio of almost a thousand apartments. The process of beautifying a neighborhood may sound like a positive thing, but mention “gentrification” in a local bar, and it’s sure to divide a crowd. While the new facades looked nice, Tony’s organization was moving into a place that had existing residents. He and other Downtown Project lieutenants had repeatedly referred to the area as a series of empty lots—an ignorant assertion considering the dozens of low-income apartment blocks, which were in turn surrounded by homeless encampments. Referring to it that way also ignored the reason the city’s vulnerable had been drawn to the area in the first place: there were several social service agencies based in the area, along with soup kitchens operating out of the area’s churches. When the Downtown Project began trying to insert new residents, they were met with immediate hurdles. After a $1.5 million donation to Teach for America, Tony convinced the organization to move its Las Vegas office to the neighborhood. With more than a hundred teachers set to arrive in the

neighborhood, the Downtown Project bought a boxy fifty-unit apartment block known as Towne Terrace to house them. The only problem was that people already lived in the building. After waiting anxiously to learn if they would be evicted from their homes, the residents met with Andrew Donner, who—clearly underestimating the hurdles to evicting tenants—told them that the Downtown Project would extend their leases for another twelve months, and promised to be transparent if anything changed. Tony later told a reporter from the New York Times that he would do better: “We made some bad assumptions. Next time, we’ll dig deeper.”

While Natalie had led her own kitchen several times, she’d never owned a restaurant. After her encounter with Tony at the Downtown Cocktail Room in late 2011, she’d been asked to submit a business proposal to Don Welch, a task that quickly became overwhelming. She had to learn how to set up small business insurance. In fact, she’d need more than one type of insurance: she’d have to obtain general liability, professional liability, business income coverage, and workers’ compensation. She’d need to learn how to balance books and install a phone line. She submitted her proposal seven times, and each time was told to try again. Michael spent days with her at the Beat coaching her on how to refine the plan. On the seventh attempt, she had herself a deal. What Natalie didn’t know was that Tony had a lot riding on her: her restaurant would be his new neighborhood’s first small business investment. Tony agreed to provide $150,000, and a further $75,000 would be contributed by Fred Mossler, Don Welch, Andrew Donner, and Donner’s partner Todd Kessler. The money came with some conditions, which would become the standard offer for other small businesses in the Downtown Project, from tech startups to bars. The capital would be interest- free, and there was the unusual caveat that if the restaurant failed or shuttered, Natalie could walk away from it with no questions asked, nor any obligation to pay back the money. But in exchange, the investors would be entitled to 50 percent of all future profits of the business. Essentially, they

were taking a huge chunk of the potential upside to offset the risk of the downside. Even though Natalie knew little about running a business, the future profits clause seemed like a burden. When she spoke to a business-savvy friend, though, he pointed out that “fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing,” Natalie recalled the friend saying. And after being burned by her previous employer, Natalie was intent on doing her research on Tony. “I went as far back as I could, and I couldn’t find a negative thing about the guy,” she said. The next challenge was finding a location. She didn’t expect to generate enough revenue to be able to afford any of the high rents on Fremont Street, next to the other bars and restaurants. Prices had begun to shoot up amid the buzz that Tony was preparing to splash $200 million buying property in the neighborhood. One searing hot day, Natalie was cooling down in the Beat and lamenting to Michael that there was no way she could start a restaurant nearby on her budget. There was a place she might be able to afford, he told her, but it was a couple of blocks away. Standing on the corner of Seventh Street and East Carson, a block south of Fremont Street, Michael showed her a boarded-up storefront that occupied the corner of a run-down duplex apartment building. The space had been closed for years, and in her time living in the area, she’d never noticed it. Looking around, she saw a Motel 6 directly across the street that charged $30 a night, and not much else. But at $2,000 per month, she could afford it, and so she began work on the neighborhood’s newest restaurant, Eat. A restaurant like Eat, with an eclectic brunch menu and good coffee, was one among dozens of ideas spread out on a wall in Tony’s apartment in the Ogden. Tony and a Zappos employee named Zach Ware, who was helping to organize the transition of the company’s headquarters, began leading tours of downtown that started in Tony’s apartment. Those on the tours were encouraged to scribble their business ideas on multicolored Postit notes that were added to the wall and sorted in a grid. Ideas ranged from an outdoor chess board to a vintage music store, artist/music development, a doughnut shop, a dry cleaner, a beauty salon, a thrift shop, and a restaurant serving raw vegan cuisine.

New arrivals to downtown Vegas came together at a block party organized by Joey Vanas called First Friday, held the first week of every month at a rotating slate of bars, which allowed people to see what the buzz was about. Paul Carr, a journalist with TechCrunch and a contributor to the Huffington Post, agreed to go on a tour around the downtown neighborhood, at Tony’s invitation. “This will be a completely different area in the next five years,” Tony said. “We’re bringing food, live music, an entertainment scene; we’ve even talked about opening a charter school.” Developing the neighborhood was sort of like playing a real-life game of Sim City, Tony added. “From Sin City to Sim City.” He paused. “You know, like adding another little hump on the ‘n.’” During another visit months later, Carr met with Tony at the Downtown Cocktail Room. Carr had just quit his job, and with a glass of Fernet-Branca in hand, Tony asked Carr what he wanted to do: “Like, if you could do anything in the world, professionally, what would it be?” Carr said he’d start a wildly unprofitable print magazine, like The Economist, but with jokes. On the condition that Carr start the business downtown, Tony said, he would fund him. Tony would end up investing around half a million dollars in Carr’s news website, NSFWCorp. Some people even traveled halfway across the world to join Tony’s world. Mark Rowland, a British retail executive who lived in Sydney, first heard of Tony in 2010 when he was researching how to improve the corporate culture of Wagamama restaurant chains, for which he was CEO of the Australian licensee. When he came across Zappos, he’d been so amazed that he decided he was going to start his own company, StyleTread, to essentially be a carbon copy of Zappos, but in Australia. Before he went ahead, he wrote to Tony to inform him of his plan and that he meant no ill will. Tony had responded fifteen minutes later, saying that it was he who was sorry: after eating at Wagamama in the United Kingdom, he’d stolen the idea for his restaurant at 1000 Van Ness that his parents had managed a decade earlier. Now, at the start of 2013, Mark had just sold StyleTread and was looking for his next challenge. Tony suggested he come to Las Vegas and start a mentoring business that could help guide members of the community. The result: a coaching company called ROCeteer—a name that played on the Downtown Project’s “return on community” metric. Neither

man could have imagined that Mark’s venture would become a literal lifeline to some of the neighborhood’s new citizens.

From the start of 2012 until the end of 2013, it felt like businesses were sprouting out of vacant lots or glossing over eyesores every week. Old office buildings were being refurbished to house arriving tech companies and organizations, most of which were funded through an arm of the Downtown Project called the Vegas Tech Fund. Whether at bars or offices, entrepreneurs would go through several rounds of pitching before facing Fred Mossler. Sometimes Tony would sit in the corner, typing away at his computer, seemingly not listening. Among their first investments was a company led by a young entrepreneur named Keller Rinaudo, a recent Harvard graduate who’d been part of a team that developed a tiny, implantable biological computer made of human DNA and RNA, a breakthrough technology that could one day be used to direct therapies to diseased cells or tissues. Rinaudo was lured to downtown Las Vegas to work on his new startup called Romotive, which made toy robots that could be controlled by iPhones. Rinaudo was given $500,000 to build the company, growing it from three to fifteen employees, all of whom lived in the Ogden. Keller said he chose downtown Las Vegas over San Francisco because it was a place where he could truly build his company culture from scratch. “I don’t think there’s a chance there [in San Francisco] of building a tribe of people who love each other, and that’s what we’ve built here,” he told a reporter. Jody Sherman, a frizzy-haired surfer from Santa Monica who’d known Tony for years through the tech industry, had come in late 2011 to see what Tony was building. Standing in Tony’s penthouse apartment in the Ogden, he stared at the Post-it wall of ideas, and then looked out the window overlooking Tony’s neighborhood. “Downtown basically sells itself,” Jody told a reporter about the view from the Ogden. With a $600,000 investment from the Downtown Project, Sherman agreed to move his e-commerce company Ecomom to Vegas in 2012. Jody himself moved into the Ogden, four floors below Tony.

To house companies like Ecomom and Romotive, the Downtown Project acquired three- and four-story office buildings dotted around the area. Most were located several blocks from the central Fremont Street vein, so Tony introduced rules that would force people to intermingle with the community. “Even though there’s plenty of parking inside those office buildings, we’re actually requiring new tenants to park a couple of blocks away, so they have to crisscross the city,” Tony said during a talk at SXSW in 2013. “So we prioritize collisions over convenience.” His host was bewildered. “That’s fascinating,” she said. “You’re playing like, not God, [but] in some way, orchestrating interesting situations.” On the ground, fervor surrounded the Downtown Project’s leader. At any one time, Tony could be followed by an entourage of five or even up to a dozen people. “They’d be talking passionately and trying to pitch their idea to him,” Mike Henry, a former stage manager for SXSW who was hired to manage the Downtown Project’s music events booking, said later. “They’d come closer and then come closer and you’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, it’s gonna happen again.’” Ultimately Tony would introduce his gaggle to Mike and suggest they all talk to him; perhaps there might be some synergies, or things they could work on together. “And then Tony would bolt and you would just inherit these fucking people,” Mike recalled. (After such interactions, Mike typically walked the group to a bar, where he made his own exit.) Just as Tony had envisioned, a tech community was emerging from the desert floor. To ensure that it lasted, he would need a pool of talent to pull from. Silicon Valley had Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Cal Poly students, who were ripe for picking for the tech workforce. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, meanwhile, did not have the same strengths in innovation or science, so Tony struck an agreement with an organization called Venture for America and donated $1 million to the organization. The brainchild of entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who would later run unsuccessful bids for U.S. president and mayor of New York City, the organization was similar to the concept behind Teach for America by pairing college students and recent graduates with startup businesses based in lower-tier cities around the country, like Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Baltimore—and now downtown Las Vegas.

Among the first class of students who arrived in 2012 was a bright-eyed twenty-three-year-old named Ovik Banerjee, who had just graduated at the top of his class from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ovik had studied environmental science and biology, but he was also tugged by an entrepreneurial streak. Weeks before his arrival he wrote with measured enthusiasm about joining a societal experiment unlike any other. “The path will not be easy. Urban revitalization is not a formula that can always be solved with money, endorsement and enthusiasm,” he said in a blog post. “Cities are complex, and the Downtown Project may leave Vegas where it started, or even worse. But it is an incredible experiment in urbanism, and I for one am excited to be a part of it.”

Last, to bind the neighborhood together, Tony would need art, and lots of it. Mimi, who had been managing some of the Downtown Project’s rollout, was assigned to strike an agreement with the Burning Man festival to import art sculptures and the iconic “mutant vehicles”—ranging from alien spaceships to beat-up cars on which were poised frightening creatures—to be displayed around the neighborhood like an outdoor gallery. It would also be an opportunity to intertwine some of the philosophies behind the festival with the neighborhood, like radical self-expression and civic responsibility. “Tony asked them to submit anything from small projects to large projects,” Mimi told a reporter. “But he likes fire.” Perhaps the most impressive arrival was a rusted praying mantis with bulging eyes that glowed a neon green at night and could shoot jets of fire from its antennae. “It is not about, ‘Let’s try to make downtown Vegas a mini Burning Man,’” Hsieh said at the time. “It is really about combining all these different perspectives … that can help build a unique community for downtown Las Vegas.” As more citizens flooded in, buildings that were once to be avoided at all costs were now go-to spots. No longer was the Gold Spike a place to drive past and ignore. After buying the Gold Spike, the Downtown Project bought a neighboring business, the Oasis Motel, and combined the buildings into a single place connected around a swimming pool. Tony wanted to make the building one of the main nerve centers of the Downtown Project—a place where people could get work done and then

stay for drinks as the day turned into night. They tore out the slot machines, banned smoking, and upgraded the Wi-Fi. Now oversized games like chess and Jenga filled the former gaming floor. And if the Downtown Project was going to be a place where big ideas were driving its mission, then it would need to host a perpetual roster of big-thinking speakers—in essence, a place to hold TED Talk–style events. So they partnered with Michael Cornthwaite and purchased a shuttered convenience store next to the Downtown Cocktail Room, which they turned into a three-story building that housed a 150-seat theater complex, complete with a rooftop bar, a cocktail lounge, and a cafe. It would be called the Inspire Theater. When Natalie opened her restaurant in May 2012, a few months after Tony and Fred had announced the launch of the Downtown Project, she was all too cognizant of the opportunity that Tony’s generosity had afforded her. No one had ever invested in her like this before, let alone a stranger, and she was determined to show that she was deserving of the opportunity. She paid herself $66 per day, which she calculated was enough to cover her rent, food for herself, and food for her dogs. She forwent everything she deemed nonessential: car insurance, health insurance, cable TV. “It was very important for me to get his money back,” she said later. She paid back her loan in a year and three months. Almost immediately she saw that her hard work was going to pay dividends. Her restaurant was becoming a central place drawing people into a previously darkened corner of Las Vegas, and it was only getting brighter. Two months before she opened, the Downtown Project announced that it had bought the Motel 6 across the street and planned to demolish it. In its place would be an open-air shopping center built with shipping containers, with boutique retail shops, funky restaurants and bars, and a children’s playground. Welcoming people to the Container Park, as it would be called, would be the giant praying mantis, shooting flames fifty feet above the ground from its antennae.

CHAPTER 11

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Opening a Las Vegas casino in the twenty-first century requires a lot of money, but arguably less creativity than it did decades before. Unlike the elaborate themed resorts built in the 1990s, like the Luxor or Paris, which lured visitors with a sense of wonderment, newer casinos sought to create buzz by rolling out a calendar full of live events and performances with the biggest artists in the world. When the Cosmopolitan opened in December 2010, with its two glass towers that would look at home in Manhattan, its talent schedule was unrivaled in Las Vegas, perhaps even the world. In its first eighteen months, dozens of headliners, most of whom were used to selling out stadiums—Jay-Z, Coldplay, Florence + The Machine, Adele, and Mumford and Sons—played in the resort’s various bars and clubs. Deadmau5 played his first Las Vegas concerts there. With the Cosmopolitan’s checkbook, Rehan Choudhry had perhaps one of the most envied talent booking roles in America. Most of his nights would end with strobe lights and the thumping bass line of another musician he had booked. His life in Vegas felt far removed from his childhood in Virginia, which had in some ways been limiting: the son of Pakistani parents, he often dealt with the tensions of growing up in a firstgeneration immigrant family. After college, and a few other roles, he landed at Caesars Entertainment in Atlantic City, booking celebrity chefs for its casinos there. Shortly after, the Cosmopolitan had poached him to lead their opening. The thirty-year-old was now a regular fixture at most big Las Vegas events, with what felt like the keys to Sin City. But amid the glitz of being the go-to guy at the Strip’s clubs, there was one thing Rehan dreamed about: his own music festival. So in early 2012,

when the Cosmopolitan decided it had spent enough, Rehan decided it was time to strike out on his own. What he had in mind was a small festival somewhere in Vegas that would combine music, keynote speakers, and high-end food offerings. Rehan was always throwing ideas around with Ryan Doherty, a close friend who co-owned a media and publishing company in Las Vegas. Ryan, a creative with an extraordinary attention to detail, had seen opportunity in the Tony Hsieh buzz happening downtown and was currently opening a couple of bars in the area, Commonwealth and Park on Fremont, independent of the Downtown Project. Rehan had first met Ryan and his business partner, Justin Weniger, when they were working with the Cosmopolitan to help promote its launch, and they featured him in one of their magazines, Vegas Seven. Ryan and Justin had started a flyer printing business in the days before social media and had since built a company called Wendoh Media, a play on their last names, which included a video production unit, multiple magazines and websites, and a marketing agency. While Justin was more of a friendly acquaintance, Rehan and Ryan were often seen together around town. “I was very new to the city, so Ryan became a friend early on,” Rehan said later. “We just became buddies. We went to shows together, we went to dinner together.” As Ryan listened to Rehan’s festival idea, he thought the best person for Rehan to speak to was the new neighborhood patriarch, Tony Hsieh. As it happened, Rehan had been trying to broker a meeting with Tony. Like some who entered Tony’s orbit, Rehan didn’t know much about him, but he was aware that Tony was the rich guy throwing money around downtown. Through a mutual contact, Rehan was told to come to the Zappos all-hands meeting in June 2012, which was being held at the recently opened Smith Center for the Performing Arts. Outside, Rehan was introduced to Tony, and he stammered his way through a thirty-second elevator pitch: to bring a music festival to the Downtown area that “celebrates the beauty and love and hope in the world.” Tony stared ahead and made no eye contact, nodding a couple of times. It reminded Rehan of the times he’d spoken to disinterested celebrity musicians—“like talking to a wall that wanted nothing to do with me.”

But as Rehan mulled his insecurities, Tony was absorbing the pitch like a sponge. A music festival was exactly what he’d been looking for. Though he’d spent plenty of time with reporters, talking about his zany ideas about how collisions could transform a neighborhood, no amount of press coverage could draw tens of thousands of people to the downtown area like a music festival. Just as he had seen the several hundred people being shuttled from venue to venue in the Red Bull party bus during Neon Reverb, he could fill the city blocks with people and music and lights and art. During several meetings with Fred Mossler and Don Welch at the Downtown Cocktail Room, which had since become the de facto headquarters of the Downtown Project, Rehan laid out his idea to take over six city blocks of downtown. Joey Vanas, who had been running the monthly block party First Friday, was brought in to provide further feedback. Rehan envisioned a stage for live performances, alongside keynote speakers like Bill Clinton and Jay-Z. There would be an area to screen art-house films, and a “village” where some of the best chefs in the world would be flown in to provide fine dining. Poets would read their work on the street, as surprise fashion shows popped up seemingly out of nowhere. All this would come together under the festival name: Life Is Beautiful. In the kitchen of Tony’s sprawling Ogden apartment, Rehan made his final pitch to Tony, Fred, Joey, Don, and Michael Cornthwaite. As a bestcase scenario, he calculated that after ticket sales and expenses, the festival would lose around $600,000 in its first year, and become profitable the following year. His presentation concluded with a touch of highmindedness: “The downtown Las Vegas community has the opportunity to achieve whatever their minds can dream for the future.” Tony didn’t say much. Rehan was then asked to leave. Sitting in a pizza shop at the Plaza Hotel an hour later, Rehan got a call from Don, saying he and Fred were looking for him. When they arrived, Fred informed him that the festival had been greenlit. He’d be given $1.5 million; in a structure similar to Natalie’s restaurant agreement, Tony and the Downtown Project would put up 100 percent of the cash for 50 percent equity in the company. It would also be entitled to 50 percent of future profits, and any other future investors would first need to be approved by

Tony and the Downtown Project. In addition, Joey Vanas would come on as a co-founder, and be given a minority stake in the company. As the cofounder and CEO of the festival, Rehan’s salary would start modestly, at $60,000 a year. And if it all failed, Rehan could walk away, no questions asked. While he digested the terms of the agreement, he considered the fact that he was, after all, being given an opportunity beyond his wildest dreams. He had booked big names for events, and done concerts, but never led his own festival. Fred told Rehan that there was an all-hands meeting happening for the Downtown Project, at the Plaza Hotel, right now, and Tony wanted him to announce the festival in a few minutes. “I just became a part of the family,” Rehan recalled. Minutes after his speech in front of the Downtown Project employees, Joey grabbed him and led him to a table to meet more people. One of them, Joey commented on the way over, was Mimi, who, Joey warned, would not like him: Rehan was yet another person to enter Tony’s orbit without her approval. This warning was confusing to Rehan. Once he sat down with her, he found that “she was polite, but clearly not enthusiastic about meeting me.” When the festival was announced in November 2012, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a front-page story quoting Rehan, and from then on he became the face of the festival. He was talking to reporters from Entrepreneur and NBC. Ryan and Justin put him on the front cover of Vegas Seven. “I had the mayor on speed dial. I could get permits approved, deals done with 48 hours’ notice,” he said. “I was invited to every major charity gala, every major event … There’s a lot of social clout that came with it.” To put it subtly, Rehan’s ego had become enlarged. Mike Henry recalled that during his job interview to do music booking for Downtown Project events, Tony was showing him around the neighborhood when they bumped into Rehan, and Tony suggested the two men chat over their mutual interests in bringing shows to town. As Rehan looked at him with what felt to Mike like contempt, Mike thought, “I will never fucking hear from this guy. Not once. No way. And I didn’t either.” During one press interview, Rehan had talked about the marvel of the existing music scene in the neighborhood—namely, the Neon Reverb

festival. But when James Woodbridge’s team contacted Rehan with an idea to launch a stage for local bands under the Neon Reverb name, or program some shows at local bars, they were met with radio silence. Several more requests were made, and none of them got any response. “A reply of some sort would have been nice to prevent the impression of just being completely blown off,” James said later. Another slighted Neon Reverb musician put it more bluntly: “I took it very personally that the work that had been done organically by locals to build the Neon Reverb festival was ignored in favor of, you know, giving millions and millions of dollars to a douchebag like Rehan Choudhry to basically do a terrible, awful version.” Little of the naysaying mattered to Rehan: he’d made one pitch, one time, to one organization and, just like that, had been given more than a million dollars to launch a multiday music festival with the biggest musicians in the world. He could not help but feel awestruck by the power Tony had granted him. Rehan found himself among a swirling group of people who were enamored of Tony’s presence. He was spending time with celebrities as Tony pushed further into the realm of pop culture icon. The model Amber Valletta came by one day to meet Tony. Ashton Kutcher stopped by another time. Richard Branson did multiple tours of the neighborhood. One time, Rehan was standing in a VIP section at Coachella with Tony and Kimbal Musk, when Elon Musk walked over and put his arms around them, grinning. Anything felt possible. “We drank the KoolAid. We changed all of our social media feeds to promote our relationship with him,” Rehan said later. “We had gained press associated with him, we gained awareness associated with him, we were meeting people through him that we would never have met before.” Rather quickly, Rehan was wielding significant social capital within the community as the head of the Downtown Project’s biggest marketing exercise. He soon learned that holding such a role meant that his responsibilities extended far beyond just spearheading Life Is Beautiful. He was being thrust into situations in which he had no experience, like weighing in on business ideas or helping with recruiting. “All of a sudden, I was in meetings for things that I had nothing to do with,” he said. “I was being asked to vet people that I had no business vetting, or didn’t really understand the context for.”

One day, a young woman named Aimee Groth showed up at his door. Tony had sent her there to learn from him, but Rehan took that to mean she was there to be vetted. She had just moved to Downtown to launch her own project: a book that was to document life in the Downtown Project. She’d been convinced to move into the neighborhood after a chance meeting with Tony in 2012. Aimee had been a senior editor at Business Insider when she met Tony at a Venture for America gala in New York. Later at a Manhattan nightclub, he turned to her and asked, “If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”

The Life Is Beautiful festival would also help to reinforce another message about Tony’s social experiment: it was a constant party. Part of what bonded the neighborhood together was the seemingly never-ending cycle of social events and the blurred lines between work and the rest of life. The common denominator was the presence of alcohol, and as the man at the center of the village, Tony’s alcohol intake rose alongside his increasing fame. Tony had recently expanded his Delivering Happiness brand and launched a company of the same name with Jenn Lim, with the goal of providing Zappos-style human resources and leadership training to other corporations and businesses looking to improve employee satisfaction. In one video interview, done in London in 2012 to discuss the new venture, Tony deferred to Jenn whenever the interviewer asked questions. While she answered, Tony took hold of a bottle of vodka and poured generously into three glasses. “An actual video of Tony Hsieh pouring me a vodka,” the interviewer says. “This is quite gangster, I’ve got to say.” In the first years of the Downtown Project, the company had no corporate office. Instead workers were encouraged to meet and work at the various bars in the neighborhood, like the Gold Spike or Michael’s Downtown Cocktail Room. Another venue that became a fixture was Parlour Bar, an unappealing black-walled space on the gaming floor of the El Cortez. Kenny Epstein, a longtime Vegas casino figure who owned the El Cortez, recalled how Tony would come into his casino, almost without fail, around 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and slump down in a bench seat in a corner of the bar. A half hour later, another half dozen people

would come in, either groups from Zappos and the Downtown Project or new arrivals pitching business, and slide into the bench seats around two knee-high tables. It was hardly a suitable work space, but with a constant stream of liquor, the group would sit around, their faces illuminated by the screens of their MacBooks, while the ring-ding of the gaming floor floated in. After three or four hours, they would leave and their evening would begin. Unlike many of his newer colleagues, Tony’s older friends noticed the increasing role of alcohol in his life. Jon Greenman, his former Harvard roommate, came to see Tony multiple times in Las Vegas. Whether at the Bellagio for dinner or at a house party, Tony would order round after round of shots. It was certainly a different Tony from his days in Harvard, but it also didn’t seem problematic to Jon. Tony’s drinking never became a cause for alarm for Jon because, by all appearances, Tony simply held his alcohol well, and his day-to-day output never seemed to be impaired. He didn’t become belligerent, violent, or overly happy. Ying Liu also noticed a difference from their days at NYU. It had been nearly two decades since she and Tony explored New York as college students, when she’d been touched by Tony’s curiosity about her. They had been in and out of contact over the years, and she visited him in Las Vegas on two occasions. On the first visit, she was initially put off by the fact that she needed to schedule time with him through an assistant. When she and her family showed up for their appointment, what she thought would be a catch-up breakfast with Tony ended up being a group tour of the Downtown Project. “I’m sorry,” he said to Ying after he finished leading the tour. “I just couldn’t find the time. Are you guys going to stay longer?” They chatted for a few minutes, but he seemed preoccupied. Ying complained about his new attitude to Alex Hsu, the fellow NYU classmate and childhood friend of Tony’s who was also visiting Las Vegas that weekend. “He is not the same Tony anymore,” Alex reasoned. “He’s an influential leader now. What did you expect?” On her second visit, however, she decided to leave the family at home, and instead she came to Las Vegas with her girlfriends. On this visit, Tony made time for her. Per an itinerary sent by his assistant, she was instructed to meet Tony in the afternoon at a bar in downtown Vegas. “The schedule said, ‘Drink with Tony,’” she recalled. Tony had already been at the bar for

hours when she and her girlfriends arrived, and he was surrounded by people. “I still don’t drink,” she said. “And he was already heavy with alcohol.” Tony then took Ying and her girlfriends to his favorite Chinese restaurant in downtown Vegas. He asked Ying if she might serve him a chicken drumstick—just like college, she thought. It was a glimpse of the old Tony, the one she would mother and serve food to from Chinese takeout boxes during her NYU days. Later that evening, Tony invited Ying and her girlfriends to an outdoor event space where members of the Downtown Project often gathered around a fire. At one point, Tony turned to Ying with a playful look. “Do you still think women screaming during sex is because they are in pain?” Ying rolled her eyes. But the fond reminiscence didn’t last long. Ying watched as Tony offered each person sitting around a campfire a tiny bottle of Fernet-Branca —one of the defining factors of every visit to the Downtown neighborhood. An Italian herbaceous digestif typically consumed in small amounts after a meal, Tony had adopted the drink as his signature. Visitors like Ivanka Trump would recall drinking Fernet with Tony. While he provided several explanations for his love of the obscure drink, another reason he gave to a friend was that it allowed him to create a new experience for everyone who did it with him. “He said that you could have a lot of it and you won’t have that hangover effect,” Ying recalled. As the night continued, Tony was surrounded by others, and Ying again found it difficult to have a conversation of substance. As the evening slowed down, Tony came over, put his arm around Ying, and asked her how she was doing. It was one of few moments Tony and Ying had been alone, and it could have been a good time to chat—but she didn’t quite know where to start. She mumbled a response and they stood in silence, staring at the campfire. “I just felt guarded because he was not Tony anymore,” she later said. “He wasn’t the same.”

Drug use also factored into the routine of events, festivals, and nights out. In her book The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia, published years later, Aimee Groth recalled taking MDMA at

several events alongside friends and people in Tony’s orbit. Tony himself refused to discuss his relationship to drugs publicly—he told Aimee, “I stay away from talking about religion, politics, or drugs in general because those topics are very polarizing, and people have already made up their minds on what side of the issues they want to be on.” In an interview with Playboy magazine, he said, “My hesitation in answering questions like these is that there’s a perception that you need to do drugs in order to have certain experiences. People have a visceral reaction to that idea, so I don’t like to state a preference one way or the other.” The constant drinking and partying was something that Rehan, who had been around the club scene for years, had recognized as an element of the culture of the Downtown Project: alcohol would factor into almost every situation. He could remember meetings ending at 11 a.m. with Tony offering everyone a round of Fernet. Because of the flow of people and meetings, Tony was rarely surrounded by the same group of people for more than a couple of hours. “Nobody could ever really get a sense of how much he was drinking at any given moment,” Rehan said. One morning after an event to announce the lineup for the Life Is Beautiful festival, Rehan was supremely hung over and went for a walk with Tony. He turned to Tony and asked how he kept up with drinking so much. “At some point along the way, I stopped getting hangovers, so I wake up in the morning feeling fine,” Tony replied. “I think that that may be the first sign of being an alcoholic.”

As the party of the Downtown Project rolled on, the neighborhood’s inaugural festival was approaching. Rehan had managed to secure hometown superstars the Killers to headline Life Is Beautiful. Other international acts included the Kings of Leon, Beck, and Imagine Dragons. Fine-dining restaurants were slated to open pop-up stalls at the festival, providing a culinary experience that departed far from the fast food offered at most events. But the contracts were still being negotiated with musicians when several other festivals across the country announced that they were being canceled, citing financial issues. As a result, talent agencies like William

Morris Endeavor, which represented the Killers, began demanding 50 percent up-front payments, as opposed to the typical 10 percent deposit, according to Rehan. Life Is Beautiful would also need to guarantee that 100 percent of the money would be paid, even if the festival did not go ahead. What this meant was that Tony and the Downtown Project would need to pour in an additional $2 million. Rehan’s request for money immediately ricocheted around the Downtown Project. Several people wondered whether they had made the wrong decision by choosing him to lead the festival. Tony, looking around his leadership, decided that he needed someone who could inspect the finances, so he appointed Andrew Donner to consult for the business before joining as a partner. Andrew offered Rehan $1 million to buy out his equity in the festival and to step down from his management role. “I was still very much good friends with Tony,” Rehan said. “I was very much one of the leaders of Downtown Project’s social structure, and had a good amount of influence in the organization.” Rehan turned down the offer and felt reassured about his decision when Fred pulled him aside during a trip to New York. He and Tony valued people who didn’t try to make a quick buck, Fred said. “It shows that you’re with us and shows your faith in us.” (Fred said he didn’t recall the conversation.) On October 26, around thirty thousand people descended on the festival grounds. The two parking lots that separated the Ogden and the Zappos headquarters were now the main stage. The festival spanned more than a dozen blocks along Fremont Street; one section was covered in grass. Popup art installations lined the streets, new street art was covering the walls of old buildings, and fine-dining restaurants like Nobu had their own storefronts. Now that the streets were filled with festivalgoers, it was exactly what Tony had imagined his neighborhood would look like at its most vibrant. “Tony was really excited,” Joey recalled. “It was something that was really important to him.” The greatest power of the event, Joey realized, was that it exhibited the neighborhood to its highest and best potential. For the first time in half a century, downtown Las Vegas was teeming with life again. Unlike the megafestivals Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival, where more than a hundred thousand people would squirm through jam-packed mosh pits or wait an hour in line for the bathroom, the first year of Life Is

Beautiful felt like revelers were being offered all the perks of a music and arts festival without any of the usual downsides. There were barely lines for food, drinks, and bathrooms, and because it was held in an urban center, there was plenty of space for car parking. “It was magic,” Joey said later. “You’re eating Nobu, watching Kings of Leon … As you’re laying out in the grass, you have five feet around you of space.” On the second and final day of the festival, strong winds swept through the grounds. The day before, a beam at the main entrance gate had fallen down. The organizers lowered the stage towers and shut down a Ferris wheel. But the bands and DJs played on. Not long after the Killers finished their closing set and the last revelers trickled out, Joey walked around the festival grounds. The winds were still blowing trash around. On his walk home, he sent Tony a text: “On a scale of one to 10 how happy are you right now?” Tony replied: “11.”

CHAPTER 12

THE DARWINIAN PERSPECTIVE

Much as new business partners like Rehan felt like they were on cloud nine once they’d entered Tony’s inner orbit, the experience for the women in his life was similarly intoxicating. But Michelle D’Attilio was going to learn that loving Tony came with a big caveat. At thirty-nine, with two preteen kids from a previous marriage, she was around the same age as Tony when they met in April 2013. He was visiting Milwaukee for a speaking engagement at an entrepreneurship event. At the time, she ran a social media marketing firm called Sosh and was also in a committed relationship. When her company was hired to promote the entrepreneurship event, Michelle offered to do it for free as long as she could get time with the Zappos leadership team in exchange. She had been shopping on Zappos for years, and she wanted to land them as a client. Michelle soon got a text from one of the organizers of the event. “The Zappos crew is here,” he said, “it’s Friday night, and they are getting drinks at the Iron Horse Hotel before going out.” So Michelle, wearing a cocktail dress that complemented her jet-black hair and piercing green eyes, joined the Milwaukee welcoming committee and met Tony, Fred Mossler, and Andrew Donner. Initially, the plan was to go to a posh lounge at the top of a twenty-three-story building that had panoramic views of the city and Lake Michigan. “I took one look at these guys and said, ‘No. This is a group of people who have been all around the world. They’ve already been to all of the nicest bars.’” Instead of taking them to the best and fanciest that Milwaukee had to offer, Michelle announced she would be taking them to Victor’s, a bar with a dance floor that was all neon and leather. En route in a party bus, the group was bopping to classics when a song came on and

someone asked who the artist was. Tony immediately answered that it was Kylie Minogue, and Michelle laughed and poked fun at him for knowing who she was. At the bar, the group danced all night to songs from the nineties. Hours later at closing time, the bar served frozen pizzas. Michelle sensed Tony’s comfort with her. He texted her after he gave his talk, asking where she was. During a dinner that weekend, Michelle had to leave early as she had told her kids she would be home by ten that night, and Tony offered to walk her out, suggesting he wanted a cigarette, anyway. They exchanged emails over the next few months. Michelle was growing her business and was eager for advice from the Tony Hsieh. He invited her to a conference in August in downtown Vegas. Known as Catalyst Week, and billed as “more affordable and less exclusive than TED Conferences,” the four-day event series included talks, tours of Zappos and the Downtown Project, and networking events for entrepreneurs. As Tony’s guest, she stayed at a unit in the Ogden. Shortly after she arrived, she met Tony at his penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Ogden. After a few pleasantries they walked out of the apartment and waited for the elevator. “I’m a small-town Wisconsin girl, standing here with this extremely successful human, and I’m feeling nervous,” she said. But as she darted a glance at Tony, she saw that he was keeping his eyes on his phone. He started pacing sheepishly around the elevator bank. Eventually, at the mercy of a slow elevator, he started walking in circles around her. She realized he was nervous too. “It was really endearing to see this human who had so much success still be nervous or anxious,” she later recalled. That day, he took her on a tour around downtown, showing her his favorite Vegas haunts. They talked about their shared love for junk food. They agreed that chicken tenders with light breading were superior; she preferred a thicker patty in a cheeseburger, while he liked it thinner. They also realized that they both had social anxiety and needed solitude to recharge. Years later, when they were together and needed to get away from crowds or noise, they took long walks without saying a single word. Afterward, Tony would say to her, “Nice talk.” The morning after their tour around downtown, Michelle woke up early to go for a run around the neighborhood. She had mentioned to Tony the day before that it was part of her routine to go on a jog and wake herself up.

When she entered the lobby downstairs, a security guard was waiting to join her on the run. Though Downtown Project–powered gentrification was crawling across the neighborhood, parts of it were still unsafe, and Tony wanted her to run with a security detail. They stayed in touch over the next year. She attended several more Catalyst Weeks, and their friendship grew. But had she ever considered romance? Well, there was one thing that made her pause.

One of Tony’s favorite books was The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Published in 2005 by journalist Neil Strauss, the book describes a series of social techniques used by so-called pickup artists to seduce women. With chapter titles such as “Select a Target,” “Isolate the Target,” and “Blast Last-Minute Resistance,” the book lays out a misogynistic road map for supposedly training awkward, insecure men to seduce beautiful women, while also pushing the idea that women are simply inconsequential compared to the whims of men. Despite Strauss’s later conclusion that a life solely focused on chasing women was “empty” and “for losers,” the book was a bestseller and became a bible for men in need of a confidence boost. For someone who often felt challenged by social engagements and would sometimes make those around him uncomfortable with his shyness, Tony saw techniques in the book that could offer instruction on how to manipulate social settings for certain outcomes, not unlike the enchanting question he had posed to Aimee Groth—“If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”—that ultimately convinced her to move to the downtown neighborhood. Aimee, who spent five years coming and going from the neighborhood, staying on couches or renting one of the Downtown Project’s apartments, concluded in her book that by issuing invitations that contained lofty ideals, Tony had used techniques from The Game and the pickup artist community to convince her and others to come to the neighborhood. In an interview with Playboy, Tony acknowledged as much, and said that his interest in the theories generated by the pickup community had partly inspired his thinking about how the Downtown Project was created.

“I remember hearing that if you’re going on a date with a girl, the best thing to do is change locations every half hour or hour and do something different,” he explained. “Basically, at the end, if you’ve gone to seven different locations, it will have the same effect on memory as going on seven dates in single locations.” The whole point of compressing memory, and seemingly time, in this way is to seduce a girl faster. “But that technique has other applications as well,” he said. “It’s part of what I’m trying to do with Downtown Project. When people come visit us we basically hop from location to location to location, so even though they’ve been here only two or three nights, it will seem as though they’ve been here two weeks. It’ll have a big impact on their memory. Humans remember things in terms of geography and number of stories. I want a city where all this stuff is within walking distance so you can have a bunch of different experiences.” But given how literally he interpreted the social engineering tools in Strauss’s The Game, surely he had used them in his sex life. The Playboy reporter pointed out that he was forty and single. What were his thoughts about monogamy? Well, from a Darwinian perspective, Tony responded, a monogamous guy would have fewer copies of his genes in the next generation than a guy who wasn’t. “I think it’s pretty hard to find one partner and call it a day,” he went on. “Using the analogy of friends, why not find just one friend and call it a day? The answer is because you get a different type of connection, different conversations, different experiences with different friends. I would say the same thing is true on the dating side.” It was something Tony had no qualms talking about both publicly and privately. Sometimes at events—it could be a Zappos holiday party or a conference—there would be two, three, four women who were there as his dates. Sometimes women would arrive and Tony would introduce them to the other women. Often it seemed like Tony was engaged in some type of game, and as young women flooded into the neighborhood, many of them tried to get close to him. He dated people from Zappos, people from the Downtown Project, and others who orbited the community. One girlfriend was Rachael Brown, who had joined Zappos in 2004 as a temporary worker in the call center before she was promoted to train new customer service hires. At some point Tony had taken a liking to her and promoted her to teach Zappos

culture to all new hires, and by 2010 she was overseeing production of the company’s famous quarterly all-hands meetings. It was also around this time that she and Tony started dating. While they eventually went their separate ways, and Rachael ended up leaving Zappos to turn her attention to her new career as a cellist in Las Vegas, she would reenter Tony’s life years later. To outsiders, it may have raised eyebrows for the CEO of a company to engage in a relationship with a subordinate. Certainly, as cultural views on workplace behavior sharpened in the wake of the #MeToo movement, such relationships might have attracted further scrutiny years later. But to those inside the community at the time, the fact that Tony dated employees and was expressly open about being polyamorous seemed to allow most to overlook any questions they had. This arrangement also existed in a community he was building where the traditional boundaries of work, life, and play were essentially nonexistent; people worked in the same offices, lived in the same apartment buildings, and drank at the same bars. While polyamory was a consistent thread in Tony’s romantic life, the outcomes often differed. Suzie Baleson, a former high school cheerleader who grew up in a bayside town on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, was in her late twenties when she met Tony in 2012. She had spent the better part of a decade working as a tax consultant for Deloitte and the global professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal when a mutual friend introduced her to Andrew Donner, who was looking to hire someone to help on the financial side of his real estate company, Resort Gaming Group. Andrew, who now oversaw most of the Downtown Project’s real estate deals, was joined by Tony for a trip to New York where they met with Suzie for an interview. She joined Andrew’s firm, then moved into the Ogden and was sucked into the local community. She also spent more time with Tony, and before long she was hopping on airplanes, visiting places around the country with him, and going to Las Vegas Knights games. “When you are his plus-one to something, people literally felt like they were the chosen one,” Suzie recalled. “He made me feel special all the time.” Like Rachael, she also maintained a friendship with Tony over the years before playing a significant role in his life later on. The setup worked for some women, but not for others. Antonia Dodge, the Zappos contractor who had been quoted by the New York Times

discussing Tony’s social phobias, first met Tony in the summer of 2010 when she was hired by Zappos to assess the personalities of a small team within the company. As part of Zappos Insights, the team held in-person workshops for C-suite-level executives from other companies who wanted to learn more about how Zappos built its culture. Antonia was brought in to understand what every team member’s blind spots were in order to effectively train the high-ranking executives who were coming through their workshops. While she acted as a consultant for Zappos, she was also asked to assess Tony. Though it was unclear to her whom that directive came from, one thing was clear—it was not something that he had requested for himself. “He barely answered” her questions, Antonia later recalled. “He could not have been more uncomfortable about being personality-profiled by a stranger.” As she started asking her usual round of questions—What is your relationship to alone time? What is your relationship to deadlines or schedules?—she watched as Tony slowly started to physically turn into himself like a roly-poly bug as he pulled his knees to his chest and cradled his head with his own arms. Eventually she cut the session short. “I think he might have been one of the top five most uncomfortable people in a profiling session.” The next week, Antonia was at a party with other Zapponians at Tony’s house in Southern Highlands. When she approached Tony, bracing herself for yet another awkward conversation, she found a man entirely different from the one she had profiled during her evaluation. Instead she met Tony the host. He started giving her a tour of the house and introduced her to other guests. It was a different side of Tony, and one that she was drawn to when they became friends shortly after. As she got deeper into the Zappos circle, she understood that Tony had at least two girlfriends at the time, one of whom was Rachael Brown. A few months after her work with Zappos had ended, Tony asked Antonia if she would join him at a Halloween golf tournament that the company hosted every year for vendors. Still in her early thirties, and having had friends who were in polyamorous communities, she found herself intrigued. When she arrived, she quickly realized that she was not his only date to the event. There were five other, much younger women surrounding him, dressed in Halloween costumes. “I showed up as part of a

little harem,” she said. “It was essentially as many women as you could fit into a golf cart.” Antonia, with a set of serious green-yellow eyes and signature streaks of white hair, found herself the odd woman out. “All the other girls were dressed up as the sexy version of whatever they were dressed up as. And I never dress up as the sexy version of anything. So I think he wanted eye candy, and then he wanted conversation. I suspect I was the conversation.” As the golf tournament progressed, Tony and Antonia got into a heated discussion about romantic relationships. She shared with him and the rest of the women that in order for her to be in a relationship with a partner, she needed him to be an equal in terms of success and ambition. “I don’t agree with that,” quipped one of the younger women in the group. “I don’t agree with it either,” Tony said. Of course you don’t, Antonia thought as she glanced at the swarm around Tony. By the end of the tournament, Antonia found herself laughing about the absurdity of the day. But Tony texted again a few weeks later, this time inviting her to a Zappos holiday party. Why not? she thought. When she arrived at Tony’s house in Southern Highlands, in jeans and a shirt, she expected to be greeted by yet another group of women. But it was just Tony. As they rode in the car together, Antonia found him disengaged, choosing to pay attention to his BlackBerry instead of conversing with her. She ended up chatting with the driver in order to pass the time. When they arrived at the location, she realized it was a house. In fact, it was an intimate, swanky party of senior-level Zappos employees at Fred Mossler’s home. Oh, okay, she thought. I guess this is a date. As she tried to make conversation with Tony throughout the night, however, he continued to either ignore her or feign disinterest. Antonia thought about Tony’s study of the pickup artist community. “That night, I couldn’t tell whether he legitimately found me incredibly boring or if he was running [The Game],” she said. “But either way, I was being strategically ignored.” According to the rules of pickup artists, ignoring a person was supposed to enhance attraction. Later on that night, Tony suggested that Antonia should date another party attendee she had just met. Again, Antonia wondered, Is The Game being run? “It was a weird

night,” Antonia later recalled. “It was probably the last time I really ever hung out with him.”

In September 2014, Michelle’s long-term boyfriend broke up with her on her birthday. “He basically walked out on me,” she said. After hearing what happened, Tony had an idea. “Come to Hawaii with me,” he said to Michelle. “What are you talking about?” she laughed. The plan was to go to Honolulu to celebrate a friend’s fiftieth-birthday party for a few days, and then go to Atlanta for the electronic dance music festival TomorrowWorld. Along with Fred, they were going to do some research for Life Is Beautiful. Michelle was eager to take her mind off her breakup, and Tony said he’d cover the costs—so she said yes. From the start of the trip, Tony’s antics were on full display, endearing him more and more to Michelle. On the flight over, Tony started pulling several power cords out of his backpack. He shared that he always brought them traveling because it was the best way to strike up a conversation with strangers at an airport, where people were often looking for an outlet. In the process of pulling out the cords to show her, he dropped his phone, which led to a chaotic scene of Tony pulling off all the cushions in search of his mobile while Michelle watched, laughing. As they sat in first class—Tony had since abandoned his habit of flying budget airline Southwest—they shared headphones connected to an iPod and danced in their seats for most of the six-hour flight. She remembered how she could not stop laughing. “This silly, magical, fun side of Tony was the reason that people fell in love with him,” she said. “Not necessarily romantic love. I mean the human who could create fun out of any little thing.” Soon after, Tony invited Michelle again to Hawaii. Until this point, their relationship had been platonic. Michelle had never felt pressure from Tony, but she wondered whether his feelings were warming. Maybe he had been courting her since they met eighteen months before. All these thoughts, she realized, were emerging because she was starting to develop romantic feelings for Tony. “It was a gradual build,” she said. “When you have two

people who have social anxiety, putting yourself out there is a little frightening.” They discussed what they looked for in a partner, and their futures. Tony was steadfast in his views around polyamory. Michelle craved the stability and comfort of monogamy. But, she found comfort in Tony, and she was having fun. The only pressure she felt from Tony was whether she had the bandwidth to jet-set with him around the world. There was one element of Tony’s polyamory that suited her: radical honesty and transparency. For example, if Tony was spending time with another woman, he would never hide it. Though Michelle knew that at the end of the day she wanted a partner who was committed only to her, she found herself opening up to the idea of dating Tony. She understood they would most likely never marry. But if she could date Tony while continuing to date others, she saw no harm in adding herself to his growing group of lovers. The next month, ahead of his birthday, Tony flew Michelle to Las Vegas. She was known for her meatball recipe, and that night it was on the menu for the few dozen people gathered for Tony’s birthday dinner. Looking around, she found herself welcome in Tony’s community with open arms. “I have always struggled with the feeling of home,” Michelle said. Later that night, Tony and Michelle kissed. Seemingly overnight, Michelle found a part of her life revolving around Tony. They came up with a system where Tony would email her a list of engagements he had coming up in the next few weeks—from weddings to conferences to birthday parties—and she would respond with the events she would attend. For those that she couldn’t come to, Tony would usually then invite another woman. Unless it was an international trip, she rarely liked to leave Wisconsin for longer than three days at a time because of her kids. Throughout 2015, they crisscrossed the globe, from New York and Florida to South Africa and Dubai. Though Michelle never asked, Tony always paid. He visited her in Milwaukee a handful of times. Sometimes, Michelle would bring her kids with her to Vegas, and she enjoyed watching him interact with her kids. In turn, she met Tony’s parents. During Life Is Beautiful one year, his mom, Judy, took a photo of Michelle with her kids. Looking up at her, Judy remarked how nice it was that she had such a close relationship with her children.

At times Michelle felt conflicted, but she reminded herself that blurred lines were part of the deal. “We were never in a fully committed relationship,” she said. “He dated other women, and I dated other men. But he was basically my person. He always came first, and I was comfortable in that situation. In fact, I met some of the most amazing women I’ve ever met in my life through him.” It went well—until it didn’t. During a trip to New York in October 2015, Michelle was with Tony at a group dinner at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan when she took notice of his interest in two other women at the table. It was a bit much. “He turned it on a little more when they were around,” she recalled, seeing him tell more jokes or become more animated in telling stories. After the dinner, she decided to bring it up with him. “I know we’re not monogamous,” she started. “But when we’re together, you are with me.” Tony didn’t understand why she was upset. As they argued, Tony applied his logic to the situation: Michelle knew what she was signing up for, he said, and he hadn’t done anything to break their rules of engagement. The discussion reached an impasse, but in the weeks after, Michelle started having doubts about their relationship. She soon visited Tony in Vegas again, but left feeling uncertain once more about where they stood. Some weeks later, after yet another whirlwind trip, she texted him from an airport, expressing as much. With hopes of comforting her, Tony responded, “This too shall pass.” Over the holidays, Michelle found herself at a crossroads. A friend had reentered her life and he wanted to be in a committed, monogamous relationship with her. Given her feelings of doubt about Tony, Michelle realized it was time to end the romance with him. “Hey, we need to be friends for a little bit,” she told Tony on a FaceTime call that December. “That means no physical relationship.” “Why?” he asked. She’d met someone, she said. She’d bent her own rules to be with Tony, but regardless of her love for him and the comfort she found within his world, she knew that being true to herself ultimately meant being in a monogamous relationship. Tony never called Michelle his girlfriend while they were dating, but after they broke up, he would tell people she was his ex-girlfriend. Michelle, meanwhile, maintained her friendship with him. He eventually

hired her to manage all of his social media accounts. “You’re the only one that understands how to communicate in a way that I would,” he said to Michelle. To outsiders, it may have appeared Tony was capitalizing on the women in his sphere. For some of the women who took his arm at events or jetted with him to foreign corners, Tony was exciting to be around. For Michelle, he was someone to spend time with until she found a lifelong monogamous partner, and Tony never indicated that it bothered him. But even as the rotating cast of women ensured that Tony was never alone, they also allowed him to spread himself a mile wide, across relationships often an inch deep, and avoid the struggles and rewards of committing to a single person.

CHAPTER 13

ANDY

If Tony’s dalliances with women were unconventional, his relationships with his two younger brothers were just as ill-defined. The three Hsiehs were by no means a close set of brothers. Over the years, Tony had rarely mentioned Andy and Dave in public or to friends. As for Andy and Dave, it was rare not to have Tony mentioned in conversation, whether they wanted to talk about him or not. Even so, Tony had made room for Andy and Dave in his various business ventures. Starting with his newspaper route and button-making enterprises in Marin, when he passed the roles down to his brothers, he then went on to hire them at Zappos. Sometimes they would even share clothes. “So is it true, I heard that you don’t even have a business suit?” Oprah Winfrey asked Tony during a 2008 interview on her talk show. That day’s episode was called “Young Millionaire Moguls” and Tony, who was thirtyfour at the time, was featured in a segment that followed an interview with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the twenty-two-year-old actress twins who had a combined estimated net worth of $100 million from their films. Though the twins appeared on-set for the interview with Oprah, Tony opted to call in through a video conference. As Oprah and the audience shifted their attention to the large screen, Tony’s face filled the camera view. Behind him, a thicket of ferns hung from the roof above his desk in the old Henderson office of Zappos. “I’m not much for dressing up, so my brother and I actually share a suit,” Tony answered. The studio audience roared with laughter. “But it’s a little awkward when my brother and I have to go to the same wedding. Usually, I just end up wearing a collared shirt instead.”

Tony had never been selfish nor boastful about his fortunes, but it inevitably forced Andy and Dave to live under the very large shadow of their big brother. For Dave, the dynamic seemed to instill in him a deep desire to avoid the fact that his brother was almost a billionaire. While Tony referred to him as David in Delivering Happiness, he was known to most as Dave. Dave was soft-spoken and awkward, and people were often shocked by his resemblance to Tony. But while Tony lived in a penthouse in the Ogden, in addition to his mansion in Southern Highlands, Dave lived in a modest home with his girlfriend. “He was sweet and quiet,” said Jen Louie, who met the Hsieh brothers when she was an event producer in Las Vegas in the early 2000s. “Dave is not a man of many words.” Rarely was he seen around Tony outside of family events. Friends who knew Andy, though, observed a spark of jealousy within the middle Hsieh brother that generated a constant desire to prove himself. And as the years wore on, some saw the beginnings of a Shakespearean tale of fratricidal strife. “[Andy] didn’t have the golden touch that Tony did, but not very many people do,” recalled one friend who worked with Andy at Zappos. “I never saw any warmth between them.”

When Tony left for Harvard in the early 1990s, Andy was already following in his big brother’s footsteps by attending the Branson School, the elite college preparatory school in Ross, California. He assumed the role as head of the button-making business and proved to be a gifted piano player, even more skilled than Tony. After graduating from Branson, Andy was admitted to an industrial engineering program at Stanford University in 1994. Dave, meanwhile, went with Richard and Judy to Hong Kong for a brief stint during this time, after Richard got a promotion at Chevron. Like the hundreds of freshmen arriving at the storied Stanford campus, Andy took part in Rush Week, an orientation where first-year students tour the campus meeting with fraternities and sororities to vie for an invitation. By the end of the week, Andy was welcomed into Lambda Phi Epsilon, an Asian American fraternity. As one Lambda Phi Epsilon alum put it, their fraternity was “less gross” and slightly more academic than the other fraternities that weren’t

exclusively Asian. But still, it wasn’t without the traditional hazing. One of Andy’s former fraternity brothers remembered the new members being forced to do push-ups on command at random moments of the day. Other times they were ordered to run laps of the football field. Once they were instructed to run naked around the Stanford Quad, the university’s central courtyard. Andy was a popular kid within Lambda Phi Epsilon. He was easy to talk to and immediately personable, especially among his fraternity brothers, who came from Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese families. He was not overly gregarious, one fraternity brother recalled, nor did he run for any leadership positions in the fraternity, but he was open and friendly. The hazing went on for six months before Andy graduated from pledge to brother. By this time, Tony had gone from Harvard grad to the millionaire tech founder of LinkExchange, and any hope that Andy would match his brother’s achievements grew further out of reach. His brother’s success was evidently weighing on his own vision for the future. One evening during the fraternity induction process, brothers had to share something that made them vulnerable. When Andy’s turn came, he told those gathered that he felt immense pressure living his entire life in the shadow of his brother.

Andy graduated from Stanford in 1999 with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in industrial engineering, seemingly with a world of opportunity before him. But within three years he was working for Tony at Zappos. He worked briefly as a consultant for a specialty food marketing company after graduating, but he remained well within his older brother’s orbit—he moved into one of Tony’s units in 1000 Van Ness during the heydays of LinkExchange and Venture Frogs. Andy’s apartment was a two-bedroom unit on the seventh floor directly below the infamous Club BIO, which was dubbed “Tony’s batcave.” While Club BIO was for socializing, Tony sought peace and quiet in his younger brother’s apartment. “No one went into 706 except for me, Andy, and Tony,” recalled James Henrikson, Tony’s old friend who lived in 1000 Van Ness.

When Zappos moved to Las Vegas, Andy followed Tony there and took a job with the company, landing on the merchandising team. For the most part, there was little acknowledgment at the company that Andy and Tony were brothers, and Tony purposely kept an arm’s-length distance from Andy. “If there was a problem with Andy or even if it was a win for Andy, Tony had nothing to do with it,” recalled Chris Peake, who worked alongside Andy under Fred. Dave also eventually joined Zappos, working in the human resources department. Andy had shown a desire to prove himself at Zappos, but he was less enthusiastic about his role on the merchandising team, which was to secure vendors for kids’ shoes. To combat his ennui, he had been assigned to work with Mark Guadagnoli in a team internally called Black Ops, which was tasked with finding new—sometimes abstract—revenue streams for Zappos. Andy combined pep talks with an entrepreneurial drive and streams of ideas during BlackOps meetings. Mark said he often talked about “hitting home runs.” Andy had found a confidant in Mark, and some of their work was earning nods from Zappos brass. They launched the Zappos yearbook, a collection of photos and memories from employees—hot-dog-eating contests and office parades—and sold advertisements to vendors for a quarter million dollars a year. Another venture included designing a limitededition Zappos Monopoly. Instead of train stations, different models of Clarks shoes were for sale. Rather than Boardwalk, Lacoste went for $400, or to the highest bidder. Their projects together also meant the two men would work late at Zappos’s headquarters. During some of these evenings, there were moments when Andy confided in Mark about his relationship with Tony. First and foremost, Mark recalled, Andy admired Tony. Andy saw his brother as someone who had achieved everything he had been taught to value as a child: vast wealth, success, and admiration. Mark also sensed sibling rivalry during some of these conversations. Not resentment, but a wanting within Andy for what his brother had amounted to. Andy believed that if he too could catch a lucky break, then he could achieve what his brother had.

By the time Tony became known to the world, the younger Hsieh brothers’ tenures at Zappos had come to abrupt ends. Dave was let go during the 2008 financial crisis when Zappos announced it was firing 8 percent of its workforce and around 100 employees were let go. Getting laid off had hit Dave particularly hard, according to Holly McNamara, who had been acquainted with all the Hsieh brothers but was yet to work for Tony on the Delivering Happiness tour. Dave confided in Holly at the time that it was not just being let go from Zappos that hurt—it was that Tony never talked to him about it afterward. Andy’s departure, meanwhile, was less straightforward, with conflicting accounts about why he left Zappos. In the recollection of one Zapponian who worked on the same team as Andy, it was a mutual decision that boiled down to Andy being a poor cultural fit. “We had different ideals of what Zappos was and different ideals of work ethic and leadership,” the person said. In short, Andy did not seem as hardworking as his older brother, and he used his familial status to skate by. But Andy’s departure from Zappos presented him with an opportunity to chase a lifelong pursuit: creating a company just as successful as his older brother’s. As Andy mused on what he hoped would be his billiondollar idea, he thought about his last few years in Las Vegas hanging around in the periphery of Tony’s circle. On some nights, he’d been surrounded by other young tech millionaire founders and CEOs who came to Sin City for private and exclusive experiences. Though Andy had yet to earn his stripes as a successful tech founder, spending time with his brother had given him a window on such a lifestyle. So shortly after moving back to San Francisco in 2011, Andy started building a company called Lux Delux, an online invitation-only membership club that connected users to high-end experiences in dining, wellness spas, and nightlife in Las Vegas. Being related to Tony helped in more ways than one. A former Lux Delux employee who joined the company in its early days said the fact that Andy was Tony’s brother was a decisive factor in why he decided to join the company. “With that last name, you know, the brother of Tony Hsieh, I felt like he could bring in a lot of resources,” the employee recalled. “Maybe Tony might even invest in the company, right?” In 2012, Lux Delux raised its first significant round of funding. Quite remarkably, Andy put in $3 million of his own money, according to

documents. Their father, Richard Hsieh, was the largest outside investor by far, putting in $1.6 million. Their mother, Judy, and Dave each put in around $100,000, with Dave eventually taking on a role at Lux Delux. In fact, every single Hsieh family member was an investor in the company— except for Tony. That said, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where Andy would have had $3 million to invest in Lux Delux unless he had help from Tony. Other investors included SV Angel, a venture capital firm headed by legendary tech investor Ron Conway; Alex Hsu, the childhood friend of Tony’s; and Joe Lonsdale, the future libertarian venture capital investor who would go on to start the data mining behemoth Palantir with billionaires Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp. Joe wrote a roughly $100,000 check to Lux Delux. Asked about the investment a decade later, he wrote, “That was just a small investment and one among over a hundred from that time period—I met him via Tony whom I knew through friends in technology founder circles.” Just as Tony had launched Zappos from his condo in 1000 Van Ness, Lux Delux’s product and engineering operations were primarily based out of Andy’s San Francisco apartment in the South of Market district, a part of town that had started attracting new tech talent and companies like Airbnb and Zynga. His two-bedroom loft had an open-plan kitchen and dining room, framed by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the neighborhood. But unlike Tony, who likely knew how to code better than all the engineers at Zappos combined, Andy did not bring any software engineering expertise to his work. There was a clear knowledge gap, and some of his employees noticed. One worker recalled arriving at Andy’s loft and seeing him frantically scribbling mathematical equations on the windows overlooking the industrial streets of SoMa. Taking a closer look at the figures, the employee realized they were nonsensical formulas and asked Andy what he was doing. “We have an investor coming in,” Andy replied. “We need to look like we are a startup.” Andy also enlisted the help of Holly McNamara, whose concierge business had taken off after she left the Delivering Happiness tour, and who had a wide network of contacts in the Las Vegas nightlife scene. She helped Lux Delux get its public relations off the ground, and pitched the company to club promoters, restaurateurs, and other Vegas contacts who could

become partners in providing VIP experiences. The company’s Facebook page had become a big selling point, given that it had rapidly amassed over 100,000 followers. The data point was promoted in emails to drive partnerships. But shortly after, Andy instructed the company to stop advertising the number of Facebook followers the company had, and Holly wondered if Lux Delux had bought its followers. But Andy was simply following the well-worn path of archetypical tech founder: fake it till you make it. He was finally seizing his opportunity to show the world what he could do. Less than two years after Lux Delux was born, Andy suddenly pivoted the business. Food delivery apps like Postmates and Seamless were becoming popular in San Francisco, and Andy wanted to bring that concept to Vegas. “It wasn’t just a partial change but a complete brand identity change,” said Jen Louie, who was eventually hired by Andy and given the title of head of strategic partnerships at Lux Delux. Prior to signing on with Lux Delux, she was an independent business development and marketing consultant who had a deep Rolodex in Vegas. Her brother, David Louie, also worked at Lux Delux in a similar capacity and had a close working relationship with Andy. By Jen’s recollection, Andy put everything he had into his startup and worked as hard as anyone in the company. Despite her hefty-sounding title, Jen kept her other client work. “Lux Delux was a startup,” she said. “So they couldn’t pay me enough to be full-time.” In the beginning, Andy appeared to spare no expense for Lux Delux’s operations, paying for first-class flights and even private jets for some employees on work trips. But soon after Lux Delux made the pivot to food delivery, Andy asked Jen if she would be willing to work for half her salary. She agreed, attributing it to typical startup woes. A month later, Andy asked her if she would be willing to work for free. She declined and quit shortly after. Lux Delux never took off, and by the end of 2014, no one seemed to be working for the business. As of 2022 its Facebook page remains active and has more than a million followers. Stock images with general captions alluding to a dreamy and luxurious lifestyle are still posted every few days there and on its Twitter account, which looks more like an account administered by a bot than a real person, and what the business offers today is unclear. Its main tagline, which is imposed on a banner photo of a woman

with her back turned to the camera wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, ambiguously states, “Experience Life.” Tony had always made it clear he had no interest in selling shoes. His passion for Zappos came from a desire to build the best customer service experience with a strong company culture that made his employees excited and happy to come to work. When Andy explained his vision for Lux Delux, he painted a rosy picture full of generalities to friends and potential employees—it would be an engineering-driven company, similar to Facebook, and culture would come above all else, he said, parroting lines from Delivering Happiness. But oftentimes Andy’s employees were left wondering what drove him toward the tech entrepreneur path. “It felt like he was just repeating things that people said of what a great startup should be,” said the former Lux Delux employee. “I never understood why he wanted to build this company. Maybe he just wanted to prove to everyone that he could do it too—maybe not as great as Tony, but at least close to what the Tony Hsieh built.”

CHAPTER 14

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

Tony’s downtown Vegas experiment was now roaring ahead. Dreams were being made, and businesses being built. But soon enough a more troubling reality of building a community emerged, too. It would be one of the youngest members of the community, the recent college graduate Ovik Banerjee, who would reveal its darkest chapter. Ovik wasn’t the most physically affectionate brother—he hated hugs— but he did find ways to connect with his younger brother, Anondo, by discussing and debating their purpose in the world. Their conversations often turned to how they were going to live a meaningful life, how to live alongside their values, and how to be happy. When the opportunity to join the Downtown Project as a Venture for America fellow arose, Ovik felt that he had found a way to answer all of life’s biggest questions. He devoured every piece of literature he could find on Tony and his life; he’d read the memoir, and encouraged his family to read it, too. He’d even read the Zappos culture book. In a world where people did a lot of talking, he saw that Tony was doing a lot of doing. When Ovik’s family arrived in Las Vegas to visit him in the summer of 2013, they were, like many who came to downtown Las Vegas, amazed. His mother and father, both immigrants from India, had raised their older son and his younger brother and sister in Hoover, a leafy suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, before moving to nearby Tuscaloosa. In Las Vegas they were put up for free in a luxury high-rise apartment in the Ogden, from where they could view the neighborhood Ovik was living in. They saw that he kept a nice space in the Town Terrace apartments, which was now housing Downtown Project workers, along with his other Venture for

America fellows. At Eat one morning, Natalie Young came out to greet Ovik by name, and his parents were glad to see that their son had become a part of a community. Ovik’s father, Subhankar, was particularly impressed to hear about how Natalie’s restaurant started, and her backstory about straightening her life out in the Strip’s kitchens. Business was going so well, she told him, that she was opening a second restaurant in the neighborhood with Tony, this one with a menu focused on fried chicken. After the meal, Ovik gave his family a tour of the area, starting at the Container Park, which was almost complete and due to open in a few months. Many of the shipping containers had been shifted into position, stacked on top of one another, and would soon be filled with restaurants and bars. In the center would be an elaborate jungle gym, and at the rear, behind a performance stage, would be an old train caboose, which would house a hair salon called Bolt Barber. As they walked by the praying mantis at the entrance, Anondo asked what Ovik thought about the frequent jets of flames it shot from its antennae. Given Ovik’s degree in environmental science and his views on global warming, the question made him bristle. “I didn’t get to be involved in that decision,” he said to Anondo. In the evening, Ovik took them to the Gold Spike, where they stood in a room that looked like a fun park for adults, filled with foosball, billiards, and ping-pong tables. Kegs of beer were stacked against the wall. Ovik appeared uneasy in this setting; he wasn’t a big drinker, and the nonstoppartying side of the Downtown Project didn’t appeal to him. There were a few other things that made him uncomfortable about the Downtown Project, his family later learned. Despite the nice accommodations and pleasant eateries, his first months had been chaotic and directionless; he’d been shifted from project to project, and encouraged to find purpose in the neighborhood on his own. One of his tasks had been to secure building permits for the construction of what would become known as the Learning Village, a series of modular trailers that would house classrooms and meeting spaces on a landscaped lot next to the Container Park. He had no experience obtaining permits but figured he would rely on his intuition, conduct the necessary due diligence, and figure it out. When he concluded he would need to get a permanent building license, he was instructed by several superiors to get a temporary license instead, as it was simpler to obtain and had fewer restrictions. Even though he knew the

Learning Village was being built as a permanent structure, Ovik obliged. The breach of his principles shook him. But his family didn’t quite grasp his unease when it came time to leave. A few months later, when he went home to Tuscaloosa for Thanksgiving, Ovik was visibly distressed. He had been reassigned to work on launching a new project called the 9th Bridge School, a pre-K education facility, and had been tasked by Tony’s cousin Connie Yeh to research and help design the curriculum—something he had no training for or business doing, he told his family. But he was most concerned by the prospect of getting fired after he cold-emailed Tony to outline his concerns. Ovik had detailed three major issues with the Downtown Project. There was seemingly no direction or mission, and the core values felt meaningless. There was little communication. And management was not held accountable. When Tony did respond, he began by telling Ovik that the values and culture of the Downtown Project weren’t meant to mirror that of Zappos, and that it took five years to figure out the company’s own values and culture. “fred and I are confident about the long-term outcome because we’ve done this before and know what to expect,” Tony wrote in an email. He then addressed Ovik’s complaints point by point, starting with Ovik’s concern that the Downtown Project lacked “culture, mission, and core values.” Getting the culture right was a priority, Tony wrote, but he countered that it would take time: unlike a company, building culture for a city is a whole other challenge. “At zappos, we can choose who we hire and fire. you can’t choose who lives or works downtown, and each business dtp invests in will have a different culture and set of values which dtp needs to somehow integrate with,” Tony wrote. Ovik also said there was poor communication and connectivity within the Downtown Project, and suggested holding monthly meetings to keep the community informed, and serve as a place to air grievances. In response, Tony suggested Ovik take it upon himself to organize meetings if it was something he was passionate about. And finally, there seemed to be a lack of accountability at employee and manager levels, Ovik wrote, adding that there should be an established line of feedback to ensure that people are meeting their goals. Tony again said this was something that would be addressed over time but added: “i would

encourage each employee to just meet regularly with his/her manager to accomplish the above.” When Ovik came back to Tuscaloosa for the winter break, he seemed more at ease. His parents had reassured him that if he did leave the Downtown Project suddenly, they would be there to support him until he figured out his next step. His two-year fellowship with Venture for America would end in the spring anyway, and he was starting to think about returning to school, maybe getting a medical degree like his father. After feeling that he had been forced to compromise his moral compass with the Learning Village permits, one thing he knew was what he didn’t want to do with his future: work somewhere that was long on idealism and short on realism. While he was home, Ovik celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday with his family. “Thank you all for the birthday wishes!” he posted on Facebook on December 27. “Looking forward to what my next journey around the sun has in store.” On New Year’s Day, he climbed into the car with his parents for the hour-long drive to the airport in Birmingham. He seemed happy. Before getting on the plane, he shot off a tweet: “Vegas friends, anyone want to give a ride to a wayward Indian from the airport at 9pm tonight?” He didn’t get any responses, though. Five days later, on January 6, 2014, Ovik jumped to his death from his apartment balcony.

A year before, the body of Jody Sherman, the affable CEO of the ecommerce site Ecomom, who’d arrived in downtown after Tony’s tour of the area and subsequent investment, had been found in his car with a selfinflicted gunshot wound to the head. Jody had been seen as an insistently positive member of the community. At forty-eight, he was a little older than the fresh-faced entrepreneurs streaming into the neighborhood, and he had assumed something of a mentor role. His laid-back surfer vibe was a contrast to the typically high-strung demeanor of most founders. His death had shocked not only the Downtown Project community but also Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, where he’d had a decades-long career as an entrepreneur. Many of his former colleagues and friends posted and

wrote about their despair, but they also were forced to consider the fact that not only had he died, but he’d killed himself. Prominent venture capitalist Jason Calacanis wrote at the time that Sherman was remembered for being “relentlessly positive, driven and fun,” and that “he was a human router who left an impression.” Calacanis said Jody’s death forced him to think about two other entrepreneurs who had died by suicide recently: Aaron Swartz, the twentysix-year-old co-founder of Reddit, and twenty-two-year-old Ilya Zhitomirskiy, who had founded the social networking site Diaspora. “Perhaps we owe it to these three amazing humans to examine if the pressures of being a founder, the pressure of our community’s relentless pursuit of greatness, in some way contributed to their deaths?” Calacanis wrote. “I’m not an expert on suicide, but I am an expert on being a founder. Many of the founders I know have been desperate, depressed and overwhelmed in their careers. For everyone that shared this with me, I’m certain 10 more didn’t … Is it worth exploring why this happens and if it is, in fact, a trend?” Over the years such a phenomenon had been explored, but many questions remained. In his 2005 book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, John Gartner had explored whether American entrepreneurs share a common condition: hypomania, “a mild form of mania, often found in the relatives of manic depressives. Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas. They think, talk, move, and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions ‘just doesn’t get it.’ Hypomanics are not crazy, but ‘normal’ is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, between normal and abnormal.” Gartner, a clinical psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, zeroed in on the tech industry, which had just gone through a boom-and-bust cycle. In a survey of ten internet CEOs, Gartner found that each of them identified with most traits of hypomania: feelings that they were “brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world”; “channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand ambitions”; “often works on little sleep”; and “sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that can have painful consequences.” Part of being hypomanic, Gartner stated, was that in

addition to euphoric highs and feelings of grandeur came susceptibility to a depressive down cycle that can be magnified under the stresses of leading a company. A few years after Jody’s death, a study was launched at the University of California, Berkeley, led by a professor named Michael Freeman, to study the mental health histories of entrepreneurs. Published in the journal Small Business Economics in 2018, Freeman’s study found that 72 percent of entrepreneurs acknowledged having either a personal or family history of mental illness. When compared to the general population, Freeman and his team found that 49 percent of entrepreneurs reported having one or more mental health conditions in their lifetime—like ADHD, substance abuse, bipolar disorder, or anxiety—compared to 32 percent of non-entrepreneurs. Depression was specifically high, with entrepreneurs experiencing twice as much as the general population. While rates of suicide among entrepreneurs have never been adequately measured, there has been growing momentum among some tech leaders to increase dialogue around identifying warning signs. Brad Feld, another venture capitalist, became a shining light for entrepreneurs seeking help after he began speaking openly about his struggle with depression over the years, and highlighted the unique challenges facing those whose identities are often tied to their success. “The intensity of being an entrepreneur, especially when your company is failing, or you are failing at your role, can be overwhelming,” he wrote on his blog. “It’s ok to fail. It’s ok to lose. It’s ok to be depressed.” Fear of failure was evidently facing Jody. It was later revealed that his death occurred days before a scheduled company meeting, when he was going to have to inform the board that Ecomom had run out of money, just six months after raising $5 million. The company had been bleeding money thanks to an offer that allowed customers to receive a 50 percent discount every time they purchased from the website, meaning that every time Ecomom sold a product, it actually lost money. While it’s a strategy employed by some tech companies desperate to build a customer base— before changing the pricing model to a profitable one when enough customers have signed on—it’s an extremely risky play. The board only learned that the company was facing bankruptcy after he died, when a recently hired accountant revealed that Jody had asked him to produce

several financial forecasts. In the week before his death, after seeing the forecasts, Jody had handed a will to his secretary and made subtly dour comments to the accountant: “If you want to fire me that’s ok” and “I’m too old to start over.” In the months after Jody’s death, Mark Rowland had been coming and going from Las Vegas as he developed a business plan to launch his mentor service, ROCeteer. He quickly saw that beyond Jody, there were others in the community in need of help, and they had nowhere to turn for it. Many of the entrepreneurs had been handed a $500,000 check to launch their company and then were basically told to run with it. As more people came to ROCeteer for help, Mark found himself sharing an anecdote about the pressures facing entrepreneurs. Before arriving at the Downtown Project, he was the founder and CEO of StyleTread, the Australian copy of Zappos. Even though he had children of his own, he often compared the growth of his company to fathering a child, and his love of being an entrepreneur was paying off. In 2012, he was on a multicity tour around Australia to talk about StyleTread’s success. What his audiences didn’t know was that he was also in talks to secure a hefty funding round to keep the company afloat; it was still growing, but its sales alone couldn’t sustain the business. A Chinese investor had agreed to provide $10 million, and an Australian firm was willing to give him $7 million, but the fine print was still being negotiated. The deal was scheduled to close the day before a planned speech in Sydney, and Mark envisioned announcing the deal during the talk. The crowd would respond with raucous applause, he imagined. But as the deadline approached, he received an email: the Chinese firm was backing out. No reason was given. Without the Chinese investor, the Australian firm said it wasn’t willing to move ahead either. It was devastating news: he would have to lay off his seventy employees, and the outward appearance of his image as a successful entrepreneur would evaporate. That and his entire life savings were on the line: without telling his wife, he had used their house as collateral to buy the company’s inventory. He would be forced to pull his kids out of private school, and they’d likely have to move. Life as he knew it would end. Driving his car home that night, he contemplated suicide. “God, wouldn’t it just be easier if I just ended my life now,” he recalled thinking. “Don’t have

to worry about all this stress, don’t have to worry about telling all these people.’” After twenty seconds of considering the possibility, a rush of faces and memories entered his mind. He had a wife who loved him, two kids who depended on him, and family in England who missed him—human connections. Now his mind was finding ways to reinforce the reasons to stay on earth. Those few moments in the darkness scared him so much that he vowed never to contemplate suicide again. “When you’re potentially gonna lose the company, and potentially going to fire everyone, you get your identity confused with the identity of the company,” Mark said. “And then the company’s a failure, then you think you’re a failure.” (As it turned out, Mark secured financing before the deadline and kept the company afloat, selling it a year later.) Even after Jody’s death, the facade of a utopia for entrepreneurs in downtown Las Vegas had remained. But with Ovik’s death marking the second suicide in a year, clouds were moving in on the sunshine, rainbows, and open bar tabs. The people who worked, ate, and drank together were now looking for a place to turn to, and found nowhere to go. The Downtown Project acknowledged Ovik’s passing in a Facebook post, but no leaders, including Tony, addressed the community with public meetings to process the grief. People could see a doctor at the Downtown Project’s medical practice, Turntable Health, who could refer patients to therapists, but they would have to foot the cost on their own. ROCeteer essentially became a clearing house for people in the community in need, and Mark and his team found themselves hearing the concerns of entrepreneurs and other citizens who felt that they had nowhere to talk about the pressures they were feeling. In extreme cases the ROCeteer staff would pass on information about the suicide helpline and other mental health support services. But ROCeteer could only do so much. Aside from having a life coach on staff, they were not equipped to employ psychotherapists or provide access to therapy services. Tony’s acknowledgment of Ovik’s death was limited to a company-wide email to Downtown Project employees, where he announced they would be assessing ways to help the community. “I know it’s been a tough couple of weeks for everyone. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is

that different people grieve and cope in different ways—sometimes we need support, sometimes we need space, and sometimes we need time.” Mark, he wrote, had been assigned to lead a group of people to figure out how to “nurture the emotional health of Downtown Project employees, affiliated partners, and the ways in which we support one another.” Even though Tony was a difficult person to read at the best of times, Mark felt that Ovik’s death had weighed on him. “You could just see it in his face, his body language,” Mark said later. “He’s a very stoic person … it was weighing on him.” With a team of eight others, Mark fielded proposals that ranged from a dedicated crisis hotline to starting a church. One of the initial efforts included taking members of the community on bus trips to the surrounding mountains and valleys for day-long hikes. They then looked at more longlasting efforts, the most promising of which was brought to the Downtown Project management by a British consultant named Pritpal Tamber, who specialized in advising companies on how to implement healthcare initiatives. Tamber proposed coming into the neighborhood, conducting interviews with some of its members about their access to medical services and their general well-being, and then proposing a”framework” that would underpin the Downtown Project’s efforts to improve the mental health of people in the community. However, it was going to cost around $1 million. The Downtown Project deemed it too expensive, and it was abandoned. Then, four months after Ovik’s death, another person died by suicide. Matt Berman, the fifty-year-old founder of Bolt Barber, the hair salon in the Western-style caboose at the back of the Container Park, was found dead at his home. Members of the Downtown Project reeled at the third suicide in sixteen months. Again, the Downtown Project leadership seemed to be at a loss for what to do. For community members, there was again nowhere to readily seek help, and no public display of grieving. After Matt’s suicide, Aimee Groth wrote that she had difficulty processing the loss: “It hardly felt real because no one talked about it. There was no outward mourning the loss of another member of the community.” It turned out that the three suicides were just the tragedies that had bubbled to the surface. As ROCeteer tried to provide support and direct dozens of people to places where they could get help, Mark said that on at

least four other occasions he and his colleagues had to intervene and spend time with people who were at high risk of harming themselves. A few months after Matt’s death, Tony was asked by a reporter to comment on the suicides in his community. “Suicides happen anywhere. Look at the stats,” Tony said. “It’s harder for people who are really good students in school. Then they move into this, where there is no instruction manual, and you have to be MacGyver on your own.” Tony’s apathetic response prompted some jaws to drop. Kimberly Knoll, a therapist who specialized in marriage counseling, had been working with some members of the community after Ovik’s death. She told a reporter that yes, the pressures of working for startups could trigger dormant, preexisting mental health issues. But in the Downtown Project, “the difference here is the focus on happiness—that’s a goal,” she said. “If we negate the negative emotions in our lives, it takes us away from happiness and brings around shame. The whole idea of Downtown is grand and wonderful and purposeful, but sometimes the way we’re going about it isn’t psychologically healthy.” The environment and pressure around happiness, Kimberly said, were unique to Downtown Vegas. “It comes from top down. It comes from Tony, from Zappos,” she said to the reporter. “The book is called Delivering Happiness.”

After Ovik’s death, Andrew Yang cut ties with the Downtown Project and stopped sending Venture for America fellows. Ovik’s father, Subhankar, concluded that Tony had failed in a personal responsibility to maintain the welfare of his eldest son. Tony’s absence from any kind of public address further angered him. “With your silence, you’ve just compounded that failure,” Anondo recalled his father saying. Subhankar died four years later, of a heart attack while traveling on an airplane. What was most painful for Ovik’s family was learning that he had written a suicide letter just days after he celebrated his birthday with them. Throughout his life he had struggled with insomnia and was sometimes removed, but no one among his friends or family saw any clear danger that he was at risk of harming himself.

“My brother was an incredibly smart, driven, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed twentysomething-year-old, coming into a place trying to make it better,” Anondo said. “I don’t blame Tony Hsieh or the Downtown Project. I just blame the broader system that takes advantage of, you know, people who want to try and change the world.”

CHAPTER 15

“THE MAYOR OF DOWNTOWN LAS VEGAS”

At some point, people who lived downtown and visiting reporters began affectionately referring to Tony as the “Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas.” When Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, was asked by a reporter for her thoughts on Tony’s moniker, she said it made for good PR. “A puff of energy,” she said. But for some time, the title had been sharpening the spotlight on Tony’s role in the community and raising questions about what exactly he was responsible for. He was, after all, the primary financier of the entire neighborhood, and had the final sign-off when his money was spent. That meant people looked to him for guidance on how to get more of his money. And when people thought about how to envision their neighborhood, it was his philosophies and quotes that people turned to for direction and motivation. With the burden of leadership at his feet, Tony attempted to shrink away from the title by drawing clear distinctions between his social experiment and the actuality of running a city. Much of the confusion, he realized, was of his own doing. When he and Fred announced the Downtown Project, they did so with enormous emphasis on the word “community.” They even invented the metric “return on community” to guide the neighborhood’s investments by tracking things like “collisionable hours” (the amount of time people are in public space where serendipitous meetings can occur) and “co-learning” (how much time people spend learning from one another). Tony’s philosophy was that a return on community would ultimately lead to more

profits if people were being empowered by one another to achieve their dreams. But in the wake of Ovik’s death, a clear fissure had emerged in the veneer of happiness that shone around the Downtown Project, and the community was looking to their mayor for guidance, something Tony was not comfortable with. He now saw that he needed to walk back what it meant to be a part of the Downtown Project. No longer would it be using the metric of return on community. In fact, the word “community” was to be removed from language associated with the Downtown Project. The word was to be replaced by “connectedness.” The new “Three C’s” of the Downtown Project would be collisions, co-learning, and connectedness. “In the past, we used the word ‘Community’ a lot more but we learned that a lot of people misinterpreted or misunderstood our goals,” Tony wrote in a post online in February 2014. “There are a lot of people that seem to expect us to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city (for example, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health). We have to sometimes remind people that we’re not the government.” The emphasis on “community” had also created a perception for some that the Downtown Project was a charity or nonprofit. Tony wrote, “We found that when we used the word ‘Community,’ there were a lot of groups that suddenly expected us to donate money to them or invest in them just because they lived in the community or because it was for a good cause. People would be upset if donating or investing in them did not happen to fit in with our priorities and business goals, and they would refer back to our use of the word ‘Community.’” Tony had also put himself in a seemingly impossible situation: not only was he the default leader of, primary investor in, and visionary behind an entire neighborhood, he was still the CEO of Zappos. He had long stressed that his style of management was purely visionary and that he wouldn’t be involved with personnel matters; he had once told a publication, “I view my role more as trying to set up an environment where the personalities, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come out and can shine.” Since 2013, an effort had been underway to roll out a new management structure for the Downtown Project that was meant to eliminate job titles and force people to make up their own roles—kind of like a tribe, Tony

would say. Holacracy, as this structure was called, would also further remove Tony from the spotlight, and shift responsibility for the neighborhood away from him. “Tony doesn’t really like conflict,” said Maggie Hsu, who was assigned to lead the rollout of the management system at the Downtown Project. “Holacracy was this way to diffuse that because he wasn’t the bad guy or central decision maker.” The concept of Holacracy was created by Brian Robertson, a software developer who had been trying to reduce management decisions at a company he started. After seeing him at a conference, Tony was immediately struck by how Robertson’s management idea could address the issues he was facing: he was drowning in responsibility. During the latter half of 2013, Robertson and his consulting team spent weeks holding seminars with Downtown Project employees to school them on how to give up their titles and, seemingly, their designated responsibilities. Robertson’s rules were governed by the Holacracy Constitution, which he made up, and contained language that was more akin to a scientific study than plain English. That was frustrating for the hundreds of people who had better things to do than decipher its nonsense. When conflicts arose, for example, practitioners were expected to engage in an act called “processing tensions,” an act that the Holacracy Constitution defined by the following statement: A Partner duly filling a Role shall regularly compare the current expression of such Role’s Purpose and enactment of its Accountabilities to such Partner’s sense of an ideal potential expression of such Purpose and enactment of such Accountabilities to identify gaps between the current reality and such a sensed potential (each such gap a “Tension”). For each tension so identified, such Partner shall attempt to reduce such Tension by identifying and enacting one or more appropriate courses of action given the authorities and other mechanisms available to such Partner under this Constitution. It was angering for some, eye-rolling for others. Rather than bosses, teams, and divisions, there were now “circles,” “links,” and “tasks.” It sounded confusing, and it was. After endless meetings, the members of the

Downtown Project could never quite grasp how to use the system or implement it. Instead it created more friction among the community.

As the Holacracy rollout sputtered, some of the Downtown Project’s bets were not paying off. A slow-moving exodus had grown into a steady stream of tech companies closing or moving out of Vegas. In addition to the collapse of Ecomom, other companies were either shuttering or leaving Las Vegas for places where they could hire better talent, as efforts in Las Vegas to build a pool of skilled workers paled in comparison to what was being done in other tech hubs. Romotive, which had grown to twenty employees and was widely seen as one of the Downtown Project’s most successful investments, left Las Vegas in 2013, merely a year after arriving. A few months after a $5 million funding round led by the venture capital firm Sequoia—spearheaded by none other than Alfred Lin—Romotive announced it was moving to Silicon Valley to be closer to “strategic partners and hiring brilliant senior talent,” founder Keller Rinaudo wrote in a community-wide email. “This was a difficult decision for us because Romotive wouldn’t be the company we are without the constant support of Downtown Project, Tony, Zach, Fred, and many others.” (Years later, Keller pivoted the business to automating logistics with drone delivery and renamed it Zipline. In 2022, Zipline was valued at $2.5 billion and employed 800 people.) Jen McCabe, an entrepreneur who’d been leading tech investments for the Downtown Project, had been given $10 million to launch a company called Factorli at the start of 2014. It was expected to manufacture small hardware parts with 3D printers in a warehouse the Downtown Project owned. Even before it opened, Factorli had gained so much attention that President Barack Obama highlighted the company during a speech at the White House about innovative American companies. “You’ve got Jen McCabe,” Obama said, “who is setting up a space called Factorli, in Las Vegas, to provide custom, small-scale manufacturing, kind of like a Kinko’s or a copy shop, but instead of printing flyers, they’re going to be able to print custom parts for American products.” But before the warehouse even opened, the company was shut down.

Some of the smaller businesses were faring better, like Natalie’s Eat and another restaurant called Vegenation, a vegetarian spot that had opened across the street. A nearby dog park was maintaining steady business. Another restaurant opened by Fred, Nacho Daddy, was a success. Others included Carson Kitchen and La Comida. But it was grueling for other small businesses. Despite claiming that the Container Park received 300,000 visitors in its opening three months, Downtown Project executives saw that the overall neighborhood wasn’t getting the foot traffic it had hoped for, and there was a realization that few Zappos employees were venturing far from the campus to mingle in the surrounding neighborhood. Six months after the Container Park opened, Michael Cornthwaite sold his interest in three restaurants he had opened in the center. With suicides and business failures, cracks were starting to appear in the startup utopia. But none of this was yet apparent in the public narrative about Tony and the Downtown Project. Wide-eyed fascination in the neighborhood continued, and national reporters were still returning to their newsrooms with notepads full of inspiring stories. While on assignment for Re/Code, Nellie Bowles spent three weeks living downtown during the summer of 2014, and on September 29 published the first installment in a planned series of stories: “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia.” In the article, she wrote that “there’s an excitement to being in a startup city devoted to startups, a sense of camaraderie.” When she asked Tony to explain his phenomenon, he described downtown Las Vegas as “TED meets SXSW meets Burning Man, but as a lifestyle, rather than events … and we can scale this to multiple cities.” One person who had been sold on Tony’s vision was David Gould, a professor at the University of Iowa who met Tony when he came to speak to Gould’s students about unique leadership during his Delivering Happiness bus tour. After the talk, Gould’s students had followed Tony all the way back to his bus with more questions. “It was like a real live Pied Piper,” Gould said. A few years later, Gould followed Tony, too, leaving his job to come live downtown after Tony said he wanted to push the “boundaries of education” and would fund whatever he wanted to do. While Nellie couldn’t figure out exactly what Gould’s role was, he told her his title was “Director of Imagination” and that he managed a community space downtown.

One thing Gould mentioned was that he had become bothered by community groups in Las Vegas that were not linked to the Downtown Project but were pushing for grants and funding. He felt they were taking advantage of Tony’s generosity, citing one example of a group of teachers who were seeking funding for a theater. He told Nellie, “The umbrella Tony has in his hand—only so many people can fit under that umbrella.”

There was a much different story about to break that had not filtered back to Nellie before her article appeared on Re/Code’s website. Mike Henry, Downtown Project’s director of music booking, had noticed recently that Tony had been in the office frequently, attending meetings with grave-faced leaders like Michael Downs, a local casino executive who had joined the Downtown Project in 2012, which was weird: Tony was almost never in the office. The evening Nellie’s story was published, Mike was among a select group of Downtown Project employees who began receiving calls from their managers. Close to midnight, Michael Downs was on the phone. “I imagine you have heard that some changes are going to be made,” Downs said. “Your position is not being eliminated. It will be a difficult day for all of us, but you will be fine.” Then he hung up. It seemed Mike’s suspicions were being confirmed. That night, Tony texted Michelle D’Attilio, who was back in Milwaukee. Sitting at the kitchen table with her kids, she turned her phone over and read the message. “Some news is gonna come out,” he wrote. “It’s not going to be great.” She called him and they spoke briefly. Though he did not share details with Michelle, she could hear it in his voice. She told him that she wished she was in Vegas right now with him. “It made me realize that he was having a really, really rough night and that he was sad,” she later recalled. Mike’s cellphone was pinging with text messages the next morning. When he stepped off the elevator, he ran into his boss, Ashton Allen, who looked like he’d seen a ghost. “Not right now,” Ashton muttered as he walked past. One after the other, employees were instructed to go to an upper level of the building, where six Downtown Project leaders—including Michael

Downs and Maggie Hsu—were seated in separate glass offices, each alongside a member of human resources. As the employees sat in front of their respective managers, they were then told they no longer had a job. Mike and the remaining workers watched the office descend into chaos. Some cried; others looked shell-shocked. Several people huddled in small groups and embraced one another. “It was like a show,” Mike recalled. Amid the beanbags, ping-pong tables, and Nerf gun pellets, the shock for some employees turned to white-hot anger. “This is bullshit!” one person yelled as they stormed through the office. “Supposed to be about community,” wailed another. One person, in a rage, walked over to the wall next to the elevator bank and tore off a large banner pinned to the wall that read, COMMUNITY, COLLISIONS, AND CO-LEARNING. In total, thirty people lost their jobs out of a staff of one hundred in the Downtown Project’s corporate headquarters. In public statements, Tony pointed to the fact that the Downtown Project employed around three hundred people in a community of around eight hundred. But while the number seemed comparatively small, the layoffs became the figurative straw that broke the neighborhood’s utopian back. A day after being quoted singing Tony’s praises, David Gould, the “Director of Imagination,” wrote an emotional letter announcing he had handed in his resignation before he could be fired. The note, which sounded more like the scrawl of a jilted lover, was published in the Las Vegas Weekly and accused Tony and the Downtown Project of “a collage of decadence, greed, and missing leadership.” Dear Tony, We met in the fall of 2010, when your “Delivering Happiness” book tour stopped by my University of Iowa class. I could never have imagined how dramatically that hot August afternoon would change the course of my life. I have retold the story many times of how the students spontaneously followed you out of the classroom that day. Exactly three years later, I left my home, and position at the university, to follow you as well. He went on:

While some squandered the opportunity to “dent the universe,” others never cared about doing so in the first place. There were heroes among us, however, and it is for them that my soul weeps. Once local reporters picked up on the story, it was like a balloon filled with happiness had burst. All that was left were sneering onlookers. “‘Bloodletting’ at Downtown Project with Massive Layoffs,” blared the Las Vegas Weekly, writing that “Hsieh has washed his hands of Downtown Project recently and has upper management handling the layoffs.” Paul Carr, whose coverage of the Downtown Project in NSFWCorp had soured —leading to Tony’s refusal to give him more money and forcing him to sell the company to another publication, Pando Daily—wrote an article summarizing the comments of his business partner, who said of the layoffs that “bad management and broken promises at the DTP eroded public trust” even as “they were given a pass by ‘breathless’ reporting in the media.” The most scathing piece came from an opinion writer for the Review-Journal, who wrote, “The cult of Tony Hsieh developed a crack this past week, and that’s a good thing.” The columnist, John L. Smith, mocked what he called “Hsieh’s true believers,” who “bought into his rhetoric like kids waiting in line to sit on Santa’s lap.” Targeting David Gould, he continued, “What was your first clue, professor? The nebulous business plan? The daily boozefest? The suspicious suicides of other true believers?” Concluding his piece, Smith’s words dripped with condescension: “If losing 30 workers spells the beginning of the end of Hsieh’s Downtown Dalai Lama routine, that’s a good thing.” A day after publishing her largely positive profile of Tony and the Downtown Project, Nellie Bowles followed up with a series of stories in Re/Code with a rather different tone. She reported that Tony was stepping back from his lead role at the Downtown Project, and quoted an anonymous source who blamed the layoffs on bad hiring practices. “Tony is not always altogether the most wise judge of character. There’s a lot of family. There’s a lot of drinking buddies. And some poor choices were made,” the source said. The Washington Post followed up with a piece that suggested Tony’s experiment was doomed—“Why Zappos’s CEO Couldn’t Save Downtown Las Vegas”—while Bloomberg opened its story with “Is Tony Hsieh giving up on Las Vegas?” The online publication Slate declared that “if there’s a

dark side of techtopia—of the arrogant-bordering-on-delusional notion that a multimillion-dollar investment and a happiness manifesto can remake a struggling city—this is it.” After years of reporters coming and going from Tony’s social experiment with stories of lives changed and unmatched generosity, he and the Downtown Project were totally unprepared to navigate the media storm, and their rebuttals were drowned out by the slew of negative headlines. In a statement, Tony tried to emphasize the fact he was never the CEO of the Downtown Project, and that his position was the same it had been six months before the layoffs: “an investor, advisor and equivalent of a board member that sets high-level general direction and strategy but is not involved in day-to-day management of people or projects.” Unlike a singular business or company, the Downtown Project “is a collection of several hundred businesses and legal entities,” each with its own goals and personalities. But his explanations were futile; the Delivering Happiness brand and the utopian messaging around the neighborhood contrasted too starkly against suicides, layoffs, and the realities of managing companies. Some members of the community tried to boost morale. Mark Rowland and his team at ROCeteer contacted Downtown Project businesses and asked them to submit thank-you notes, which he compiled in a booklet and presented to Tony and Fred. Three dozen businesses responded. “Tony and DTP changed my experience of Las Vegas—and my life!—for the better,” Natalie wrote on behalf of Eat. “I probably would have left town two years ago. Instead, I’m a business owner, creating jobs and inspiring positive change in others—just as Tony and DTP did for me.” A group of employees at a company called Launchkey, which provided password-free login software, wrote that the mission of the Downtown Project would prevail. “Changing a city is hard. But so is changing the world,” they wrote. “We will all be remembered by the impact we have on the future, not the people we piss off today.”

CHAPTER 16

THE ISLAND

There was one other person who stepped in to help Tony, with far greater consequences. Justin Weniger had been around more often since he and Ryan had opened their bars downtown, including Commonwealth. Like the Downtown Cocktail Room, it was inspired by Prohibition-era speakeasies, and had transformed an old, seedy sex shop into a cavernous space for lowkey candlelit conversations. Inside, one could find all sorts of trinkets lining the exposed brick walls. Hanging above the twenty-foot-long bar was a magnificent peacock, its plumage fanned out as if it was courting a mate. With a rooftop made for a DJ set, the venue came complete with a secretive speakeasy bar called Laundromat, tucked behind an obscure door. While Ryan typically ran point on the bars, which they controlled through an entity called Corner Bar Management, and sought new opportunities for Wendoh’s media business, Justin had overseen operations and finances for their ventures. More recently, though, Justin been taking a greater interest in the Life Is Beautiful festival and had been leading Wendoh’s efforts to help market the event as a media partner. Despite the controversy swirling around the Downtown Project, the festival was still scheduled to launch in a few weeks; Kanye West would be headlining the event. Tall and tanned with cropped blond hair, Justin was watching the onslaught of bad press when one of his editors at Vegas Seven came into his office to let him know they were planning to write a story about the Downtown Project layoffs. “Have you spoken to Tony?” Justin asked. They hadn’t been able to reach him, the editor said. “Well, then it’s not a story,”

Justin replied. Instead Justin suggested he would try to get Tony to agree to an interview, to get the “real story.” Under the headline “Tony Hsieh Speaks” was a glowing two-page Q&A that touted an exclusive interview with Tony. “There are those who want the Downtown Project to fail, and last week, those naysayers were given an unwitting gift,” the article stated. “For what it’s worth, Hsieh says he isn’t worried about the Downtown Project’s future.” Opening the feature, the reporter asked, “Why do you think the media has been gunning for the Downtown Project?” “It’s probably a combination of things … it could be a branding mistake that causes confusion,” Tony replied. Had all the bad press affected him personally? “The part that bothered me the most was the misleading headlines, the inaccuracies … there was one headline that said I was stepping down from Downtown Project. Similar headlines implied that Downtown Project was falling apart … that’s not something we ever prepared for.” Tony said he planned to spend hours talking to each person who had been fired, including David Gould. “Stepping back, last week was hard. I got a hundred text messages alone. I have a long list of people to reach out to.” He concluded by acknowledging “we could have done a better job of communicating” but he remained convinced that Downtown Las Vegas had the ingredients to succeed. “I just hope we can do it together.” Much of the news cycle had moved on by the time the article was posted in the second week of October 2014. Tony was preparing to announce the opening of the neighborhood’s first grocery. A new boutique hotel would be announced the week after. But after Justin emailed Tony a link to the article, along with an invitation to meet up for a drink, he received a response sometime in the middle of the night: “I really appreciate what you did.” It turned out Justin’s gesture to commission the article had piqued Tony’s interest.

A few days before the 2014 Life Is Beautiful festival in October, Rehan got a call from Fred asking him to meet at a wine bar in the Container Park.

While Rehan had maintained his role as the face of the Life Is Beautiful festival in glossy magazine covers and articles, his control over the company had all but been removed after he was replaced as CEO in January by Andrew Donner. Despite the management shift, the festival was expected to lose more money this year, and ticket sales were going to be short. He wasn’t sure what was on Fred’s agenda, but given the fact he was barely on speaking terms with Andrew and that Fred only weighed in if there was a major development, something felt fateful about the invitation. As he approached the bar, he saw Fred and Andrew but noticed Tony wasn’t there. Surely he would have had to sign off on any major decision. He thought about how his near-daily interactions with Tony had dried up, and he no longer felt like Tony was looking out for him. As his social capital had declined, his rose-tinted view of Tony became jaded. One night a few weeks before the festival, Tony had texted Rehan around 11 p.m. asking him to come meet him at the restaurant Carson Kitchen. When he arrived, Tony was seated with the owner of a local taco shop. He looked up as Rehan approached. The taco shop owner had some ideas about the upcoming festival, he said. Specifically, Rehan should consider ditching Kanye West as its headline act. The previous year, Kanye had come to downtown ahead of the first festival to tour the grounds and meet with Tony. During a private meeting after the tour, Kanye had asked Tony for his feedback about starting his own shoe company. Tony responded that “we should stick to what we know.” A couple of weeks later, Kanye went on a podcast and trashedtalked Zappos. “I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he’s trying to tell me what I need to focus on,” Kanye said. “Meanwhile, he sells all this shit product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling shit product.” While Kanye took his idea elsewhere—he partnered with Adidas to launch its Yeezy line of sneakers, creating what would become a $5 billion business (Adidas cut ties with the rapper in October 2022 after he made antisemitic remarks)—he had since come around and agreed to perform at this year’s festival. The taco shop owner explained that because Kanye had disrespected Tony and therefore didn’t stand for the values that the Downtown Project and Life Is Beautiful represented, Rehan should publicly announce that Kanye was being thrown off the lineup. Doing that would show Rehan’s

commitment to the culture and values of the Downtown Project. He could book another headliner, the taco shop owner reasoned, and the announcement would probably create enough publicity that it would sell more tickets. Thinking about how such an announcement would result in Rehan and Life Is Beautiful being blacklisted by all of America’s talent agencies, Rehan struggled to swallow his pride, and glanced over at Tony, who didn’t look up from his phone. (Rehan ignored the advice, and Kanye headlined the event.) Now, sitting at the wine bar opposite Fred and Andrew, Rehan listened as Fred told him that they had sold half of the Life Is Beautiful company to Wendoh Media. Justin and Ryan were being brought in as partners for the festival. In exchange, the Downtown Project would be taking a 50 percent stake in Wendoh Media. And the millions of dollars of debt owed by the festival to Tony would be wiped out.

Rehan took a few days to process the news. Tony had once asked him what he thought about Justin leading the marketing for Life Is Beautiful fulltime, but selling the company hadn’t been on the table, nor were Justin’s and Ryan’s roles as partners. It turned out that after the Vegas Seven article, Tony had invited Justin to join him and others, including Fred and Andrew Donner, on a trip to Maui to attend a conference. On the island, Tony probed Justin about his background and was seemingly impressed by his trajectory: from top college football player at UNLV to selling nightclub flyers, publishing magazines, and now operating bars. Justin, Tony said, had all the qualities of MacGyver. Ryan insisted to Rehan that he had known nothing about the deal until the last minute and that this was something spearheaded by Justin. But, he reasoned, perhaps having Justin involved wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Justin and Rehan were around the same age, and Justin was someone Rehan could negotiate with, unlike Andrew. Rehan relaxed a little when Justin reassured him that he could maintain creative control of the event. But their relationship rapidly soured. Justin confronted Rehan over excessive spending on dinners, clothes, and other entertainment expenses. (Rehan later said Justin never directly confronted him, and said his

spending was approved by Fred.) Justin also took issue with the efforts from the Life Is Beautiful public relations team to get publicity for Rehan, which included a Q&A interview with Complex about his personal style and morning routine, a feature sponsored by men’s product company Gillette. Now, instead of jumping on planes for trips to New York or Chicago or Atlanta, Rehan was finding out after the fact that Justin and Ryan were going in his place. By the time the next festival had come and gone in 2015, Rehan was making a last-ditch effort to stay involved. Looking at how much money the festival had lost again, approximately $8.5 million, he proposed bringing in an outside hedge fund to invest and assume the financial burden of future festivals while guaranteeing that it remained downtown. In response, Tony emailed Rehan to say he was meeting with Fred to discuss Life Is Beautiful, but reinforced that he was not involved in the decision-making regarding the festival and that Rehan should instead be seeking approval from Fred. “The only purpose of [Fred] meeting with me (and everyone else) is to get all the different perspectives, *not* for me to greenlight or not greenlight anything.” Rehan pushed for one more meeting with Tony: “Does that mean we can’t grab drinks?;)” Tony replied, “We definitely can, but it will need to be a little ways out —i just didn’t want to delay things on the LIB side as this week is crazy with halloween stuff and amazon visiting us for several days, and i’m out of town next week…” Rehan’s reply was his last interaction with Tony: “Cool. Definitely miss hanging out with you man. Let’s plan something when you’re free.”

Shortly after, Tony, Fred, Andrew, Justin, and Ryan went on the annual trip to Hawaii. Rehan had asked Fred and Andrew if he could come, but was ultimately denied. When they returned, Andrew Donner invited Rehan to his house, where he informed Rehan that he was being fired. It was Justin’s decision, and Tony had signed off on it, Andrew said. Rehan was given $200,000 for his stake in the company—a fraction of the $1 million he had been offered the year before—and signed a document saying he would not speak ill of the festival or its executives.

He left Las Vegas shortly after and moved to New York with his new wife. He remained angry for years, and while he could dismiss Justin as someone he just despised, processing the loss of his relationship with Ryan was much more challenging. At one point Rehan returned to Vegas and ran into Ryan in front of Commonwealth. Standing before Rehan, Ryan maintained that he hadn’t known it was going to end the way it did. Rehan could barely hold himself together. “Ryan, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about you. I literally think about you every single day,” Rehan told him. “And every day, I wish and pray that someone will call me, and tell me that you got hit by a fucking bus.” Like others before him, Rehan felt that Tony had shown him the world and the stars, only to have it all ripped from him in an instant. “It was strangely like a reality show where you could get voted off the island at any given point,” Rehan said later. “And in doing so you were very publicly voted off.” As Rehan built a new life in New York, Justin took his place on Tony’s island. In the coming years, being voted off was an outcome that Justin would manage to avoid, no matter the cost.

CHAPTER 17

THE TRAILER PARK

Janice Lopez had been watching Tony from afar for years. Ever since they parted ways on the last day of high school, she had often wondered what became of the soft-spoken boy with whom she shared the silence of the theater all those years ago, directing the spotlights onto the stars of their school performances. After Branson, she had faced a decision: either stick with her love of performing arts or pursue her talent for architecture. She chose Hollywood, and after graduating from the University of Southern California, she landed at a boutique talent agency before joining Warner Brothers as a film director’s assistant, working on shows like Friends and The Drew Carey Show. She got married. As the years wore on, Janice never had to look far to see how her old friend was doing. She read online about Tony selling LinkExchange for millions of dollars to Microsoft, and then saw him on TV, talking about his quirky shoe website. She had been home one day in 2008 when Oprah came on the TV and introduced her next guest: Janice’s high school buddy. Jumping up and down at the sight of Tony Skyping into Oprah’s studio, Janice couldn’t stop laughing. He totally hacked this shit, she thought. He figured out how to not be there, while still being there. By the end of 2013, Janice had long since abandoned Hollywood and was working as a real estate agent in Los Angeles. She had also revisited her high school dreams, gone back to college, and launched a career as an interior designer and architect. While she had solidified her professional life, she was now twice divorced, had two kids, and was feeling ready for a change of scenery.

That Christmas, she was in Las Vegas to visit her stepdad with her kids, and was thinking about whom she might know in town to meet up with. Her stepdad had often said that if you reach a standstill in life, ask someone how you can help. Considering her current situation, now seemed like a good time to take his advice. It was a wild thought, twenty years later and all, but what if she reached out to Tony? She had heard he was building an entire neighborhood or something. She sent him an email—“it’s been a hot minute”—and got a reply shortly after saying that he would love to meet, asking her to talk to Mimi about arrangements, and offering to let her stay in one of his crash pads at the Ogden. As had happened to countless people before her, Janice’s life was about to change. Meeting at the Container Park, the two looked at each other for a while. They were both still shy and awkward, but it was like nothing had changed, and Janice felt comfort in seeing him. Tony looked at her seriously and asked what she was up to in life. She told him about her new career as an architect. “How could I be helpful here?” she asked. What she didn’t know was that her own skills would serve a crucial part of Tony’s next chapter.

Once Janice was settled, she learned pretty quickly that she was entering Tony’s life at a time when he was searching for his own new direction. As reporters, commentators, and anyone else with an opinion zeroed in on Tony’s reputation and legacy, he had begun his retreat. Suddenly the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas was looking to shed responsibilities and shrink his personal footprint. Soon after stepping down as leader of the Downtown Project, Tony was told by the building owners of the Ogden that they no longer wanted to lease the units. The landlord was now demanding that Tony either buy the eighty apartments that the Downtown Project was currently leasing— including his personal luxury condo on the twenty-third floor—or vacate the building. This ultimatum came at an opportune time because Tony no longer wanted to live at the Ogden. Before, he’d welcomed serendipitous moments

with strangers in the building. But having an open-door policy no longer served him. Given the media assault in recent months, as well as the legions of followers he had gained in downtown Las Vegas, Tony was feeling exposed. He yearned for privacy. As Tony and his team brainstormed where he should live next, Janice stood on his twenty-third-floor balcony, looking across Tony’s fiefdom of Fremont East. She spotted a row of Airstream trailers glinting in the sunlight, parked in an empty lot about the size of half a city block. They had been purchased by the Downtown Project as part of an ill-thought-out plan to turn them into hotels, and had been sitting idle for more than a year. Her mind started to race. While studying interior architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, she had gutted and renovated the interior of an Airstream trailer for a project. She walked back inside to where Tony was sitting and typing on his laptop. “Hey, Tony,” she said. Tony continued to type, his eyes locked on the screen. “What if you lived in an Airstream?” He stopped and looked up. The idea floated around the room. Tony thought back to the days of his book tour. “When I was on the Delivering Happiness bus, I learned that I didn’t need much,” he said. “I pretty much had everything I needed on that bus.” Tony sent out a message to his closest friends and confidants: We’re going to do a living experiment for two weeks, he wrote. Janice is available … tomorrow. Meet her at the Airstream lot, and see if you might be interested in living in an Airstream or tiny house. The experiment would last well beyond two weeks. In November 2014, Tony moved into an Airstream trailer permanently, along with about a dozen of his friends, who paid around $950 a month in rent. Janice moved in with her two young children. So did his old girlfriend from the Venture Frog days, Eva Lee, who was in the process of getting a divorce at the time. “The original idea behind it was to basically try to create an urban version of Burning Man where there’s just lots of creative stuff going on,” Tony later told a journalist. “What I love about it is that the place is literally changing every week.” Within six months, the lot had a name: Airstream Park. The village of trailers and tiny homes on Fremont became Tony’s safe haven within

downtown Las Vegas. There were live music jam sessions every weekend and a constant stream of art installations that lit up the space. A giant jellyfish was erected at one point. Most nights at the park ended with conversations around campfires, a favorite pastime of Tony’s. Eventually, dogs, cats, and chickens settled in the park, as well as a chocolate-brown alpaca named Marley that roamed the grounds. One day Tony took Janice’s kids to Zappos for an event and returned with Blizzy, a fluffy white mutt. The dog would be Tony’s loyal companion for years to come. Every Airstream trailer and tiny home opened toward the center of the lot, a common “living room” with AstroTurf carpeting the concrete where people set up camping chairs, tables, and fire pits. To complete the space, a large outdoor screen was set up for movie nights. Like 1000 Van Ness in San Francisco and the Ogden, in more ways than one Airstream Park became the latest reincarnation of Tony’s Harvard dorm room, where everyone he knew and trusted lived within feet of him. Airstream Park, in his mind, was the ultimate utopia of community living. Even as his net worth crept toward $1 billion, observers pointed out the seeming contradiction in Tony’s choice. “With a net worth of $840 million, Tony Hsieh could have a Caribbean island or a palatial estate overlooking an ocean vista all to himself,” read one story from the Washington Post. “Instead, the Zappos.com chief executive has set down roots in a less exclusive locale: a dusty Las Vegas trailer park.” Reporters seized the opportunity to tour his living quarters. In an interview with the Las Vegas Weekly in early 2015, Tony chatted with a reporter in the park’s community kitchen, housed in a shipping container. As he tended to a large pot filled with spicy kimchi noodle egg drop soup, he told the reporter, “I have two skills. I’m the world’s best iPhone photographer and I’m the best improv soup maker.” In another video segment for ABC News titled “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life,” Tony gave the reporter a tour, even inviting the camera crew into his small trailer home. In one shot, Tony fed Marley the alpaca a carrot from his mouth. As Marley chomped, Tony’s eyes crinkled with laughter. Genuine glee spread across his face. After a year of turmoil in the Downtown Project, Tony was eager to put forth another image: a simple man of few needs and with a penchant for homemade soups, living among friends and farm animals.

As Tony successfully steered the media coverage, much of it left out other notable components of Airstream Park. Though there were parents and children who lived in the community full-time, the atmosphere was not completely wholesome. Parties happened frequently, alcohol was freeflowing, and recreational drugs were easy to find. “There were people who lived in the village who were sober,” said a frequent visitor to the Airstream Park. “But you could also easily go up to anyone there and say, ‘Hey, do you have some mushrooms laying around somewhere?’” It was during this time that Tony met Anthony Taylor. Anthony (not his real name) was working in internet marketing when he was introduced to Tony through a mutual friend at an art show. Tony immediately loved his energy: Anthony Taylor was the quintessential hype guy. Full of excitement and quick to smile, he became the face of the park to many visitors, giving tours and prompting awe among them as he showed them how to live with less—often wearing outfits that looked as if he’d just arrived from Burning Man. At the end of each tour, he’d hand his guests a carrot to feed Marley the alpaca. To his new neighbors at the park he would say it felt like a home, compared to his rough upbringing. But once the music started and events were in swing, his party boy spirit was complemented by his reputation as the go-to guy for recreational drugs. “A lot of us used to say Tony collected lost souls in a way,” said the frequent visitor. “He would bring them into his world, treat them really well, and then they would become fiercely loyal to him. Anthony was one of those people.” Unsurprisingly, he became a polarizing figure within Airstream Park. There were some who saw Anthony as a bad influence on the community. Others sympathized with Anthony’s fascination with and devotion to Tony. “People say, ‘Oh, he was the Airstream Park drug dealer,’” said the visitor. “Well, if he was, then everyone who lived in the village was. There was not a single person in Tony’s close sphere that didn’t overlook things that probably should have been thought about.” Either way, it was a lifestyle shared by Tony, Anthony, and many others within the community. Though it was an open secret in downtown Las Vegas, it was still a part of his identity that Tony preferred to keep away from prying eyes.

Airstream Park gave off an air of radical inclusion—one of the ten guiding principles of Burning Man. But the media coverage never mentioned the six-foot-high concrete wall surrounding the park. There were a few gaps for entry that were guarded by “park rangers,” who essentially acted as bouncers for Tony’s community. The wall was just tall enough to keep out curious and unwanted eyes, though not so tall as to feel suffocating for its inhabitants. Airstream Park was Tony’s world, and he was eager to protect it from anything that might dare invade and disrupt his safe haven.

It had been two years since Tony announced Holacracy’s roll-out at Zappos, but the company had yet to reach the state of radical self-management he envisioned. In March 2015, he sent a 4,700-word company-wide email. “We’ve been operating partially under Holacracy and partially under the legacy management hierarchy in parallel for over a year now,” Tony started in his note. “Having one foot in one world while having the other foot in the other world has slowed down our transformation towards self-management and self-organization. “After many conversations and a lot of feedback about where we are today versus our desired state of self-organization, self-management, increased autonomy, and increased efficiency,” he continued, “we are going to take a ‘rip the bandaid’ approach.” In other words, employees either had to adopt Holacracy or take a buyout. Zappos lost 210 out of 1,503 employees over the following months. Some Zapponians had started wondering whether Tony should resign from Zappos. “The brewing employee discontent reflects the paradox at the heart of any company’s move to Holacracy,” read a New York Times story about the debacle. “For all the talk of self-management and consensus building, the decision to go down this path was Mr. Hsieh’s alone.” Tony remained defensive about Holacracy to a press that was unwilling to accept it. “The media has kind of portrayed it as ‘there’s just total chaos,’” he said during an onstage interview with veteran technology reporter Kara Swisher during a conference in early 2016. During the fireside chat, Tony stumbled over his words, appearing even more

uncomfortable than he usually was in media interviews. “There actually still is a hierarchy.” “No, I think they portray it as a crazy cult,” Swisher responded. The audience laughed. “A crazy cult, in total chaos,” Tony clarified sarcastically. “Well, that’s sort of the definition of a crazy cult,” she responded. The narrative of Tony being the leader of a cult had been building for years. Back when Tony was on his book tour for Delivering Happiness, he had appeared on The Colbert Report with comedian Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central, during which Colbert—who found it difficult to fathom a company like Zappos, one that only hired employees if they were “a little weird” and could join costume parades and even spend the night in Tony’s house in Southern Highlands—asked Tony point-blank, “Is this a cult? Are you Dear Leader father of a cult? Do you have child brides? How far—how much control do you have over these people?” The audience was still laughing then. People began to throw the word “cult” around more seriously when journalists reported that Tony’s friends were required to get tattoos to attend his fortieth-birthday party in December 2013—a small circle, representing a pixel. “It’s an intense display of loyalty—getting inked for a boss generally isn’t part of corporate culture—and it exemplifies the concerns some Las Vegans have about Hsieh,” read a Las Vegas Sun report. “Hsieh’s grip has reached the point that when online tech publication Gizmodo recently sent a reporter downtown, the author said the entrepreneur’s empire ‘can feel cultish.’” From his struggle to upend corporate hierarchy to his devout group of followers, his public image as a zany visionary morphed into a more disquieting figure. “Many believe Hsieh … fosters an environment where devotion is rewarded and criticism isn’t tolerated,” the Las Vegas Sun wrote. “Downtown Las Vegas, they say, is becoming Tony’s Town, a place where either you follow Hsieh—and line up for a tattoo—or you’re deemed in the way.” By the time Tony appeared onstage at the conference with Kara Swisher in 2016, the fissures in Tony’s philosophies were starting to appear. And as the public punches started again, this time targeting Holacracy and claiming that he was running a cult, Tony’s sanguine exterior started to crack.

In Airstream Park, his closest confidants started taking notice. In the fall of 2016, Tony threw a party at Airstream Park for Michelle D’Attilio’s birthday. At one point during the night, “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson blasted through the speakers. As soon as she heard the song, Michelle immediately thought back to her last birthday, when she had been with Tony at a bar with a few girlfriends. When the song came on that night, Tony had hopped out of his chair and started doing the moonwalk. Tony had told Michelle the next day that he used to watch Michael Jackson as a kid and mirror the moonwalk by himself. So when “Billie Jean” came on at Airstream Park, Michelle urged Tony to do the moonwalk again, in front of all their friends. Tony seemed hesitant, but after some pushing from Michelle and a few others, he did the moonwalk for just a few seconds as partygoers whooped and cheered. He quickly sat back down. Later that night, Tony brought up the moonwalk moment in private. “Why are you so upset?” Michelle asked. “Why did you make me do the moonwalk in front of everyone?” he said. “Because you’ve done it before and you’re so good at it!” “Listen,” Tony said angrily. “I can’t just turn it on anytime.” Michelle was confused. What are we really talking about here? As she stared at Tony, something about his facial expression made her stop. She looked closer and realized he had tears in his eyes. As she took the moment in, she thought about the recent media coverage as well as Tony’s standing at Zappos and the Downtown Project. The pressure was getting to him, she thought. It was one of the only times she ever saw Tony cry.

CHAPTER 18

THE RIGHT HAND

When Tony had been leaping from one chapter to another—building Zappos, the Amazon acquisition, the Delivering Happiness book, the launch of the Downtown Project, Holacracy—there was one man by his side the entire time: Fred Mossler. Since the early days of Zappos, Fred had been Tony’s right-hand man. And when the Downtown Project came along, it was a vision the two men created together. They donned costumes at Zappos all-hands meetings and biked around Burning Man each year. Fred was one of a dwindling number of people who could tell Tony no. He was a giant in the community that they had built. And he had an important role: a check-and-balance for Tony’s untethered ambitions and ideas, just as Alfred had been before he returned to Silicon Valley. But by 2014, Fred was forty-eight, had remarried, and had three children. When Airstream Park was being built, a trailer had been reserved for Fred and his wife, Meghan, whom he had met at Zappos years before. After staying there for a weekend, they decided not to move in. For all the years of unconventionality under Tony’s wing, he simply could not stomach moving into a trailer and raising his kids in a pseudo-commune. As Holacracy continued its troubled rollout at Zappos, Fred supported the effort internally by sending encouraging company-wide emails while listening to employees’ gripes with the new system. He appeared in media interviews with Tony to defend the corporate structure. “As I noodle on the press coverage, what no one has mentioned is if any company were bold enough to offer their entire employee base a severance the likes of which we did,” Fred said during an interview in early 2016. “In reading all the exit

interviews and speaking with people leaving, the exodus is less about Holacracy/dissatisfaction and more about the opportunity to pursue other passions or fulfill other goals in life. The fact we can make such an offer and only 18% choose to leave is, I’m guessing, an impressive statistic in the corporate world.” “I completely agree with Fred,” Tony said. But unbeknownst to the wider public, Fred was contemplating his own exit from Zappos. Some Zapponians had started noticing Fred’s increasing absence. In the past, when both Fred and Tony were in a meeting, it was not unusual to witness the two debating, with Fred talking Tony down from his outrageous ideas. But Fred, some noticed, had started to disagree less. “Fred was also at his desk more,” said Chris Peake, who reported directly to Fred. “Before, he was never really at his desk. He was usually moving and shaking, just very busy.” A few months after the interview, Fred announced he was leaving Zappos. “I’ve spent almost seventeen years with Zappos and have seen it grow from a two-bedroom apartment to the amazing company it is today,” Fred wrote in a company-wide email. “There are no words that can describe what this company has and what the people in it have meant for me.” He continued, “Tony will remain focused on Zappos, but we’ll still be tied at the hip and I still expect to contribute to Zappos as his thought partner. Downtown Las Vegas is where my heart and soul are and where all of my closest friends are. I will always be around and available for collisions downtown.”

First Alfred and then Fred had served as Tony’s life partners, in business and in friendship. Neither of them was afraid to disagree with Tony, and he regarded them as equals. But after Fred’s departure, there was no clear successor, and Tony boasted to old acquaintances that his friends kept getting younger and younger. The crowd at Zappos and Airstream Park partied more, disagreed less, and were woefully ill-equipped to become Tony’s peers. Despite surrounding himself with deferential people, Tony still saw value in a right-hand man who challenged him and demanded his respect.

When Fred left, Tony started trying to recruit a man named Victor Oviedo, a partner at a New York–based investment firm whose warm eyes and bright smile contrasted with his no-nonsense, Ivy League–bred financier background. Victor was a partner at SkyBridge Capital, a hedge fund founded by Anthony Scaramucci, the enigmatic Wall Street figure who would later have a tumultuous stint as President Donald Trump’s press secretary. Since 2009, SkyBridge had held its annual SALT Conference in Las Vegas, a meeting of the minds where the guests and keynote speakers included billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman and politicians such as future President Joe Biden and former British prime minister Tony Blair. In 2017, Victor asked the singer and songwriter Jewel to perform at SALT. Jewel agreed and asked if she could also give a talk on mental health and mindfulness at the conference with her new friend Tony Hsieh. The two had just met on billionaire Richard Branson’s Necker Island at another conference, and they had connected on a variety of topics, from Holacracy to mindfulness. Jewel was passionate about mental health, and she told Victor that having Tony at this panel would give it more credibility among the SALT crowd. Victor agreed, and met Tony for the first time at the conference. Several months later, Jewel invited Victor to a charity event in Las Vegas. Tony, who was also there, threw his usual line at Victor. “The next time you’re in town, come stay with me at the Airstream Park,” he said to Victor. “My email is [email protected].” “All right, [email protected], next time I’m in town, I’ll shoot you an email,” Victor said. He thought it was unusual for Tony, a prominent CEO, to invite him to stay with him so soon after meeting. But from their brief interactions, Victor could tell that Tony’s life was far from ordinary. A few days later, Victor emailed Tony and told him he already had a trip planned for Vegas later in the month. Tony wrote back, “Why don’t you come to the office for a tour and then come shadow me for a day?” Soon after, Victor arrived at Zappos and received tours of the company headquarters and the Downtown Project before the guide dropped him off at Airstream Park at the end of the afternoon. He found Tony sitting at a long table with a few other residents, drinking Fernet.

Victor sat down, and the two dove into a conversation about Holacracy at Zappos. Tony told Victor he wanted Holacracy to evolve into a new system called market-based dynamics, in which every team would be run like its own independent business and every employee would have to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset to thrive. The structure was based on Tony’s theory that everyone could become a self-starting entrepreneur so long as they were given the tools to succeed. Victor later told confidants that his friendship with Tony began at this precise moment, when he challenged Tony on his new idea. “What parts of market-based dynamics don’t make sense to you?” Tony asked Victor. The others at the table turned to pay attention to the debate. “This idea you believe in that there is an entrepreneur in everyone,” Victor said. “You don’t think anyone could become an entrepreneur?” “Maybe anyone could be, but not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, Tony. Some people just want to go to work, and then they want to go home to their friends and family. Or maybe they want to pursue personal hobbies. I just do not agree with the premise of a setting where you force everyone to become an entrepreneur.” Tony stared at him, slowly nodding. He seemed taken aback that Victor was willing to openly debate his theory. Then, Victor looked around the table and saw some of the shocked faces looking back at him. Having spent a lot of time with successful individuals through the SALT Conference, Victor quickly read the room: Tony’s intellectual curiosity and his ability to transform ideas into conclusions were elite. But he had surrounded himself with yes-men. Victor left the trailer park that night wondering if he had gone too far. But the next day Tony again invited Victor to shadow him for the day. Victor sat in on several Zappos meetings, including one in which Tony and his core lieutenants were prepping for a presentation to Amazon’s Jeff Wilke, a high-ranking executive who reported directly to Jeff Bezos. Tony asked Victor for his input, despite having no formal role at Zappos. Is this a test? Victor thought. Am I being interviewed right now? Tony ended the day by inviting Victor to move to Vegas. “Zero chance,” Victor immediately replied. “How about you come work for me?” Tony asked.

“I have no interest in becoming employee number seven hundred thousand at Amazon,” he said. But they kept talking, and Tony invited Victor on a ski trip to Powder Mountain in Utah with a few of his friends, including Zappos employees and Airstream Park residents. On the ski trip, Victor watched as Tony made soup for the group of twenty people while everyone else played beer pong. Once the soup was served, Tony curled up on a couch in the corner of the living room. People came up to him to chat. When they moved off, Tony would open a book on his lap and read while surrounded by partying chaos. Victor’s excursions with Tony started happening every month, from Zappos meetings in Vegas to Life Is Beautiful festival planning in Hawaii, and even to distilleries in Guadalajara to do research on a potential new tequila branding opportunity with Nacho Daddy. They attended conferences together when Tony was speaking, and met fellow entrepreneurs at their offices to explore various partnerships, from StockX to MIT Labs in Boston. Then one day, Tony handed Victor forty pages of financial documents. They were a summary of Tony’s investments tied to the Downtown Project and the financials for Life Is Beautiful. Tony told Victor he was concerned that he was being ripped off, and he was particularly disappointed with the financial performance and structure of Life Is Beautiful. Victor went through the documents. “If you are basing the performance solely on financial returns, then your concerns are valid,” he said to Tony. But wasn’t Tony investing in these ventures to build community? By that metric, Victor said, these businesses are somewhat successful. It appeared that Tony needed Victor to remind him that the community-building aspect of these investments was the ultimate measure of return. Victor never minced his words around Tony. As a result, Tony kept asking Victor to come work for him at Zappos and the Downtown Project. Tony even recruited others to ask Victor for him. After months of courtship, Victor made his observations clear to Tony. “I would love to do something with you,” he said. “But frankly, I think you’re wasting your time at Zappos. You’ve done everything there is for you to do here. When you’re ready to jump into your next adventure, I’d be happy to join you as your partner.”

Tony struck out with Victor. They remained friends, but Tony still needed a right-hand man in Vegas to deliver on his ideas for Zappos and the Downtown Project. Instead of recruiting from the outside, Tony realized he could find someone within his ranks.

“It’d be really fun to just have a ball pit right here,” Tony said, pointing to a corner as Tyler Williams followed him around the Zappos campus. Tyler was scribbling down notes as Tony dumped the outputs of his whirring mind onto him. “I would like a slide here that comes from the second floor. It could be great to have music in the plaza, or maybe a dog park.” Tyler had been at Zappos for five years now and had been promoted several times. Internally, he was known as the “Fungineer,” a role that served as a clearinghouse for any strange idea that Tony came up with. In one instance, Tony asked Tyler to build a jacket that had built-in portable chargers and other gadgets, similar to the jacket worn by Richard “Data” Wang, a character in the 1985 cult classic The Goonies. In another case, Tyler helped build the “instant dance floor” in the Zappos lobby. At the push of a button—which said NEVER PUSH THIS BUTTON—speakers would slide up from the ground, thumping music would blare out, and fog machines would fill the Zappos lobby with smoke, creating the illusion of a dance floor. In 2016, Tony promoted Tyler to lead Zappos’s brand expansion department, giving him a $20 million annual budget. Prior to this, the biggest budget Tyler had managed was around half a million dollars. Tony had also never given the branding role to anyone other than himself. Tyler, who was a decade younger than Tony, looked up to the Zappos visionary. Like Rehan, who had been swept into Tony’s inner circle, Tyler now had a front-row seat to Tony’s life as a tech leader and cultural icon. In his new role, Tyler started jetting off with Tony across the world, from music festivals to conferences. When Tony drank a shot of Fernet, Tyler was usually right there with him. When Tony went up onstage to talk about Holacracy, Tyler was sitting in the audience. In many ways, they were polar opposites. Tony was introverted at heart, while Tyler was effusive and loved to entertain. But Tyler was a crutch for Tony in social situations: when Tony

wanted to slink into the background, it was Tyler who stepped up to take attention away from him. Tyler was resourceful, and he was usually more or less willing to partake in the festivities. He was now Tony’s new right hand. Being at Tony’s side also meant hobnobbing with celebrities like Jewel. The Grammy Award–winning artist had become more involved in Tony’s world after the SALT Conference and had recently agreed to build a program at Zappos that could help his employees maintain their mental health. Called Whole Human, it would provide Zapponians with a series of courses on how to achieve optimal emotional and physical health. In their conversations, Jewel and Tony realized their missions and goals were complementary—that fostering Zappos employees’ happiness would be key to a successful corporate culture. But the Zappos definition of employee happiness—an open bar at the office with a philosophy of “work hard, play hard”—was at complete odds with the philosophy that Jewel was trying to introduce. “Happiness is different than excitement,” Jewel said. “Excitement and perk-driven culture becomes addictive in nature and creates entitlement.” By her definition, in fact, Zappos had it all wrong. So in the spring of 2018, Jewel organized a mindfulness retreat on the Colorado River in Nevada for about a dozen Zappos employees including Tony and Tyler. While Tony backed out of the trip at the last minute, Tyler and the others showed up with boat gear and coolers full of beer and hard alcohol. “Hey, guys, that’s not the point of this trip,” Jewel said. This was to be an alcohol- and substance-free retreat. They chuckled and packed the alcohol back into their cars. For the next few hours, they boated up the Colorado River, stopping by hot springs and cavernous coves. In one of the caves, Jewel sang a capella, her soprano echoing around the red rock chambers. For Tyler, it was one of the most amazing days of his life. He only wished that Tony had been there to experience it. In fact, Tyler had started to worry about his boss. In the last couple of months, Tyler had started to notice a yellowing in the whites of Tony’s eyes —jaundice, he later figured, a symptom of alcoholic hepatitis. Tyler also saw that Tony’s hands would tremble during Zappos meetings. Sometimes during morning meetings, mimosas would appear, and Tony was always a

willing participant. Tyler realized that he had never seen a day when Tony was not drinking. Tyler reached a point in 2018 where he physically could not keep up with his mentor’s vices. In the fall, Tyler started experiencing nausea and heartburn. His doctor asked him what his diet looked like, and was shocked to learn how much Fernet-Branca Tyler was drinking. “You are teaching your body not to digest anything, because it’s thinking the digestif will do it for you,” the doctor told him. The doctor instructed Tyler to make serious life changes. As Tyler wondered how Tony was stomaching his Fernet habit, he witnessed another, even more troubling encounter. A meeting had been scheduled at the El Cortez between Tony and a man named Ben Jorgensen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had recently raised $30 million for his new blockchain technology company, Constellation Labs. Ben and Tony had met previously during the early Downtown Project days and had remained friends. There was enough mutual respect between the two men that during a visit to Airstream Park, Tony had once confided in Ben about his frustrations. “Everybody seems to want something from me,” Tony had said. “I don’t want anything from you,” Ben said. “You want my time,” Tony said. “It’s still something. I’m so tired of it all.” The two ended up going back to his trailer and watching a YouTube video about the perspective of the human eye. There Ben watched as Tony turned off from the world. Still, Ben had been inspired by Tony’s vision and generosity. Many times he had witnessed Tony in conversations gently nudging people toward their purpose. For the meeting at the El Cortez, Ben had wanted his Constellation cofounders to meet Tony and be inspired. But as the meeting approached, Ben —who had only been working on his startup for eight months and was in the trenches of building it—was forced to reschedule. Tony, who had nearly every waking minute of his life accounted for, made it clear to Tyler in private that he was peeved. On the day of the rescheduled meeting, Tony showed up at the Parlour Bar at El Cortez with his entourage, Tyler included. As their drinks arrived,

Ben discussed his company and his views on the wider crypto community with Tony and his group. When Ben finished, Tony bored into Ben with a series of questions. “How do you make a business out of crypto? What exactly is the business model?” Tony’s tone felt hostile. As Ben tried to answer, Tony interrupted him. “Well, what is the value of it? How do you even sell that?” Ben was used to people being skeptical about his cryptocurrency business—it was 2018, after all, when Bitcoin crashed from $20,000 a coin to just over $3,000. But this was the last thing Ben had expected from Tony. He had brought his team to Vegas hoping for what Tony was famous for— encouraging entrepreneurs through productive and inspiring conversation. “It was a very weird dynamic, and my co-founders eventually started to object to Tony’s questions,” Ben said later. “They knew how much the meeting meant to me.” As everyone at the table watched the uncomfortable encounter go down, Tyler sat quietly. He had rarely, if ever, seen Tony be so hostile. He wondered whether Tony felt intellectually threatened by Ben, a sign of ego that seemed foreign to the Tony he knew. The meeting ended on such a sour note that Tyler was compelled to reach out to Ben and apologize. But as he walked away from the El Cortez, he found himself thinking, Where the hell did that come from?

CHAPTER 19

GENIE IN A BOTTLE

The small propeller plane was circling high above the playa as Tyler looked out the window. His body felt the hum of the engines as he scanned the view below before him: a sprawling sea of encampments organized in the shape of a horseshoe, a seeming hieroglyphic mirage emerging from the haze of the desert. He felt his adrenaline shoot up, and a smile crinkled across his face. We’re back, he thought. Back to Burning Man. The annual pilgrimage to Black Rock City—the ephemeral town that exists only one week a year in the name of Burning Man—occurs at the end of every summer. By 2019, Tony and his crew were veterans. To get an invite from Tony was to receive a golden ticket to join his circle of confidants and followers. Tony’s camp, which for liability reasons—given open drug use at the camp and the event—was technically called Mimi’s camp even though he footed the bill, provided everything a so-called Burner would need to survive and thrive for a week rolling around in the playa dust. Their “Welcome to Burning Man” starter pack included individual trailers with stocked fridges, scarves, dust masks, goggles, and light kits. Tyler first joined Tony’s crew at the festival in 2014. He remembered being told as a child that Burning Man was a gathering of devil-worshiping pagans in the desert, all coming together to burn an idol, procreate, and get weird. But he was no longer that kid, and he was excited to experience the community that had inspired so much of Tony’s work in Zappos and downtown Las Vegas. That first year, Tony never left his side; he wanted to make sure his newest member of the Burning Man crew was having a good time. It was

almost as if he wanted to vicariously experience going to Burning Man for the first time again through Tyler. He took videos of Tyler’s awed reactions to Black Rock City: tens of thousands of individuals coming together to create a world of kaleidoscopic art and rapture as the sun went down. He had gone to Burning Man every year since, and they had experienced some wild events. Two years before, on the final night of the festival, Tony had been watching the main ceremony—the burning of the sculpture at the center of Black Rock City—when a man he had just been talking to ran into the fire and died. Now it was Tony’s ninth time at Burning Man and Tyler’s sixth. There were first-time Burners in their camp this year, including Tony’s parents and his former girlfriend Michelle D’Attilio. For Tony, Burning Man was a place where he could search for inspiration and ideas. Weeks after his first burn on the playa in 2011, he invited four of the founding leaders of Burning Man to Las Vegas to discuss how he could apply the ten principles of Burning Man to Zappos and to the yet undeveloped Downtown Project he planned to build. And through the years, he continued the tradition of taking what he could out of the playa into “the default world”—a term that Burners used in reference to the rest of the year spent away from the festival. Tony purchased a gutted Boeing 747 that acted as a club at Black Rock City for several years, and he intended to bring it to downtown Las Vegas to turn it into an event space. The theme for Burning Man in 2019 was “Metamorphoses”—a celebration of change and an exploration of uncertainty. But Tony’s life had remained unchanged for quite some time, at least by his standards. In 1998, he sold LinkExchange. About a decade later in 2009, he sold Zappos. Now another ten years had passed. He was forty-five years old and Zappos had just celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Holacracy had failed to take hold, so Tony was now steering the company toward market-based dynamics. The transition was still sluggish at best, and he was pushing his executives to go faster. They pushed back, with long-term veterans like Chris Peake telling Tony they had to go slow in order to educate the thirteen hundred Zapponians on the completely novel corporate structure. Meanwhile, the Downtown Project was approaching its seventh year, and it was still a money-losing venture. Many of the Downtown Project

businesses Tony had invested in had yet to figure out how to be selfsustaining and independent and were still asking him for more funding. Two of his top Downtown Project lieutenants, Fred and Andrew Donner, had taken a step back to focus on their own projects, which made Tony question whether he still had the right group of leaders to steer the project’s course. All this made Tony ponder a question he had considered many times before: What’s next? He was eager to embark on his next chapter. Members of Tony’s Burning Man crew were usually given plastic watches synced to the same time. Phones barely had reception on the playa, so their watches would be the only tool they had to guide meet-up times and points. It was another spectacularly planned year. Around a dozen RVs parked in a circle surrounded a dome tent in the center, where a hanging chandelier illuminated the Persian rugs and accented throw pillows across the ground. Though his parents, Richard and Judy, tried their best to keep up to the pace, they usually turned in early at nighttime. Judy took a nap one night on Tony’s cloud-nine-themed art car. One night, Tony got Judy, who was wearing a long flowy dress, and Michelle, clad in thigh-high dusty boots and an LED necklace, to dance with each other as a crowd surrounded them. Though Tony knew this would make them uncomfortable, he still pushed them to the front, giggling as he videoed the two women awkwardly dancing together. Once his parents retired to bed, Tony went off into the night with Tyler. Aside from alcohol and cannabis, of which there was plenty, Tony also sought out psychedelic mushrooms and MDMA to enhance his experience, which he said he used to elicit a different perspective and connection to Black Rock City. “The thing about doing recreational drugs with Tony was everything was always intentional,” said a member of his Burning Man crew. “As in, we’re going somewhere to see something so we can get inspired and then integrate that thought process into making an environment better for people in the default world.” As they biked through the playa, following the bass lines and neon lights pulsating in the dark, they crossed paths with Shelby Sacco, which is not her real name. She represented a new crop of Burning Man attendees in recent years: techies who came to Black Rock to discover life outside of their screens and algorithms, in the hope of achieving enlightenment.

As the desert’s energy throbbed around their chance encounter, Shelby reached into her bag and took out a small container. Inside was a white powder, and she told Tony and Tyler that it was ketamine. Typically used as an animal tranquilizer, ketamine had made an entrance to the rave scene in recent decades, giving users a dissociative high that can distort sights and sounds and make the user feel disconnected from reality—especially when that reality involves physical or mental pain. She explained that ketamine was a nonaddictive drug, there are no hangovers or negative health effects, and under its influence you can only be happy. “Those are two things that Tony always searched for,” the Burning Man crew member said. “It was basically described as like the perfect drug.”

Ketamine was first synthesized in 1956 by chemists at the pharmaceutical firm Parke Davis Company, as a means to replace the surgical anesthetic PCP, which had a tendency to trigger hallucinations and psychotic episodes after surgery. Formerly called CI-581, ketamine was supposed to be a safer alternative, and it went on to become the world’s top-selling anesthetic, used by pediatricians and veterinarians. During the 1970s, it was used as an anesthetic in the field for soldiers during the Vietnam War, which sparked the beginning of abuse of the drug when soldiers and veterans became addicted to its hallucinatory and calming effects. But the publication of Journeys into the Bright World by Marcia Moore and Howard Alltounian in 1978 offered scientific literature on the potential benefits of the drug, while other advocates like John Lilly, a neuroscientist who later documented his use of the drug in The Scientist, helped spread ketamine use across the East Coast social scene in the 1980s and 1990s. The drug moved into raves and clubs, earning the nickname Special K for its trance-inducing qualities on the dance floor. In 1999, ketamine was deemed a Schedule III narcotic by the Drug Enforcement Agency, which meant that unless it was dispensed by a medical practitioner, it would be a crime to sell or intend to sell the drug. The earliest studies on the effects of ketamine in treating mental disorders started in the 1960s, when a controversial Mexican psychotherapist named Salvador Roquet started using the drug as a form of psychotherapy. Roquet was arrested by Mexican authorities in the mid-

1970s due to his use of illegal drugs. “I think the major reason was that conventional psychiatrists were angry at the publicity that Salvador had been receiving,” said Stanley Krippner, a psychologist who was a friend of Salvador’s and helped facilitate his release from detention. But a decade later, psychiatrists in the Soviet Union launched their own experiment with ketamine as psychotherapy to treat alcoholism. After ten years of research, Russian doctors Evgeny Krupitsky and A. Y. Grinenko published their findings in the 1990s: “The results of a controlled clinical trial demonstrated a considerable increase in efficacy of the authors’ standard alcoholism treatment when supplemented by ketamine psychedelic therapy.” The researchers also found that ketamine-assisted psychedelic therapy induced “positive transformation of non-verbalized (mostly unconscious) self-concept and emotional attitudes, to various aspects of self and other people, positive changes in life values and purposes, important insights into the meaning of life and an increase in the level of spiritual development. Most importantly, these psychological changes were shown to favor a sober lifestyle.” In 2000, the drug was tested on patients to treat depression in a study led by Robert M. Berman at Yale University. Seven patients with major depression were given intravenous treatment of ketamine for two days. The researchers found that “subjects with depression evidenced significant improvement in depressive symptoms within 72 hours after ketamine but not placebo infusion.” The research has largely been limited to small sample groups, with a need for more data on longer-term efficacy and safety. But the few that exist show evidence that ketamine, in a supervised setting, could help patients with mood and anxiety disorders. In 2020, psychiatrists at the Karolinska Institutet, a medical research university in Sweden, ran another experiment where thirty patients with “difficult-to-treat depression” were randomly assigned to a ketamine-infusion group or a placebo group. Then in the next phase, those who wanted to could receive ketamine twice for two weeks. “The result was that over 70 percent of those treated with ketamine responded to the drug,” the researchers found. Recent studies into the potential therapeutic uses for ketamine have looked into it as a treatment for suicidal ideation, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In addition to anecdotal evidence, word of

mouth, and off-label uses, the studies bolstered support for more research into ketamine therapies. But even though ketamine has shown positive signals in research studies to treat mental disorders, professional psychiatrists remain wary of mass-prescribing the drug. “Ketamine has the advantage of being very rapid-acting, but at the same time it is a narcoticclassed drug that can lead to addiction,” said Johan Lundberg, one of the authors of a Swedish study on the drug. “So it’ll be interesting to examine in future studies if this receptor can be a target for new, effective drugs that don’t have the adverse effects of ketamine.” “I think if you put ketamine into an overexcited brain, it will calm it down,” said Dr. Karl Jansen, one of the premier researchers in ketamine who has studied the use and abuse of the drug. “If you put ketamine into a calm brain, it will over-excite it. It’s probably pro-convulsant in a normal brain, and anticonvulsant in an epileptic brain. It’s a very complicated drug.” But it was in California-based tech circles that so-called ketamine clinics—facilities in which licensed doctors administer ketamine in a supervised setting—found an audience in the mid-2010s, around the same time it became clear that entrepreneurs were more susceptible to depression due to the stressors of their jobs. Because the clinics offered the drug for an off-label use, insurance companies would not cover the treatments, so the kinds of patients these clinics attracted were wealthy—from technologists to executives to stay-at-home parents. Those who could afford the treatment would sit back in a reclining chair hooked up to an IV drip as the ketamine triggered hallucinations and other dissociative experiences to help cure mood and anxiety disorders. The claim that ketamine is nonaddictive has never been supported by any medical research, even though some doctors have made such bold statements. In a 2017 Los Angeles Magazine story about the rise of ketamine clinics in the city, Dr. Steven Mandel stated outright that the drug is nonaddictive, “insisting there’s no danger of tolerance or addiction.” But abuse of the drug is possible. Ketamine made the crossover from an anesthetic to Special K—the club drug version that can be snorted as a powder instead of being injected. “Recreational users claim that a snort of the stuff (some prefer injection) can make a Daft Punk concert transcendent,” read the Los Angeles Magazine story.

But snorting the drug in an unsupervised setting is not the same as having a professional administer it with an IV drip. Far from the supervised clinics in California, Tony, Tyler, and their ketamine-espousing friend bent over to snort the white powder as the festival swirled around them. Tyler didn’t think much of the drug; it made him feel a little loopy, like he was drunk, but that was the extent of it. And he thought Tony had a similar experience. They said goodbye to Shelby and moved on through the playa. Unbeknownst to Tyler, a seed had been planted in Tony’s head. In recent months, Tony had come to see that his years of alcohol consumption were finally catching up to him, and he had been looking for a healthier alternative. Could ketamine be the answer? Like most ideas that he gravitated toward, its tentacles started to wrap around his mind.

About a month later in Las Vegas, the annual Life Is Beautiful festival roared ahead. By now, it had grown to a massive event as part of the international festival circuit, drawing close to two hundred thousand attendees over the course of a three-day weekend. With mind-boggling neon lights and fireworks lighting the downtown Vegas skyline, Tony’s vision had again come to fruition: a weekend that his closest friends could come together and enjoy. That year, Tony was most excited to see Billie Eilish, the eighteen-year-old phenom with a propensity to be unapologetically herself. “Tony loved Billie,” said Michelle, who attended the festival with her daughter and watched Eilish with Tony. “He just thought she was the coolest.” As the weekend wore on, Tony told Michelle that he had been attending drug-assisted therapies with one of his other girlfriends. He had done a lot of research on psychotherapy, he said, particularly therapies that involve MDMA and psilocybin (the clinical name for the active substance in hallucinogenic mushrooms). Recently psilocybin, in particular, had been getting attention in biotech circles as a legitimate form of treatment for mood and anxiety disorders, but it had yet to pass the clinical trials required to receive approval from the FDA. Like ketamine, a contingent of alternative psychotherapists were using these drugs in an off-label manner.

Tony insisted to Michelle that the sessions were mostly for his girlfriend and not for him. But the therapist had been working on Tony, too. Michelle asked him what they had learned. “She said there’s nothing wrong with me,” Tony replied. “Apparently I have it all figured out.” She laughed. Any therapist who tells a patient, especially one like Tony, that he had it all figured out should have her license revoked, Michelle thought. “No, for real,” Tony said. “She thinks that the way I think and everything I’m doing is good.” And Tony claimed the therapist had said he could not get addicted to drugs because he did not have an addictive personality. Michelle was hearing a newfound arrogance in Tony’s tone. In the years she’d known Tony, her favorite memory of him was when he walked around her in circles at the elevator bank in the Ogden, too nervous to talk. His humility back then had been surprising and endearing. But this new version of Tony that spoke as if he was invincible—she had very little idea where he came from or who he was.

A few weeks later, in November, Tony, Tyler, and a few others attended the Summit conference in downtown Los Angeles. It was a four-day gathering of Silicon Valley elite, and Tony had been a regular attendee over the years. The event included talks from Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell. But of all the technorati in attendance, Tony had only one person he wanted to rendezvous with: Shelby, the woman from Burning Man. He told Tyler he wanted to meet up with her to try ketamine again. Just as he had researched the science of happiness, how to build a city, and even the art of comedy, Tony had been researching ketamine. He had read several books on the drug, including The Little Book of Ketamine, which he later started passing out to his friends. The book doesn’t rubberstamp the drug, but it doesn’t indict it either. While researching the drug, Tony read that when under the drug’s influence, people can have spiritual and insightful revelations that can provide relief for physical and emotional

pain. The most common reason patients want to explore ketamine therapy is to treat depression, but Tony never told his confidants he felt depressed. He framed it more in a spirit of exploration. And so they met with Shelby again. Over the course of the four-day event, Tony was continuously on ketamine, throughout the day and night. He told those around him that it was triggering his brain in a way that he had never experienced before. Tyler was right alongside him. He was doing less than Tony—not unusual, given Tony’s higher tolerance for substances than most people— but Tyler had also gotten feedback from his wife: “I don’t like you on that drug. You’re not the same person for three days after you do it.” Tyler also started to notice behaviors in Tony he hadn’t seen before. Tony was usually very discreet about his drug use. Discretion was core to Tony’s way of living and allowed him to balance the contradictory circles of his life, from corporate boardrooms to festival revelry. But at Summit he was very open about his ketamine use, trying to convince others to do it with him, including the girlfriend he had gone to therapy with. She said no, and later became so concerned about his usage that she ended her relationship with him. Like Michelle, Tyler also started noticing Tony’s newfound arrogance. “I respond to things differently,” Tyler heard him say at one point during Summit. “I’m a super genius, and I have complete control. I can do things that others can’t. I can download tae kwon do and instantly be a master of it.” Tyler realized that Tony was reciting lines and scenarios from The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves’s character Neo discovers he is living in a simulation and vows to break out of it. There’s a famous scene in the film where he “downloads” tae kwon do and kung fu, as if a person could download skills like they would an app on their iPhone. Immediately after the download, Neo becomes a trained fighter. Tyler was unsure what to make of all this. But after giving it a little thought, he brushed Tony’s bizarre claims aside. He probably just needs to sober up and get some rest, Tyler thought. After the conference, Tony immediately wanted more of the drug, and it didn’t take long for him to reunite with it again. Around Thanksgiving, Tony toured down the California coast for a series of events and gatherings. It started at Belcampo, a thirty-thousand-acre regenerative and organic farm

at the base of Mount Shasta. He came as a guest of the supply chain director, who had heard about Tony’s love for Belcampo’s famous bone broth. After the farm, he went to Oakland to attend the Soiled Dove, a circus-themed dinner event, as a guest of actor David Arquette. Finally, the trip concluded in South Lake Tahoe for an immersive art event at the MontBleu Hotel. Tyler joined him with Michelle, who had been hired by Tony a few months prior to manage his social media accounts. Shelby was there too. Only on this trip did Michelle learn that Tony was doing ketamine. She was also told by Tony, Tyler, and Shelby that it was nonaddictive, it was being used in psychotherapy, and it opened up the mind in revolutionary and creative ways. Michelle decided to try it, but she didn’t do much, and she finished the trip thinking little of the drug. A few days later in December, Michelle was in Vegas at the opening of Fergusons, a formerly run-down motel in downtown Vegas that Tony had spent $15 million to convert into a trendy town square. Behind the property, he had built a new and improved Airstream Park, in which he was now living. A series of events had been organized to celebrate the opening of another linchpin of Tony’s grand plan for downtown Vegas. His parents, Richard and Judy, had come to support the event. During one performance at the theater room in Zappos headquarters, Michelle took a photograph of Tony as he smiled at the performers onstage. “This was probably the last time I saw him okay, like in a good space,” Michelle later said. “Happy and healthy.”

CHAPTER 20

WINTER CAMP

The temperature often hovers above freezing on Las Vegas nights between December and January. The flow of conferences and festivals has typically dissipated by then, and people spend more time making plans to see family than arranging business trips. With the downtime surrounding Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Tony had built a weeks-long tradition for his community every year: Winter Camp. A stream of family-friendly events revolving around Airstream Park, from potsticker-wrapping parties to poetry slams, would keep his circle of friends coming back to his home. Every night, a movie played on the big outdoor screen. It was usually a wholesome time among the Airstream trailers, and now that they had just moved into their new location behind Fergusons, this year was supposed to be special. But Tony was not himself. His behavior had become so outside the norm that those living with him grew increasingly concerned about it. Tony started telling people that he and Tyler had discovered a new drug called ketamine, prompting many of them to confront Tyler. Why is Tony so into ketamine? they would ask. Why are you encouraging this heavy use of it? Tony had secured a large batch of ketamine and was snorting it daily, pressuring those around him to take the drug so they could all be on the same “flow.” He invited psychotherapists from a ketamine clinic in Los Angeles to give a talk about the positive effects of the drug. But when they arrived, they only encouraged using the drug in a controlled setting under supervision. In his Airstream trailer, he had a chart that tracked how often he was using the drug, and how much his friends were using it, including Tyler.

Tyler had initially been unperturbed by Tony’s ketamine use. But faced with questions and accusations, he started visiting Winter Camp more often to check on Tony. What he witnessed made him realize that something bigger was going on: Tony’s world and legacy were now at stake. Typically, Tony was quiet and reserved. He was often the last to talk and when he did, he was a man of few words. But now he was acting in a manic manner, appearing shirtless and shoeless in the frigid air, pacing around the trailers and tiny homes and ranting about new, strange ideas. He wanted to start a new religion. He claimed he could morph his body into a gazelle and become one with nature and terrain. He was working toward unlocking the escape combination to the universe. If he could break out of this simulation controlled by artificial intelligence, he said to friends, he could become the new controller of the universe and heal everyone from all physical and mental maladies. He started offering everyone massages and would randomly start stretching while walking around Airstream Park. There were moments when his personality went from calm to manic to calm again, as if he were switching it on and off at will. When people asked Tony why he was acting so strangely, he told them it was Method acting. He also started treating his friends in a way that was alarming and almost cruel. He gave friends “strikes”—like a parental warning issued to a misbehaving child—for interrupting him. He continued to pressure them to do ketamine with him, even when they made it clear that they did not want to. He started putting people on time-out. When his friends told him they were concerned, he offered them half of his net worth if they would sign a pact to never question him. Tyler started to track Tony’s sleep patterns on his Apple Watch—a feature that Tony shared with his close friends—and saw that he was barely sleeping. He also noticed his weight dropping. Tyler made steaks for him, a food that he knew Tony loved, but now they went uneaten. Tyler was still getting pressured by Tony to do ketamine with him. He would oblige, but he was increasingly worried for his mentor. He wondered if Tony was in a drug-induced psychosis. Tyler started doing his own research, and came across a study in the Shanghai Archive of Psychiatry suggesting that about 60 percent of drug-induced psychosis cases can be resolved within a month if the person completely stops taking that drug, 30

percent of cases may persist for one to six months, and about 10 percent can persist for more than six months after drug use ends. As the reality of the situation began to sink in, Tyler, after some cajoling, got Tony to agree to a pact: they would no longer use ketamine when Winter Camp was over at the end of January.

Despite a growing number of concerned friends watching Tony’s behavior become more bizarre by the day, those around him still didn’t do much to intervene. After all, he was the Tony Hsieh. Surely he could handle himself. For instance, no one seemed too concerned when Tony proposed taking a trip to Maui with a few friends and a baby, to test whether polygamy-style parenting was possible. He had been discussing the concept with close friends for years. “I liked the concepts of the tribes who raised all their children as their own, regardless of whose kids,” he once wrote in an email to a friend. “It exists to a smaller extent at Airstream park and I’m pretty confident if you researched you’d find it exists to a greater extent in the US.” The baby boy was Eva’s, his ex-girlfriend who was still living at Airstream Park, and Tony was his godfather. Three other friends, including a recent entrant named Don Calder, who oversaw operations of a Burning Man sculpture park in a California ghost town called Nipton, and Jillian Tedrow, a former bartender at Bunkhouse Saloon, came along. Neither Eva nor the baby’s father attended. But some people who had known Tony for a long time felt the change in him more acutely. One night at Fergusons, Mark Guadagnoli, the university professor and former Zappos executive, arrived with his two teenage kids to have dinner with Tony and Michelle. In years past, Mark and Tony would embrace, make note of the fact they missed each other, and then enjoy themselves. But Mark had noticed that this Tony had less time to sit and be present. Tony spoke to Mark and his kids only briefly before disappearing to talk to others. Later, Mark realized that he had been watching his friend spin away like a golf ball. “If you put a little bit of right spin on the ball, it’s gonna go straight for a while,” he said later. Not until the last moment does the ball lurch away from its straight path.

Justin Weniger had also been having a hard time getting in contact with Tony. After what seemed a successful Life Is Beautiful, the festival had again lost money, despite its massive turnout. It was also the last festival Ryan Doherty would be involved with after he and Justin had split their business earlier in the year; Justin had sold his stake in Corner Bar Management, the entity that oversaw their growing portfolio of bars on Fremont Street, in exchange for Ryan’s stake in Life Is Beautiful. In other words, Justin bet the farm on the festival. On Tony’s birthday in December, Justin sent him a message wishing him well. He didn’t hear back. He did, however, have a meeting scheduled with Millie Chou, the Downtown Project’s lawyer. After he arrived at her office, she told Justin he was being removed as CEO, and the festival’s director of finance, a man named David Oehm, was replacing him. When Tony did respond days later, he said he had been busy digging himself out of emails and other matters and hadn’t had a clue about Justin being removed as CEO. Later that week, Tony agreed to take a break from a poker tournament at Fergusons to meet with Justin. “Either you knew it and you’re a liar,” Justin told him, “or you don’t know it, and you’re stupid. And I know you’re not stupid.” Tony looked up at him with a tear in his eye and said something Justin hadn’t heard from him before: “I’m sorry.” Two weeks later, Justin met with him at the El Cortez, and found Tony preoccupied by something. Sitting in the bar chain-smoking cigarettes, Tony told him that he was planning a surprise for Ryan Doherty in a few days: “So check this out. I want to turn the laundry room at Fergusons into a spoof of the Laundry Room at Commonwealth.” Justin watched as Tony spoke with animation about how he wanted to show his appreciation to Ryan for creating experiences for people with his bars. He was going to blindfold Ryan, give him a vacuum-sealed frozen salmon, pick him up in a roadster from Commonwealth, and then drive him to Fergusons, where a party would be held in the laundry room, complete with chandeliers and furniture like those in the actual Laundry Room bar. That was my bar and my business six months ago, and I gave it away to do Life Is Beautiful with you, Justin thought. Now you’re rubbing my nose in it.

Later, Justin went to the party and watched as Ryan took off his blindfold and put down the fish. Looking bewildered, Ryan walked around before wandering over to Justin. “What the fuck is going on?” he said.

Ryan’s party was one of several events where Tony raised eyebrows. In January 2020, Michelle came to Vegas to help run social media at the Zappos holiday party. Though Michelle had been largely kept out of the loop regarding Tony’s behavior at Winter Camp, she noticed he was unusually elated to see her. Throughout the weekend she woke up every morning to a series of text messages that Tony had sent at odd hours of the night, and she realized he wasn’t sleeping. Seeing Tony, it made her think of one of her family members who is bipolar. “There’s no other way to put it,” she said later. “I’ve seen manic behavior.” Knowing how drugs and a lack of sleep could take a mental toll on her relative, she decided to raise her concerns to Tony in his trailer at Airstream Park. “I’m worried about you,” Michelle said. “Will you just get some sleep?” “I’m totally fine,” he said. “I will sleep tomorrow.” They went around in circles, talking for an hour. Eventually Michelle started to cry—she could not understand why he refused to sleep. He stared back at her with a blank face and left the trailer. The next day, Michelle texted Tony to see if he was up. Yes, he wrote back, he had just woken up. Michelle, feeling a sense of relief that he had finally slept, walked over to his trailer to have one more chat before she flew back home to Milwaukee. When she got there, Tony led her to the back of the trailer. They sat on his bed facing the front of the trailer, and he showed her a wall of Post-it notes by the bed. The notes were arranged in a scale, and they were numbered from +3 to -3. Below each number were names of family members and friends. “You were a plus two until last night,” Tony said to her. “Now you’re a negative one point five.” Michelle stared at the wall. She noticed that his parents, Richard and Judy, were on the negative scale.

“You were behaving like my parents,” he said to her. “You were trying to control me. You were judging me, and I don’t want to be judged.” “Okay,” she said. She bit her lip to keep the tears from rolling down her face, and walked out of the trailer.

Eventually, word of Tony’s behavior reached Zappos’s top brass. Tyler, now a leader at Zappos who served as a direct conduit to Tony, found himself getting pulled into daily meetings with Zappos leadership. Executives like chief operating officer Kedar Deshpande, chief people officer Hollie Delaney, senior director of culture Christa Foley, and head of internal operations John Bunch were asking for daily updates on Tony’s mental and physical state. But despite the alarming reports, they were unwilling to give up on Tony. He was more than just the CEO of Zappos—he was Zappos. Further, Kedar, who was effectively second-in-command, had only recently been promoted to the C-suite and was excited about the prospect of working with and learning from Tony. So the leadership team at Zappos agreed not to alert Amazon to their CEO’s current troubles. For decades, Tony had been the fearless leader of Zappos and the Downtown Project. Though he had gotten himself into tough spots before, he had always somehow conquered them. Why was this time any different? Plus, Tony was still making efforts to keep up appearances. News of a novel and highly infectious virus called COVID-19 had emerged on the other side of the world, threatening to upend the world. Having first appeared in China, it was now showing up in Europe, and governments were being forced to shut down businesses, events, and their economies. Stay-at-home orders were introduced to limit human-to-human interaction. While it was only a matter of time before the virus arrived in the United States, Tony was still sticking to his social events calendar and in the last week of January he had gone to Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival. But at the start of February, Tony’s behavior reached a critical point. He had been asked to officiate the local wedding of a couple who owned a beloved Thai restaurant downtown. While the bride wore a white qipao (a

traditional, formfitting Chinese dress) and the groom wore a suit with a black tie, Tony showed up to the ceremony in a bright orange long-sleeved shirt. Holding a stretching stick covered in Post-it notes as he led the couple through their vows, Tony seemed high, and spoke in a slow and robotic drawl, drawing laughter from many of the wedding guests. Later, some people turned around to see Tony leading a yoga class during the reception. What seemed funny to the crowd, and which might have been dismissed as “Tony being Tony” in years prior, was yet another alarm bell to his friends who had witnessed him unraveling over the last two months. Almost a dozen people at the wedding called and texted Tyler, who wasn’t there, describing Tony’s behavior. By this point, Tyler estimated that Tony was doing three to five grams of ketamine a day. Winter Camp was also over by now, and it was clear that Tony had broken the pact they’d made. That night, Tyler went to the trailer park and tried to talk to Tony about his behavior at the wedding. Tony told him that he had not been under the influence of ketamine and that he was simply engaging in Method acting. “Tyler, you’re starting to drain my energy,” Tony said to him. “You’re constantly coming at me.” After their conversation, Tony asked people who had been at the wedding to call Tyler and tell him that they hadn’t found his behavior concerning. By this point, Tyler had started talking to interventionists and researching rehabilitation facilities. He was working with a few others close to Tony, including Ryan Doherty and Mimi Pham, to try to get him to commit to getting help. Tyler also knew he was on thin ice. Tony was worried that his friends were talking about him behind his back—which they were—but he concluded that much of the impetus stemmed from Tyler, and he was becoming increasingly agitated by Tyler’s concern. Taking place beyond the confines of Airstream Park and Fergusons, the wedding had marked a tipping point. Tony’s drug use was now an open secret in downtown Las Vegas. And it wasn’t just concern for Tony’s wellbeing: he was the central nerve for Zappos, which employed fifteen hundred people and was owned by one of the largest corporations in the world. He was also financing all of the Downtown Project, a city within a city that could crumble if anything happened to him. Enough was enough. Tony needed to leave Las Vegas and either be immersed in a new environment, away from his access to drugs, or go to a

rehab facility. So the night after the wedding, Tyler and one of Tony’s former girlfriends entered Tony’s trailer and embarked on a heated negotiation with Tony to try to convince him to get out of town, maybe to a place that Tony loved like Park City, Utah. He attended the Sundance Film Festival there every year, he loved to ski, and it was tranquil, far from the sins and impulses of Vegas. He was also in the process of purchasing a house there. “Let’s take a group of friends,” Tyler pleaded, “and let’s just get out of here.” But after a marathon six hours, they were unable to get Tony to commit. At around four o’clock in the morning, Tyler decided to leave the trailer, sensing that Tony had no fight left in him. Tony remained a scarce presence and barely left his trailer over the next couple of days. Others at Fergusons talked about staging an intervention, but couldn’t seem to pin him down. Among them was Ryan Doherty, who arrived at Fergusons the following evening for a scheduled meeting with Tony. After Ryan waited among the Airstream trailers for hours, Tony never came out to greet him, and he eventually left. Though the next morning, Ryan returned, and this time walked into Tony’s trailer, shutting the door behind him. Several hours later, the two men emerged and left Fergusons bound for the airport.

CHAPTER 21

FLOW STATE

Tyler stood outside 255 Park Avenue in Utah’s Park City and looked up at the house before him through his thick-rimmed glasses. He’d been here many times before. It was right in the heart of Old Town on a street carved into the side of the mountain, as if floating above Park City’s saloons and restaurants. Tyler scanned the property—the gray ledger stones framing the wooden garage door, the olive-green weatherboards, its snow-covered roof, and the neighboring houses on either side, one painted in a rich cerulean and the other in farmhouse red. From Main Street, the house was just one of hundreds of vibrant and picturesque ski houses that dotted the mountainside, giving Park City its postcard charm. As he took in the crisp air, Tyler thought back to his last stay here, just a few weeks prior, recalling how he’d felt the last time he was inside this house. Tony usually rented 255 Park Avenue every year for the Sundance Film Festival, the ten-day affair in Park City at the end of January when Hollywood actors, directors, press, and other industry folk descend on the high-end ski town. Indie film premieres and heavy libations at corporatesponsored lounges were followed by star-studded afterparties. Beginning in the early 2010s, Silicon Valley became a regular presence at Sundance. Google would host concerts at TAO, a nightclub on Main Street, while Microsoft, still hoping for the success of its search engine, Bing, would take every opportunity to sponsor events and plug its search brand. As Hollywood continued its shift toward digital media, the growing technorati found more and more reasons to bill a trip to the artsy, glitzy event as a corporate outing.

The lodge on Park Avenue was a five-minute walk from the Sundance box office. In years past, Tony would host breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for his friends and guests inside the home. Mimi and Tyler often organized the gatherings, attended by other tech founders and a sprinkle of Hollywood stars. One Los Angeles–based music branding agent who introduced Tony to actor David Arquette and whose clients included hip-hop artists Mary J. Blige and Anderson .Paak said she always made it a point to see Tony at Sundance. “He would rent that home and curate different dinners and conversations,” she said. “He wanted to be around that kind of energy and creativity.” Despite Tony’s alarming behavior at Winter Camp, attending the film festival had offered what appeared to be a brief return to normalcy in Tony’s life just days before he officiated the wedding. That year for Sundance, Zappos partnered with a digital content company called HitRecord, which was co-founded by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the actor who would go on to play Uber founder Travis Kalanick in a Showtime special called Super Pumped, based on the book of the same name by New York Times journalist Mike Isaac. Together, they aired ten mini-documentaries at Sundance, each representing one of Zappos’s ten core values. Tony spent time with Joseph at the festival, as well as with singer Paula Abdul, whom he had met just a few weeks prior. Paula came to Sundance at Tony’s invitation and even stayed on a bunk bed in one of the rooms at Tony’s rented lodge. “A trip to Sundance and Zappos all in one week!?” Abdul tweeted. “So fun hanging out with these amazing people that have become my new friends!!” It might have seemed like any other year, but Tony did not stop doing ketamine for the film festival. Though many who kept company with him were unaware of his increasing habit, he made no effort to hide it in front of Tyler. One night, while the other guests were asleep at the house, Tyler agreed to stay up late with Tony and watch The Matrix. Under the drug’s influence, Tony insisted that the two of them do ketamine together and reenact scenes from the film between Morpheus and Neo. “I don’t want to,” Tyler replied. It was a phrase that Tyler had started saying more in recent weeks as Tony’s requests to do ketamine escalated. Sometimes Tyler would say yes, but as time wore on, he would say no more often than not. It was then

usually followed by Tyler telling his boss how he did not like the way Tony behaved on the drug and what his episodes were doing to the wider Airstream community. But Tony always knew exactly what to say to get Tyler to lay off. I only need to do it for a little longer to figure some things out, Tony would say, or I’m dealing with a lot emotionally, and this is the only thing that’s helping me. Tyler would look at his boss and relent. But at Sundance, the conversation went in a different direction. “I wish I had a Tyler coin,” Tony said one day, staring at Tyler sitting on the couch, “that I could just put into you, and you would do anything that I asked.” Tyler stared back. To think that this might have been Tony’s intention all along—that he had been investing all this time and energy into Tyler not because he wanted to mentor him but as a means to groom him into a blind follower—was disturbing. Tyler could barely believe this was the same Tony he had looked up to for so many years. In the weeks since Sundance, Tony’s unraveling had become a public conversation after the wedding in downtown Las Vegas. Inside Tony’s Airstream trailer, Ryan Doherty, who had previous experience helping friends with addiction issues, had gotten Tony to commit to finding help by convincing him that if he didn’t go to rehab on his own terms, he would lose control of his own narrative if Zappos—or even worse, Amazon— stepped in and forced him to. With Mimi’s assistance in making arrangements, he had boarded a private jet with Tony to take him to the facility near Park City. When speaking to friends, Tony had told them that rehab would be like beating a boss in a video game. Tyler didn’t know quite what to make of Tony’s comparison, but he still felt a tinge of hope. A week into his stay, Tony called Tyler and asked him to write a list of all the things that he had done in the last few months that seemed concerning. Tony then asked him to come to Park City and present it to him when he was out of rehab. “We can go over the list one by one,” Tony said over the phone. It was strange, Tyler thought, but in some ways it was a very Tony kind of ask. It seemed logical and methodical—much the way Tony had always approached and hacked through problems in the past. While Tyler remained optimistic, Tony stayed in rehab for not quite two weeks before checking himself out of the facility. It had not been enough time, Tyler thought, thinking about the Shanghai Mental Health Center

research about how long a person needs to be clean before coming out of a drug-induced psychosis. It simply did not seem like enough time. But it didn’t matter what Tyler thought; Tony was already out. A week after Tony’s rehab stint had ended, Tyler was now back in Park City, standing in front of 255 Park Avenue, nervously waiting for Tony. Tony emerged from the house, and they decided to walk to Pink Elephant, a discreet coffee shop on the second floor of a small black building on Main Street. As they walked past snow-covered porches and down the grated steel outdoor stairs that connected the residential streets to the bustling corridor of Old Town, Tyler stole glances at Tony. He seemed normal and calm enough, Tyler thought. Reaching Main Street, they took a quick left and walked inside a multiuse retail space, through a gold-painted door frame and past racks of trendy ski wear, past the buzzing sounds emanating from the clippers at Billy’s Barber Shop, then up a flight of stairs that brought them to the coffee bar. Tyler ordered a coffee, black, while Tony opted out of a drink. Once Tyler fetched his cup from the barista, the two settled around a small round table. The coffee shop was noisy and crowded, not uncomfortably, but just enough to mask the strange conversation that was about to unfold. “So what’s on your list?” Tony asked. Tyler pulled the letter out of his pocket and started reading it out loud. He never made eye contact with his mentor as he read. “You said you were becoming Neo from The Matrix,” Tyler started. “That you were transcending human consciousness. You said you were achieving Limitless, unlocking your full brain,” referring to the 2011 science fiction movie about a man who takes a drug called NZT-48 that exponentially enhances his intelligence and emotional quotients. The list continued: You said you could run a three-hour marathon without training. You said you could grow your height, so that you were seven foot tall. You said people are molecules. You said you could download skills, like in The Matrix. You offered a million dollars for somebody to wake you up. You were telling people, “I’m not mad at you. Because if I were mad at you, it would be like being mad at the dog.”

You said you didn’t have to pee anymore, that your body could recycle urine. You said you could manifest things like create water from a spigot. You said you could solve and cure COVID. You could solve world peace. You were interpretative dancing. You were pretending like you were inside movies. You started talking like a robot, and started speaking in other made-up languages. You barely slept. You forgot things and had no memory. Reckless, fearless, open drug use, giving everybody a book about ketamine and talking openly about it. Not enjoying the things you normally like. The wedding, going from normal to manic. Putting people on time-out for lowering your energy flow. Your physical appearance. Weight loss, bruising on your body. Hollow eyes. Pulled muscles, you were clearly in pain. Blank looks. Stares. No energy. Tyler slowly looked up. Tony was staring straight at him, giving little away. After a moment of silence, Tony spoke. “I need to stack all of that as the combination,” Tony said, his gaze never leaving Tyler’s. “It’s all the key to exiting into the next dimension.” Tyler stared back, the same way he had when Tony brought up the idea of a Tyler coin. As he processed what Tony just said, days out of rehab, he came to one simple conclusion: Tony is still not okay.

Tyler came and went from Park City over the next few weeks, joining a revolving door of friends and family arriving in town to check on Tony. His family—Richard, Judy, Andy, and Dave—were among the first to arrive, and they stayed at a nearby lodge. Tyler, it turned out, was one in a small circle of people who knew Tony had been in rehab. During his time in

rehab, Tony was able to use his phone, and he had been sending messages to others, urging them to join him in Park City and stay with him at the rented house in the days after his release. Justin had been flying home from a work trip to Bermuda when he received a text from Tony asking him to come to Park City. Despite Justin’s demotion from Life Is Beautiful, he’d heard about Tony’s stay in rehab, and decided to go and see him. Suzie Baleson, who had attended events and parties as Tony’s plus-one for years and had run into Tony at Sundance just a few weeks before, also accepted an invitation from Tony to join him in Park City. Zappos executives and a younger crowd of friends also got the call-up. Ryan Doherty, however, was not welcome: Tony believed Ryan had duped him into going to rehab under false pretenses, and deemed him persona non grata. Tony indicated that he intended to stay in the town for the foreseeable months, a decision cemented by his purchase of a new ski lodge at 1422 Empire Avenue, a chalet sunk into a sloping neighborhood a half mile from Main Street. He’d first inquired about the property when he’d been in town for Sundance, and after a month of negotiating, he took over the building. Across the street from a parking lot at the bottom of Park City mountain, where skiers and snowboarders trudged awkwardly toward the chairlifts, the five-bedroom property was impressive. Hardwood beams as thick as trees emerged from cemented blocks of river rock, holding up the eaves that framed the front of the home. Thanks to two pines that stood on either side of the short driveway, and neighboring homes that looked like they were designed by the same architect, the property was barely noticeable to passersby. The unassuming exterior belied a grandiosity within. At the center of the house was a timber staircase that spiraled up three floors like a drill bit. Walls and ceilings had exposed framing, giving the feel of a wealthy man’s log cabin, and the hardwood floors were covered in immaculate rugs. In the mornings, Tony could wake up in the master bedroom to a vivid panorama of the famed mountain through two red-framed doors that opened onto a balcony hanging over the garage. He first invited Suzie and Justin to stay at the lodge with him, along with an assistant, Juliet. Justin had most of his wealth tied up in the Life Is Beautiful festival, and now, with all live events canceled for the foreseeable future, it was entirely unclear whether the festival would survive. The

cancellation of live events had also impacted a large chunk of Suzie’s prospective income. Her company, Wellth Collective, had been planning to organize events at SXSW—which was now canceled—and many of her clients were cutting back on marketing expenditures. Aside from seeing their friend, being in proximity to a man as wealthy as Tony would have been a comforting notion as they stared down the uncertainty of the pandemic. At first, they implemented a regimented program around Tony, reasoning that if he was in recovery, then his environment should revolve around health, wellness, and productivity. The space became a co-working and living area where Tony could receive his guests and work on sporadic projects. Suzie ordered workout equipment and a Peloton exercise bike to turn one room into a gym, while Justin started organizing hikes through the mountains. Over the coming months, however, those who entered Tony’s orbit found themselves in situations that prior to Tony going to rehab would have been considered “normal.” But now the shots of Fernet, hours-long trips on psychedelic mushrooms, and spending his money at his request on dinners, accommodations, real estate, and private jets all came across differently. He often seemed coherent during walks at dawn through the mountains and during dinners at the lodge. His obsession with devouring books also had not abated and on most mornings he and Justin would allocate an hour to reading followed by discussion. This would then lead to Tony writing his conclusions on Post-it notes and slapping them on walls around the house, creating a dizzying visual scene of his thoughts. But it was hard to ignore that his outlandish ideas, once seen as the musings of a contrarian thinker, could now be interpreted as symptoms of psychosis. Along with Tyler, several other members of the Zappos leadership had been making trips to Park City. Tony hadn’t been out of rehab for long, and his future at the company was increasingly unclear. Over barbecues and meetings in the lodge’s vast interior to discuss work matters, company leaders like Kedar Deshpande and John Bunch, the latter leading the rollout of Zappos’s market-based dynamics program, listened as Tony dictated new ways to run the company. It was difficult to ignore that Tony’s behaviors were a significant departure from his typical demeanor during discussions with leadership.

Normally he would sit quietly in a corner and type on his laptop, occasionally speaking up to offer a thought, or sometimes not speaking at all. Now he was commanding a room for thirty minutes at a time without letting others talk, and directing the Zappos leaders to execute wildly irrational ideas. For years, he had been fixated on the concept of flow states, a widely held belief in Silicon Valley and upper corporate circles that individuals can improve their output and well-being by striving to be “in the zone.” One text he frequently invoked was Stealing Fire, a bestselling book that outlined a road map for achieving a state of positive psychology. One of the authors, Steven Kotler, had previously written another bestselling book, The Rise of Superman, which studied the neuroscience behind the peak performance of action sports athletes. With Stealing Fire, he and co-author Jamie Wheal expanded that research to conclude that seemingly any discipline could achieve an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.” After consulting and studying the methods of CEOs, Navy SEALs, and scientists, they argued that when this state is achieved, motivations like self-awareness and time fall away as mental and physical performance takes hold. It’s easy to imagine a jazz player reaching this state every time they pick up an instrument, for example, but harder to picture an academic being in the zone for weeks at a time to finish their dissertation. Its teachings didn’t veer too far from the Challenge Point Framework that Mark Guadagnoli had espoused all those years ago at the steakhouse in Henderson with Fred, Alfred, and Tony, describing how giving people a task of optimal difficulty can help them learn faster. While he talked about how he was trying to achieve his own flow state, Tony told the executives that the concept should be scaled up from individuals to the entire Zappos workforce. Under other circumstances the idea could have been seen as just another one of Tony’s edgy, if sometimes weird, ideas to manage his company. After all, these executives were working for a company that had a corporate culture unlike any other company of its scale, where employees had tripped on psychedelic drugs with the CEO at Burning Man, visited his home at his trailer park, and led wild parades through the company offices. To achieve company-wide flow state, Tony proposed, they should entirely do away with organizational calendars and instead introduce a new

way of managing schedules: if everyone was in the same flow state, they would just know where to be, and when to join meetings. More than once he said that if all the employees were in the same flow state, then he could show them his superpowers. As he pushed the patience of Zappos leaders, he developed an obsessive focus on testing the boundaries of his own mental and physical strength. Over the years at conferences, Tony had met Wim “the Ice Man” Hof, the Dutch athlete known for his ability to expose his body to conditions of extreme cold, and had been somewhat intrigued by his achievements. Hof first gained renown for swimming a record fifty-seven meters under an ice sheet, then went on to set numerous Guinness World Records for feats like running the fastest barefoot half-marathon across ice and spending the longest time in direct contact with ice (more than two hours). In an ultimate show of his ability, he once climbed 24,500 feet up Mount Everest wearing only shorts (he aborted the ultimate mission to the peak due to a foot injury). Using a combination of yoga, meditation, cold exposure, and breathing techniques, Hof had been able to defy what were commonly thought of as the limits of the human body. Dutch scientists had studied Hof’s practices and found that, in short, he had developed a heightened control of his body’s stress hormones. He had gained a following of people trying to emulate his practices and launched an eponymous patented regimen that employed his disciples to teach others how to test the limits of their bodies. As it turned out, one of these disciples worked in Utah, so Tony hired him to spend time at the lodge, training him and his friends on how to implement Hof’s methods into his own daily regimen. Tony started doing away with shoes on hikes through the surrounding mountains. One day, he, Justin, and Tyler sat next to one another in gigantic ice buckets on the rear deck after a lengthy meditation and breathing exercises. Tony and Justin would go on jogs through the town wearing only T-shirts, even as snow fell around them in below-freezing temperatures. Hof’s teachings planted a seed within Tony to study the much broader field of biohacking. The concept had become popular recently in Silicon Valley, where prominent tech leaders like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had begun to talk about their embrace of it. In addition to cold exposure therapy and enhanced breathing techniques, Dorsey had spoken about eating only

one meal a day and fasting completely on weekends as a way to improve his tolerance of stress and optimize other aspects of his health. Others had invoked biohacking as the logic behind various experiments aimed to increase longevity. Dave Asprey, the self-described “father of biohacking” who founded the Silicon Valley supplement startup Bulletproof Nutrition, underwent an operation where a doctor harvested stem cells from his bone marrow and then injected them back into his body in the hope that it would enable him to live to 180 years old. And in the far nether regions of biohacking are people who call themselves “grinders,” those who implant computer chips under their skin in experiments to wire the brain directly to a digital output. While such efforts sound radical to most people, they have become widely accepted, even adopted, as ways to further the realm of productivity and individual betterment within Silicon Valley, a place where its leaders consistently pioneer what was previously thought unimaginable. Living longer, for example, is something that Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel have each spent millions of dollars on researching. But as his fixation on biohacking and flow states deepened, Tony was venturing closer to a dark rabbit hole from which he might not escape. His friends in Park City tried to find comfort in reverting to their old habits, despite his changing behavior and ever-grander visions. Some clinked shots of Fernet with him. For some Zappos executives, the longstanding bizarre corporate culture seemed to be re-creating itself on a smaller scale in Park City. Brandon Hollis, Zappos’s chief legal counsel, was often around, either manning the barbecue or downing drinks with his boss. Tyler and Tony would embark on so-called hero’s journeys, where they would take a handful of hallucinogenic mushrooms and trip for half a day while remaining motionless—something they had done many times before. Despite Tyler’s concern for Tony, there were parts of their friendship that he appeared unable to let go of. By April, another element was added to Tony’s vortex of people: a crew of younger friends who were there to party and have fun.

At 3:22 p.m. on the last Saturday of May, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence watched from a viewing pad in Cape Canaveral,

Florida, as a rocketship lifted off, en route to space. Made by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturer, the flight was historic, marking the first privately owned spaceship to carry astronauts into space and heralding a new era in spaceflight. It also was the first time astronauts had eschewed NASA’s Airstream-built Astrovan to shuttle them to the launch pad since spaceflight began in 1961. Instead, they climbed into Musk-owned Tesla SUVs while listening to AC/DC. On a television screen within 1422 Empire Avenue in Park City, Tony was also watching as the rocket passed through the stratosphere. Tony had often talked about Elon Musk. Elon’s pronouncements about a multiverse and the concept that we are all living in a simulation were things that Tony believed in, and for that reason he saw Elon as an equal. Tony had long harbored Elon’s belief, shared by many people who build artificial intelligence technology, that humans exist in multiple dimensions and our current experience is no more than a simulation. Just as with religion, only faith binds its believers, but the notion has recently taken on new dimensions, so to speak, with Facebook’s introduction of a “metaverse,” where one can interact with others in a virtual world. Tony believed Elon Musk was a person of a caliber shared by Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, a group that he saw himself as a part of. Surrounding him in the lodge were Zappos employees who he deemed had failed to execute on ideas, like implementing a company-wide flow. Not only were they not doing as he demanded; they were becoming a frequent presence in his home. He’d been especially incensed by the presence in his house of Brandon Hollis, who in his role as general counsel of Zappos had been reporting back to executives what he’d been seeing. Brandon had also relaxed into the comfort of Tony’s home and had been staying there without asking Tony if he minded. (Brandon later disputed this, stating that Tony “expressly” invited him and provided “continued permission” for him to stay at 1422 Empire.) At one point a guest of his came to stay for several weeks, and then another guest Brandon had invited came to stay. As Tony stared at the television screen, a tap was dripping in his mind. Then the faucet broke. “I’ve been doing it all wrong,” he said, standing up in the middle of the room. He picked up his laptop, sat at a nearby table, and began bashing the keyboard. It looked as if he was hardwired into the computer itself.

For as long as he could remember, he’d been trying to empower others. What he really needed to do, he told those in the room, was to operate at his own full mental capacity. Just as Elon was sending astronauts into space, Tony’s intellect and drive could come up with a cure for COVID-19. He would usher in world peace. No goal would be too grand. All he needed was to reach the flow state. “We have to go faster,” he said, not looking away from the screen. He paused momentarily to scribble messages on Post-it notes, which he stuck on the wall. The words “flow state” appeared among arrows and other markings. Those standing around him exchanged glances. Tony wanted people who could execute his vision, whatever that may be. “I need the message to get out to people that I’m willing to pay top dollar.”

There was a lot happening when Tyler walked into the house that afternoon. He could see that a new array of Post-it notes now covered the wall behind where Tony was sitting, and people were quietly muttering to one another. One person said something about Tony having a revelation. Taking in the scene of the living room, Brandon approached Tyler with a baffled look on his face. Brandon told him that Tony had set him and another person an objective: to get everyone in the same flow state. If they could achieve the task, then he would pay him $100,000. Brandon acquiesced to Tony’s insistence, though he told Tyler he had at least negotiated the figure down to $10,000. Tyler suggested they rent a pontoon boat at Deer Creek Reservoir, about twenty miles south of Park City. If everyone was chatting, eating, drinking, and swimming together, Tyler reasoned, then perhaps Tony would see that everyone was in a synchronized flow state. A short time later, the two Zappos executives and Tony joined half a dozen others, including Suzie and Justin, in a black Sprinter van parked in front of Tony’s chalet. One of Tony’s on-again off-again girlfriends, Ali Bevilacqua, was there, too. With Tyler behind the wheel as the Sprinter wound its way south, everyone seemed excited for the day ahead. Tony had a serene look on his face.

As the only person in the group who knew how to drive a boat, Tyler volunteered to be captain for the day. The passengers were giddy as the boat, stocked with drinks, food, and blankets, put-putted away from the shore. Almost as soon as the land began to recede behind them, the calm was interrupted by a disturbing storm in the form of Tony. As the sun crested high above the lake, Tyler looked over from the boat’s controls to see something change in Tony’s demeanor, as if a switch had been flicked. Tony had a Sharpie in his hand and was scribbling what appeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphs on his arms and torso. Others turned their heads to steal a glance at him before averting their eyes. The more furiously he dragged the marker over his body, the more he began muttering to himself. He flinched and tightened his jaw, and some heard him spitting the words “flow state.” He stood up and stalked to the rear of the boat, where he sat in the shade of the upper deck. As the boat idled in the middle of the lake, Tony’s flinching became more violent. Someone jumped into the lake, making a splash. “You are interrupting my flow state,” Tony yelled. “I need to be in a flow state.” He lurched up, snatched a blanket, and climbed up to the upper deck. Everyone watched in silence as he curled up in a fetal position and pulled the blanket over him. His mumbling continued, sometimes breaking out into incoherent shouts. The words “flow state” kept coming. Tyler steered the pontoon boat back to shore. The fun was over. Everyone was mostly silent on the journey home, and once they reached the chalet, a quiet fell over the house. Ali was sobbing to herself. Others looked ashen-faced. Tony, they believed, seemed to have found more ketamine. Tyler trudged up the winding staircase to Tony’s bedroom. Until they’d set out on the boat that afternoon, Tyler had been hopeful Tony might be changing for the better. Now it was clear that Tony had found his kryptonite, and Tyler’s hope was replaced with dread. As he reached the top of the stairs, he looked up to see Tony standing in the doorway. Before Tyler could say anything, Tony said, “Hey, I just want you to know. I was acting.” Tyler stared back at him.

“I had tasked Brandon to get everyone in flow, and I was trying to be a hindrance,” Tony said. Tyler looked back at him with quiet disappointment. Tony sensed it. “Can you tell everybody in the house that that’s what I was doing?” Tony said. Before Tyler turned to go back downstairs, Tony said something that made Tyler feel defeated. “If you don’t question me again,” Tony said, “I’ll give you half my net worth.”

CHAPTER 22

THE GORDIAN KNOT

“Let’s go for a walk,” Tony said. “I’ve got a surprise.” It was a morning in early June in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Justin was standing in the living room of the lodge. Tony’s episode on the boat had made clear to the group that he was far from okay. Justin, Tyler, and others had concluded that Tony may have acquired more ketamine during a visit from Anthony in the days before they went out on the lake, and they had each taken turns demanding that Anthony not provide Tony with drugs. While Tyler had left for Vegas to put some space between him and Tony, Justin had reached an agreement with Tony and scrawled the terms of a new “contract” on a piece of paper, stipulating that Tony would not do any chemical drugs for thirty days—specifically ketamine—and that if he planned to do mushrooms, he would have to notify Justin ahead of time. The penalty would be a loss of friendship, and Tony would need to donate to a charity. Justin walked out the front door, following Tony as he took a left, heading south down Empire Avenue. “Pop quiz,” Tony said, turning to him. “Do you remember the year Zappos was founded?” They took another left down a side street, and Justin thought for a moment. There was a woman who worked behind the front desk in the lobby of Zappos’s Las Vegas headquarters who was a huge Prince fan. Under the company’s market-based dynamics program, which encouraged employees to start their own ventures within the company, she had launched her own bar in the lobby called the 1999 Bar—in honor both of Prince’s famous song and of the year that Zappos was founded.

They took another left down a street that ran parallel to Empire Avenue. “It was 1999,” Justin replied. They walked for another minute, and then Tony stopped in front of a towering three-story house clad with navy and brown timbers, built on a river-rock foundation. It looked more suited for a corporate retreat than a weekend getaway with friends. Justin figured you could throw a stone over the property’s back fence and hit the lodge they had just walked from. “Go type it into that door right there,” Tony said, pointing to a keypad on the front door. Bewildered, Justin walked over to the door and pressed in the code. The door clicked open. “Well,” Tony said, gesturing, “let’s go in, then.” Tony had grown tired of the constant stream of people coming and going from his lodge at 1422 Empire, so he’d decided to rent this mansion around the block as a way to reclaim his privacy. His thinking, he told Justin, was that he could get people like Brandon Hollis out of his home, while employing other friends, like Jillian, who’d managed one of his nowshuttered Las Vegas bars, to run the property. It also fit in with his plans to create a new community in Park City. Artists, entrepreneurs, and others could come to see him and pitch him on ideas of how they were going to build something, just as previous entrepreneurs and guests had done while staying at Tony’s apartments in the Ogden. Complete with a Jacuzzi, indoor gym, billiards room, elevator, and sauna, the ten-bedroom, ten-bathroom mansion was listed on rental websites like Expedia and Vrbo as the “Epic Lodge.” Tony had struck an agreement with the owner to lease the property on a month-to-month basis, with an option to perhaps buy it. “I want you to make this the Life Is Beautiful house,” Tony said, walking through the home. He had been coming up with all sorts of ideas for Life Is Beautiful since the pandemic had canceled the festival. Justin’s proximity to Tony also meant that his role remained central to Life Is Beautiful, and Tony had been discussing some ideas with him for how he could lead it forward. A few weeks before, they had hiked up Park City mountain and reached the backside of the slope, where Tony had first spotted what he believed was a natural amphitheater in the mountainside. Turning to Justin, Tony had

proposed they launch a COVID-friendly festival, where everyone could socially distance outside. Tony would give Justin $100 million to pull it off. Justin had ignored the proposal, and he was now shooting down this idea. Most of the festival’s employees had been furloughed; immediately occupying a multimillion-dollar house named after the festival would make for terrible optics. After some wrangling, Tony proposed the property be called the “Welcome House,” and that it would serve as base camp for the dozens of people that Tony was inviting into town to help him create his new community. The contradiction between Tony’s need for privacy and his instinct to invite anyone who’d come and stay on his dime wasn’t lost on Justin. But, Justin figured, if Tony could make it thirty days without another drug-induced psychotic break and was surrounded by people looking to innovate, then perhaps they could build from there.

On the morning of June 27, Steve Maroney, a man who went by his nickname Steve-O, and who had been a driver for Tony for years, steered his coach into Park City. Along with Tyler and a half dozen others, including Ava Zech, the daughter of a Zappos executive whom Tony had dedicated his memoir to when she was just eleven years old, Steve-O had driven overnight from Vegas, and was stopping in Utah to pick up Tony and Justin before heading north to Montana for the annual July 4 trip. In years past, the Montana trip was one of the highlights of the year. The group would stay at a lodge on the eastern bank of Flathead Lake, facing the Blacktail Mountains. Aside from daily barbecues and hikes, the group would typically work remotely during the day and Tony would feverishly respond to emails. Then, when the clock struck 5 p.m., happy hour would commence, and the libations would come out. This year was different from others, however. Not only because of pandemic-imposed hurdles, but because it was unclear whether Tony would slip again. The jury was still out on whether Tony was making his way back to reality. He’d spent the past few weeks focused on business ideas and had shown some determination to get back on track. He’d stuck to his

commitment to Justin and appeared to have stayed away from drugs. He was still devouring books, and he had resolved his privacy issue: Brandon Hollis and others had now settled into bedrooms in the Welcome House. Word had also spread far and wide that Tony was looking to do deals and was spending his money again, like in the early days of the Downtown Project in Las Vegas. More people arrived in town at his invitation, as well as on his promises of vast sums of money and a mandate only to build something. Tony had been leading the ever-growing group hiking through Park City’s mountains each morning. To manage the influx of guests arriving at the Welcome House, Suzie struck an agreement with Tony to use her company, Wellth Collective, to manage the operations of the house— organizing transportation, events, and accommodations—for a fee. People from all eras of Tony’s life were arriving by the busload with business ideas. One new arrival was asked to build a 3D printing lab at the Welcome House. Another group of people pitched an idea for cashing in on the COVID-19-driven boom in demand for personal protective equipment. One apparent deal had consumed him: a virtual reality company that had agreements with commercial landlords to set up demonstrations in malls. While the pandemic had forced malls across the country to close, putting the virtual reality company at risk of bankruptcy, something obscure got Tony’s attention. As he described it to Justin, the company had exclusive rights to stream Disney-owned content in live settings—a clause that Tony proclaimed would return a billion-dollar payoff once people returned to malls. He was determined to raise funding for the company and save it, but a deadline to invest was looming in the week before July 4, and so he asked Justin to help him close it. In Tony’s mind, he was the one who could identify million-dollar ideas that could become billion-dollar companies, and he was going to pay whatever people asked. Despite cautious optimism about Tony’s condition, Tyler had been somewhat reticent about reentering Tony’s Park City orbit. Since he’d been back in Vegas, he had been receiving calls from several people who had seen Tony in Park City. Tony had been talking maniacally at points, they told Tyler, returning to his goals of ensuring world peace and curing COVID-19. Tony had conducted some meetings while in his underwear. Other times he talked about how he had psychic abilities and had learned how to levitate.

After stepping off the bus, Tyler walked into the Welcome House for the first time and saw faces he didn’t know. His concerns were confirmed when he learned about one woman staying at the Welcome House. She was a Zappos employee who worked in the tech department and had arrived in town at Tony’s invitation. After meeting Tony for the first time, he had offered to give her $10 million to start a new business with undefined goals. She barely knew him, and had expressed her discomfort to a friend when Tony had asked her if she would join him on the July 4 trip to Montana as a plus-one. Tyler found Tony and interrupted a one-on-one meeting he was having. Tony was visibly enraged, but Tyler calmly said the Zappos employee wouldn’t be joining them in Park City, nor did she want to accept his multimillion-dollar offer.

The Montana trip seemed destined to be a failure before it even started. For one, there seemed to be something off with Tony. As the group prepared to leave Park City, he had walked onto the bus wearing nothing but pajama pants and holding only a box of crayons. As the bus wound out of Park City, he emerged from his bedroom at the rear of the bus and called for everyone’s attention. There would be a change of plans: he and Justin would spend only twelve hours in Montana, using each hour to complete an activity they would typically do during the week-long trip. One hour for jumping in the lake. One hour to do the mouse race. One hour at Burger Shack, and so on. Then he and Justin would take the bus back to Park City that night and work on the virtual reality deal for the rest of the week. The bus was quiet for a moment, and then Ava spoke up. “That’s a bummer,” she said. “We don’t go to Montana just to go to Montana. We go to Montana because that’s the time that we get to spend with you when you’re not working.” Tony’s expression flickered, and his eyes drifted around the cabin coldly. “Well, I’m paying for everyone to be here. You should all be more grateful.” He looked at Ava’s boyfriend and noted aloud that he was on the trip, all expenses paid. His eyes then fell on Tyler. “Tyler, you never pay attention,” he said. Tyler sat in silence as Tony assigned him a percentage

rating for his supposed attention span. Tony then berated Tyler for having poor bus etiquette and leaving his shoes on the bunk. After hurling more insults, Tony retired to his bedroom. Justin followed him.

The bus was rolling through the Montana plains when an alarm woke Tyler soon after dawn. During his rant, Tony had told Tyler he would pay him $1 million to wake him up at 8 a.m., giving him enough time to prepare before their 10 a.m. arrival at the lodge. After climbing out of his bunk, Tyler walked to Tony’s bedroom and saw that the room was a mess, but Tony wasn’t there. In the bathroom, past Tony’s bed, Tyler could hear the shower running. He’s up already, Tyler figured. He knocked on the bathroom door, but no one responded. Tyler went to the front of the bus and chatted with Steve-O as the bus pushed north. Twenty minutes later, he went and knocked on the bathroom door again. Still no answer. This is a really long shower, thought Tyler. He knocked a half dozen times over the next hour and a half without response. It was almost ten o’clock when the bus reached the lodge and swung into the parking lot. Tyler went to check on Tony once more, but this time he saw water seeping from under the bathroom door. He knocked furiously and called out until he was jolted by a response. “Get Justin,” Tony screamed from behind the door. “Everyone else get the fuck off the bus.” Tyler sighed deeply. He walked to Justin’s bunk and shook him awake. “Good luck, man,” Tyler said. Once everyone had filed off the bus and headed to check into the lodge, Justin crouched outside the bathroom. The floor was wet. “What’s going on?” he said through the door. “Justin, is that you?” Tony replied. “Yeah.” “Are you alone?” “Yeah.” Justin could hear the shower still running. Before they’d gone to bed last night, he and Tony had chatted briefly in Tony’s bedroom. Tony had

even told a few jokes, and he was under the impression Tony had cooled off since railing against his guests. Justin looked around Tony’s bedroom. It was a mess. His eyes fell to the bed, where he saw a crumpled gold foil wrapper. He’d seen them before, back at the Empire Avenue house in Park City: they were used to store magic-mushroom-infused chocolates. Then he saw a second wrapper, and a third. He counted five in total. A single mushroom chocolate could typically induce a hallucinogenic trip for hours, even an entire day. Whatever Tony was experiencing now would be beyond what any mind could sustain. Justin walked back to the bathroom door, and was hit by the smell of shit. The shower had stopped running. “The water, I need the water, I need the water,” Tony yelled. The bus’s tank, it seemed, was empty. Justin stepped off the bus and tried to think. The gray water would begin backing up through the shower drain and flood the bus with sewage if they refilled the tank before draining the gray water tank first. And dumping the gray water in the lodge’s parking lot wasn’t an option. Back on the bus, Justin told Tony through the bathroom door that the shower would have to stay off. “You had one job,” Tony roared. “Are you bringing a commitment? Everyone breaks commitments, everyone breaks commitments. We had a contract, we had a contract that you were going to fix the water.” “Tony, you need to stop this,” Justin growled back. “Just get the fuck off my bus,” Tony screamed. “You’re useless.” Justin tried to calm him down. Eventually silence fell between the two men. “Justin,” Tony said finally, his voice muffled by the door. “Do you trust me?” “Yeah, I trust you, Tony.” “Do you trust me unconditionally?” “No, I don’t trust anyone unconditionally. But I trust you generally; we can agree on that.” “I need you to trust me unconditionally.” “I can’t trust you unconditionally unless I know what you’re gonna ask me.” There was a long pause before Tony spoke in a lowered voice. “I’m going to solve corona. I’m going to solve COVID right now. I almost have

it figured out.” He paused again. “I just need more mushrooms.” “I’m absolutely not doing that,” Justin replied. “I will give you a million dollars right now.” “Tony, there’s no amount of money in the world—” “I’ll give you $10 million right now.” “Tony, there’s no amount of money in the world—” “I’ll give you half of my net worth,” Tony said. “We’re going to be partners in everything that I do going forward. And if you trust me, I promise you this is going to work out, and we’re going to solve corona, we’re going to solve COVID, we’re gonna create world peace, and we’re gonna change the world together. You just have to trust me.” Justin found himself with few levers left to pull, if any. How long would he have to stay with Tony until his trip ended? And how long would it be until Tony was capable of a rational conversation? On the other hand, if he left the bus, Tony might find a way to get more drugs to Montana. As Justin considered his options in silence, Tony’s voice came through the door once more. “Fine. I’ll find somebody else that will.”

It had been a long day for those at the lakeside lodge. Tyler, drained of patience, decided not to venture onto the bus. But he knew there was something he had to do. On the phone to the Zappos leadership team, he informed them that something needed to be done about Tony: the events of the past day proved he wasn’t going to get better. Tyler didn’t know what action needed to be taken, but the ball was now in corporate’s lap. Some people had stepped onto the bus and tried reasoning with Tony, only to walk off in tears or leave shaken at his condition. During the day, Tony came to believe that he was in an active shooter simulation and started trashing the bus. Perhaps most distressing, Tony at one point asked his friends to join in a suicide pact with him. Dying, he told them, was the best way to transcend human consciousness, and the only way to hack the “AI simulation” was to burn the bus with them all inside. Ava, who had started the trip excited to spend time with Tony, left the bus looking visibly distraught. When she walked past Justin, who sat under

a nearby tree most of the day, she wouldn’t say what had been discussed. She only offered that “Tony wants to damn you to a multidimensional hell.” Justin had kept an eye on the bus throughout the day to make sure Tony didn’t leave. If Tony was seen in public in this state, the secret would be out, and the world would know the happiness guru of Zappos was in a really bad place; he could picture the headlines. Tony never tried to leave the vehicle, but instead made it clear that Justin was no longer in his circle of trust. Toward the end of the day, he told Justin there would be a private jet leaving in the early hours of the next morning to fly him back to Salt Lake City. Tony would be taking the bus back to Park City. This actually didn’t seem like a bad idea, Justin thought. Perhaps Tony would calm down without Justin around, and rest for a few hours on the ride back. Then, once they were back in Park City, they could discuss what had happened. Unbeknownst to Justin, Tony had been sending messages far and wide from inside the bus. Later that evening, two chartered jets arrived at a nearby airport. Anthony Taylor had arrived in one; Ali Bevilacqua was in the other. It seemed Tony was willing his wishes into being.

The next morning, twenty-four hours after they’d arrived, Tyler and the rest of the Montana group decided that they’d stay there until they could find their own way back to Park City. Before leaving on the bus the night before, Tony had agreed to share his location in a group message chat with members of the Montana trip, allowing them to follow his movements. Tony seemed to be coming down from his trip, Steve-O reported to Tyler that morning, but he was still in the process of calming down. They were due to arrive back in Park City later that afternoon, Steve-O told him. Justin would already be there by then and could meet Tony when he arrived. But though the plan seemed straightforward, Tony managed to derail it. At one point, Tyler got wind that Tony had been texting people asking them to join a scavenger hunt, the specifics of which he couldn’t figure out. Tyler checked Tony’s location and realized the pulsing blue dot on his phone screen hadn’t moved for a while. It appeared to be in Salt Lake City. The only person they knew who lived there was a friend of Anthony Taylor’s. Tyler connected the dots. “Please don’t give Tony ketamine,” Tyler wrote in

a text to Anthony. “I know I can’t match whatever Tony is offering, but I’ll give you everything I have in this life.” Anthony didn’t respond. Tony wasn’t responding to texts either. Tyler wrote to him: “How come you’re not texting me? Did you stop trusting me?” Tony’s reply came soon enough. In the group chat, he sent a screenshot of Tyler’s text to Anthony. He followed up with a large block of text accusing Tyler of going behind his back. Then, in rapid-fire instructions, Tony demanded that Brandon Hollis, the Zappos general counsel, write up a contract guaranteeing the transfer of Tyler’s assets to Anthony. Tyler sent a text to the group chat, addressed to Tony: “We are all your friends and love you but the last couple days you’ve attacked each and every one of us for no reason. Elissa and I paid to be here to connect and spend time with you. We love you. No matter how much you push us away or attack us, we love you. No matter what you say we love you. Wish you were here to spend an amazing week with us.” It was the last time Tyler ever communicated with Tony.

Justin had arrived back in Park City by now, and spent much of the day trying to figure out his next move. Tony had made it twenty-eight days into his agreement to abstain from drugs. But he’d broken his commitment and was now seemingly at the point of no return. Either Justin had to commit to getting Tony medical help—an effort that had failed before—or it was time for him to go back to Vegas and move on. That evening, Justin was on his way home after meeting Suzie for dinner at a restaurant in town when he received a call shortly before midnight. It was Juliet, one of Tony’s assistants. She was at the house at 1422 Empire, and Tony had just arrived at the home. He was acting manic, she said. He was rearranging furniture and other objects, placing candles everywhere, and talking desperately to himself. She was there with Ali, and they were each in separate rooms upstairs. Justin headed to the house. It was quiet when he arrived. He found Ali and Juliet downstairs. They seemed tense. Tony had calmed down, they told him, but was now upstairs in his room. Justin told them he was going to

stay nearby at the Welcome House. If anything happens, call me. He’d leave his phone on loud.

Around 4 a.m., Justin was woken by rapid knocking on his bedroom door. It was Suzie. She had received a frantic stream of messages from Ali and Juliet and had come to the Welcome House to wake him up. He checked his phone and saw that he’d missed more than twenty calls, and dozens of texts. Tony is breaking things in the house, he’s writing messages on the walls, came the urgent messages from Ali and Juliet. He’s talking to himself about multiple dimensions. Justin ran into the street but stopped short before he reached the house. Tony’s bedroom upstairs had a balcony that overlooked Empire Avenue. If he saw Justin approaching the house, he might be startled, and, depending on his state of mind, it couldn’t be ruled out that he might harm himself. Justin walked around the property before reaching the front entrance. He pushed open the door, and time slowed down as he came to terms with the nightmare he was witnessing. He could see candles flickering from within the darkened house, revealing streams of water cascading down the grand staircase at the center of the home. Smashed glass and plates were strewn across the floor. Candles were everywhere. On the walls were messages scribbled by a furious hand with a thick black marker. Names of friends. Incoherent text and Post-it notes across every wall. Then Justin noticed one message on the front door: “This is Tony’s house. He gets what he wants.” Walking around the exterior of the home and looking through the windows, Justin tried to process the scene. Tony appeared to have flooded a bathroom upstairs after trashing the house. It occurred to Justin that if a live wire were to come into contact with the flowing water, the house could go up in flames. Justin met Ali and Juliet at the back door and they left the property. He returned to the Welcome House around the corner and dialed a number for mental health services in Park City, before the operator patched him through to 911. He stressed that he wanted to remain anonymous and was

calling on behalf of his friend, who was a “high-profile” person and who appeared to be having a psychotic break and was at risk of hurting himself. Several police cars arrived within minutes, and Justin went out to the street to meet them a few houses down. An ambulance arrived seconds later, followed by firefighters. The police found Tony sitting on his back porch. Despite the devastation around him, his expression was serene.

For the second night in a row, Justin and Suzie met for dinner in town and tried to piece things together. After Tony was taken to Park City Hospital, Justin had called Mimi because she managed Tony’s medical records and personal information. He also called Richard Hsieh and recounted what had occurred over the past twenty-four hours. Considering the destruction done to the property, and the perceived risk that Tony could have harmed himself, or others, Justin felt sure Tony would be held at the hospital for at least a few days, until a psychiatric evaluation could be completed. That would then provide an opening to potentially coax Tony back into a rehab facility. Justin and Suzie hadn’t been allowed to join him in the hospital because they weren’t family, so they had remained at the Empire Avenue house throughout the day. Mimi had hired professional cleaners to help restore the building, and a flood damage service arrived, cut holes in the wall, and used heaters to blow hot air into the walls to dry them out. They scrubbed the walls to wash away the black marker, and all of the Post-it notes were removed. Furniture was reorganized. And garbage bag after garbage bag was filled with broken glass and plates. At one point Justin had gone into Tony’s en suite bathroom and found a glass bottle, like an old-fashioned milk bottle, tipped over on the floor beside the toilet. The bottle was about a third full of what appeared to be vitamin capsules. By the brown substance within them, he assumed they were mushrooms. A handful of the capsules were scattered across the floor. It was impossible to tell if the bottle had been full or where it had come from, but as he looked around the house, Justin could only wonder. At the restaurant, Suzie ordered a margarita. After the events of the past forty-eight hours, they decided, perhaps Tony had finally hit rock bottom.

The only feasible outcome, they thought, was that Tony would be committed to a psychiatric facility or rehab, and then the slow road to recovery would begin. Their conversation was interrupted by Suzie’s phone ringing. It was an unknown Utah number. Odd, she thought, considering it was late. She held the phone to her ear, and Justin watched her face drain of blood. She looked up and mouthed: “It’s Tony.” The hospital was releasing him. “What do you mean?” Suzie said into the phone. Justin called the police officer who had taken Tony from the house the night before. Why is Tony being released? The police have no power to stop Tony from leaving the hospital, the officer told him; all they could do was pass on their recommendation to the medical staff. A short time later, Justin and Suzie pulled into the emergency room entrance and saw a figure huddled on the curb. Tony was wrapped in a purple puffer jacket and wearing gray sweats. He looked up, his eyes glazed and hollow.

CHAPTER 23

STICKY NOTES

The sun was beating down on Park City when David Hill cracked his first beer of the day. He and his friend Tyler Davis had just sat down on the front porch after a morning hiking the surrounding mountains and were using the moment to relax before a night of July 4 celebrations. A small garden separated the blue miner’s cottage from the sidewalk, and from where they were sitting, they could look up and down the street toward the hills at each end of Park Avenue. “Happy Fourth of July!” they called out to a group of people walking by, lifting their drinks. It was a marvelous day. The skies were clear, and the sound of one of their favorite bands, the reggae funk group Iration, was playing from a speaker on the porch. The two men had known each other since they were kids, and trips like this were among the few times they could catch up. Tyler lived in Florida and worked at a real estate company, while David worked at a recruiting firm in Dallas. “Happy Fourth!” they hollered with big grins at two men walking by. After the pandemic closure of the spring, Park City had reopened its restaurants in June and had become a hot spot for those in need of the outdoors. Tyler and David had rented the cottage via Airbnb for the long weekend; it was the first time they’d been able to get away with friends since the pandemic had started. As the reggae played, Tyler stared after the two men who’d just walked past, and noticed one of them wasn’t wearing shoes—an odd sight in a ritzy town where financial advisors and tech workers in polo shirts and vests line the sidewalks. He exchanged a glance with David as they realized the two

men had turned around and were now walking back toward them. One man was taller and looked to be about fifty, with long gray-streaked hair that dangled over his shoulders, giving him the look of an older “hippie guy,” Tyler recalled. The other man, without the shoes, looked more disheveled as he came closer. With a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he was wearing a tattered maroon button-down shirt. His blue jeans scuffed along the ground. “What are you guys up to?” the shoeless man said, looking at them with glassy eyes. On the porch, Tyler and David tensed slightly and mumbled something about relaxing and drinking beers. “How long are you guys staying here?” the man asked. They told him they had been renting the house from Airbnb and planned to leave the next day. “Why don’t you stay for an extra week?” he said. “I’ll pay for the Airbnb.” What is going on here? Tyler thought. These two strange men, standing in front of them chain-smoking cigarettes, were now proposing they cover the cost of the Airbnb so they could stay another week? The shoeless man looked at David. “What do you do?” he said. David was cautiously interested to see where this was going and told him he worked in recruiting. The man became more animated. “I’m actually trying to recruit people to move to Park City,” he said. “Would you be willing to start recruiting for me?” “Well, we focus on, like, sales recruiting, specifically software and medical device sales,” David said. “What’s your placement fee?” the man responded. “On average, $10,000.” The man said he would pay double that for every person that David could recruit to come to Park City. After some more back-and-forth, David gave the man his phone number, and then wrote the man’s contact information on a piece of paper, but threw it away. “I legitimately thought he was homeless,” David recalled. “I didn’t think that the deal was serious at all.” Had David followed up, he would have joined a burgeoning group of people about to make fortunes off a seemingly unwell man.

Three weeks later, Tony was walking through a cavernous living room, his footsteps echoing on hardwood floors. As the real estate agent guided him and his friends past a river-rock wall, he looked through floor-to-ceiling windows toward an expansive balcony that overlooked a blue-green lake. In the distance, the mountains framed the horizon. Tony turned to the real estate agent. “I’ll double your commission if you let me smoke a cigarette right now.” The sprawling ranch at 2636 Aspen Springs Drive would be the first of almost a dozen properties Tony would buy nearby, but it was by far the most impressive. Sunk into the base of Iron Mountain in a small, exclusive neighborhood about three miles north of Park City’s town center, the property fell away from the street, obscured by paper birch and pine. Driving past, one could fail to notice the mansion’s exterior. The ninebedroom home spread across two floors and a loft space; several rooms had fireplaces. Below the balcony was an enclosed gym and indoor pool, and somewhere within the rabbit warren of rooms was a theater, cellars, and multiple bars. Outside, the lake lapped softly on a small sandy beach, and farther down the hill a two-story carriage house complete with its own horse corral had been converted into a guest residence with a panoramic view of a rolling meadow all the way to the four-lane state highway a quarter mile away. The $15 million Tony put up for the house was but a fraction of his spending in recent weeks, and he was only getting started. Ever since his release from the hospital, Tony had become convinced that he was building a whole new world in Park City. He was fixated on building his community —an ecosystem, as he called it. He was putting out the call far and wide for people to join him: to friends in Las Vegas, former girlfriends, people he’d spoken to at conferences, people he’d met at Burning Man—seemingly everyone he knew. He told people that he wanted to build a new community here in this swanky mountain town, home to the rich and famous. Like Las Vegas, only better. What that meant, exactly, wasn’t clear to anyone who accepted his invitation. But Tony was making them an offer that made it easy to put aside any doubts. They could come and stay in one of his mansions, most

often rent-free, all expenses paid. Food would be catered. They would be hired as “project managers” and be given free rein to invent their own roles and find their purpose. In return they’d earn more money than they ever had before. If they could show Tony a tax return, he would double their best salary. Only one other primary condition came with some of these lifechanging contracts, often written on neon-colored Post-it notes: those who arrived had to “be happy.” Adding to the stream of people who had been coming and going from Park City in previous months, dozens more arrived to see what the buzz was about. Friends and former confidants at Zappos and the Downtown Project arrived in town, including Janice Lopez, John Bunch, and Jamie Naughton, his chief of staff and head of corporate communications at Zappos. So did Don Calder, the man who’d joined Tony in Hawaii for the baby experiment during Winter Camp. Rachael Brown, his former girlfriend, moved into the ranch, and Blizzy, Tony’s beloved fluffy white mutt, was brought along, too. In addition to handling social media accounts, Michelle D’Attilio was hired to create websites for various projects that Tony and Suzie were building. The day after he purchased the ranch, Tony led Michelle around the grand estate. He was wearing sweatpants, but no shirt or shoes. Michelle had heard about what happened in Montana and the destruction at 1422 Empire, and she was now visiting every other week to check on him. She hadn’t brought up his meltdown, reasoning that she might have more sway over him if she worked behind the scenes to support him, rather than question his behavior and risk joining Tyler on the time-out list. During one visit earlier in the month, she had noticed how dirty Tony’s feet were. Michelle snapped a photo of them and sent it to a friend who had been with Tony. “Has he washed his feet?” she texted her friend. “What’s going on?” As Tony and Michelle walked the property, they stopped at the front porch and sat on the ground with their backs to the main door. As they had countless times before, they sat in silence taking in the pristine air and summer heat. At last Tony turned to Michelle. “I’m thinking of retiring from Zappos,” he said. “What do you think?”

By now, Zappos executives were more than aware of Tony’s troubles. It was unclear to Michelle whether this thought had come to Tony of his own volition or if he was starting to get pressure from the company to take a step back. Michelle looked at her friend. She noticed his face was unwashed and gaunt. He seemed sober but exhausted. She could sense the weight on his shoulders. “Do whatever is going to make you happy,” she said. “You’ve done so much already for so many people. It’s okay for you to step back and take care of yourself.” Tony stared back at her. The silence hung for a moment longer before someone approached them, breaking their moment of solitude.

To accommodate the swelling number of people arriving in Park City, the ranch served as the nerve center of Tony’s new world. A stream of tour buses and Sprinter vans shuttled people to and from Las Vegas, cluttering the quiet residential street in front of the property. Tony hired a chef from Las Vegas to run the kitchen and build out the equivalent of a restaurant operation; with a $10,000-per-day budget, caviar was on the menu one day, king crab legs another. Beyond the bedrooms in the main building and the extra rooms in the carriage house, Tony ordered Airstream trailers and tiny homes to be parked in the horse corral, allowing for more people to stay onsite. Tony ended up spending more than $50 million on seventeen houses and vacant lots in the Park City region to accommodate his followers. New arrivals, whether they’d known Tony for months or years, found themselves entering a community where there existed a clear hierarchy of people, each wrestling for power, influence, and Tony’s attention. At the top of the pyramid, Mimi and Suzie established themselves as competing factions seeking to serve as gatekeepers to the community. Mimi spent most of her time away from Park City but beamed into Tony’s bedroom during daily video conference calls and secured the role of managing logistics at the ranch: ordering food, paying bills, and monitoring who was leaving and arriving. Tony also assigned Mimi to be the final sign-off on most business ideas, ventures, or other major purchases. Outside of the ranch, most logistical issues were claimed by Suzie and her employees at Wellth

Collective, who served as the primary travel agent for people arriving in Park City, coordinating where they would stay, what flights they were booking, and how they were getting to and from the airport. Others seemed to have less defined roles. After hearing Tony’s plan to build a new community in Park City, Victoria Recano, the TV reporter Tony had first met in San Francisco twenty years before, arrived with her husband and children in July, moving into one of the properties with a mandate, among other things, to produce videos for Tony to watch. Among the first projects Tony assigned her was to produce a video about herself, a forty-five-minute compilation of her news clips and family videos spliced together. Soon after, Tony told her he wanted a documentary on the history of the Swahili people, the millennia-old civilization from the coastal areas of East Africa near Tanzania. “Defining the Swahili people isn’t easy,” Victoria’s raspy newswoman voice declared over images of men in robes standing by ragged tents in the desert. “It all depends on who you ask, where you ask it, and when. It’s very tricky.” Millions of dollars were being promised every week, for salaries, for projects, and for investments, and Tony hired a team of court reporters— people typically employed to transcribe legal proceedings—to stay at the ranch and document his conversations. Mark Evensvold, who for years had managed the Nacho Daddy restaurant in Las Vegas, which Tony part-owned with Fred Mossler, came to Park City, and on the lakefront one afternoon in August, Mark and Tony discussed the terms of Mark’s purpose in Park City, while a court reporter typed nearby, recording their words. Mark’s roles would involve overseeing several bars at the ranch—the bar next to Tony’s bedroom, another one next to the pool, and the upstairs kitchen bar—to make sure they were always stocked and in service. If Tony wanted to go to sleep, Mark would have to tell people to leave. In addition, he could also embark on other projects that interested him. Maybe he could build a koi pond or construct a treehouse? “You just work on whatever you feel like,” Tony said. “There’s no real schedule.” On a Post-it note, in a barely legible scribble, Mark wrote down the terms of the deal they’d just discussed. Tony asked him to read it aloud. “I will arrive on-site here as of September 20, 2020, responsible for bars, help with security and project management. Salary is $450K a year,” Mark said.

As a sign-on bonus, Mark went on, Tony would transfer most of his 25 percent stake in Nacho Daddy to Mark. Tony leaned over and signed his name on the note.

CHAPTER 24

OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

The Hsieh family had already come and gone by the time Tony bought the ranch. After Tony’s episode at 1422 Empire Avenue and subsequent stay in the hospital, Richard had arrived in Park City with Judy, Dave, and Andy. Despite their arrival, Tony spent little time with them, and asked friends to ensure that he would never be left alone with them. In the moments Tony did spend with his family, he left them struggling to connect with their boy. At one point Tony told them that he planned to start a new family business. The purpose of the endeavor was unclear, but it was the responsibility of each of his family members to come up with a plan to raise money in a few weeks. He never followed up. During another moment with Judy, he said he would be open with her if she would act like his friend. If she acted like a family member, then he would hide information from her. When she told him that he needed to see a therapist, he said he would, but only if for every minute he was in therapy she would be in an ice bath. When she pressed the therapy point once more, mentioning his issues with attention, Tony left the house in a rage. When it came time for the family to depart, Andy thought twice about leaving. Despite their distance over the years, seeing a swirl of new people he had never met before made him want to stay in Park City and keep an eye on his brother. Ten days later he returned and quickly realized that he’d entered an ecosystem where people were competing for Tony’s money, pitching projects that didn’t make sense, and living in houses they would never be able to afford otherwise. And there was a rule that ominously dictated many behaviors in the Park City enclave: never tell Tony you were

concerned about his behavior. To do so meant risking excommunication, along with Tyler and Ryan Doherty. One solution Andy came up with was to bring in people he could trust to identify bad actors. As it happened, Andy knew that his brother had been wanting for a while to work with their longtime friend Tony Lee. Lee had spearheaded Wells Fargo’s loans to Zappos in 2003 when it was close to bankruptcy. Since then, Lee had worked at a number of smaller banks before settling in Texas to manage the finances of the Bass family, the oil dynasty that was worth more than $5 billion. He and Andy had remained close friends over the years; Andy had asked Lee to be the best man at his wedding before it was canceled. Now, at a time when his brother’s spending was spinning out of control, Andy figured they could benefit from a professional financial manager to conduct some due diligence. Lee was reluctant to entertain the idea of uprooting his life in Texas and to leave a comfortable job to join the mania of Tony’s world, but he agreed to a meeting. During a dinner in late July at a restaurant on Main Street, Tony told him that he was turning Park City into a community similar to the one he had built in downtown Las Vegas, but better. Lee’s role would involve overseeing all finances in the Park City ventures. As he had done with others, Tony offered to pay double Lee’s current salary, which meant he would be earning $1.5 million a year. Sensing Lee’s hesitancy, Tony turned to one of the people at the dinner, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and suggested that if he could convince Lee to stay, he’d receive a 10 percent commission, or $150,000. After dinner, Andy pulled Lee aside. Coming to Park City made sense for multiple reasons, he said. Andy and Lee could finally work together after trying to figure out a way for years. Second, Andy said, with Lee overseeing the finances, he could also help weed out people who were taking advantage of his brother.

Andy’s request came with a sense of urgency, as money was streaming from Tony’s accounts. If people had concerns about taking money from a man drifting further from reality, few seemed to consider the Faustian bargain

they were entering—an oversight that took vivid form when Tony found another destructive fascination. In the weeks after his release from the hospital, Tony returned to the idea of biohacking as a way to increase his own personal output, and became convinced that inhaling nitrous oxide was a way to heighten his blood oxygen levels and eliminate the need for sleep. Better known as laughing gas for its use at dental offices, nitrous oxide is commercially available as an everyday kitchen item: the cartridges used in cream whipping machines, known as Whip-Its. The shiny silver canisters are about two inches in length and slot into Whip-It machines. While it’s illegal to inhale the gas, it has found popularity with teenagers who can’t legally buy alcohol and among festival revelers seeking a cheap, quick high. Inhaling the gas induces an immediate high, making one feel relaxed and sometimes giggly for a minute or two. But the brain can only handle so much nitrous oxide before it begins to dissociate and lose connection with reality. Excessive use can lead to brain damage, and some teenagers have died from chemical asphyxiation; the actress Demi Moore passed out with seizures and was sent to a hospital after a night of inhaling Whip-Its. Between cigarettes, Tony was inhaling from the Whip-It canister like he was drinking water from a bottle. As he sat in bed at the ranch, the floor around him was covered by hundreds of Whip-It cartridges. By one estimate, Tony was using more than fifty a day. “You could hear his dog coming because it would jingle jingle through the things,” one person who was at the ranch daily recalled. Tony found comrades to indulge his newest addiction. Among them was Don Calder, who had been pitching Tony on potentially buying the town of Nipton and all of its sculptures as a Burning Man–style fun park. When their canisters ran empty, they were replenished from a pallet of Whip-It cartridges like those used to stock department stores, which Tony kept in the garage. Tony’s near-constant stream of nitrous oxide prompted strange behavior. One time Tony stepped on glass, cut his foot, and walked around the ranch leaving streaks of blood on the floor—a trail, Tony said, that would make it easy to find him. On another occasion, he tried starving himself of food and water to eliminate the need to use the bathroom. His physical appearance changed, and his weight fell below one hundred pounds, leaving his frame

looking skeletal. His head seemed to bulge above his body, while his slender limbs moved with fatigue. At one point paranoia took hold, and Tony was convinced one morning that Tyler was in Park City, trying to stage an intervention. The scare prompted him to hire a legion of black-clothed security guards to form a human perimeter around the ranch. Visitors who came to see Tony encountered guards in different wings of the property, as if they were entering a fortified estate. Tony then became fixated on finding ways to justify his nitrous oxide habit, and dispatched those around him to find out more about it. Victoria produced another video at his request, this one titled “The Nitrous Oxide Advantage,” a montage of psychedelic images and videos cut between sound bites from supposed experts answering questions Victoria had crowdsourced from people at the ranch. “Nitrous oxide has control over the brain in ways no other drug does,” Victoria’s voice-over said. “It is at our lowest level of brain wave activity. Any lower and we are brain dead.” Not unlike what he’d done during his fascination with ketamine, Tony called for research on whether nitrous oxide was something that could change lives; maybe it could become another legal high like marijuana. He found a willing volunteer in a man named Nadeem Nathoo, the co-founder of an organization called the Knowledge Society, who was also seen inhaling nitrous alongside Tony. Nadeem had met Tony after a conference one night in Las Vegas. His organization offered training programs to highachieving teenagers interested in entrepreneurship and seeking internships at places like Microsoft and IBM. Nadeem had arrived in Park City after receiving a text from Tony, and at Tony’s insistence Nadeem invited three alumni of the Knowledge Society program to join them as well. Almost as soon as they arrived, the fresh-faced twentysomethings were asked to produce a research paper on the health benefits of nitrous oxide. Tony dipped in and out of megalomania. One morning he preached to Michelle about achieving world peace. Given that he was paying her to oversee his social media accounts, he posited how they could be used for such a goal. Before going down the rabbit hole, Michelle said, they needed to define what world peace meant. For Michelle, it meant a world with peaceful resolutions to conflict. Tony’s definition was both more simplistic and reductive: for him, world peace meant a world without any conflict.

“He wanted to create this playground where everyone would be happy,” she said later. Everyone in Park City understood that the best time to speak with Tony was at dawn—it was when he was at his most lucid. Justin and Suzie, who had both remained in Park City but were staying in other houses, would often join Tony on the lakefront beach as he cooked breakfast and was more clear-eyed. There they would discuss business affairs—from property acquisitions to contracts with new entrants—before Tony’s mental state declined throughout the day. Tony raised eyebrows by leading group hikes through the mountains without shoes on while inhaling from his nitrous cartridge. While he was initially seen at mealtimes and held meetings in various rooms at the ranch to discuss the stream of projects being pitched to him, he gradually started spending more time in his bedroom, and would hold court while sitting in bed, surrounded by nitrous oxide cartridges. “His room looked like a homeless shelter,” Andy said later. “There was feces on the ground. Plants in his toilets. Broken glass, broken plates all over the ground. Rotten food under the bed. Rotten food on the walls … it was disgusting.”

People were finding new ways to spend his money, as Tony seemed willing to spend himself broke. On multiple occasions he said he wanted to shed any attachment to the world he’d created in Las Vegas. There were too many broken commitments there. And rather than his community coming together for him, they’d forced him into rehab instead. No more Zappos. No more shoes. No more Downtown Project. No more people asking for money to build a community he no longer cared about. One way to achieve this, Tony declared, was that he would sell his entire real estate portfolio in Las Vegas. Despite having paid in excess of $200 million for the properties downtown, he wanted them gone, no matter the price. To execute the plan, he turned to the two people who’d been meeting him every morning on the beach. On a Post-it note stuck to his bedroom wall, he delegated the task to Justin and Suzie. The first person to bring him back a deal would earn a 10 percent commission.

Such agreements were encouraged by a nonsensical incentive scheme Tony had come up with, called 10X. It started when Tony declared that for his new community to be more effective than his Las Vegas experiment, it must reconsider how output was achieved and measured. Therefore, he told people, everything would need to be achieved in multiples of ten: ten times faster, ten times bigger, ten times more. Initially, the first iteration of 10X launched with a noble goal: to help the town of Park City reopen amid the pandemic. Suzie had been in charge of spearheading the effort with her company, Wellth Collective. With the help of a recently hired assistant named Elizabeth Pezzello, who in turn had brought her fiancé, Brett Gorman, to Park City to work for Suzie, the three approached restaurants downtown and secured agreements to book them out on Sundays, guaranteeing thousands of dollars for revenue-starved businesses. The plan was to walk around downtown and sell $10 memberships to people, granting them an all-you-can-eat-and-drink pass to any of the restaurants; participants were given T-shirts and merchandise with a 10X logo. It might have sounded charitable, given that the venture made no financial sense, but the state of Utah took issue with running an open bar tab on an entire town and shut the program down after its second week. But the philosophy of 10X remained, and morphed into something else. In addition to the double-your-best-salary deals, Tony vowed that anyone who spent his money would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on the amount they spent. If someone booked out a restaurant and spent $1,000 on the tab, for example, they would earn $100. If they recruited someone to live in Park City, they’d be entitled to a 10 percent commission on that person’s annual salary. And if someone could source a real estate deal and spent $1 million on the property, that person would be entitled to $100,000. Starting with smaller tasks around the ranch and expanding all the way to Tony’s entire Las Vegas real estate portfolio, commissions were being doled out on a daily basis.

Tony Lee had by now assumed the role of financial overseer and had a front-row seat as money left his old friend’s bank accounts. Unlike the mundane stock performance charts Lee had been overseeing for the Bass

family, he was now staring at receipts for investments in gold and real estate properties, hot air balloons, and proposals for helicopter tour companies. Lee could also see those vying for Tony’s money beginning to fight for it—a development often motivated by the 10X incentive program. For many of the big-ticket items, Mimi and Suzie were attempting to establish themselves as the source of deals, to prove to Tony that they were deserving of a commission. This manifested in strange ways. One day, Suzie’s top assistants, Elizabeth and Brett, who were employed by Wellth Collective, announced that they had been hired to cater solely to Tony. As part of the swap, they would now be paid through an LLC that Mimi controlled, and Elizabeth and Brett would be getting a pay raise: each would be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. For years, Mimi had been paid a flat $9,000-a-month salary from Tony, in addition to travel expenses. But after Tony’s Park City chapter began, Mimi negotiated a pay raise and was now earning a $30,000-per-month base salary—a sum that soon became dwarfed by the money she was scooping up in 10X commissions. In total, through an LLC she controlled, Mimi sent invoices for what amounted to more than $20 million. In one case, Mimi “managed” a contractor who was being paid $83,333.33 a month for “assistance and management of various projects”—earning her $8,333 every time the contractor was paid by Tony. When Tony bought a fleet of buses and asked that Mimi arrange for them to be retrofitted at a cost of $3.7 million, she took 10 percent of the fee. Then there was the $7 million acquisition of the Big Moose Yacht Club, an event space on prime real estate at the foot of Park City’s ski lifts, which entitled Mimi to a $700,000 commission. In a twisted way, Tony’s incentive structure was working the way he envisioned it; people were vying to execute his every whim. When he had an idea to launch a film studio that produced documentaries, Mimi took up the proposition. On a sticky note, she and Tony wrote up the terms of a contract to set up an LLC with $10 million to fund documentary film projects produced by an existing studio called XTR. The LLC would be controlled by Tony, Mimi, and her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, a former lawyer and aspiring film producer. As part of the agreement, Mimi and her boyfriend were entitled to 55 percent of the profit from the venture, despite

not putting in their own money. And in line with 10X, Roberto would be entitled to a $1 million commission for setting up the LLC. Mimi then charged Tony another 10 percent fee on the cost of hiring the lawyers to arrange the $1 million commission payment to Roberto. It might have seemed excessive, but two months later, Roberto told XTR that Tony had approved another $7.5 million for the venture. It’s unclear if the money was wired, but soon afterward, the attorneys who had written up the terms for the $1 million commission payment to Roberto amended the contract to state he was now owed $1.75 million. Mimi’s efforts often came into conflict with those of Suzie, and at one point she introduced a “Suzie penalty,” which Tony agreed to: for every day Suzie was on one of Tony’s properties, Mimi would fine him $30,000. While it seemed outrageous, Tony racked up $1.83 million in fees under the scheme and received an invoice from Mimi’s boyfriend. Tony ended up paying $420,000. But Suzie gained ground in other ways and successfully convinced Tony to commit to one-on-one time, which gave rise to other opportunities. After her restaurant program on Main Street was abandoned, Tony told her she had a $1 million weekly budget to throw events around Park City every Sunday, a figure Suzie claimed she never spent in its entirety. Then, in addition to trying to broker a deal to sell Tony’s real estate portfolio, she worked with Tony to launch a project known as the Magic Castle, a $5 million proposal to turn an event space in town into a co-working facility. Like Peter Pan’s Neverland, every new project or idea could sound enchanting. Another person Mimi seemed to be constantly feuding with over the 10X commissions was Andy. Since Tony had met Paula Abdul earlier in the year, he had wanted to convince her to come to town and do some shows; because tours had been canceled as a result of the pandemic, she had spare time. So Tony proposed that Paula do 180 shows at a local event venue known as Yellowstone for a $9 million contract. Whoever could close the deal would get the $900,000 commission. Andy claimed that he had arranged it, while Mimi argued that in fact she was entitled to it, but nothing ever came of the proposal. In another dispute, Andy and Mimi lobbied Tony regarding who they thought was entitled to a 10 percent commission on the $15 million ranch he was now living in.

Andy tried to rally support among others to pursue deals with Tony’s money. At one point, he urged Janice to try and convince Tony to invest $10 million in an entity that would own a tequila company. He brought it up to her on at least five other occasions, eventually suggesting she ask for $50 million for the venture. But Janice refused, and it went nowhere. Lee, for his part, initially seemed to encourage Andy’s pursuit of Tony’s commission payments. After Tony had dangled the 10 percent commission in front of Ryan Fitzpatrick at their initial dinner in July, Andy encouraged Tony Lee to make it clear to his brother that it was he who was entitled to the commission, if he ended up taking the job. “You are welcomed [sic] to go broker a deal for me,” Lee wrote in a text to Andy. “Go talk to him.” “Yeah I’ll talk to him,” Andy replied. “Tell him I’m your broker.” Lee seemed enthused. “You have to earn your commission now and make it happen.:)) hope tony pays you.” “I’ll make it happen with Tony! And you make it happen with him that I’m your broker:),” Andy replied. “The higher my number whether 1.4 or 1.5 [million dollars] you will get a bigger commission. Go fight for me now.:))” “Win win!” Andy wrote back. “Mainly excited for you to be here and we can hang out together.” Lee later claimed he wasn’t aware how ill Tony was until after he decided to take on the role. After he started working, he soon soured on Andy and came to believe that he was seeking to exploit his sick brother, rather than protect him. At one point, Lee claimed that Andy asked him to divert as much as $100 million to an account he controlled, to put aside for Tony’s “retirement,” which he refused to do; a claim Andy later denied. As for Andy’s efforts to secure a 10 percent commission on Lee’s salary, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, those fell by the wayside when Tony himself refused the proposal. It didn’t seem to matter though, as Andy had already negotiated his own salary contract with his brother—one valued at $1 million a year.

CHAPTER 25

WHO WILL SAVE YOUR SOUL?

The chaos spiraling within Tony’s community was finally about to spill into public view, but for just a moment. On a Sunday evening in August, as the sun began its descent behind Iron Mountain, a group of residents were huddled at the top of the driveway of 2636 Aspen Springs Drive. As they waited to enter the ranch, there was an element of cautious curiosity; mention of the address had raised eyebrows among the neighbors for weeks. Among those gathered was Bill Ciraco, a former Wall Street trader who had reached the edge of burnout before moving into the neighborhood with his wife and teenage daughter a few weeks before. At first he’d been enamored of the area, a cluster of ski chalets and palatial winter lodges strung along a one-mile loop of road that ascends and descends the base of Iron Mountain, granting a panorama of the valley below. Bill’s real estate agent had told him the neighborhood had an active homeowners association, made up primarily of year-round residents who looked out for one another (in part through the security cameras that peered out from under the eaves) and knew when something was amiss. An unknown car with out-of-state plates parked in the street for too long could prompt alarm and even a 911 call. And unless an invite was issued by one of Aspen Springs’s wealthy residents, strangers had no business being there. It was like a gated community but without the gate, Bill had been told. But after the disturbances of the past few weeks, he was wondering whether he’d made a huge mistake. Two weeks after moving in with his wife and teenage daughter, Bill learned that a supposed billionaire had paid $15 million for the ranch at the bottom of the loop, one of the

neighborhood’s most extravagant properties. While he’d initially been buoyed by the idea that the sale could raise home prices in an area he’d just moved into, his excitement turned to concern when he’d seen a group of security guards flanking the property—hardly the image of a safe neighborhood. A deluge of vehicles had started coming and going from the property, too. As many as twenty-five cars lined the street outside the home at one point, and then even tour buses began arriving at the property. Finally, what felt like nonstop nights of parties had prompted 911 calls from neighbors. Now, gathered at the problem house, some nodded in agreement that the recent events had been a great concern to their tranquil community. An olive branch had arrived the day before, in the form of an email to the homeowners association inviting the neighbors for a night of cocktails and entertainment at the ranch. The message also revealed that their new neighbor was Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, a company that Amazon had bought for over $1 billion. Outside of a small group of people, no one even knew Tony was here. Perhaps tonight the neighbors would have an opportunity to quiz Mr. Hsieh on what business he had being in Aspen Springs. Bill made his way down the driveway with the neighbors, where they were asked to stand in front of the garage to wait for a COVID-19 test. A man wearing a denim jacket weaved through the group; a red bandana was tied around his neck. With a grin, he introduced himself as Anthony. “I’m Tony’s guy,” Anthony said. He raised a fistful of bandanas and motioned for Bill to take one and tie it around his wrist. “It’s so Tony knows who his guests are versus his employees.” As he took a bandana, it took a moment for Bill to register where he had met guys that reminded him of Anthony. On Wall Street, the best traders didn’t have to work for Morgan Stanley to get the best clients. With charisma and million-dollar smiles, they just had to raise hype by spending more on strippers and cocaine. Standing on the deck, Bill took a glass of wine from a server and observed the scene around him. A few dozen people dressed like hipsters stood around, chatting. Most looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. Someone passed by and mentioned that Tony was so happy to host all the neighbors. Bill thought it was weird that Tony was being spoken for. Where was he? Bill’s mind drifted to one of those celebrity cocktail parties

he’d attended at the Mondrian in West Hollywood. Everyone was smiling and looked pleased to be at a fancy party. They were there on the host’s dime, but no one really even knew the host. The small talk was interrupted by a woman who stood in front of the fireplace holding a microphone. “We have a special guest here tonight,” she said, prompting a murmur. “Jewel is here to perform.” Cocktails at a supposed billionaire’s home were one thing. But a private show with a Grammy-winning artist was pretty cool, Bill thought; he was a longtime fan and the proud owner of Jewel’s first album. Jewel emerged from the far side of the room, wearing a pink tie-dyed flight suit that faded to purple down the leg. Two lengths of blond hair fell below a cream cowboy hat and swung over her chest as she moved in front of the microphone, holding a guitar. Introducing herself, she told her audience about her life story, growing up in Alaska, overcoming great hardship, experiencing homelessness in California, and being a victim of abuse. She now led a charity that helped youth get back on their feet in underserved communities. Then she began to sing. More than a dozen candles shimmered on the table in front of her as she swayed and dipped with her guitar. The living room was shrouded in dusk by the time she sang her final ballad, “Who Will Save Your Soul.” She reached a crescendo, then descended into the final chorus: … And who will save your soul? If you won’t save your own? The room was silent for a moment before those gathered broke into raucous applause. Everyone marveled at what they’d seen. Whatever the disturbance of the past few weeks, the neighbors agreed there seemed to be a sincere effort to make peace with them. Only they couldn’t thank their host. Tony was still nowhere to be seen. Bill was grinning when a woman approached him and the neighbors, identifiable by their red bandanas. “We are moving on to the dinner section of the night,” she said. “So we’re going to have to ask you to leave.” Bill’s wonderment vanished like a wisp of smoke.

People outside of Tony’s inner circle had been trying to reach him for weeks. While the neighbors didn’t know it, they were part of a growing group of people to whom Tony Hsieh remained unseen. As stories of outrageous spending, drug use, and neighborhood uproar filtered beyond the properties in Park City, those in Las Vegas began to discuss what to do about Tony. The lives of thousands of people—employees at Zappos, the Downtown Project business owners, residents of the community he had built in Las Vegas—were vastly impacted by the whims of a man who was descending into madness. These concerns had become even more urgent when word got back to the Downtown Project executives that Tony intended to sell his entire Las Vegas real estate portfolio, doing away with the Downtown Project, Fergusons, and everything else he owned there. On multiple occasions Michael Downs, the Downtown Project executive, and Jen Taler, who lived at Fergusons and oversaw operations there, had arrived in Park City to try to find out what Tony’s intentions were for both institutions. After learning that Tony was trying to sell his entire real estate portfolio, both left incensed, not knowing what was next. Without more money from Tony, their world in Las Vegas would likely collapse. Since leaving in June, Tyler had shared what occurred on the bus to Montana with some people in Las Vegas and at Zappos, and momentum grew to send an interventionist to Park City to, effectively, retrieve Tony. With the help of Tony’s parents, Tyler arranged for an interventionist named Elisa Hallerman, who specialized in celebrity cases, to go to Park City in early August. In order to get her onto the property, Tyler needed to convince someone who was on the ground at the ranch to add Elisa’s name to an approval list for the security guards. Tyler called Michelle just before midnight on August 4. “We have to get Tony healthy,” Tyler said to her. Michelle was exasperated. Not only had Tyler become persona non grata by this point, but there was now a narrative in Park City that Tyler had a savior complex. There were also other rumors—rumors that Tony believed—that Tyler was going to come onto the property and kidnap Tony in order to get him into rehab. Tony’s paranoia was also being fueled by

whispers that his parents were preparing to set up a conservatorship, a court order that allows guardians to make decisions for individuals deemed incapacitated or incapable of managing their own affairs. “Tyler, I get it,” Michelle said. “We’re working on it. But your involvement right now is causing more issues. You are creating more paranoia, and we are trying to get him help. Just let us do this.” The next morning, Michelle received a text message from Justin—he had found a doctor that he believed could help Tony. He wanted Michelle to walk the doctor onto the property that day at 11:30 a.m. With the intent of appeasing Tyler, Michelle texted him to let him know that there was a doctor coming to the ranch. But Tyler had other plans, and once he heard from Michelle, he notified the interventionist. Fifteen minutes before Justin’s doctor was scheduled to arrive, Hallerman showed up at the ranch in a car with two other men—plainclothes police officers—and asked the security team for Michelle. When she came out, Hallerman introduced herself and asked Michelle to join her in the car. “We have extremely powerful people that have hired me,” Hallerman said to Michelle inside the car. “This is a Michael Jackson situation, do you understand? You would be liable if he dies.” As Hallerman bore into her, Michelle saw the doctor Justin had sent walking up the hill. She immediately jumped out of the car and took him onto the property in hopes of finding Tony. Before they could, however, the security team—unaware of any scheduled medical visits, and operating under strict instructions to keep strangers out—pulled Michelle and the doctor into two separate rooms and interrogated them. While Michelle and the doctor were being questioned, Hallerman demanded that Tony come outside to see her and the two police officers for a welfare check—typically an in-person visit from law enforcement officers responding to a request from a friend or family member concerned about a person’s mental or physical health. Standing at the top of the driveway, Tony talked with her and passed the welfare check. “He could snap in and out of anything,” Michelle later said. At the end of their discussion, Tony asked the officers who had requested the welfare check. “Your parents,” they responded. Even though the family had been involved in organizing the intervention, it was untrue that they had asked for the welfare check—it was technically Tyler who had

done so. But Tony made it clear to those at the ranch that his parents were now excommunicated. People within the house were similarly irritated by the unsolicited intervention attempt, and Tyler stopped receiving updates from Suzie, Justin, and Michelle.

Other friends began making individual efforts with more desperation. From Las Vegas, Tony’s old friend Mark Guadagnoli had on multiple occasions tried to reach him on his phone to schedule a visit. Instead he received responses from Elizabeth Pezzello, who was now managing most of Tony’s communications, telling him that Tony was either out of town or unavailable. She didn’t know when he’d be free. A few days after the failed intervention, Mark decided to call the Park City police and request that they do a welfare check. On the phone to a clerk, Mark provided his details, gave the address of Tony’s ranch, and expressed that he was concerned for his friend’s safety. The clerk said they’d send a car out to the address. Thirty minutes later Mark received a call from a Park City police officer who wanted to know who he was, why he wanted the welfare check conducted, the nature of his relationship with Tony, and how long he’d known Tony. Mark answered the questions, adding that he’d known Tony for “less than twenty years.” The officer sounded more annoyed than willing to help, but agreed to call Mark once a wellness check had been done. Hours went by without a response, and Mark decided to call the police station again and leave a message with the clerk. The officer phoned back two hours later and told him that no, he hadn’t conducted the welfare check or gone to the house. Instead, he knew people at the house, and they’d told him everything was okay. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have just gone to the house yourself,” Mark said. The officer told him, “That’s not the way we do it. I already knew these people, and I trust them.” It so happened that Fred Mossler and his wife, Meghan, were also in Park City that day. It was the second time they’d come to check on Tony. Seeing the state Tony was in, this time had been harder than before. After talking with him on the beach, they resolved that he was very ill. When it came time for them to leave, Suzie offered to walk them to their car. As

they neared the car, Suzie turned to them and asked that upon their return to Vegas they please urge people to stop calling in welfare checks. That morning alone, she’d learned of a welfare check request that had been put in from a friend who had known Tony for “less than twenty years.”

Ultimately, it was Jewel who, with her star power, could glide past the guards and Tony’s followers to capture his attention long enough to hold a mirror up to him. Eager to move past the disturbances of the past week, Tony had been anticipating her arrival and was excited to show her around his compound and the world he was building there. When she received the invitation, Jewel was at first reluctant to go. Over text message, Janice Lopez had told her that Tony recently bought a large property, and wanted to host her; it would be a COVID-friendly environment. If she was willing, Tony would send a coach or private plane, Janice told her. Jewel had spent the pandemic at her home in Telluride, Colorado, a town tucked away in the San Juan mountain range, known for its worldclass skiing and unpretentious airs. She spent those months taking long hikes and watching her son canoe across the lake by her home. The last thing she wanted was to leave her bubble of tranquility. But something about the text worried her. Unsure of what to do, she asked her friend and business partner Ryan Wolfington what he thought. “What’s your gut telling you?” Ryan asked. “I’m worried about Tony,” she said. “But I feel like it’s the right thing to do.” Before they left, Ryan called Tyler, whom he had come to know over the years from the work that Jewel did with Zappos, to ask if there was anything they should know before their visit to Park City. “It’s not gonna be what you think,” Tyler said. “You’re gonna have to be really prepared for what you walk into.” With that in mind, Jewel, Ryan, and Aphrah Brokaw, who oversaw operations of Jewel’s holding company, flew to Park City. Arriving at the ranch, the first thing Jewel was struck by was the contingent of security

guards meeting them. It was so unlike the last time they’d seen Tony at his trailer park in Las Vegas, where he’d been there to greet them. Looking toward the compound, they were soon greeted by a group of Tony’s assistants. “It’s so good to have you here,” a member of the welcoming party said to Jewel and her team, grinning at them. At the ranch, they were told that Tony was going through a creative stage and was in the process of finding himself. He’d been supporting the community and individuals; through 10X he’d been trying to motivate people to build businesses to change the world. Tony was waiting for Jewel by the spa, they said. While Jewel went to find him, Ryan and Aphrah were given a tour of the property. When they walked through the house, they noticed a dozen people sitting around seemingly doing nothing; those were court reporters who transcribed conversations around the ranch, they were told. Everyone they encountered seemed to have forced grins pasted across their faces, as if they were welcoming arrivals for a tour around Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. “Tony’s a genius,” said one person. “Tony’s doing really great things,” said another. Hundreds of candles lit the rooms throughout the home, and melted wax covered the floor and window sills. As their tour continued, they noticed that water was gushing from the sinks and showers, even though no one was using them. The sound of running water, they were told, was intended to emulate the sounds of nature, specifically the ambiance of the Amazon jungle. Standing outside an exterior window looking into Tony’s bedroom on the ground floor, they were shown a ten-foot surfboard covered in AstroTurf that balanced on the window sill, serving as a ramp to enter his room. Inside, the room was trashed; the floor was covered in discarded Whip-It canisters. It was hard to ignore how the opulence of the home contrasted with the filth that filled it. Food scraps and dirt littered the floor, along with discarded clothes and misplaced furniture. They were particularly disturbed to see hand-sized clusters of trash covered in candle wax. A closer look revealed that the wax-covered substance was dog feces. Outside, Jewel found Tony sitting next to the pond in the area known as the spa. Walking toward the beach, Jewel saw that the spa was a ditch dug into the side of the bank, shielded by a tattered rag hanging on a clothesline.

Tony was meditating, seated on one of two chairs positioned next to a table. A large bowl filled with discarded Whip-It canisters sat on the table; hundreds of canisters and dozens of cigarette butts lay on the sand. Greeting Jewel, Tony looked around and explained that he often bathed here. The pond itself was where they washed many of the dishes and kitchen utensils, to reinforce a natural way of living. The sight of Tony’s gaunt face was disorienting and became only more so when he began to explain what he was working on. The secret to everything he was doing in Park City, he told Jewel, was world peace. He showed Jewel a Post-it note covered with a scribble of numbers and markings, which he said was an algorithm he’d written to enable him to “scale world peace” within six months.

Reconvening at the carriage house, where they were expecting to stay, Jewel discussed next steps with her team. “As the president of Jewel Inc., it is my obligation to tell you that you being here could compromise you,” Ryan said. “There’s obviously something untoward going on here. There’s clear drug use. This could become a liability.” Jewel looked up at Ryan and sighed. They would stay to help Tony, she told him. Looking around at the house—the filth, the drugs, the sycophants—they became convinced that Tony was going to die if he stayed on this path. They concluded that there seemed to be no one in Tony’s current orbit aware of his fate—or, if they were aware, then they were willingly enabling his demise and being paid for it. Ryan went back to the main house of the ranch with Aphrah, in an attempt to get a better handle on the environment. As they walked to the kitchen on the second floor, Elizabeth greeted them both, and she and Aphrah exchanged phone numbers. Elizabeth then introduced them to Suzie, who told them she owned a wellness business and threw events with Deepak Chopra. Others joined the conversation. At one point, someone told Ryan and Aphrah that if they wanted Tony to donate to Jewel’s nonprofit, Inspiring Children Foundation, all they

needed to do was write a dollar amount on a Post-it. Anything less than $2 million was okay, but anything over would have to go through Tony’s lawyers, they were told. Like a bribe, Jewel thought, when Ryan told her about the offer.

The next night, Tony, Jewel, and a few others gathered in the theater for a screening of one of Tony’s favorite films, the 1941 Frank Sinatra classic Las Vegas Nights. Seated on a lounge, Jewel told Tony about a manuscript she was working on, and mentioned that she had thought about addiction as a topic for the book. In between sips from his Whip-It canister, Tony immediately became agitated. He said that drugs were both mind- and heart-opening. “I’m not worried about me, because I can see through it,” he said. “I’m the 1 percent of people that can use these substances, and they become good. They become a skill.” He went on, “It becomes a value add to my life. But most people, they don’t know how to do that, and we’re gonna teach people how to do that.” Jewel was unmoved. If Tony wanted her to be someone who would agree with him, she told him, she wouldn’t. “That’s why I’ve gotten rid of anybody who comes into my ecosystem and talks about these things in a way that isn’t aligned with what we’re doing,” he said. “Because, you know, people have always doubted what I’m doing.” He’ll get rid of anyone who doesn’t support his drug use, she thought. She resolved that she needed to send a message to Tony and everyone who was living in his Park City world: Tony was going to die, and those around him were being put on notice. Jewel had planned to stay for as long as a week, and before arriving, she’d agreed to do a performance for Tony’s guests. But now the purpose of their stay took on a new meaning. Jewel and her assistants spent their days and evenings speaking with the other guests at the ranch to determine whom they could trust and who was there simply to take from a sick man. As she created the set list for the performance, she thought about how her lyrics now took on a heavier meaning.

Before walking into the living room to perform her set, Jewel and her team were told that the neighbors had been invited to attend the performance. Later, they learned the neighbors had been calling the police and complaining about the disturbance to their community; the security guards, parade of vehicles, and parties had been a rude shock. Jewel’s presence was supposed to legitimize what was happening here to the outside world, her team concluded. For a brief moment, Tony emerged from his bedroom to see Jewel sing, only to retreat again before the neighbors noticed him.

At one point during her stay, Jewel walked out to the front of the ranch to see Tony greeting a group of men. They had arrived in a truck, on the bed of which was fastened a giant octopus sculpture about the size of a sedan. Tony had seen the beast once before at Burning Man and been enamored by its appearance. It had since been on display in Nipton, and Don had arranged for Tony to bring it to the ranch. It was missing two of its tentacles now, but it was just as impressive as he’d remembered. As Jewel watched them unload the sculpture, she heard that one of the men had COVID-19 but had decided to come anyway, so she demanded he stay away from Tony. Her team tried to intervene and influence in other ways, and Ryan tried speaking with Andy. The conversations were shallow and brief. But on the night of her performance, Ryan approached Andy, and told him of their concerns about Tony’s well-being. He explained to him their background in helping folks with mental health problems. After listening quietly, Andy asked, “Can we talk about this privately tomorrow?” The next morning, the day that Jewel was scheduled to leave Park City, her team invited Andy to come speak with her at the carriage house for privacy. Andy arrived with one demand: “I can’t have anybody knowing that we are talking about this. I can’t get kicked out of here because I am the only one looking out for Tony, and anytime somebody tries to do something, the people around him really bad-mouth them, Tony gets paranoid, and then kicks them out of his life.” As the conversation progressed, Jewel and Ryan laid out to Andy their observations and their concerns. They said they believed Tony was in a

drug-induced psychosis. It was reaching a critical juncture, and it was time for doctors to come in to assess Tony. But their main message to Andy was simple: Tony was going to die very soon if no one stepped in. For a few moments Andy looked silently at Jewel and Ryan. Finally he said, “I don’t know what to do. I need your help. Can you help me get professionals or get somebody or do something? Someone tried to get doctors here,” he said, referring to the failed intervention attempt by Elisa Hallerman. “Tony has banned my parents—I’m not even allowed to talk to them. If they find out I’m talking to my parents, Tony won’t have anything to do with me.” They ended the conversation with Andy agreeing to keep them updated on Tony’s condition as they started efforts to get Tony professional help. As Jewel and her team left the ranch, they stopped at the top of the driveway, where there was a huddle of security guards at the entry gate. “Who’s in charge?” Jewel asked. One of the guards stepped forward. “Do you know what your oath is?” she continued. “Your oath as a security or a police officer is to honor and protect, do no harm. To help people, to protect people from doing harm to themselves and others. “There’s people taking advantage of Tony in there. There’s dangerous behavior. He’s not being protected. He’s being taken advantage of. And I’m putting you on notice that someone’s going to die in there. He’s gonna light that house on fire.” She held the guard’s gaze. “If anything happens to my friend Tony Hsieh, I’m gonna hold you 100 percent accountable.”

By Labor Day weekend, barely a night had gone by when music hadn’t been pounding across the pond, cars weren’t lining the street, and shouts weren’t echoing through the neighborhood. The night of cocktails and Jewel’s performance had done little to stop residents like Bill Ciraco from calling the police with noise complaints. Some nights people were gathered on the ranch’s beach watching movies on an outdoor screen, surrounded by hundreds of candles and tiki torches. On other nights, neighbors had been horrified to see giant flames spitting above the trees from what they later discovered were hot air balloon baskets.

On the night of September 8, police were called to the house shortly after 11 p.m., after yet another neighbor said that “music was blasting” from the property. When the police arrived, the music had been shut off, but the lead officer, Leslie Welker, insisted that this time they needed to speak with Tony Hsieh in person. She had been at the house multiple times now, and the noise complaints hadn’t been stopped by only talking with the security guards. The owner of the security company, Shawn Kane, approached Welker and said that Tony was sleeping and unavailable. Welker looked over her shoulder and noted the fact that most of the lights were on in the house, and inside she could see a “large” group of people. “It appeared that Kane and his employees were trying to stop us from going down to the house and trying to make contact with Hsieh,” Welker wrote in her police report later. Sensing that they were being had, Welker and her partner walked past the guards and down the sloping driveway toward the front door of the home. Through the windows on either side of the door, they could see people milling about. After half an hour, Shawn came to the door, this time with two men who identified themselves as Don and Andy. They told Welker that they were in charge of the house, in addition to Tony, who wasn’t available. They complained that neighbors had been harassing them; they had only been singing karaoke. Don provided his contact information when Welker asked. Andy refused to offer more than his first name. As the officers went back out into the darkness, they walked by the giant octopus, lying like a sentry to the dark world Tony had built.

CHAPTER 26

ON THE EDGE OF THE ETHERWORLD

A decade before, Tony Hsieh had been on the cusp of national celebrity, a newly certified tech tycoon with a grand ambition to create his own world in Las Vegas, a world where the opportunity to be happy was core to its existence. He had just traveled the country with his Delivering Happiness memoir in hand, offering a template for how people, companies, and the world could be happy. Fans were introduced through his recollections to an intensely curious child wunderkind who built a life that thrived on human connection. He spoke of experiences that had shaped him, and how they informed his decisions. Toward the end of his book, Tony urged his readers to reflect by asking two questions: What is your goal in life? And why? Tony had often recounted that one of his first memories as a child was of catching fireflies in a jar. During a Zappos all-hands meeting one year, Tony took to the stage with the motivational speaker Simon Sinek, a former advertising executive who had sold books on how to influence human behavior, among other things, and had a hugely successful run on the TED Talk circuit. Tony’s first memory was significant, Sinek told the audience, because every person’s worldview is a product of the experiences they had when they were young. Tony “sees everybody as a firefly,” Sinek said, sitting next to Tony on an oversized box, their legs dangling beneath them. “He sees the entire world as people with bright lights. He doesn’t distinguish who are the bright ones and who are the dim ones; everybody has a bright light and everybody is out there doing their thing.

“If you put them in a container,” Sinek went on, “where all of their brightness comes together, you create a flashlight. You can actually light a path for somebody else. And I firmly believe that when you are at your best, that is what you are doing with Zappos.” The message could hardly be limited to Zappos, and in his bestselling book Start with Why, Sinek writes that inspiration is one of two ways to influence human behavior. It takes time and hard work, but in the end it is more likely to result in loyalty, love, and a shared vision. The ecosystem Tony had built in Las Vegas had begun as a self-contained community of strivers and doers, bound by the goal of seeking and achieving happiness. Just by asking near-strangers a simple question—“If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”—Tony had inspired hundreds of people to chase their dreams, building businesses and experiences overnight, and changing lives along the way. Time and again, Tony had used his money to inspire others, from Natalie Young’s first restaurant to Rehan Choudhry’s vision of Life Is Beautiful. In essence, Tony had been doing the same thing since he was a child: finding lights, collecting them, and then inspiring them to illuminate a path forward for others. Inspiration can be futile, though, and somewhere along the way in Tony’s sprawling Las Vegas community, his ability to inspire fell to the inevitability of human conflict, leaving those in his village desperate for his validation. It was something he was often unable to give, and with few requests other than for more money, the singular goal of happiness gave way to a sense that it wasn’t happiness everyone was chasing after all. Perhaps it was security. At one point, it seemed, Tony had stopped searching for happiness, too. The other way to influence others, Sinek writes, is manipulation. And while Tony’s ability to inspire was a feature of him at his best, by the time he arrived in Park City, his dreams had been reimagined by a mind decaying by the day, and he’d created a new world whose citizens were often motivated by greed. A world of extravagant homes far from his trailer park, filled with people who hated one another but said yes to him, knowing that more fortunes were on the way. Rather than pushing people to chase their dreams, Tony had used his wealth to goad compliance. There were efforts to curb his behavior by some who stayed to help, sure. Efforts to bring in doctors and therapists, and to deny his most

outlandish financial escapades, which would have rendered him broke. But toward the end, his mother, his father, Fred, and Alfred—people who had said no over the years, no matter the cost—were all gone. Like wealthy geniuses afflicted by drug addiction before him, Tony Hsieh was on an island of his own making, one where his delusions had replaced his reality. There was no happiness or inspiration here in Park City, only money. Perhaps it was the fear of being voted off Tony’s island that kept people close to him. Maybe they were motivated by a will to help him, or a desire to take money from him, or both. But as days turned into months of living alongside this version of Tony, there could be no illusions about what those in Park City were a part of. And the music didn’t stop. It got louder, even as the sounds of his former life faded. In late August, Tony bought a convoy of tour buses for a cross-country voyage. He came up with the idea that buses were the transportation of the future, and he believed he could get people like Elon Musk to invest in a bus convoy venture. All on Tony’s dime, the purpose of the trip was to drive Rachael Brown to New London, Connecticut, where she’d just purchased a home. But the timing of the trip coincided with another important task. Tony was aware that he was supposed to sign documents to confirm his resignation from Zappos. Suzie, who was not going on the tour, initially asked Michelle to deliver the documents to Tony. But Michelle was only going on part of the bus tour, so she was never sent the documents. Instead, Elizabeth Pezzello was tasked with delivering them to Tony. A few days later, on Monday, August 24, 2020, the company announced that Tony was stepping down from Zappos. The company’s chief operating officer, Kedar Deshpande, released a clinical-sounding statement: “We want to thank Tony for his 20 years of work on behalf of Zappos customers, and we wish him well in his retirement.” Immediately after the announcement, Michelle’s phone rang. It was Andy on the line, and he needed her to track all the news stories that were being written about Tony’s retirement. It appeared that the timing of the announcement had taken Tony by surprise. It had also deeply upset him, and it remained unclear to many of his friends whether he had actually signed the documents or if Zappos, recognizing an impossibly deteriorating situation, had made the executive decision to remove him.

Tony resolved only to keep moving in the same direction. One week in September, Justin told him that he only had $12 million to his name—a false figure meant to encourage him to rein in his spending. Soon after, with a hefty supply of nitrous canisters in tow, Tony took a dozen people on a private jet to Alaska to meet with Brock Pierce, the former child-actorturned-crypto-billionaire who was running an independent campaign for U.S. president. During a talk at the Anchorage hotel where they were staying, Brock detailed his journey through spirituality, touched on the multiverse, and discussed with Tony whether the Illuminati were real. When Brock was finished, Tony told those gathered that he was giving each of them $1 million to pursue their own spiritual journeys—it seemed to be fate he’d brought twelve people with him, he told them. Justin would be responsible for distributing the funds. (Justin didn’t follow up, and Tony didn’t ask about it again.) Finally there was an excursion five hours south of Park City to a sprawling compound near St. George, Utah, called Holmstead Ranch Resort, which was for sale. Arriving on a tour bus, the group marveled at the size of the property and its numerous cabins, which came complete with an idyllic lake and an amphitheater. Tony envisioned turning it into his own theme park or event space, something like his very own Disneyland. While Suzie negotiated the sale price with the owner, Tony told Justin that he could use the property to launch events linked to Life Is Beautiful, and talked with Andy and Don about hosting a Rufus Du Sol concert there. But the excursions and events served as little more than distractions from the fact that Tony was on a wretched path, and it was becoming impossible for those orbiting around him to ignore that they were part of his journey. A week after Jewel left Tony’s world, a letter had arrived at the ranch, penned by the musician. Standing in his fiefdom, Tony had called together a group of people to view the letter, including Rachael Brown and Michelle, and asked someone to read it out loud. Hi Tony, It was great seeing you. I feel compelled to write: I am going to be blunt.

I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. I think you are taking too many drugs that cause you to disassociate. Your intelligence is formidable, but I see you creating rationalizations that are ludicrous and medically unsound, and the people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself. Your body cannot take not sleeping. And the amount of N2O you are doing is not natural. You will not hack sleep and you will not outsmart nature. Your goal of creating a new country is amazing, but you are not in a state to execute it. When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble. You are in trouble, Tony. I cherish you & can’t in good conscience not speak up. Anyone who sees you would be worried. It is not healthy or sane. If the world could see how you are living, they would not see you as a tech visionary, they would see you as a drug addicted man who is a cliché. And that’s not how you should go down or be known. Please don’t be like the stereotype of a billionaire who surrounds himself with yes-men and goes from eccentric to madness—but never sees the line that is crossed because he won’t listen to anyone that loves him. Maybe people are too polite or need too much money from you to tell you that the only harm to you right now is yourself. Please get sober. Prove that it is your brilliance that can pull off the impossible, and not the drugs. If you can only create and be brilliant when you are high, then it is not you anyway. It’s the plant speaking through you and anyone can be that. And I believe you are more than that. Your talent is for human connection. For creating culture for humans to thrive in. Not velocity. Everyone has their talent, don’t throw yours away because you are comparing yourself to someone else … you can’t connect when you are dissociating or high. You

cannot connect to anyone. You are rambling and not making sense, but you think you are. I need to be clear. You sound like a crazy person when you are talking and no one seems to be telling you. It’s because you are also very smart. And they are used to you being eccentric. What you are saying isn’t smart. It’s mental. The brilliance for creating connection is killed by the fantasy world you are living in. You can’t even connect with me or anyone who comes to the house. It’s sad. I find it incredibly sad and I don’t think this is your time to die. You made some sort of promise to humanity when you were young, to solve complex problems and create connection. You did that but now you have lost your way. The wolf is lost out on the edges of the ether-worlds. You can not help the pack from where you are. No one worth their salt will take you seriously right now. Please get grounded. If you want to save this planet, come back to earth and get to work in a way that will make a difference. I say this with love, and as possibly the only person in your circle who is not on your pay roll. I am here to help in any way I can. J Tony asked Michelle to post a photo of the letter on his social media accounts. Fighting back tears, she said no. But for weeks, the letter was affixed to a window overlooking the pond, for all to see.

CHAPTER 27

BLIZZY

“We’re going to Hawaii!” Elizabeth Pezzello exclaimed. Alongside her fiancé, Brett Gorman, she was standing in front of a screen clicking through a PowerPoint presentation. A few others stood around the garden outside Tony’s bedroom window. As one slide shifted to the next, Elizabeth and Brett showed a beautiful mansion on Maui, proposing a long weekend trip before Thanksgiving. As they scrolled through the slides, options for different-sized Gulfstream jets appeared on the screen, along with corresponding pricing options. Since Tony had taken them on as assistants, Elizabeth and Brett had become somewhat of a power couple in Park City. Many in Park City had bristled at how the pair had worked their way into Tony’s inner orbit. But they controlled much of Tony’s outgoing communication and served as gatekeepers to those who met with him. They had assumed the master bedroom of the ranch and had hired a legion of their own assistants to help them complete a list of seemingly nonsensical tasks, including arranging for their own dog to be cleaned and producing a daily newsletter called Blizzy Ranch Daily News. Often at night, they would go into town for expensive dinners. They had also found mutual benefit in aligning themselves with Andy, counseling him as he feuded with Suzie and Mimi. Considering the trips of the past few months, their Hawaii idea might not have seemed too far-fetched. But Tony was particularly unstable. Just days before, he had been taken to the hospital after complaining that he thought his blood had turned to metal. It would have been the best opportunity yet to get Tony admitted had he not grown impatient while

waiting to be processed in the ER and demanded that his friends, including Andy, Don, Janice, and Justin, return him to the ranch. A small glimmer of hope had arrived when Don convinced Tony to start taking nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, a brain supplement that can help improve cognitive function. A nurse had been at the ranch administering the supplement to Tony via an IV drip for several hours a day, and some people had remarked that Tony seemed more clear-eyed after the sessions. Miraculously, he had stopped doing nitrous oxide as a result, and elements of his old self had begun to shine through in conversation; he was lucid and laughing. Carting him away again on a private jet would only disrupt whatever limited will Tony might have had to continue taking the supplement. As Elizabeth and Brett scrolled through dollar sign after dollar sign on the PowerPoint presentation, some people looked on in disgust.

But Elizabeth and Brett got their way: Hawaii would be one of several stops on another whirlwind tour. Along with Tony, an assistant, Andy, Rachael Brown, a musician named Daniel Park, the NAD nurse with her IV drip in tow, and Tony’s dog, Blizzy, they returned to Connecticut at the start of November to hang out at Rachael’s house in New London for a couple of days. Janice Lopez was among those who had stayed behind at the ranch to try to clean up the place and get things in order. Before the group left, she had hugged Andy, feeling comforted that Tony would be in good hands if his brother was by his side. He promised to stay in contact. Only a few days went by before the group’s plans changed. The national election had come and gone, with Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump, and Brock Pierce was looking to celebrate his birthday and the end of his campaign, and to meet with friends who had supported him. While the group had intended to stay in Connecticut, they decided to make a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to attend Brock’s birthday party. They were en route to the airport when Janice, back in Utah, received a call. It was a FaceTime from Andy. He was holding the phone as Tony’s

face appeared on the screen. Tony was leaning against the wall of the coach, holding a Whip-It canister. “Did you get my text?” Tony asked. She hadn’t seen it, but smiled as her screen lit up: “R2D2 needs C3PO.” “Come to Puerto Rico,” he said. “I can’t,” she replied, “I have the kids.” Tony pushed. Could she trust Don to look after them? “I promised them more time, T, so they’re here to hold down the fort,” she said. Tony paused for a moment, then looked around, as if digging for a memory. “We’ve known each other a long time,” he said, thinking of the Branson School and those moments of silence in the theater. “Remember when we used to just hang in the rafters?” Aside from the fact that he was holding a Whip-It canister, something was off, Janice thought. Tony only ever became nostalgic when they were alone. Tony’s demeanor became serious. “Who do you trust?” “What are you talking about?” she said. “Like who do you trust around here in this ecosystem?” Janice looked at Don, and Andy through the phone, and chuckled. “Well, I trust these two yahoos,” she said. “And I trust you.” Tony looked into the camera as his voice fell to a whisper. “Don’t trust anyone.” Then, in a murmur, he repeated it again. “Don’t trust anyone.”

Janice received infrequent updates from Tony’s entourage from then on, and her worry only grew deeper when others told her that Tony was trashing the hotel room, and that he’d locked himself in the bathroom with Blizzy. The next morning she received another call, this one more disturbing. It was from a woman named Karla Ballard, a tech entrepreneur who had run alongside Brock as his vice presidential pick. She was in San Juan and had just gotten off a FaceTime call with Tony. He had called in distress from his hotel room, and now Karla was panicked.

“What’s going on with Blizzy?” Karla said. “You do realize I’m not there?” Janice said. “I didn’t go to Puerto Rico.” “Yeah, but I can’t get hold of anyone else,” Karla said. Tony had been frantic, Karla recounted, telling her that Blizzy was not well. The dog is sick, he had said. Judging by his agitation, Karla thought Blizzy could be dying, but Tony wasn’t offering more details, nor would he show her the dog. When she suggested calling a veterinarian to the hotel room, Tony said no. He was adamant. Then the call ended. “Is he okay?” Janice asked of Blizzy. “Is he alive? Is he dead?” “He’s alive,” Karla said. “But not well.” Though not for long. Soon after, when the others finally arrived in Tony’s hotel room, Blizzy’s body was saturated with water and bloated. The dog was dead.

The group flew back to Connecticut, bringing the animal’s body in a cooler. In the backyard of Rachael’s home, they held a small ceremony as Blizzy was buried in a hole dug in the ground. Tony was inconsolable, and for the next few days he seemed lost in a stupor, inhaling from his Whip-It flask constantly. Like before, he rearranged furniture in the home, lit dozens of candles, and left a trail of nitrous oxide canisters in his wake, much to Rachael’s chagrin. After midnight on November 16, a fire alarm shrieked through the home, sending an automatic signal to the local firehouse. A crew of firefighters arrived, but left the property after being told it was a false alarm. Twenty minutes after the crew left, however, another fire alarm summoned them back to the home, and this time the firefighters insisted on being let in. While the man who answered the door protested their entry, inside they found a room hazed in smoke, melted plastic on the stove, and some cardboard that was hot to the touch. They put the burned items in a sink and soaked them while the smoke dissipated, and then left again. By the next evening, before they were due to embark on Elizabeth and Brett’s proposed Hawaiian getaway, Rachael had had enough and ordered

Tony to leave her home. It was approaching midnight, and the flight to Maui was due to leave in a few hours. He could have slept at a nearby hotel, or even in one of the vehicles on standby. But as they yelled at each other, Tony marched outside into the freezing air and stood on the beach at the rear of Rachael’s home. She technically didn’t own the beach, he told her, so she couldn’t stop him from spending the night there. Andy and Brett came outside to mediate, and then Tony pointed to a shed attached to the side of the house. He would sleep there, he pronounced. Just as they had done time and again before, those around Tony relented.

CHAPTER 28

THANKSGIVING

Vernon Skau had reason to hope that Tony would survive that evening. Arriving at the house minutes after Tony had been taken away by paramedics, New London’s fire marshal checked in with Tom Curcio, the fire chief. There had been a fire in the shed, Curcio told him. Walking around the scene, Skau spoke to the other fire investigators, who told him that the paramedics had been able to resuscitate Tony in the back of the ambulance. At the hospital, the machines had detected a pulse. Tony was still alive, and despite the fire, he’d made it out with barely a scratch; there were no serious burns on his body aside from superficial tissue damage on his shoulder. Skau, who has a round, welcoming face that betrays a no-nonsense approach to his work, set about interviewing those at the scene to figure out what had happened. In his twenty years as a firefighter with the New London Fire Department, he had learned that to get the most accurate record of what happened, witnesses had to be separated and interviewed immediately. While he spoke with Rachael Brown, police and firefighters jotted down details provided by the others, who were interviewed in vehicles parked in front of the home. A picture quickly emerged. After the argument with Rachael, Tony had gone to the shed to wait until it was time to leave for the flight to Hawaii. It was freezing outside, and Tony had tried to stay warm, first by covering himself with a blanket and then by lighting pieces of paper and a Ziploc bag on fire. Surveillance footage from a camera affixed to the top of the shed showed Brett and an assistant frequently checking on him. Then, at one

point, the assistant had dragged in a propane space heater to try to warm the space. But a glaring question remained: What was Tony doing when the fire started? At 3:15 a.m., the surveillance footage showed that Tony had pushed open the shed door and dragged the propane heater outside, only to bring it back into the shed a few moments later. At this time, something was overheating in the shed, and a trail of smoke and small embers could be seen drifting out. Then, inexplicably, after Tony pulled the door shut behind him, the sound of a deadbolt latching shut could be heard. A few minutes later, Andy had approached the shed and knocked, telling Tony it was time to leave for the flight, evidently unaware of the danger his brother was in. Come back in five minutes, Tony had told him. Two minutes later, the carbon monoxide alarm started shrieking, a loud hissing sound could be heard, and smoke was billowing from the shed. As Elizabeth called 911 and fire crews were dispatched to the property, Andy, Brett, and the assistant had tried breaking down the locked door, without success. From within the shed, they could hear a loud hissing noise. Vernon’s early hypothesis was that a tragic accident had occurred. He considered the role of the propane space heater. Given its proximity to the source of the fire, and the abundance of black soot nearby, it seemed evident that the tank had become overheated by coming into contact with some sort of heat source, and then forced the relief valve to open—as it is designed to do under pressure, and likely the source of the loud hissing sound—releasing propane gas that came into contact with an open flame within the shed. But it was unclear if the heater itself had been the source of heat that triggered the tank to release gas. Perhaps the heater had come into contact with some sort of combustible, like paper or other storage items in the shed, and then ignited. Though this theory seemed somewhat unlikely: when Tony had brought the heater outside, the surveillance footage appeared to show that the heater was not working at the time. Another theory, that burning cigarettes or the marijuana pipe lying on the ground could have ignited one of the objects scattered across the floor, like the blanket, also seemed unlikely. Skau knew that cigarettes rarely start fires and can take anywhere between twenty-two minutes and five hours to ignite another object, by which point they are likely burned out anyway.

The presence of candles in the shed could also have started the fire, providing a naked flame to ignite a combustible. Several candles were lying around the area where the fire had started, and earlier in the night, one of the candles had been burning the blanket when the assistant asked Tony to extinguish it before it caught fire. However, a gray basket on the other side of the shed, away from where the fire started, presented a final potential explanation, one more troubling. Inside it were pieces of burned paper, which appeared to be Post-it notes. Closer to the source of the fire, a Ziploc bag also held pieces of burned paper. It would be impossible to determine Tony’s reason for lighting the pieces of paper, but their presence suggested he might have either recklessly or intentionally started the fire. There also was no clear explanation for why the shed door had locked once Tony closed it for the last time. Once the fire started, if the release of propane gas hadn’t rendered Tony unresponsive, the cluster of Fernet bottles, Whip-It canisters, and a marijuana pipe indicated he’d been heavily inebriated as the flames engulfed the shed. The only person who could provide answers was Tony. A few hours after arriving at Lawrence Memorial Hospital in New London, he’d been airlifted by helicopter sixty miles west down the Connecticut coast to Bridgeport Hospital, to the state’s burn center, where he’d been transferred to an intensive care unit. Once he arrived back at the firehouse the following afternoon, Vernon called the hospital, and requested an update on Tony’s condition. The response was limited: critical but stable condition. What wasn’t clear to Vernon, or to anyone outside the hospital, was the extent of any internal damage Tony had sustained. The first effects of smoke inhalation come within seconds, bringing an onset of nausea and loss of vision. Once carbon monoxide fills the lungs, it attaches to red blood cells, starving the body’s organs of oxygen. Death can occur within minutes, and even if the victim survives, the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning all but guarantee brain damage. Every day, once at the start of his shift, and once at the end, Vernon called the hospital for an update. The response was always the same: critical but stable. With each call, Vernon reported Tony’s status back to Tom Curcio. With a short crop of brown hair and a bushy mustache that makes

him immediately identifiable around town as the fire chief, Tom was vaguely aware of Tony Hsieh: his wife was a loyal Zappos customer and had been buying shoes from the website for years. She later bought him a copy of Delivering Happiness. “I couldn’t put the book down,” Tom recalled. “It just seemed like wherever he jumped to, wherever he went, he took an interest in that town or city, and he did a lot for it.” As Tony’s days in the hospital wore on, it became clearer that if he was going to make it out alive, he likely wouldn’t emerge the same person, and Vernon was beginning to sense that he might never learn how the fire started. The morning after Thanksgiving was the start of Tony’s ninth day in the hospital. Outside of his family and some of his friends, the world had no idea that Tony Hsieh had been in a coma for over a week. Vernon, who’d spent the previous day surrounded by his children and grandchildren, called the burn unit in Bridgeport from his home. The reply from the hospital staffer was different this time: “He’s just passed.”

CHAPTER 29

THE AFTERMATH

The day after Thanksgiving, Michelle was relaxing in her living room in Milwaukee with her boyfriend and daughter when the phone rang. It was Jamie Naughton, Tony’s longtime confidant from Zappos. Michelle was anticipating good news, as she had been hearing the same report as Vernon Skau: critical but stable. In the days before, a message had been sent out to friends, stating that Tony’s vitals were improving. But the call didn’t go as Michelle expected. “He—he died,” Jamie said. Michelle froze. Unable to process what she was hearing, she emotionally shut down. “He died,” Michelle repeated out loud. Her daughter looked at her and burst into tears. She had little time to process the news. A few hours later, she received a call from a woman named Puoy Premsrirut who had been working as Tony’s attorney for the last few months. She was with Tony’s family. “We’d like for you to write the post to tell the world,” Puoy said. The next day, a message was posted on Tony’s social media pages at 9:30 a.m.: Today we are saddened to share the news of Tony’s passing. We can only imagine what he would say if he were here to announce this to you all, but we envision his message would resonate that: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy is the ability to bring about change. Tony has given energy to so many people. For those who knew him well, you knew of his childlike wonder; his love for experiences and relationships over material things. Let us all feel Tony’s energy and use it to deliver happiness.

The outpouring of grief was immediate. From President Bill Clinton to Ivanka Trump, thousands of people took to social media to share memories, photos, and videos of a man who was universally admired. Jeff Bezos was among the peers, employees, and complete strangers who came together in a mass of voices on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, each reciting stories of lives changed by Tony’s vision and generosity—cementing a legacy of humanity rarely left behind by business leaders. “I treasure every conversation I ever had with Tony Hsieh,” Clinton wrote. “He was fascinating, brilliant, and inspiring, and his unwavering efforts to spread happiness—and enthusiasm for mentoring young entrepreneurs—touched countless lives for the better.” Ivanka Trump posted a collage of photos taken with Tony over the years. One photo was the image of them standing in front of the White House, taken years before Ivanka became the First Daughter. In another photo, Jared Kushner and Jen Taler are standing with Ivanka and Tony on a casino floor, laughing while eating hot dogs. “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss of my dear friend Tony Hsieh,” she wrote. “Tony was a deeply original thinker always challenging me to reject conformity & follow my heart. Tony was driven by the mission of delivering happiness & brought joy to all who knew him. Rest In Peace Tony.” In Jeff Bezos’s tribute to Tony on social media, the Amazon founder wrote, “The world lost you way too soon. Your curiosity, vision, and relentless focus on customers leave an indelible mark. You will be missed by so many, Tony. Rest In Peace.” Many of the public figures who wrote tributes to Tony had little to no knowledge of what the last twelve months of his life had been like. One person who did was Jewel, who posted a twelve-minute video elegy to Tony in the days after his passing. “I sat here for a long time before I pushed Record, trying to figure out what to say,” she started slowly. “I’ve seen a lot of posts which are beautiful but I haven’t really been able to bring myself to post.” The singer paused and looked down at the guitar on her lap. “The brain can’t comprehend why you can’t just call that person anymore. The heart can’t understand why you can’t just hug that person anymore,” she said quietly, fighting back tears. She then recounted how she’d first met Tony on Necker Island, and the conversations they’d had over the years. “I remember he asked me what

was my definition of success,” she said. “I can’t remember what my answer was. But I remember his—his answer was the willingness to lose it all. “He really brought a lot of love and joy into the world. His idea of collision points—again, mimicking nature, it was quantum. That molecular level of these atoms colliding and creating new things and that’s what he was creating with the Downtown Project. How cool was that? “We were very lucky to have known Tony,” she continued. “And I’m sad and sorry that he’s gone. I’m sure his cosmic spirit is floating around here so I would like to sing.” She then turned to her guitar and started to sing “Over the Rainbow.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she sang, “When all the world is a hopeless jumble and the raindrops tumble all around, heaven opens a magic lane.”

In downtown Las Vegas, emotions ran high. What started as sorrow and despair rapidly morphed into shock and anger, as more and more stories of Tony’s physical and mental decline over the last twelve months came into view. There was also an underlying fear of what would happen to the entire community now that Tony was dead, especially when it emerged that he had died without a will. Tony had picked up so many bills, millions of dollars every year, for so many ventures in Las Vegas since the birth of the Downtown Project. Tony hadn’t ended up selling his real estate portfolio while he was alive, but instead had agreed to another deal Justin had brought him in his final months. In the weeks before his death, Tony had instead closed on a deal to pay Andrew Donner’s company $65 million to buy the Zappos headquarters. Perhaps a final protest to the company he had spent two decades building, only to be unceremoniously farewelled. Now residents of his neighborhood wondered if Richard and Andy, who had been named co-administrators of Tony’s estate by Clark County District Court, would sell the estate’s property portfolio to the next opportunistic developer, turning downtown Las Vegas into another swampland of highrise luxury hotels and loud casinos. Zapponians, meanwhile, feared for their company’s future. Would Zappos, the company that was so crucial to

Tony’s legacy, get hacked into parts and disappear into Amazon’s corporate crypt? For those outside of Las Vegas, it was hard to come to terms with Tony’s passing without an explanation for his death. How did a seemingly healthy and massively successful forty-six-year-old tech visionary die so suddenly? Some wondered if he’d had a terminal illness that he had kept secret. One rumor was that Tony had been kidnapped by the mob for ransom and his death was the result of the kidnapping gone wrong. Without answers, people had started to fill in the gaps with outlandish theories and musings. The reality was worse. Many who knew Tony but had lost touch with him in recent years echoed a similar sentiment when they heard about the events of his last year: “I wish I had been there to help him.” What became clear was that the community Tony had built from the ground up had failed to come together in his time of need. Despite the various efforts to get Tony help, they were not coordinated and were ultimately futile. It was partly Tony’s own doing—his paranoia had spread and bred feelings of mistrust among the entire group. Michelle admitted that, at Tony’s request, she had ignored Tyler’s calls for periods of time when she was in Park City, having bought into the idea that Tyler had gone too far. “It was like groupthink,” Michelle recalled, pointing to the psychological phenomenon common in cults that drives people to desire conformity within a group. “It was the only explanation.”

There had also been vast sums of money on the line, which blinded some in Park City to the fact that Tony was slowly killing himself. Just how much money came into view shortly after his death. Alongside her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, Mimi filed the first lawsuit in February, three months after the fatal fire, in Clark County Superior Court. “Mimi Pham had been Tony Hsieh’s assistant, right hand person, and friend for the seventeen years preceding his death,” her initial filing read. The complaint stated that the two were so close that Tony had used Mimi’s cellphone as his own, that he had put cable and utility bills in her name, and that they shared the same address on their driver’s licenses. “Unlike the

relationship that existed between Tony Hsieh and Mimi Pham, neither Richard Hsieh nor Andrew Hsieh had a close personal relationship with Tony Hsieh, even though they are blood relatives. In fact, although Andrew Hsieh moved to Park City, Utah, to live with Tony Hsieh in the calendar year 2020, that is not an indication of a familial bond as he was offered $1,000,000 annual salary in exchange for said move.” Mimi sued the estate and the Hsieh family for $130 million. She hired high-profile Vegas lawyers David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, whose previous clients included Paris Hilton, Bruno Mars, and Robert Durst. In Mimi’s creditor’s claims to the estate, she stated she was owed $9 million as part of the fees related to managing Park City properties and the documentary film company venture. She sued for anticipated profit from the film company, claiming she was entitled to $75 million. Finally, she and Roberto said they were owed an additional $25 million for “interference with the contract and the prospective economic advantage.” The next week, Puoy Premsrirut filed court documents stating she was owed $360,000 in legal fees. Two months later, in April, Tony Lee sued the estate and the Hsieh family for $7 million for breach of contract, claiming he was promised an annual $1.5 million salary for five years. “At no time during Tony Hsieh’s life did Andy Hsieh or Richard Hsieh ever challenge or question the validity of the Guaranteed Contract,” Lee said. He also questioned the intentions of Tony’s younger brother in his lawsuit, labeling Andy as an enabler of Tony’s drug and alcohol use. “It was Andy that arranged the purchase of thousands of canisters of nitrous oxide at an alarming rate for Tony Hsieh’s continued use when others who cared for Mr. Hsieh refused to do so,” read Lee’s complaint. Lee claimed that Andy “plied Tony Hsieh with alcohol” and attempted to divert millions of dollars from Tony’s account to his own. Mark Evensvold, who had shown up in Park City with no mandate but to make up a role, sued the estate next, for $12.5 million, two months after Tony Lee’s lawsuit. “A man who supposedly had business dealings with the late tech mogul … leaves more than one question unanswered,” read a local Las Vegas news report about the case. The complaint included a transcript of the conversation with Tony, typed by the court reporter, and a copy of the contract scrawled on the Post-it note as evidence of a legitimate agreement.

Several months later, both Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger filed claims against the Hsieh estate for alleged money owed. Justin filed his creditor’s claim “out of an abundance of caution,” the filing claimed. Justin said he was “justly due and owned” a 27.7 percent equity interest in Life Is Beautiful. Suzie and her company, Wellth Collective, sued the Hsieh family for $8.7 million for work that she did for Tony in Park City. Her lawsuit also included a copy of the Post-it note that detailed the Magic Castle project, which Suzie said was supposed to receive $5 million from Tony. It also added that when Tony agreed to his contracts with Suzie, he “had clarity in what he had asked” her to do. By the end of Tony’s chapter in Park City, it later emerged, the balance on his line of credit was more than $250 million.

In the months after Tony’s death, the family largely kept quiet. Only one statement, from Richard, was released shortly after Tony’s passing: “We are so deeply grateful for the outpouring of love and respect shown in the wake of Tony’s passing. There is no human that did not fall in love with Tony’s humanity, which is why so many have been left heartbroken.” But with the family’s silence, a vacuum formed, and the debates and rumors around Andy’s role in Park City slowly came to a boil of confusion and outrage. The lawsuits from Mimi and Tony Lee painted Andy as a Judas-like character who took advantage of his older brother on his darkest days and kept him sick by fueling him with a never-ending supply of drugs and alcohol. Revelations of the $1 million annual salary and images posted to social media of him attending film premieres and walking the red carpet with Elizabeth and Brett to celebrate the release of projects by XTR reinforced to some onlookers an image of a man reaping riches from his deceased brother. What that narrative disregarded, however, was that for the last months of Tony’s life, Andy was secretly in constant contact with Jewel and Ryan Wolfington. The communications were clandestine because Andy feared that Tony would throw him out of his inner circle, as he had done with his mom, dad, and Tyler. The singer arranged a consultation for Andy with Dr.

Blaise Aguirre, a child and adolescent psychiatrist whose patients included highly suicidal individuals, so that Andy could better handle Tony’s deteriorating state. With Dr. Aguirre’s advice, the plan was for Andy to somehow facilitate a hospital visit for Tony, which could then set into motion the family’s plans to put Tony under a conservatorship and get him into a recovery facility. But every state has its own laborious process for setting up a conservatorship, and given Tony’s constantly changing whereabouts, it made the plan—which would have required a doctor to declare Tony unfit to handle his own affairs, as well as a judge to confirm the ruling—difficult to execute. At one point, the family had doctors and attorneys in Nevada, Utah, and Connecticut on standby. But in the end, the effort was futile. Some viewed Andy as the ultimate grifter who helped lead his brother to his death. Others saw Andy as an unwilling participant, forced to play by the twisted rules in Park City in order to stay close to his brother and not be excommunicated. Many wondered whether the events of the last twelve months would lead to a fissure in the Hsieh family, most notably between Richard and Andy, who were now co-administering Tony’s legacy. They got part of the answer in the fall of 2021, nearly eight months after Tony’s passing, when the Hsiehs filed a scorched-earth response to Mimi’s and Tony Lee’s lawsuits. The family hired Vivian Thoreen, a high-powered attorney based in Los Angeles whose clients included Jamie Spears, the father of pop icon Britney Spears. The legal team asked some of Tony’s closest confidants—from Tyler to Suzie—to sit for hours-long depositions and recount the events of 2020. In a court filing, the family issued blanket denials of nearly every allegation that Mimi made against Andy. The family accused Mimi, her boyfriend, Roberto, and Tony Lee of having “coordinated, influenced, and directed Tony’s activities in and around Park City, and deliberately profited from their insider status and Tony’s vulnerability.” The family laid bare Tony’s struggles and demons well before 2020. “Despite his professional successes, Tony struggled with significant social anxiety,” the family wrote in the filing. “Tony’s mind moved at an incredible speed and Tony described using alcohol as a social lubricant to alleviate his social anxiety and to allow him to better communicate and make deeper connections to the people around him.” The family revealed

that Tony had prescriptions for Adderall (to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), Xanax (to treat anxiety and panic disorders), and Ambien (to treat insomnia). The Hsiehs also stated that Tony suffered from depression. According to the family, ketamine was Tony’s attempt to find a healthier alternative to his alcohol and prescription medication consumption. But “it immediately caused Tony to suffer from disorganized delusions and delusions of grandeur. While Tony was known as a man with elaborate ideas, those same ideas while Tony was under the influence of Ketamine were delusional and destructive. Among other effects, the delusions caused Tony to believe he needed to consume more Ketamine in order to solve the problems existing within the delusion.” Charting the events from Tony’s ketamine usage at the Summit conference in Los Angeles through Park City in great detail, the court filing documented how mentally debilitated Tony had become and that anyone who had engaged with him in business in the months after were taking advantage of a sick man who needed help. “While Tony had always been an unconventional thinker and risk taker, there had always been a method and principles guiding Tony’s professional endeavors,” the family’s response read. “While using Ketamine, Tony was unable to exercise reasonable diligence and judgment and was vulnerable to those trying to take advantage of him.” Or as another friend of Tony’s put it, “The king had no clothes and the sycophants wouldn’t say a fucking word.”

It is indisputable that Tony had been surrounded by people who took advantage of his generosity—and his ego—during his last year in Park City. This dynamic, however, was sometimes countered by good intentions and actions, even from those who made business deals with him, from Justin and Suzie’s health regimen to Mimi’s role in helping to get Tony into rehab. Andy had slipped vitamins and protein supplements into Tony’s food. Amid the attempts to get Tony help, what emerged in the hundreds of hours of interviews we conducted with people who witnessed Tony’s descent was that there were no heroes or villains. Some well-meaning actors gave in to

the temptations of greed, while supposed bad actors had complicated histories that gave their roles context. Mimi and her boyfriend eventually dropped their lawsuit against the Hsiehs, a year after Tony’s death. In a victory for the family, Mimi also agreed to pay the Hsieh estate $750,000 to settle all claims. Tony Lee’s lawsuit and a number of other creditor claims remain ongoing. Two months after Suzie filed her claim against the Hsieh estate, she launched a venture capital firm called Wellth Ventures, “committed to building a healthier, more sustainable and more connected world” with another partner. Per a press release, billionaire Richard Branson has “made a financial commitment to support Wellth Ventures’ activities.” The same release also states that Suzie “worked in real estate and accounting as a partner in a $350 million Las Vegas–based development fund,” but made no mention of Tony Hsieh or the Downtown Project. Justin, as it turned out, had been successful in negotiating a deal for Life Is Beautiful during his year in Park City, and in February 2022 Rolling Stone announced it had acquired a majority stake in the festival. “The combination of Rolling Stone, with our scale of over 60 million readers, and our ability as a journalistic outfit, to combine that skillset with an unbelievable live event that attracts 180,000 people a year—that’s new territory and really, really compelling,” CEO Gus Wenner said. But by then, Justin had been paid for his equity and parted ways with the festival. Elizabeth and Brett got married in Park City, in a ceremony attended by Richard, Judy, and Andy. After moving to Florida, Elizabeth started a wellness company selling NAD therapies. Kedar Deshpande, who was appointed chief executive of Zappos after Tony, served only a year at the helm before leaving for another role. In the summer of 2022, the fears of Zappos employees were realized, and under its new CEO, Scott Schaefer, a stream of longtime executives were let go from the company. Tyler remained, maintaining his role of director of brand experience at the company. He is creating an archive of Tony-related assets to present to the Hsieh family from Zappos. Michelle continued to do media work for the Hsieh family, including the launch of the Tony Hsieh Award, which recognizes individuals who have achieved “significant advancement and bold innovation.”

Collaborators on this include TED Talks, Alfred Lin, and Fred Mossler. In 2016, years after Tony texted her the message, “This too shall pass,” Michelle had the phrase tattooed on her back in Tibetan. After Tony’s death, she added “12.12” above the existing tattoo—for Tony’s birthday. Fred, his wife, Meghan, and their children still live in downtown Las Vegas. After Fred left Zappos, the couple started a new company, Ross and Snow, which sells authentic Italian leather shoes. In 2022, after Justin left Life Is Beautiful, Fred accepted an invitation from Richard and Andy to join the board of the festival. As for Andy, perhaps no person has remained a more polarizing figure in the remnants of Tony’s community. But beyond the debate swirling around his motivations in Park City, there remained a seemingly unanswered question: Why did Andy film his brother as he lay dying on the stretcher? In hindsight, some considered his actions as documenting the event, however tragic, to gather evidence for the conservatorship he and the family were preparing. Perhaps he just hadn’t realized that his brother was actually dying. There was another reading of his actions, however. In the months leading up to Tony’s end in Connecticut, Andy had been frequently filming his brother and telling those around them that it would be good content for a documentary he was thinking of putting together about his brother’s life— even while he was being stretchered into an ambulance without a pulse. Just as Tony was the only person who knew how the fire started, only Andy could explain why he pulled out his phone while emergency crews worked on his brother. He has declined to talk to reporters, maintaining his silence. In July 2022, nearly two years after Tony’s death, Richard notified the court that Andy was no longer a co-administrator of Tony’s estate.

In his memoir, Tony wrote that if you ask why enough times in life, the ultimate answer is always happiness. But not until the final pages, in the first passage of his epilogue, does Tony offer a clue to his own reason, a question he answers with more questions.

As a guiding principle in life for anything I do, I try to ask myself, What would happen if everyone in the world acted in the same way? What would the world look like? What would the net effect be on the overall happiness in the world? Tony considered himself a builder—of companies, experiences, and communities. With these building blocks, he thought, he could build his way to happiness—that this ephemeral state of mind was an end output that could be achieved with only a source code. In the end, he kept acquiring and building until eventually, he had everything in the world—and it still wasn’t enough. Herein lies the tragedy of this story. Because for all those whose lives he touched—from Canady Hall A in Harvard to those who followed him for two decades at Zappos, and all the strangers in between—they could agree on one thing: Tony Hsieh was more than enough.

Walking through Aspen Springs in the months after his death, one could see a reminder that Tony once lived here. Down the sloping driveway of his sprawling ranch was a large sculpture, seven feet tall and thirty feet long. A psychedelic array of royal blue tiles flowed seamlessly into orange, a mosaic that wrapped around a half dozen concrete tentacles—two were missing. The remaining limbs were contorted in a menacing position, as if they were about to whip forward. Looming behind them was an enormous bulbous head, burrowed into the dirt, as if hiding in the sand of the ocean floor, waiting to seize its prey. Two black eyes the size of hands peered forward, keeping watch on the front door of the estate. The octopus had arrived that afternoon in August 2020 as the swirl of chaos at the ranch reached a crescendo. Tony had wanted art scattered through his property to re-create an element of Burning Man in Park City, just as he had done in Las Vegas. But unlike other sculptures at the property, the octopus was poised in the brush, center stage. It was the first thing Tony would see when he entered the property and when he left it.

It remained there, like a sentry, as Tony spent his final months spiraling toward his fatal end. It was there as his contingent of followers grew. As tens of millions of dollars drained from his bank accounts. As the memory of all that he had achieved in life faded amid his isolation from family and friends, old and dear. As he became a gaunt shadow of his former self, his genius obscured by drug addiction and breaks with reality. The octopus lay there, waiting. Many years before, when Tony was a boy, he had sat down in front of a typewriter to write a poem. Embodied within a child’s drawing that depicts a vividly soulless creature with hollow eyes and grasping tentacles, his words recount a nightmare in which he is running down the street he grew up on, Coast Oak Way. He is running from a slimy, smiling octopus that is chasing him—why, he doesn’t know. I run down the street, passing a court. The Octopus is getting even closer. He tries to climb a brown wooden wall, but he keeps slipping. No one is around to help him. The octopus is advancing. He is being chased farther from home. I run around the corner up Canyon Oak. Then the monster of Tony’s mind arrives. The Octopus grabs me And then there’s darkness. I am now wide awake.

EPILOGUE

Fred Mossler was the first to arrive at the Parlour Bar on a sweltering September afternoon. As his wife, Meghan, stepped inside next to him, his eyes scanned the black lounge chairs and booths. Tucked within the rabbit warren of the El Cortez’s gaming room floor, the bar rang with the dings and chimes of the slot machines. Effervescent air pushed through the vents above, suppressing the tobacco smoke that trailed through the room. With a pair of sunglasses resting atop his graying hair, he wore a royal blue and white checkered button-down shirt that hung loosely from his shoulders. A soft familiarity washed over his face as he walked farther into the space, glancing for a moment at a booth in the far corner. There was nothing visibly remarkable about the sunken leather seat. But Fred held countless memories of sitting there, next to Tony, hunched over their laptops. On two round knee-high tables, shots of Fernet would be placed between the keyboards and notepads, and they’d down the alcohol amid discussion of their next idea or their next deal. A revolving cast of dreamers and doers would join them, for advice or to pitch them new business. A smoke trail would float up from an American Spirit between Tony’s fingers, a dreamlike glow forming around his stoic expression. Now on the wall was a plaque above the leather booth in which Tony once sat. Tony’s Corner, it read. Dedicated to a true visionary and champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh. This corner of the Parlour Bar was a favorite meeting spot for Tony and his Zappos and Downtown Project teams for many years. The power outlet below was installed to help power their smart devices as big ideas were hatched and big deals were made.

Fred looked up as two other people walked through the rows of blackjack tables and entered the bar. He greeted a Zappos employee with an enthusiastic handshake, and they spoke quietly as other figures began appearing in the space. Justin Weniger walked in, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Life Is Beautiful logo. He looked around while greeting the party. It was the first day of the 2021 Life Is Beautiful music festival, and Justin’s three-day event was scheduled to start in half an hour. In years past, Tony had traditionally hosted a kickoff brunch for his friends at the trailer park. But this time, Justin had organized the gathering to toast Tony’s memory before the festival started. On this afternoon, thousands of people would descend on Tony’s neighborhood to fill the empty parking lots, its restaurants, and its streets, while a kaleidoscope of laser beams and lights would draw them further into the labyrinth of the world Tony built. Before international stars like Megan Thee Stallion, Glass Animals, and Tame Impala would lead the revelers to move in unison, just as Tony had with the other ravers all those years ago in the San Francisco warehouse, the horizon would swallow the sunlight as the night summoned the neons to light the desert valley. As far as the eye would allow, from the downtown that Tony had built all the way to the corporate casinos to the south, the lights would speckle the panorama like stars. Though Tony wouldn’t be there to see his creation come to life this night, the lights of Las Vegas would shine a little brighter than they ever had before. Fred stood up and walked over to the bar to join a Zappos employee. A dozen people had showed up to the toast. “Let’s make this year the best festival ever,” one person sitting at the table said. “Obviously this year is going to be different,” added another. Fred returned to the booth, carrying glasses of Fernet. “Here’s a little shot for our friend,” he said. He leaned over, then placed the glass where Tony used to sit.

Even at a young age, his peers recognized his unusual intellect. In the sixth grade, Tony won the “Most Likely to Succeed” superlative.

A school portrait of Tony in the seventh grade at Miller Creek Middle School.

(Above, center photo) Tony (left) in his first year at the Branson School with friend David Padover (center). Tony and David were two out of four students from Miller Creek Middle School who were admitted to the prestigious private college prep. Despite growing up together, Tony and David’s friendship ended at Branson due to a disagreement.

(Right, bottom left photo) Tony (left) in his sophomore year at Branson with friends, including Alex Hsu (center). They were two of very few Asians at the elite college prep. Tony and Alex would maintain a friendship, long after high school.

(Above, top photo) Tony (left) in Branson’s mock trial club. He was on the prosecution team with childhood friend Eric Liu (not pictured), and successfully convicted the opposing team for manslaughter. While his teammates are wearing blazers, collared shirts, and long skirts, Tony is dressed much more casually.

(Above, center left photo) Tony (center) in the electronics club during his senior year at Branson. He was also on the fencing team and in chess club.

Tony at graduation at Harvard University, surrounded by several friends who later became employees at LinkExchange. Included in the group photographs are Jose Santos, Jon Greenman, Sanjay Madan, Jill Wheeler and others.

Tony and Ying Liu in front of the Theater Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, during the summer of 1983.

Zappos’s San Francisco office, circa 2000.

Nick Swinmurn and Fred Mossler, circa 2004.

Tony with his book, Delivering Happiness.

In July 2010, Tony briefly left the media tour for Delivering Happiness in order to attend a political fundraiser for Senator Harry Reid (left). President Barack Obama (right) was also in attendance. Tony gave a copy of his book to Reggie Love, President Obama’s aide, at this event, in hopes he would pass it along to the president. Ten days later, Reggie wrote in an email to Tony, “I was unable to get the President to read your book, b/c I’ve been glued to it. . . . I’ll now also be sure to pass along your book.”

Tony Hsieh judges contestants during the annual Las Vegas Halloween Parade in 2013.

Tony with Mimi Pham in 2014 at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit Cocktail Party in San Francisco.

Tony with Michelle D’Attilio.

July 4 holiday break in Bigfork, Montana, 2017.

From left to right: Justin Weniger, Ryan Doherty, Tyler Williams, and Tony.

Tony (center) with Fred Mossler (far right).

Tony cooking in Park City.

Andy Hsieh and a friend with Brett Gorman and Elizabeth Pezzello (right couple).

The shed where Tony was pulled from the fire in November 2020. Courtesy of New London Fire Department.

View of the backyard of 500 Pequot Avenue. The shed that caught fire is attached to the right side of the home. Courtesy of New London Fire Department.

Memorial of Tony at Fremont Street Experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of hundreds of conversations with people who knew Tony intimately through each chapter of his life. Without them, we would not have been able to share Tony’s story in such depth, nor been able to capture why it matters to each of us. For their support and trust, we are deeply grateful to them for allowing us to tell the story of their dear friend. We want to thank Randall Lane, our editor at Forbes, who urged us to pursue our first story about Tony in December 2020, and whose encouragement, guidance, and prose got us through two days, and one long night, to ensure that we delivered “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy.” That effort was supported by leaders within Forbes’s editorial team, including Luisa Kroll, Kerry Dolan, Michael Noer, Alex Konrad, and Jessica Bohrer, and highlighted the magazine’s ability to support its reporters in pursuing and delivering high-caliber journalism and storytelling. Henry Holt & Co. have been remarkable partners, and we count our lucky stars that it was Sarah Crichton who found us. It was her unwavering belief in the story of Tony Hsieh, and in us, that ensured that this book was written. Our stellar editors, Serena Jones and Anita Sheih, showed incredible attention to detail, asking questions, pointing out narrative holes, and suggesting changes that breathed life into our manuscript. Additionally, we want to thank Michael Cantwell for providing a thorough legal review, and Majd Al Waheidi for doing a fantastic job fact-checking our book; we are thankful for their diligence. Our agent, Ethan Bassoff, with Ross Yoon, also took a chance on a pair of first-time book authors. Over two years, Ethan listened to our complaints, insecurities, and ideas, and provided nothing more than wisdom, advice, and comfort as we stumbled along this journey. From proposal to prologue, Ethan shepherded us through, and for that we are

immensely grateful. We also want to thank Howard Yoon for his role in helping us reframe parts of the manuscript. From Angel: To my two sisters, Christine and Carmen—for without their wisdom and encouragement, I would be nowhere close to where I find myself today. To Mom and Dad, thank you for all that you have sacrificed. To Gorjan Hrustanovic, for putting up with me all these years. In truth, you’ve been my best friend ever since we met, even if neither of us can agree on when that was. To Kerry Dolan, Keren Blankfeld, Duy Linh Tu, and Marie Beaudette, thank you for taking a chance on me. I owe my sanity and levity to my girlfriends in San Francisco and Los Angeles—thank you for saving me from a humorless, self-serious reality. To my coauthor David, thank you for the last two years, from your encouragement to your pasta Bolognese to your pretty awful jokes. There’d be none of this without you. From David: I have too many people to thank from both sides of the Pacific, but I’d like to make sure Meg Kissinger and Kevin McKenna know how grateful I am for their mentorship and friendship. I’m equally grateful for my editors at Forbes, Jeff Taylor, John Paczkowski, and Katharine Schwab. To Inti Pacheco, Grace Ashford, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Jacqueline Williams, and Kristin Schwab: thank you for supporting me in more ways than one. There are few words available to describe how incredible it has been to work on this book with Angel. In addition to being a killer reporter, her empathy can be seen throughout this manuscript. Reporting, debating, and writing alongside her for the past couple of years has been an experience I will treasure. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my family, who have kept me afloat with their love, and continue to inspire me. Each day I’m grateful for Michael, who always listens, and for Kate, whose wisdom knows few bounds. For Dad, my first reader for so many years, and for Mum, who never stops asking questions, and taught me to do the same.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The Hsieh family did not respond to our requests for interviews, nor did they respond to extensive fact-checking questions. The family has been involved in litigation for much of the past two years. Vivian Lee Thoreen and Stephanie Berardino, their attorneys, did not respond to our repeated requests for interviews or for comment. A few months into our writing process, the Hsieh family began to respond to the lawsuits with surprising candor, laying bare Tony’s struggles to the world. We interpreted these documents as the Hsieh family’s way of presenting their side of the story to the public. We incorporated information from their court filings in our book to the extent possible, in addition to reviewing thousands of pages of court documents filed by other parties, as well as police and fire reports; all have been cited in the endnotes. We interviewed more than 150 people for this book. Some spoke to us for dozens of hours, recounting both joyful and painful memories. They shared videos and photographs, digging up digital photographs from longlost cloud drives or yearbooks in dusty garage boxes. Many of them worked for Tony, Zappos, or the Downtown Project; were classmates of Tony’s from elementary school to Harvard; or have known the Hsieh family socially. Some of our sources only spoke to us on the condition of anonymity. On-the-record sources are cited in the endnotes. Relying on individual recollections can give rise to errors due to the fickleness of memory. To counter this, we re-interviewed a number of sources regularly over the course of a year and a half to reconcile their accounts with those of others and to ensure accuracy. All quoted dialogue in the manuscript has been drawn either from recollections of people who were present for those conversations, from audio or video recordings, or from written records.

The manuscript was independently fact-checked by Majd Al Waheidi, who knew the identity of each source, checked each quotation, and accessed all of our reporting and research materials—from legal documents to interview recordings. In the first half of 2021, we spent more than a month reporting from downtown Las Vegas, where we stayed at the Ogden and immersed ourselves in the neighborhood that Tony built. We later returned to attend Life Is Beautiful in September 2021. We also traveled to Park City, UT, New London, CT, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We consulted the University of Illinois Archives, which had an extensive library of accounts and details of Taiwanese and Chinese student life and culture at the institution starting from the early 1900s. We were lucky to connect with Salvatore de Sando, a trained archivist who was no longer working with the university at the time, but still pointed us in the right direction and helped us with our research. For Tony’s earlier years, we drew information—including inner dialogue and thoughts—from his book, Delivering Happiness. We crossreferenced his account of events with some of his close friends, peers, and employees and sometimes found discrepancies between those accounts. We made note of these discrepancies in the manuscript. In addition to our sources, we drew on research from other journalists, including the Wall Street Journal reporters Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, whose book Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh provided an account of Tony’s life, and Aimee Groth, whose reporting in various publications and her book The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia provided a first-person account of Tony’s Downtown Project. Most notably, we were able to piece together parts of Tony’s downtown Las Vegas world from articles published by the Las Vegas Review Journal and Las Vegas Sun—reporting that underscored the necessity and importance of local journalism. For the events of the last year and a half of Tony’s life, we relied largely on legal filings and on the accounts of people who were there, and we appreciate just how gracious they were with us. They continued to cooperate, even when we asked them to recount painful memories from 2020. This book would be without depth had they not entrusted us to

deliver a narrative that is both honest and cautionary. We thank them for their trust.

NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed. Prologue Elizabeth was one of them: Multiple anonymous sources. outside the shed door: Details of the fire, including the hours leading up to it, were documented in incident reports, videos, and photos provided by the New London Police and Fire Departments as part of their investigation into the cause of the accident. lighting a Ziploc bag on fire: New London Fire and Police Department documents. Elizabeth dialed 911: Recording of 911 call released by New London Police Department. they found him lying faceup: Incident reports provided by New London Fire and Police Departments. Bezos said at the time: “Video from Jeff Bezos About Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, posted by 07272009july, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. during talks with Oprah: TV interview, The Oprah Winfrey Show, episode “Millionaire Moguls,” October 23, 2008. and Barbara Walters: “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness,’” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OBZFVwu1s&t=5s. New York Times bestseller: “We’re #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List!,” Delivering Happiness website, retrieved July 31, 2022, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/were-1-onthe-new-york-times-bestseller-list. toured the late-night TV shows: TV interview on The Colbert Report, August 1, 2011, https://www.cc.com/video/mqbxt0/the-colbert-report-tony-hsieh. shared the stage with Bill Clinton: “Local Laboratories: Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Clinton Global Initiative, July 2, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHqslKiU4yY. Ashton Kutcher: “Delivering Happiness with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore—Part One,” YouTube, posted by Delivering Happiness, March 21, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK0r5821Kw.

Richard Branson: Branson, Richard, “Tony Hsieh Remembered,” Virgin company website, November 30, 2020, https://www.virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/tony-hsiehremembered. Jewel: Instagram post, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQ_i8bnZIu/?hl=en. Maggie Hsu: Interview with Maggie Hsu, February 10, 2021. “a young Buddha”: Schoenmann, Joe, “What’s Behind Tony Hsieh’s Unrelenting Drive to Remake Downtown Las Vegas?,” Las Vegas Sun, April 20, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/apr/20/behind-tony-hsiehs-passion-remake-downtown-las-veg/. photo taken at Microsoft’s headquarters: Rich, Motoko, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. who is eating a hot dog: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, 11:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. built a trailer park … a pet alpaca, and his dog: “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life,” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=3S9J0IGmRPo. introduced to ketamine: Some details of the events of 2020 are documented in a court filing from the Hsieh family in response to various lawsuits. Other sources are either noted in the narrative or in other footnotes in following chapters. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). were optimistic: Interview with Vernon Skau and Tom Curcio, February 20, 2021. sent a whoosh of ignited gas: New London Police and Fire Departments documents. turned off his life support: New London Police and Fire Departments documents. Bill Clinton: Bill Clinton, @BillClinton, “I treasure every conversation,” Twitter, November 30, 2020, 8:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/1333578663380520961. Ivanka Trump: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, 11:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. the first article: Au-Yeung, Angel, and Jeans, David, “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy: The SelfDestructive Last Months of the Zappos Visionary,” Forbes, December 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/12/04/tony-hsiehs-american-tragedy-the-selfdestructive-last-months-of-the-zappos-visionary/. started filming: Video footage provided by New London Police and Fire Departments; multiple anonymous sources. Chapter 1: The Golden Child “To me … money meant that later on in life”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 10.

As one historian put it: Olson, Emily. “Remembering Silicon Valley’s Trailblazing ‘Troublemakers’” TheSixFifty, December 7, 2017, https://www.thesixfifty.com/remembering-siliconvalleys-trailblazing-troublemakers-3968/. In one issue from 1984: Sklarewitz, Norman, “Tim Knight: The Computer Opened a Window,” Boys’ Life 74, no. 9 (September 1984): 96. “I learned”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 14. Richard earned his PhD: De Sando, Salvator, “Illini Everywhere: Taiwanese Illini, Since 1922,” Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 28, 2018, https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/taiwanese-illini/. to get her PhD in psychology: Hsieh, Judy S., “The Cognitive Effects of Chinese Language Training in a Sample of Chinese-American Children,” PhD diss., California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley/Alameda, 1991. recognized Taiwan: Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, “The Taiwan Straits Crises: 1954–55 and 1958,” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953–1960/taiwan-strait-crises. Ang Lee: National Taiwan University of Arts, “NTUA Hall of Fame, Alumni,” 2006, https://portal2.ntua.edu.tw/enntua/4_102.htm. co-founder of Garmin: Garmin US/company/leadership/executive/min-kao/.

company

website,

https://www.garmin.com/en-

dating back to the early 1900s: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” in the same field: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” for social work: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” He became a member: De Sando, “Illini Everywhere.” his research received funding: Hsieh, Richard Chuan-Kang, “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1991, 183. catching fireflies in jars: “Simon Sinek Talks Culture with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Simon Sinek, August 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqUx4BJ1ENY. where the family moved: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 7. Among the expectations outlined for him: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 7. Chapter 2: Wide Awake Confederate states: Brenner, Keri, “Marin’s Dixie School District Officially Changes Name,” Mercury News, July 10, 2019, https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/10/dixie-changes-name-tomiller-creek-elementary-school-district/. “Tony H.”: Conversation with David Padover, June 2021. “Somehow my parents managed to find”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 7. The Three Investigators: On-background conversation with a childhood friend, February 2021. The yearbook page: Source material from a childhood friend, 1985 Dixie Elementary School yearbook, 47.

“enclave within an enclave”: Dougherty, Conor, “California Prep School Shaken by Arrests of Headmaster and Woman, 21, on Drug Charges,” New York Times, October 7, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/us/branson-prep-school-shaken-by-arrest-of-headmasterthomas-price-with-a-woman-21-on-drug-charges.html. $50,000-a-year-tuition: “Affording Branson,” Branson school https://www.branson.org/admissions/affording-branson, accessed August 25, 2022.

website,

in the county: “History Watch: Lagunitas Country Club Built on Site of ‘Pink Saloon,’” Marin Independent Journal, July 19, 2018, https://www.marinij.com/2015/07/13/history-watch-lagunitascountry-club-built-on-site-of-pink-saloon/. $220,000: Data USA of Deloitte, Datawheel and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT Media Lab,https://datausa.io/profile/geo/rossca/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20Ross%2C%20CA%20had,%2C%20a%20%E2%88%9210.2%25%2 0decrease, accessed December 5, 2022. $2 million: Data USA of Deloitte, Datawheel and Cesar Hidalgo of MIT Media Lab.https://datausa.io/profile/geo/rossca/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20Ross%2C%20CA%20had,%2C%20a%20%E2%88%9210.2%25%2 0decrease, accessed December 5, 2022. admitted to Branson: On-background conversation with childhood friend, February 2021. plotting which Grateful Dead shows: On-background conversation with former Branson teacher, June 2021. “I remember thinking that the first day”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 15. phone sex operator: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 16. “A++++++++++++”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 19. “excellence in classroom achievement and other pursuits”: 1990 and 1991 Branson School yearbook, provided by anonymous source. reads the caption: Branson School yearbook, provided by anonymous source. “I walked away”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 20. yearbook page: Branson School yearbook, provided by anonymous source. Chapter 3: The Bet by the other colleges: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 19. eight U.S. presidents: “Obama Joins List of Seven Presidents with Harvard Degrees,” Harvard Gazette, November 6, 2008, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-list-ofseven-presidents-with-harvard-degrees/. over a hundred Olympians: “Olympians,” Harvard University, https://gocrimson.com/sports/2020/5/5/information-history-olympians.

May

5,

2020,

“yielded the most”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 8. rarely be the case: Private conversation during a virtual memorial service among some of Tony’s Harvard-era friends, December 2020.

“There was a core group”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 24. In one candid photograph: Provided by anonymous source. leaving open Tuesdays and Thursdays: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 19. for sixteen hours straight: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 24. scanned copy: Provided by anonymous source. “The bad news”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 25. harvard.general message board: Wong, Brant K., “Senior Forms ‘Bible’ Study Group on ’Net,” Harvard Crimson, May 12, 1995, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1995/5/12/senior-forms-biblestudy-group-on/. “Programmers Win Contest”: Imes, Ann M., “Programmers Win Contest,” Harvard Crimson, February 1993, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/2/20/programmers-win-contest-pa-harvardteam/. named Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Board of Trustees page on The Exploratorium website, https://www.exploratorium.edu/about/board-of-trustees/craig-silverstein, accessed October 23, 2022. “NYU blended seamlessly into the urban jungle of Manhattan”: “Helping Revitalize a City|Hsieh, Tony,” YouTube, posted by Long Now Foundation, May 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ0wo-pczoI. weddings and other catered events: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 26. for the federal government: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 26. code name “Secret”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 26. A photograph taken on that day: Provided by anonymous source. “To me, it seemed like a win-win”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 51. Chapter 4: LinkExchange “I felt that I’d succeeded”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 30. “The Year Everything Changed”: McCracken, Harry, “1995: The Year Everything Changed,” Fast Company, December 2015, https://www.fastcompany.com/3053055/1995-the-year-everythingchanged. the website domain Yahoo.com: Wolfe, Jennifer C., and Chasser, Anne H., Brand Rewired: Connecting Branding, Creativity, and Intellectual Property Strategy (Wiley, 2010), 145. started an email distribution list: Craig Newmark Philanthropies website, https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org/about-us/craig-newmark-bio/, accessed August 25, 2021. Match.com: Kushner, David, “Recruiting Women to Online Dating Was a Challenge,” The Atlantic, April 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/how-matchcom-digitizeddating/586603/. in Seattle: Stone, Brad, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown, 2013), 28.

continues to prohibit: McPhate, Mike, “California Today: Silicon Valley’s Secret Sauce,” New York Times, May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/california-today-silicon-valley.html. I can’t believe this is real: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 46. Kate O’Brien’s: From interview with Kevin Ascher, May 2021. “Where Wuppies Gather”: Angwin, Julia, “Where Wuppies Gather: DrinkExchange Draws Hundreds Every Month,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Where-Wuppies-Gather-DrinkExchange-draws2808693.php. impromptu trip to Yosemite: Conversation during a virtual memorial service among some of Tony’s Harvard-era friends, December 2020. August 1998: “Russia Rebounds,” International Monetary Fund, September 9, 2003, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/nft/2003/russia/. “At the time, I didn’t think”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 47. “the evil empire”: Interview with Steve Valenzuela, former chief financial officer at LinkExchange, May 2021. “Without getting into too much detail”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 50. “Well, I guess the deal closed”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 50. Chapter 5: Raving “The steady wordless electronic beats”: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 79. “They not only created Internet communities”: Buck, Stephanie, “During the First San Francisco Dot-Com Boom, Techies and Ravers Got Together to Save the World,” Quartz, August 2017, https://qz.com/1045840/during-the-first-san-francisco-dot-com-boom-techies-and-ravers-gottogether-to-save-the-world/. One reveler recounted: Durbin, Samantha, “Acid, Dance, Unity: What Happened to the ’90s Bay Area Rave Scene?,” The Bold Italic, June 2019, https://thebolditalic.com/acid-dance-unity-whathappened-to-the-90s-bay-area-rave-scene-50a5320b7001. National Drug Intelligence Center: “Other Dangerous Drugs,” National Drug Intelligence Center, California Northern and Eastern Districts Drug Threat Assessment, January 2001, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/653/odd.htm. “optimal conditions”: “Five Things to Know About MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD,” Mount Sinai Physician’s Channel, https://physicians.mountsinai.org/news/five-things-to-know-aboutmdma-assisted-psychotherapy-forptsd#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPeople%20taking%20MDMA%20report%20feelings,of%20difficult%20 or%20traumatic%20material.%E2%80%9D, accessed Octo- ber 23, 2022. deflect reporters’ questions: Hochman, David, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014. “At raves, it was part”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 80. after her pet frog: Private conversation during a virtual memorial service among some of Tony’s Harvard-era friends, December 2020.

Cisco Chinese Chicken Salad: Dean, Katie, “Not Just Food, It’s Fancy Food,” Wired, January 22, 2003, https://www.wired.com/2003/01/not-just-food-its-fancy-food/. “We could create our own adult version”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 56. “Dot-Com Party Madness”: Cave, Damien, “Dot-Com Party Madness,” Salon, April 25, 2000, https://www.salon.com/2000/04/25/party_5/. “The company had 200 customers”: Adler, Carlyle, “The Fresh Prince of Software,” CNN, March 1, 2003, https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2003/03/01/338759/index.htm. “It’s simply become part of the way”: Cave, “Dot-Com Party Madness.” Alfred and Sanjay often skipped the Club BIO nights”: Anonymous source, February 2021. There’s a photo of the just-married couple: Provided by an anonymous source. In one photograph for the San Francisco Chronicle: Sinton, Peter, “Incubators Coddle Web Startups,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 1999, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Incubators-Coddle-Web-Startups-2891370.php. AskJeeves,… Entango, NeoPlanet, and Fusion: Tom, Allison, “Venture Frogs: Startups Haven’t Croaked,” CNN, July 6, 2001, http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/07/06/venture.frogs/. $7.5 million to a company called eCompanies: Loftus, Peter, “ECompanies Pays $7.5 Million for Domain Name ‘Business.com,’” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 1999, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB943997934427207890#:~:text=ECompanies%2C%20a%20Santa%2 0Monica%2C%20Calif,Internet%20domain%20name%20to%20date. Bank of America paid $3 million: “BofA Paid Big Bucks for Domain,” Wired, February 8, 2000. a bid for $823,456: “Drugs.com: The $823,000 Name,” CBS News, August 16, 1999, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drugscom-the-823000-name/. Alex Hsu’s cellphone number: Anonymous source, July 2021. Tony’s immediate thought: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 57. Chapter 6: The Shoe Guy A few days later, in June 1999: Email from anonymous source. Tony said he should put an extra “p” in it: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 33. over turkey sandwiches and chicken noodle soup: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 56. “Nick and Fred were exactly the type”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 34. They invested $500,000 in seed capital: Eng, Dinah, “Nick Swinmurn: Zappos’ Silent Founder,” Fortune, September 5, 2012, https://fortune.com/2012/09/05/nick-swinmurn-zappos-silent-founder/. a $68.3 million exit: Lin, Alfred, “My Final Letter to Tony Hsieh,” Forbes, December 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/12/01/my-final-letter-to-tony-hsieh-by-alfred-lin/? sh=533275f1239b. Zappos was days away from running out of cash: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 72. “I have my birthday party this weekend”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 73. “Isn’t this amazing?”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 84.

the stock market cratered: Tymkiw, Catherine, “Bleak Friday on Wall Street,” CNN Money, April 14, 2000, https://money.cnn.com/2000/04/14/markets/markets_newyork/. “Our decision to focus”: Dean, Katie, “Drugs.com Kicks Domain Habit,” Wired, June 1, 2001. “Right now, because we are unprofitable”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 100. “The situation was dire”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 103. cost about $2 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 107. “Where are we going to get the money?”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 108. “What would make Zappos better?”: Interview with Fred Mossler, December 3, 2020. pour $6 million: Eng, “Nick Swinmurn.” tripled to $8.6 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 109. 20 percent of their inventory: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 111. “Zappos was saved”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 116. “As your friend and financial adviser”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 120. nearly quadrupled its revenue to $32 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 124. the company ended with $70 million in gross sales: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 132. deliberating between various cities: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 134. Seventy employees agreed to make the move: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 135. Chapter 7: The Trifecta go over and introduce himself: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 6, 2021. tenured kinesiology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Mark Guadagnoli online biography, https://www.unlv.edu/people/mark-guadagnoli, accessed October 23, 2022. He explained: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 6, 2021. Challenge Point Framework: Guadagnoli, Mark A., and Lee, Timothy, D., “Challenge Point: A Framework for Conceptualizing the Effects of Various Practice Conditions in Motor Learning,” Journal of Motor Behavior 36, no. 2 (2004): 212–24. St. Louis Rams: “Pfeiffer Kicks Way into Rams Camp,” UNLV press release, July 26, 2004, https://unlvrebels.com/news/2004/7/26/Pieffer_Kicks_Way_Into_Rams_Camp. cited his research: List of citations on PubMed, linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=15130871.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?

Tony was listening with intense curiosity: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 6, 2021. “We don’t know; we’d like for you to tell us”: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. three-day “camps”: “Zappos Insights Training Events,” https://www.zapposinsights.com/training, retrieved July 30, 2022. making $800 million a quarter: eBay SEC filing 10K, 2004 Annual Report, February 28, 2005, https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001065088/647583bb-4282–488d-9bcdc334e206c1ae.pdf.

acquired the payment processing company PayPal for $1.5 billion: SEC filing, July 8, 2002, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702026650/a2084015zex-99_1.htm. bought Rent.com: Mangalindan, Mylene, “Ebay Purchases Web Site Rent.com for $415 Million,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2004, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB110324713823002980. 25 percent stake in Craigslist: Richtel, Matt, “Ebay Buys 25% Stake in Craigslist, an Online Bulletin Board,” New York Times, August 14, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/business/ebay-buys-25-stake-in-craigslist-an-online-bulletinboard.html. no longer books but electronic gadgets: “Amazon.com Electronics Sales Surpass Books Sales for the First Time,” Amazon press release, November 30, 2004, https://press.aboutamazon.com/newsreleases/news-release-details/amazoncom-electronics-sales-surpass-books-sales-first-time. $70 million in sales: Hsieh, Tony, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010. in a conference room at a DoubleTree hotel: Stone, Brad, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown, 2013), 203. “I realized that to Amazon”: Hsieh, Tony, “Why I Sold Zappos,” Inc., June 1, 2010, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zapposs.html. Zappos’s company policies: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 156. five closest pizza shops: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 146. “Read this by Wednesday”: Interview with Chris Peake, March 24, 2021. $1 billion in revenue by 2010: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 120. “achieving their goal in life, whatever it was”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 131. “Whether it’s the happiness that customers feel”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 229. Zappos employees were milling about: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. “Here’s the frequency of the top ten words”: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. Under images of shoes and notices of promotions: Endless.com website front page, October 5, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071005045713/http://www.endless.com/, retrieved April 29, 2021. $100 million in sales in a single month: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” convey a straightforward message: Carlson, Nicholas, “Layoffs at Zappos, According to Employee Tweets, CEO Blog,” Business Insider, November 6, 2008. laying off 8 percent of its workforce: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 193. facing a dwindling number of bad options: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 207. Jeff interrupted: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” have twenty-five times more impact there: Interview with Fred Mossler, December 3, 2020. On July 22, Tony sent an email to his employees: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 219. at a value of $1.2 billion: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 220.

“Most people came dressed as either brides or grooms”: “AWESOME ZAPPOS VEGAS PARTY!!!,” YouTube, posted by Zappos.com, January 19, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=hJrxTR4z2b0. “Tony didn’t mind throwing a thousand plates”: Interview with Chris Peake, May 6, 2021. “You’re in such great hands”: “Video from Jeff Bezos About Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, posted by 07272009july, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. Chapter 8: Delivering Happiness gliding around a kitchen island on a scooter: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 6, 2021. Northern California’s Lake Tahoe: Lim, Jenn, “First There Was a Book…,” Delivering Happiness website, 2011, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/first-there-was-a-book. Excedrin, an over-the-counter migraine medicine: Hochman, David, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014. peppering her with questions: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. “never around”: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. her apartment in Los Angeles one weekend: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. shoe conference in 2005: Interview with Mimi Pham, May 13, 2021. She had previously had a brush with the law after a drug-related incident: Grind, Kirsten, and Sayre, Katherine, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (Simon & Schuster, 2022), 426. Joey Vanas: Interview with Joey Vanas, May 2021. “Just ask her to clean it up”: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. “She was telling him something”: Interview with Patricia McHale, March 2021. “I’m outside South by Southwest”: “Tony Hsieh Delivering Happiness Book & Bus Tour,” YouTube, posted by Techco Media, March 16, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rM4IaM2Qsww. During one flight: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. sponsors at the launch parties: “Delivering Happiness, Book Launch Event Recap: April–June 2010,” PowerPoint presentation, June 23, 2010, sent by anonymous source. a guest judge on The Apprentice: Norman, Jean Reid, “Zappos CEO Appears on ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’” Las Vegas Sun, March 9, 2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/09/zapposceo-appears-celebrity-apprentice/. Ivanka and Tony had been photographed: Snyder, Gabriel, “Do You Trust These People to Save the Economy,” Gawker, March 6, 2009, https://www.gawker.com/5165880/do-you-trust-thesepeople-to-save-the-economy. Tony provided an editorial review: “Women Who Work,” Penguin Random House website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/544570/women-who-work-by-ivankatrump/9781524734411, retrieved July 31, 2022. his new publicist, Christine Peake: Interview with Christine Peake, March 10, 2021.

“Do you think he’s going to find this funny?”: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. top of the New York Times bestseller list: “We’re #1 on The New York Times Bestseller List!,” Delivering Happiness website, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/were-1-on-the-new-yorktimes-bestseller-list, accessed October 23, 2022. a three-month, twenty-three-city bus tour: Interview with Holly McNamara, Match 6, 2010. purchased a tour bus from the Dave Matthews Band: Lim, Jenn, Beyond Happiness: How Authentic Leaders Prioritize Purpose and People for Growth and Impact (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), 2. “Project Specialist Supreme”: Delivering Happiness website, April 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110314092020/http://www.deliveringhappiness.com:80/contact/. did not actually travel with the bus for the majority of the tour: Interview with Joey Vanas, May 2021. “Little Miss Sunshine”: Delivering Happiness website, April 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110314092020/http://www.deliveringhappiness.com:80/contact/. Holly went to speak with Tony: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 2021. In tears, Holly called Patricia: Interview with Patricia McHale, March 23, 2021. “It’s human nature to want to help people”: Email provided by anonymous source. he sent an email, reminding those on the bus tour: Email provided by anonymous source. Holly brought up the battle against Mimi: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 6, 2021. The bus crew had filmed a rap music video: “Happy Wrap—Take One,” YouTube, posted by DeliveringHappiness, September 20, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtiIXo9Id-s. Tony used ResultSource: Bercovici, Jeff, “Here’s How You Buy Your Way onto the New York Times Bestsellers List,” Forbes, February 22, 2013. One day, Mimi called Patricia: Interview with Patricia McHale, March 23, 2021. However, Holly recalled: Interview with Holly McNamara, March 10, 2021. Chapter 9: The New Project “When you have the little Z’s”: “From 2010: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by CBS Sunday Morning, November 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSHG3EU1EZ4. full-body Spider-Man suit: “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness,’” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OBZFVwu1s&t=5s. race down a miniature track: “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness.’” Donald J. Pliner slip-ons: Rich, Motoko, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. “At times, Mr. Hsieh came across as an alien”: Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?” A year after the sale Alfred departed: Arrington, Michael, “Alfred Lin to Leave Zappos, Join Sequoia Capital,” TechCrunch, April 9, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/09/alfred-lin-leaveszappos-joins-sequoia-capital/.

he joined the board of Airbnb: TechCrunch, “Airbnb’s Brian Chesky on How He Met Board Member Alfred Lin,” September 27, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/video/airbnbs-brian-chesky-onhow-he-met-board-member-alfred-lin/. Cities “spur innovation”: Silver, Diana, “Up, Up, Up,” New York Times, February 11, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.html. would take over the old City Hall building: Schoenmann, Joe, “Zappos Views Las Vegas City Hall as Perfect Fit for New Headquarters,” Las Vegas Sun, November 29, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/nov/29/zapposcom-moving-green-valley-las-vegas-city-hall/. closed on the acquisition of the property in the summer of 2012: Toplikar, Dave, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal Bringing Zappos Downtown,” Las Vegas Sun, February 1, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/01/las-vegas-city-council-approves-final-deal-bringin/. “We need one of those”: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Wisdom 2.0, March 3, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kaAVbf-17w. he also found the campuses incredibly insular: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” “The more we thought about it”: “Tony Hsei The City as a Startup–H264 MOV 1280x720 GBG Water 1800,” YouTube, posted by GreenBiz, March 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lkQVPx5kAxc. apply with a video cover letter: “Zappos Is a Weird Company—and It’s Happy That Way,” YouTube, March 2, 2017, posted by PBS NewsHour, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=5mknIg_Abfw&t=237s. became a Zappos legend: Garfinkel, Perry, “Engineering Happiness at Zappos,” New York Times, August 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/engineering-happiness-atzappos.html. He started at the call center: Garfinkel, “Engineering Happiness at Zappos.” he made a centaur costume: Bell, Jennie, “True Stories of How Tony Hsieh Taught His Zappos Team the Meaning of ‘Wow,’” Footwear News, December 21, 2020, https://footwearnews.com/2020/business/retail/tony-hsieh-zappos-employee-stories-1203085519/. “What are you doing tonight?”: Bell, “True Stories.” A red double-decker, a school bus: Bell, “True Stories.” finally moving the Zappos headquarters: Toplikar, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal.” either conference rooms or a speakeasy: Lazar, Shira, “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Unless You’re Tony Hsieh,” Entrepreneur, March 12, 2013, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226056. “the city as a startup”: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” The $350 million would be distributed across four categories: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh”; Semuels, Alana, “$350 Million Might Not Be Enough to Save Las Vegas,” The Atlantic, March 2, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/350-million-mightnot-be-enough-to-save-las-vegas/386213/.

$50 million to invest in tech startups: Downtown Project company https://dtplv.com/portfolio_page/technology-startups/, accessed October 23, 2022.

website,

Underpinning the Downtown Project were three central goals: “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” return on community (ROC): “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” return on luck (ROL): “Zappos and Downtown Project: Tony Hsieh.” “This is part of the reason”: “Tony Hsei: The City as a Startup,” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lkQVPx5kAxc. “Some speculate it’s ego”: Schoenmann, Joe, “What’s Behind Tony Hsieh’s Unrelenting Drive to Remake Downtown Las Vegas?” Las Vegas Sun, April 20, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/apr/20/behind-tony-hsiehs-passion-remake-downtown-las-veg/. Chapter 10: The Desert Tech Utopia Natalie’s life changed: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. Michael slid into the booth and sat next to her: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. the Gold Spike casino, which advertised: Bohler, Peter, “How Zappos’ CEO Turned Las Vegas Into a Startup Fantasyland,” Wired, January 21, 2014. gang members had once robbed the place at gunpoint: “21 Las Vegas Gang Members Indicted on Federal Racketeering, Murder, Drug and Firearm Charges,” press release, United States Attorney’s Office, Nevada, August 14, 2003, https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nv/news/2003/08142003b.html. a woman was shot by her husband in the parking lot: Choate, Alan, “Woman in Critical Condition After Downtown Shooting,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 17, 2008. patrons could stand on its roof: Travel Nevada, https://travelnevada.com/bars/atomic-liquors/, retrieved July 31, 2022.

“Atomic

Liquors,”

“Downtown is a happening scene”: Video of interview with 702.tv, Las Vegas Weekly, provided by James Woodbridge. he co-founded the Neon Reverb festival: Interview with James Woodbridge, April 9, 2021. “Can we build a ski slope right here?”: Toplikar, David, “Goodman: Zappos Move a ‘Watershed Moment’ for Downtown Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Sun, December 1, 2010. poor sales following the Great Recession: Green, Steve, “Buyers Sue for Deposit Money on Downtown Condos,” Las Vegas Sun, July 1, 2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/01/buyerssue-deposits-back-downtown-luxury-condos/. when Tony moved there in May 2011: Corbett, Sara, “How Zappos’ CEO Turned Las Vegas Into a Startup Fantasyland,” Wired, January 21, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/01/zappos-tony-hsiehlas-vegas/. When the Downtown Project was announced in January 2012: Downtown Project 2019 pitch deck, provided by anonymous source. portfolio of almost a thousand apartments: Snel, Alan, “Downtown Project Breaks Through with Apartment Building,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 18, 2015,

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/downtown-project-breaks-through-withapartment-building/. Tony convinced the organization: Pratt, Timothy, “What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas,” New York Times Magazine, October 19, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/whathappens-in-brooklyn-moves-to-vegas.html. She submitted her proposal seven times: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. The loan would be interest-free: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. Standing on the corner of Seventh Street and East Carson: Interview with Natalie Young, March 8, 2021. Ideas ranged from an outdoor chess board: Image provided by anonymous source. Tony asked Carr what he wanted to do: Carr, Paul Bradley, “Tony,” Paul Bradley Carr (blog), November 29, 2020, https://paulbradleycarr.com/2020/11/29/tony/. Tony would end up investing around half a million dollars: Lacy, Sarah, “NSFW Corp. Raises Mid-Six Figure Seed Deal (Our Incredibly Biased Report),” Pando, July 4, 2012. Mark Rowland, a British retail executive: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 22, 2021. Keller Rinaudo, a recent Harvard graduate: Harvard University, “In a First, Scientists Develop Tiny Implantable Biocomputers,” ScienceDaily, May 22, 2007, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070521140917.htm. Rinaudo was given $500,000: Schoenmann, Joe, “Joe Downtown: Is Romotive’s Departure a Sign of the Future?,” Las Vegas Weekly, March 20, 2013, https://lasvegasweekly.com/column/joedowntown/2013/mar/20/joe-downtown-vegastechfunds-romotive-silicon-valle/. Keller said he chose downtown Las Vegas: Corbett, “How Zappos’ CEO.” “Downtown basically sells itself”: Pratt, “What Happens in Brooklyn.” “Even though there’s plenty of parking”: “Tony Hsieh Talks Downtown Las Vegas, Zappos, and More at Samsung SXSW 2013,” YouTube, posted by What’s Trending, March 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwm9gL9IkH4. “They’d be talking passionately”: Interview with Mike Henry, April 20, 2021. Tony struck an agreement: Venture for America, “Venture for America December Newsletter,” December 14, 2012, https://ventureforamerica.org/2012/12/venture-for-america-decembernewsletter/. Ovik had studied environmental science and biology: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Water Institute Community Mourns Passing of Former Student Banerjee,” January 14, 2014, https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/water-institute-community-mourns-passing-of-former-staff-memberbanerjee/. “The path will not be easy. Urban revitalization”: “You’re Moving to Vegas?,” Polis (blog), July 19, 2012, https://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/07/youre-moving-to-vegas.html. “Tony asked them to submit anything”: Spillman, Benjamin, “Burning Man Culture Spreads in Downtown Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 24, 2012, https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/arts-culture/burning-man-culture-spreads-indowntown-las-vegas/.

“It is not about, ‘Let’s try to make’”: Spillman, “Burning Man Culture Spreads.” the Oasis Motel: Snel, Alan, “Downtown Project Unveils Boutique Hotel Oasis,” Las Vegas ReviewJournal, October 21, 2014. purchased an abandoned convenience store: Kirk, Mimi, “The Rise of Adaptive Reuse in Las Vegas,” Architect Magazine, May 1, 2019. Chapter 11: Life Is Beautiful When the Cosmopolitan opened in December 2010: The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, “The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas Opens Its Doors,” press release, December 17, 2010, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-cosmopolitan-of-las-vegas-opens-its-doors112093394.html. In its first eighteen months, dozens of headliners: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, March 4, 2021. His life in Vegas: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. Rehan had first met Ryan: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, March 4, 2021. “I was very new to the city”: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, March 4, 2021. stammered his way through a thirty-second elevator pitch: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, June 21, 2021. It reminded Rehan: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. the festival would lose around $600,000 in its first year: Life Is Beautiful pitch deck, provided by an anonymous source. When they arrived, Fred informed him: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. During one press interview: Patterson, Spencer, “Chatting with the Man Behind Planned Downtown Festival Life Is Beautiful,” Las Vegas Weekly, November 13, 2021, https://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-see-it/2012/nov/13/chatting-man-behind-planned-downtownfestival-life/. Another slighted Neon Reverb musician: Interview with anonymous source. “We drank the Kool-Aid”: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, December 9, 2020. Aimee had been a senior editor: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 19. Later at a Manhattan nightclub: Groth, The Kingdom of Happiness, 73. Tony had recently expanded his Delivering Happiness brand: Delivering Happiness website, https://www.deliveringhappiness.com/about. In one video interview: “Drinking Vodka with Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Jenn Lim (Delivering Happiness),” YouTube, posted by mediatechsocial, May 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=qBUfRf_VkmA (no longer available). Jon Greenman … came to see Tony: Interview with Jon Greenman, February 22, 2021. On the first visit: Interview with Ying Liu, May 10, 2021. On her second visit: Interview with Ying Liu, May 10, 2021.

Visitors like Ivanka Trump: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Tony would want us to celebrate his life,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/IvankaTrump/status/1332748999883976711? s=20&t=Xay0_RegJzR46iM3qUgeRg. “At some point along the way, I stopped getting hangovers”: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. Andrew offered Rehan $1 million: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, December 9, 2020. On October 26, around thirty thousand people: Patterson, Spencer, “Time of Our Life: Downtown’s Life Is Beautiful Exceeds All Expectations,” Las Vegas Weekly, October 31, 2013, https://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2013/oct/31/life-is-beautiful-festival-exceeds-expectations/#/0. “Tony was really excited”: Interview with Joey Vanas, May 26, 2021. On the second and final day of the festival, strong winds: Patterson, “Time of Our Life.” Chapter 12: The Darwinian Perspective At thirty-nine, with two teenage kids: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, April 2, 2021. “more affordable and less exclusive than TED Conferences”: McKinney, Sarah, “Amanda Slavin: The Creative Catalyst Behind CatalystCreativ,” Forbes, March 19, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahmckinney/2014/03/19/amanda-slavin-the-creative-catalystbehind-catalystcreativ/?sh=6fbbd5aa72ae. One of Tony’s favorite books: Hochman, David, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014. that ultimately convinced her to move to the downtown neighborhood: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 73. In an interview with Playboy: Hochman, “Playboy Interview.” the company’s famous quarterly all-hands meetings: Boley, Michael, “Meet the Women Who’ve Changed Zappos History,” Zappos, March 5, 2019, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/womenshistory-zappos. “When you are his plus-one to something”: Interview with Suzie Baleson, July 29, 2021. “He barely answered”: Interview with Antonia Dodge, April 23, 2021. “Come to Hawaii with me”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, April 2, 2021. he would tell people she was his ex-girlfriend: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 9, 2021. Chapter 13: Andy passed the roles down to his brothers: Hsieh, Tony, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Grand Central Publishing, 2012), 14. Dave was soft-spoken and awkward: Interview with Jen Louie, April 20, 2021. industrial engineering program at Stanford University in 1994: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn page, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhsi3h/, accessed October 23, 2022. Dave, meanwhile, went with Richard and Judy to Hong Kong: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 14. Andy took part in Rush Week: Interview with anonymous source.

As one Lambda Phi Epsilon alum put it: Interview with anonymous source. When Andy’s turn came: Interview with anonymous source. Andy graduated from Stanford in 1999: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn page. specialty food marketing company: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn page. one of Tony’s units in 1000 Van Ness: Interview with James Henrikson, March 7, 2021. “Tony’s batcave”: Interview with James Henrikson, March 7, 2021. “If there was a problem with Andy”: Interview with Chris Peake, April 10, 2021. he had been assigned to work with Mark Guadagnoli: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, November 16, 2021. young tech millionaire founders and CEOs who came to Sin City: Interview with Jen Louie, April 20, 2021. “according to documents”: Funding documents provided by anonymous source. “That was just a small investment”: Email from Joe Lonsdale, March 14, 2021. Andy’s San Francisco apartment: 601 4th Street, Unit 213, San Francisco, CA 94107, per funding documents. companies like Airbnb and Zynga: Cutler, Kim-Mai, “Watch Tech’s Takeover of San Francisco’s Office Space in This Visualization,” TechCrunch, February 25, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/25/tech-office-space/?ncid=rss. One worker recalled arriving: Interview with anonymous source. first-class flights and even private jets: Grind, Kirsten, and Sayre, Katherine, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (Simon & Schuster, 2022), 147. its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LuxDelux/, accessed February 1, 2022. Chapter 14: Trouble in Paradise he hated hugs: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. At Eat one morning: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. “I didn’t get to be involved in that decision”: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, June 24, 2021. things that made him uncomfortable about the Downtown Project: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. One of his tasks: Bowles, Nellie, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?,” Vox, October 1, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/11631452/the-downtown-projectsuicides-can-the-pursuit-of-happiness-kill-you. “fred and I are confident”: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 152. When Ovik came back to Tuscaloosa: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, June 24, 2021. the body of Jody Sherman: Chang, Andrea, “After Jody Sherman Death, Tech Community Seeks Dialogue on Suicide,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013.

Prominent venture capitalist Jason Calacanis wrote: Calacanis, Jason, “Do We Need to Talk About Suicide?,” Pando Daily, January 31, 2013, retrieved August 1, 2022, http://web.archive.org/web/20130204052814/https://pandodaily.com/2013/01/31/do-we-need-to-talkabout-suicide/. Freeman’s study found that 72 percent of entrepreneurs: Freeman, Michael A., “The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families,” Small Business Economics 53 (2019): 323–42, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-018-0059-8. “The intensity of being an entrepreneur”: Feld, Brad, “Founder Suicides,” October 2, 2014, https://feld.com/archives/2014/10/founder-suicides/. It was later revealed: Shontell, Alyson, “The Story of a Failed Startup and a Founder Driven to Suicide,” Business Insider, April 4, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/jody-sherman-ecomom2013-4. In the week before his death, after seeing the forecasts: Shontell, Alyson, “A Grave Financial Error Sank a Startup and Contributed to its Founder’s Suicide,” Business Insider, April 24, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/jody-sherman-ecomom-and-a-grave-financial-error-2013-4. In 2012, he was on a multicity tour around Australia: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 23, 2021. “God, wouldn’t it just be easier”: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 23, 2021. “When you’re potentially gonna lose”: Interview with Mark Rowland, March 23, 2021. Tony’s acknowledgment of Ovik’s death: Email provided by anonymous source. Tamber proposed: Email shared by anonymous source. Matt Berman, the fifty-year-old founder: Schoenmann, Joe, “Joe Downtown: Tragedy, Secrets and the Tough Side of Downtown Development,” Las Vegas Weekly, June 4, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/column/joe-downtown/2014/jun/04/joe-downtown-tragedy-secrets-andtough-side-downto/. After Matt’s suicide, Aimee Groth wrote: Groth, Aimee, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (Simon & Schuster, 2017), 191. “Suicides happen anywhere”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides.” “the difference here is the focus on happiness”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides.” Andrew Yang cut ties with Tony: Groth, The Kingdom of Happiness, 157. “With your silence, you’ve just compounded that failure”: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. What was most painful for Ovik’s family: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. “My brother was an incredibly smart”: Interview with Anondo Banerjee, March 12, 2021. Chapter 15: “The Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas” “Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas”: Walker, Alissa, “Meeting Tony Hsieh, the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas,” Gizmodo, January 14, 2014, https://gizmodo.com/meeting-tony-hsieh-the-mayor-ofdowntown-las-vegas-1500530600.

“A puff of energy”: Bowles, Nellie, “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia,” Vox, September 29, 2014. “In the past, we used the word ‘Community’”: “Downtown Project: Collisions, Co-Learning, Connectness,” Evernote, February 7, 2014, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/client/snv? noteGuid=66aed622-6730-4009-86b02d2ffe7ea26f¬eKey=0fca9f01d630275220b4caea45a4bb41&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernot e.com%2Fshard%2Fs16%2Fsh%2F66aed622-6730-4009-86b02d2ffe7ea26f%2F0fca9f01d630275220b4caea45a4bb41&title=Downtown%2BProject%253A%2BC ollisions%252C%2BCo-Learning%252C%2BConnectness. “I view my role more as trying to set up”: “Zappos Milestone: Q&A with Tony Hsieh,” Footwear News, May 4, 2009. “Tony doesn’t really like conflict”: Interview with Maggie Hsu, February 21, 2021. “A Partner duly filling a Role”: Quoted in Groth, Aimee, “The Story of the Man Who’s Flattening the World of Corporate Hierarchies,” Business Insider, January 16, 2014, https://qz.com/167145/thestory-of-holacracys-founder-began-when-he-started-coding-at-age-6/. “strategic partners and hiring brilliant senior talent”: Lacy, Sara, “More Bad News for Vegas Tech Fund: Star Company Romotive Is Moving to the Bay Area,” Pando.com, March 15, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20140213154736/http://pando.com/2013/03/15/more-bad-news-forvegas-tech-fund-star-company-romotive-is-moving-to-the-bay-area/, retrieved August 2, 2022. Jen McCabe … had been given $10 million: Bowles, Nellie, “Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project,” Vox, September 30, 2014. “You’ve got Jen McCabe,” Obama said: Obama White House Archives, “Remarks by the President at the White House Maker Faire,” June 18, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/18/remarks-president-white-housemaker-faire. the Container Park received three hundred thousand visitors: Morrison, Jane Anne, “Las Vegas Council Favors Allowing Minors at Container Park,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 19, 2014. Michael Cornthwaite sold his interest in three restaurants: Shoenmann, Joe, “Joe Downtown: Group Lauds Container Park as It Pulls Plug on 3 Shops There,” Las Vegas Sun, April 1, 2014. Close to midnight, Michael Downs was on the phone: Interview with Mike Henry, April 27, 2021. “It was like a show”: Interview with Mike Henry, April 27, 2021. In total, thirty people lost their jobs: Snel, Alan, “Downtown Project Lays Off 30 Workers; Hsieh Role Unchanged,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 30, 2014. In a statement, Tony tried to emphasize: Bowles, Nellie, “Tony Hsieh Answers Some of Our Questions About the Future of Las Vegas’s Downtown Project,” Vox, October 2, 2014. compiled in a booklet: Provided by Mark Rowland. Chapter 16: The Island “Have you spoken to Tony?”: Interview with anonymous source. he received a response sometime in the middle of the night: Interview with anonymous source. Rehan got a call from Fred: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, December 9, 2020.

Tony had texted Rehan: Interview with Rehan Choudhry, February 18, 2021. Kanye went on a podcast: Ellis, Bret Easton, “B.E.E.-KANYE PART 1-11/18/2013,” Podcast One, November 18, 2013. “I got into this giant argument”: Chan, Jennifer, “Kanye West Slams Zappos CEO: ‘He Sells All This S—t Product to Everybody,’” E! News, November 19, 2013, http://www.eonline.com/news/482850/kanye-west-slams-zappos-ceo-he-sells-all-this-shit-product-toeverybody. Tony probed Justin about his background: Interview with anonymous source. Justin confronted Rehan over excessive spending: Interview with anonymous source. In response, Tony emailed Rehan: Email provided by Rehan Choudhry. Rehan was given $200,000 for his stake: Provided by anonymous source. Chapter 17: The Trailer Park Tony sent out a message: Interview with anonymous source. $950 a month in rent: “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life,” YouTube, posted by ABC News, August 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9J0IgmRPo. conversations around campfires, a favorite pastime of Tony’s: Interview with anonymous source. a chocolate-brown alpaca named Marley: “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life.” a common “living room”: Video interview with Shira Lazar, Adventures in Curiosity, “Inside Ferguson’s Downtown Project Las Vegas With Tony Hsieh,” February 14, 2019. “With a net worth of $840 million”: Holley, Peter, “Why This CEO Is Worth Almost $1 Billion but Lives in a Trailer Park,” Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theswitch/wp/2015/07/21/why-a-ceo-worth-840-million-lives-in-a-trailer-park-with-his-pet-alpaca/. Tony chatted with a reporter: Totten, Kristy, “Living Small: At Downtown’s Airstream Park, Home Is Where the Experiment Is,” Las Vegas Weekly, February 5, 2015, https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2015/feb/05/airstream-park-experiment-living-small-hsiehdownt/#/0. Anthony … was working in internet marketing: Interview with anonymous source. “not a single person in Tony’s close sphere”: Interview with anonymous source. Airstream Park gave off an air of radical inclusion: “What Is Burning Man? The 10 Principles of Burning Man,” Burning Man website, https://burningman.org/about/10-principles/, accessed October 23, 2022. 4,700-word company-wide email: Groth, Aimee, “Internal Memo: Zappos Is Offering Severance to Employees Who Aren’t All In on Holacracy,” Quartz, March 26, 2015, https://qz.com/370616/internal-memo-zappos-is-offering-severance-to-employees-who-arent-all-inwith-holacracy/. Zappos lost 210 out of 1,503 employees: Usufzy, Pashtana, “200 Accept Buyouts at Zappos After Management Changes,” Las Vegas Sun, May 5, 2015, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/may/05/200-accept-buyouts-zappos-after-companysmanagemen/.

“The brewing employee discontent”: Gelles, David, “At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,” New York Times, July 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-sellingshoes-and-a-vision.html. “The media has kind of portrayed it”: “Tony Hsieh Explains Why He Sold Zappos and What He Thinks of Amazon (Full Interview),” YouTube, posted by Recode, May 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69WEofQd1DM&t=54s. “It’s an intense display of loyalty”: Komenda, Ed, “Is Tony Hsieh Downtown Las Vegas’ Savior or Conqueror?,” Las Vegas Sun, February 23, 2014, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2014/feb/23/tonyhsieh-downtown-las-vegas-savior-or-conqueror/. “‘can feel cultish’”: Walker, Alissa, “Zappos Isn’t a Cult? All Tony Hsieh’s Friends Got Matching Tattoos,” Gizmodo, February 24, 2014, https://gizmodo.com/zappos-isnt-a-cult-all-tony-hsiehsfriends-got-match-1529721696. The pressure was getting to him, she thought: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, April 15, 2021. Chapter 18: The Right Hand “As I noodle on the press coverage”: Ferenstein, Greg, “Exclusive: Zappos CEO Responds to Reports of Employee Departures After Radical Management Experiment,” Medium, January 19, 2016, https://medium.com/@ferenstein/exclusive-zappos-ceo-responds-to-reports-of-mass-employeedepartures-after-radical-management-3f6c51a71928. “I completely agree with Fred”: Ferenstein, “Exclusive.” A few months after the interview: Reingold, Jennifer, “Another Zappos Leader Departs,” Fortune, April 13, 2016, https://fortune.com/2016/04/13/another-zappos-leader-departs/. Ivy League–bred financier background: “Leadership,” https://www.stagelightgroup.com/leadership, accessed September 1, 2022.

Stagelight

Group,

tumultuous stint: Tracy, Abigail, “West Wing Chaos: Scaramucci Abruptly Fired as White House Communications Director,” Vanity Fair, July 31, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-mooch-cut-loose-scaramucci-fired-as-white-housecommunications-director. SALT Conference: “SALT Conference Returns to Las Vegas May 7–10, 2019 Targeting Growth,” press release, SALT conference, November 1, 2018, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saltconference-returns-to-las-vegas-may-7–10–2019-targeting-growth-300741703.html. In 2017, Victor asked the singer and songwriter: Interview with anonymous source. Necker Island: Instagram post, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQ_i8bnZIu/? hl=en. “All right, [email protected]”: Interview with anonymous source. “It’d be really fun to just have a ball pit”: Interview with anonymous source. “Fungineer”: Garfinkel, Perry, “Engineering Happiness at Zappos,” New York Times, August 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/engineering-happiness-at-zappos.html. Called Whole Human: Jarvey, Natalie, “CES: Jewel Launches Platform to Bring Mindfulness to the Workplace,” Hollywood Reporter, January 9, 2018,

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ces-jewel-launches-platform-bringmindfulness-workplace-1073163/. Jewel organized a mindfulness retreat: Interview with anonymous source. Tyler reached a point in 2018: Interview with anonymous source. Ben and Tony had met: Interview with Ben Jorgensen, October 22, 2021. Chapter 19: Genie in a Bottle We’re back, he thought: Interview with anonymous source. Tony’s camp, which for liability reasons: Interview with anonymous source. he invited four of the founding leaders: Burning Man Project, “Tony Hsieh’s Legacy Reminds Us All of the Importance of Community,” December 10, 2020, https://journal.burningman.org/2020/12/news/global-news/tony-hsieh-legacy/. Tony purchased a gutted Boeing 747: Johnson, Shea, “Zappos Will Use Burning Man 747 Jet for Downtown Project,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 17, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/las-vegas/zappos-will-use-burningman-747-jet-for-downtown-project-1959430/. “Metamorphoses”: “2019 Art Theme: Metamorphoses,” Burning Man website, https://burningman.org/about/history/brc-history/event-archives/2019-event-archive/2019-art-thememetamorphoses/. market-based dynamics: Peake, Chris, “First Steps for Learning and Engaging,” Zappos, May 5, 2019, https://hatch.apps.zappos.com/evolve/first-steps-for-learning-and-engaging. Members of Tony’s Burning Man crew: Interview with anonymous source. Judy took a nap … cloud-nine-themed art car: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 9, 2021. Though Tony knew this would make them uncomfortable: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 9, 2021. Parke Davis Company: Li, Linda, and Vlisides, Phillip E., “Ketamine: 50 Years of Modulating the Mind,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, November 15, 2016, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126726/. replace the surgical anesthetic PCP: Chun, Rene, “Inside the Los Angeles Clinic That Uses Ketamine to Treat Depression,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 19, 2017, https://www.lamag.com/longform/the-ketamine-club/. During the 1970s, it was used: Domino, Edward F., and Warner, David S., “Taming the Ketamine Tiger,” Anesthesiology 113 (2010): 678–84, https://pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology/article/113/3/678/10426/Taming-the-Ketamine-Tiger. offered scientific literature: “History of Ketamine in Psychiatric Medicine,” Avesta Ketamine Wellness, https://www.avestaketaminewellness.com/blog/history-of-ketamine-in-psychiatricmedicine. in the 1980s and 1990s: “History of Ketamine in Psychiatric Medicine.” Special K: “Ketamine,” Drug Enforcement Administration, https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drug_chem_info/ketamine.pdf.

September

2019,

Schedule III narcotic: “Schedules of Controlled Substances: Placement of Ketamine into Schedule III,” Drug Enforcement Administration, https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/fed_regs/rules/1999/fr0713.htm. Salvador Roquet: Witt, Emily, “Ketamine Therapy Is Going Mainstream. Are We Ready?,” New Yorker, December 29, 2021. due to his use of illegal drugs: Correspondence with Stanley Krippner, PhD. Evgeny Krupitsky and A. Y. Grinenko: Krupitsky, E. M., and Grinenko, A. Y., “Ketamine Psychedelic Therapy (KPT): A Review of the Results of Ten Years of Research,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 29, no. 2 (1997). In 2000, the drug was tested: Berman, Robert, Cappiello, Angela, et al., “Antidepressant Effects of Ketamine in Depressed Patients,” Biological Psychiatry 47 (2000): 351–54, https://www.amgketamine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/6-Antidepressant.pdf. “difficult-to-treat depression”: Tiger, Mikael, “A Randomized Placebo-Controlled PET Study of Ketamine’s Effect on Serotonin1B Receptor Binding in Patients with SSRI-Resistant Depression,” Translational Psychiatry (2020): art. 159, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-020-0844-4. “I think if you put ketamine”: “A Brief Chat with http://scotto.org/listing.php?id=178, accessed October 23, 2022.

Dr.

Karl

Jansen,”

Scotto,

Could ketamine be the answer?: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-–828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). two hundred thousand attendees: Kim, Kyndell, “Thousands Expected for ‘Life Is Beautiful’ Music Festival in Las Vegas,” KTNV, September 20, 2019, https://news3lv.com/news/local/thousands-expected-for-life-is-beautiful-music-festival-in-las-vegas. Chapter 20: Winter Camp What he witnessed: Interview with anonymous source. But now he was acting in a manic manner: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). sleep patterns on his Apple Watch: Interview with anonymous source. came across a study: Deng, Xianhua, “Long-term Follow-up of Patients Treated for Psychotic Symptoms That Persist After Stopping Illicit Drug Use,” Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry 24, no. 5 (2012): 271–78, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4198875/. “I liked the concepts of the tribes”: Provided by anonymous source. “If you put a little bit of right spin”: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 10, 2021. Justin sent him a message: Interview with anonymous source. “Either you knew it and you’re a liar”: Interview with anonymous source. Looking bewildered, Ryan walked around: Interview with anonymous source.

“There’s no other way to put it”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 15, 2021. “I’m worried about you”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, June 15, 2021. asking for daily updates: Interview with anonymous source. agreed not to alert Amazon: Interview with anonymous source. Holding a stretching stick covered in Post-it notes: Video provided by anonymous source. increasingly agitated by Tyler’s concern: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Chapter 21: Flow State Silicon Valley became a regular presence at Sundance: Wu, Tim, “Silicon Valley Takes on Hollywood—at Sundance,” Slate, January 23, 2012, https://slate.com/culture/2012/01/silicon-valleyat-the-sundance-film-festival-tech-companies-taking-on-hollywood.html. Google would host concerts: “Civil Wars to Headline Google Music Series at Sundance,” Rolling Stone, January 13, 2012. Bing: Wu, “Silicon Valley Takes on Hollywood.” a digital content company called HitRecord: “HITRECORD Returns to Sundance Film Festival 2020 to Celebrate Its Vibrant Community with Live Projects, in Collaboration with Zappos,” press release, December 19, 2019, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hitrecord-returns-tosundance-film-festival-2020-to-celebrate-its-vibrant-community-with-live-projects-in-collaborationwith-zappos-300977684.html. Zappos’s ten core values: “Announcing HITRECORD x Zappos at the Sundance Film Festival,” HitRecord, December 19, 2019, https://hitrecord.org/records/4099581. even stayed on a bunk bed: Interview with Victoria Recano, April 19, 2021. Abdul tweeted: Paula Abdul, @PaulaAbdul, “A trip to Sundance and @Zappos all in one week,” Twitter, January 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/paulaabdul/status/1223068569694605312. “I wish I had a Tyler coin”: Interview with anonymous source. asked him to write a list of all the things: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). The list continued: Reference to this list is cited in Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.) Tony was able to use his phone: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.).

The unassuming exterior belied a grandiosity within: Zillow listing, 1422 Empire Avenue, Park City, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1422-Empire-Ave-Park-City-UT-84060/89095788_zpid/, accessed October 23, 2022. At first, they implemented a regimented program around Tony: Interviews with anonymous sources. Over barbecues and meetings: Interviews with anonymous sources. fifty-seven meters under an ice sheet: Weeks, Jonny, “A Cold-Water Cure? My Weekend with the ‘Ice Man,’” The Guardian, May 8, 2019. fastest barefoot half-marathon across ice: Guinness World Records website, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-half-marathon-barefoot-on-icesnow, retrieved August 2, 2022. Mount Everest wearing only shorts: Odell, Michael, “He Swims in Ice and Climbs Everest. Meet Tough Guy Wim Hof,’” The Times (London), March 7, 2017. 180 years old: Kelly, Guy, “Meet the Man Who Plans to Live to 180 (and Has Spent $2 Million Trying),” The Telegraph, January 22, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/meetman-plans-live-180-has-spent-2million-trying/. Tyler and Tony would embark on so-called hero’s journeys: Interviews with anonymous sources. At 3:22 p.m. on the last Saturday of May: Luscombe, Richard, and Sample, Ian, “SpaceX Successfully Launches Nasa Astronauts into Orbit,” The Guardian, May 30, 2020. presence in his house of Brandon Hollis: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. “We have to go faster”: Interview with anonymous source. Brandon approached Tyler: Interview with anonymous source. Others turned their heads to steal a glance at him: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Chapter 22: The Gordian Knot “Pop quiz,” Tony said, turning to him: Interview with anonymous source. Expedia: Expedia listing, https://www.expedia.com/Park-City-Hotels-Massive-10-Bed-10-BathLuxury-Mountain-Home-In-Old-Town.h54112819.Hotel-Information, retrieved August 3, 2022. Vrbo: Vrbo listing, https://www.vrbo.com/1997020, retrieved August 3, 2022. Steve-O … steered his bus into Park City: Interviews with anonymous sources. for a fee: Interviews with anonymous sources. a virtual reality company: Interviews with anonymous sources. Tyler found Tony: Interview with anonymous source. destined to be a failure before it even started: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). nothing but pajama pants and holding only a box of crayons: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August

23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). he and Justin would spend only twelve hours in Montana: Interview with anonymous source. The bus was rolling through the Montana plains: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Justin walked back to the bathroom door: Interview with anonymous source. and tried reasoning with Tony: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. active shooter simulation … suicide pact: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Around 4 a.m., Justin was woken by rapid knocking on his bedroom door: Interview with anonymous source. Chapter 23: Sticky Notes “Happy Fourth of July!” they called out to a group: Interview with Tyler Davis and David Hill, December 15, 2020. Tony turned to the real estate agent: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. The sprawling ranch: Zillow listing, 2636 Aspen Springs Drive, Park City, UT, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2636-Aspen-Springs-Dr-Park-City-UT-84060/68846639_zpid/, retrieved August 3, 2022. Zappos executives were more than aware of Tony’s troubles: Interview with anonymous source. pressure from the company to take a step back: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Among the first projects Tony assigned her: Video provided by anonymous source. Mark and Tony discussed the terms: Mark Evensvold, Creditor’s Claim, In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, filed June 1, 2021, Clark County District Court, Case No. P-20–105105-E. Chapter 24: Old Friends and New The Hsieh family had already come and gone: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). At one point Tony told them: Grind, Kirsten, and Sayre, Katherine, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (Simon & Schuster, 2022), 212. Ten days later he returned: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). longtime friend Tony Lee: Tony Lee and his company, Pelagic LLC, filed a lawsuit after Tony’s death, detailing his account of events in 2020. See Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and

Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, A-21-833547-C. became convinced that inhaling nitrious oxide: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). the actress Demi Moore passed out: TMZ, “Demi Moore Health Crisis … Inhaling Nitrous Oxide,” January 26, 2012, https://www.tmz.com/2012/01/25/demi-moore-whip-its-nitrous-oxideseizure/#.TyFWacVSRvY. hundreds of Whip-It cartridges: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Tony found willing comrades like Don Calder: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Victoria produced another video: Video provided by anonymous source. Nadeem had arrived in Park City: Interviews with anonymous sources. Andy said later: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Creditor Pelagic’s Motion For Order Nunc Pro Tunc Concerning Order Granting Ex Parte Application To Accept Resignation Of Co-Administrator, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, P-20-105105-E. Transcripts of Andy’s depositions were part of the exhibits in this court filing. he wanted them gone: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Initially, the first iteration of 10X: Interviews with anonymous sources. Elizabeth and Brett would be getting a pay raise: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. she took 10 percent of the fee: See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). set up an LLC with $10 million: See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21–829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021, 20. Lee wrote in a text to Andy: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Creditor Pelagic’s Motion For Order Nunc Pro Tunc Concerning Order Granting Ex Parte Application To Accept Resignation Of Co-Administrator, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, P-20-105105-E. Text messages were part of the exhibits in this court filing. Chapter 25: Who Will Save Your Soul? a group of residents were huddled: Interview with Bill Ciraco, March 27, 2021. Jewel emerged from the far side of the room: Video provided by anonymous source. Michael Downs … and Jen Taler … had arrived: Interviews with anonymous sources. Tyler was going to … kidnap Tony: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, July 1, 2021.

once he heard from Michelle, he notified the interventionist: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Tony talked with her and passed the welfare check: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Mark decided to call the Park City police: Interview with Mark Guadagnoli, April 15, 2021. Suzie turned to them: Interviews with anonymous sources. When she received the invitation: Interview with a member of Jewel’s team, April 2021. The sound of running water, they were told: Interviews with anonymous sources. On the night of September 8, police were called to the house: Police report provided by Park City Police Department under Government Records Access and Management Act, Utah. Chapter 26: On the Edge of the Ether-World one of his first memories as a child: “Simon Sinek Talks Culture with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, posted by Simon Sinek, August 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=uqUx4BJ1ENY. Tony bought a convoy of tour buses: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. the company announced that Tony was stepping down from Zappos: Schulz, Bailey, and Velotta, Richard N., “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Retires,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 24, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-ceo-tony-hsiehchampion-of-downtown-las-vegas-retires-2102935/. Michelle’s phone rang: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, September 10, 2021. It had also deeply upset him: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). One week in September, Justin told him: Interview with anonymous source. Finally there was an excursion: Interview with multiple anonymous sources. letter … penned by Jewel: Provided by anonymous source. Chapter 27: Blizzy “We’re going to Hawaii!”: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. somewhat of a power couple: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. producing a daily newsletter: Provided by anonymous source. he had been taken to the hospital: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. A nurse had been at the ranch: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. Janice, back in Utah, received a call: Interview with multiple anonymous sources.

had just gotten off a FaceTime call with Tony: Interview with Karla Ballard, October 24, 2021. in a cooler: Interviews with multiple anonymous sources. A crew of firefighters arrived: Incident report provided by New London Fire Department. She technically didn’t own the beach, he told her: Incident report provided by New London Police Department. Chapter 28: Thanksgiving Vernon Skau had reason to hope: Interview with Vernon Skau, February 20, 2021. A picture quickly emerged: “Origin and Cause” incident report provided by New London Fire Department. Tom was vaguely aware of Tony Hsieh: Interview with Tom Curcio, February 20, 2021. Chapter 29: The Aftermath The day after Thanksgiving: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, November 8, 2021. “We’d like for you to write the post to tell the world”: Interview with Michelle D’Attilio, November 8, 2021. Bill Clinton: Bill Clinton, @BillClinton, “I treasure every conversation,” Twitter, November 30, 2020, 8:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/1333578663380520961. Ivanka Trump: Ivanka Trump, @IvankaTrump, “Celebrating the life while mourning the loss,” Twitter, November 28, 2020, 11:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. Jeff Bezos: Instagram post, November 28, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIJYUQhHzLq/. twelve-minute video elegy: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CIQ_i8bnZIu/?hl=en.

post,

December

1,

2020,

Mimi filed the first lawsuit in February: Mimi’s company is called Baby Monster LLC. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, A-21-828090-C, Eighth District Court, Nevada. Paris Hilton: Toplikar, Dave, “Paris Hilton Pleads Guilty in Las Vegas Drug Arrest,” Las Vegas Sun, September 20, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/sep/20/paris-hilton-plead-guilty-vegasdrug-arrest/. Bruno Mars: Ritter, Ken, “Bruno Mars Gets Date for Las Vegas Cocaine Plea Deal,” Las Vegas Sun, February 4, 2011, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2011/feb/04/us-bruno-mars-vegas-arrest/. Robert Durst: Bagli, Charles V., “After a 14-Month Delay, Robert Durst’s Murder Trial Returns to Court,” New York Times, May 17, 2021. The next week, Puoy Premsrirut filed: Ferrara, David, “Attorney Seeks $360K in Legal Fees from Tony Hsieh’s Estate,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 16, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/courts/attorney-seeks-360k-in-legal-fees-from-tony-hsiehsestate-2282089/. Two months later, in April, Tony Lee: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, A-21–833547-C.

both Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger: Charns, David, “I-Team: Company Seeks Millions from Tony Hsieh’s Estate, Some for ‘Magic Castle’ Project, Included Traveling Magicians,” 8 News Now, November 22, 2021, https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/i-team-special-reports/i-teamcompany-seeks-millions-from-tony-hsiehs-estate-for-magic-castle-project-included-travelingmagicians/; Newburg, Katelyn, “Life Is Beautiful CEO Withdraws Creditors Claim in Tony Hsieh Case,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 28, 2022, https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/courts/life-is-beautiful-ceo-withdraws-creditors-claim-in-tonyhsieh-case-2520681/. Only one statement: Au-Yeung, Angel, and Jeans, David, “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy: The Self-Destructive Last Months of the Zappos Visionary,” Forbes, December 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/12/04/tony-hsiehs-american-tragedy-the-selfdestructive-last-months-of-the-zappos-visionary/. Andy was secretly in constant contact: Interview with a member of Jewel’s team, April 2021. doctors and attorneys … on standby: Interview with a member of Jewel’s team, April 2021. scorched-earth response: Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Richard notified the court: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, P-20-0105105-E. a poem: Provided by anonymous source.

IMAGE CREDITS

Here Here Here Here Here

Map of downtown Las Vegas, designed by Gene Thorpe “Teeth” poem, Tony Hsieh, a book of poems written by students at Miller Creek Middle School, courtesy of an anonymous source. “TOOMUCHTODONESS” poem, Tony Hsieh, a book of poems written by students at Miller Creek Middle School, courtesy of an anonymous source. “Octopus” poem, Tony Hsieh, a book of poems written by students at Miller Creek Middle School, courtesy of an anonymous source. Senior yearbook page, Tony Hsieh, the Branson School yearbook, 1991, courtesy of an anonymous source.

Photo insert Fig. 1 “Most likely to succeed” portrait of Tony Hsieh in sixth grade, Miller Creek Middle School yearbook, 1985, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 2 Portrait of Tony Hsieh in seventh grade, Miller Creek Middle School yearbook, 1986, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 3 Tony Hsieh and David Padover, the Branson School yearbook, 1988, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 4 Tony Hsieh and friends, including Alex Hsu, at the Branson School, the Branson School yearbook, 1989, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 5 Tony Hsieh celebrating the mock trial club at the Branson School, the Branson School yearbook, 1990, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 6 Tony Hsieh in his senior year at the Branson School, the Branson School yearbook, 1991, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 7a Tony Hsieh at Harvard University’s graduation day, 1995, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 7b Tony Hsieh at Harvard University’s graduation day, 1995, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 8 Tony and Ying Liu in front of the Theater Museum, courtesy of Ying Liu. Fig. 9 Zappos office in San Francisco, circa 2000, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 10 Nick Swinmurn and Fred Mossler, circa 2004, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 11 Portrait of Tony Hsieh with his book, Delivering Happiness. Bloomberg/Getty Images Fig. 12 Tony Hsieh with Senator Harry Reid and President Barack Obama at a fundraising event in July 2010, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 13 Tony Hsieh judging Halloween contest, 2013. Ethan Miller/Getty Images Fig. 14 Tony Hsieh and Mimi Pham, 2014. Michael Kovac/Getty Images Fig. 15 Tony Hsieh and Michelle D’Attilio, courtesy of Michelle D’Attilio. Fig. 16 Tony Hsieh at Bigfork, Montana, 2017, courtesy of an anonymous source.

Fig. 17 Tony Hsieh with Justin Weniger, Ryan Doherty, and Tyler Williams, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 18 Tony Hsieh with Fred Mossler and others at Zappos event. Denise Truscello/Getty Images Fig. 19 Tony Hsieh cooking at Park City home, 2020, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 20 Andy Hsieh with Brett Gorman and Elizabeth Pezzello at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Noam Galai/Getty Images Fig. 21 Photo of burned-out shed at 500 Pequot Avenue, New London, Connecticut, November 2020. Courtesy of New London Fire Department. Fig. 22 Photo of backyard of 500 Pequot Avenue, New London, Connecticut, November 2020. Courtesy of New London Fire Department. Fig. 23 Memorial of Tony Hsieh at Fremont Street Experience, December 2020. Bryan Steffy/Getty Images

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. ABC News Abdul, Paula Abercrombie & Fitch Accel AC/DC acid Ackman, Bill Adderall Adele ADHD Adidas Aguirre, Blaise AIDS Airbnb Airstream Park Alaska alcoholism Allen, Ashton Alltounian, Howard Alvarez & Marsal Amazon death of Tony and Downtown Project and Tony’s decline and Zappos bought by Ambien AMC Theaters American Chemical Society American Institute of Chemical Engineers Anderson, Richard Dean

Anderson .Paak Apple Apprentice, The (TV show) Arizona State University Arquette, David Ascher, Kevin Asian Americans AskJeeves Asprey, Dave Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest Astrovan Atlantic City Atomic Liquors Austin, Texas B-52s Baleson, Suzie Ballard, Karla Ballmer, Steve Baltimore Banerjee, Anondo Banerjee, Ovik Banerjee, Subhankar Bank of America Barnes & Noble Barrass, Kathy Barshack, Lenny Bass, Derrick Bass family Bayle, Michael BBN Beat Coffeehouse The Beau Hodges Band Beauty Bar Beck Belcampo farm Bellagio hotel Benioff, Marc Ben-Shahar, Tal Ben Sherman Berman, Matt Berman, Robert M. Bevilacqua, Ali Bezos, Jeff Biden, Joe Bigfoot holding company Big Moose Yacht Club “Billie Jean” (song)

biohacking bipolar disorder Bitcoin Black Ops (Zappos team) Black people Black Rock City Blair, Tony Blige, Mary J. Blizzy Ranch Daily News Bloomberg Bloomberg, Michael Bolt Barber Bomberman (video game) Bowles, Nellie Boy Scouts of America Boys’ Life Bozzini, Mark Branson, Richard Branson School, The Bridgeport Hospital Brin, Sergey Brokaw, Aphrah Brown, Rachael Brown University Bruno Magli Bulletproof Nutrition Bunch, John Bunkhouse Saloon Burning Man Business Insider Caesars Entertainment Calacanis, Jason Calder, Don California School of Professional Psychology California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly) Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip) Camacho, David carbon monoxide Carr, Paul Carson Kitchen Catalyst Week Challenge Point Framework Chesnoff, David Chevron China Chinese New Year Chopra, Deepak

Chou, Millie Choudhry, Rehan Ciraco, Bill civil rights movement Clark County District Court Clark County Superior Court Clay, Phillip Cleveland Clinton, Bill Club BIO CNN Coachella Colbert, Stephen Coldplay Collins, Jim Colorado River mindfulness retreat Comedy Central Commonwealth bar Complex Confucius conservatorship Constellation Labs Container Park Conway, Ron Cooney, Susan Coors Light Cornell University Corner Bar Management Cornthwaite, Jennifer Cornthwaite, Michael Cosmopolitan casino, The COVID-19 Craigslist Crimson, The Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Cum Laude Society Curcio, Tom D’Attilio, Michelle Dave Matthews Band Davis, Tyler Days of Our Lives (TV show) Deadmau5 Delaney, Hollie Delivering Happiness company Delivering Happiness (Hsieh) book tour sales

written Deloitte depression Deshpande, Kedar Detroit Diaspora (website) Digital Royalty DiVincenzo, Tony DJ Solomon Dodge, Antonia Doherty, Ryan domain names Donner, Andrew DoorDash dopamine Dorsey, Jack dot-com boom Downs, Michael Downtown Cocktail Room “Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia” (Bowles) Downtown Project (DTP) all-hands meetings artists and Burning Man and Catalyst Week and community and conditions for businesses in core values and death of Tony and drinking and events and financials and Fred Mossler and Groth book on Holacracy and layoffs and Life Is Beautiful and problems outlined real estate portfolio and startups and suicides and Tony and Fred first plan renovation of Tony as “Mayor” of Tony draws people to Tony’s dating and Tony’s decline and Tony’s drinking and drugs and Tony steps away from

Victor Oviedo and Drew Carey Show, The (TV show) DrinkExchange Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) drug-induced psychosis. See also ketamine; nitrous oxide; and other specific drugs Drugstore.com Durst, Robert Eat restaurant eBay Eckert, Charles e-commerce Ecomom eCompanies Economist, The Eiffel Tower Restaurant Eilish, Billie El Cortez casino Electric Daisy Carnival Ellison, Larry Endless.com Entango Entrepreneur Eon Epstein, Kenny Evensvold, Mark Everything Store, The (Stone) Facebook Factorli Fast Company Feld, Brad Fergusons Fernet-Branca 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) financial crisis of 2008 First Friday block parties Fitzpatrick, Ryan Flathead Lake, Montana Florence + The Machine flow states Foley, Christa Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Forbes Fortune Fred Factor, The (Sanborn) Freeman, Michael Free Stuff for Kids

Fremont East district Friends (TV show) Fusion Game, The (Strauss) Garfinkel, Spencer Garmin Gartner, John Gates, Bill Gehry, Frank gentrification Gillette Gizmodo Glaeser, Edward Glass Animals Gobbler, The Golden State Warriors Gold Spike casino Goodman, Carolyn Goodman, Oscar Google Goonies, The (film) Gordon-Levitt, Joseph Gorman, Brett Gould, David Graham, Paul Grande, Roberto Grease (musical) Great by Choice (Collins) Greenman, Jon Griffin bar Grinenko, A. Y. Groth, Aimee Gruber, Frank grunge rock Guadagnoli, Mark Guadagnoli, Max Guadalajara Guangdong Province, China Guardian Angels Haidt, Jonathan Haines, Pat Hallerman, Elisa Halloween golf tournament Happier (Ben-Shahar) happiness, science of Happiness Hypothesis, The (Haidt)

Hard Rock Casino (Vegas) Harvard Bartending School Harvard Student Agencies Harvard University Business School Hawaii Hawk, Tony Hayashi, Kami Henderson, Nevada Henrikson, James Henry, Mike Hill, David Hilton, Paris HitRecord Hof, Wim “the Ice Man” Holacracy Hollis, Brandon homelessness Hong Kong Hsieh, Andrew Chia-Pei “Andy” (brother) childhood and youth and death of Tony and education of Elizabeth Pezzello and Life Is Beautiful and Lux Delux built by Tony’s decline and Tony’s estate and Tony’s mid-career relationship with Tony’s resignation from Zappos and Van Ness condo and works at Zappos Hsieh, Anthony Chia-Hua “Tony” ADHD and Airstream Park and Alfred Lin as partner and check on Alfred’s departure and awards and honors and biohacking and birth of brother Andy and brother Dave and Burning Man and button business as teen and childhood and early youth of Club BIO and conservatorship attempts and costumes and

crypto and cult accusations and death of, in New London fire Delivering Happiness company and Delivering Happiness memoir and Delivering Happiness tours and depression and dog Blizzy and dog Blizzy’s death and Downtown Project and Downtown Project focus changed by Downtown Project layoffs and Downtown Project suicides and dress and style at Zappos and drinking and alcoholism and drug-induced psychosis, entourage, and decline of drugs and early jobs and early poems by early reading education of, at Chinese school education of, at Harvard education of, at Miller Creek Elementary and Middle Schools education of, at the Branson School entourage grows in Vegas estate of, and lawsuits Excedrin and family and friends attempt to help with interventions and welfare checks financial crisis of 2008 and fireflies and flow states and Fred Mossler as partner at Zappos and Fred’s departure from Zappos and friendships with Chinese students at NYU and friendship with Holly McNamara and friendship with James Henrikson and friendship with Janice Lopez and friendship with Jenn Lim and friendship with Ying Liu and Gobbler, The, created by happiness mantra and Harvard classmates cruise and hero’s journeys and Holacracy and image and physical appearance of Internet Marketing Solutions and Jewel’s attempts to help job at Oracle and

jobs at Harvard and Kanye West and ketamine and Las Vegas real estate portfolio and Las Vegas toast to memory of leadership ability and Life Is Beautiful and LinkExchange founded by LinkExchange sale to Microsoft and LinkExchange sale to Yahoo rejected by market-based dynamics and Mark Guadagnoli builds employee orientation for MDMA or Ecstasy and media and megalomania and Mimi Pham as personal assistant of nitrous oxide (laughing gas; Whip-Its) and NSFWCorp and octopus image and early poem of Ogden building home in Vegas and old friends visit during Downtown Project years Oprah interview and parents and parents and friends cut off by Park City entourage and spending during decline of Park City hospitalizations and Park City move and disturbing behavior of Park City psychotic break and Park City rehab attempt and personality of piano playing and pickup community techniques and poker and polygamy-based parenting and private search for inner peace and public image of, as head of Zappos Quincy House Grille at Harvard and rave scene and “return on community” philosophy and romance and friendship with Michelle D’Attilio romance with Eva Lee romantic relationships and polyamory of Ryan Doherty’s party and weird behavior of Sequoia and Soiled Dove event and Southern Highlands mansion of SpaceX and speaking by

stereotypes eluded by Summit conference and SXSW and trips to Hawaii and trip to Alaska and trip to Belcampo farm and trip to Holmstead Ranch Resort and trip to Hong Kong while at Harvard and trip to Mexico as teen to view eclipse and trip to Montana and meltdown by trip to Mount Kilimanjaro and trip to New London from Park City trip to Taiwan and trip to Yosemite and TV appearances of Tyler Williams and Van Ness Avenue home and Club BIO and Venture Frogs and Victor Oviedo asked to join Zappos by, with departure of Fred wealth of, vs. happiness goal WHISKY for Zappos and Winter Camp and as Zappos CEO, after sale to Amazon as Zappos CEO, during dot-com bust Zappos corporate culture and Zappos customer service and Zappos idea first pitched to Zappos launch and early funding and Zappos management and Zappos move to Las Vegas and Zappos name and Zappos resignation by Zappos sale to Amazon and Hsieh, David (brother) Hsieh, Judy Shiao-Ling Lee (mother) Hsieh, Richard Chuan-Kang (father) background and career of death of Tony and intervention and Tony’s estate and Tony’s psychotic breaks and Hsu, Alex Hsu, Eleen Hsu, Maggie Huffington Post hypomania Hypomanic Edge, The (Gartner)

IBM Imagine Dragons India “Inside Zappos CEO’s Wild, Wonderful Life” (video) Inspire Theater Inspiring Children Foundation InstaCart Instagram Internet Marketing Solutions Isaac, Mike Jackson, Michael Jansen, Karl Japan Jay-Z Jewel Jobs, Steve John, Elton Johns Hopkins University Medical School Jorgensen, Ben Journeys into the Bright World (Moore and Alltounian) Juliet (Tony’s assistant) Kalanick, Travis Kane, Shawn Kao, Min Karolinska Institutet Karp, Alexander Kate O’Brien’s bar Kentucky warehouse Kessler, Todd ketamine Khosrowshahi, Dara Killers, The Kingdom of Happiness, The (Groth) Kings of Leon Kleiner Perkins Knoll, Kimberly Knowledge Society Koran Kotler, Steven Krawiec, Peter Krippner, Stanley Krupitsky, Evgeny Kushner, Jared Kutcher, Ashton Lagunitas Country Club

Lambda Phi Epsilon fraternity Las Vegas. See also Downtown Project; and specific sites death of Tony and map of Oscar Goodman’s early downtown plans in Tony plans to sell his real estate in Tony’s decline and Zappos first located in suburbs of Las Vegas Arts District Las Vegas City Hall Las Vegas Knights Las Vegas Nights (film) Las Vegas Review-Journal Las Vegas Sun Las Vegas Symphony Park Las Vegas Weekly Las Vegas World Market Launchkey Laundromat bar Laundry Room bar Lawn, Mei Lawrence Memorial Hospital (New London) Lazy Stars band Learning Village Lee, Ang Lee, Eva Lee, General Tsai (maternal grandfather) Lee, Peggy (maternal grandmother) Lee, Tony Lehman Brothers LGBTQ community Life Is Beautiful financials and half sold to Wendoh Media Justin Weniger fired from Rehan Choudhry fired from Lilly, John Lim, Jenn Limitless (film) Lin, Alfred leaves Tony for Tellme Networks leaves Zappos for Sequoia LinkExchange and as Zappos COO Zappos early years and Zappos sale to Amazon and LinkExchange sold to Microsoft

Yahoo and Little Book of Ketamine, The (Kelly) Liu, Eric Liu, Ying Livestrong Lombardi, Laura Lombardi Sports Lonsdale, Joe Lopez, Janice Los Angeles Los Angeles Magazine Los Del Rio Louie, David Louie, Jen Love, Reggie “Love Shack” (song) low-income housing Lucasfilm Lucas Valley Lundberg, Johan Lux Delux Luxor hotel “Macarena” (song) Madan, Sanjay Magic Castle project Mandel, Steven Mao Zedong marijuana Marin County market-based dynamics Marley the alpaca Maroney, Steve “Steve-O” Mars, Bruno Martin, Amy Jo Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Match.com Matrix, The (film) McCabe, Jen McHale, Patricia McNamara, Holly MDMA (Ecstasy) Megan Thee Stallion Melrose Place (TV show) Mel’s Diner “metaverse” #MeToo movement

Mexico Michaud, Mike Microsoft LinkExchange bought by Miller Creek Elementary School (formerly Dixie) Miller Creek Middle School mindfulness Minogue, Kylie “Molecular Thermodynamics and High Pressure Kinetics of Polar Reactions in Solutions” (Richard Hsieh) Monster Energy girls Montana July 4 trips MontBleu Hotel (South Lake Tahoe) Mont Marin Moore, Demi Moore, Marcia Morabito, Angela Moritz, Michael Mossler, Fred Alfred Lin’s departure from Zappos and as check-and-balance for Tony death of Tony and departure from Zappos and Downtown Project and Las Vegas memorial toast to Tony and Life Is Beautiful and Mark Guadagnoli brought to Zappos by Nacho Daddy opened by Ogden building and remarriage and family and Tony’s psychotic break and travels with Tony and Zappos Holacracy campaign and Zappos launch and Zappos leadership team and Zappos sale to Amazon and Mossler, Kalei Mossler, Meghan Motel 6 (Las Vegas) Mount Everest Mount Kilimanjaro MTV multiverse Mumford and Sons Musk, Elon Musk, Kimbal Nacho Daddy

NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) Nathoo, Nadeem National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) National Drug Intelligence Center National Science Foundation National Taiwan University (NTU) Naughton, Jamie Navy SEALs NBC Necker Island Neighborhood Renewal (Clay) Neon Reverb NeoPlanet Netscape Neumann, Adam New Balance New London, death of Tony in New London Fire Department Newmark, Craig New Orleans Newsom, Gavin Newsom, Jennifer Siebel New York City New York Times, The bestseller list New York University (NYU) Nike 1999 Bar 9th Bridge School Nipton, California “Nitrous Oxide Advantage, The” (video) nitrous oxide (laughing gas; Whip-Its) Nobu Nordstrom norepinephrine NSFWCorp Oasis Motel Obama, Barack “Octopus” (poem by Tony) octopus sculpture Oehm, David Ogden building Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Mary-Kate OpenTable Oracle Orthodox Jews

Our Town (Wilder) “Over the Rainbow” (song) Oviedo, Victor Padover, David Page, Larry Pakistani immigrants Palantir Pando Daily Paris Hotel Park, Daniel Park City Andy and death of Tony and intervention attempts and welfare checks in Jewel’s visit to Tony in rehab in Tony moves to Tony’s line of credit in Tony’s psychotic break and decline in Park City Hospital Park City police Parke Davis Company Park on Fremont Parlour Bar Partovi, Ali Partovi, Hadi PayPal PCP Peake, Chris Peake, Christine Pence, Mike Pete’s Brewing Company Pezzello, Elizabeth PGA Tour Pham, Mimi Phi Lambda Upsilon pickup community Pierce, Brock Pillsbury, Skye PlanetRx Playboy Plaza Hotel Poler, Ariel polygamy-style parenting positive psychology Postmates Powder Mountain ski trip

Premsrirut, Puoy Prince Princeton University psychedelic mushrooms (psilocybin) Puerto Rico Quincy House Grille rave scene Raytheon Recano, Victoria Re/Code Reddit regression testing Reid, Harry Resort Gaming Group ResultSource return on community (ROC) return on investment (ROI) return on luck (ROL) Rinaudo, Keller Rise of Superman, The (Kotler) Robertson, Brian ROCeteer Rolling Stone Romotive (later Zipline) Roquet, Salvador Ross and Snow Rowland, Mark Rufus Du Sol Russian financial crisis “Sacco, Shelby” (pseudonym) Salesforce.com Salomon Brothers Salon SALT Conference Sanborn, Mark San Francisco San Francisco Chronicle Scaramucci, Anthony Schaefer, Scott Schleifer, Kimberly Schonfeld, Richard Scientist, The (Lilly) Seamless Sears Sequoia Capital

serotonin Shanghai Archive of Psychiatry Shanghai Mental Health Center Sherman, Jody ShoeSite. See also Zappos Shotwell, Gwynne Showtime Silicon Valley Silverstein, Craig Sinek, Simon Skau, Vernon Skechers SkyBridge Capital Slate Small Business Economics Smith, John L. Smith Center for the Performing Arts Soiled Dove event “Sometimes” (song) Sosh Soto, Jose South by Southwest (SXSW) Southern Highlands mansion Southern Oregon University South of Market district (SoMa) Southwest Airlines Soviet Union SpaceX Spears, Britney Spears, Jamie Special K. See also ketamine Spinnaker Software Stanford University Starbucks Star Trek Star Trek: The Experience Start with Why (Sinek) Stealing Fire (Kotler and Wheal) St. Louis Rams stock market crash of 2000 StockX Stone, Brad Strauss, Neil StyleTread suicides Summit conference Sundance Film Festival Super Pumped (TV show)

SV Angel Swartz, Aaron Swinmurn, Nick Swisher, Kara Taiwan Taler, Jen Tamber, Pritpal Tame Impala Tanzania TAO nightclub “Taylor, Anthony” (pseudonym) Teach for America TechCrunch Tedrow, Jillian TED Talks “Teeth” (poem by Tony) Tellme Networks Telluride, Colorado 10X scheme Terra Linda High School Tesla SUVs Theil, Peter Thoreen, Vivian Three Investigators, The (Arthur) TomorrowWorld Tony Hsieh Award “Tony Hsieh Speaks” “TOOMUCHTODONESS” (poem by Tony) Towne Terrace apartments Triumph of the City (Glaeser) Troy, Ms. Trump, Donald Trump, Ivanka Turntable Health Twitter Uber U.S. Army Research Office University of California, Berkeley University of California, Los Angeles University of California, San Francisco University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) University of Iowa University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University of Southern California USA Today bestseller list

USA Track and Field Valenzuela, Steve Valletta, Amber Vanas, Joey Vanguard bar Van Ness complex (1000 Van Ness Avenue) Vegas Seven Vegas Tech Fund Vegenation restaurant Venture for America Venture Frogs Venture Frogs Incubator Venture Frogs Restaurant Viaweb Vietnam War Virgin Wagamama Walters, Barbara Ware, Zach Warner Brothers Washington Post, The Weir, Bob Welch, Don WeLive Welker, Leslie Wells Fargo Wellth Collective Wellth Ventures Wendoh Media Weniger, Justin Wenner, Gus West, Kanye WeWork “What’s Happening to My Body?” Book for Boys, The (Madaras) Wheal, Jamie Wheeler, Jill Whip-Its. See nitrous oxide WHISKY (Warehouse Inventory System in Kentucky) “Who Will Save Your Soul” (song) Wilke, Jeff William Morris Endeavor Williams, Elissa Williams, Evan Williams, Tyler Winfrey, Oprah Winter Camp

Wired Wolfington, Ryan Women Who Work (Ivanka Trump) Woodbridge, James World War II World Wide Web Xanax XTR studio Y2K Yahoo Yale University Yang, Andrew Yang, Jerry Y Combinator Yeh, Connie Yosemite camping trip Young, Natalie Zappos Alfred Lin departs from Amazon buys Burning Man and corporate culture of customer service and death of Tony and Downtown Project and Elissa Williams discovers, in Vegas extranet created for “FAT” (Fred Mossler, Alfred Lin, and Tony) leadership team of financial crisis of 2008 and founding of, and early growth founding of, idea pitched by Nick Swinmurn Fred departs from Fred joins, as shoe guy Holacracy and Jewel’s Whole Human program for Kanye West and Las Vegas headquarters in old City Hall market-based dynamics and Mark Guadagnoli hired to train staff of meetings and Michelle D’Attilio and mini-promotions and moves to Henderson, Las Vegas suburb moves to Las Vegas downtown name created

parties and events at Simon Sinek’s message to StyleTread mimics Sundance Film Festival and Tony as CEO of Tony asks Victor Oviedo to join Tony dates employees at Tony decides to go all in on Tony hires, then lets go, brothers Andy and Dave at Tony’s drug problems and decline and Tony seen as cult leader at Tony’s resignation from Tyler informs leadership of Tony’s breakdown Tyler Williams hired by Van Ness Avenue complex and warehouse and shoe stores bought by Wells Fargo loans of 2003 and WHISKY and Zappos Insights Zappos Monopoly Zappos University Zappos yearbook ZDTV (cable channel) Zech, Ava Zhitomirskiy, Ilya Zipline (formerly Romotive) Zynga

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Angel Au-Yeung is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a former staff writer for Forbes. She was born in Hong Kong and grew up in California, the youngest of three sisters. She attended UC San Diego for undergrad as a cognitive neuroscience major and Columbia University for her graduate degree in journalism. You can sign up for email updates here.

David Jeans is an investigative reporter for Forbes, where he covers the tech industry. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School and has reported for the New York Times, the Associated Press, and other publications. He grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and lives in New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.

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WONDER BOY: TONY HSIEH, ZAPPOS, AND THE MYTH OF HAPPINESS IN SILICON VALLEY. Copyright © 2023 by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271. www.henryholt.com Cover design by Emily Mahar Cover photograph © Jake Chessum / Trunk Archive Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Au-Yeung, Angel, 1991- author. | Jeans, David, 1992- author. Title: Wonder boy : Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the myth of happiness in Silicon Valley / Angel AuYeung and David Jeans. Description: First edition. | New York : Henry Holt and Company, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005568 (print) | LCCN 2023005569 (ebook) | ISBN 9781250829092 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250829085 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hsieh, Tony. | Zappos.com (Firm) | Businessmen—United States—Biography. | Footwear industry—United States. | Clothing trade—United States. | Electronic commerce— United States. Classification: LCC HC102.5.H75 A92 2023 (print) | LCC HC102.5.H75 (ebook) | DDC 381/.45685310092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005568 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005569 e-ISBN 9781250829085 First Edition 2023 Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

CONTENTS

Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Epigraph Prologue Map 1: The Golden Child 2: Wide Awake 3: The Bet 4: LinkExchange 5: Raving 6: The Shoe Guy 7: The Trifecta 8: Delivering Happiness 9: The New Project 10: The Desert Tech Utopia 11: Life Is Beautiful 12: The Darwinian Perspective 13: Andy 14: Trouble in Paradise

15: “The Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas” 16: The Island 17: The Trailer Park 18: The Right Hand 19: Genie in a Bottle 20: Winter Camp 21: Flow State 22: The Gordian Knot 23: Sticky Notes 24: Old Friends and New 25: Who Will Save Your Soul? 26: On the Edge of the Ether-World 27: Blizzy 28: Thanksgiving 29: The Aftermath Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Notes Image Credits Index About the Authors Copyright

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For Steve Grind. Even though I dedicated my first book to him, he deserves it even more this time. —Kirsten For my mom —Katherine

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. —Albert Camus

NOTE TO READERS

Tony Hsieh’s sudden death in late November 2020 at only forty-six years of age

sent shock waves through the business community and around the world. One of America’s most beloved entrepreneurs, Tony was adored and respected for his unconventional ideas on workplace culture and happiness, which he detailed in his best-selling book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. A near billionaire, he had almost single-handedly developed downtown Las Vegas over the previous decade. He had built one of the most joyful companies on earth as chief executive officer of the shoe-selling site Zappos, now owned by Amazon. Thousands of people around the world, many of whom didn’t even know him, loved him because of his singular ability to lift people up and see the best in them. His story might have ended there, with the beautiful obituaries published in newspapers and magazines that detailed his life and accomplishments, including where we work as reporters, the Wall Street Journal. But Tony died under mysterious circumstances at a young age in a shed fire in Connecticut. Almost immediately after his death, we began hearing stories about his last year as he embarked on a new vision in a new town, Park City, Utah. He had surrounded himself with people who were taking advantage of him. We were told that alcohol and drugs had played a role in his death, but we weren’t sure how. We learned that he might have suffered from mental health issues, possibly worsened by the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, few details about the fire that had killed him were released in the weeks after his death, including why Tony was in New London, Connecticut, at all. A much bigger story needed to be unraveled.

As a result, we were faced with a challenge. On the one hand, we had a mystery: How did Tony Hsieh die? But we also had a biography, the storied career of a person who saw the world differently and encouraged others to believe in themselves, to write. And so we ended up with two intertwined stories: one about Tony Hsieh’s life and one about his death. Because this is a deeply personal story, and to differentiate from other members of the Hsieh family, we have opted to refer to Tony by his first name throughout, while we use the last names of other people who are mentioned in this book. The exception is Jewel, who is commonly referred to by her first name. Tony Hsieh moved to Park City—which he had often visited for the Sundance Film Festival—in early 2020 after leaving rehab with big plans. He wanted to boost arts in the community, support local businesses, and bring people together. It was in some ways modeled after his famous Las Vegas Downtown Project, in which he had invested $350 million in the development of a struggling part of the city. But like so many of us, he was privately struggling. He began heavily abusing drugs, exacerbating lifelong mental health issues that he had always hidden from others. He spent tens of millions of dollars in just a few months, with people around him vying for pieces of his fortune. It all caught up with him one night in a riverside house in New London, Connecticut, when a shed he was in caught fire. We have based this account on more than two hundred interviews with his close friends, employees, business associates, and others such as lawyers, doctors, consultants, and professors who interacted with him in the last year of his life and throughout his career. Some people are quoted on the record; others spoke to us anonymously. This book is also based on thousands of documents, photos, and videos. We obtained hundreds of police, local government, business, and court records— from New London, the San Francisco Bay Area, Las Vegas, and Utah. Some we received through filing Freedom of Information Act requests or from public disclosures, others from people involved in the story. Related to Tony’s last year in Park City, we viewed dozens of pictures taken of Tony’s multimillion-dollar mansion in Park City known as the Ranch, watched videos taken by those who had interacted with him, and reviewed dozens of

employees’ schedules during the summer and fall of 2020. We viewed internal communications, such as emails and text messages, between members of Tony’s inner circle. We have detailed our sourcing in full at the back of the book, including our efforts to obtain some documents that have not been released by Park City officials and responses from some of the parties involved. We have also benefited from Tony’s own book, Delivering Happiness, which he published in 2010, as well as a more recent book about Zappos in Tony’s and his employees’ own words, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work and Your Life by Putting Service First. We ask you not to assume that a person or a business that appears prominently in the narrative, or is mentioned, participated in this book, although every person and entity cited was given the opportunity to do so. Dialogue is in quotes only when it is described in a record, or when it was relayed by someone directly involved, or by someone who witnessed a particular scene. Please keep in mind that even in seemingly private moments, Tony was nearly always surrounded by multiple friends or employees. A note about Cirque Lodge, the rehabilitation facility in Utah, in particular: it was enormously generous in granting us access to its owner, therapists, and other staff. We were allowed to tour its facilities and experience its program (including a helicopter ride!). However, the employees did not breach doctorpatient confidentiality by giving us information about Tony Hsieh’s stay there or his medical condition in general, nor did they discuss any other patients who had visited the facility. Some of the scenes in this book, particularly at the end, will be hard to digest. We’re especially aware of how difficult it might be for Tony’s loved ones. This is a story of a business pioneer who pushed countless boundaries throughout his career but also suffered from addiction and mental health issues, particularly in his last year. From the very nature of his death, parts of the story will be disturbing. But at the heart of Tony’s life story is his drive to connect with people—to solve problems for others and generally make the world a kinder place in which to live—a legacy that has continued even after his death and that we hope this book will contribute to.

Know that we have chosen the descriptions of his mental, emotional, and physical states with the utmost care and that we have not included many devastating accounts and details from friends, employees, and visitors that would have only served to repeat descriptions of his condition or make the story appear salacious. What we did choose to use, we did so with the intention of showing his unfortunate decline at a time when many people around him were taking advantage of his condition. Our primary hope, however, is that through these carefully selected scenes and details, Tony’s story will serve as a warning to many others not to ignore looming mental health and addiction issues. Indeed, many of the people we spoke to for this book were understandably concerned about how Tony’s last year would ultimately reflect on his legacy as a vaunted entrepreneur and beloved CEO. We would argue that not only will that legacy remain but one of his more unexpected gifts to the world will be to serve as an example of someone who could have been saved, by himself or others, if mental health issues weren’t so stigmatized. Tony’s struggles are also emblematic of the impossible expectations, often unspoken, that we place on society’s most respected figures—those whom we look to for answers and perfection. It is our hope that his story will shine a light on these issues, possibly helping others in the process. If you or someone you know is struggling, we have included an appendix with information on mental health and substance abuse resources. Our goal in telling Tony’s story is to break the cycle of silence and isolation around these issues with the hope of destigmatizing reaching out for help when you’re struggling. People are there to help, even when it might not seem like it, and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, and Crisis Text Line, 741741, provide immediate, around-the-clock assistance. A fuller list of mental health resources can be found at the end of the book.

PROLOGUE “A FREAK ACCIDENT”

New London, Connecticut, November 18–19, 2020

Fire

Chief Thomas Curcio drove across the dark neighborhoods of New London, Connecticut, in the early morning of November 18, 2020, the crackling sound of his car scanner the only noise breaking the silence in his SUV. He had been awakened by a call to his cell phone around 3:30 a.m. by dispatch with reports of a fire and a person trapped inside a house or possibly a nearby structure. That wasn’t unusual. New London is only six square miles, with a population of about 27,000, but it is a densely populated urban area—“like someone took a slice out of New York City,” his fire marshal, Vernon Skau, likes to tell people. The small department is busy enough on most days, handling about 7,500 calls a year. A large glass cabinet at the fire station showcases pictures and artifacts from some of New London’s most memorable fires, large and small: a blown fuse at a fast-food restaurant that had charred the inside; a Samsung cell phone that had exploded. Once the largest of a string of affluent coastal towns in southeastern Connecticut, New London has been in decline since the 1980s, when the Crystal Mall opened on the outskirts of town, sucking business away from local shops on State and Bank Streets in the downtown area. A recent attempt to infuse arts into the city stalled during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Chief Curcio was born and raised in New London and has worked at its fire department since he was twenty-two. As a kid, he pretended to respond to fires using his Matchbox toy cars. He had been given the top job at the department two years earlier, at an official ceremony covered by the local newspaper. Fifty-eight now, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pleasing New England accent, Curcio knows many of New London’s residents by name and its streets by heart. The address of the fire, 500 Pequot Avenue, was only half a mile away from his house in a high-end neighborhood of New London. It was the middle of the night and freezing—about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. He was not the first to arrive. It was a serious incident, and New London’s three fire trucks, including a ladder truck, had been dispatched to the scene. Several police cars and an ambulance had also pulled up in front of a fairly large gray house, not unlike others on the residential street overlooking the water. Curcio knew its previous owner, a local doctor, but not who lived there currently. If it was a house fire, it didn’t look serious upon arrival. A thin plume of smoke rose from the backyard. The front of the house, with a sloping roof and a round attic window, appeared undamaged. Most of the lights were on, turning the property into a glowing beacon in the middle of a very dark street. Curcio stepped out of his SUV in his firefighting gear and a face mask, a department precaution during the pandemic. As he hurried across the street, he could see the ambulance crew loading a man on a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The person appeared to be alive but unconscious, with an oxygen mask strapped around his head. Curcio didn’t stop to examine him further. His job as chief was to direct the firefighters at the scene while also performing an initial evaluation of what had occurred. He went to the backyard, where several of his colleagues were gathered around a small shed attached to the house. The shed faced a rectangular pool, which was covered for the winter months, and beyond a short wall at the end of the property, Curcio knew, was the Thames River, although he couldn’t see it in the darkness. In New London, the Thames River spills into Long Island Sound.

The shed was where the man who had been pulled out had been found. He had been lying on a blanket inside, unconscious. The wooden door had been locked, and firefighters had had to pry it open with “forcible hand entry tools” to pull him out, a later fire department report said. “He’s barricaded,” one rescue worker shouted into her radio to a dispatcher. The man hadn’t been badly burned, and the fire had been put out right away. Parts of the inside still smoldered, and it was a jumble of beach chairs and long foam floaties used in pools. A propane space heater was partially charred, as was the edge of the blanket the man had been lying on. A candle had tipped over, spilling wax over a plastic ziplock bag stuffed with Post-it notes. Small metal canisters littered the ground that fire investigators later identified as cartridges of nitrous oxide, the kind you might attach to a whipped cream dispenser, known as whippets. Cigarettes were strewn around, and a pool of Tiki torch fluid had spilled onto the floor. All of those objects Curcio’s department would later describe as possible causes of the fire. Curcio moved on to the basement of the house, which was attached to the shed and could be accessed by sliding doors from the backyard. The basement could theoretically have been harmed during a fire. It was there that he saw something unusual. All of the walls of the finished room were covered in bright yellow sticky notes, a mosaic of paper squares that traveled all the way to the ceiling. Words and messages were scrawled on them, but Curcio couldn’t make out what they said. “The man must be a scientist or an engineer,” he thought to himself, “someone who lays out their thoughts on many pieces of paper, like a map.” In addition to his day job, Curcio worked part-time at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital nearby, performing stress tests on patients in the cardiology department. He would sometimes see sticky notes or other scraps of paper tacked up on meeting room walls. Soon Curcio’s phone lit up with a text message. The New London police chief, also on the scene, had sent the name of the victim to everyone else working there: Tony Hsieh. The chief speculated in his text that he might be the CEO of the online shoe retailer Zappos. Later the fire chief researched Tony more.

He found that Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) was only forty-six and had become something of a business legend through his nearly two decades at the helm of Zappos, the online shoe company now owned by Amazon. Tony was known worldwide for his radical ideas about company culture and had led a redevelopment of downtown Las Vegas, plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into the downtown area of the city and funding dozens of new companies. Early in his career, before Zappos, he had sold a startup to Microsoft during the internet boom of the 1990s, cementing his reputation as a genius entrepreneur. Later Chief Curcio would ask his wife to buy him a copy of Tony’s best-selling book, Delivering Happiness, for Christmas. The book, published in 2010, detailed Tony’s life and the company culture at Zappos, inspiring business leaders, government officials, and readers around the world. Tony’s ties to New London were unclear; the articles Curcio found all showed that Tony lived in Las Vegas but had recently been buying properties in Park City, Utah. In a later police report, one officer at the scene of the fire had also googled Tony and written the barest of details, likely from his Wikipedia page: Anthony “Tony” Hsieh was an “American Entrepreneur and venture capitalist who has a net worth of $850 million dollars. He was born in Illinois on 12-12-73 and grew up in California. He earned his Computer Science degree at Harvard University. He retired as the CEO of Zappos in August 2020, after 21 years.” The night of the fire, the firefighters and police noticed three large Mercedes passenger vans, the kind that transport celebrities to events, parked in front of the house on Pequot Avenue. In New London, where the streets are filled with more economical vehicles, they stood out. Inside one of the vans, a group of men and women sat silently, looking shaken. Curcio and his team soon learned that many of them were employees of the wealthy businessman. The fire department had split up the interviewing with the police, a standard procedure in an investigation with many witnesses. An officer spoke to one of them, Brett Gorman, who described himself as an employee of Tony’s. Gorman said he was engaged to another employee, a young woman named Elizabeth Pezzello.

When the officer asked for more information about Tony, Gorman explained that Tony had several investments in and out of the country. The officer asked him to elaborate, but he just shrugged. “Does the business have a name?” the officer prodded. “No,” Gorman replied. “Well, how does the business make money?” Gorman laughed. “I don’t mean ‘business’ in that way, as in making money,” he said. “Tony is very rich, and he is retired except for a project we have going on in Utah.” He, Pezzello, and three other employees, he told the officer, were part of Tony’s “core team.” The Mercedes vans had been waiting to take them all on a trip to Hawaii. How does an accomplished chief executive officer, one of America’s most beloved entrepreneurs, end up in a burning shed thousands of miles away from his home city of Las Vegas in the middle of a devastating pandemic? As reporters at the Wall Street Journal, we wanted to find the answer. In stories for the Journal in 2020 and 2021, we explored Tony’s struggles with alcohol and, later, drugs. We deeply examined the entourage who surrounded him in Park City, Utah, during 2020, a group of friends and employees— including his own brother—many of whom enabled Tony’s worsening drug addiction while feeding off his wealth. But we quickly realized that Tony’s path to the burning shed in New London, Connecticut, was much more complicated and heartbreaking than we had first realized. His journey had actually started years earlier, with a fundamental goal that many people can surely relate to: he wanted to be happy. His desire to achieve happiness, and especially to spread it to those around him, was so great that he staked his entire career, and his livelihood, on that goal. It was his life’s mission, and it was ultimately his downfall. At Zappos, he infused the company with a culture known for its outrageous parties, constant happy hours, and a list of values that encouraged workers to be “a little weird,” an unusual workplace renaissance he detailed in his book,

Delivering Happiness. Determined to bring joy to people who bought shoes from Zappos and those who worked for him, he believed strongly in the value of customer service and in building a workplace culture that would allow all employees to be themselves. With the line between friends and employees already blurred, Tony took his happiness goal one step further by empowering his workers to take on more responsibility in a much-watched management experiment called holacracy. This decentralized organizational theory meant that he refused to adhere to a traditional company structure or the confines of a chief executive officer role; he thought everyone should be empowered to achieve his or her own goals. In downtown Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh dedicated $350 million of his own fortune to turning the forgotten corner of the city into an urban theme park filled with brightly colored art, bars, and event venues. He wooed entrepreneurs from across the country, investing in their businesses in exchange for their moving to Vegas. He asked his friends and acquaintances, “What do you need to live up to your full potential?” and then gave them the money or time they required. He rarely directed those questions inward, in part to avoid addressing his own problems. He failed to take care of himself. Tony was endlessly generous. He never asked for anything in return. Across the tech industry, charismatic, eccentric innovators have often been exalted—lifted up and put onto unrealistic pedestals for the rest of us to admire or vilify. Tony Hsieh was no different, and he was viewed as a sort of business culture messiah, a leader who could solve all the riddles plaguing the workplace. Thousands of business owners, government officials, and academics made the pilgrimage to Zappos each year to learn from his genius. But the relentless pursuit of happiness has a darker side. Beneath his public, happiness-focused veneer, Tony struggled privately: he had undiagnosed mental health issues and facial recognition problems that he kept hidden from even some of his closest friends. Across Silicon Valley, a work-until-you-break ethos is common as superstar CEOs and founders race to build products they believe will help humanity, whether they are operating social media platforms, renting out coworking space, or selling shoes. There is no time to stop. There is no room to stumble.

Only recently has it become more accepted for high-performing people such as CEOs, celebrities, and athletes—the tennis star Naomi Osaka and the Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, for example—to admit that they need a break. There is, however, still a great stigma. Tony, despite his close friendship with the singer and songwriter Jewel, a mental health expert in her own right, refused to seek help, always believing, as many in the tech industry do, that he could somehow hack his own problems through diet or exercise or cold baths. The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting quarantine away from his closest friends took a terrible toll on him. Tony never married or had children. Always a heavy drinker—a way of life, particularly at ZapposI—Tony increased his drinking in the latter years of his life as he continued to ignore his own internal suffering in the pursuit of others’ happiness. Even in his darkest moments, he wanted to make sure that those around him felt they were loved and taken care of. Ultimately, he turned to drugs—ketamine and nitrous oxide—to help free his mind and to try to find some relief. His life reached a devastating conclusion in Park City, Utah, where he tried to build a utopian community in 2020. He wanted his loved ones, and the people of the world, to live together free of Covid-19 and achieve the lasting peace he sought. By that time, though, his mental health problems had worsened, and he suffered a series of breakdowns that could no longer be ignored. By that point in his life, though, a new entourage surrounded him, including his brother. At their best, many of these people, paid handsomely from Tony’s fortune and beholden to a man they worshipped, simply stood by as he unraveled before them. At their worst, others enabled all his most terrible instincts and drug use. By the time he locked himself into a shed in New London, Connecticut, in November 2020 at a house owned by a woman considered to be his “soul mate,” Tony was lost, a wisp of the man so many people had loved. The man peddling happiness couldn’t make himself happy. By the time his friends and family tried to save him, it was too late.

This is the story of one great and flawed entrepreneur and the long, fateful journey he took to try to make the world a better place. It is also the story of a man who struggled silently with his inner turmoil for decades, even as he was surrounded by dozens of people who loved him and, in the end, some others who didn’t. More than anything, it is the story of the great desire in all of us to find happiness, and bring happiness to others, at any cost. Two days after the shed fire in late November 2020, a neighbor, Patricia Richardson, was at her house in New London, which shared a side yard with the site of the shed fire, 500 Pequot Avenue. The former publisher of the local newspaper, The Day, Richardson didn’t know her neighbors well, since they were almost never home. When she did see them, they seemed nice, and polite. A group of them had moved in that September of 2020, but the house appeared to be owned by just one of them, Rachael Brown, whom Richardson had greeted on several occasions. Brown was a middle-aged woman, friendly enough, with light brown hair that looked like it had been dyed blonde. One day in the fall of 2020, Richardson had looked down into her side yard to find a small lavender metal canister that fit into the palm of her hand. She had no idea what it was and, after examining it a little, had thrown it away. By that time, she had heard about Tony Hsieh and knew he was somehow affiliated with the property. She’d looked him up but had never seen him. The house at 500 Pequot Avenue stood empty for weeks at a time, and when Brown was home, she was usually with a small group of people. They were generally quiet, but one time in the fall of 2020 the neighbors were treated to an unusual spectacle. Spotlights were set up on the side of the house, and a wrestling ring was assembled. A group of people came out dressed in costume, including the actor David Arquette. Arquette is a former professional wrestler and a friend of Tony’s, but the neighbors didn’t know that. On the night of the fire in late November 2020, Richardson woke up to the sound of several people screaming outside. “Tony!” she heard the people yell.

“Tony!” She rushed to open her sliding glass door and looked over her balcony, from which she could see Brown’s backyard. A woman was on the neighbor’s balcony, pacing and yelling “1014!” over and over. Richardson later learned that it was the code to the nearby pool shed. Below, she saw two men clawing desperately at the door of the shed, which appeared to be locked. An alarm blared. Richardson couldn’t figure out what was going on until she heard one of the neighbors yell something about a fire. She immediately ran back inside and called the police. Later she watched from her yard as thick smoke poured from the shed. It smelled acrid, like an electrical fire. Across the fence the next morning, she saw one of the neighbors, a man named Anthony Hebert who visited there sometimes with Brown. There was a memorial on their side of the fence, a tacky, brightly colored thing that appeared to be marking a small grave. The memorial included a stack of white rocks, a bird feeder, two Tiki torches, and plastic flowers arranged over an arch. Hebert greeted her and explained, “Rachael’s dog died. It was really old and blind and sick, and she’s really upset. “And now her friend…” he trailed off. Richardson told him she had called the police the night before and said she hoped their friend would be okay. The details of who had been pulled from the shed had not yet made national news. Soon reporters from all over the country would be stationed on the residential street, and Richardson would be followed by camera drones as she walked down the beach. “It was a freak accident,” Hebert acknowledged, “but he’s young. He’s going to be okay. “It was really just a freak accident.” I. Zappos has a drug- and alcohol-use policy that prohibits illegal drug use in the workplace and requires that any alcohol consumption at company offices or at work-related events be done responsibly.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE “A VERY OPTIMISTIC, INNOCENT TIME”

Park City, Utah, February 2020–March 2020 San Francisco, California, 1995–1998

My role is about unleashing what people already have inside them. That is maybe suppressed in most work environments. —Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh was free.

He pushed through a set of double glass doors, pulling a suitcase with several changes of clothes, cell phone in hand. His eyes were clearer than they had been in weeks, and his face looked fuller. His black hair, which he had recently shaved off completely, had grown back into little spikes. He already needed a haircut. Tony paid little attention to the majesty of his surroundings as he hurried to a Mercedes van waiting in the sprawling parking lot. Directly in front of him towered the Provo Peaks, a set of mountains in Utah’s Wasatch Range, only miles away. To his left was what the locals called the “Wasatch front” side of Mount Timpanogos, one of the largest mountains in the range. On the “Wasatch back” side of the mountain, out of Tony’s view, was the Cascade Cirque. Even at a distance, the Cirque, a glacier-carved amphitheater, is recognizable by the dark, jagged slashes across its white surface, as if a tiger had run its claw horizontally across the snow. It was the end of February, and a light snow was falling. Earlier in the month, there had been several blizzards in the area, and snow from those storms was still

piled high in some corners of the parking lot. The drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in the town of Orem, Utah, that Tony had just left was named for the glacier—Cirque Lodge—and Tony would have seen plenty of the surrounding area during his stay. The facility, known as “the studio,” because of its affiliation with the Osmonds singing band in the 1970s, has a panoramic view of the mountain range through large windows in its dining room and common areas, and winding hallways that resemble dorm rooms. Cirque Lodge charges most patients $38,700 a month to stay in the studio, typical for a celebrity facility. Cirque Lodge was founded in 1999 by Richard Losee, a devout Mormon whose background was in the beauty and jewelry industries. After watching a relative deal with drug addiction without the right mix of treatment options, Losee made a life-altering decision to change the plans for a wellness center he had been planning to build in the mountains. Instead, he turned it into a rehabilitation clinic. He has since turned down several offers from private equity firms to purchase it. Losee, who keeps an office at the studio location, is known by clients for his quiet kindness and flexibility. Despite its reputation as a facility for the rich and famous, Cirque Lodge routinely cuts its prices for clients who can’t afford it, and many staff members have worked there nearly since it was founded. Others have been addicts themselves or watched loved ones suffer. Because of his stature, Tony would normally have been staying at Cirque’s smaller, more private facility, a mountain chalet known as “the lodge,” about a twenty-minute drive away, hidden at the top of an unmarked driveway in the mountains near Sundance, Utah. The treatment plan is about the same, but the rooms are private and guests are allowed more access to phones and computers. The monthly cost is also higher, about $64,000 a month. Big-name former clients such as Lindsay Lohan and Kirsten Dunst typically preferred to stay at the more intimate lodge facility because of its privacy and because it looks more like a cabin retreat. Never more than sixteen clients are in residence at any one time. But Tony stayed at the studio location, which resembled dorm rooms, instead so that he could quickly adapt to his preferred habitat—with a lot of people around him.

He did not want to stay at either location—or any facility at all, for that matter. But his friends had insisted. By the end of 2019, Tony had begun acting erratically. He had always been a heavy drinker—his cologne was the smell of his favorite drink, the Italian liqueur Fernet-Branca, his friends liked to joke—but he had begun experimenting with more drugs as well. He had started taking ketamine, a drug used medically as an anesthetic that can cause hallucinations, but also thought to help with inspiration and creativity. The practice had been encouraged by a shaman, a religious leader believed to fall into a trancelike state to communicate with the spirit world. Tony told his friends that the shaman was taking him on trips into the desert. Usually Tony reserved his drug use for his annual trip to the Burning Man art and music festival in the Nevada desert, one of his favorite events. His strange behavior started becoming noticeable at Zappos, where he had been CEO for two decades, veering from his standard silliness to downright puzzling. Working on his acres of new development plans, Tony was talking a lot, all the time, about outlandish ideas and plans as he walked around downtown Las Vegas. Usually reserved, he was even chatting to strangers, who didn’t know him and would stare curiously at him on the street. His friends really began to worry in January 2020, after he decided to throw one of his close friends, Ryan Doherty, a surprise party. Doherty, a clean-cut Boston native, is a longtime, well-known bar owner in Las Vegas. One of his most popular bars in the downtown area, Commonwealth, has a secret speakeasy tucked inside the back. Called the Laundry Room, the small brickwalled room has plush brown couches, small tables, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling near the wooden wraparound bar, and framed black-and-white portraits lining the walls. Tony had spent his life throwing parties for his friends, often with themes. And this time he wanted to give the entire parking lot where he lived in an Airstream trailer with a dozen other Airstreams and a scattering of tiny, wooden homes the same old-timey feel of a speakeasy in honor of Doherty. He wanted to somehow recreate the feeling Doherty gave others when they walked into his popular bar. So his plans weren’t unusual. But the entire night seemed off-kilter.

The party started in downtown Las Vegas. Someone picked up Doherty, blindfolded him, and handed him a cold package wrapped in paper, instructing him to hold it. He was then placed in a car that sped around the city, so he wouldn’t know where he was going. Doherty needed to brace himself in the car during the crazy drive, so he stuffed the package awkwardly down his shirt. He knew the Airstream park where Tony lived, but when the car pulled up and his blindfold lifted, he found a maze of sheets and makeshift walls, an experience that someone later explained had been aimed at “sensory deprivation.” In the twenty-four hours spent constructing the party, Tony had dispatched friends to Doherty’s speakeasy to borrow some of the furniture, arranging it in front of the Airstream trailers. The cold package Doherty carried was a bundle of raw fresh fish. He was expected to hand the fish to a waiting chef, who would cook it for the group’s dinner. Its significance was unclear. Attendees, most of them wearing white, speculated that it must be Doherty’s birthday for Tony to plan such an elaborate celebration. It wasn’t. His friends were confused, with the night not coming together fully and Tony acting strangely, and they tried to make sense of what was unfolding. Perhaps Tony was trying to create his own version of the Jejune Institute, an underground alternative universe in which players complete tasks based on a made-up story line that an artist invented in San Francisco. “A fake protest, drawing 250 people, was enacted for a ‘minichapter,’ created to delight hardcore gamers,” the New York Times wrote about the experience in 2012. Tony had recently discussed a vision of an immersive, real-life “game” experience in downtown Las Vegas like the one organized in San Francisco years earlier, and maybe, they thought, they were living through a trial run. The party became one of the incidents that ultimately convinced Tony’s friends that he might need help. Soon after, several of them began to broach the subject of Tony going to rehab. Talking him into something, however, always required careful framing, especially about more delicate issues. Some of his friends came on too strong, telling him that he was an addict or that he had a problem. Doherty, who knew Tony well, took another tack, persuading him in an hours-long conversation that if he went to rehab by his own choice, he could

control the narrative. He wouldn’t want Zappos to discover that something was wrong and then force him to go, Doherty argued. Doherty had prepared for the conversation, having researched the best rehab facilities in the country. He ultimately landed on Cirque Lodge, chosen in part because Tony loved the area. Almost every year he and his group traveled to the annual Sundance Film Festival, and they typically stayed in a rental in Park City, Utah. Tony was actually in the process of buying a property there in the winter of 2020 for vacation use, a wood-frame house across from the ski resort on Empire Avenue. It provided a cover for him to be out of town. Of utmost importance was keeping it quiet. Tony was a business celebrity, and Las Vegas was insular; word could spread quickly. No one wanted executives at Amazon, which had bought Zappos in 2009, to find out. Zappos operated largely autonomously from Amazon, but the parent company was likely to get involved if the company discovered that Tony had a drug problem. If anyone in Las Vegas asked, they were told that Tony and Doherty were visiting the new vacation property, getting it ready for visitors. The Sundance Film Festival would also have just ended, and parties sometimes continued in the days after. The program at Cirque Lodge seemed perfect for Tony. It is “experiential,” relying on various activities throughout the day to help treat patients. Its facility in the town of Orem, Utah, about an hour from Park City, has a state-of-the art ropes course housed in a 17,000-square-foot room that also features an indoor rock-climbing area and storage closets packed with outdoor gear. A recording studio featuring musical instruments and equipment that would make any professional band jealous is on hand for music therapy. In the summer, Cirque Lodge employees lead clients on hikes through the rising rock walls of nearby Provo Canyon, often taking the 1.5-mile trail to Bridal Veil Falls, a two-tiered waterfall gushing from the rocks. They go rafting and tubing down the Provo River. In the winter, they snowshoe. Most clients participate in equine therapy with a skilled, long-standing staff member, Dave Beck, an intense man with piercing blue eyes who is himself a recovering alcoholic. At indoor and outdoor staging areas, Beck teaches patients how to issue commands to the horses, trying to get them to trot in a circle around the client or change the direction in which they are walking. It is a challenge, even for people used to animals, so Beck hopes

to break through patients’ egos so they will ask for help when they are struggling. That is a skill he is hoping they will take back to the real world. Though the program at Cirque Lodge employs the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, among other traditional therapies, Beck and Losee early on introduced experiential therapies as a way to get clients distracted and perhaps interested in another activity besides their addiction. This awakening to something new is what Beck refers to as an “internal spiritual experience,” one of the main steps in the AA manual. “This is a very simple program,” said Beck, as he picked up his own manual, which was falling apart and duct taped in some places. “It’s very difficult to execute.” Tony agreed to go to Cirque Lodge after Doherty spoke to him and left Las Vegas in a private jet. When Doherty had broached the topic with Tony, much of their conversation had involved Tony negotiating his length of stay at Cirque Lodge, refusing to go for the full thirty days that is common in most addiction programs today. It is very rare for a client to stay at Cirque Lodge less than a month. Usually it takes a week or ten days just to become adjusted to the daily schedule and acknowledge the need for help. Some centers now promote stays as long as three months. “The longer someone stays, the more likely their chances are of staying sober,” Losee said later. Tony agreed to two weeks total. On day thirteen, he left. Though there is a small front desk, there is no security, only a reception desk. Clients can leave at any time. As he walked out, Tony climbed into the waiting Mercedes Sprinter van in the parking lot, and it drove through a pair of wrought-iron gates and away from the treatment facility. It wasn’t the first time Tony had left somewhere important early. In 1995, he sat at a desk in a row of other desks in a large room full of rows of desks at the database management giant Oracle Corporation. He had just graduated from Harvard University with a degree in computer science. Oracle had hired him for a software engineering position, even though Tony didn’t really know what the job entailed.

He was twenty-two, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, with a penchant for playing pranks, programming computers, and eating at Taco Bell. He wore his black hair shaggy, and it crept down the back of his neck. He looked no older than fifteen. Oracle’s business is not exciting; it helps companies around the world manage information. But it is one of the founding companies of Silicon Valley, and its chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, remains well regarded as one of the area’s original tech founders. When Tony arrived almost two decades after its 1970s founding, Oracle, located in the small South Bay community of Redwood City, was one of the Valley’s greatest success stories. Its custom-built headquarters spanned several multistory green glass towers that half circled a small lake. Employees called it “Larry’s Lagoon.” Oracle had gone public in 1986 and was bringing in more than $2 billion in revenue each year. The $40,000 salary that Oracle offered Tony straight out of college seemed like a staggering amount at the time. He had been raised in nearby Marin, California, just north of San Francisco, so he would be returning home, sort of, and definitely to warmer weather than in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had spent the last four years of undergrad. Tony was one of hundreds of software engineers at Oracle, and he quickly became bored. His parents, Richard and Judy, a chemical engineer and a psychologist, had imposed intense structure and discipline on his life and that of his two younger brothers, Andy and Dave, while they were growing up. As a result, Tony hated monotony and routine. He had gone to Harvard for his parents’ sake, but what he really wanted to do was start his own business. He wanted to make money, not because he needed it—his family had always lived comfortably—but because he wanted to build something that would deliver freedom from having to worry about the cost of anything. He didn’t have expensive tastes; he preferred jeans and a T-shirt over any other outfit and was happy sharing a rental with his roommate, Sanjay Madan, who also had graduated from Harvard and taken a job at Oracle. Madan was an ultrasmart computer programmer of Indian descent who, improbably, spoke less than Tony did.

Tony learned that at Oracle, no one was tracking his time in the office. He came in late and left early, taking an hour-long nap break during the day at his apartment nearby. He waited it out a few months and then quit. Madan also left his job at Oracle. Together the two planned to design company websites, a venture Tony’s parents did not support. Richard Hsieh told him frankly, “It didn’t really sound like that could ever become a big enough business to be meaningful.” Back then, the internet was in its infancy, a novelty called the World Wide Web—which helps explain why Richard Hsieh was doubtful about his son’s new career path. In 1995, only about 3 percent of the US population had ever signed on to the Web. Yahoo! had launched the previous year, and Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon all got their start as Tony was thinking about a web business. Oracle became one of the first software companies to design a strategy for the internet. It was a defining moment for Silicon Valley, a feeling in the air that people there were on the verge of something big, a small quivering that was about to turn into an earthquake. “It was all brand new to everyone,” recalled Alan Shusterman, one of the founding team members in the business Tony would start at the time, LinkExchange, and the director of product management. “It was like ‘Oh, my God, I could have my website visited by people all over the world! I can sell golf balls or anything I want online!’ It was a very optimistic, innocent time.” In August 1995, the web browser Netscape went public, with shares priced at $28 each. Demand for the stock was so high that the opening of trading was delayed by almost two hours. It closed at $58 a share that day. The frenzy set off what would later be described as a gold rush, a flood of money set to spill into the coffers of startups across the region. “Until then, Silicon Valley was just a place where microchips were made, not the fountainhead of global commerce,” the business magazine Fortune wrote a decade later. Tony and Madan had an idea for how to revolutionize internet advertising. The industry was burgeoning at the time, and few companies allocated any of their advertising budget to websites. Most of the money still went to traditional media such as television, radio, and print. When they did advertise online,

companies purchased banner ads, usually directly from the website where they wanted to advertise. The banner ads were cartoonish and clunky; the first one had launched in 1994 on HotWired with faded white text on a black background: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? → YOU WILL.” Tony and Madan came up with an idea for a collective advertising system, one that would lower the barrier to entry for smaller websites especially. It worked like this: any business could join the network for free and insert a code on its own website; banner ads from a variety of other businesses would then start showing up. The website would earn half a credit for every ad it displayed. The credits would rack up, and then the website could use them to purchase its own advertising banners on other sites in the network. Tony and Madan called the business LinkExchange. (LinkExchange kept about half of the advertising from its member businesses and sold it for a profit to larger companies. Members could also purchase advertising.) LinkExchange grew much faster than Tony and Madan had anticipated. After only a few months, they had tens of thousands of customers. After six months, they had fielded their first purchase offer from a private investor, for $1 million. They turned it down. LinkExchange was growing so rapidly that it seemed like a bad idea to sell so quickly. By 1997, LinkExchange had about fifty employees and had moved out of the cramped San Mateo apartment that Tony and Madan shared where it had been housed for almost a year. Now employees worked from two floors of a nondescript brick building in an area of San Francisco that was less than desirable at the time, the South of Market neighborhood known as SoMa. A sign in the lobby of the building warned tenants that it was not earthquake safe. Rather than pay for desks, which were expensive, Tony and Madan bought dozens of doors that came with holes for doorknobs from a local hardware store. Computers sat on the wooden doors, which rested on concrete blocks and sawhorses, their power cords snaking through the doorknob holes and into wall outlets. Underneath the desks, Tony and most of the other employees kept sleeping bags. They often worked late into the night, crashing on the floor afterward only to start over in the morning. Internet advertising had taken off, and

LinkExchange had fierce competitors, including its biggest one, DoubleClick, which would be acquired about a decade later by Google. When an important World Wide Web conference, Internet World ’97, was held in Los Angeles, LinkExchange couldn’t afford to pay for flights, admission, and the cost of an entire booth. But the conference was an important chance for startups to be noticed and promote themselves—Microsoft was introducing its next web browser, Internet Explorer 4.0, and AOL was showing off its latest software, Casablanca. Tony wanted to be there, so he rented a Winnebago, nicknamed it “Web-a-bago,” and drove a small group of employees the six hours to Los Angeles. He parked the RV, littered with junk food, guitars, and pagers, at a prime spot at the conference. He draped a banner with the LinkExchange logo across the front, a much lower-quality version of a booth than the nearby flashy digs of AltaVista, a new web search engine. The LinkExchange executives sent an email blast to their customers, telling them that they would get a free T-shirt if they showed up at the “booth” by noon on the day of the conference. Soon dozens of people were lined up and then walked through the conference venue wearing bright blue shirts with LinkExchange’s logo, far outpacing the impact of the more upscale booths. Tony had brought in two more recent Harvard graduates: his former college classmate Alfred Lin and the identical twin brother of an Iranian-American friend, Ali Partovi, to help with the business. Lin, whose parents had also immigrated from Taiwan, had met Tony at Harvard when Tony had devised a scheme to sell slices of pizza to his classmates, buying and installing a pizza oven in a campus hangout area. The way Tony remembered it and later described it in Delivering Happiness, Lin had one-upped him by buying whole pizzas and reselling slices to other students at a higher price. Though Lin wasn’t trying to make money off his roommates, he found that when he charged $1.25 or $1.50 per slice, his customers gave him $2 anyway. No one wanted to give up the precious quarters needed for laundry, vending machines, and arcade games. He and Tony would joke about Lin’s apparent pizza arbitrage. However it happened, the move impressed Tony, forever endearing Lin to him. The pizza story became their origin story. They shared a similar upbringing, both having been raised by strict parents who had high expectations

for their sons. In their early years in business, they also shared a feeling of not always fitting in at the party and hated being onstage to make presentations before both grew into business leaders with big successes. Tony didn’t know Partovi well, but his identical twin brother, Hadi, had been on the Harvard computer programming team with Tony. They had competed together at a renowned worldwide coding competition in 1994. Ali Partovi, Tony joked, was basically Hadi’s stunt double. Ali Partovi, who was also twenty-three at the time, helped Tony with aspects of management that didn’t suit him. LinkExchange was so small that Tony was essentially a co-CEO with all his other business partners: no one really held the formal title. Tony preferred it that way. He didn’t like bureaucracy and had chafed at the company structures set up by Oracle. At LinkExchange’s monthly all-hands meetings, Partovi would often handle the speaking, while Tony might say something brief and then step to the side. A San Francisco Focus magazine article on startup culture at the time referred repeatedly to Tony and his partners as “the kids,” and the reporter described how Tony, in his T-shirt and running shoes, “stares ahead, looking bored.” Partovi, by comparison, was a “chatterbox,” the article reported. In one-on-one meetings with employees, Tony sometimes never spoke. He sat silently, absorbing what the other person was saying. Some employees were disarmed by this and sat awkwardly waiting, while others kept talking to fill the silence. “It was the ultimate Socratic method,” observed Scott Laughlin, who headed up LinkExchange’s sales department at the time. “He would look at you until you asked all the questions you should have asked yourself. He didn’t like to hear himself talk.” Laughlin, who had moved over to LinkExchange after working at a popular Web magazine, recalled a meeting he had had with Tony and LinkExchange’s engineering director. In the meeting, Laughlin and the engineering director explained to Tony that some customers were unhappy with an aspect of the website—they couldn’t easily find the types of businesses where they wanted to place their own ads. But fixing the problem would require a massive overhaul of the website. Tony remained mostly quiet as the two detailed the problem, and the meeting ended without a solution.

The next morning, Laughlin woke up to a one-sentence email from Tony: “Is this better?” with a link to the LinkExchange website. Tony had spent the whole night since the meeting rewriting code so that the issue was fixed. He had done it himself, rather than assign it to someone else. “I was swayed by your argument,” he told Laughlin. There was a playfulness about Tony, a wry wit that shined through even when he wasn’t talking much. Despite his awkwardness, he had the ability to connect with people in a way that others didn’t, mostly because he truly seemed to care about everyone around him. It was clear that he thought about the world in an unusual way, with an almost childlike enthusiasm. “If you’re looking at a model of something, he would go off to the side and look at it at a twenty-degree angle because he saw the contours differently,” said Shusterman. “He would say these things all the time that were just really remarkable insights.” Tony once decided to take a road trip across the country to talk to other companies about advertising—itself an extraordinary move for a young startup founder. After he returned, he sent off a detailed email to the LinkExchange team with his predictions about how the advertising industry would change over the next decade, including how companies would want more control over their advertising by managing their own in-house platforms, a seemingly unlikely trend at the time. All of Tony’s predictions ultimately came true, Shusterman recalled later. At a time when workplace culture looked more like The Office or Dilbert, Tony instituted silliness. He hazed new employees, customers, and even prospective business partners. Shusterman was deputized as the “pledgemaster,” in charge of planning whatever zaniness might occur. Ahead of one companywide meeting, Shusterman asked Tony what was on the agenda from the executive team. “Oh, we have nothing,” Tony replied. The meeting was being held strictly to make the new employees dress up in business suits and do push-ups and jumping jacks in front of everyone else. Though it might sound harsh to some and could have been under a different CEO, Tony encouraged LinkExchange

employees to have fun and laugh at themselves, as opposed to a suit-and-tie culture of seriousness and business metrics. Tony came up with an unusual low-cost marketing strategy, dispatching his team to email thousands of customers, asking them to display the LinkExchange logo in an unusual way and then mail in a picture of it. Within weeks, the company was overwhelmed with postcards. One customer was shown walking through a mall holding a large, homemade LinkExchange sign; another mowed the logo onto his suburban lawn. One man had shaved it into his hair, another had painted it across his pet snake. The photos covered an entire wall of LinkExchange’s San Francisco office and frequently delighted visitors and job candidates. Ultimately Tony helped create a loyal, devoted customer base not unlike the fans of Steve Jobs’s Apple products. Tony and Partovi—who was much more anxious than Tony, even in his early twenties—one day discussed LinkExchange’s customer service department. Typically companies don’t like to focus on customer service because it doesn’t make money and in fact usually drains money because of the cost of employing people to answer phones and emails of existing customers. Partovi was brainstorming ways that LinkExchange could automate aspects of customer service to keep costs from ballooning as the business continued to grow. Tony thought about it and then challenged Partovi: “What if instead of controlling customer service costs, we just paid the employees more?” Tony theorized that if the division was handled well, it would translate to good marketing for LinkExchange. He also seemed to genuinely care about the people working in the department. The strategy worked. Sometimes Tony’s ideas didn’t translate to the real world, though, and it was up to Partovi and Lin to rein in his most outlandish schemes. “He had an extremely positive, creative energy,” Partovi said later. “There had to be a counterbalance to temper that.” Soon Jerry Yang, a cofounder of Yahoo!, came calling, interested not in investing in but in possibly buying LinkExchange. At the time, Yang was a legend, the Mark Zuckerberg, before the tech backlash, of his day. Yang had cofounded Yahoo! with a colleague, David Filo, in 1994 while a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford, and the company’s success had been rapid,

attracting many big-name investors. Named for Gulliver’s Travels—a “yahoo” is an uncouth and uncivilized being, a description that attracted Yang and Filo— Yahoo! tried to list websites for users in a directory format. It later became one of the first internet search engines. Yang wanted to buy LinkExchange for $20 million, a massive amount in the 1990s that would give Tony and his executive team the gift of financial independence at a very young age. Yang invited Tony and Partovi to Yahoo!’s small office in Sunnyvale to discuss a potential deal. For days leading up to the meeting, Partovi felt stressed. He wanted to talk about it constantly, weighing the pros and cons of selling versus growing more. Tony, in contrast, seemed unconcerned and not at all focused on the coming meeting. He continued addressing day-to-day issues at LinkExchange that seemed trivial in the context of the potential windfall at stake. When they met Yang, Tony smiled and shook his hand. “Hey, I heard you just got married—congratulations,” he said warmly. Yang had indeed just married a Costa Rican woman he had met in Japan. Immediately the tension in the room dissipated, and Partovi marveled at his twenty-four-year-old friend. “His ability to think about the other person and connect at a human level was amazing,” Partovi said later. The group debated selling to Yahoo! but ultimately decided against it. Again, LinkExchange’s rapid growth convinced them to hang on, although a second deal months later for five times as much nearly came together before Yahoo! got cold feet. After Tony and Madan turned down Yahoo!’s first offer, they drew the attention of Michael Moritz, a forty-two-year-old Welsh former journalist turned venture capitalist, who was a Yahoo! investor and aware of the company’s courting of LinkExchange. Moritz was among the best-known Silicon Valley investors, representing Sequoia Capital. His reputation would only grow due to his then-recent investment in Yahoo! and his early, prescient bet on Google. Meanwhile, Sequoia’s stature also increased, and it became one of the most sought-after venture capital firms by startups. Moritz invested $3 million in LinkExchange and was forced by Tony to awkwardly perform the macarena in front of employees.

LinkExchange continued to grow, and around it, San Francisco was going through a renaissance. Raves had become part of the culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s, starting with meetups after dark hosted by bands with names such as Wicked that grew a cult following. Sometimes parties took place under the Golden Gate Bridge, along the wild, unpopulated shoreline of Baker Beach, and then moved to repurposed garages and underground clubs in the city’s iconic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. In the earliest meetups on Baker Beach, attendees constructed a giant statue of a person using driftwood that had washed up along the rocks. They then lit it on fire, creating a “burning man,” the genesis of the art and music festival that would later gain popularity after it moved to the Nevada desert. Before the days of group invitations on social media, ravers joined secret listservs, calling a phone number the day before to figure out the location. Much like the 1970s-era hippies before them, the ravers were a community, and they operated under the acronym PLUR—Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. Many of them wore bright-colored necklaces, shirts, or backpacks, but there was no real dress code. Tony was skeptical of raves, even though he was slowly realizing how much he valued his close friends and having a group of them around all the time. He liked to throw parties, in large part because he wanted to make his friends happy and observe them as they enjoyed a well-planned get-together. At parties, he could also usually avoid one-on-one conversations. One night, he tagged along with his friends to a rave. They drove outside of the city to a warehouse with nothing else around it, except for hundreds of cars parked outside. The warehouse was massive, “the size of ten football fields,” Tony later wrote in Delivering Happiness. Green laser beams crisscrossed the crowd, and a machine churned fog into the cavernous space. Ultraviolet lights stationed around the warehouse caused the decorations on the wall to light up, giving the room an eerie glow. Not a fan of techno music—the backbone of raves—Tony didn’t understand the draw of the constant, repetitive thumping with no words. But then he entered the warehouse and, unlike in a typical nightclub, where people dance in small groups, often facing each other, here everyone moved at the same pace,

bouncing up and down, looking toward the DJ. Tony was struck by an inexplicable feeling of awe and was greatly moved by the scene. “As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational person in a group, I was surprised to feel myself swept with an overwhelming sense of spirituality—not in the religious sense, but a sense of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the universe,” he later wrote. “It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness, the same way a flock of birds might seem like a single entity instead of a collection of individual birds. Everyone in the warehouse had a shared purpose. We were all contributors to the collective rave experience.” He would spend the rest of his life chasing that feeling and trying to recreate what he called a “tribe” wherever he went. At raves, he also discovered ecstasy, a staple of the culture, and enjoyed the intense feeling of happiness and energy that spread through him after he placed the small round pill on his tongue. He’d usually add to the mix with vodka— Grey Goose was his favorite brand—straight or with soda. His friends noticed that drinking made him more confident and less shy, a feeling he seemed to crave. At LinkExchange, Tony supported Partovi and Shusterman when they organized a social club called DrinkExchange, open to anyone in San Francisco. The club held events at local bars, usually once a month, with operating rules similar to those of LinkExchange: attendees were asked to buy two drinks and give them away to two people they didn’t know, and then they would theoretically receive drinks back the same way. Hundreds of people showed up. One clunky online invitation read, “We’re hoping to build THE definitive social event for Wuppies (Web Yuppies), and we need YOUR attendance to get us there. Make sure you come and buy somebody a drink! Invite as many Internet-savvy people as you’d like, but make sure to tell them about the important DrinkExchange model.” At LinkExchange, the culture was souring. Tony, Madan, and Partovi had operated as a three-pronged chief executive officer team for most of the company’s existence. But LinkExchange had grown too large to sustain that unusual approach. Moritz stepped in to run it temporarily, but then the group hired an outsider, Mark Bozzini, the former CEO of Pete’s Brewing Company.

Bozzini, who had no real internet experience, brought in senior executives, and the group did not mesh well with the younger team. Bozzini and his team planned to take LinkExchange public, but a financial crisis in Russia suddenly triggered a temporary shutdown of the public market in the United States. Instead, LinkExchange began looking for buyers. The LinkExchange team found itself in a bidding war between Netscape and Microsoft, sparked in part by Partovi’s twin brother, Hadi. Hadi worked at Microsoft and told then president Steve Ballmer, “I haven’t talked to you about my brother’s company before, but they’re about to get acquired, and I’ve spent the last five years competing with Netscape.” Microsoft won the bid. The Seattle-based software behemoth, at the time the “evil giant” among tech companies, paid $265 million, more than ten times Yahoo!’s offer only a year earlier. In the local San Jose Mercury News, a story about the deal ran on the front page, packaged next to the day’s events in the government’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. Tony was only twenty-four, part of the first crop of startup superstars who helped create the myth of the fortune to be found in Silicon Valley. “Against the backdrop of a booming economy, capital aplenty and the wide open frontiers of technology, a new generation of entrepreneurs are utterly prepared to amass their fortunes under their own steam,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2000, describing Tony and other entrepreneurs’ good fortune. Startups that sold themselves or went public during those two years were affectionately called 98ers and 99ers, a reference to the wildly successful 48ers and 49ers during the Gold Rush. eBay, the online auction site, went public a few months before LinkExchange was sold in 1998, priced at the top of its range (and breaking the earlier IPO dry spell that had dissuaded LinkExchange from going public). “The 98ers cleaned up in the same way that the 48ers did,” said David A. Kirsch, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, in an interview. Kirsch had once maintained a giant database of Silicon Valley startup failures in the 1990s. Tony earned $32 million from the LinkExchange sale. He would have earned 20 percent more if he had stuck to an agreement with Microsoft to stay with the

company for a year. But Tony no longer liked the culture, even though LinkExchange had of course hazed Ballmer and his deputies after the sale, making them don silly clothes and dance. He found Microsoft to be much more political, and more formal. Tony dreaded getting up in the morning to go to work. He quit a few weeks after the deal was signed.

CHAPTER TWO TREASURE MOUNTAIN

Park City, February 2020–April 2020 San Francisco and Las Vegas, 1998–2008

To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. —Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

In the 1950s, Park City nearly disappeared.

Today, the town is nestled among ski slopes and rustic mansions carved high into the craggy Wasatch mountain rocks. Cross-country skiers glide across snowy paths that become biking routes lined with wildflowers in summertime. Ski lifts ferry vacationers up the tree-lined mountainside, where Wild West miners once dug for silver in the hope of becoming rich. The town sits a thirtyminute drive east—and roughly three thousand feet above—its neighbor Salt Lake City. Its roots, like those of other Western towns, go back to mining days after precious metals were discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1898, the town was home to about 7,500 residents. Park City survived big fires and catastrophic mine collapses, but the late 1940s and 1950s brought an economic crisis after metal prices plummeted. Mines closed and thousands of people left, while Main Street businesses were boarded up. Park City appeared in a guidebook of Western ghost towns, even though 1,150 people still lived there.

When a mining company decided to convert its cableways used for carrying silver ore to ferry skiers and tourists instead, Park City was set on a new course in history. The Treasure Mountain ski resort opened in 1963; it later became Park City Mountain Resort. Now about 8,400 people live in town. The snowy months are the lifeblood of local businesses that cater to wealthy second homers and vacationers. In January, the Sundance Film Festival takes over the town. More than 100,000 people attend over the eleven-day festival of movie screenings. Hollywood stars walk the press line at the Park City High School auditorium. At the bottom of the ski slopes, tourists and locals stroll through Old Town, rows of quaint buildings that hint at the town’s origins as a mining camp. Now family-owned restaurants, bars, and shops line Main Street. This American West charm resides uneasily with the Park City area’s current booming industry: highdollar real estate. Stacks of luxury modernist homes and towering resorts have been carved into the mountainsides. Meanwhile, pricey fur shops, yoga clothing chains, and art galleries have cropped up alongside the family-owned businesses. The arrivals have aggravated locals, who dislike the image of Park City as a playground of the wealthy. “We look shiny when you see us in a Sundance story or some stupid Entertainment Weekly story,” said one longtime resident, Teri Orr. “We’re not based on shiny. We’re based on being outdoors. We’re based on being good neighbors. We’re based in disproportionately caring about our small town, if you read letters to the editor in the paper. We’re passionate.” Orr moved to Park City in 1979 with her two children to escape a bad marriage in Tahoe City, California. She had only $10,000 and no college degree when she arrived. “This was our second-chance place,” she said. In Park City, “we all kind of screwed up, whether it was divorce or a business, and for some people, it was meant to be a Band-Aid.” She worked for a ski shop, and she got a part-time gig writing a column for the long-running Park Record newspaper starting at $10 per month. Eventually she became editor. In 1993, she left the newsroom and founded a nonprofit that would become the Park City Institute. The nonprofit brings performing arts and other cultural events to the town: touring ballets, summer concert series, and talks from high-

profile figures such as Monica Lewinsky and Edward Snowden. The ambition, as she saw it, was to build an arts scene that would thrive beyond the expectations for a town of Park City’s size. The onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 hit Park City with a month left in the ski season. As news of the virus threat dominated worldwide headlines, the Park Record on March 14 reported the first known instance of community spread in Summit County, an adult man who “had not traveled recently and did not have contact with another person confirmed to have the virus.” “This really changes the picture,” a local public health official told the newspaper. In the following days, many businesses were ordered to close, and limits were placed on public gatherings. Park City business owners who stake their year on the ski season shuttered their shops with expenses looming. City Hall, too, foresaw an economic crisis due to the loss in tax revenues from the tourism economy. The future of a planned $100 million arts and culture district, a flagship project funded in part by tax dollars from tourism, was suddenly thrown into question. City leaders, including most recently Mayor Andy Beerman, had been working for three years to develop the district in partnership with the Sundance Institute, which would relocate its headquarters there. But Park City, like other cities around the world, fell nearly silent. Orr stayed home alone in her two-story lavender house off Little Kate Road, her grown children and grandchildren thirty miles away and down the mountain in Salt Lake City. One day in April, she needed a break. She drove her Subaru Outback the two miles to Main Street to retrieve her mail at the post office and stop by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory to pick up dessert. Outside Dolly’s Bookstore, a figure quickly caught her attention. A wiry, thin Asian man smoking a cigarette stood outside wearing no shoes despite the cold, his bare feet pacing the empty sidewalk. The man, she later learned, was likely the latest billionaire to move to town. And he had his own vision for the future of Park City. His name was Tony Hsieh.

After he left rehab in late February, Tony had his driver take him to the vacation home in Park City that he was in the process of buying, a wood-frame house on Empire Avenue. He planned to stay about a month and then return to Las Vegas. The Sundance Film Festival had officially ended for the year a few weeks prior, though some of Tony’s friends were still in town and the parties kept going. Over the years, Tony had become something of a regular at the festival, making friends not just with other executive producers who had helped fund films, as he occasionally did, but with the stars themselves. He had become particularly close with the forty-year-old actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, known for 500 Days of Summer and Inception, and with David Arquette of the Scream movie franchise fame. Recently, Tony had helped fund an independent film, Try Harder!, by the Asian American director Debbie Lum, about students at San Francisco’s largest high school trying to get into college. Tony is listed as one of ten executive producers, along with his longtime friend and assistant, Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, who for years had helped Tony run his day-to-day life. In late February 2020, fresh out of leaving rehab early, Tony attended parties and bar meetups as if nothing had happened. Most people didn’t know that anything had. He seemed more like his normal self, with his jeans and T-shirts not hanging quite so loosely off his frame. As he always did, he listened intently, made small jokes, and occasionally cracked his sly smile. A dimple punctuated his left cheek. He carried around a glass of Fernet, sipping it throughout the evening. The friends who knew about his rehab stay weren’t worried about his drinking because he had always seemed to tolerate it well. They only wanted to keep him off ketamine, believing that that was the chief cause of his downward spiral. Some of his friends still didn’t know that he had been to rehab, while the others were happy to avoid the topic. They wanted to make Tony comfortable. Though Tony hated being alone, he also avoided talking about himself, especially in social settings, curling inward mentally or walking away when he felt put on the spot. Now he seemed even quieter, if that were possible, as though he were mulling some things over that he didn’t want to discuss. He also seemed more closed off,

the usual brightness in his eyes turned pensive. Noticeably absent was Ryan Doherty, who had convinced him to go to rehab. Tony had started telling people that Doherty had forced him to go, when he didn’t need it. Doherty had also made clear to Tony that he did not want to be part of his Park City plans. Tony had an immediate problem, one that demanded he focus on his role as CEO of Zappos: he had to get the company ready for a brewing global health crisis. Long before businesses began to send their employees home in March 2020, Tony recognized the severity of the coming pandemic. “Do you really think it’s necessary to send everyone home?” one of his executives asked him as the staff worked night and day to ready Zappos to be run remotely. “It’s not a question of ‘if,’ ” Tony replied. “It’s ‘when.’ ” Through the transition, as Zappos closed its headquarters and sent hundreds of employees home, Tony wasn’t panicked by the unprecedented crisis, despite its long list of unknowns. He was as calm as he had been at LinkExchange, on the verge of selling his startup for millions of dollars. Tony was effectively stuck in Park City in the early months of the pandemic. He could have driven himself the six hours back to Las Vegas, but he hated to drive, and his driver, Steve Moroney, the owner of Experience Transport Agency, was based in Las Vegas. Tony had known him so long that he and his friends called him “Steve-O.” There also was the early fear of how the virus spread— could you get it walking outside or even in your car? No one knew for sure. Tony had become famous for living in a small Airstream trailer, surrounded by friends in other Airstreams, in a parking lot in downtown Las Vegas with his small dog, Blizzy, and an alpaca named Marley. His communal way of living, though, was anathema to the pandemic lockdown. Even if he had managed to get back, few people wanted to live in the trailer park right now if they had the choice. The pandemic isolated the world. For Tony, it quickly stole his foundation for being. He had spent two decades building communities in cities and with his friends in San Francisco and Las Vegas: at work, at parties he hosted, at raves he attended, and at Burning Man every year. Tony floated through crowds, preferred to have a lot of people around him, and had a repulsion to alone time. Even at night, he’d find himself waking up a friend and asking to go for a 2:00

a.m. walk. His friends always agreed because they loved and admired Tony, so they stepped outside into the darkness and waited for him to ask the first question. His desire to create groups of people around him had started early in his life, in the years after the LinkExchange sale in the late 1990s. Tony had walked away after the deal with Microsoft with $32 million, a newly minted twenty-four-year-old tech mogul little known beyond Silicon Valley. His seemingly limitless options stalled him, and he found that despite his wealth, he just wanted to spend time with friends. One day in the rough Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, he drove by 1000 Van Ness Avenue, a strikingly opulent 1920s building originally designed for a Cadillac dealership. Developers were converting the building into residential lofts and an AMC multiplex theater. Tony decided then that 1000 Van Ness would be his home base—for what, to be determined later. He and his friends would figure out what to do together with little space and few boundaries between them. He convinced Alfred Lin and other former LinkExchange coworkers to move into the lofts, and the group eventually owned 20 percent of the apartments. He and Lin launched a venture capital fund, Venture Frogs, and opened an incubator for their startups in the building as well. The investment fund had a few hits—OpenTable, the restaurant reservation site, for example—and some misses. In 1999, Tony got a voice mail from a stranger, cold-calling with an investment pitch for his website, shoesite.com, which sold footwear on the web. Nick Swinmurn, a native of England who had moved to Cupertino, California, with his parents when he was seven, was a marketing manager for an online carbuying service. He had come up with the idea for shoesite.com, which he hoped would be the Amazon.com of shoes, after being unable to find a specific pair of Airwalk boots in his size in a local mall. A search of the handful of online retailers had also failed. Tony shared the same skepticism of online retail as most people did in the early days. Other websites were losing money. Tony would later recount that he had worried that people would not want to buy shoes without trying them on first. But Swinmurn offered up some statistics, which always impressed Tony: in

1998, 5 percent of the $40 billion footwear industry was transacted through printed catalogs, and the number was quickly growing. If people would order shoes through the mail without trying them on, why not online? Tony, intrigued by the hard numbers, agreed to a meeting. Swinmurn, balding with a pointed goatee that grew longer over the years, showed up at the Van Ness Avenue lofts to meet with Tony and Lin, wearing board shorts and a T-shirt. Tony urged Swinmurn to find a person with retail footwear experience. Swinmurn called a Nordstrom store in a downtown San Francisco mall and found Fred Mossler, a shoe buyer. Mossler, a tanned thirty-three-year-old with a bright white smile, bears a striking resemblance to Nicolas Cage, a fact Tony delighted in. The two would become like family over the ensuing years. At that moment, though, Mossler had risk factors to weigh: he had spent eight years moving up at the growing Seattlebased department store, had bought a house, and had had his first child. But once Venture Frogs agreed to make an investment in the new company, he quit Nordstrom. The partners changed the name of the retailer to Zappos, a play on the Spanish word for shoes, zapatos. The Van Ness Avenue building, meanwhile, had become a nexus of partying alongside work. Tony organized elaborate nightlong events in his penthouse loft, number 810, which became known as Club BIO after a guest misread a sign in the elevator directing visitors to the apartment. He lived in a seventh-floor loft, but when the penthouse was listed for sale, he saw an opportunity—not for a real estate investment but for parties. “Owning the loft would ultimately enable more experiences,” he later wrote in Delivering Happiness. Meanwhile, Tony had been experimenting more with ecstasy and liked taking the drug, especially with friends. At one rave in 1999, he spotted a man sitting at a booth toward the back of a giant warehouse. Emanuel Sferios, a community activist, had recently founded the organization DanceSafe to test ecstasy before people ingested it. Sferios wasn’t a raver but had taken an interest in the drug after it had helped him recover from some of his own childhood trauma. By adding a particular substance known as a chemical reagent to MDMA, he could tell in thirty seconds whether it was truly the drug. He hoped to prevent rave attendees from

dying from counterfeit pills, but his new organization could do only so much with its staff of unpaid volunteers. Sferios had just been rejected for a $25,000 grant. Tony bounced up to his table—“clearly on MDMA,” Sferios recalled later— and introduced himself. He said enthusiastically, “I love what you guys are doing, this is great.” He explained that he had just sold his technology company to Microsoft. “If I could give you as much money as you wanted right now, how much would you ask for?” Sferios, surprised by the unexpected, benevolent stranger, re-counted to Tony the $25,000 grant he had just lost. Tony pulled out his checkbook and wrote out a check for the amount on the spot. “It catapulted us,” Sferios said later. DanceSafe trained people around the country to test drugs at raves and has since become one of the preeminent nonprofits advocating for harm reduction in the electronic dance community. Tony was its first large donor. In 2000, the investor euphoria that had helped propel LinkExchange and fueled huge valuations at other startups came crashing to an end. The Silicon Valley dot-com bubble burst, and investors shied away from the market just as Zappos was looking to grow. Tony, still an investor-adviser to the company, later wrote that he had felt he had something to prove, that LinkExchange “wasn’t just dumb luck.” So he stepped into the role of chief executive officer. “I decided that Zappos was going to be the universe that I wanted to help envision and build,” he wrote in Delivering Happiness. “It would be the universe that I believed in.” On October 19, 2000, Tony emailed Zappos staff, laying out a nine-month plan for surviving the tough market. “Right now, because we are unprofitable with very limited cash, we are in a race against time,” he said. Over the coming months, Zappos imposed a round of layoffs. Tony worked closely with Mossler to develop faster shipping methods to grow sales, and he gave up Club BIO and moved five beds into the apartment for Zappos workers to live there rent-free before selling the loft in 2002 to help save the company. He poured millions of dollars of his own money into the fledgling company. That sort of move might have terrified some young entrepreneurs, but Tony had a

large appetite for risk, and lived his life with little margin for error. In addition to his venture investments, he moved money into real estate and stocks. At one point, less than a decade after the LinkExchange sale, his cash balance, not including some assets he owned, was only $40,000. Tony didn’t seem to care much about that number. He was always confident that he’d make things work out. By 2003, Zappos was back on top and posted $70 million in gross sales that year. Tony implemented a new customer service incentive, designed to overcome customers’ hesitation about buying shoes online and trying them on at home: Zappos would give them 60 days to return shoes free; by the end of the year, Zappos had increased that to 365 days. Tony later attributed that trial period as the reason Zappos had survived while other dot-coms had failed. It was two years before Amazon would launch its popular Prime service, offering free two-day shipping for an annual fee of $79. Tony and his executive team then made a fateful decision: in 2004, they moved Zappos’ headquarters to Las Vegas, in a low-tax state that, they hoped, employees would enjoy. In the Bay Area, it had become difficult to hire staff, especially customer service reps who saw the job as no more than a temporary gig. But Zappos’ momentum as a company, along with the prospects of a lower cost of living and a bit of adventure, was enough to attract its existing staff. The built-up camaraderie was enough to convince seventy-two employees out of ninety to relocate. In those early years in Las Vegas, the company was headquartered at an industrial park in the suburb of Henderson, Nevada. A new family in the desert was born out of necessity since almost all the employees who had moved didn’t know anyone in Las Vegas. Zapponians—as they were called—invaded bars and restaurants together and explored the city. It had been six years since Tony had sold LinkExchange, but he was still a young CEO, only thirty years old. Still, he had developed ideas about how companies should be run, and he had especially learned from his last year at LinkExchange, when the culture had begun to sour with the influx of new employees and executives and he hadn’t wanted to go to work anymore. More than anything, he did not want that to happen at Zappos.

Zappos was growing rapidly in the early aughts, hiring between forty and eighty people every two weeks. That was a good problem to have, but before long, Tony couldn’t interview every single person himself, nor could Fred Mossler or Alfred Lin. There had to be some way to lay the groundwork for the type of person Tony wanted to work at Zappos without their having to meet each one individually. Tony began to study his friends and the employees that Zappos had already hired. He wrote down what he liked about them and what made them good or fun or interesting people. Over the course of a few months, he assembled a list that had dozens of different qualities on it, all the adjectives that described the people he cared about the most. He also asked his current employees what they thought about Zappos’ culture. He came up with a list of thirty-seven core values, including some that seemed obvious, such as “Company growth,” and others that were more specific, such as “Willing to laugh at ourselves.” Tony spent much of 2005 working with Zappos’ human resources team revising the list, hoping that it would help guide which employees should be hired and which shouldn’t. He emailed employees several more times to ask their opinions. For a fairly new company, Tony’s time spent on values was rare. In their early years, most startups are much more focused on their product and their growth. Decades later, it would become more common for companies of all sizes to adopt a values blueprint, following Tony’s lead. He “was really good at scaling himself,” one former executive observed. Ultimately Tony ended up with ten values that became the foundation of Zappos: 1. Deliver WOW Through Service 2. Embrace and Drive Change 3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness 4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded 5. Pursue Growth and Learning 6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication 7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit 8. Do More With Less

9. Be Passionate and Determined 10. Be Humble

Value number 3 garnered the most attention, and quirky tales of Zappos’ friendly customer service people and office antics prompted a growing number of media profiles of Tony and the company, glowing pieces about building community and passion in the workplace and keeping staffers invested in the culture. New hires were offered a $2,000 bonus to quit during their four weeks of training unless they wanted to stay, a new method developed by Tony that sparked more media attention. When Tony was featured on his first magazine cover in the early aughts, one Zappos employee bought dozens of copies and handed them out to everyone else in the office. Throughout the day, each employee walked up to Tony and asked him to sign it, laughing and making fun of his newfound fame. Tony was in on the joke—he had had no desire to be interviewed, but he also understood that it was a necessary part of the job. He wasn’t good at public speaking, but he was a relentless researcher and taught himself how to improve by studying comedians and carefully watching other experts. The motto “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness” spread throughout Zappos’ offices, and all employees had full license to make their workspace their own. The Henderson office was decorated year-round from floor to ceiling with personal knickknacks, posters, streamers, and stuffed animals, all crammed together. TV camera crews following Tony around captured the weirdness: an Oktoberfest celebration with workers wearing German folk costumes, a toga party, toy cars racing among cubicles. It wasn’t a silent office: noise machines went off, music played, and someone had one of those clapping toys. In contrast, Tony guided journalists and Wall Street analysts on tours in a demure fashion, often wearing a Zappos-branded T-shirt and jeans. He twirled a small umbrella to signal that he was taking visitors around. Tony’s own office was a space no larger than anyone else’s in the middle of the mayhem, surrounded by giant jungle-style plants and stuffed animals, as in a zoo. His desk was cluttered with mementos given to him by friends and employees.

For outsiders, the Zappos tours could be overwhelming, like visiting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a crush of colors and noise and decorations. A giant wall featured ties that had been cut off the business suits of stiffly dressed visitors. On tours, Tony hewed closely to his message of human connection, rarely revealing anything personal. “We really want people’s true personalities to shine in the workplace,” he said. Just like the DJs onstage at the all-night raves Tony loved, he orchestrated the fun from a place of power but somehow slipped into the background. He rarely mentioned shoes. “It was a little bit surreal because everyone seemed so happy,” said Wall Street analyst Colin Sebastian, who visited Tony on several occasions. “I’ve been to thousands of offices, and none of them were like this.” Some of the early employees who had moved from San Francisco suffered in the heat of the Las Vegas summers—“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” is a quip often heard among Bay Area residents—and soon a number of the Zappos men decided to shave their heads. Some of the women shaved their legs in solidarity. Later Zappos formalized the event, calling it “Bald and Blue,” and asked Zapponians to either shave their heads or dye their hair blue in allegiance to the brand. Visitors could see that Tony was a special, rare kind of CEO. He had come up with an unusual way to build a big company: by making sure that everyone wanted to come to work every day. “We call them ‘magic leaders’: they are able to build companies in ways that run against the grain of anything that has been done before,” Sebastian, the Wall Street analyst, said later. Under Tony’s leadership, Zappos grew to more than $1 billion in gross merchandise sales ($635 million in net revenue after customer returns) by 2008, what Inc. magazine called “an e-commerce powerhouse.” Internally, though, Tony and his board of directors disagreed about the company’s next steps. Some early investors who sat on the board wanted a financial exit, such as being acquired, rather than riding along with Tony’s big ideas. The board called those “Tony’s social experiments.” “The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes,” Tony said.

Meanwhile, Zappos was in a precarious financial position because of the unfolding 2008 financial crisis. Like many retailers, the company relied on revolving credit to pay for inventory, but if it missed certain monthly business targets, its current banks could walk away. In an environment in which access to credit was becoming incredibly hard, it was unlikely that another bank would step in to save Zappos, possibly leading to the company’s bankruptcy. (Zappos had not actually missed any payments yet.) Then in walked Amazon. The world’s largest and most powerful online retailer had unsuccessfully approached Zappos about a deal in 2005 and two years later had launched its own competitor to Zappos, an online shoe retailer called Endless.com. For Tony and his management team, a sale this time around seemed to solve a lot of problems as pressure from the board mounted. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was still interested. In April 2009, Tony met with Bezos in Seattle, an encounter he described in writing about why he had decided to sell in Inc. magazine. In a PowerPoint slideshow to the online magnate, Tony brought up how he strived to make workers and employees happy. “Did you know that people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy?” Bezos asked, interrupting Tony’s presentation. “Those were the exact words on my next slide,” Tony later wrote. That year, Tony signed an all-stock deal to sell Zappos for $1.2 billion, marking Amazon’s biggest acquisition in its fourteen-year history. Analysts speculated that Bezos, then Amazon’s CEO, had bought Zappos because it was the only real competitive threat to his company. Tony insisted that Zappos would continue to operate independently, its own weird family, despite Amazon’s reputation as more aggressive and buttoneddown. A personal video Bezos sent internally to the Zappos team seemed to confirm that. In the video, Bezos, standing in the front yard of what looked to be his house in Seattle, introduced himself to Zappos employees. “Hello, my name is Jeff Bezos,” he said, “and I started Amazon.com about fifteen years ago.” Bezos, who would go on to become the richest person in the world, operating one of the largest tech companies, told Zappos employees how he had launched Amazon in his house with only a few employees and not enough electricity to power the startup’s servers.

He then pointed to a sheet of paper on which he had written what he called “a short list” of the things he knew were important to any business: “Obsess over customers,” “Invent,” and “Think long term,” points that Tony also clearly valued. Bezos, who was effusive in the video, told the Zappos team, “I have never seen a company with a culture like Zappos, and I think that kind of unique culture is a very significant asset, and I’m super excited about that.” He described all the time he had spent talking to Tony, Lin, and Mossler and sought to reassure employees that they wouldn’t be going anywhere, saying that Zappos’ workers were in good hands. “I’ve seen a lot of leaders of companies, and I haven’t seen any better than those three,” he said. He concluded, “That culture and the Zappos brand are huge assets that I value very much, and I want those things to continue.” As the CEO of Zappos, Tony asked for a salary of just $36,000, less than some call service reps were paid. The stock deal had been lucrative for him, boosting his net worth to nearly $1 billion. His risktaking had paid off once again. Under Amazon, Zappos expanded from a thousand brands of shoes to clothing and even cookware. Some small details changed, like the way budgeting happened, for example. But otherwise, Zappos was left alone, hundreds of miles away from Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. Happy Zappos customers emailed constantly, asking Tony to take over the Internal Revenue Service or start a new business, such as an airline. “In 20 years, I wouldn’t rule out a Zappos airline where we offer the best customer service,” he said at a conference. In March 2020, Tony started calling and texting friends, imploring them to come visit him in Park City, despite the nationwide quarantine due to the spread of Covid-19. He could be very convincing, and many of his friends had grown used to saying yes to any of his plans. Some didn’t need much persuasion at all. Tyler Williams drove the six hours from Las Vegas, often leaving his wife, who had been his high school sweetheart, back home. The drive is beautiful: the

barren desert outside Las Vegas soon gives way to steep, rocky canyons, the Virgin River a trickle following the side of the highway for a stretch. After Interstate 15 briefly crosses through Arizona, the reds and beiges of the desert turn into vast stretches of green farmland, and finally, after more than five hours, the peaks of the Wasatch range open up in front of the highway. Williams visited Tony several times over the ensuing weeks, driving back and forth from Las Vegas. He was the quintessential longtime Zappos employee, and he had invented his own title: “fungineer.” A musician originally from Alaska with a chest-length beard the color of rust, Williams had been touring across the country a decade earlier with a little-known rock band before burning out and moving to Las Vegas. His wife had taken a tour of Zappos and encouraged him to apply. In 2011, the year he wanted a job, statistics showed that it was easier to get into Harvard than to get a job at the online shoe retailer. So Williams made a short music video, hoping to set himself apart from the thousands of other applicants. He cloned himself on screen, seven copies of himself wearing a V-neck sweater and plaid shirt, his red hair teased into a mohawk. The song featured lyrics about Zappos’ corporate values with a chorus repeating the company name over and over: “Za-a-a-apo-os.” Tony watched the video, and was impressed. Williams got the job, starting in Zappos’ customer service department, and then worked his way up over the years until he eventually controlled one of the company’s largest budgets outside of e-commerce, something called “Brand Aura.” “Brand Aura” basically described experimental projects, sometimes at the behest of Tony and sometimes involving frivolous exploits, such as building unique porta-potties for events. Called “Porta Parties,” the traveling toilets came with selfie stations and motorized squatty feet. “Zappos is always making things fun, and now I’m excited about the toilet,” one user said in a company promotional video. For Williams, as for many Zappos employees, his work relationship with Tony blurred into close friendship, and he was well known as one of Tony’s chief advisers, willing to do most anything for him and around him almost every hour of the day. Tony asked him once, “What if we built a jacket that had charging ports in it with batteries?” Though there was no clear use for it, Williams made one

anyway, a clunky prototype with wires hanging everywhere. It worked but was never used by anyone. In Park City, Williams joined a small group of Tony’s friends who had also come to visit, a hodgepodge of people who had touched his life at one point or another. Not all of them were part of Tony’s close inner circle in Las Vegas. A large entourage surrounded Tony at all times, so it wasn’t unusual to get to know a wide variety of people from all demographics anytime you spent time with him. The first few weeks of the pandemic shutdown felt like a retreat. The mountains were covered in snow, but the ski resorts were closed, so the group mostly stayed in. Not too concerned about catching the virus, Tony found a masseuse who was willing to come to the rental house, where guests were treated to long massages. Tony joined meetings through Amazon’s private online video service, continuing to run Zappos from afar. In their downtime, the group read books together, and Tony always had a recommendation for a new nonfiction or self-help book he liked. A voracious reader his whole life, he constantly read and researched new ideas. Often he used books to express his thoughts about a new philosophy or way of life he was contemplating. In Park City, he recommended The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success & Happiness by Jeff Olson, a slim manual by a little-known marketing executive that proclaims it holds the “SECRET to a successful life.” In life, the book argues, the people who succeed make small changes to their daily activities, focusing on time management and savings, rather than expect a big break to propel them to success. Tony also kept a copy of Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, a journalist, and Jamie Wheal, a leadership expert. The book outlines a process called ecstasis, a condition in which a group of people subconsciously act as one unit, with examples including Google engineers and Navy SEALs on a mission. This mode of acting makes one superhuman, with increased focus, quicker muscle reaction, and the ability to recognize patterns. Tony had long been interested in ways to maximize his body’s capabilities, a lifestyle that has become somewhat of an obsession in Silicon Valley. The

process, called biohacking or DIY biology, involves activities that aim to increase a person’s physical and cognitive abilities, many of them unproven by science. That can include everything from intermittent fasting and specialized diets to running experiments on yourself. In the latter, more controversial practice, some adherents of biohacking have inoculated themselves with healthy feces in attempts to improve their stomach function, while others have injected themselves with the blood of a younger person to try to improve their vitality. One biohacker described biohacking to the website Vox as “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” Biohacking started gaining popularity in 2014 after a twenty-five-year-old engineer in Silicon Valley, Rob Rhinehart, introduced Soylent, a bland beige liquid that professed to include all the nutrients of a single meal. Even though some customers described it as tasting “rancid,” it gained a cult following among people who wanted to skip the hassle of buying food and preparing meals. It soon raised over $70 million from well-known investors. Rhinehart claimed to have spent months drinking it, leading to big improvements in his health. The New York Times called it “the most joyless new technology to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS.” In 2017, a thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur, Serge Faguet, published a series of controversial blog posts on the technology platform Hacker Noon, claiming that he had spent $200,000 on biohacking to try to improve his mood and energy level. The result was that he had become “calmer, thinner, extroverted, healthier & happier.” He detailed his procedure: three hours before bed, he begins to block blue light with special glasses, and he tracks his sleep with an Oura smart ring, a product that registers a user’s health information; he fasts intermittently throughout the week; he has an intense daily gym routine; he meditates regularly and practices not lying about anything; he takes more than two dozen drugs and supplements daily, including antidepressants, a growth hormone, an estrogen blocker, and lithium, a drug frequently used to treat bipolar disorder; and he uses a hearing aid, despite having normal hearing. The posts were panned as “the embodiment of Silicon Valley’s toxic machiavellian bro culture,” according to the Guardian, but Faguet’s thousands

of mostly male readers applauded his efforts, particularly when he noted his increased sex drive. Perhaps the most recognizable of Silicon Valley’s biohackers is Jack Dorsey, until late 2021 the chief executive officer of both the social media giant Twitter and the financial payments service provider Square. Dorsey, who looks like the antithesis of an executive, with a long, scraggly beard and nose ring, has spoken openly about his unusual routines. He believes in intermittent fasting, which can take several different forms, including one known as “16/8”—fasting every day for fourteen to sixteen hours and restricting one’s daily eating window to eight to ten hours. Dorsey’s practice involves eating one meal a day, typically dinner. He starts his day with a drink he calls “salt juice,” a mixture of Himalayan salt, water, and lemon juice that has questionable benefits. He takes ice baths several times a day, a process sometimes used by athletes to reduce inflammation. Though the practice can reportedly repair muscles, studies examining its benefits are mixed, research shows. Tony had never been extreme about his own biohacking, but he had certainly run experiments on himself and gone on what some friends described as “exercise benders,” climbing three peaks in southern California in just one day. Once he tried to limit himself to four hours of sleep a day. Another time he went on a twenty-six-day diet, progressing through the alphabet on each day. On the letter A day, he could eat apples, anchovies, and asparagus; by the time he reached the letter Z, he was nearly fasting. His experimentation continued, including with drugs, where he added ketamine to the mix in late 2019, going farther than he had before. At the time, mind-altering drugs such as psychedelics were experiencing something of a renaissance. Decades after the government had banned the drugs in the 1960s, researchers were discovering that ecstasy, mushrooms, and ketamine could be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. The author Michael Pollan discovered their beneficial properties while writing his 2018 book about LSD and mushrooms, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. “What was missing from my life?” asked Pollan, who is in his fifties. “Nothing I could think of—until, that is, word

of the new research into psychedelics began to find its way to me, making me wonder if perhaps I had failed to recognize the potential of these molecules as a tool for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.” Ketamine, used in medical procedures, is generally regarded as a dissociative anesthetic. Recreationally, it is snorted or injected. In small doses, however, it can operate like a psychedelic drug, and patients who take it often feel as though they have some kind of profound understanding of reality under its influence, according to the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. David Feifel. Dr. Feifel developed the world’s first ketamine infusion program for psychiatric disorders more than a decade ago and uses it to treat patients with severe depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder at his San Diego clinic. He has found that it can produce an almost immediate effect, one that can last for months, even though the drug stays in a patient’s body less than twentyfour hours. “It blows the other treatments out of the water,” he said. Taken in high doses, a process that users sometimes call “going to K-land” or a “K-hole,” ketamine can cause disorientation and even temporary paralysis. Doing it illegally, he says, is “fraught with danger.” In 2018, twenty-eight-year-old Aaron Traywick, a well-known biohacker, drowned in a flotation tank filled with body-temperature salt water used for sensory deprivation and deep relaxation. A relative told the New York Times that he had likely taken ketamine, some of which was later found in his pants pocket, and lost consciousness. Traywick believed that people should be able to design and self-administer unapproved treatments. Months before his death, he had stood in front of an audience at an annual biohacker conference, removed his suit pants, and injected himself in the thigh with a treatment he had devised that he claimed cured herpes. He had broadcast the controversial stunt on Facebook. “You would not be here today—if polio, malaria, if these diseases were still in place without self-experimentation,” he had told the audience. “You are in your right to self-experiment. It is your right, and it is your body.” Ketamine was the drug that landed Tony in rehab in February 2020, and in the early days after he left, Williams and other friends in Park City tried to keep him away from it. He grudgingly went along with them. But he drank Fernet and occasionally took ecstasy. He wasn’t fully sober, as someone who had just

left a treatment program should be. He refused to talk in depth about his use of any drug; more often than not, he would hand a friend one of his favorite books to explain his thinking about most subjects. Long before articles began examining the effects of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, Tony was experiencing it firsthand, and early. The handful of people around him couldn’t make up for his normal daily existence, in which he had regularly interacted with dozens of people, including coworkers, many of whom lived next to him in the Airstream park in Las Vegas. By early April, he had devised a solution: he would buy a fleet of tour buses in Park City to shuttle people back and forth from Las Vegas. He dispatched Mimi Pham, his longtime personal assistant, to help handle the details. Soon he owned several large buses and had hired a company to supply drivers. His personal driver, Steve Moroney, came to town to help him. Tony wasn’t the first tech entrepreneur to discover Utah. Like the biohacking trend, Silicon Valley had already arrived first in the form of the Summit Series, an invitation-only series of events for entrepreneurs, artists, and wealthy elites that counted Tony among its audience. Summit Series founders had organized the purchase of an entire mountain a ninety-minute drive away from Park City, in Eden, Utah, for $40 million from owners in financial distress. Powder Mountain Resort would develop high-end ski resort homes marketed to Summit’s elite members, curating a community from its rosters. “The folks that are here aren’t just here to have a second home in the mountains,” Powder Mountain CEO Gary Derck told the Wall Street Journal in 2019. “They’re also here to connect their family to other like-minded families and basically constantly better themselves and the world and their own particular initiatives.” Tony was starting to have other ideas for Park City as well. As he spent more time in the small town, cradled in the volcanic rock of the Wasatch Mountains, all he saw were possibilities.

CHAPTER THREE COLLISIONS

Park City, April and May 2020 Las Vegas, 2011–2013

No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future. —Tony Hsieh

In the darkness of the desert night, Tony Hsieh gazed across the pulsing mass of

human bodies and lights known as Black Rock City. It was 2011, his first year at Burning Man, which had become a rite of passage for every techie in Silicon Valley. Tens of thousands of people, who adopt “Burner” names and dress in costumes, build a temporary village in the middle of the desert known as “the Playa,” where they live in makeshift yurts, domes, and campers. DJs play throbbing music as dancers etch their feet through the sand. The minieconomy runs on gifting items—no money is allowed and there is no expectation of receiving anything in return. The festival started in San Francisco in 1986, when its founders burned a wooden effigy on Baker Beach, and was later moved to the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. The tech community soon followed. In 1998, a startup called Google put a Burning Man stick figure onto its now-iconic search engine, a message that Google employees were headed for the desert. It was the first-ever “Google Doodle,” which would become a regular feature. Soon executives from Facebook, Twitter, and venture capital firms also descended on the festival,

arriving on private jets, hiring chefs to serve tasting menus, and sleeping in luxury RVs. Some saw it as a betrayal of Burning Man’s free community ethos. Still, the festival became intertwined with the tech community. As the billionaire Elon Musk told a reporter for Vox in 2014, Burning Man is Silicon Valley, “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.” Despite being a near billionaire, Tony stayed low profile as usual, joining the party with the humble masses on the Playa. He was instantly in love. Like an underground rave, Burning Man triggered what he referred to as a “hive switch,” a term coined by a social psychologist: a body of people working together for the greater good rather than their own self-interest. “When you experience it, it is pure awe,” he said later in an interview with Playboy, “like when you see something in nature that’s bigger than yourself.” At Burning Man, people gathered with no schedules, talking and sharing meals and riding bikes around the trippy art sculptures that lit up the desert. Burning Man’s stated values matched everything Tony had come to believe in: inclusion, civil responsibility, gifting, and communal effort. Perhaps because his own strict upbringing had lacked wonder and fun, Tony was attracted to activities that allowed him to view the world from a more innocent, childlike perspective. His friends likened him to Tom Hanks’s character in the 1980s movie Big: a kid trapped in an adult’s body. Nothing enabled Tony to feel small again more than Burning Man and its outsized, nearly overwhelming grassroots grandeur. The festival “ignited a light in him and altered the course of his life,” the organization later wrote about Tony. That first year, 2011, Tony wore his usual shorts and T-shirt. He watched the Burners float past him in scanty sequined attire and science fiction–inspired headdresses adorned with tentacles. He stood out as a plain-clothed newcomer late one August night as he came across Phil Plastina’s art car. “Art car” is Burning Man vernacular for a vehicle transformed into a mobile sculpture, such as a fire-spewing rhinoceros or a dinosaur, that moves around the Playa like a parade float. In Tony’s first year, the art cars would have been astounding and impressive, a collection of glowing and unusual vehicles moving improbably throughout the middle of nowhere. “Gluing a few tchotchkes on your car or covering it in glo-sticks does not an art car make,” Burning Man has declared.

“Your car must be approved by our Department of Mutant Vehicles and you must have a DMV sticker in order to drive it.” Plastina’s art car, however, was in another realm altogether. A longtime Burner, Plastina had been driving from Santa Cruz to the Nevada festival for so long that he remembered when it had been dominated by beefy guys with guns and “Mad Max types.” By 2011, he had fallen on hard luck. The financial crisis had wiped out his construction business, almost causing him and his brother to lose their beachfront home in Santa Cruz. To save it, they had repossessed other houses for the banks, he recalled later. The job paid $10,000 a house but was heartbreaking. He had to force families and their children to leave, often in only a few hours. “We were cleaning out their books with photos in them, little dressers— everything. We were the devil,” said Plastina, whose gruff accent reveals his Queens, New York, upbringing. Plastina quit the job, and with the money he had saved—about $200,000— he spent the next two years building the largest, most outlandish art car that anyone at Burning Man had ever seen. He wanted to create something positive from all his heart-wrenching work. With the help of some friends in California, he constructed a massive enclosed stage on top of a flatbed truck, which looked like a spaceship rising high above the ground. They welded giant pieces of metal together to create the stage, then took the type of reflective material used for greenhouses and stuck it around the outside of the stage, so that when dozens of neon lines are turned on, the reflection of the lights makes it seem as though you can reach your hand right through the panel. A jack in the shape of a Burning Man stick figure could raise and lower the entire metal stage at the press of a button—the art car’s crowning jewel. A second truck carried electronics, speakers, a sound system engineer, and DJs. Plastina had recently formed an electronic dance music group called the Dancetronauts, and together, dressed in elaborate white space suits, they gyrated inside the art car to the music. Tony saw Plastina’s art car for the first time during its debut event, and it was a knockout sensation. Thousands of people gathered around to watch, dancing

and screaming under the desert stars, nothing else around for miles and miles. Tony was drawn to the crowd as if the art car’s flashing neon lights were pulling him in. When Plastina climbed down carefully from the vehicle after the first set, Tony stood there, staring at him with intense interest, his eyes gleaming with admiration. He introduced himself, but the name meant nothing to Plastina. “Hey, I want you in Vegas,” Tony said. Plastina laughed. “We’re not for sale, man,” he told Tony. “Look, I’m Tony Hsieh, I run Zappos, the shoe company, and I’m developing Las Vegas, and we need to have this in Las Vegas,” Tony continued in his characteristic style of wasting no time on pleasantries. Anyone else might have come across as a spoiled rich kid, but Tony was so earnest in his appreciation of beautiful things that made him happy and that might bring others joy that his selfless intent always seemed to shine through. “How much is it going to cost? A million dollars? Two million?” he probed. Plastina brushed him off and climbed back onto his spaceship. But Tony wouldn’t give up. After another round of dancing, one of the Dancetronauts went over to Plastina and whispered into his ear, “There are some people who want to talk to you.” A line of people, producers, and event organizers who were attending Burning Man wanted him to bring the art car to their own events. The Dancestronauts would ultimately draw a niche following, playing at tech parties across Silicon Valley. At the front of the line was Tony, waiting to speak with Plastina again. He was vibrating with excitement and blurted out, “I want you in Vegas at any cost.” Plastina quickly learned a key lesson about Tony: behind his quiet demeanor, he was powerfully convincing with both words and money. His childlike idealism and his sheer faith in everything working out made it hard for others to say no. He paid for the California-based Dancetronauts to perform in Las Vegas three times, priming Plastina for his bigger pitch: he offered to pay for Plastina to move to Las Vegas, including his housing and food, in exchange for performing only one night a month at the “First Friday” downtown arts festival. Plastina eventually agreed. He relocated to Las Vegas, upending his life to join the

growing congregation of Tony Hsieh. Tony became an honorary Dancetronaut himself, donning a white space suit and sometimes performing on the art car along with the other dancers. Tony’s magnetism drew in Plastina, but there was something more than that about his excitement. It was like watching your own ambition reflected in Tony, so sure was he that you could live up to anything you strove to become. Plastina had never meant to stake his career on the Dancetronauts. It was basically an extracurricular activity that was fun on weekends sometimes and at Burning Man. Tony immediately recognized the group’s, and Plastina’s, potential. It was a trick he played: you thought you were following his vision, but really you were following your own. “I never meant to do this, ever,” Plastina said a decade later. “I gave up my company, I sold my home. I moved down here for Tony.” Tony was obsessed with what he called “collisions”: the act of people—maybe strangers, maybe friends—randomly meeting to form bonds and partnerships but mostly to come up with great ideas or business projects, such as the one he forged with Plastina. He didn’t actually believe in bad ideas; ideas that weren’t fully formed simply hadn’t benefited yet from the right collision. Often, he acted as a secret matchmaker, orchestrating collisions between people he had decided should meet by inviting them to a happy hour or a party so that they could run into each other “by accident.” His friends usually enjoyed the happy “accidents,” only grumbling sometimes about Tony’s enthusiasm for a clearly terrible idea. It was exactly the way Tony planned to build his own minicity, downtown Las Vegas, and how, a decade later, he planned to tackle another one: Park City, Utah. Las Vegas evokes a mirage, a casino town that shines brightly out of nowhere in the black Nevada desert at nighttime. A series of entrepreneurs built the modern Las Vegas Strip, erecting bigger and bigger resorts filled with craps tables, noisy slot machines, booming nightclubs, and Cirque du Soleil shows. Before the pandemic began, about 42 million people from around the world flocked to the city every year, despite its oppressive heat.

The city’s tourism boosters struck gold in 2003 when they launched a campaign that would become legend and made permissiveness its motto: “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” And most of what happened in Vegas stayed on the Strip, compared to downtown. Even before relocating Zappos to the Vegas area, Tony had grown to love the city. Starting around 1999, he had become fascinated by poker, first playing in card rooms in California and later taking weekend trips to Las Vegas. At crowded tables of mostly tourists, he discovered how to master the game through math and outdo his less astute rivals. But the thrill of winning money waned, and he became more interested in making friends with other players. “I realized that once I had learned the basics of poker, I wasn’t really building anything by spending endless hours in casinos playing the game,” he later wrote in Delivering Happiness. “I realized that I needed to be doing something more fulfilling…. It was time for me to change tables.” About six miles north of the Strip, downtown Las Vegas in 2011 was a collection of old, classic casinos, such as the Golden Nugget, that nodded to the town’s Wild West roots with a grittier vibe, when Tony arrived. Along the major thoroughfare is the Fremont Street Experience, a pedestrian-only tourist attraction, with an overhead light show, zip-lining, live music, and cheap shops. Beyond that area, crossing over into East Fremont Street, downtown had crumbled. Sex workers and homeless people had settled in. Residents knew to avoid the area. One of the only businesses on East Fremont Street was a weathered old hotel and casino called the Gold Spike. Across the street was a run-down motel, once the site of one of Las Vegas’s deadliest bombings. “Most tourists never see downtown Las Vegas,” the New York Times wrote in 2012. The 2008 financial crisis had ravaged the entire city, and it had become “ground zero for the Great Recession,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, with some of the highest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the country. In that broken-down, desolate side of Las Vegas, baking under the relentless desert sun, Tony saw only promise. He was first introduced in 2009 to the downtown area by one of the locals, a man named Michael Cornthwaite, who had recently opened one of the few new businesses in the struggling neighborhood, a classy bar called Downtown Cocktail Room that served craft

cocktails amid low lighting and leather chairs. Cornthwaite had moved to Las Vegas more than a decade earlier from Chicago and asked the locals where to hang out. Their answer was a depressing chain of bars where people sat at a row of video-gambling screens and didn’t talk to each other. Cornthwaite took that as a challenge. He wanted to open something better. Tony walked the empty blocks of downtown Las Vegas, always asking “What if?” of his close friends and business partners: Cornthwaite; his wife, Jennifer; Fred Mossler, who was still helping run Zappos; and his soon-to-be-wife, Meghan. It was several years after Tony had moved Zappos to nearby Henderson, Nevada, and more than a decade after his brief foray into poker playing. “What if this was an event space?” he would ask. “What if this bar had a speaking series that took place in the back?” “What if, what if, what if…” In 2012, Tony, who was living in a house in the suburbs, moved into the Ogden, a luxury tower in downtown Las Vegas. Late at night, he and his friends would stand around eating kabobs from the only nearby restaurant, brainstorming. Tony scrawled ideas down on sticky notes, posting them around his apartment, desk, and computer monitor, perfect squares of possibilities. He had a wall filled with thoughts about how to change his adopted hometown. He sometimes invited friends or visitors to post their own notes. He wanted to reshape Las Vegas into his own Silicon Valley. He imagined the empty streets filled with talented entrepreneurs and their thriving startups, cool stores for visitors, and art everywhere to look at. One of the things that attracted him to downtown Las Vegas most was that unlike in many other cities, Tony saw the business owners working together, lifting each other up: a new kind of community. “The fact that people were really rolling up their sleeves and trying their best to create business and the community—he loved that,” said Jennifer Cornthwaite later. Tony fueled his ideas with the writings of intellectuals, and for downtown Vegas, he turned to the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. It clearly explained the benefits of urban living, and Tony referenced it often when describing his plans for downtown Las Vegas. In it, the author, Edward Glaeser, an urbanist

and Harvard University economics professor, argued that successful cities attract smart entrepreneurial people in part by being urban playgrounds. Echoing one of Tony’s key tenets, Glaeser wrote that “human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist.” Tony called Glaeser at his Harvard office after reading his book, so thrilled with it that he offered to have his father, Richard Hsieh, translate it into Mandarin. Glaeser, meanwhile, had had to Google “Tony Hsieh” and “Zappos” before they spoke. Tony asked Glaeser some detailed questions, such as what level of urban density is the most desirable, Glaeser recalled. (The answer to that question, Glaeser says, varies depending on the place and the person.) Tony was most excited to connect with someone who agreed with him so fully. Sometimes his ideas seemed so strange to the average person that he needed validation. “I just seemed to give him some scientific support for his own viewpoint,” said Glaeser. At Tony’s request, Glaeser made a three-day pilgrimage to Las Vegas in 2012, just before any real development took off. Tony took him on a tour and invited him to speak at Zappos. Glaeser found Tony to be intelligent and remarkably humble but focused less on the details of making his vision a reality. “How are your pedestrian pathways designed; the weather; making sure people are going to have a good walking experience—he was less engaged with things like that,” he recalled. Tony had already decided that moving Zappos to downtown Las Vegas would help create the sort of communal living and work situation that he hoped to achieve. Rather than working on a company campus that excluded outsiders, such as Apple’s in Silicon Valley and Nike’s outside Portland, Oregon, Zappos’ 1,200 employees would live and spend money right where they worked. The company would rent the empty former City Hall building downtown, a 1970sera brown behemoth with a horizontal panel of windows lining the very top and the back. To convince city officials to approve the many complicated details of the plan, more than a dozen Zappos employees showed up at a Las Vegas City Council meeting in 2011 as a flash mob. Wearing light blue company shirts and waving blue and white pom-poms, they streamed into the front of the room facing the

row of city officials. As the startled council looked on, they began to perform a minutes-long choreographed dance, bending and dipping and waving their hands. Orchestrating the event hadn’t been hard. At that point, Zappos operated almost like a high school, with various groups for employees’ interests, including a dance club. The city council ultimately approved Zappos’ move into the building in 2012. At the time of the vote, then councilman Bob Coffin likened the project to the investments that the tycoon Howard Hughes had made in the city during a recession in 1967. “It is eerily similar to me that someone is coming into town who believes in this town, who wasn’t here, stuck in the old ways, and sees something here that others didn’t,” he said. Born in Texas, in 1905, Hughes had turned an inheritance from his father into an even bigger $2 billion fortune, through producing Hollywood films, speculating in real estate, and starting an airline, among other entrepreneurial ventures. A famous aviator himself, Hughes became a recluse later in life as symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder—in particular, a fear of germs— made him avoid human contact. He arrived in Las Vegas in 1966 before dawn on a train in his pajamas and checked into a penthouse suite of the Desert Inn on the Las Vegas Strip. From its confines, he began making big purchases in Vegas, motivated by a desire to be the largest single property owner in the city. Hughes bought six casinos, enough to capture one-third of the annual revenue on the Strip—swiftly buying out Mafia owners and shifting the Strip away from organized crime and into an American vacation destination. He also bought nearly all of the remaining undeveloped land in Las Vegas, an old airport terminal, and a TV station. He left Las Vegas four years later, in 1970, having never ventured out of the Desert Inn. Tony convinced dozens of entrepreneurs to leave Silicon Valley and other areas across the country as part of an ambitious goal to recruit ten thousand new residents to downtown Las Vegas in five years. The entrepreneurs could take advantage of $50 million of seed money Tony was putting aside, part of his $350 million plan for the area, which now had a formal name: Downtown Project. And it had a headline-grabbing goal: to build “the most community-focused

large city in the world.” Tony came up with a new reporting metric to measure a business’s positive impact on its surroundings: return on community, or ROC. Ultimately, Downtown Project would create more than 1,500 jobs, including 130 at tech startups, and make more than 60 small-business investments. Over the ensuing decade, it would create more than $200 million in economic output. Tony bought the Gold Spike casino and gave it a full renovation. He had the motel that was the former bombing site torn down. He ordered more than a dozen forty-foot shipping containers from Long Beach, California, and workers stacked them in a rough circle across sixty acres, forming the basis of a completely new kind of development called Container Park. Inside the metal containers, bars and restaurants opened, as well as a playground with a giant treehouse right in the middle. Parents could watch their children play while sipping wine. The number of strollers outside the bars became one of the chief metrics the executives running Container Park used to measure its success. “There was a lot of exuberance around that time, a lot of hopefulness, and a lot of big plans,” Doug McPhail, a former director of Container Park, said later. Before he met Tony for lunch the first time, his colleagues warned him: he may just sit there, not speaking, or he may get up and leave without warning. In the end, Tony was perfectly normal, even chatty, when they met. Tony also infused downtown Las Vegas with the whimsical, cartoonish art he had seen on the Playa at Burning Man. Though much of the art there is built for the festival, collectors and museums often buy it afterward to take offsite. Fergusons, a new cluster of art galleries and shops, features a massive stack of trucks curling in a circle toward the sky. Nearby, a towering, bright pink flamingo stands in the middle of a parking lot at one point used for a free, ongoing speaker series. A dog day care business featuring a giant yellow fire hydrant outside opened. In front of Container Park, Tony installed his pièce de résistance, a forty-foot metal praying mantis trucked in from Burning Man. On most nights, employees of Container Park awaken the large, bug-eyed insect with a drum circle, inviting members of the crowd to take part. Soon the two metal antennas sticking out of the mantis’s head shoot plumes of fire into the air in short, loud blasts, startling the visitors gathered around it. Some people clap and some laugh, while others

are stunned into silence by the unusual spectacle. It is a surprising sight, even for Las Vegas. Always looking for a close group of people to surround himself with, Tony took over two apartments in the Ogden, the luxury tower into which he had moved, one of the only nice buildings to live in in the area. The Ogden faces an empty parking lot, but at night, some residents stepping out onto their balconies have a clear view of the lights of the Strip. Tony convinced friends and Zappos employees to move into his new building with him. Fred Mossler, his wife, Meghan, and their new baby joined him, as did many others. Eventually Tony would combine three large penthouse suites on the twenty-third floor. Plants filled one entire room to replicate a jungle. The “movie room” featured an expensive flat-screen TV. Energy drinks, including his favorite, Red Bull, were stationed throughout the space. He rented fifty additional apartments in the building, all of them filled with his friends, visitors, and coworkers. One friend who lived there, Mimi Pham, had a markedly strong influence over Tony. With long black hair and a dragon tattoo on her right shoulder, Pham, who had met Tony at a shoe conference in 2005, had proven herself indispensable to every facet of Tony’s life as his personal assistant. She got his meals and bought his clothes. She controlled his credit cards, and the two at one point shared an address on their driver’s licenses. She doled out his tickets to Burning Man every year, a big responsibility and also an honor. Tony couldn’t get through a day without Pham helping to organize some detail. When he ordered a last-minute, elaborate party, other Las Vegas employees would balk. But Pham would insist. She excelled at getting things done. With an investment from the Downtown Project, she opened a media production studio. Even though they weren’t a couple, she was extremely possessive of their special relationship. Tony’s close friends knew not to mess with her. One friend compared her to a cat: “She’d be like the nicest kitty and then swipe you and cut your hand. And then she would just sit there, licking her paw.” When Tony decided to tell a select few friends that he was going to rehab, one of the first he told was Pham.

Another friend who moved into the Ogden for a time was Suzie Baleson, a twenty-seven-year-old Texan who had recently quit her job as an accountant with the international consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to work with Tony’s development fund in Las Vegas. Several of Tony’s friends thought he might have a crush on Baleson, with her long blond hair and athletic body, but they weren’t dating. Tony had girlfriends on and off, but at thirty-eight, he’d had no longterm commitments. Because of his unique ability to make everyone feel singularly special, women and men often hung around him. At Zappos, the company kept a file folder on his known stalkers. Being a friend of Tony’s meant learning to tolerate a lot of personality types, often in a good way—you met people you never would otherwise as a result of all the collisions. Tony wasn’t discerning about who he chose to be his friend, and he sometimes trusted people too easily. “Tony collects people,” one of his friends told the magazine Wired. “You almost don’t even realize you’re being collected.” Tony’s interest in people often shifted like the seasons, but in a way that seemed to keep most people happy. Someone might be “in season,” getting the lion’s share of his attention, and then be out of season several months later, even though Tony still kept him or her close, inviting that person to events or parties or weekend trips. Though he might not spend every day with the friend anymore, he still found ways to connect and make him or her feel special. In that way, he accumulated an astonishing number of people who cared deeply about him and who turned to him for inspiration. Still, for some people that approach to friendship created an intense longing. They missed the days and months when his spotlight had shone on them exclusively. Some friends spent years trying to regain his full interest. Some of Tony’s friends hoped that Baleson’s season wouldn’t last long. They found her to be something of a braggart, and she sometimes seemed to exaggerate her connections or accomplishments. She often talked about Deepak Chopra, the famous Indian American author and motivational speaker, whom she described as her mentor. “One can only imagine what sitting and chatting with Deepak for hours has been—it’s beyond,” she said in an interview for a podcast focused on female entrepreneurs. Even her descriptions of her after-

college status as an international accountant, traveling through Europe and Asia to restructure companies, seemed inflated to some friends for one so young. She described Tony as a mentor, explaining in the podcast that “the most important thing he taught me was to surround myself with good people.” In 2013, after more than a year in Las Vegas, Baleson moved to New York City to start her own business, a health and wellness company called Wellthily. But like most people who collided with Tony, they stayed in touch. In a photo of the two of them on the subway in 2016, Baleson is smiling at the camera, her head resting on Tony’s cheek. In the spring of 2020, Baleson was still living in the West Village in New York, the US epicenter of the worsening coronavirus pandemic, when she heard about Tony’s plans in Park City. New York City residents were fleeing en masse. Baleson had earlier parted ways with her business partner and renamed her company the Wellth Collective. It had a grandiose, vague goal: “produce fitness and wellness-focused events around the world to introduce our tribe to the best in all things wellth,” according to her website. The business, however, was somewhat reliant on travel, so it stalled as the pandemic unfolded. Baleson, single and thirty-five, had no reason to stay in New York. She became one of an eclectic mix of friends and long-ago acquaintances that Tony began to assemble in Park City in the spring of 2020. Some moved there; others came for long visits. The group had few similarities except for their love of Tony and their lack of ties holding them back from joining him. Tony was beginning to formulate a plan for Park City, one that had a twopronged approach. First, he wanted to somehow help prop up the businesses that were suffering from Covid-19 shutdowns. Second, he wanted to create an environment where his friends could come and hang out without worrying about the threat of the pandemic, which, in only a month, had already completely upended the way the world lived. Tony wasn’t particularly worried about the virus, but, always attuned to his friends’ needs, he knew that some people would be more concerned about it than others.

To fulfill the latter goal, he decided to buy dozens of residential properties across town and turn them into Airbnbs. He already had shuttle buses to ferry people from Las Vegas to Park City, and now his friends would have a place to stay while they were there. He planned to turn over the properties to his friends, who could lease them out for some of the rental profits, with Tony taking a cut. Though tourism had come to a dead halt because of the pandemic—indeed, Airbnb itself was trying to raise private equity to stay afloat—Tony bet that it would eventually turn around. (It did, and Airbnb went public in December 2020, proving that it could navigate the pandemic.) On the face of it, the plan didn’t seem so unusual; at the start of Tony’s development of downtown Las Vegas, even more bizarre ideas had been tossed around. The details weren’t ironed out, but Tony rarely concentrated on those. He typically relied on trusted friends and employees at Zappos, or in downtown Las Vegas, to carry out his plans for him. He was the visionary. Park City, with its neat rows of homey restaurants and retail shops such as Patagonia along Main Street, could not have been more different from downtown Las Vegas when Tony first took an interest in the area in 2011. Park City, in some ways, looks like Aspen, Vail, or any other American ski town: polished and neat, with few ragged edges. The pandemic, though, had changed the landscape, placing the city nearly on the same wobbly economic footing that downtown Las Vegas had been on a decade earlier. When Tony arrived in the spring of 2020, he thought it seemed just as needy. The ski season had ended abruptly, and now the summer season was threatened as well. In early April, the organizers of the Tour of Utah, a bicycle race that passes through downtown Park City and draws thousands of onlookers, canceled the event. Next came the shutdown of what is known as the Silly Market, an outdoor festival filled with artists, entertainers, and food stands that typically takes place in the summer and fall. In 2019, the Silly Market had drawn nearly two hundred thousand visitors. The head of Park City’s visitor center acknowledged that the city’s tourism could be in “limbo” that summer. Baleson and another Las Vegas friend of Tony’s, Justin Weniger, began helping Tony with a quasi-business operation that everyone started calling “10X.”

Weniger, a baseball cap–wearing event planner, had previously been at the helm of one of Tony’s largest parties, an annual musical festival called Life Is Beautiful in the streets of downtown Las Vegas, which attracted more than 100,000 attendees in the early fall. Weniger, who speaks quickly, often mumbling, had helped organize the annual event for years but seemed to travel on the outskirts of Tony’s main group of friends, never quite earning full admittance for reasons that are unclear. His status at Life Is Beautiful was thrown into limbo in early 2020 in part because of a possible sale of the event to Rolling Stone magazine. Life Is Beautiful looked likely to be canceled that year because of the pandemic, and Weniger was eager to help out with Tony’s new business plans. In addition to the separate, Airbnb portion of the business, the 10X scheme worked like this: Park City residents bought $10 monthly memberships that granted them access on a designated Sunday to unlimited food and drinks at a set list of local restaurants. Tony picked up the entire tab, supporting the local businesses in the process. The cost was offset—although not by much—by the $10 memberships. The reason it was called 10X was that anyone who participated would theoretically get ten times the value of every dollar spent. Tony had tapped a local event organizer, Shaun Kimball, to work with Baleson and Weniger. Kimball, a surfer in his late thirties who lived part-time in Newport Beach, California, had met Tony several years earlier on a crowded day at Park City’s No Name Saloon, a rustic bar on Main Street featuring an antler chandelier and sparkling white lights hanging from the ceiling. The bar was packed, and Kimball and his date couldn’t find anywhere to sit. Tony had observed their dilemma and invited them to join his table. Kimball posted an advertisement on Facebook: Utah friends, anyone that knows me, knows I always GO BIG, for my next act, some will say “its too good to be true.” Think Sundance in the Summer. You have the unique opportunity to participate in something truly amazing! Let me introduce you to ‘The 10X-Experience.’

As many as a thousand people, mostly locals, purchased tickets. Covid restrictions were beginning to loosen, and more people were visiting Main Street again. Some of Tony’s friends were skeptical—and slightly confused—when he pitched 10X to them. How could a business make a profit from a customer who ate $100 in sushi and drank $50 in cocktails but paid only $10? The Airbnb portion of the plan also didn’t add up. For locals, the membership plan didn’t make much sense either, but the benefits were clear; Tony was subsidizing their flailing businesses. Tana Toly, whose family owns Red Banjo Pizza, the oldest business in Park City, had no idea who Tony was when she was pitched to participate, nor did she immediately know about his involvement in the plan. Her no-frills pizza joint with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, founded by her grandparents in 1962, has remained mostly unchanged through Park City’s evolution into a luxury destination. The idea, local business owners were told, was that 10X would lose money at first, but increased membership pricing over time, from $10 to $100 to $1,000 or more, would eventually bring in a profit. The business would expand into other cities. Membership would also include experiences such as fly fishing, golfing, and horseback riding and eventually lodging. “In all honesty it just—a lot of it didn’t make total sense,” Toly admitted. She agreed to participate anyway. Businesses had been shuttered for nearly two months, and their owners were desperate. Even as Park City reopened in the spring and summer of 2020, event cancellations and the continued lack of tourism in general meant far fewer customers than normal. Some of the business owners approached Kimball in tears, thanking the 10X organizers for the help. He accepted the gratitude on behalf of Tony, who rarely made a personal appearance at the Sunday events. At Tekila, a two-story Mexican restaurant, Tony’s 10X crew rented the entire restaurant for five weeks straight, from 5:00 p.m. until the bar closed, with Tony paying the bill. Members of his group piled onto the wide patio overlooking Main Street almost every night, drinking pitchers of margaritas and racking up

tabs in the thousands of dollars. Most of the businesses had outdoor locations, and it was summer, so they weren’t actively encouraging people to flout Covid rules. Tony Hsieh was a mystery to Tekila’s owner, J. C. Martinez, who met his strange new benefactor only once or twice, always in a crowd, and never for long. All Martinez knew was that Tony Hsieh was a godsend to his business. It seemed like his whole mission, Martinez said later, was to “spread a lot of love all over.”

CHAPTER FOUR DELIVERING HAPPINESS

Las Vegas, 2010

If happiness is everyone’s ultimate goal, wouldn’t it be great if we could change the world and get everyone and every business thinking in that context and that framework? —Tony Hsieh

In 2009, Tony Hsieh retreated to Lake Tahoe from Las Vegas with his longtime

friend Jenn Lim, whom he called his “backup brain.” In just eight days, they wrote the intertwined stories of Tony’s entrepreneurial life and Zappos’ bumpy rise to success. In a humorous, down-to-earth style, Tony told the story he’d been telling in pieces for years on the public speaking circuit. The pair, who had met in their twenties at Tony’s party loft in San Francisco, had flourished under pressure together before. They had summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania in 2002, reaching the 19,300-foot peak at sunrise after several days of hiking. Lim consulted for Zappos, including on workplace culture projects. Along the way, she had become a trusted member of Tony’s inner circle. In Tahoe, they worked on the book in twenty-four-hour stints with short naps, struggling to stay awake. They guzzled Red Bull and Tony’s favorite drink at the time, vodka. “We tried coffee. And alcohol. And then coffee and alcohol,” Tony told Footwear News in an interview. Lim added, “We actually put coffee beans in a vodka bottle.”

Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, debuted at number one on the New York Times best-seller list in June 2010 and stayed on the list for twenty-eight consecutive weeks. Tony laid out how Zappos’ purpose had evolved from building the largest shoe selection online in the startup days to a loftier goal by 2009: delivering happiness to the world. Thousands of entrepreneurs and business leaders, hungry for a fresh start after the 2008 financial crisis and the long recession that followed, read about Zappos’ ten core values, including what would become the most famous on the list, “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness.” With the help of the book’s publication, Tony Hsieh evolved into a happiness guru and Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters into a home for his apostles. Zappos had reached $1 billion in annual sales, so Tony’s take that happiness leads to worker productivity and profits, not the other way around, carried new weight. “So, in terms of this book, how is all this ‘happiness’ delivered? Just like everything else Hsieh has done: successfully,” a reviewer for Inc. wrote. A Wall Street Journal review noted, “It is hard not to like a CEO who, without a trace of irony, says that his corporate mission has become ‘delivering happiness to the world.’ ” Inside Zappos, a world of pure positivity had been years in the making, starting with recruitment practices. “We only hire happy people and we try to keep them happy,” Alfred Lin, the chief operating officer who left in 2010, once said. “Our philosophy is you can’t have happy customers without having happy employees, and you can’t have happy employees without having a company where people are inspired by the culture.” This radical approach was working. For seven years in a row, Zappos was named one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. Entry-level employees starting in the call center could rise to senior manager level within five to seven years thanks to a formal path Zappos had developed for moving up the ladder. The company required workers to take a four-week new-hire training course that averaged 160 hours and had additional hours of training for employees in the company’s “core curriculum.” Classes included “The Science of Happiness.”

The starting pay at Zappos’ call center, known as the Customer Loyalty Team, in 2010 was about $11, above Nevada’s $8.25 minimum wage, and the company paid 100 percent of workers’ health care insurance premiums. The starting pay has since increased to $15.75 hourly, compared to the state’s $8.75 for companies that provide medical benefits. Zappos was proving that shoes could be sold online at the same time as it was introducing its unusual culture of fun to the world. Getting a Zappos job became nearly impossible. Even before Delivering Happiness was published, the growing company had hired only 250 people from a pool of 25,000 applicants in one year. Prospective employees were picked up from the Las Vegas airport in Zappos’ airport shuttle, and a job seeker was immediately disqualified if the driver reported that he or she was rude. An interviewee’s technical skills and more subjective evaluation as a “culture fit” weighed equally in the hiring decision. “Job interviews took place in a room set up as a talk show set,” according to one case study by organizational behavior researchers. “Recruiters gave candidates creative tasks such as coming up with a design for Steve Madden shoes, and asked such questions as ‘On a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you?’ ” The application forms included a shoe-themed maze and a crossword puzzle. The cartoonish vibe of the process obscured a possible hazard: the culture-fit question became a filter, one that appeared to favor the young, cheerful, and tattooed. Tony noted that his staff listed dog day care as their top request for the new Las Vegas campus—even more than child day care. Tony’s injection of playfulness into corporate life might not seem unusual today. Tech companies across Silicon Valley are known, if not lampooned, for their open-air offices featuring Ping-Pong tables, nap rooms, free meals, gyms, and beer and kombucha on tap. Such amenities might brighten the day or make employees’ work life more luxurious. But it also has the effect of employees’ staying in the office longer and working more hours. As a Google employee, for example, if you can do your laundry, take dance classes, and eat a gourmet dinner all on the Googleplex campus, why go home? Tony took a different spin on companies’ growing movement to make their offices “fun” and pushed it further. His vision was less about freebies and

creature comforts (and getting employees to work nonstop) and more about embracing individuality and human connection as employee perks. He was trying to build a lifestyle. The company policy mandated employees’ spending social time together. He introduced family picnics and all-hands happy hours that took place on a regular basis. Zappos encouraged managers to spend 10 to 20 percent of their time with team members outside the office, including at the ubiquitous gatherings at local bars and outings to local events. The ten core values included “Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit” and “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication.” Tony even got himself approved by the county to officiate at employees’ weddings. “A lot of companies talk about work-life balance,” he told the New York Times. “We’re more about work-life integration. At the end of the day, it’s life.” Though Tony’s friends and employees never quite understood where his obsession came from, Zappos’ new mission of delivering happiness was a composite of everything he had spent years working toward. Early on, he had thought that Zappos’ mission could be “to inspire and be inspired,” but others around him had wondered how a business could achieve that every day. It seemed more like a personal goal, something a human could strive for, not a forprofit venture. So he had begun to think more about the joy the company wanted to send in every box of shoes to customers: delivering happiness. But Tony was also a shrewd businessperson, and he did not lose his drive for financial success. All of the warm feelings and camaraderie in the workplace culture were meant to lead to profits as well. Tony had realized years earlier at LinkExchange that investing in customer service, rooted in worker happiness, could be the key to growing the business. He had amplified that approach at Zappos, making it a core mission. It was, in fact, another of the reasons Jeff Bezos at Amazon wanted to buy the company in 2009. “I get all weak-kneed when I see a customer-obsessed company, and Zappos is certainly that,” he said in the internal video to Zappos employees when Amazon purchased the company in 2009. Every employee, no matter what his or her role, had to learn to answer phone calls from customers. Customer Loyalty Team members weren’t judged on how quickly they could get off the phone or how much they could upsell a customer.

Instead, Tony developed a new metric called Personal Service Level (PSL), which measured how well the employee connected with a customer. Zappos wasn’t a shoe company, Tony liked to say; it was a service company selling shoes. He fielded phone calls himself during the holiday rush, an annual two-week period at the end of the year known as “Holiday Helper,” in which every employee spends ten hours on the phone. Sitting at his desk among his coworkers, Tony never introduced himself to customers but enjoyed getting into long conversations about obscure topics with them. A customer in Florida called in and mentioned that he planted Christmas trees and raised cows. Soon Tony was in a deep conversation about how the customer had to castrate his cows. Another time, Tony answered the phone with a typical greeting: “Hi, welcome to Zappos, can I help you?” The customer replied, “Do you have any shoes that are like fall?” Without pausing, Tony patiently queried, “Do you mean like the season? Do you mean brown?” Before he could get to the bottom of it, the customer threw a curveball: “Do you know anything about quantum dynamics?” At that point, a customer service agent at another company might have dodged the question and stuck to the script or simply hung up. But Tony got excited. Quantum dynamics, which describes energy at the atomic and subatomic levels, was something that he had studied casually. His curious mind frequently led him to research topics that had nothing to do with business. The customer had reached probably the only person at Zappos who would have known anything about it. Tony never mentioned that he was the CEO, even though they spoke for close to an hour. Tony was the rare top executive who didn’t care about titles, endearing himself to employees, who could also see that he authentically enjoyed being silly. It wasn’t a gimmick. He loved board games, puns, dancing, and putting on magic shows. Most people thought he had the worst taste in music because he liked only songs that were upbeat, such as Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” any time of the year, or electronic dance music. He was constantly getting up to mischief and playing small tricks; he knew the entire secret menu at the fast-food chain In-N-Out Burger and claimed to be the only person to have

ordered the now-discontinued “100 by 100” burger—one hundred patties stacked together. He was also fond of robots and in 2013 was introduced through a friend to Alexandria “Ali” Bevilacqua, a twenty-seven-year-old actress and Las Vegas native who played a robot in the Blue Man Group. The first time they hung out together, Tony invited her to ride Razor scooters with him around his penthouse apartments at the Ogden. The two started dating shortly thereafter. Later, Tony decided he wanted to visit Santa Claus during the Christmas season, so he and Bevilacqua, along with Fred Mossler and another friend, joined a line filled with children and their parents waiting to tell the joyful man their holiday wishes. Spying a nearby playground, Tony and Bevilacqua, a small woman with short blond hair, left Mossler to stand in line while they pushed each other on the swings and took turns on the slide until it was time to see Santa. “He really didn’t care what people thought,” Bevilacqua said later. “It was like ‘I’m going to have fun, and I’m going to do this hilarious thing.’ ” Inside and outside work, Tony’s thoughtfulness and generosity were unparalleled. He was the first to buy tickets to dance recitals or plays featuring his friends’ children or donate to a school fundraiser. He remembered the music, movies, and bands each friend liked and introduced them to their favorite celebrities when they passed through Las Vegas. When his friend Michael Cornthwaite’s wife, Jennifer, was in labor at home with their daughter in 2013, Tony went directly from the plane after landing from Italy to be the first person to visit their new baby. Jamie Naughton, Zappos’ longtime chief of staff, was having trouble getting out of a bad marriage in the early aughts. With no hesitation, Tony moved her, her baby daughter, and her mother into his own house in Henderson, Nevada, for several months. He was hyperaware of what those around him needed. If anyone, even a lowlevel Zappos employee, wanted time with Tony, he personally handed over his cell phone to the person and instructed him or her to put the appointment on his calendar. At Burning Man, he noticed a woman in his group shivering and gave her a furry Technicolor jacket from his own stash to wear, making a new friend in the process.

At Zappos, his generosity came partly in the form of parties. They weren’t just any parties, though; they were full-fledged events orchestrated over months, designed to give every worker an unforgettable experience, one he or she might not have had otherwise. Tony wanted to see what would happen when different people collided among the music and lights and other details. Zappos spent millions of dollars a year on the parties, “family picnics,” and happy hours and employed an entire team of planners—the fungineers—to design them. The company regularly took over nightclubs and other venues across Las Vegas. Employees joked that “Party with your peers” was the unofficial eleventh core value at Zappos. Though Tony wasn’t often involved in the planning, he stationed himself at the door to greet people when they arrived. In 2015, Zappos rented out an open-air stage at the LIGHT nightclub at the Mandalay Bay hotel on the Strip. As music pulsed and lights flashed over the crowd, the Dancetronauts, along with acrobats from Cirque du Soleil, all dressed in space suits, flew over the massive crowd of screaming, cheering employees. At another point in the festivities, a haunting meditational song filled the giant space, and lit candles flickered along walkways. All at once, a procession of break dancers dressed as monks filed onstage from both doors, chanting to the audience. The next year, for Zappos’ annual vendor appreciation party, the theme was “Untamed Circus.” More than 2,500 people poured into Drai’s Beachclub and Nightclub at the Cromwell on the Strip, a 35,000-square-foot space with multiple roof decks. Zappos had turned the venue into an old-timey traveling band of oddities with an impressive array of clowns, stilt walkers, and ballerinas flitting around among the guests. Lion tamers and fire breathers performed for the retail industry crowd. A giant red-paneled disco ball spun as the crowds danced and mingled; guests were served unlimited drinks from multiple bars and ate alcohol-infused cotton candy. At one point Tony stood onstage, attempting to juggle circus rings. At one Zappos holiday party, a paintball warehouse was turned into an endof-the-world scene, with zombies hidden around every corner, and a New York DJ, Jason Smith, who was regularly hired for Zappos’ parties, organized sound effects, such as a plane crashing, from the top of a fake army tank. When

attendees walked into the warehouse from the parking lot, they walked by a pretend CNN newscast about the end of the world playing on the side of the building. At another party, Tony dressed up as Morpheus in the movie The Matrix and handed out red and blue pills (really jelly beans) to attendees. Smith, the DJ, was used to playing much tamer company parties and nightclubs in New York City. At Zappos, the work that went into the parties was beyond anything he had ever seen before. “They would make this really magical experience and transform the whole club,” he said later. “It was surreal.” Taking care of others acted as a powerful salve to Tony. If his friends were happy, he was happy, too. He was like a mirror, reflecting those around him. “So if I am around an introverted person that is really awkward,” he explained to the New York Times in 2011. “But if I am around an extroverted person I will be whoever they are times point-5.” Tony’s employees and friends couldn’t reciprocate his lavish gifts of time and money, and Tony expected nothing in return. He had an odd relationship with money. He didn’t seem to take it seriously, but he also didn’t flaunt it. Money would come and go. He used it only as a means to an end, and if his friends could benefit from it, why not? His friends still found ways to show their devotion. For Tony’s fortieth birthday in 2013, a group of people got matching tattoos of small circles— pixels, a nerdy computer joke—in his honor, surprising him at his party later in the night. That stunt prompted questions from the local media about whether Tony was running a cult instead of a company, a half-joking question that had followed him since the release of Delivering Happiness in 2010. On The Colbert Report in 2011, Stephen Colbert asked Tony directly, “Is this a cult? Are you, dear leader, father of a cult? Do you have child brides? How much control do you have over these people?” Tony, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, his hair shaved close to his head, chuckled and quickly moved the conversation back to Zappos’ ten core values. Tony wasn’t a cult leader, but it was true that he had attracted a legion of devoted followers who not only admired his business acumen but also his inherent goodness and ability to lift others up.

But Tony did a terrible job taking care of himself and tuning in to his own needs. Often he ignored them altogether. Devout people pleasers such as Tony generally worry that if they prioritize their own desires, they will ultimately end up alone. Why would anyone choose to stay? One friend compared Tony to the children’s story The Giving Tree, in which a tree gives and gives to the boy she loves, never receiving anything in return, until there is nothing left of her. Tony’s pursuit of happiness starting in the mid-2000s helped usher the burgeoning tech world into a broader movement that had been brewing in America for a few years already: positive psychology. Psychology as a science had focused on treating conditions such as depression and anxiety as described in a diagnostic manual. In the late 1990s, the psychologist Martin Seligman argued that that wasn’t enough. Instead of focusing only on problems, psychology could also suggest how to live a good life—happy, healthy, meaningful—which, he argued, could be studied scientifically, too. By looking at geniuses and society’s most accomplished members, psychologists could discover “the roots of a positive life,” as he commented in his 1998 speech as president of the American Psychological Association. It wasn’t an entirely new concept, as psychologists had been discussing a more humanistic and holistic approach to psychology going back to the mid-twentieth century. But in 2002, he went on to publish Authentic Happiness, which became a best seller. “Ideally psychology should be able to help document what kind of families result in the healthiest children, what work environments support the greatest satisfaction among workers, and what policies result in the strongest civic commitment,” he wrote. In the following decade, positive psychology took off among academics. Meanwhile, self-help books and consulting services by untrained gurus and life coaches also proliferated, fueled by the new scientific interest, offering the masses what the author, journalist, and activist Barbara Ehrenreich called “pop positive thinking,” the linking of positive thoughts with good outcomes in life, in her critique of the field, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

The lines between science and pop culture became blurred, at least from the consumer’s perspective. The meaning of happiness remained up for debate. Pleasure, enjoyment, positivity, gratitude, purpose, well-being, and virtue, plucked from Western and Eastern philosophies, blended into a cultural movement. Positive psychologists tried to distance themselves from the pop culture of self-help but at the same time embraced methods echoing life coaching and motivation, including publishing books aimed at a general audience with “you” and “your” in the title and marketing to corporations interested in worker productivity. Simply being happy wasn’t the sole goal, Ehrenreich noted; it was about happiness leading to improved health and success. “Happy, or positive, people—however that is measured—do seem to be more successful at work,” she wrote. “They are more likely to get a second interview while job hunting, get positive evaluations from superiors, resist burnout, and advance up the career ladder. But this probably reflects little more than corporate bias in favor of a positive attitude and against ‘negative’ people.” In his journey into that world, Tony had discovered The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, published in 2006, often recommending it to friends and in media interviews. The book argues that happiness can’t be achieved by looking only outside oneself for fulfillment. Nor does it come only from within through a mindful, detached state of being. Instead, it “comes from between,” from connections between yourself and others, in love and in work. Tony might have been shy, but he never stopped wanting to connect with people. He saw himself as someone who could spread that philosophy. With Delivering Happiness, he could start from Zappos and launch a pay-it-forward happiness chain that could make the entire world happy. In doing so, he thought, he could be happy, too. Tony dedicated the final chapter of his 2010 book to the concept of happiness, including graphs and charts that revealed his analytical mind in motion. In particular, he was fascinated by the idea that achieving a longtime goal or winning the lottery didn’t provide lasting, sustainable happiness. He acknowledged that deeply human problem, but he didn’t question whether the pursuit of happiness should, in fact, be the end goal. “The question for you to

ask yourself is whether what you think you want to pursue will actually get you the happiness you think it will get you,” he posited. Tony believed that his brand of happiness could create the best business conditions. Workers could come as themselves and be accepted. Customers would be respected as individual humans with their own joy and pain, as well. Lim, with the help of Tony, spun off Delivering Happiness into a consulting firm—what she and Tony called “a movement,” capitalizing on happiness’s moment in the corporate spotlight. Lim became CEO and Chief Happiness Officer. The consulting team would grow to include positions such as CoachSultant & Win-Win-Win Collaborations Booster, Culture Orchestrator, Global Happiness Navigator, and Happiness Owl. For years to come, Tony and Lim would relentlessly promote the book and its message, decorating a tour bus with a smiley face that they drove across the country, taking dozens of friends with them. They were accelerating a trend across the United States, including on Silicon Valley’s sunshine-soaked tech campuses. Companies had begun to embrace integrating the concept of happiness into the corporate structure, including more companies adding a “chief happiness officer” role. One of Google’s first engineers, Chade-Meng Tan, took the title Jolly Good Fellow. He developed a mindfulness course for Google employees and wrote a book in 2012 about emotional intelligence called Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). Tan began his speeches by asking the audience to do a thought exercise: “Imagine two human beings. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, just wish for those two human beings to be happy. That’s all.” Early on, in 2003, the now-common chief happiness officer role appeared as a marketing stunt. McDonald’s named its mascot clown, Ronald McDonald, “Chief Happiness Officer” to generate some silly news stories. Today, the title has become accepted as a professional role at tech companies and other businesses for people who lead human resources or problem solving for customers. By 2014, there were so many happiness officers that the New Republic called it “the latest, creepiest job in corporate America.”

Nonetheless, Tony’s brand stood out. It seemed authentic and full of hope. Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters became an optimism mecca of sorts. Tony always promoted transparency—he published his daily email and meeting log online for anyone to see—and he threw open the doors to anyone to tour Zappos. Thousands of business leaders and entrepreneurs from retail companies, banks, and software providers made trips there, hoping to learn from Tony Hsieh, the man who was bringing workplace happiness to the masses. One of them was Tony Gareri, who in 2010 walked the halls of the sprawling Las Vegas Market, a home furnishings trade show during which tens of thousands of retailers and suppliers browsing rugs, sofas, and bedroom sets typically fill up the expo center. Gareri was representing Roma Moulding, the Toronto-based picture frame company his father had founded in 1984. But that year, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the trade show was nearly empty. At a dinner with others in the industry, a woman handed him a copy of Delivering Happiness, which he finished on the five-hour flight home, reading the last lines with skepticism and a little curiosity. Maybe it’s a Vegas thing—good publicity, he thought. Back home, Gareri looked up Tony Hsieh and Zappos online, and on a whim, he put his name on a waiting list to attend a three-day boot camp at Zappos to learn all about the company’s culture. The next day, Zappos called about an opening, and a week later, Gareri stepped onto a Zappos shuttle at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport with other eager campers who’d just arrived. The days were an endless series of talks by quirky employees, tours of wackily decorated offices, and a field trip to downtown Las Vegas, to which Zappos planned to move its headquarters from the suburb of Henderson. During a steak dinner at Tony’s home, Gareri made sure to grab the seat across from the guru. He was now a changed man, wanting to institute a happiness culture at his twenty-six-year-old company. Initially, Tony told him that it wasn’t possible. “You should shut down the company, go across the street, and reopen the company,” he remembered Tony telling him, warning that a culture overhaul is a gargantuan task. If Gareri did try to instigate change from within, Tony suggested, it would be difficult and take a wholehearted

commitment. That was enough for Gareri. “I needed to hear from him it was possible,” he said. Gareri knew that his company’s culture had become toxic, a reality that had become clear to him while he was touring Zapposland. Roma Moulding’s products were high quality, but Gareri had mentally checked out, waiting to decide whether to stay or go. Tony Hsieh gave him an answer and a newfound commitment to positive leadership. Gareri got his father and other company executives to agree to try a Zapposlike culture revolution at the family-owned company. Starting with an admission to employees that the company had failed to put them first, he had begun to consider how the company could “blur the line between work and play.” Roma Moulding started holding all-hands meetings, like Zappos’ famous gatherings, with Gareri talking to employees with the zeal of a motivational speaker, that have continued for a decade and counting. Roma began promoting public tours to show off its own workplace culture as its business rebounded and thrived. “Company cultures develop over time,” said Gareri, who also launched a public speaking career. “It’s not a three-month, one-year strategy. It’s truly—as Tony stated—a five-minimum-to-lifetime strategy. The more love and the more attention you give it, I think it continues to pay dividends.” Happiness, though, can have a darker side. Psychologists have found that focusing on happiness can have the paradoxical effect of making people less happy by creating higher expectations. In one experiment, a group of people viewed a two-minute video clip previously proven to induce positive emotions about a female figure skater winning a gold medal and celebrating with her coach as the crowd cheers. Before watching the positive video, some participants read a made-up news article emphasizing the importance of happiness in life; others read an article that, instead of happiness, wrote about the importance of using “accurate judgment” in life. The group who read the article on happiness reported being less happy while watching the joyful video. “These findings are consistent with the idea that valuing happiness leads to less happiness by setting people up for disappointment,” the researchers

concluded. Self-help books promote “a mindset to maximize happiness,” they wrote, when, in fact, people might be more helped by the approach of the philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1873: Mill said that happy people are those whose minds are focused “on some object other than their own happiness.” In a separate study, researchers concluded that the pursuit of happiness can actually make people feel lonelier, because Western notions of happiness focus more on one’s own feelings and do not take those of friends and strangers into account, which could possibly damage social connections with others. Daniel Horowitz, a historian at Smith College, wrote about the rise of positive psychology and happiness studies in his book Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America. He traced how the positive psychology movement became big business in the 2000s, fueled in particular by the spread of messaging on social media and the popularity of TED Talk videos that feature snappy how-to-live-the-good-life content from witty, sometimes dramatic experts. Among the most popular TED Talks is “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in 2004, which, as Horowitz noted, has been viewed almost 20 million times online. Meanwhile, tech companies and corporations as big as Walmart began hiring happiness coaches preaching themes similar to Tony’s company-culture manifesto. Horowitz noted that the movement has attracted “a world of serial searchers” for life enhancement. Horowitz pointed to a landmark work published by the social psychologist Philip Brickman in the 1970s. Brickman and a colleague published a paper stating that people can get stuck walking on a “hedonic treadmill,” a futile search for long-lasting happiness. In fact, boosts in positive emotions as a result of good fortune or life events are only temporary. People adapt and soon return to their emotional baselines. The thrill wears off. Unfortunately, Brickman committed suicide at the age of thirtyeight by jumping off an apartment building in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In an obituary, fellow psychologists wrote : The best way off the hedonic treadmill, according to Phil’s writings, is commitment—the almost magical mechanism that converts the inevitable pain and dissatisfaction in life into purpose and meaningful-ness. Unfortunately, commitments can be very fragile…. His writings reveal deep

feelings for the phenomena he studied; perhaps he had too much feeling and too much insight. These two things together are the mainsprings of unique creative achievement, but they are also the elements of tragedy.

Some research has linked the extreme valuing of happiness to an increased risk of developing mania as part of bipolar disorder and depression, and high levels of positive emotions can be associated with risky behaviors including alcohol and drug use. The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, known worldwide for his happiness research, in a surprising 2018 interview said he had become convinced that people don’t want to be happy—they’re interested in life satisfaction, constructed by the memories of our lives and the accomplishments of our goals, rather than day-to-day happiness. “The question of whether society should intervene so that people will be happier is very controversial, but whether society should strive for people to suffer less—that’s widely accepted,” he said, adding later “in general, if you want to reduce suffering, mental health is a good place to start—because the extent of illness is enormous and the intensity of the distress doesn’t allow for any talk of happiness.” In his own quest for peace and joyfulness, Tony struggled quietly. He suffered from significant social anxiety, the unrelenting feeling of being watched and judged by the people around him, and also, likely, depression. Although he had never received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability associated with difficulties in communication and social interaction, he speculated to some of his close friends that he was somewhere on the spectrum. It was easy to see why he thought so. In conversation, he often skipped small talk and asked something direct instead, such as “What would it take to reach your full potential?” Despite his limitless generosity, he was missing a level of empathy common in most people—and he knew it. He approached the problem as he had those of downtown Las Vegas and Zappos: by studying, reading books and articles about humans and their desires. He was brilliant—he could do complex mathematical equations in his

head, and he told people that his mind was always working eight seconds ahead of everyone else’s. Unbeknownst to even some of his closest friends, Tony suffered from facial blindness, also undiagnosed, which sometimes made it difficult to identify the people around him. In an August 2010 essay, the New Yorker writer Oliver Sacks wrote devastatingly about the way his own inability to recognize faces and even familiar places had contributed to a lifetime of frustrating interactions: “On several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.” It’s unclear how severe Tony’s affliction was because he told so few people about it. He once complained to a close friend that he might not recognize his own mother if she walked by him unannounced. Tony developed workarounds by recognizing the voices of close friends or by asking a select group of people to help guide him through particularly difficult events with a lot of people. When someone entered a room, he might distract the person by offering him or her something—such as a meal—so he could leave the room and listen as the new person talked with others. Most of his friends assumed he was absent-minded or had memory problems because of his very busy lifestyle. In one example of what was likely Tony’s inability to recognize faces, Phil Plastina, the head of the Dancetronauts, who by that time knew Tony well, sat next to him at a bar for more than two hours one night in Las Vegas. Even though Tony turned to look at him several times, he never said anything, treating him like a stranger. Finally Plastina, who had been talking to someone else, took Tony’s arm and said hello. Tony greeted him as if he had just arrived. Each of Tony’s health problems was an obstacle, standing in the way of the kind of life he wanted for himself, one filled with all different kinds of people and events. He refused to talk openly about any of his issues, despite the number of friends who surrounded him. He took Adderall, a medication generally associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and Xanax for his social anxiety. He took Ambien to help him sleep. But that wasn’t enough. Earlier, when he had lived in San Francisco, he had discovered the pleasing effects of alcohol, specifically Grey Goose vodka, at the parties he had hosted at

his loft during the years after the LinkExchange sale. Alcohol was like a lubricant, enabling him to have the types of conversations and moments he wanted with the people around him. (It should not have been mixed with medications such as Adderall and Xanax, but he didn’t appear to suffer negative effects from doing so.) By 2010, what had been occasional drinking grew into a nightly ritual. Through the parties and events he threw at Zappos, he seamlessly infused it into the culture there as well. Though alcohol-heavy workplaces have often led to problems for companies, it seemed to work for the most part at Zappos, where so much prominence was already placed on “fun.” It wouldn’t be odd to see the CEO do a shot in the middle of the day or at a meeting. His employees worshipped him, and they joined in. Drinking became a part of who Tony was, a feature of his character that everyone around him accepted, like his deep desire to have fun or his relentless determination to always be on time for everything, down to the minute. To a few close friends, Tony admitted why he thought he needed so much alcohol in his life. He said he felt that he couldn’t talk to people properly if he was sober. In other words, he had trouble forming connections, the friendships he cared so deeply about. Sometimes his friends would broach the subject with him, as in 2013, when his then girlfriend, Ali Bevilacqua, asked him, “What’s up with the drinking? Why do you have to drink every night?” “I have to drink,” he replied. “It’s the only way I can live in the now. It’s the only way I can get out of my head.” Nothing cemented his drinking lifestyle more than the three-and-a-halfmonth book tour for Delivering Happiness, a cross-country road trip in 2010 on a large bus featuring friends he had collected over the years and whom he had invited to join him. The bus, colored light turquoise with the book’s logo and a big, winking smiley face, stopped at music festivals, bars, truck stops, and more. On board, the bus had a full-time bartender, and it was a never-ending party, celebrating his successful book. The group that followed Tony carried bright yellow HAPPINESS X-ING AHEAD signs wherever they went. Starting in Las Vegas, the bus drove more than three thousand miles across the country, stopping for sack races in Colorado, a happy

hour with local residents in Omaha, Nebraska, and hula-hooping in Rhode Island. In New Orleans, the tour bus drove through the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood still devastated after Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures in 2005. Flooded-out houses were still marked with X’s and numbers spray-painted by emergency workers who had recorded how many people or pets had been rescued or died. Tony’s bus, usually filled with music and conversation, was silent as it pulled into the ward. Even years after the hurricane, the damage was startling to observe. Tony was emphatic about the group’s visit, and he partnered with a nonprofit to spend two days repairing and rebuilding houses. He worked alongside everyone else. Other companies might have publicized that sort of “human” move by their CEO, but it would never even occur to Tony. At the South by Southwest festival in Austin, the bus caught up with the actor and investor Ashton Kutcher, who later joined the bus trip for a stretch, partying with everyone on board. “Nobody in the bus had a personal agenda that they were trying to fill,” Kutcher told Tony and Jenn Lim in a later interview. The pair often interviewed people for video postings online during the tour. “I think everybody’s agenda was just to give and share happiness.” In New York City, Zappos employees rode in fifteen pedicabs through Times Square, waving HAPPINESS X-ING AHEAD signs and passing them out to tourists waiting to board tour buses or purchase cheap theater tickets. With big grins and shouts of glee, they shouted “Happiness!” or “Happiness crossing!” to mildly confused passersby on the sidewalks. “But are you happy?” a bystander shouted at the miniature parade. No one seemed to hear or bothered to respond as the procession carried on.

PART II

CHAPTER FIVE THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Park City, May and June 2020 Las Vegas, 2012–2016

I think of my role more as being like the architect of the greenhouse, where under the right conditions, the plants will flourish and thrive on their own. —Tony Hsieh

In Park City, a blanket of wintertime snow hides a small lake on Aspen Springs

Drive that disappears into the white landscape on the main highway into the ski resort town. But in springtime, the valley meadows thaw out, revealing verdant pastures traced by a few rusty fences and groves of trees. The sparkling pond reflects sunlight through the cathedral windows of what became known by Tony Hsieh and his friends as the Ranch. Aspen Springs Drive, a residential road, passes the pond before carving through trees up the mountainside. The trees cloak luxury homes that are close enough to be considered part of a neighborhood but far enough apart that their residents can mostly forget about other people. Realtors marketed the house at 2636 Aspen Springs Drive—a nine-bedroom, thirteen-bathroom house on seventeen acres of land that also includes a horse corral, a tennis court, an indoor swimming pool, and waterfront lounge areas on a sandy beach with mountains in the distance—as Crescent Ranch. Sold for about $7 million in 2016, only four years later, the house was listed for $14.9 million in the rush for big houses and distant neighbors during the pandemic.

In late spring 2020, Tony toured the house and was immediately enamored. The house features tall windows, overlooking the private lake, the mountains in the background. Members of his entourage explored like kids, bouncing through the different rooms. Tony and his crew made the decision to buy it almost immediately. He offered to pay nearly $16 million, a million dollars over the asking price, if the sellers would not return home. They agreed. Soon after, the sellers’ real estate agent returned as movers were packing up the family’s belongings. By then Tony had already placed hundreds of candles around the house. Lately, he had developed a fixation with fire. He “explained to me that the candles were a symbol of what life was like in a simpler time,” the real estate agent said later. Buying the Ranch was Tony’s biggest step in what appeared to be a period of renewal in his life, despite the social distancing and doomsday atmosphere of the pandemic. Postrehab, he had embarked on a digital detox in an attempt to find clarity, turning off his two cell phones and answering only important emails related to his work at Zappos. He was still the CEO, but he was increasingly dropping out of online meetings. When he did show up, he often seemed unfocused, as though he were paying attention to something else. If any of his friends wanted to reach him, they had to email one of his assistants. Despite being somewhat absent from work and hard to track down for friends, Tony seemed to be in the best shape of his life in early spring 2020. He wasn’t drinking much and had even given up smoking American Spirit cigarettes for the most part, a habit he loved. He had made a pact with his Las Vegas friend Justin Weniger to stop taking ketamine, and staying off the drug seemed to be helping. After he left rehab in late February 2020, Tony lived in the $4 million woodframe house on Empire Avenue that he had initially planned for a vacation rental. The house was directly across from the ski slopes of Park City Mountain. In the spring of 2020, skiing was shut down because of the pandemic. But almost every day, Tony walked out of his house, crossed the massive, empty parking lot of the resort lodge, and picked one of the network of trails that weaves across the shuttered ski slopes, ascending the mountain.

The trails are strenuous, made all the harder by Park City’s nearly seventhousand-foot elevation, with hikes that can reach ten thousand feet. The high altitude can cause dizziness, headaches, or even an upset stomach in some people, especially those used to living at lower elevations, such as Las Vegas. One of the more popular paths up Park City Mountain is the Armstrong Trail, a series of switchbacks on rocky terrain that passes through groves of aspen and pine trees, before eventually giving way to a panoramic view of Park City. At the cluster of boulders at the top, hikers can look out across the entire valley, the white letters PC carved into a hillside in the distance. But the view is achieved only after nearly four miles of straight uphill hiking, and assuming that one walks at a fast clip, the endeavor could take three hours or more. In the spring, the weather in Park City can be fickle, 70 degrees one day and 38 and snowing the next, with stretches of crusty snow lining parts of the trails shadowed by towering pine trees, making them even more treacherous to walk. Weniger, a longtime trail runner and mountain biker, was a reliable companion on those hikes, but few of Tony’s other visitors could keep up with him. Some dropped out of a hike before ever making it a third of the way up. On those long walks, Tony practiced a sort of heavy-breathing technique that he had read about in a book called The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter and that was supposed to boost his endurance. Back at home, he lowered himself into icy baths at least four times a week, remaining five minutes or more, a method of reducing body inflammation and healing muscle aches. He also spent a long time stretching. Almost every day, he made soup. It was one of his favorite foods, and he hardly ever used a recipe, enjoying the act of throwing random ingredients and leftovers together to see what might work. When Tony’s longtime driver, Steve Moroney, who hadn’t seen him for a month or more, came to pick him up at the Empire Avenue house in the early spring of 2020, Tony was standing in the kitchen wearing only sweats, his shirt off, drinking a glass of water. He was completely toned, his abs glistening. “Wow,” Moroney said. “You’ve really been working out!” Even when Tony had been on an exercise binge in the past—climbing California mountains or

deciding to run a marathon—he had still usually had a little belly. Moroney jokingly poked Tony’s flat stomach. Like all of Tony’s employees, Moroney’s standing with his boss was more of a close friend than a paid worker, and he had been driving Tony and his entourage around since the Delivering Happiness tour bus a decade earlier. He viewed Tony as family. Tony smiled at Moroney and described his near-daily hikes. Moroney, and others who saw Tony at the time, assumed that his new fitness routine meant he was better. He looked so good, so healthy, and there didn’t seem to be drugs around. But other longtime friends such as Tyler Williams, his right-hand man and close friend at Zappos, saw something else when they watched him leave to hike miles up those mountains. They observed early signs of the manic behavior that he had displayed months earlier in Las Vegas, before rehab. Though drugs seemed to be out of the equation for now, he talked intensely about his big visions for Park City and 10X—not always coherently— while at the same time philosophizing about living a life free of constraints such as money and time. He didn’t want to think about Zappos or even wear shoes. Some of his new visions seemed to be instigated by his recent insecurity about what he had achieved in his career, compared with other chief executive officers. He didn’t often compare himself to others, at least publicly, so that was a new phenomenon. In late May 2020, he had watched with rapt attention as the billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX had launched two astronauts into space for the first time. Something shifted in Tony in that moment, and he seemed to question his whole approach to management, particularly developing people and urging them to learn through reading books on their own path. Though he wasn’t necessarily discarding his overall quest for happiness, he wondered if he had taken the wrong way to get there. Maybe he shouldn’t have been working at such a long, slow game, focused on building up the people around him to achieve greatness. Instead, and with an egotistical tone that was also unlike him, he wondered aloud if he had been doing it all wrong. Had he missed an opportunity to do something really big that could change humankind? He had to fix it—he had to fix everything right now. What exactly he had to fix was unclear to those around him.

That change in tone also accompanied his inexplicable new buying spree, starting with the Ranch. He was already talking about investing in other properties as part of his 10X plan. That was also very out of character since, until recently, he had lived in a small Aistream trailer, still preferred fast food, and, despite working at a shoe company, wore only black Asics. Williams and others kept quiet about their suspicions about Tony’s behavior because they initially didn’t see any clear evidence that something was wrong. Despite his career-long focus on healthy relationships, which was a corporate value at Zappos, he had been hard to talk to about anything serious. He had walled off parts of himself and hated confrontation. It was part of the reason why getting him into rehab earlier in 2020 had been so challenging: his friends knew that he would react negatively to any questions, possibly telling them to leave Park City. They didn’t want to leave. They were worried. Something was brewing. By 2012 in Las Vegas, Tony had cemented his stardom with his success at Zappos and the publication of Delivering Happiness, but it wasn’t enough to keep him still. He was an innovator, always seeking the next radical idea, the next promising discovery, while disdaining taking the easy route. His obsession with cities hadn’t been quelled by his decision to personally invest $350 million into the one where he lived. He began repeating a research conclusion that would become a mantra: when a city’s population doubles in size, productivity increases by 15 percent. Corporations, though, get bogged down in bureaucracy and leave innovation behind while growing. “Cities have stood the test of time,” he said. “They’re selforganized. The mayor of a city doesn’t actually tell its residents what to do or where to live.” Tony’s thinking seemed inspired by researchers such as the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, who applied scientific equations to the study of cities. His and others’ work had found that as a city doubled in size, economic measures such as income, number of patents granted, and GDP went up by 15 percent—but so did the darker side of the equation, with a 15 percent rise in

negative factors such as crime, traffic congestion, and certain diseases including AIDS. But ever a devotee of positivity, Tony focused on the good side of the equation as the foundation for his riskiest move yet. Tony considered himself to be a “futurist,” someone who studies and predicts what will happen a dozen years from now, or even fifty or a hundred years. He found that more than three-quarters of the businesses on Fortune magazine’s first list of the five hundred biggest companies in the United States in 1955 had since failed. Zappos needed to ensure its survival in the long term. Tony had already rethought the traditional office and workday, even the role of the customer and the manager-employee relationship. Now he was eyeing something grander, questioning traditional hierarchy—as in workers managed by bosses overseen by more bosses—which dated back to the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. It felt nothing like the freewheeling office that was Zappos. There was also Tony’s role as CEO, a job that by 2012 he had held for more than a decade but didn’t actually love. Unlike other business executives, who enjoy the power of overseeing a global enterprise, who work their whole careers to get to that point, he didn’t like the unmanageable stress that came with it, and he especially didn’t like telling people what to do. That was why he always recommended books or TED Talks to get his viewpoint across to someone. Often he would spend his mornings scouring the internet for interesting articles and information and then send them to the right people at the right time, usually when he wanted them to think about a new idea. Those missives were affectionately known as Tony’s “data drops.” “I think of my role more as being like the architect of the greenhouse, where under the right conditions, the plants will flourish and thrive on their own,” he once said. Not only was he uncomfortable with the job personally, he questioned the role of CEO at any company—he found it to be a flawed title that caused nepotism and put the company at risk for relying so much on one person. Instead he wondered how he could give more authority to the loyal employees he’d fostered for years. Eager to find a better way, he read about theories of self-management, which essentially does away with the typical company structure. It appealed to his desire for the next iteration of Zappos.

In October 2012, he traveled to Lost Pines, a resort about twenty-five miles outside Austin, Texas, the liberal tech hub of the South. He was giving a talk at the annual Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, part of a movement started by Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey, where a group of about two hundred corporate leaders gathered each year. Americans weren’t happy with the corporate greed that had been revealed during the 2008 financial crisis. Conscious Capitalism offered an answer by emphasizing a higher purpose alongside profits. Tony’s presentation of Zappos’ values and his interest in reviving downtown Las Vegas fit right in. In the rotating cast of wealthy do-gooders laying out their plans, Tony paid attention when it was Brian Robertson’s turn onstage. Robertson, with a goatee and a kind demeanor, has described himself as having a rebellious streak, questioning the status quo and authority from his school days into his professional life. His life-changing invention, the reason he had been invited to speak at the conference, had come after he had nearly crashed a plane. He was flying solo with only twenty hours of training completed when a low-voltage light on his instrument dashboard turned on midflight. But Robertson ignored it because his other instruments, including the altimeter, appeared normal. He ended up flying through a storm and nearly losing control. He later thought about how humans in the workplace are a company’s sensors and a lone worker can sometimes be ignored. “How do I build an organization where everybody gets to bring all of their wisdom, all of their gifts, all of their talents, and there’s no risk that we outvote somebody that has some critical insight?” he asked at one TED Talk. To the Texas crowd, he described the ability of his system of self-management for companies, which he had named holacracy, to flatten the hierarchy and ensure that all workers are heard. Robertson noticed Tony in the audience because he wore a ratty T-shirt among the upscale crowd. He didn’t know who Tony was, but he could feel him listening intently. Tony approached him immediately after the talk. “He came up to me and started just peppering me with questions, like really curious, a little skeptical,” Robertson remembered. “I gave him all the answers I could.”

Tony shared his favorite stat: “Research shows that every time the size of a city doubles, innovation or productivity per resident increases by 15 percent, but when companies get bigger, innovation or productivity per employee generally goes down.” He added, “So, I’m interested in how we can create organizations that are more like cities and less like bureaucratic corporations.” Robertson said he thought he could help. Holacracy is a form of self-management in which instead of a team of people reporting to a boss, who then reports to another boss, as in a traditional hierarchy, there are groups of largely self-managed teams. Workers fill “roles” within “circles.” The circles are fluid; an employee can hold multiple roles. The traditional one-on-one meetings with a manager are replaced with “tactical meetings” “where all members of the circle are accountable to each other.” Problems are called “tensions,” and a tension is defined as “a gap between what is and what could be.” The way holacracy spells it out, tensions are sensed intuitively by the body, rather than recognized only by the mind. Each circle holds governance meetings to “process” the tensions felt by circle members. The name holacracy was inspired by the journalist and critic Arthur Koestler’s 1967 philosophical psychology book The Ghost in the Machine, which explores the relationship between human consciousness and the physical body. Humans, Koestler said, are like “holons,” things that are simultaneously independent and part of something bigger, connected by what is known as a holarchy. “It captured the spirit we were looking for—governance of and by the organizational holarchy,” Robertson blogged as part of the history of holacracy; “through the people, but not of or for the people.” After chatting at the conference, Robertson accepted Tony’s invitation to visit Zappos in Las Vegas and talk about how holacracy could be implemented there. Then, in late 2013, Zappos began rolling out the new management structure. Tony expected a full transition to take as long as five years, with a basic framework in place within one year. He announced the change to holacracy at Zappos’ quarterly all-hands meeting in November 2013. The event also included a Lion King performance and an employee climbing into a container of tarantulas for a $250 gift card.

Internally, Tony liked to tell people that Zappos was small enough to withstand the massive management overhaul that he was proposing, big enough to matter as the world watched, and strong enough to go through the pain. On March 24, 2015, at 3:18 p.m., Tony hit “Send” on a 4,500-word email that would, for better or worse, make Zappos famous yet again. He instructed his employees to take thirty minutes to read the email. Zappos was shifting entirely to self-management, using the holacracy system, and as of April 30, there would effectively be no bosses. The company would become a “Teal organization,” a concept introduced by the self-management guru Frederic Laloux, who wrote Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Laloux created an overview of different business organizations inspired by levels of human consciousness through evolution. “Red” is “impulsive,” with predatory leadership such as exists in street gangs; “orange” is “achiever,” with goal-oriented leadership such as that of charter schools; and “green” is “pluralistic,” with a focus on consensus building and values, such as Southwest Airlines. “Teal” is “evolutionary.” A Teal organization has creativity and future potential, and “decisions are informed not only by the rational mind, but also by the wisdom of emotions, intuition, and aesthetics.” The announcement was like an earthquake that shook Zappos and its employees, who had grown used to their company’s zany, everything-goes culture. Although it encouraged self-reliance, transparency, and autonomy, the holacracy structure was rigid, particularly at first. It came with a lot of processes and rules. As one executive put it, “It was like learning to write with your left hand.” Some people broke down crying when they read Tony’s email. At one of the leadership team’s first meetings about integrating holacracy, with Robertson in attendance as the “facilitator,” some of the executives were so shaken and upset that they opened a bottle of Grey Goose vodka to pass around,I taking shots while he was talking. Tony’s email had also included a fateful offer: the company would give any employee who didn’t want to deal with self-management a severance of three months’ pay. Those with at least four years’ experience would get one month’s pay for every year at Zappos. The offer didn’t spell it out, but employees who

chose to stay would implicitly be buying into holacracy. That was the tactic Tony often used quietly to persuade people to adopt his unusual plans, including in downtown Las Vegas, where entrepreneurs who accepted his investment money were also essentially signing off on his vision for the city. “Like all the bold steps we’ve done in the past, it feels a little scary, but it also feels like exactly the type of thing that only a company such as Zappos would dare to attempt at this scale,” Tony’s email said. “With our core values and culture as the foundation for everything we do, I’m personally excited about all the potential creativity and energy of our employees that are just waiting for the right environment and structure to be unlocked and unleashed. I can’t wait to see how we reinvent ourselves, and I can’t wait to see what unfolds next.” In early May 2015, Zappos reported that 14 percent of its workers—about 210 of its 1,500 people—had taken the buyout offer and left the company. That number increased to 18 percent by January 2016. Tony felt frustrated that the media reports on the departures didn’t focus on the other side of the equation: 82 percent of the employees had stayed committed to Zappos. If any other company had made that offer, he argued, the retention rate would have been much lower. In 2015, the nonprofit arm of billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group invited Tony to speak at a small retreat on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. Branson, who has founded more than four hundred businesses worldwide, bought the seventy-acre, uninhabited circle of rain forest in the 1970s, turning it into his family home and a private getaway. Among celebrities and business executives, it’s considered an honor to be invited, and sometimes attendees would come as part of a small conference or other event. As Branson observed in a 2014 YouTube video produced by Virgin, “The most extraordinary people come to Necker.” He and Tony had crossed paths before, including when Branson had visited Tony in Las Vegas, touring Zappos and his other developments. Tony, his hair shaved at the sides and styled into a tall mohawk, spoke about holacracy, detailing his efforts at Zappos. Afterward, he fielded questions from

other attendees about the practice. By now he was an accomplished speaker and practiced at hiding any social anxiety he might have been feeling. Soon a woman about his age, with long blond hair, standing in the back, began dominating the conversation, asking smart, open-minded questions about holacracy in a way that Tony had never heard before. He had been used to getting pointed questions from other business executives who missed the point of his new management system entirely. “I love you,” Tony thought as the woman spoke, although he didn’t say it out loud. Afterward, as Tony stood around speaking to attendees, he was introduced to Jewel, who had skyrocketed to fame as a homeless folksinger in the 1990s with songs such as “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “You Were Meant for Me.” It was as though she and Tony spoke a secret language and she could translate his holacracy plans in a way that real people would understand. Growing up in the backwoods of Alaska, Jewel Kilcher had relied on nature and the beauty of her surroundings to help her escape a tumultuous childhood, including an abusive father. She had ridden her horse frequently, and after she left home at only fifteen, she worked hard to remain true to those roots, even as she toured the world as a musician who had unexpectedly found fame. She immediately saw that Tony was trying to build the company through holacracy like “a natural, living breathing organism,” she later explained after Tony invited her to speak at a Zappos company event. Holacracy was all about “circles” of operation, and Jewel saw the body as a great metaphor: the kidney, liver, and spleen, all acting independently but still operating within the larger body system. “They’re imprinted with the code, which is the values of the company,” she explained. Because nature had been evolving and learning since the beginning of creation, to build a human system similar to it would be the most efficient and effective if a company cared about longevity, she reasoned, which Tony clearly did. Jewel didn’t think about things such as “org charts.” Jewel had spent more than a decade working on mental health issues affecting at-risk youth through her nonprofit, the Inspiring Children Foundation, and had expanded that work to helping school districts and companies. Tony was fascinated by her use of nature as a role model for grit and resilience. In 2016, he asked her to design a program at Zappos that would encourage employees to deal

with stress and mental health and help turn them into resilient, self-starting entrepreneurs, which they would need to fit in the new holacracy system. Alone and adrift at only fifteen, Jewel had herself struggled with mental health problems. Like Tony, Jewel is an introvert, but she had realized that her tactic of hiding in plain sight to keep herself safe was limiting her ability to experience connection and joy. She had set out to correct that by being vulnerable when she sang. She forced herself to maintain eye contact and be very honest about herself and her flaws. She found that the strategy worked: the feeling of connection was exhilarating and radical, and she knew she had stumbled onto something important. While she had been homeless, she had begun to study her anxiety and experiment with different techniques to help overcome it, including writing. She called her journal “The Happiness Project” and later wrote her own best-selling book, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. Every time she wrote something down, she felt her anxiety lessen. Tony and Tyler Williams worked with Jewel to develop an online portal at Zappos called “Whole Human,” filled with mental health resources, one that could be used at other companies across the country. Jewel and her team created ten pillars of high-performance living, including emotional fitness, calm mind, physical fitness, and community and connection. They came up with dozens of tools to help employees when they felt overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed, including meditation and other mindfulness techniques. As part of her work with Zappos, Jewel moved temporarily to Las Vegas, where the Inspiring Children Foundation is based. She became one of dozens of musicians and movie stars who flowed through the Airstream trailer park in downtown Las Vegas. Tony had moved there from the nearby Ogden apartment building in 2014 and now lived with thirty other friends spread out among twenty of the bullet-shaped metal trailers, along with tiny houses measuring only several hundred square feet. The semiplanned community, which Tony referred to as “an urban version of Burning Man” and sometimes as the “world’s largest living room,” had a pool, a barbecue, and a campfire going every night. Five cats lived there, as did fifteen dogs and Tony’s alpaca, Marley. Tony loved llamas and alpacas because they looked so silly. He also owned a small terrier mix, Blizzy, short for Blizzard,

which he had spontaneously adopted at a Zappos pet event and whose stature in Tony’s life warranted the establishment of Blizzy’s own Instagram account. Sarah Jessica Parker posed with Blizzy for his feed, as did Britney Spears. Jewel had been hanging out there one Sunday around 2017 for an informal weekly brunch Tony regularly held when two local musicians, a beat boxer and a rapper, also wandered in. That wasn’t unusual. Sometimes there would be a high school kid playing a piano or a sixty-five-year-old playing the drums. Soon Jewel and the three musicians performed together for Tony and his friends, producing several new songs together on the spot. It was the sort of ultimate “collision” that Tony had always hoped for, and it was how Jewel was used to seeing him, quietly content and radiating positive energy from a perch nearby. But as they worked with Tony at Zappos, Jewel and her team realized that there might be another reason he wanted them there: he was also struggling and clearly wanted to learn some coping mechanisms for his mental health issues from them. He was under so much pressure to perform for his employees and customers and even his friends. Jewel’s team sensed that Tony was suffering from social anxiety, which he had told few people about, and they thought he had a sensitive personality. The latter attribute meant he would be hypersensitive to large groups of people and energy, a problem for Tony, who had built his life around being in groups. He hadn’t learned how to manage that, or the constant stress of his life, in a healthy way. Working nonstop and traveling all the time— on business and road trips—were ways of self-medicating, as was his drinking. By 2015, Tony’s alcoholic beverage of choice had switched to the Italian liqueur Fernet, a weedy, herbal-tasting liquid that Tony liked to joke was his “Chinese medicine.” He liked to pretend that it actually was medicine, a clear distraction from his reliance on alcohol, telling people it was a liqueur soaked in fourteen herbs and spices, that it was a digestive and helped with nausea. Don’t judge it for sixty seconds, he would tell people. Allow it to coat your stomach like medicine. His friends would laugh along and gamely try the bitter liquid. When Tyler Williams was asked in 2019 by a Medium writer about the things he wished someone had told him about Zappos when he first started the job, he said the amount of Fernet he would be drinking. “I wish someone had told me to build up my tolerance because seriously—we drink a lot of it,” he said.

Williams was the rare friend who could keep up with Tony’s 24/7 lifestyle. He believed in Tony and the work they were doing at Zappos, and he didn’t have any kids. His wife, however, put her foot down about living in the Airstream trailer park and also declined a job offer from Tony. On some days, Tony drank throughout the day, but it wasn’t obvious even to some of the people closest to him. During meetings throughout the day or at a Zappos event, he would have a shot here and a shot there, but there were different people attending the meetings, who saw him having only one or two shots at a time. When evening rolled around and the parties began, he would have several more shots or drinks over the course of the night. By the end of the day, he might have consumed as many as eighteen shots or drinks, and he was small. Despite the dozens of people around him all the time, very few of them— maybe none of them—would have witnessed the entirety of that consumption because they weren’t with him all day long. Williams, who was about fifty pounds heavier than Tony, once tried to keep up with him shot for shot on a trip to Santa Fe. He passed out. Tony easily explained away any concerns about his drinking, although there were very few people who tried to talk to him about it because of how resistant he was to any personal confrontation. He also seemed to have it under control. As a way of convincing his friends that he didn’t have a problem, he took up smoking and said he would quit in six months to show them that he could give up anything he wanted. But when the six months ended, he extended that time frame to a year because, he said, smoking was “meditative” for him. He continued to smoke, and his friends stopped asking about it. Once, not long after Delivering Happiness was published, a longtime friend who didn’t see him regularly became concerned about his drinking. In a brief moment when the two were alone together, the friend asked him point-blank to give it up. Tony was quiet for a moment. Then he took the friend’s hands and said, “I have a doctor, and he says I’m fine. If he ever tells me I’m not, I promise you I’ll quit.” A later court filing describing Tony’s mental health issues during his lifetime seemed to indicate that Tony had consulted a medical professional on the matter, saying that “he understood the negative health effects associated

with the prolonged use of alcohol and the prescription medication he was taking.” Tony’s ex-girlfriend Ali Bevilacqua, meanwhile, tried to gently convince Tony to cut back on his drinking in a way she hoped he would be receptive to. Tony could be very stubborn, and he really didn’t believe that anything was wrong. There was a subtle art to convincing him of things. Bevilacqua had moved next to Tony in the Airstream trailer park in 2018 when they were dating, and in the mornings, they had taken turns making each other breakfast. It was usually his most sober time of day. She would tell him, “I like you best when you’re sober. Do you really need to drink?” Tony would shrug off the question. The problem was, he didn’t like himself sober. While Jewel was working with him at Zappos, Tony never outwardly asked her or her team for help with whatever he was struggling with, although he queried Jewel for book recommendations about mental health. He tried to take up meditation. When Jewel and her team held longer, deeper retreats or workshops in which Zappos employees had to discuss their personal struggles, he was conveniently not around. When it came time for him to fully fund the “Whole Human” project, he declined, despite all the work put in by Jewel and her team to develop a prototype for the program. It’s possible that Zappos just didn’t have the funding. But Tony never explained why. Tony’s avoidance of discussing his own problems publicly isn’t unique to him. The stigma around mental illness has existed for centuries. We have a history of locking people away in psychiatric hospitals, diagnosing people with schizophrenia, for example, while also categorizing them as ones to be feared and avoided. In the 1960s, society took a new approach: designed to deinstitutionalize the system and release people from deplorable conditions, a wave of hospital closures brought people back into communities. But outpatient treatment and community services have been underfunded and frequently ignored by political leaders. Many Americans, particularly racial and ethnic minority groups, have limited access to care, a crisis that worsened during the

isolation and job losses brought about by the pandemic. Meanwhile, the news media and entertainment often portray those with mental illness as violent, unpredictable, and worthy of being blamed for their condition. The lingering bias that prevents people from getting help has been an ongoing, decades-long fight by advocates, who work to increase access to care in a broken, underfunded public system. In recent years, the push to destigmatize mental health has gained steam with big celebrities taking up the cause or speaking publicly about their experiences. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry launched a series on Apple TV+ devoted to the topic featuring celebrities such as Lady Gaga and other famous people. Kanye West, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, has publicly described his manic episodes, telling David Letterman in 2019, “You see everything. You feel the government is putting chips in your head. You feel you’re being recorded. You feel all of these things.” In the business world, where a company’s stock price flickers on just a few words from a CEO, mental health remains a taboo topic that is rarely discussed. Founders are synonymous with their companies; a public image of stability is crucial as they pitch for venture capital funding and make the rounds at networking events. Even those who are privileged to be able to afford the priciest private psychiatric care and have access to it fear the consequences from investors and customers, who demand a steady projection of confidence and infallibility in trying to grow a company. One Sunday morning in 2017, Tesla founder Elon Musk tweeted to his followers—around 17 million at the time, now 60 million—about the reality of his life: “The reality is great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress. Don’t think people want to hear about the last two.” In response, a Twitter user asked Musk if he had bipolar disorder. Musk replied, “Yeah,” followed by a second answer: “Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.” When another follower said that a lot of fellow founders would want to hear about how he’s dealt with the lows and stress, Musk responded, “I’m sure there are better answers than what I do, which is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.”

In 2021, Musk, while hosting Saturday Night Live, opened up further, announcing for the first time in his opening monologue that he had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Unhooking an entrepreneur’s identity from the roller coaster of work is what Jerry Colonna, an executive coach, focuses on accomplishing with a blend of Buddhism and introspection. Colonna earned a reputation as the person “who makes founders cry” and promotes what he calls the “art of growing up.” That involves radical self-inquiry, a process of a person confronting what they’d rather not see. Being a better human—in other words, growing up—is “hard because we’re scared,” he said. “Tony wrote a book on happiness,” he said. “I wish he was aiming for contentment…. I am enough. I am enough just as I am.” Dr. Michael Freeman, a psychiatrist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, noticed a pattern among the founders of smaller companies he interacted with in his career in Silicon Valley, which included his own entrepreneurial pursuits. Those company founders didn’t sleep much. Some took imprudent risks and alienated their employees and colleagues, often blowing up their relationships. They had chosen a less stable professional life with long work hours and a high chance of failure. They were also often charismatic, bold, creative, and interesting to be around. The links between artistic creativity—that of poets, musicians, and painters —and mental health had already been explored, including in the book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison. Dr. Freeman coauthored a study that continued the theme, and posed a similar question: “Are entrepreneurs touched with fire?” What the researchers found surprised them. Nearly half of the study’s entrepreneurs self-reported having at least one mental health condition, while one-third of people in a comparison group reported having a condition. Half of the entrepreneurs who reported having no mental health conditions said they had a close family member with one, compared to one-quarter of the nonentrepreneurs. Across the United States, one in five people experiences a mental health condition each year. One in twenty experiences a serious mental illness such as

schizophrenia or severe depression and bipolar disorder. In Dr. Freeman’s study, entrepreneurs were twice as likely to have depression, three times more likely to have a substance use disorder, six times as likely to have ADHD, and eleven times as likely to have bipolar disorder as were nonentrepreneurs. In 2013, Aaron Swartz, a pioneer in online activism who created RSS when he was fourteen years old and cofounded Reddit, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six. He had written about depression in his blog. “I feel ashamed to have an illness,” he wrote. “(It sounds absurd, but there still is an enormous stigma around being sick.) I don’t want to use being ill as an excuse. (Although I sometimes wonder how much more productive I’d be if I wasn’t so sick.)” He wasn’t the only one; there was a rash of suicides among entrepreneurs at the time. Dr. Freeman noted that many of the genetically inherited personality traits that are crucial for entrepreneurial success, such as risk and creativity, can overlap with mental health conditions like bipolar disorder and ADHD, when taken to the extreme or tested in stressful environments. Entrepreneurs, he said, “can be quite vulnerable.” Early June 2020, when Tony toured his new nine-bedroom mansion in Park City, should have been a hopeful time. The pandemic appeared to be winding down, with cities across the country tentatively reopening heading into the summer. Tony had been out of rehab and living in his new mountain town for more than three months. The plans for 10X seemed to be taking off. He was in the best shape of his life and had managed to stay off ketamine. But lately it seemed as though he was losing his way again. Ali Bevilacqua, who was living in Los Angeles, had flown to visit him in Park City and had joined him and the rest of his friends for the tour of the new mansion, the Ranch. The two had broken up in 2014, in part because of Tony’s alcoholism, and then gotten back together in 2018 for about a year. The last time Bevilacqua had seen Tony had been about six months prior at her own family’s Christmas gathering in 2019, which he had attended in the past, even when they weren’t

dating. He had been acting strangely at the time, but she hadn’t thought too much of it—there had been a lot of people there, and she was used to his awkwardness in groups where he didn’t know many people. That was during the months he had been taking ketamine, but Bevilacqua said later that she hadn’t known he was using drugs. During her visit to Park City, though, Tony was not acting like himself. He told people that he had developed psychic abilities while living in Utah and could levitate. While Bevilacqua was there, he refused to eat or sleep and was paranoid and talking fast but not making much sense. He had taken a marker and scribbled over his entire body. On a boat ride with a group of people around nearby Deer Creek Reservoir, he sat huddled in a corner under a blanket. Bevilacqua had rifled through his things and found a vial of white powder: ketamine. In a conference on the balcony of the Empire Avenue house—it was too soon to move into the Ranch, on the other side of Park City—Bevilacqua and Tony’s other friends whispered about what they should do. Nobody knew, but everyone was worried. Bevilacqua eventually had to fly home. Several weeks later, in late June 2020, Tony and his friends in Park City piled into Tony’s main tour bus on their way to the unincorporated town of Bigfork, Montana, and the Flathead Lake Lodge, a family-owned, two-thousand-acre dude ranch. With sailing on Flathead Lake, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the West, horseback riding, and hiking, the lodge was a perfect getaway for the group, and Tony tried to go once a year for a week. Tony’s previous trips to Flathead Lake had been healthy and restorative, so his friends believed that taking him there would be a good opportunity to isolate him from some of his visitors, who were clearly supplying him with drugs. They thought the fresh air and change of scenery might help him. The drive to Bigfork from Park City is almost seven hundred miles, winding through forests and mountain passes and through the state of Idaho. Steve Moroney, Tony’s longtime driver, would be piloting. A group of friends joined them on the bus, including Justin Weniger and Tyler Williams. They planned to drive straight from Park City to Montana overnight, roughly nine hours or more, and stay at the dude ranch through the Fourth of July.

In a normal year, Bigfork is known for its Independence Day celebration, with myriad fireworks stands around town and a big parade winding through its main streets. Though the parade was canceled in 2020, Tony and his friends knew that the dude ranch organized its own private fireworks display on the lake. They could lie on their backs on the grass, watching the sky slowly get dark, the mountains in the distance, fireworks exploding in rainbows all around them. I. Zappos said that people who attended the meeting do not recall a bottle of vodka being passed around.

CHAPTER SIX A CREATIVE SOLUTION

Park City, June 2020 Las Vegas, 2013–2019

There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. —Tony Hsieh, quoting The Matrix

In the darkened room where he was napping, Steve Moroney was shaken awake.

Tony’s longtime driver opened his eyes groggily to see his boss standing next to his bed, antsy. It was late June 2020, and the crew had arrived in Montana only hours earlier to enjoy the Fourth of July there as a way to try to help Tony. After the long overnight drive from Park City, Moroney had been planning to take a substantial nap. What he hadn’t known at the time, since he sat with headphones on in front of a curtain while driving so as not to be distracted, was that Tony had ingested a large number of psychedelic mushrooms while en route. Tony had boarded the bus in Park City wearing only pajama pants. He had brought no luggage, except for a box of crayons. The tour bus was fifty-five feet long, and Tony had his own small room. He retreated there with the drugs that were somehow already on board. As the group arrived in Montana in the morning, the mushrooms kicked in. Tony screamed to his friends, “Everybody get off the bus!” and then began pacing up and down the aisles, shouting that there was an active shooter and crouching down between the seats to hide from the dangerous gunman. By that

time Moroney had parked the bus at the Flathead Lake Lodge and gone to get a ride to his hotel nearby so he could sleep. Tony’s worried friends filed off the bus and decided to take turns going back in to check on him. Tony started to throw things around, trying to destroy the interior. The bus, which he had bought for about $2 million before he had moved to Park City, was one of his most prized possessions. At one point, he shouted that his friends should join him in a suicide pact. Dying, he explained, was the best way to transcend human consciousness. He would burn the bus down, he told them, so they could all die together. Of course he had no way to do it, but his friends were distraught. He was having a full-fledged breakdown, and he had never acted like this before. After several hours, he finally calmed down enough that he went to go find Moroney, leaving his friends at the lodge. “Steve-O,” Tony said. “I need you to wake up. I have a very important meeting, the most important of my career.” Moroney sat up slowly as Tony relayed that they had to drive, right that minute, to go see Jeff Bezos, the founder and then chief executive officer of Amazon, for a meeting in Las Vegas. It was unclear why Bezos, who lives in Seattle, where Amazon is based, would be in Las Vegas, especially during the pandemic. Tony apologized to Moroney. He was not usually demanding, and he cared deeply about his employees, particularly his longtime driver. The two had a special bond. He knew that Moroney needed sleep after the drive from Park City —but this was an urgent matter. Moroney agreed to drive Tony the roughly fifteen hours it would take to get to Las Vegas, even though he had just driven all the way to Montana from Park City. He would end up driving more than 1,500 miles in two days. But first he went to look for a cup of coffee. While Moroney got ready at his hotel near Flathead Lake Lodge, Tony disappeared. Soon after, in Los Angeles, Ali Bevilacqua, Tony’s ex-girlfriend, answered a FaceTime call and saw on her screen that Tony was huddled alone. He was back on the tour bus. Right away she knew something was wrong. Tony spoke quickly again, saying that he was playing a game. He had texted several friends and offered to pay them handsomely if they could locate him.

“I’ll give you a million dollars if you can find me,” he told Bevilacqua, who had no interest in his money. It was clear that Tony was not himself. Bevilacqua knew exactly where he was from an app that allowed them to share their locations, and she knew about his annual trip to Montana. She immediately called Tony’s private travel agent and had him book her onto a private jet there. It was hours after Tony had awakened Moroney when the driver finally started off with him. They left his friends, including Justin Weniger and Tyler Williams, who were aware of the change in plans, behind in Montana. Weniger would take a later flight back, while Williams and his wife stayed on for several more days. Instead of driving to Las Vegas, Tony directed Moroney to the nearest local airport, Kalispell, about half an hour away from the dude ranch. There they picked up Bevilacqua, and they also picked up another friend who had “won” the $1 million reward for guessing Tony’s location. And that friend had brought something for Tony: more drugs. By 2019 in Las Vegas, Tony’s drinking had increased enough that more of his close friends became concerned. He moved up evening bar meetups to the afternoon or even late morning. His face was puffy, and the whites of his eyes had turned a yellow hue. In 2016, he had gone through a stretch of working out and running, earning praise from his friends, but that period had ended. Now, at forty-five years old, he was hardly exercising and was not paying attention to what he ate. The last five years had been challenging not only at Zappos but also at his downtown Las Vegas development project. Each problem represented a fissure, an accumulation of growing cracks in the fortress of happiness he had spent years building around himself and his friends and employees. Tony had enticed roughly three hundred entrepreneurs to participate in the Downtown Project with investments from his commitment to spend $350 million, including a $50 million Vegas Tech Fund, $50 million on small businesses, and $50 million for arts and culture, health care, and education projects. His vision for Las Vegas was a continuation of what he had written

about in Delivering Happiness: a new kind of Silicon Valley, one of joyfulness and community, that truly might help save the world. He wanted talented entrepreneurs who could fulfill that mission to relocate to the Nevada desert with him. One of the first to move to Las Vegas was Jody Sherman, the cofounder and CEO of Ecomom, a website for healthy kids’ products. Despite already having a network in Los Angeles, Sherman was attracted to Tony’s vision for the area and Zappos’ early success in online retailing. The Vegas Tech Fund was among the investors in Ecomom’s $4 million fundraising round in late 2011, when Sherman relocated the company to Las Vegas. Much in alignment with Tony’s beliefs, Sherman’s vision for Ecomom included giving back. For Ecomom, that included an initiative to provide food to hungry children. Just over a year later, in February 2013, Sherman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was forty-seven. It was revealed that the company had burned through millions of dollars from investors. The company management and board of directors, having uncovered the financial problems, shut Ecomom down. “He was always very optimistic,” Rob Skaggs, Sherman’s brother-in-law, who worked for Ecomom in Las Vegas, said later. “There weren’t signs that he was depressed or that he needed serious help that I could see.” The tech community mourned the beloved entrepreneur and called for a public mental health discussion on the pressures in startup life, including the high expectations to be—and appear—successful. The following year, 2014, two other people associated with the Downtown Project in Las Vegas died by suicide. One was a young employee; the other was a barbershop owner with a store inside Container Park. What leads a person to suicide is complex; the emotional pain that feels unbearable can have many sources, some unknowable from the outside. But the close-together deaths of those three men, who were closely attached to Tony and his Downtown Project, raised questions, most notably: If Tony’s declared vision was one of happiness and community, how could those entrepreneurs have felt so alone?

The suicides were “a jarring moment of flesh-and-bone reality” for the downtown Las Vegas community, Vox wrote. Meanwhile, questions emerged about how the Downtown Project was managing its investments. A high-profile win crumbled quickly in 2014. Jen McCabe, who led hardware investments for Tony’s tech fund, had launched a manufacturing company, Factorli, in Las Vegas with a $10 million investment from the fund. Her company was even mentioned by President Barack Obama in a speech about the importance of American manufacturing to boosting job creation. In an interview with Vox in 2014, McCabe described how she had been inspired by Tony. He had told her to spend three months doing nothing but writing down her startup ideas in a notebook. “I just trusted Tony,” she said. “He looked at me seriously and unblinkingly, and when he laser-focuses in, when he speaks in that way, you absolutely know it’ll work out.” Two months after Obama had mentioned McCabe, Factorli shut down. Downtown Project leaders, by some accounts, had simply lost interest in the company, and other businesses there were closing. One of the Downtown Project’s successes, a robotics startup called Romotive, had decided to move away from Las Vegas to Silicon Valley. Tony had picked up detractors: some Las Vegas residents bristled at the assumption that the city didn’t have any arts and culture and that Tony Hsieh was going to swoop in and enlighten them. Others saw the redevelopment along East Fremont as an insular hipster-ville without consideration for the lowerincome neighborhoods that had been there before Tony’s arrival. The area was written up in Vegas tourism guides. But how many locals who weren’t part of Tony’s clique spent much time there? The facades of some of the shuttered businesses Tony had purchased were painted with brightly colored, funky murals even as the buildings remained unused. Back in 2011, as Tony had been conceptualizing the Downtown Project, Brian “Paco” Álvarez, a Las Vegas native, cultural anthropologist, and wellknown supporter of the local arts scene, had given Tony a tour of the small downtown arts district and its galleries. Two years later, Zappos had recruited Álvarez, convincing him to leave his government job as a curator of archives for

the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, to manage art and goods for a Zappos gift shop, Z’Boutique, which sold company swag. He wished that the city had been more critical of Tony’s decisionmaking for the downtown area, rather than blindly offering support. “Do you need to invest $100,000 in a flower shop when there are ten other flower shops in the area?” he asked later. “Do you really need to invest in a donut shop that sells three- or fourdollar donuts with bacon on it in a neighborhood where the average income… is $32,000 a year?” Phil Plastina, Tony’s friend from the Dancetronauts who had also moved to Las Vegas, questioned him about that very aspect of his plans, telling Tony that he might have misjudged the kind of customers who would come to downtown Las Vegas and support the new companies. Plastina knew that some of the entrepreneurs were having trouble, and he could tell that they had no idea what they were doing. Some were blindly following Tony’s vision. “Listen, man,” Plastina said to Tony one day in 2014. “There’s something called ‘demographic’ that you’re not paying attention to. These people that come here, they’re from Middle America, they have NASCAR hats, and they drink. This is not the person that’s going to buy glass art on a Friday night.” “This is an experiment,” Tony explained. “It’s a pretty fucking expensive experiment,” Plastina retorted. He did not care what Tony thought of him. “Well, I have the money to see what happens here,” Tony replied. That sort of thinking was common for Tony, who had always viewed money as a way to try new things, not as a status symbol. In what seemed like a retreat, Downtown Project stopped using its muchtouted “return on community” metric. In a firmly worded public statement, Tony reminded the public that his business venture was not a charity, nor could it solve all of Las Vegas’s problems, writing: There are a lot of people that seem to expect us to address and solve every single problem that exists in a city (for example, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health)…. Downtown Project is a startup entrepreneurial venture that happens to also have good intentions…. We found that when we used the word ‘Community,’ there were a lot of groups that suddenly expected us to donate money to them or invest in them just because they lived in the community or

because it was for a good cause.

The Downtown Project would shift away from a focus on “community” as a measure of success and instead turn to “Collisions, Co-Learning, and Connectedness,” also known as “the 3 Cs.” Tony had once again fit a real-world problem into a theoretical equation. In September 2014, to cut costs, Downtown Project laid off thirty people to cut costs, about 10 percent of its employees, in what the Las Vegas Weekly called a “bloodletting.” David Gould, a University of Iowa academic who had moved to Las Vegas and was Downtown Project’s “director of imagination,” declared in a public resignation letter written to Tony that the layoffs could be blamed on “a collage of decadence, greed, and missing leadership.” Throughout the turmoil and the scrutiny by the press, Tony remained coldly matter-of-fact. He seemed to be working to keep it all quiet or at least avoid it; Vox noted that there had been no large-scale supportive gatherings held or community resources established for the entrepreneurs in the wake of the suicides. When the Review-Journal asked him about the shutdown of Factorli, once one of the Downtown Project’s prized investments, Tony was clearly impatient with having to acknowledge what was going wrong. He wrote in response, uninterested in discussing a postmortem, even for an entrepreneur whom he had supposedly inspired, “I’m not on the board of Factorli and just like the vast majority of other investments, I’m not close enough to them to know the details.” Related to the deaths, he told Vox, “Suicides happen anywhere. Look at the stats. It’s harder for people who are really good students in school. Then they move in to this, where there is no instruction manual, and you have to be MacGyver on your own.” Behind the scenes, Tony’s close friends could tell that the problems at Downtown Project, especially the suicides, had affected him, but he just didn’t know how to express it. He didn’t want to talk about them in any depth. At Zappos, he was dealing with another potential crisis. His leadership team was divided on whether holacracy was working or not. He faced particularly

strong opposition from his chief operating officer, Arun Rajan. Rajan was focused on trying to run Zappos’ bread-and-butter business, the e-commerce platform, and had little patience with Tony’s management experiments or his happiness goals. Holacracy had had some successes since Zappos had officially rolled it out in 2014, perhaps notably overcoming groupthink bias, the goal of allowing individual opinions to count. In one example, Zappos employees wanted to bring their dogs to work. Under the old management structure, Zappos’ human resources director would have unilaterally made the decision and had declined several times in the past because she was allergic. Holacracy didn’t have a rule about dogs, so employees started bringing them in. Soon the employees who were opposed to dogs in the office brought up a “tension”—a holacracy term—to broker a peace deal. Through meetings guided by the new process, the employees agreed that the dogs could stay, as long as they used certain elevators and were approved beforehand. Whether holacracy boosted Zappos’ profits was less clear. Zappos’ customer service department—the hallmark of Tony’s “Delivering Happiness” mission— was suffering, with call center employees skipping out on shifts they didn’t want and not enough resources being allocated to the team. Even as holacracy aimed to wipe out bureaucracy, meetings in each “circle” were overwhelmed by processes, with a long list of steps that a facilitator had to go through after someone brought up a “tension”: an “amend and clarify round,” an “objection round,” “clarification of the tension and reactions,” and finally the “closing round.” The biggest problem for Zappos wasn’t actually the meetings, though; it was the lack of accountability. If someone went against a policy, for example, it was often unclear whose job it was to reprimand or fire that person. Even if Tony had wanted to (which he didn’t), it would not have been easy for him to walk away from holacracy. Zappos had become the face of this new kind of management practice. Indeed, business leaders from around the world flocked to Las Vegas to learn about it. The publishing platform Medium, one of the other high-profile companies to adopt the new system, had given it up by 2016, saying that it was “difficult to coordinate efforts at scale.” Medium had also had trouble recruiting, which the

company blamed in part on the public perception of holacracy, with media headlines such as “What Happened When This Major Company Got Rid of All Its Bosses” and “Here’s How Zappos’ Wacky Self-Management System Works.” On the hunt for a solution to solve the problems holacracy was creating, Tony read another book on company structure called Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization, this time by an author who calls himself “an enemy of holacracy” but believes strongly in “decentralized decision making.” Niels Pflaeging, a German management consultant, has staked his two-decade career on typical hierarchical structures at companies not working in today’s complex market. In Pflaeging’s decentralized approach to management, small teams of people, rather than a Csuite of executives, run the company, enabling true innovation to take place in smaller, less process-driven teams. But unlike holacracy’s systems, with all of the meetings that Pflaeging, who counsels companies around the world, believes perpetuates command and control instead of overcoming it, his approach requires overhauling the company in favor of autonomous teams without the bureaucracy. “For an organization that wants to produce happiness, it’s interesting Tony got hooked on such a technocratic, flawed thing,” he said. Hoping to make peace with his executives while also convincing them to stick with his management structure, Tony flew his leadership team to Berlin to meet with Pflaeging in late 2017, putting everyone up in suites at Das Stue, a five-star luxury hotel in the center of the city. He paid for the entire trip out of pocket, including every decadent meal, often ordered from the hotel. He encouraged his executives to bring their spouses, also paid for by him. In return, Tony wanted his team to keep an open mind and read yet another book, a giant, complicated tome called The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, by former McKinsey & Company consultant Eric Beinhocker. In many thousands of words, the book details the complications of markets and how companies need to be able to adapt. Pflaeging found the whole visit slightly odd. He usually held workshops in conference rooms or offices; Tony’s crew wanted him to come to their hotel suite. That was a normal practice for Tony; often at large events where he didn’t

know many people, he could stave off his social anxiety by renting a hotel suite and inviting groups there instead. At Das Stue, however, the suite had an open bathroom in the room where Pflaeging held his workshops, making it more awkward than usual. In fact, in Pflaeging’s view, Tony and his employees didn’t seem to want to leave the hotel at all. Pflaeging recalled that at one point he had to convince them to go to another (nice) restaurant nearby. They ordered in Fernet. Pflaeging didn’t like it. It was clear to him that at least some of the executives were frustrated with holacracy and trying to find a way out. “They wanted to move away from it silently,” he noted. Tony did ultimately change Zappos’ approach to holacracy. He kept parts and added other features, most notably a term he invented, market-based dynamics (MBD), which he had already been working on before the Berlin trip. He had derived the concept from The Origin of Wealth. Using market-based dynamics, each “circle”—at one point there were about five hundred at Zappos—ran like an autonomous small business, like a department in a typical company. The circles interacted with one another as they would with businesses outside of Zappos. Like small startups, they invested in their own projects and came up with their own budgets. At the same time, they were collectively responsible for delivering a profit for Amazon. For example, Zappos’ IT department was its own circle and could charge for its goods and services if an employee needed a new laptop or help with software. But if someone within Zappos wanted to start an IT circle, he or she could do so, thus creating competition and accountability for the service. Tony wanted everything to be transparent, including each circle’s budget. He also wanted to organize Zappos into a number of different “startups” to help drive innovation. “If every circle by the end of 2020 increases revenue by 5% more than what it is now, without increasing expenses, that’s $100 million to the bottom line for the company,” he explained at a conference in 2019. “That’s very doable for everyone.” Zappos was careful to note in an internal Q&A that “MBD is a layer we are building on top of Holacracy (not instead of Holacracy).”

Whether holacracy—or market-based dynamics—was a success by the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 depended on who at Zappos you talked to. In some circles, it worked smoothly, and the decentralized approach to management that Tony had sought had been achieved. Other circles, such as customer service, weren’t using it at all. Market-based dynamics had been implemented at less than half of the company’s units. Some employees, particularly new hires, loved it. Others wished that Zappos had never changed at all. Meanwhile, Amazon had started to exert more pressure on Tony and Zappos’ executives. By 2019, a decade had passed since Amazon had purchased Zappos, and its executives had been patient. As Jeff Bezos had promised, the company had largely left Zappos, and Tony, alone, a rare move that signaled his approval of Tony. Amazon had, in fact, learned from Zappos and its management experiments. At one point, Amazon executives had had preliminary discussions about integrating parts of holacracy into some of their other divisions. They seemed, on the whole, supportive. Still, Tony worried about what he and other Zappos executives referred to as “Amazon creep,” the tech behemoth increasingly getting involved in Zappos’ business. Tony wanted to protect his employees from Amazon’s famously aggressive work culture and its layers of bureaucracy. Tony and his team were careful to call Amazon only if they really needed something. Sometimes even a simple question could turn into a conference call with half a dozen Amazon executives. Tony reported to Jeff Wilke, then the head of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business and one of Bezos’s top lieutenants at the time. Wilke, then fifty-three, was widely seen as a successor to Bezos and the second most important person at Amazon. An email from him could be panic inducing—he dashed one off to his team anytime there was a shipping defect. He signed his emails with his initials, JAW. The two, however, had a good relationship, and Wilke appreciated Tony as a business management visionary, often tolerating the antics he played in Zappos’

internal reports to Amazon. Tony would sometimes try to avoid discussing dry business metrics by stuffing Zappos’ updates with all the different management experiments the company was running. Within the next two years, Wilke wanted Zappos to meet a series of business goals that had nothing to do with its culture or its management experiments. Rather, Tony would need to increase Zappos’ profits and its customer base. It was a goal for all of Amazon’s autonomous units; after a decade under the much larger conglomerate, Zappos should be meeting certain profit targets. It was now a “mature” company in Amazon’s view, and it was falling short. Zappos was profitable, but it was hitting only about 30 percent of those targets and had no clear plan for improvement. In typical fashion, Tony tried to think of ways he could meet the new business goals in a creative way, rather than just by selling more shoes. He started thinking about branching out into other business lines that could make Zappos more efficient and productive—basically saving money to make money. He needed the next $1 billion idea. To try to help boost his productivity, his solution was to hack sleep. In other words, he didn’t sleep very much at all. He believed that rest should be measured by sleep cycles, not by hours, and he calculated that a person has five sleep cycles lasting about ninety minutes each in a seven-and-a-half-hour time period. As a workaround, he would sleep only six hours, or four and a half, representing four or three sleep cycles, at night and take a twenty-minute nap in the afternoon or evening, which he considered another sleep cycle. “You’re tired so you can go straight into REM sleep and kind of hack it that way,” he told a blogger for the shared office space company WeWork in 2019. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults get at least seven hours of sleep a night.) Tony purchased the Oura smart ring, popular in Silicon Valley, to “optimize” his sleep, allowing his concerned friends to access the data. They found that some nights he wasn’t getting even four hours of sleep, more like two or three. In 2019, worried about that trend and his increased alcohol use, some of his friends attempted to help him. Garrett Miller, a longtime Zappos employee and close friend, gave up alcohol himself in an effort to inspire Tony to do the same.

Each night, he would try to get Tony to return to his Airstream trailer earlier than usual to encourage him to sleep. It was nearly impossible, though; Miller couldn’t be around him all the time, and with Tony’s entourage large and growing, he was always surrounded by people who wanted to meet him or musicians and movie stars passing through Las Vegas, as well as employees or friends out to party. At Zappos, Tony had long before integrated alcohol into the very fabric of the company, and there was no easy way to extricate himself. He had even built a bar called 1999, for the year Zappos was founded, near the lobby of the company’s headquarters building, which also now housed a games arcade. Tony’s close circle of friends had shifted over the years, and stalwarts such as Alfred Lin, Fred Mossler, and Jenn Lim were no longer around as much. Mossler had left Zappos in 2016 to start his own high-end shoe company with his wife, Meghan, called Ross and Snow; they also had several investments around town, including the popular downtown Las Vegas eatery Nacho Daddy. Lin had left Zappos around the time Delivering Happiness had been published in 2010 to become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley, the banner firm that had long before funded LinkExchange. Even Phil Plastina, the head of the Dancetronauts, had stopped visiting the Airstream trailer park as much, as he was unfamiliar with the new, mostly younger group of Tony fans, a mix of Zappos employees and people Tony had met around Las Vegas. Tony’s longtime preoccupation with youth and surrounding himself with fun people had turned into something of an obsession. He began hanging out with a seventeen-year-old former waitress, Juliette Bajak, at the Airstream trailer park. Even though he explained to concerned friends that he was just mentoring her, it seemed like a strange friendship, even for Tony.I Many of the people around Tony just assumed that it was normal for him to drink so much—hadn’t he always? He tolerated alcohol well. He rarely appeared intoxicated and could have the same conversation at midnight that he had at 3:00 p.m. His energy and charisma also swept away most people’s concerns. Tony’s fans latched onto his public persona, while his real self faded. In the last decade, he had become a sort of business god, known for his big ideas, eccentric lifestyle, and happiness mantra, and any character flaws weren’t worth

noting, or examining, by the people feeding off his wealth and energy. He was intensely idolized, and he was also beginning to believe in his own greatness. At Cirque Lodge, the rehab facility that Tony briefly attended in early 2020, that sort of dichotomy is common. The team of therapists and program leaders there are used to seeing clients such as business leaders, actors, social media influencers, and other public figures who work nonstop building companies or competing as high-profile athletes. The thought of slowing down feels like a threat. They are very smart, but they also have large egos. They rely on teams of friends or assistants to do everything for them; no one has ever told them no. When they have missed events or exhibited unusual behavior, their entourages have covered for them. “They’re insulated from a lot of the consequences that would hit the average person early” in an addiction cycle, said Aaron Olson, one of the therapists at Cirque Lodge. The rehab facility’s high-powered clients, despite being surrounded by legions of employees and assistants, suffer from “an incredible loneliness,” another Cirque Lodge therapist, Brian Tease, explained. “The public doesn’t understand the shame, and this loneliness, that they have. In the end, what they really want is to be connected.” High-profile clients also face another hurdle to treatment, because they don’t want to let down dozens of people who are dependent on them, whether those people are employees of a company, bandmates of a musician about to go on tour, or teammates of a professional athlete. Then there’s another, more troubling and amorphous, layer around them. “You get a lot of people riding on coattails,” Keith Fierman, Cirque Lodge’s intervention specialist, pointed out. Fierman keeps a Civil War–era ball and chain in his office at Cirque Lodge to symbolize alcoholism and addiction. When Richard Losee, Cirque Lodge’s founder, first decided more than twenty years ago to transition his new wellness facility into a rehab clinic, he’d had no formal psychological training. One of the questions he had thought about the most in those first few years was: When is someone an addict? There seemed to be no definitive answer, and it’s one that society continues to struggle with, particularly when it comes to so-called functional alcoholics, a term some of Tony’s friends used to describe him.

In her book, Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic: Professional Views and Personal Insights, the therapist Sarah Allen Benton cited research estimating that the majority of people struggling with alcohol abuse are actually high functioning. Today, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and other organizations don’t even use the terms high-functioning alcoholic and alcoholic at all. The broad category is instead called alcohol use disorder (AUD), and patients are given a mild, moderate, or severe diagnosis based on a list of eleven symptoms, not on how much they are actually drinking. For example, its website asks whether you have “had times when you ended up drinking more, or longer, than you intended” or “spent a lot of time drinking.” Answering yes to just two of the eleven questions means a person has a mild form of AUD. Many people who abuse alcohol are what society might consider “functional,” but they are privately, and quietly, ruining various areas of their lives. “How do we know they’re ‘functional’?” pondered Dr. George Koob, the director of the NIAAA. “They may be functional in the sense that they go to work every day, but are they making other wise decisions?” The therapists at Cirque Lodge say that their clients often don’t exhibit the classic signs of addiction touted in pop culture. Some haven’t even been in trouble, never having received warnings for public endangerment or driving under the influence. Instead, in family pictures, it’s often the addict who looks the healthiest. Everyone around him or her, meanwhile, suffers from the fallout of the loved one’s disease. One therapist at Cirque Lodge, Francine Miller, said that her father had died of alcoholism when she was only seventeen. He had never missed a day of work in his life. Cirque Lodge founder Richard Losee, who received his drug and rehabilitation certificate from the University of Utah, said he had found his best answer to the question of what constitutes an addict from one of his mentors in the field, who told him about a simple gauge: the addict doesn’t know how or when he or she is going to stop. Other specialists say a person is an addict if his or her life has become unmanageable. (NIAAA’s Alcohol Use Disorder spectrum questions are aimed at sussing out both these descriptions.)

One thing specialists seem to agree on is that every kind of alcohol or drug abuse is self-medication. As Fierman put it, it is covering up a larger problem that often hasn’t been diagnosed. “You’re uncomfortable in your own skin,” he said. In the latter half of 2019, Tony made a surprising proclamation to some of his friends. He had been looking for alternatives to alcohol and the medications he had been taking—Adderall and Xanax—to help his social anxiety and depression. He thought he had found a solution: he would cut back on drinking and ingest psychedelic mushrooms and ketamine instead. Tony had recently tried ketamine at Burning Man with Tyler Williams, who was always game to experiment with his good friend, and he had enjoyed the intense feeling of happiness and spirituality that came with it. Ketamine, typically used by veterinarians on animals or during medical procedures, can cause mental detachment, almost as though a person is outside his or her own body, staring down. It can spark silliness. It can dull pain. Mushrooms are similar and can spark euphoria and happiness. But both ketamine and mushrooms can also cause panic and hallucinations, particularly if taken in large amounts or over a long duration of time. The friends who knew how much of a problem alcohol had become for Tony were confused by his decision. He still took ecstasy on weekends sometimes and had done so at Burning Man, but otherwise he was not a habitual drug user. They were also relieved, though. Maybe he would really give up drinking, and his health would improve. In late 2019, as proof that he was moving in the right direction, Tony showed some of his friends a TED Talk by Dr. Rick Doblin, the cofounder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Dr. Doblin has crusaded against the criminalization of LSD and ecstasy by the US government almost since he was eighteen and experimenting with the drugs himself. He is well known in the field of psychedelics. Early in his career, Dr. Doblin found that MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, in conjunction with intensive therapy, can be used to treat post-

traumatic stress disorder in war veterans and survivors of sexual assault, and he spent more than three decades gathering enough testing data to prove his controversial point. In April 2019 in Vancouver, Dr. Doblin, in the midst of his third phase of clinical trials, spoke about the promising results not only for sufferers of posttraumatic stress disorder but also social anxiety, substance abuse, and alcoholism. “Psychedelics are really just tools, and whether their outcomes are beneficial or harmful depends on how they’re used,” he told an audience that was clearly engaged and receptive, laughing at his occasional joke (LSD “let me have a spiritual connection that unfortunately my Bar Mitzvah did not produce”) and clapping eagerly after he relayed his success in clinical trials. What Dr. Doblin made clear in his TED Talk, however, is that psychedelics should be administered in a clinical setting as part of treatment that includes therapy with professionals. He also made another important distinction that Tony failed to convey to his friends. Rather than encouraging “microdosing,” the en vogue practice, especially among the tech community, of consuming small amounts of drugs regularly, Dr. Doblin advised just the opposite: in his opinion, patients would benefit the most from taking several large “macro” doses of LSD or MDMA in a formal treatment setting with the oversight of a medical professional. Then they would stop using the drugs completely afterward. He believes that his approach addresses the root causes of a patient’s problem, while microdosing is usually used more for inspiration. “We’d rather not get people thinking they need a daily drug,” he said in a question-and-answer session following his TED Talk. Indeed, ketamine is the most addictive of the psychedelic drugs, he said later. If you take it without therapy, you just keep needing more and more of it. When it wears off, it can be disorienting. When a user takes too much of the drug, “they can get this sense they’re in touch with higher spiritual realms” and don’t spend time coming out of that state, he said. Tony was already using ketamine when he invited Dr. Doblin to Las Vegas in September 2019, but he had a lot of questions for the doctor about its use and how it could help him access different areas of the brain. He began talking to Dr.

Doblin and his team about his making a large donation to MAPS (which never came through). Dr. Doblin observed that Tony was constantly surrounded by a large group of people but also very shy. “It seemed like he was covering it up by always having people there,” he said. Several months passed, and then Tony again reached out, this time in February 2020, on the cusp of the pandemic. His mannerisms had changed. He seemed desperate, almost manic, Dr. Doblin thought. Tony told Dr. Doblin that he needed his help. He wanted him to create a study that he could participate in, in which ketamine could be taken legally to spark creativity. It would be a new use for the drug. He believed that it was helping him come up with new ideas, but his friends were worried because he was taking so much, Dr. Doblin recalled. Dr. Doblin knew right away that what Tony was suggesting wouldn’t work. He explained that it would take months to organize a study, and testing would be a massive barrier. How do you define “creativity,” for example? He reminded Tony about the decades he had spent trying to create his own drug and therapy regime, which was still not available for use. He explained to Tony the myriad government agencies that regulated drug studies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Dr. Doblin believed that Tony had gained genuine insights from ketamine that were helpful, but he was obviously taking too much. During that call, he said, Tony was “trying to find a way to justify what he was doing.” By that time, February 2020, it had become clear to Tony’s friends that his drug use was worse than his alcohol use. Tony told people that he was in a simulation created by artificial intelligence, as in The Matrix. By taking ketamine, he said, he could defeat the simulation to save humanity. Tony believed that ketamine could make him grow taller or change his body into different shapes. At a wedding he officiated at in early February 2020, he twisted his body into yoga poses as if to prove his point. Soon afterward, he went to Cirque Lodge in Park City for his short stint in rehab, never returning to Las Vegas, his home of nearly two decades.

In late June 2020, more than four months after his stay at Cirque Lodge, he arrived back in Park City in a limo with Ali Bevilacqua. The trip to Montana had been planned for a week; Tony had been there less than twenty-four hours. There had been no important meeting with Jeff Bezos. It seemed that Tony had made it up just to get Moroney to drive him to the Kalispell airport, part of his breakdown. Moroney had picked up Bevilacqua and another of Tony’s Las Vegas friends, at the Montana airport. Many of Tony’s close friends knew by that point that the friend was Tony’s ketamine supplier, and they had sought to keep him away from Tony. Moroney, however, may not have been aware until that night. On the drive back to Park City, they stopped for dinner at yet another person’s place in Salt Lake City. At the house, there was a giant container of pills: crushed-up psilocybin, or psychedelic mushrooms. Tony, only just coming off his trip from the large quantity of mushrooms he took on the way to Montana, grabbed a handful of the pills—about twenty capsules. There were so many in his hand that Bevilacqua was mostly joking when she asked, “You’re not going to take all those, are you?” Tony turned to her. He had never in his life been an angry person, only in a rare argument with a close friend, and until recently, he had almost never showed frustration, either. It was as if the drugs or his worsening mental health were exacerbating his worst traits. “Don’t you ever tell me what to do, or I’ll never take you anywhere again,” he told Bevilacqua. He shoved the pills into his mouth and swallowed them all. A normal dose might have been one or two capsules. Moroney had already left Salt Lake City to once again try to get some sleep, this time back at his hotel in Park City. So Bevilacqua and Tony rode alone the half hour back to Tony’s wood-frame house on Empire Avenue in Park City in a hired limousine. As they drove, the effect of the large dosage of pills was beginning to take hold, and Tony talked nonstop, as if words couldn’t pour out of him fast enough. He was no longer the quiet observer. Bevilacqua, beginning to panic about the situation, couldn’t interrupt his stream-of-consciousness ramblings.

When they arrived back at the house close to midnight, the only person there was Juliette Bajak, who had moved to Park City to work as Tony’s personal assistant. Bajak was older now, but she was the seventeen-year-old Tony had befriended in Las Vegas, and Bevilacqua knew her through him. Tony, clearly out of it, started to scream, and Bajak and Bevilacqua retreated to Bajak’s room. They didn’t sleep. Tony’s manic behavior progressed rapidly. Soon Bevilacqua and Bajak could hear him throwing furniture, dishes, and glassware around the house in a fullblown breakdown. Frantically, Bevilacqua tried calling and texting Justin Weniger and Suzie Baleson, but it was the middle of the night, and it was unclear if Weniger had yet made it back to Park City from Montana. Neither answered. Bevilacqua finally called Moroney, waking him up at his nearby hotel. “If we try to leave, he’s going to hurt us,” she said urgently into the phone. In the bedroom, with the door locked, Bevilacqua and Bajak were trapped, with a man they didn’t recognize, their beloved Tony, destroying the house around them. Moroney and another driver went to the house to try to help, but there was little they could do. Tony was in a state no one had seen him in before. Finally, early in the morning of June 30, Weniger and Baleson arrived at the Empire Avenue house to help run interference with another friend. While Tony was preoccupied on the second-floor balcony, Bevilacqua and Bajak emerged from the bedroom and quickly ran toward the front door. As they hurried through the house, they saw the damage—furniture knocked over, massive dents and breaks in the walls. It seemed impossible that one person could have done it all. Tony had recently started taking cold showers instead of baths, believing that each shower shaved off one hour of sleep he needed. He had left his cold shower running all night, and the stairs had turned into a gushing waterfall that was nearly impossible to traverse. They made it outside and scampered through several yards to reach the street, and another friend took them to a hotel. Bevilacqua flew straight back to Los Angeles. Someone had called the police and told a dispatcher that Tony was “threatening to hurt himself,” according to a later report from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. Five police officers and a fire truck responded to the

scene. They found Tony on the patio of the house and were able to convince him to get into a waiting ambulance. Several of Tony’s friends, including Suzie Baleson, talked to the officers. It was morning now, around 8:00 a.m. At that point, the friends weren’t concerned just about Tony’s health but about his reputation. What if the media found out about it? It would be a disaster not just for him but for Zappos, Amazon, and Las Vegas. Tony’s friends helped persuade police officers to take Tony to the hospital rather than arrest him. That move ended up being a point of contention among some of Tony’s friends who believed that an arrest might have provided a much-needed wake-up call. At the very least, Tony should have been shown the destruction he had caused in broad daylight, in case he didn’t remember. Instead, the house was cleaned, and soon afterward Tony moved to his new mansion, the Ranch. Later that night, hours after Tony had been taken to the hospital on June 30, Weniger called the police again, hoping that an officer could at least help keep Tony at the hospital. If he is released, Weniger told the dispatcher, “it will be a problem.” Tony left the hospital soon after. I. People familiar with Juliette Bajak said that she also viewed the relationship as platonic and Tony as her mentor.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE FAMILY BUSINESS

Park City, July 2020 Marin County, California, 1970–1990

People may not remember exactly what you did or what you said, but they always remember how you made them feel. That’s what matters most. —Tony Hsieh, quoting Maya Angelou

“Local Boy Has Got What It Takes!” read a December 1987 headline in the San

Rafael News, a local newspaper for the Marin County bedroom community. A grainy black-and-white photo featured a young Tony standing alone outside a post office, with bangs on his forehead and a poised smile, selling his latest business product. A ninth grader at the time, he had dozens of homemade graphic buttons for sale, pinned to boards for showing passersby. Tony had launched a business with a $100 loan from his parents, Richard and Judy Hsieh, for a button-making machine. Kids mailed him photos to be turned into pins, and Tony mailed them back, for $1 each. Customers found him through a listing in a marketing book, Free Stuff for Kids. What caught the local reporter’s attention, though, wasn’t the fact that Tony had racked up mail-order customers; it was that he was giving the profits to charity and wanted to contribute to a holiday party for his mother’s patients at a dialysis clinic in one of her earlier workplaces. He ended up raising $50. In the article, Judy Hsieh told the reporter that she wasn’t sure what Tony would grow up to be. “But whatever it is,” she said, “he can do it.”

Richard and Judy Hsieh were exacting parents who wanted Tony and his two younger brothers to excel. The Hsiehs had left Taiwan and enrolled in a US university in the late 1960s, a decade when thousands of people arrived in the United States newly eligible under the historic Immigration and Naturalization Act. Before the 1965 law, the immigration system used country-of-origin quotas that banned or severely limited arrivals from Asian countries. In the early 1960s, less than 1 percent of the US population was Asian (compared to about 7 percent today). Then President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty, signed into law a new policy eliminating the quota system. It set a cap of 290,000 annual visas, 120,000 for the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 for the Eastern. The new system had preferences for reuniting families and bringing educated, skilled immigrants to the United States. With the door now open to Asians, students from Taiwan, including Richard and Judy, enrolled in graduate programs in the United States in search of better opportunities and an escape from oppression in their homeland, which was under martial law. The Hsiehs arrived at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign during the height of Vietnam War–era political activism, including a nine-thousand-person demonstration at the university in 1969. Among the many groups being formed, Taiwanese students created the Taiwan Study Group to discuss the culture of the country on campus. Richard, a tall, slender, gregarious man with a wide smile, graduated with a doctoral degree in chemical engineering. That December, Richard and Judy had their first child, a son named Anthony, whom they called Tony. Judy, more reserved than her husband, with long hair and a petite frame, graduated from Illinois with a master’s degree in social work. She would later earn a doctorate in clinical psychology at California School of Professional Psychology Berkeley/Alameda in San Francisco. Richard accepted a position at Chevron in the San Francisco Bay Area, decades before Silicon Valley’s rise would make Marin County a sun-dappled playground for the rich and nearly inaccessible to the middle class. The Hsiehs lived in a two-story, 1960s-style house halfway up a steep hill in the San Rafael community of Lucas Valley, then a working-class neighborhood

filled with families. The community was tight-knit, and the dozens of kids living there had free range of the streets and the dirt trails that wound into the nearby hills. Richard and Judy and their sons were known by the neighbors for their kindness. Though they kept to themselves somewhat, Richard always stopped to speak with anyone on the street and knew everyone’s name. They hired a local babysitter, a teenager across the street. “They were so superfriendly,” recalled Gloria Lightner, one of the neighbors, who still lives next door to the Hsieh’s old house. Lightner knew that Tony and his younger brothers, Andy and Dave, would receive a world-class education when they were older, because anytime she ran into Richard Hsieh, he would pepper Lightner with questions about the quality of the local high school, Terra Linda. Lightner had kids just a few years older than the Hsieh boys. Later, when Tony sold LinkExchange to Microsoft in 1998, the whole neighborhood celebrated. In Delivering Happiness, Tony called Richard and Judy “your typical Asian American parents” who, along with other Asian parents in the community, had high expectations for their three children. That included getting into a prestigious college, preferably Harvard; in adulthood, being called “doctor,” whether through medical school or a PhD program; and learning to play musical instruments. The Hsiehs socialized with other Asian families in Marin County at potlucks, where parents would brag about their kids. “That was just part of the Asian culture: The accomplishments of the children were the trophies that many parents defined their own success and status by,” Tony wrote in Delivering Happiness. “We were the ultimate scorecard.” In middle school, Tony studied piano, violin, trumpet, and French horn and was expected to practice each for thirty minutes every weekday and one hour per day on weekends. To cut back on that rigorous schedule, he sometimes played tape recordings of himself practicing early in the morning, so his parents would think he was practicing while in fact he was still in bed.

“I always fantasized about making money because to me, money meant that later on in life I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted,” he wrote in Delivering Happiness. “The idea of one day running my own company also meant that I could be creative and eventually live life on my own terms.” Richard and Judy decided against sending the boys to Terra Linda and instead enrolled them at the Branson School, a renowned private college prep school for families living in the wealthy enclaves north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The wooded campus in the small community of Ross was a twentyminute drive south on Highway 101 from Tony’s house. Though the campus, with its manicured lawns and pale yellow buildings, isn’t immediately impressive, it sits at the base of Mount Tamalpais, part of Marin County’s lush nature preserves filled with redwoods and headlands overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Today, Branson charges students $52,800 a year. Tony, who spoke Mandarin Chinese at home, studied Japanese, Spanish, French, Latin, fencing, jazz piano, and drawing, and he also joined the chess club and electronics club. He ran the light board at theater productions, turning that into a paying job operating a spotlight at a community theater. He got another paying gig at $6 an hour, testing video games such as Indiana Jones and Maniac Mansion for Lucasfilm, part of Star Wars creator George Lucas’s media empire. Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch property was just a fifteen-minute drive from the Hsiehs’ home. Despite his rigorous schoolwork, Tony was often silly, performing magic tricks, writing a Shakespearean sonnet in Morse code for a class assignment, and using the computer lab’s dial-up system to call paid hotlines. He also launched small businesses, with varying degrees of success: an earthworm farm, which failed when the worms escaped into the yard (the Delivering Happiness bus visited a worm farm in honor of the childhood venture), manufacturing and selling a magic tricks kit, and his early button business, which received hundreds of mail orders a month, an early prototype of online retail. All of those adventures became part of Tony’s hero’s journey. But underneath the quirky anecdotes, the pressure his parents imposed on him to achieve brought disappointment and loneliness. His childhood was not filled with much fun or freedom. He told some friends that his first memory was of

learning how to swim as a three-year-old by jumping off a high dive at a local pool, which must have been a terrifying experience for such a young child. He missed his last dance in eighth grade because he was taking the SAT the next morning, years before students typically do in high school as a requirement for applying to college. The loss stayed with him many years later. In his senior yearbook, most of the graduating students had a personal page filled with photos and shout-outs to friends and family; Tony’s was only a white page with doodles and random musings in black ink. When the New York Times asked him for one of his childhood highlights, Tony recounted a seemingly inconsequential moment when some trick-ortreaters had shown up at his house on Halloween. Later in life, many of Tony’s friends believed that his childlike perspective and his obsession with parties and having fun were the results of missing out on so much while he was growing up. He pursued money early in life for the freedom it could bring him. It also had a side benefit: though he might not have become a doctor or a lawyer, no one—including his parents—could deny he’d achieved something big. And after becoming wealthy, he gave much of his fortune away, invested in the dreams of others and even an entire city, for the freedom he thought it could bestow on others. What deeper emotional impact his upbringing might have had remained one of his secrets. Asian Americans are less likely than white people to use available mental health services, according to studies, even though they must often deal with high cultural expectations for academic success and careers and for fulfilling family obligations. The pressure of the myth of the “model minority”—the harmful stereotype of Asian Americans as a monolithic group with the same experiences who are all “nice,” rule followers, and highly successful—can also take a toll on mental health. As an adult, Tony alternated between ignoring his Asian American heritage and making fun of it, sometimes awkwardly. He called Fernet his “Chinese medicine,” and referred to the bus that took him and friends on trips as “the Orient Express.” At one Zappos all-hands meeting, held at the Kà Theatre at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Tony stood onstage as the lights dimmed and pop music filled the

cavernous room, which is typically used for Cirque du Soleil shows. Richard Hsieh came onstage in a full-body monkey suit. “It’s the Chinese Year of the Monkey!” Tony yelled. Richard was helping Tony announce the grand opening of Zappos’ office in China, and the Chinese New Year had taken place the previous week. (Other Zappos executives also wore monkey costumes.) People who didn’t know Tony well assumed that he was close with his parents, who sometimes took starring roles in his life. His mother, Judy, despite being educated in social work and psychology, managed a pan-Asian restaurant, Venture Frogs, that Tony opened in the Don Lee building on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco after the 1998 sale of LinkExchange. The restaurant served noodles and dumplings with Silicon Valley references in the dish names, such as Palm Pad Thai and Founders’ Ahi Tuna. After Tony moved to Las Vegas, his parents would visit from their home in Silicon Valley, often speaking Mandarin Chinese with their son. They attended Zappos parties, and even Judy, who is more reserved than Richard, would dance and gamely wear disco clothing. Richard, who is more outgoing, often made jokes and texted separately with Tony’s friends as a way of keeping up with his son. Tony felt loyal to his family, but he did not frequently confide in them. He also truly trusted only a select group of Las Vegas friends, even though he had dozens of people around him. His family continued to have a hold on him deep into adulthood, even though they didn’t play an outsized role in his daily life. He worried about making a good impression when they visited. Each year, the Hsieh family typically traveled to Mexico or Hawaii for Thanksgiving. During the trip, Judy Hsieh would schedule an hour of beach time for herself with each of her sons individually, a move that Tony later told a friend was “very awkward.” Even with his parents far away in the Bay Area when Tony was an adult, he worried that his mother would somehow find out that he smoked, a habit he knew she hated. By the time he was in his thirties, Tony had realized that the typical American family setup was not going to work for him. As backup for his distaste for marriage, he liked to repeat the popular assumption: that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. “I’m not opposed to the idea of marriage,” he told the

New York Times in 2012 when it interviewed him for its “Dating Profiles of High-Tech, High-Worth Bachelors” feature. “But statistically, if half of all marriages end in divorce, and of the ones that remain married many are unhappily married, the odds are stacked against you.” Tony did want to have deep, meaningful relationships; he just chose the option of having multiple connections simultaneously. The closest description of this is polyamory: having loving, intentional relationships with multiple people at the same time. The practice has become more mainstream in the last several years; Willow Smith, the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, for example, recently said she is polyamorous. “I think it’s pretty hard to find one partner and call it a day,” Tony told Playboy. “Using the analogy of friends, why not find just one friend and call it a day? The answer is because you get a different type of connection, different conversations, different experiences with different friends. I would say the same thing is true on the dating side.” Tony’s long-term relationships didn’t always overlap, and typically only one of his relationships at a time was serious. He often kept an ex-girlfriend tightly in his orbit long after a breakup. He had distinct levels of friendships, which he kept track of almost like a CEO evaluating an org chart (although he hated org charts): some good friends might not be long-term lovers but were snuggle buddies with no sex involved. Like the businessperson he was, Tony negotiated the terms of a relationship with a prospective partner in advance, making sure that whatever level the two would operate on, both parties agreed to beforehand. Of course, some partners bristled at the arrangement—some women wanted more than Tony would give; committed girlfriends found it hard to watch him flirt with other women. Tony’s magnetic joy, though, meant that most people accepted the deal, just to be near him. By the summer of 2019, however, his pursuit of multiple relationships seemed to be isolating him. He was then forty-five, and many of his friends were married with children or at least had stable partners, and they couldn’t keep up with his round-the-clock gatherings, often with new groups of younger friends. He had fallen out of touch with some longtime friends, including Nick Swinmurn, who had given Tony the idea of Zappos two decades earlier. The last time Swinmurn had seen Tony was in 2019, and Tony had asked him to rate his

own happiness—a question he asked Swinmurn and other friends occasionally over the years. Tony seemed confused when Swinmurn answered that he was happy. Tony said that the majority of married people he had surveyed weren’t happy. “He told me that his friends kept getting younger and younger,” Swinmurn later wrote. “He seemed excited about this.” Possibly as an attempt to keep up with his friends, Tony began talking about having a child of his own, even offering to act as a “surrogate father” to one of his ex-girlfriends’ children. But when it came time to watch the child on a trip to Hawaii, he let other friends take on most of the responsibility. In 2019, he embarked on a relationship, one of his last, with a married Zappos employee whom he fell for deeply. But the executive ultimately broke up with him, deciding instead to focus on her husband and children. She would later, however, help Doherty get Tony to rehab in Utah by flying to Park City with him. Despondent over their breakup, Tony later in the fall of 2019 showed up at Ali Bevilacqua’s house in Pasadena and told her that if she wanted to get back together for the long term, he would like that. She told him she would think about it. After his psychotic break in Montana in late June 2020, Tony discovered that Tyler Williams, his longtime friend, had secretly been texting his drug supplier, begging him not to deliver more ketamine or mushrooms to Tony. Williams had even offered half of everything he owned in return for the supplier to stop. When Tony discovered the text messages, he flew into a rage. He yelled at Williams and then told him he was not welcome back in Park City. It was the very thing that all of Tony’s friends feared the most, and now it had happened to arguably the person with whom Tony was the closest. Everyone else around Tony witnessed his outburst or they heard about it later, and they knew that Williams had been banished. It was a warning shot. While he was still in Montana, Williams called Richard Hsieh. Williams told him about the bus episode, explaining that Tony clearly needed help. Soon after, Tony trashed the Empire Avenue house, trapping Bevilacqua and Juliette Bajak

inside. Tony’s parents learned of that incident as well from another friend who called after it happened. Tony’s parents, now in their seventies, hadn’t seen him since February 2020, when they had begun quarantining in the Bay Area due to the Covid-19 pandemic. California, among the states with the strictest Covid precautions, had advised travelers against leaving the state. But the Hsiehs, who were very concerned after Williams’s call and the house incident, had to act. In early July, they flew to Park City, along with Tony’s younger brothers, Andy and Dave, to see the situation for themselves. Tony had calmed down somewhat from his breakdown a week earlier but was still not himself. He again had friends flying into Park City, but there was no mention of the June incidents by anyone around him. His closest gatekeepers, Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger, didn’t say anything to the visitors. Baleson was starting to plan a big 10X party for later that month. The closest Tony came to acknowledging that anything was amiss after being released from the hospital was when he told one guest, angrily, that a rumor was going around that he was taking too much ketamine. He felt deeply betrayed, particularly after discovering Williams’s texts. Tony couldn’t see that his friends were trying to help him. Instead, he seemed to suddenly feel resentful of his decades of generosity. He had given everything he had to his friends, and now he felt that they were all turning against him. The visitors in early July 2020 also didn’t notice a big difference in Tony’s behavior. Though he seemed a little on edge, his mood didn’t seem out of the ordinary. But Richard and Judy Hsieh noticed. First of all, they saw that Tony had lost a significant amount of weight since February. He was acting slightly unhinged, climbing stairway railings to take photos and walking around barefoot. He chain-smoked constantly, even though he knew his mom didn’t like it. Normally he would never have smoked in front of his parents. One day, Tony announced to his parents and brothers that he was forming a new family business, one that would aim to improve their relationships with one another. The nature of the business was unclear. One of his brothers would be chief executive officer; the other would be chief operating officer.

At a private meeting, Tony asked his family to come up with ideas for how to raise a lot of money in three weeks. To save your son’s life, he said. He left the room while everyone else worked on the assignment. The others waited several hours for Tony to return, but he never reappeared. A couple of days later, Tony asked his mom a question: Did she want to be his friend or his family member? If she chose to be a nonjudgmental friend, he’d be open about his life. If she picked family, he would keep some secrets. Judy Hsieh, a trained psychologist, told her son she would be his friend, and in return, he told her about his drug use. She asked him to get professional help. Tony promptly turned the request into a negotiation, just as he had when Doherty had wanted him to go to rehab earlier in 2020. For every minute he went to therapy, Tony told his mom, she would have to agree to be immersed in an ice bath in exchange. It was clearly an impossible demand. The next day, Judy Hsieh tried again. She pointed out to Tony his problems with memory and attention, a direct confrontation that sparked uncharacteristic anger in Tony. He told her that she wasn’t his friend anymore and that the family was wasting its time. Then he stormed out of the house. The episode divided the Hsieh family. Tony cut off his parents, telling his friends and assistants not to respond to them. The Hsiehs tried anyway. They asked for the people in his group to schedule regular FaceTime meetings with their son. Tony’s assistants refused to respond. Dave Hsieh, the youngest brother, also went back home to Las Vegas. Dave Hsieh abhorred wealth and money and lived humbly with his girlfriend, preferring to stay out of Tony’s and Andy’s business plans over the years. Andy Hsieh, however, returned to Park City ten days later, ostensibly to watch over Tony for the family. Tony agreed to pay Andy $1 million to stay. Unlike Tony, Andy, who was younger by three years, had struggled since college to make a name for himself, always living in the shadow of his older brother’s astounding success. He’d gotten bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering from Stanford and then worked for a couple years as a consultant at McKenna, which appears to be a specialty food marketing company in San Francisco.

Soon after, he had left to take a general role at Zappos and moved with the company to Las Vegas. His LinkedIn profile still says he is a director there, nineteen years after joining in 2002. But he actually left the company more than a decade ago under circumstances that have never been established. There’s suspicion that there was tension between the brothers at Zappos. The reason for his departure seems to have been kept a closely guarded secret. Andy Hsieh tried his hand at launching his own startup, called Lux Delux, in 2011. It started off as an invitation-only membership platform, connecting the wealthy to high-end properties and clubs around the world, said David Louie, his former business partner, who is now a home mortgage consultant at Wells Fargo. Louie wasn’t exactly sure who was funding the business but said that the whole Hsieh family seemed to be involved in some capacity, although he met Tony only briefly. The family flew him first class to London and other work locations on a private jet, an experience that Louie hadn’t had before. “It was just the craziest being connected to them,” he recalled. “They are such a smart family.” Lux Delux, however, was hard to scale, and Louie sensed that Andy Hsieh and his family wanted a change in direction. So in 2013, Lux Delux abruptly transitioned its business model to food delivery. Andy Hsieh and Louie created an app that let users order meals from their phone, hoping to capitalize on the wave of similar apps such as Seamless and Grubhub, which were gaining traction across the country. Andy Hsieh and Louie focused Lux Delux in an area the Hsieh family knew well because of Tony: Las Vegas. Louie commuted back and forth from his family’s home in San Francisco, all expenses paid. He and Andy Hsieh planned to entice restaurants around Las Vegas by promising them increased sales by allowing users to order their meals on the app with free delivery. (Lux Delux would take a percentage of a business’s sales.) Ultimately they hoped to sign up many of the 150 restaurants then in downtown Las Vegas. But Andy Hsieh couldn’t get Lux Delux as a food app to take off, either. Louie eventually got tired of commuting from San Francisco and wanted to spend more time with his two children. He said that when he left around 2016, the business was still operational, and he doesn’t know what happened after

that. By 2017, though, it appeared to have been wound down. Louie’s impression of Andy Hsieh was only positive: “supernice, superloyal, superhardworking,” he said. “Just really good people, all of them.” As with the rest of his family, Tony wasn’t close with Andy, who was more talkative and social than he was. When he went out in Las Vegas with Tony and his friends, it was always mildly awkward because no one knew him. Usually he wasn’t around, though. In 2019, Andy Hsieh again filed paperwork to start a new business, this one a computer technology consulting firm called Sweet Hall, located in Silicon Valley. He listed his parents’ address in the incorporation papers. But it’s unclear if the business ever took off. Unmarried and without immediate family, Andy seemed to have nothing to prevent him from staying in Park City.

CHAPTER EIGHT UTOPIA

Park City, July 2020–August 2020

The wiser course is to think of others also when pursuing our own happiness. —Dalai Lama

Tony Hsieh spent his whole career trying to solve for happiness. How could he

lift up employees, empowering them to be their best selves? How could he create the ultimate, joyful workplace, where everyone would want to go? How could he deconstruct the very concept of a company so that there would be no confines at all? How could he create a city—downtown Las Vegas—where people would live and work in harmony, all within one square mile? In the summer of 2020, Tony had an even bigger, monumental goal, one that would render his prior accomplishments narrow, even inconsequential. That new achievement would finally, once and for all, spread happiness to everyone he knew and loved, as well as to billions of people whom he had never met. From his new home base in Park City, he wanted to create world peace. It sounded unbelievable, especially because philosophers, activists, lawmakers, and many others have tried unsuccessfully for decades, if not centuries, to achieve that very goal. But Tony was serious. He would start by designing a model community in the small mountain town to show the rest of the world how it could be done. He would fill it with thinkers, artists, and scientists, who could help him build this new kind of

utopia. The world’s intellectuals would be free to run experiments, funded by him and his team, with the ultimate goal of achieving world peace. He dispatched one of his employees to begin researching what it would take to form a new nation and how to set up governance for it. As with all of his previous big plans—the development of downtown Las Vegas, the culture and holacracy implementation at Zappos—Tony’s vision was unfocused. He was only beginning to work out the details. But this would be his life-defining project, the culmination of decades spent trying to unlock the human spirit. He labeled an orange sticky note “World Peace,” with a drawing of the peace symbol, and stuck it to a wall at the Ranch. The multimillion-dollar, 25,000square-foot mansion had become the epicenter of Tony and his employees and friends. Another sticky note gave a date for implementing Tony’s vision: New Year’s Eve, 2020. Surrounding those notes, Tony scribbled in black marker on nearly three dozen others, usually just one or two words, themes really, for how the group could solve world peace: “NATURE” “QUANTUM PHYSICS” “MIND” “BODY” “SOUL” “POLITICS” The walls, windows, and doors of the Ranch were covered in thousands of other sticky notes unrelated to world peace, constellations of yellow, green, and blue. Tony had always loved using sticky notes, but this was a far more elaborate, disconcerting display. Some were arranged in long lines, large squares, or other shapes, such as hexagons. Others appeared haphazardly placed, as if written quickly and immediately posted to the wall. Not all the handwriting was the same.

The notes described the new plans Tony and his employees had for Park City, some of which were loosely tied to his new vision. The 10X project had all but fizzled. Giving away alcohol for a fee—the price of the monthly membership—didn’t comport with Utah’s alcohol laws, which the organizers, in their rush to launch 10X, had learned only after the fact. Tony’s earlier plan to buy properties and lease them as Airbnbs had also shifted. The properties would instead be used to build a sort of compound where all the new intellectuals moving to and living in the community, as well as all the employees working on his new projects, could stay. By August 2020, Tony had bought nine houses around Park City, and sticky notes recorded more than a dozen other properties he hoped to buy for tens of millions of dollars. Some of the sticky notes briefly described plans for convincing homeowners who hadn’t listed their properties to sell. One of Tony’s newest plans, part of his world peace vision, was to launch a TED Talk–style speaker series, funding new perspectives from people around the world and streaming their talks live on the platform Twitch. One of the first to film a video for the project was Dr. Pravir Malik, a former Zappos employee, who had headed up the organizational sciences team when he was at the company. Dr. Malik, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a separate interest in light and how studying the properties of light can translate into running an organization. He has written ten books on the subject of light. At Zappos, Tony was keenly interested in Dr. Malik’s theories and usually met with him once a month to discuss his ideas and how they could be applied to companies. Tony encouraged Dr. Malik to distill his research on light into six maxims that all companies could use. Employees struggling with their managers should form a sphere of light around themselves and invite their boss into it, for example. “The employee’s sphere engulfs the manager so that the manager is reseen in light,” Dr. Malik wrote in Forbes. “Visualize light flowing in and out of the manager. Such a re-seeing has to continue until the employee feels something in themself has shifted.” When Tony reached out to Dr. Malik in 2020, Dr. Malik didn’t relocate to Park City but decided to leave Zappos to focus full-time on the new streaming idea and other research work. “He wanted meaningful, deep content that could

impact the situation around the world,” he explained about Tony’s invitation. He said he had been paid very well for his contract, more than he had been making at Zappos. Tony also invited a Utah sculptor, Gary Lee Price, to make a TED Talk–style video in early August 2020. Tony had been walking through the Mountain Trails Gallery on Park City’s Main Street one day and fallen in love with one of Price’s pieces, a large bronze sculpture of Mark Twain sitting on a bench. He sent employees to purchase the statue for about $50,000 in cash and later moved it to the deck of the Ranch, overlooking the lake. Tony reached out to Price, who told him the story of another piece he was working on, a 305-foot-tall monument called Statue of Responsibility, showing two hands intertwined. The piece is based on the 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning by the late author and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Frankl wrote that freedom should be balanced with responsibility and the Statue of Liberty should “be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” Tony’s crew filmed Price with a six-foot version of Statue of Responsibility near the lake at the Ranch, talking about his journey. (The real statue will be housed in California when it’s finished.) Price, who was also interested in world peace, was fascinated by and enamored of Tony’s earnestness in bringing about a seemingly impossible worldwide change. “It absolutely came from the heart,” said Price, who had researched Tony’s work developing downtown Las Vegas and his mission to spread happiness. “It all seemed congruent.” Price’s wife, Leesa Clark-Price, was not as easily impressed as her husband. Though she admired Tony and his generosity, she noticed nitrous oxide cartridges scattered around the property and witnessed him, his employees, and his friends inhaling it. Her own son had struggled with drug addiction, and she recognized the signs. When the Prices left after a two-day visit to the Ranch in early August 2020, Tony begged them to “bring a teepee and move onto the property,” Leesa ClarkPrice recalled. “They loved the idea of creating unique experiences.” One of Tony’s assistants later called to ask if she and Price could help them station his sculptures around Park City for a citywide scavenger hunt that would also include treasure boxes and magic. She said she would look into it.

To carry out his new plans, Tony needed more people to join him in Park City. As usual, he wanted to surround himself with an army of trusted friends, ready to assemble the necessary puzzle pieces to make his vision complete. The former collection of visitors in Park City, the ones who had gathered around him after rehab in February 2020, had largely dissipated after his June breakdowns. Only Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger had stayed on. Ali Bevilacqua, Tony’s ex-girlfriend, had visited one last time after he had trapped her in the Empire Avenue house, trying once more to help him. But it had been almost impossible to find time alone with Tony among all his guests, and when she had, he had talked nonstop and refused to listen. Finally, she had tried to be mean to get through to him, telling him that he wasn’t acting like himself and he needed help. She had thrown water at him. The two had screamed at each other. Gone was the dorky boyfriend who had played silly games with her around Las Vegas, dressing up and taking pictures and playing his favorite board games. One time they had been in Mexico for vacation and had laughed so hard while hanging out at the beach that Tony had dubbed it “the beach of endless laughter.” Bevilacqua believed that Tony had been truly happy during those times. He wasn’t now. Tony did end up quieting long enough to listen to Bevilacqua one last time. “But I had to leave him,” she said later. It was the only thing she could do. Tyler Williams had also been excommunicated after Tony had blown up at him. Tony had exiled his parents, and others who had visited in the winter and spring of 2020 also stopped showing up. Tony called and texted more friends from different cities and stages of life. Others came invited by someone else in the group. It was deep into the pandemic now, and some people were tired of quarantining wherever they were and eager for something new. Each new arrival laid his or her claim to Tony: through tales of epic parties attended together, intimate conversations, or because they were longtime friends. Some had been in the latest iteration of Tony’s inner circle in Las Vegas; others reappeared after having moved to other cities and starting families. They were a mix of former Zappos employees, ex-girlfriends, artists, and drifters. Their

connection, tenuous as it might have been, opened the gates to Tony’s slice of Park City—and to his fortune. The hodgepodge collection of Tony’s followers had one thing in common: their utter devotion to him. Tony paid many of them handsomely, sometimes double their previous salaries, or in the form of huge commissions or subsidized rent, to join him on his journey. Michelle D’Attilio, a former girlfriend in Las Vegas who ran Tony’s social media accounts, relocated to Park City from Michigan. Daniel Park Elmhorst, a musician who had once lived in the Airstream park with Tony and competed on America’s Got Talent in 2012, also arrived. Elmhorst, who goes by the name Daniel Park, now called a van his home and played music gigs on the road. A longtime friend, Victoria Recaño, an Inside Edition reporter, moved her family and young children to Park City from Los Angeles, renting a house nearby. Janice Lopez, an interior designer and childhood friend of Tony, had moved to Utah years earlier. Before that, she had cofounded and designed Airstream Park in Las Vegas. In Utah, she lived about seventy-five miles from Park City and showed up often, sometimes spending the night. Two newcomers soon ended up with outsized roles. Rachael Brown, another former girlfriend and an early, influential Zappos executive, moved into the Ranch with Tony. She had begun working as a customer service agent at Zappos in 2005, one of the company’s earliest employees, but had quickly moved up to training roles and become a confidante of Tony’s. She had been organizing Zappos’ all-hands events, the giant parties Tony loved, before leaving the company. A cellist, Brown had trained at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon School of Music in Pittsburgh and played part-time with two groups in Las Vegas that had brought classical music with a twist to the Strip: David Perrico’s Pop Strings Orchestra and Nina Di Gregorio’s Bella Electric Strings ensemble. Despite living in Vegas for her music, she had been missing from Tony’s inner circle for years. In Park City, she somehow emerged again, always by his side. Later, one of Tony’s employees, Anthony Hebert, described her as Tony’s “soul mate.” Brown hosted Tony and his friends at the house she had purchased in New London, Connecticut, more than two thousand miles away. The group drove

buses across the country to get there in the summer of 2020, avoiding flying because of Covid. Tony preferred to travel by bus anyway. Brown’s $1.3 million house is a stately property abutting the Thames River on the wealthy side of town. The well-manicured home has a rectangular pool set in a wide backyard patio overlooking the water. An attached shed holds pool equipment and beach chairs. The house is only fifteen minutes away from the smaller seaside village of Niantic, Connecticut, where Brown grew up, and her parents still live nearby, in a much less opulent neighborhood. She still planned to spend most of her time in Park City. One of Brown’s housemates at the Ranch, another newcomer, was a fortysomething cannabis entrepreneur and influencer named Don Calder, who runs a popular Instagram page, The High Society. His nickname in Park City became “Don Nipton”; before moving to be with Tony in the summer of 2020, Calder had tried to revitalize a tiny town on the California side of the Mojave Desert called Nipton. Nipton, about an hour south of Las Vegas off Interstate 15, is miles from anything, an eighty-acre plot of land with temperatures that can soar past 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The town, which is like a real-life Schitt’s Creek, has been owned for the last three decades by a California couple, Roxanne Lang and the late Jerry Freeman, who fell in love with it while prospecting for gold in the nearby mountains. Freeman bought it for about $200,000 on a lark in 1985, and he and his wife refurbished the small hotel and trading post on the property, added a grove of eucalyptus trees for some shade, and built five tiny cabins for tourists. In 2017, the year after Freeman died, Lang sold Nipton in a seller financing deal to American Green, an over-the-counter cannabis company, which wanted to build a “cannabis oasis” and make the town famous. American Green sent Don Calder to live at its new property. Calder, tanned, with a wide forehead, and from Florida, heard about American Green’s plans. He wanted to get involved and emailed the company out of the blue one night. He started organizing events, such as wellness retreats and a “sound bath” class, a meditative experience in which an attendee is “bathed” in sound.

American Green brought in art from Burning Man, including a giant circle of shopping carts, an eerie sight in the middle of the desert. The company built several tall teepees on the property, hoping to attract social media influencers looking for a good photo backdrop. Calder met Tony when he was living in Nipton in 2018; Tony and his friends sometimes drove from Las Vegas in buses and stayed for a night or two. During one visit, as Tony and his friends ate at Nipton’s small restaurant, the kitchen staff struggled to keep up with the orders. Without anyone’s asking, Tony walked behind the counter, rolled up his sleeves, and started washing the dishes stacked in the sink. That story about Tony is often repeated by the locals in Nipton, who revered him; they were less fond of Calder. Even though he lived in the town, which has a population of only twenty-five, they found him to be standoffish unless he needed something, such as to bum a cigarette. He often didn’t turn up for barbecues. He smoked pot and took mushrooms. Calder did, however, bring in a lot of visitors, increasing business, said Shawn Prophet, who worked with him at American Green during the time Calder lived there. “He turned the whole place around,” Prophet said later of Calder’s work in Nipton. But then the pandemic hit in March 2020, and the cannabis retreats and other events in Nipton ground to a halt, along with the rest of the world. American Green had already missed payments to Lang for the financing she had provided to run the town. She tried to work with the company for months but was ultimately forced to foreclose. Eventually she put the town up for sale again. The restaurant and hotel closed because of the pandemic. The teepee coverings were ripped by the wind. Tourists still came through, but nothing was open. Calder tried to convince Tony to buy the town, but a deal never came together. About an hour away in Tony’s former home of Las Vegas, the economy had cratered as the casinos had shut down in the spring of 2020, and even after they reopened in early June, fewer tourists arrived. The unemployment rate in the metro area continued to be one of the highest in the United States throughout 2020, with out-of-work casino staff waiting in long lines for food. Down on its

luck, with a lot of people suffering, Las Vegas wasn’t an appealing place in which to start over. By the summer of 2020, Calder had left Nipton and joined Tony in Park City. Anyone in Tony’s entourage who brought in business or a project to help with his vision was paid a commission, ultimately funded by Tony’s fortune, estimated years earlier at about $840 million.I As she had for much of the last seventeen years, Mimi Pham took care of the details behind the scenes, although she did not move to Park City. In 2020, Tony was paying her a huge sum to be his personal manager: $30,000 per month, or $360,000 a year. In Park City, Pham was in charge of formalizing new business deals, and she took a 10 percent commission on them, further increasing her income from Tony’s ventures. For example, when Tony retrofitted his luxury buses for $3.68 million, she claimed $368,000. Suzie Baleson handled some of the contracts through her business, the Wellth Collective, enabling her to collect commissions, and a string of sticky notes posted on one door of the Ranch confirmed that process. A contract would start with the Wellth Collective, move to two other employees for initial approval, and then eventually move to Tony for final approval. Baleson, who called herself Tony’s business manager, moved her brother and sister-in-law to Park City as well, and her sister-in-law was also employed by Tony. Connie Yeh, a cousin of Tony, was charged with transferring the money for the contracts, while Puoy Premsrirut, a Las Vegas attorney, typically drew up the necessary documents. Premsrirut, a friend of Tony, and Yeh had also worked with Tony on the Downtown Project in Las Vegas. Weniger, meanwhile, now referred to himself as Tony’s “bodyguard,” ostensibly protecting Tony from others around him. As an organizer of the Life Is Beautiful music festival, he had also been tasked with developing several music projects.

Many of the group’s plans were documented in daily online schedules kept by more than a dozen new employees and assistants hired by Tony, among them Anthony Hebert, Elizabeth Pezzello, and Brett Gorman. Pezzello, a former competitive swimmer and Miss New York USA contestant, had followed Baleson to Park City as one of Tony’s assistants. Though she had briefly worked as an executive assistant at the cloud storage company Dropbox in San Francisco, her last job had been as a YMCA swim instructor in Florida. Her fiancé, Brett Gorman, an investment manager in New York and graduate of Bowdoin College, tagged along. Gorman has a dog and loves to play golf, according to a series of sticky notes describing him at the Ranch: “Super athletic, healthy, have sense of urgency, hospitality focused” and “Love to make people laugh.” Pezzello’s Instagram feed shows the courtship of the sun-kissed couple, both in their early thirties, over several years in New York, San Francisco, and Naples, Florida, where Pezzello is from: Pezzello, with long blond hair and flawless makeup, posing on the beach or on the ski slopes; Gorman, with a wide smile and an unshaven face, standing by her side or carrying her on his shoulders. Later the two would start a “vitamin-infused hydration therapy” business in Naples, delivering vitamins intravenously into people’s arms. In Park City, Gorman was assigned to write the group’s newsletter, Blizzy Ranch Daily News, named for Tony’s dog. For that job and several others, such as coordinating visitors, he was paid nearly $500,000 a year. The glossy newsletter provided weather and dining reports, with one issue chronicling a twenty-course sushi night “for the history books” that had included fish flown in from around the world and prepared by a local chef. “According to sources close to the Blizzy Ranch Daily News, there were rumors of crying babies falling asleep to the smoothness of Chef Ben’s fish slice,” the newsletter reported. Gorman sometimes added a line to his schedules: “Just trying to help/ensure Tony and Rachael have a great day!” Tony’s brother Andy was quickly swept up into the group’s plans. Because he was a member of the Hsieh family, he was automatically accepted into the group, even though many of the others had never met him. He was assigned to line up a helicopter charter between Las Vegas and Park City and meet with tequila

suppliers for a business he was planning, among other tasks outlined in the schedules. Some of the employees, including the house’s main chef, began reporting to him, and he would send them on errands for Tony. Tony’s generosity had always been overwhelming, but in Las Vegas, his true friends had rarely taken advantage of it. None of Tony’s longtime friends, the ones who had learned over many years how to tell Tony no to some of his most audacious and impractical ideas, who knew how to let him down gently, and who would never exploit him, such as the Mosslers, the Cornthwaites, Garrett Miller or Ryan Doherty in Las Vegas, and Alfred Lin in San Francisco, were involved in the Park City plans. Instead, the new group of people didn’t just expect his generosity, they adapted their whole lives to it. One string of green sticky notes in the Ranch spelled out “Tony’s staff [whose] happiness depends on him.” The list included Andy, along with Baleson, Weniger, and Pezzello. It wasn’t clear who had written it. As the group around him coalesced, Tony embarked on another hack, curious about what his body could live without. How little could he eat or drink? Could he stop urinating? How much oxygen did his body really need? Where would full control of one’s body, defying nature, ultimately lead? He was using a new drug, one that he believed could help him achieve his vision for world peace. Nitrous oxide, he decided, could perhaps spread happiness more effectively to everyone, helping him on his journey there. I.  The origin of this oft-repeated estimate of Tony’s fortune remains unclear. Estimates in news reports fluctuate from $780 million to “close to a billion,” with sources unclear. In December 2021, a preliminary estimate showed his fortune valued at around $500 million.

PART III

CHAPTER NINE GOOD AND EVIL RECONCILED

Park City, Summer 2020

Into this pervading genius we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. —Benjamin Paul Blood, philosopher and nitrous oxide user, in 1874

The sound of running water with the faint singing of grasshoppers is audible as

the documentary begins with a black screen. The sun edges out from behind an eerie dark planet, its bright light gradually overtaking the scene, as though it is opening a door into Tony’s mind. As rainbow-colored amoebalike forms explode across the screen, the calm voice of a self-assured guru begins to speak. “A revolution is happening within our hearts and on Earth to elevate us beyond illusions, fantasies, and social masks,” the man says. “We are looking outside ourselves for fulfillment when the power to change is the inner journey.” The title emerges in white letters, “THE NITROUS OXYGEN ADVANTAGE,” followed by “THE SECRET OF THE MAGIC BOX” and an explosion of small white hearts. Tony doesn’t appear in the video, nor do any of his friends or employees, but he paid for its production in the summer and fall of 2020. For the next thirty-five minutes, Tony’s friend the Inside Edition reporter Victoria Recaño uses her soothing, trained voice to pull viewers through a galaxy of New Age images—flowers, mountains, and people hugging, crying, and meditating flash onto the screen—as she describes the properties and origins of a

mystical drug, nitrous oxide. Inhaling the gas can alleviate depression and suffering and free humans from conventional thinking, she says. Recaño was under contract through Suzie Baleson’s business, Wellth Collective, to work on video projects for Tony in Park City, including one with a mutual friend, the singer Paula Abdul. At times it feels as if the viewer is actually taking part in the video, flying through the farthest reaches of outer space, swimming through shimmering underwater caves, and running through the dark woods, as on a brief drug trip. The words “We must save our world” appear with images of modern horrors of war, floods, riots. CONSCIOUS LOVE flashes on the screen, followed by INFINITE ABUNDANCE, and COMPLETE SOUL-FREEDOM. The video often feels promotional, arguing in favor of the use of nitrous oxide. “A lot of times on this little journey that you started, it gets really lonely,” says one unidentified young woman in the video. At another point, Recaño wonders, “To what extent are scientific beliefs conducive to human happiness?” It’s not until the end that she issues a sort of disclaimer: “It is important to emphasize that we are not advocating the use of general anesthetics as psychedelic drugs; rather, we’re suggesting that the current description of cognitive effects of commonly used anesthetics is likely incomplete.” Tony had used nitrous oxide occasionally in the past, at Burning Man and a few parties. The drug had become more popular across Silicon Valley and among tech entrepreneurs looking for a new kind of high. Tony had also become curious about using the gas for his latest body hack: he was trying to see how much oxygen his body could live without, with thoughts of scaling Mount Everest. He eventually linked the inhalant with his new mission of helping create world peace and produced three videos on the drug, “The Nitrous Oxygen Advantage” being the longest and most polished. Ultimately, Tony envisioned new arrivals in Park City, from friends and employees to intellectuals, watching them. Nitrous oxide—discovered two centuries ago and also known as laughing gas, hippie crack, noz, and whippets—produces euphoria and sometimes leads to

hallucinations in its pure form. The high rushes in in less than ten seconds; it fades away in a minute or two. To keep it going, a user must quickly inhale another shot. The gas, administered through a mask, is sometimes used for medical procedures or dentist visits, to manage patients’ pain and ward off their anxiety. Lower concentrations of nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen—25 or 50 percent— have been shown to alleviate the symptoms of treatment-resistant severe depression and labor pain. Nitrous oxide isn’t addictive the way opioids or other drugs are, but its recreational use still carries risks. One pure hit can cause a calm, relaxed feeling, while a higher dose of two or more hits can make a person disassociate from his or her surroundings. Tony’s group liked whippets, a popular method of using nitrous oxide recreationally. Small cartridges are huffed through reusable commercial-grade cans used in restaurants for making whipped cream, similar to the refrigerated cans you might buy in a grocery store. The cartridges look like metal cylindrical bullets and fit into the palm of a hand. A user puts the spout of the whipped cream canister into his or her mouth and depresses the nozzle slightly, releasing a quick stream of gas. Nitrous oxide has a long history of experimental use, with many people reporting a mystical, even religious, high from the gas. Perhaps best known among this group was the American philosopher and psychologist William James, born in New York City in 1842. James, who went on to become a Harvard professor, felt that the gas whisked him into another world, a shift in consciousness that, like a dream, slipped slightly out of his grasp once he was sober. “Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists,” he once wrote. He uttered or wrote streams of thought; in fact, he first used the term stream of consciousness while high on nitrous oxide. He recorded his nonsensical thoughts on paper: What’s a mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment… Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes!

But—what escapes, WHAT escapes?

As Tony’s video “The Nitrous Oxygen Advantage” details, nitrous oxide profoundly influenced James’s thinking. In 1874, James, who suffered from bouts of depression, wondered whether nitrous oxide could unlock “the Secret of Being” after being introduced to the gas by another philosopher. In the decades since, nitrous oxide has been embraced by the counterculture in the United States. In 1975, Rolling Stone profiled a group of nitrous-loving anarchists organized as the East Bay Chemical Philosophy Symposium, with the phrase “New hope for the silly 70’s.” The dozen members of the Berkeley, California–based group consumed 500,000 quarts of nitrous oxide between 1968 and 1970, according to the report, and were “trying to turn people on to it.” In the 1980s, the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose cult built a compound on an Oregon ranch known as Rajneeshpuram, had a special dental room at his house. His dentist, a follower brought over from India, administered nitrous oxide and wrote down the meandering thoughts of Rajneesh, later known as Osho. He called the dental chamber “Noah’s Ark,” as heavy rains and floods left him isolated at his home. Rajneesh’s thoughts while high were later published as three books: Notes of a Madman, Books I Have Loved, and Glimpses of a Golden Childhood. He bragged of this work to his followers. “It must be absolutely unprecedented, because people are so afraid of the dental chair and the dentist, but I have enjoyed so much,” he said in a recorded series of his talks to the group. “I can experience whatever is happening, even under a high dose of laughing gas. It was a beautiful time.” Infamously, in 1984, his followers committed the largest US bioterrorism attack, poisoning more than 750 people in the small city of The Dalles by contaminating salad bars with salmonella. The FBI learned that they had been the source of the attack after investigating the cult for other crimes. In the 1990s, law enforcement scrambled to deal with a new phenomenon: drug-fueled raves, such as the kind Tony had once attended. Kids high on ecstasy sucked on pacifiers, while others held balloons filled with nitrous oxide at parties

that could draw tens of thousands of people to warehouses in seedier parts of cities. In 1992, three people died inside a pickup truck in the Los Angeles area after leaving the valve of an eighty-pound nitrous oxide tank open while huffing nitrous oxide from balloons. Fliers for raves were scattered in the cab of the pickup truck. The drug became so popular that decade that in 1998 a video game developer released a spaceship racing game called N2O: Nitrous Oxide, with promotions that declared, “Get ready to go higher, faster than you’ve ever gone before” and “Never trip alone, always use 2 player mode.” Figures wearing gas masks make an appearance, paired with techno music from the band the Crystal Method. Still, nitrous oxide wasn’t taken seriously as a harmful drug. The 1990s also brought the rise of Burning Man, so loved by Tony. Nitrous oxide cartridges are a frequent sighting around Black Rock City. One online nitrous oxide supplier offered an attendee discount for purchases: “Whipped cream and Burning Man?” the offer read. “Our nitrous oxide whipped cream chargers are the best quality and we have lots of inquires [sic] about delivering. We can typically get your N2O chargers delivered into a California or Nevada address within 2 business days, and we are excited to offer a number of exclusive deals especially for those customers.” The use of laughing gas as a recreational drug has been on the rise in the last two decades, particularly between 2014 and 2019, according to a study of federal data. The reason 2014 was a turning point is unclear. Investigators pulled mentions of nitrous oxide from emergency room and Food and Drug Administration reports, but the drug isn’t tracked specifically. In a survey of drug users from more than twenty-five countries, about 13 percent reported having huffed nitrous oxide in the last year, according to the annual Global Drug Survey released in January 2021, a rate that had doubled since 2015. Nitrous oxide use ranked higher than the use of heroin (1.3 percent) and meth (4.6 percent) but less than that of MDMA (38 percent) and LSD (21 percent). The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have promoted the increase of nitrous oxide use, experts say. Drug overdose deaths surged by 30 percent in 2020 during the pandemic, preliminary federal data show.

Chronic nitrous oxide use can have devastating consequences. Nitrous oxide robs the body of vitamin B12, leading, in some cases, to spinal degeneration, weakness, numbness, and loss of bodily control. Inhaling too much can cause asphyxiation and lead to accidental injuries from tripping and falling. Tony was aware of the side effects as he started using nitrous oxide more heavily, and he wanted his friends to know about them, too. As always, he wanted them to come to a conclusion about a new viewpoint of his on their own. The other two, shorter videos he produced on nitrous oxide, both untitled, focused more on concerns people might have about using the drug. “How does it affect your health?” reads an interlude in one video. A different narrator from Recaño explains that the use of nitrous oxide can lead to a vitamin B12 deficiency and a host of other health problems, such as negative effects on a user’s immune system. The pandemic had made it hard for Tony to procure ketamine, which is often obtained illegally from veterinary clinics or other medical offices. Psychedelic mushrooms had also become harder to buy. But Tony and his friends quickly found that nitrous oxide was easy to get. At first, in the summer of 2020, they bought whipped cream canisters from local grocery or convenience stores. Tony would send his drivers or several of his new Park City employees to make nitrous oxide runs. Soon he was huffing it all day long, as many as fifty cartridges in twenty-four hours, making little effort to hide his habit. Spent cartridges littered his home in Park City among the candles and Post-it notes. Mimi Pham jokingly called Tony’s huffing canister his “gun.” As the group’s intake increased, they began ordering it easily online. One of their preferred vendors was Whip-It!, owned by San Francisco–based United Brands, which sells whipped cream cartridges on its website and through Amazon. Any user, without any identification or age requirement, can buy a pack of 24, 50, or 100. A case of 600 cartridges retails for about $500. United Brands had been in trouble twice for failing to attach health warnings to its cartridges. In October 2020, as Tony and his inner circle were buying thousands of Whip-It! chargers from United Brands online, the company was

ordered to pay a $50,000 civil judgment in San Mateo, California. The district attorney there alleged that United Brands had sold nitrous oxide cartridges online without verifying that the purchaser was not a minor and that the company had failed to attach the proper health warnings to the cartridges even after it had been ordered to do so five years prior. The action came after the Department of Homeland Security had identified United Brands as a seller of nitrous oxide in smoke shops across San Diego. Nitrous oxide isn’t a controlled substance such as ecstasy or heroin, so the Food and Drug Administration—not the Drug Enforcement Agency—oversees it at the federal level under its authority to crack down on “misbranding” of products. Some states, including Utah, have passed laws that deem it illegal to sell or use it for recreational highs or require a person to be at least eighteen or twenty-one years of age to buy it. But the fact that nitrous oxide can be obtained legally makes it very difficult for law enforcement to bring criminal charges. Utah law, for example, says that a person is guilty of nitrous oxide abuse when he or she possesses it with “the intent to breathe, inhale or ingest it for the purpose of causing a condition of intoxication.” Despite attempts by law enforcement to crack down, it’s still a popular drug in Silicon Valley, where it’s largely viewed as harmless. In downtown San Francisco, Dr. Paul Abramson, a family medicine and addiction specialist, sees patients, especially those who work in the tech industry, at his medical clinic who show signs of nitrous oxide use. They arrive suffering from the neurological symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency. “I’ve gotten to the point where I see that, and I say, ‘How much nitrous are you using?’ ” he said. Some people using nitrous oxide show up for help from Dr. Abramson after being told by someone close to them, or even an employer, that they should see a doctor. Nitrous oxide, like ketamine, is a dissociative drug, making it “especially difficult for people to identify that they have a problem,” Dr. Abramson explained. “It’s very hard for them to see themselves from the outside and get help.” In Dr. Abramson’s view, rather than criminalizing the gas, there should be more education in the medical community, including greater symptom awareness, which could lead more doctors to intervene and provide treatment.

At home in the Bay Area, Richard and Judy Hsieh had been worried about their son since they had left Park City in early July 2020. Trying to talk to Tony hadn’t helped. Now they needed a more serious plan. They contacted two of Tony’s former business partners and closest friends, Fred Mossler in Las Vegas and Alfred Lin in the San Francisco Bay Area, to discuss and form a plan. They also got Tyler Williams involved, and he agreed to travel back from Las Vegas to Park City for the effort. The group found a private interventionist in Los Angeles who is an experienced drug and alcohol specialist, Dr. Elisa Hallerman, whose team, according to her website, “is exceptionally skilled at engaging in personal crisis management with the utmost discretion.” Tony’s parents hoped that the doctor’s eclectic background would help convince him to speak with her. A former Hollywood talent agent, she is also a lawyer and developed what she calls “Soulbriety,” the philosophy of soul-centered healing. She is herself a recovering alcoholic. “If we were to reframe addiction as a crisis of meaning with existential and spiritual implications, could soul inform the recovery process? The answer is a resounding YES and then some!” Dr. Hallerman wrote on her website. The Hsiehs also began gathering evidence of Tony’s psychosis. They wrote a statement, later provided to police, outlining the interactions they had had with him during the July visit, including how he had asked his mom to take ice baths in exchange for his spending time in rehab. Ultimately, they hoped to convince a judge to award conservatorship—the legal process of placing a court-appointed guardian in control of Tony and his assets—to the family. Conservatorship has perhaps become best known in recent years because of the high-profile struggles of the performer Britney Spears, whose father held the controversial position of guardian of her roughly $60 million estate for thirteen years. She was freed from conservatorship in November 2021. Often, conservators are appointed for the elderly or those with developmental disabilities. The process is typically a last resort both for the courts and for family members, because it is incredibly invasive.

The Hsiehs hoped that Dr. Hallerman could convince Tony to be evaluated by a psychologist in Utah who would quickly recognize his precarious mental state and place him on a temporary psychiatric hold. During that time, the Hsiehs could file the legal paperwork needed to take control of his life and get him the help he needed. In early August 2020, Dr. Hallerman flew to Salt Lake City and drove a rental car to Park City. She also enlisted a Summit County deputy sheriff she knew, Jon Evans. Because Tony lived in Park City and not Summit County, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office didn’t have jurisdiction over his address. Sometimes, however, deputy sheriffs freelance as security guards or do other offduty work; in this case, Evans wasn’t being paid. In the weeks since the Hsiehs had left in early July, Tony had grown increasingly paranoid, a symptom of his drug use and his mental health breakdowns. He worried that Williams would suddenly show up at the house and try to take him back to Las Vegas. He was even more insistent that his parents stop interfering. As part of his paranoia, Tony hired a local security company, Kane LLC, to staff the Ranch, stationing more than two dozen guards around the property and developing an elaborate security plan that included drones and cameras. He hired court reporters from another local firm, CitiCourt, to follow him around, typing notes on all his conversations with anyone who came through the house. Dr. Hallerman arrived at the Ranch on a beautiful, sunny, hot summer day. Two sculptures had been installed in the yard, a giant orange-and-purple octopus that appeared to be coming out of the ground and a tall, blooming yellow flower. Tony had imported Burning Man to his new property, just as he had taken parts of it to Las Vegas. The sculptures stood out amid the natural landscape and muted-tone houses in the high-end neighborhood, and neighbors had noted their arrival. With security personnel stationed in front of the mansion making it impossible for her to approach the house, Dr. Hallerman began questioning guests coming and going through the gates. She was aggressive, according to some people who witnessed her approach, asking them what they were doing,

why they were there, and did they know what was happening inside? A man was dying, she told them. One of the people she spoke to was Tony’s ex-girlfriend, Michelle D’Attilio, who had recently moved to Park City to work for him. Startled by the direct approach of the apparent stranger outside, D’Attilio went back inside the house and told everyone, including Tony, what was happening. She warned them to stay away from the person outside. Meanwhile, Justin Weniger told Tony’s friends at the Ranch that he had the situation under control and had hired his own private doctor to help get Tony healthy. Jon Evans, the Summit County deputy sheriff, took Dr. Hallerman, along with Tyler Williams, to the police department and conveyed her message to the officers there: a man was living in a residence in town who was using an incredible amount of drugs, and he needed help right away. Dr. Hallerman showed an officer, Sergeant Jay Randall, a statement from Tony’s parents describing their son’s troubling behavior lately, including the ice baths and confused speech. Randall reviewed the letter and agreed that it was worth checking on Tony. Dr. Hallerman wanted to go along, but Randall told her that wouldn’t be allowed. The police found Tony at his property across the street from the Ranch, a sixbedroom house inexplicably called “truffle shuffle” by Tony’s Park City employees. Tony came out, apparently lucid. The officers told Tony that his parents were concerned about him and wanted the police to check on him. It was the worst possible thing to say to Tony, who at that moment was intent on banishing his parents from his life. Tony assured the police that there was nothing to worry about. After speaking to him, the police agreed, deciding that he wasn’t a danger to himself or others. They left less than half an hour after they had arrived. Back at the police station, Sergeant Randall found Dr. Hallerman, along with Williams, waiting for him. Refusing to give up even as the mission was falling apart, Dr. Hallerman asked to speak to the sergeant privately. He refused, concerned that he was being manipulated and uncertain about the group’s motives, especially because they declined to put him in touch with

Tony’s parents. The Hallerman group, meanwhile, found the police to be uncooperative and out of their league, unable to deal with the delicate situation. Randall wrote in a later report about the incident, “I do not play that game.” The intervention failed.

CHAPTER TEN SAVE YOUR SOUL

Park City, August and September 2020

Now, who will save your souls? If you won’t save your own?

In

—Jewel

mid-August 2020, Jewel arrived in Utah to visit Tony with the board president of the Inspiring Children Foundation, Ryan Wolfington, and another employee. They had planned to stay only a night in between other events that summer. An assistant of Tony’s had called to invite them, ostensibly because Tony wanted to see Jewel. Dozens of guests came and went on a daily basis that July and August, and sometimes Tony’s mansion swelled with people. His employees, trying to maintain control of his schedule, meticulously wrote visitors’ names on sticky notes organized in columns stuck to the walls of the mansion. Some visitors were friends of Tony; others were friends of the growing entourage around him. Some people had been brought in to work on one of his myriad business development projects. Often guests were milling around who didn’t know one another, perplexed by one another’s purposes, almost “like a murder mystery party,” Leesa Clark-Price, the sculptor’s wife, had observed during her visit earlier that month. The roster included an array of actors such as David Arquette and public figures such as the former Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Plame, who

was there to give a talk on nuclear weapons. Fresh off a plane or chartered bus, guests had to check in with the security personnel stationed in front of the Ranch, part of Tony’s paranoia that his parents or unwanted others would somehow get onto the property. New visitors were expected to sign in, and a Polaroid picture was usually taken of them and hung on the wall, like a museum of mug shots. Their cell phones were collected by the staff. Outsiders were required to sign nondisclosure agreements, for reasons that were often unclear to them. The guests’ visits were usually handled by Suzie Baleson and Elizabeth Pezzello, but Puoy Premsrirut, the Las Vegas attorney who also now worked in Park City, sometimes handled the legal agreements. At the Ranch, security guards checked that each new arrival was “registered,” meaning that he or she had been invited by Tony or another group member. The new arrivals were then given a rapid Covid test at a station out front—though some guests later learned that the swabs had been tested only for antibodies, not actual infections. The process, recalled one guest, was “very Great Gatsby”: opulent but with strict, strange protocols. A handful of court reporters were often there, following Tony and his guests around, transcribing their conversations. One time, for no apparent reason, they showed up dressed like characters from a medieval king’s court. One of them, in a striped jester costume with a big, floppy hat, sat in a corner and smiled at guests as they arrived. A month and a half had passed since Tony’s late-June breakdown and hospital stay; his family’s failed intervention attempt had taken place about two weeks earlier. No one had talked to him about either incident, and some of his new friends who had since moved to Park City hadn’t heard about either one. But his mental state wasn’t improving. In recent weeks, Tony had developed a deeper fascination with fire. He liked fooling around with it and performing magic tricks. Fire was burning in the house all the time. Candles were sometimes perched dangerously on his bedspread, and he kept a small fire ring in his bedroom that shot flames into the air without any barrier. When Jewel and her crew walked into the Ranch in mid-August, they were astounded. The house was dirty, with hundreds of candles dripping wax onto

furniture, carpet, and countertops. Blizzy’s droppings were scattered throughout the property, some covered in candle wax. Signs instructed visitors not to clean up the trash outside, particularly outside Tony’s bedroom. At one point, Tony had told a visitor that to teach the world not to produce so much trash, it was better not to throw trash away at all. Showers and sinks ran constantly, unattended; the group was trying to mimic the sound of waterfalls. The house couldn’t be cleaned because it was “nature.” But that didn’t stop brightly colored sticky notes lining the walls, the glass doors leading to the backyard, and the windows; the group was now using them to communicate instead of texting or sending emails. Jewel and her team arrived during an unusual period of inactivity, with few other guests around. Baleson, Pezzello, and Rachael Brown greeted them at different times and introduced themselves, gushing thank-yous for visiting. But they had strange, blank smiles on their faces, as if they knew the situation was bad. Jewel and Wolfington immediately became uneasy. Jewel knew Tony’s group of friends from Las Vegas, but she didn’t see them around, nor did she recognize any of the new people. She inquired after Tony and was told that he was outside meditating in the “spa.” When Jewel walked out of the house, she found Tony sitting on a lawn chair in a corner by the small lake, wearing just his boxers. He was skinnier than she had ever seen him—emaciated. He was surrounded by whippet canisters. He lifted his thin arms to show her the inside of a small box, where he had inexplicably scribbled some barely legible numbers in columns. That, he told her, was the algorithm for world peace. “I’m going to start a new country,” he proclaimed. He had stopped sleeping, he continued, because he had “hacked” sleep and his body no longer needed it. Jewel was so stunned that she only listened. She was the first visitor to clearly see, or at least admit, what was really happening. Many of the other visitors hadn’t known Tony that well, and sometimes the property was cleaner than it was during Jewel’s visit. But the sticky notes, the trash, even the random people wandering the mansion—they were all part of the vision of a man deep in the throes of psychosis. Tony’s latest idea, his goal to achieve world peace, wasn’t just

impossible, it was the manic plan of a person who urgently needed help. Tony was in trouble. Jewel decided to extend her trip. Familiar with mental health problems, Jewel had observed people combine them with drug or alcohol abuse to try to cover up their problems. As a child, she and her parents, who were also musicians, had performed in bars together around her hometown of Homer, Alaska. There she had frequently seen adults shutting out their lives by drinking. After her mother had left the family, her father, a Vietnam War veteran, had also struggled with alcohol, the only coping mechanism he knew, she later wrote in her book, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story. He had sometimes beaten her and her brothers. The experience had taught her that people inherit an emotional language, and unless someone teaches them a new one, they are powerless over the one they have learned. “I saw that no one outran their suffering; they only piled new pain upon their original pain,” she wrote. “I saw the pain pile up into insurmountable mountains, and I saw the price people paid who buried all that pain, and along with it their hope, joy, and chance at happiness. All because they were trying to outrun the pain rather than walk through it and heal.” At Tony’s mansion, Jewel began asking the people around her, “What are you doing here?” “What is your purpose?” No one had a good answer. Most troubling—aside from the odd smiles and the appalling state of the property— was the apparent lack of concern about Tony’s condition. Most of the people treated it as though it were normal, almost seeming to celebrate him. Tony had told his new employees that he was in a creative metamorphosis and would emerge soon. The last stage of the metamorphosis would be sobriety. The one glimmer of hope Jewel found was Tony’s brother Andy. She hadn’t met him before that trip, but he seemed to be the only person to show compassion for Tony and his situation. He told Jewel and Wolfington privately that he was worried, but he didn’t know what to do. His family had already attempted an intervention and failed. Afterward, Tony had banished his parents from the property and refused to talk to them again. To Jewel and her team, Andy seemed to be in a tough situation. He wanted to stay close enough to help his brother but also not be banned by Tony for speaking out too strongly, as had happened with Tyler Williams.

At one point, Baleson tried to explain the group’s business plans to Jewel’s team. She told them that if they wrote “$1 million” or “$2 million” on a sticky note and pasted it on the wall, Tony would be sure to fund whatever project they wanted to work on. Baleson said she ran each new sticky note by Tony in the evening. Wolfington interpreted that as a bribe to ignore what they were seeing. “I’m not taking a cent from Tony in this condition,” Jewel told her team after hearing about the conversation. One night, Jewel played a private concert inside the Ranch in a cleaner upstairs area that her team had believed would be just for Tony and his friends. But some of Tony’s employees had invited neighbors and other Park City locals —an attempt to make valuable connections across the wealthy city—so the event unexpectedly turned into a miniconcert. She sang her classics “You Were Meant for Me” and “Who Will Save Your Soul,” a song she had started to write when she was only sixteen, a lost teenager in Alaska searching for a real home. In the audience, Park City’s wealthy residents and city developers clapped and sang along with her. Tony didn’t make an appearance. Instead, he remained alone in his darkened bedroom at the bottom of the house, lit candles all around him. Among the crowd was Teri Orr, the longtime Park City resident, arts leader, and former newspaper editor. In a newspaper column later recounting the party, Orr said she had heard Jewel sing “Who Will Save Your Soul” before, “But from the first notes that night there was something different. She was singing the song as a cross between a prayer and a plea.” The next day, Tony sat in a corner of the living room on a mattress with Rachael Brown and Justin Weniger, surrounded by candles. Some of the guests called it “the glowing room.” The floor was covered by an inch or two of nitrous oxide canisters. A performance coach, Branden Collinsworth, also sat with them. He had been invited to town by Baleson, who wanted to work with him on several wellness initiatives in Park City. Collinsworth knew Tony from downtown Las Vegas; he had opened a gym as part of Tony’s early development there. Like Jewel, Collinsworth had been shocked by the state of the Ranch and by Tony’s condition when he arrived.

He had run into Tony earlier in his visit to Park City, and Tony had remembered him from Las Vegas. “I’d love for you to come here,” Tony said. Before Collinsworth could answer, Tony had swooped in with what had become a common question for newcomers: “How much did you make in your highestgrossing year? I can double that, but you have to move here.” Tony’s standard contract offer to new employees was double their best salary, but the staffers typically had to rent their accommodations from Tony, thus ensuring that he recouped some of the money. (Although sometimes the rent was also subsidized.) Collinsworth declined. He had only just arrived, but he knew he wasn’t moving to Park City. When he went to visit Tony privately, with Weniger and Brown also in his room, he thought he had an idea for how to help Tony. His father is a biowarfare expert who lives in the Amazon jungle of Peru, and Collinsworth began to tell Tony about the sacred medicine men of that country and how a visit there might help him get healthy. Collinsworth offered to play some of their tribal music, known as Icaros, for him. Tony demanded marijuana, so Brown went to get it and a Bluetooth speaker. As Tony smoked his joint, first insect noises, then rough whistling, and finally the sound of a man chanting filled the room—the South American sacred tribal music. When he was done smoking, he asked Brown for nitrous oxide, inhaling a new canister about every thirty seconds, one after the other after the other. Each time, he threw the empty canister somewhere in the room, and Brown brought him another one. Collinsworth sat by the window at a distance from Tony, worried that Tony might inadvertently throw one of the chargers at him. After each nitrous oxide hit, Tony would roll on his bed, wriggling and writhing ecstatically, and sometimes he would get up and perform a “spirit dance.” But he did not look happy; he looked extremely disturbed. “That was fun,” he proclaimed after the music ended. He turned to Collinsworth and asked if he could come back every day and play the music

again. Collinsworth said no. He wanted to focus on Tony’s wellness and possibly organize a trip to Peru to help heal him. From the outside of the Ranch, Jewel had walked up to the window where Tony and Collinsworth were talking and where Tony had placed a surfboard, which acted as a ramp into the room. He didn’t like to use the door. “This is really sad,” she observed. “This is incredibly sad.” She walked to the backyard and sat on the grass near the small lake with Weniger, who had left the room earlier. Soon Collinsworth joined them. “That’s some heavy shit, man,” he said. Weniger agreed, “It’s absolutely insane.” He described how he had tried to get Tony off ketamine and how the bus trip to Montana had ruined everything. He didn’t say anything about the recent failed intervention attempt by Tony’s family that had taken place less than two weeks earlier. “He is going to die,” Jewel said bluntly. It wasn’t the first time she had spoken those difficult words during that trip. She had been warning everyone at the Ranch who she thought might help, including Tony’s security staff and his brother. Before Jewel left, she told the head of security, Shawn Kane, “If he kills himself and everyone else in there from a huge fire, you can’t say you were not warned.” Guests continued to arrive at the Ranch, and meeting after meeting chipped away at Tony’s fortune, at least on paper. Tony’s vision had been to solve world peace, but his dozens of side business plans and deals often had no relation to his broader goal. One August afternoon, Mark Evensvold, a fiftysomething director of business development for the popular Las Vegas chain of restaurants Nacho Daddy, visited Park City. Tony had invested in the Nacho Daddy business along with one of its other owners, Fred Mossler. Evensvold had been warned by friends in Las Vegas that Tony was sick and that his extravagant business plans were covering up more serious issues. Still he went to Utah and sat with Tony on the lakeside beach.

As a court reporter listened in, Evensvold pitched that he bring his skills to Park City. Tony didn’t need much convincing, agreeing to pay Evensvold $450,000 a year to operate the bars set up in various rooms in the Ranch, along with whatever else he wanted to do, under a project manager title. “Everyone is a project manager, and then you just work on whatever you feel like,” he said. As a signing bonus, Tony said, he would give up some of his investor equity in Nacho Daddy, of which he held 25 percent. Under the deal, Evensvold would take 20 percent, leaving Tony with 5 percent. Tony rambled on as they ironed out the deal. Another new obsession of Tony’s that came up in the meeting was the concept of time and how in today’s society, people are forced to go from one moment to another constantly. In addition to world peace, he wanted to somehow achieve a state of “timelessness.” “You’re either living in this world, which has no time, no money in terms of what happens here,” he told Evensvold. “But for anything that touches time or money or shoes is, like, not my world, so I don’t care. I’m fine.” Evensvold memorialized the terms of their agreement on a sticky note. On August 24, 2020, a story appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, only several hundred words. “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Retires,” the headline read. The article contained little additional information, only a confirmation from a Zappos spokeswoman on the newspaper’s scoop. After his two decades at the helm of Zappos, forging through the dot-com bust, moving to and nearly taking over downtown Las Vegas, running one of the highest-profile management experiments on Earth, and rethinking the workplace around fun, collaboration, and happiness, no public company announcement went out about Tony Hsieh’s retirement. No Zappos or Amazon executive gave an interview as reporters around the world jumped on the story, although Amazon later put out a brief statement. The short Review-Journal story said only that Zappos’ chief operating officer, Kedar Deshpande, would take over immediately as CEO. The newspaper instead

quoted Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman: “He’s a modest person. He’s not a braggart, but he loves to do things that are different and challenging. When everyone is swimming downstream, he is swimming upstream.” A longer follow-up story in the same newspaper two days later noted the $18 million in properties that Tony had purchased in Park City in the first half of the year, reporting that it was unclear what his plans were for the mountain town. The story quoted a spokesperson for the Downtown Project, since renamed DTP Companies, who said that Tony was “disconnecting” from tech for a bit and “just doing his retirement thing.” Tony had grown frustrated with Amazon since the company had issued the directive in 2019 about his needing to increase Zappos’ profits. Tony didn’t care that much about the numbers; he didn’t really want to sell shoes. His goal was creating happiness. Before the pandemic, he had been asking his leadership team to think about the high performers at Zappos who might succeed him. Still, he had tried to come up with the next billion-dollar idea to help drive Zappos’ growth, but he hadn’t found it by the time the pandemic hit. Then he had moved to Park City. In the first weeks after his short stint in rehab in early 2020, when he was still doing somewhat well, he had seemed a lot like his old self at work, directing Zappos’ Covid response remotely with the same confidence he’d used to display. But in the early summer of 2020, he was again missing more Zappos meetings and falling behind on his work. Because of the digital detox he had embarked on, he wasn’t responding to much email, either. On a call with Jeff Wilke, the top Amazon executive Tony reported to, Tony proclaimed that he had made a groundbreaking discovery. He had solved the “traveling salesman problem”: Given a list of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? The question is infamously hard to answer. Believed to have been formulated in the 1800s, it is one of the most important unsolved theories in efforts to improve business optimization and logistics. It has vexed company executives and mathematical experts for more than a century, particularly those who are focused on logistics. The question has so many challenges: how to visit each city

only once, for example. Some computer scientists have come close, deriving algorithms that seemed to find the best answer. But no one has yet to solve it. Amazon, too, had employees working on the problem, and Wilke passed Tony over to the group. Once he was on the phone with them, though, it became clear that he didn’t really have a solution. He wasn’t making much sense at all. When the Amazon team questioned him in detail, Tony said they wouldn’t understand. He had solved the problem in another language. Wilke got back on the phone with Tony. He told him he needed to take a break. Take two months off, he said, and get yourself together. Tony wasn’t on official leave, but Amazon wasn’t going to wait forever. He needed to improve his leadership. Tony missed the informal deadline. In fact, he never really tried to meet it. Though he wasn’t technically forced out, Tony complained to some close friends that “retirement” had not been his idea, it had been Wilke’s—and he would not have chosen to leave. On a series of sticky notes posted at the Ranch, someone had written the name of Deshpande, Zappos’ new CEO, and added it to the list of people who were excommunicated from the group. Tyler Williams was also included. If not for Covid, the party for Tony’s retirement would have been epic. Instead, the company held a tribute to Tony during its virtual all-hands meeting in early September 2020. Deshpande sent out a short email to Zappos employees, announcing that Tony had decided to retire. “We want to thank Tony for his 20 years of work on behalf of Zappos customers and employees and wish him well in his next chapter,” the terse note read. “As always, we are focused on wowing customers and the 10 core values that drive us every day.” Tony didn’t send out an email of his own, and Amazon provided the same statement to some reporters. Having worked at Zappos since 2011, Deshpande was a fan of Tony’s, having even visited him twice in Park City. But no one could be Tony, and Deshpande was far more serious than his famous predecessor. As chief operating officer, replacing Arun Rajan, who had defected to the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods in 2019, Deshpande had been trying to run the core of Zappos, its e-commerce platform. He often didn’t have time for the Zappos parties or the trips. With

two daughters at home, he would sometimes fly to wherever Tony was for two hours, ask him for more resources, and fly back to Las Vegas. Soon Deshpande emailed Zappos’ 1,500 employees again. The email stated that employees in several divisions would be offered a buyout. Zappos would pay a month of full pay for every year that they had been with the company, with a minimum of twelve weeks’ pay for employees who’d been there less than three years. The eligible divisions, clearly part of Tony’s quirky leadership, included Brand Aura/Storytelling, Disrupt, Evolutionary Organization, New World Pioneers, and something called Sexy Infrastructure. Deshpande knew that Zappos was a company of Tony loyalists, and he wanted people to leave if they felt they couldn’t stay on without him. Deshpande also had a lot of work to do. From a business standpoint, the company was in chaos. Market-based dynamics was only halfway implemented, but the bigger problem was all the smaller, random businesses that had sprung up within the company through holacracy and did not add to the bottom line. Executives had identified more than a hundred company initiatives, and many needed to be defunded. The customer service division was struggling. Overall, Zappos was still not meeting its Amazon-mandated growth metrics. Deshpande told executives that Zappos was going to “get back to basics,” and focus on the e-commerce platform of selling shoes and customer service. But his email to employees and the buyout offer were badly bungled. Zappos’ senior leaders, who reported to Tony, hadn’t been told in advance. When the email did go out, it was unclear to some people whether the affected employees were being forced to take the buyout—were they losing their jobs? Some employees later got calls saying that their jobs were safe. Others didn’t. Zappos employees, still working remotely through the pandemic, took the offer hard. To many of them, it felt as though Deshpande was trying to get rid of Tony’s people—that he was cleaning house. In one sign of that, Tyler Williams’s group of dozens of employees, the “brand experiments” division running Tony’s pet projects, lost most of its employees to buyouts. Williams, however, stayed on. Tony had created a family at Zappos. Some employees believed that Deshpande was destroying the family.

Tony, who was aware of the offer at Zappos, recruited even more friends and employees to Park City, including Jamie Naughton, his chief of staff, who had worked at Zappos since 2004, and John Bunch, the senior director of business development, who had helped lead the holacracy rollout. After a few weeks, about three hundred Zappos employees, about 20 percent of the company, had taken the buyout offer, more than had left after holacracy had been introduced in 2014. In Park City, the small police department practices “community policing,” a collaborative effort between officers and the town they oversee to solve problems. In ski towns such as Park City, officials sometimes refer to this as “resort policing,” which often means that officers are more likely to give someone who breaks the rules a pass, especially if they’re not a habitual offender. The goal is to keep the peace and maintain good relationships. In some communities, it’s about building trust with police as a tool for addressing crime; in places like Park City, it can come off as policing for the privileged. In 2017, Park City was ranked as the second wealthiest small urban community in the country, according to US Census data. More than 70 percent of the homes were second residences. The town’s nickname is “party city,” meaning that there is plenty of opportunity for leeway from community policing. Each year, the annual Sundance Film Festival draws a glitzy entourage of hundreds of A-listers, all of whom stay in second homes, swanky hotel rooms, or lavishly furnished Airbnbs. The ski season brings tens of thousands of tourists eager to have fun both on and off the slopes. In a town full of wealthy residents who are constantly throwing parties, it’s hard to stand out. By early September 2020, though, Tony and his entourage were heavily testing the Park City Police Department’s patience. At Tony’s mansion, a raucous party “had been going on for 40 days straight,” one neighbor told the police department in a complaint. Tour buses and RVs lined the residential street, and music often blared late into the night, with dozens of people milling about the eighteen-acre property.

One night in early September, officers arrived at the Ranch to find dozens of lit candles scattered across the lawn and picnic tables, flickering dangerously close to trees and other brush. Glowing Tiki torches lined the walkway and the path around the small lake. A large, log-burning grill flung embers into the wind. In the middle of the backyard, two giant wicker hot-air balloon baskets were improbably set up. As part of their new business plans, Tony and his group wanted to build a hot-air balloon monopoly, snapping up smaller companies across the country and expanding the business into Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. In the backyard of the Ranch, guests were trying to recreate Burning Man, with a small wooden effigy burning nearby. The fire from the hot-air balloon baskets was visible to Tony’s neighbors and from the street. Music blared, and dozens of guests and employees of Tony milled around the property. Park City has very long, dry summers, and although the weather was growing colder, the fire hazard was particularly bad in the summer of 2020. The Park City Fire District had recently mandated that residents be allowed to use only barbecues or charcoal briquets—no open flames. So when one of Tony’s neighbors saw the flying embers from the hot-air balloons and some smoke, they called the police. A passing motorcyclist saw a shot of fire and, concerned about its origin, also called in. At the Ranch, police officers were given the runaround. Shawn Kane, the head of security, promised that he would deal with officers. Puoy Premsrirut also spoke to the police, claiming to be Tony’s personal attorney but admitting that she didn’t have a license to practice in Utah. “I’m applying for one,” she assured them. When Andy Hsieh came out, he refused to give the officers his information, not even his full name. Tony never came out. The officers left the group with a warning, but the next night, September 8, they were called once again by another neighbor complaining about the noise. This time when Park City police officers arrived at the Ranch on a windy, uncharacteristically cold night, they insisted on speaking to Tony and if not to him, then to someone else who would be held responsible on Tony’s behalf. Brushing past Kane’s security team, they walked down the driveway to the

massive entryway of the Ranch, a black and stone-columned affair with a red British telephone booth stationed beside the front door. Directly inside, a whiteboard showed the faces and names of guests; as the police officers stood there, visitors came and went, checking out with security to board one of the tour buses waiting at the front of the property to go back to Las Vegas or wherever else they had come from. At one point, Brett Gorman appeared in a tie-dyed shirt and shorts to let his dog outside. “If you need to arrest the dog, feel free, I’ll get a better sleep,” he joked. For more than twenty minutes, the officers waited outside, in the entryway. Tony never appeared. Instead, Andy Hsieh and Don Calder, another of Tony’s housemates at the Ranch, finally stepped out of the glass front door, followed by Kane. “We’re looking for Tony, the homeowner,” one of the officers, Corey Allinson, said. Again the police couldn’t get a straight answer. Calder, wearing a thin long-sleeved shirt and baggy pants, told them that Tony was asleep, and besides, the house was owned by an LLC and Tony wasn’t involved at all; it was actually owned by Mimi Pham and another member of their group. Because Pham didn’t live in Park City, she wasn’t always at the Ranch, but she helped orchestrate Tony’s life from behind the scenes. “We were under the impression that Tony was the responsible party for the home,” Allinson pressed. “We were here twice last night for noise complaints and called again tonight. We keep going through Kane, and it’s not fixing the problem. We want to know who’s in charge.” Andy Hsieh, his black hair to his shoulders and wearing a white bandana around his neck, stood looking at the officers guardedly. He quibbled with Allinson about Tony’s role, questioning him about what it meant to be the “responsible party.” “What is the nature of the complaint?” he demanded at one point during the fifteen-minute conversation. “We only had one person singing karaoke.” Allinson again explained that the officers had been called multiple times before. “Okay, but we’re just talking about tonight,” Andy said. “There was literally one person with his guitar. We could have him sing for you and you can judge

for yourself. This is harassment now.” “We don’t come here because we have nothing to do,” the other officer, Leslie Welker, said. “We literally have one guy singing acoustic guitar—it’s not even plugged in,” Andy Hsieh retorted. “It’s literally absurd.” (He was referring to the musician Daniel Park, who sang and played guitar wherever he went.) Andy started to say that he was speaking only about the current complaint, but Allinson interrupted him, telling him sternly, “I’m not—I’m talking about how it didn’t work out last night, too.” He continued, “We’re not here to say we’re giving you a ticket. When we have a problem, who can we call but security? We’re community oriented. We just want to have civil conversations. “This whole deflecting around Tony, he’s not the responsible party—that’s fine, but we need a responsible party,” he concluded. Someone had called Premsrirut, who showed up, looking disheveled, having just woken up. She described the litany of neighbor complaints as “unwarranted.” “A little noise here and there,” she countered. The officers finally wrote down the names of Calder and Premsrirut and left yet again without citing the property. Now the police department was on high alert, however, and its officers were frustrated. Internally, they emailed about all the incidents that had stacked up, noting from local property records the number of purchases in Park City that Tony had made since March: nine. The officers worried that Park City’s council members might start asking questions. After one of the incidents in September, a group of officers and fire officials left the Ranch and gathered in the street to discuss the problems at the property. Welker told a member of the fire department that Andy Hsieh was clearly obfuscating what was going on. “He’s the brother of the knot head that owns this place,” Welker said. Another member of the fire department offered this description of Tony to the group: “He’s a little eccentric, a little off his rocker, spending money hand over fist. He has all this crazy stuff going on.” Rumors about drug use at the Ranch had reached the police department, although it wasn’t on display when they visited the property, and they didn’t go inside. Still, one Park City police

officer in an undated text message asked another, “I wonder if DEA Vegas knows about this guy,” referring to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Around sunrise one September morning, as neighbor complaints reached a crescendo, Chief of Police Wade Carpenter decided to make a surprise visit to the Ranch, accompanied by a fire official. They asked a neighboring ranch owner for permission to walk through an adjacent field and up to Tony’s small lake on the back side of the mansion. The chief had heard that many mornings, Tony cooked breakfast outside on an open flame, a concern given the nearby hayfields, which could catch fire during the drought. That morning, smoke drifted off two or three firepits, rolling across the pond and across the canyon, visible as Carpenter approached. There were no flames, though, and no Tony; just the remnants of some overnight activities. One unidentified man floated on the lake in a kayak. In the backyard, the chief asked to speak to Tony, but he got the standard response: “Tony’s not here.” City leaders wanted an end to the complaints from neighbors. Some had appealed directly to the mayor and other elected officials to intervene. Local politicians had begun quietly organizing challenges to the incumbent mayor, Andy Beerman, and city council members for the 2021 election. The goings-on at the Ranch added fuel to the political gossip around town. Tony’s arrival had held promise; he was someone who might underwrite City Hall’s cultural ambitions. But locals traded rumors of a darker side at the Ranch as some of them were hired for Tony’s various projects, such as catering parties or procuring supplies throughout the day and night. “We intentionally wanted to see what was going on early in the morning,” Carpenter said later, referring to the fire hazard. Though Carpenter’s stealthy visit didn’t result in a ticket, it got the attention of Tony’s employees. Within a day or two, Carpenter was back at the Ranch for a meeting with them, led by Premsrirut, along with Kane and other members of the household whom the chief didn’t recognize. Tony never made an appearance. The chief ticked through the list of fire and noise complaints. “This is not a Burning Man community,” he admonished the group, warning them about the open flames, heating lamps, and other fire hazards, along with the noise complaints. “That’s not going to take place here.” He noticed the

hundreds of sticky notes on a board with various names, which he was told helped track Tony’s visitors to his various Park City homes. As far as Carpenter was concerned, the police had done their job, looking out for the immediate health and safety of the community. Tony could do as he chose with his own life, in his own home. “Adults are going to be adults, and people have their own free agency and make their own choices,” he commented later. After the meeting with the police, Tony’s team members gathered to discuss who would be named the responsible party in the event the police ever returned. At first no one volunteered. Mimi Pham, who acted as a long-distance house manager and joined the meeting by video, refused to volunteer, saying that she did not want to go jail again for Tony. She was referring to her arrest after an ecstasy drug bust nearly twenty years earlier, before she had met Tony. Someone else would have to step up, she told the group. The team appointed the young assistant, Gorman, who was making almost $500,000 a year, in part to publish the Blizzy Ranch Daily News. In response to the meeting, Tony’s team made a sticky-note list of fire hazards that gave a “negative vibe”: “open flame, fireworks, candles, tiki torch.” Another list outlined a “positive vibe”: “residential barbecues.” A sound level above 55 decibels was a negative vibe; below was a positive vibe. The group couldn’t completely stop burning fire—Tony’s obsession persisted. Instead, they planned to put in place a number of “mitigation tools” to help with the noise and open flames. They planned to hire a fire expert to be at the house all day and night, overseeing the group’s use of it. A guard would walk the perimeter of the property and monitor the sound levels morning, noon, and night, working with Gorman to make sure the noise was at an appropriate level. The monthly cost of the two new employees would be more than $100,000. Just one night after the police meeting at the Ranch, one of Tony’s neighbors called the department, saying he couldn’t sleep for fear that the propane heaters burning at the Ranch would spark a forest fire. Once again, the police showed up. “What are they up to here?” one of the officers at the scene asked Officer

Welker, who had once again been called out to the Ranch, the third time in a week. “Whatever the hell they want,” she replied angrily. This time, the police forwarded the resulting incident report for “illegal burning” to the city attorney to potentially issue a citation. Soon after, the cold weather drove the parties inside and the neighbors stopped calling. By the fall of 2020, Tony had become like an apparition, frequently holed up in his bedroom or flitting through the crowds of people at his mansion without stopping to talk. Sometimes he stood behind doors or partitions and observed a scene rather than interacting with anyone. He still spoke to his “core” group and the people who lived at the Ranch, such as Rachael Brown and Don Calder, but he rarely held meetings with guests or other employees. His entourage was steadily taking over his life and standing in for him when he wasn’t around. With Tony an elusive figure around the house, the group had solidified. No one had specific jobs or titles, but Andy Hsieh and Calder had risen to positions equivalent to leadership. Together, the two were trying to start a tequila business funded by Tony. Calder was now considered part of the “chief of staff team,” along with Brown, Andy, Suzie Baleson, and Elizabeth Pezzello. Calder had several tasks assigned to him, some vague and some specific, including security and bringing in art. Pezzello, meanwhile, was in charge of all of Tony’s outside communication, and she and her fiancé, Gorman, drove a Jaguar SUV they parked at the top of the Ranch’s driveway, while Baleson drove a two-year-old Audi. Soon Tony discovered about $500,000 in expenses that were unaccounted for. He asked Mimi Pham to step in and monitor spending. Andy Hsieh was involved in a lot of the overall planning, orchestrating dozens of new employees and contractors. He was also in line for the same 10 percent commissions available to Tony’s other employees. He helped convince an old friend, Tony Lee, a financial adviser and former banker, to join the team in Park City. Lee had long ago helped save Zappos after the dot-com bust by providing financing while he was at Wells Fargo, but he had long resisted efforts

to get him to work for Tony. This time, Tony wanted him to manage the finances of his Park City ventures and scrutinize potential investments. Andy and another of Tony’s employees competed to convince Lee to work for him, to get the 10 percent commission. Lee eventually accepted the double salary offer of $1.5 million—of which Andy Hsieh would get $150,000. At the Ranch, Andy often carried small liquor bottles in his pocket, handing out shots to employees and guests. He stored dozens of boxes of nitrous oxide canisters, ordered online from Whip-It!, stacked neatly on the shelves in his room at the Ranch, which was called “the treehouse” by the group. His sweatshirts hung on hangers nearby. Brown acted almost like a spiritual adviser, recommending books to other employees to read. One she recommended, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, urges readers to journey into their subconsciousness and listen to their internal voices. “You do hear it when it talks, don’t you?” the book’s author, Michael A. Singer, asked in the first chapter. “Make it say ‘hello’ right now. Say it over and over a few times. Now shout it inside! Can you hear yourself saying ‘hello’ inside? Of course you can. There is a voice talking.” One pyramid of sticky notes described the group as THE CLAN OF THE WOLF HEART above Tony’s name, in all caps. “Intelligent wisdom,” read one sticky note in the cluster. “Do Not Silence,” read another. “Power of Inner Voice.” “Forgive and Encourage.” “Create spiritual boundaries.” “Master yourself!” That set of sticky notes and another grouping appeared to be based on decks of oracle cards from the Australian spiritual teacher Alana Fairchild. Fairchild says she connects with the Universal Divine Mother through a “unique divine feminine energy work modality called The Kuan Yin Transmission,” according to her website, which shows a picture of a middle-aged woman in flowing clothing half smiling with her eyes closed. Tony reached out to her twice to speak about his desire for world peace, inviting her to visit Utah to help accomplish the goal, Fairchild said later. “I would have liked to have known him

better, and learn about his plans, and I may have been able to help him in some way, but none of those things eventuated.” Still, Tony was a fan of hers and bought decks of her oracle cards, about which Fairchild explains in a video on her website that “each deck is its own spiritual practice.” The sticky notes described Tony and his group as “Earth Warriors, healers and transformation leaders”: “New way of Thinking Loving Being” “Our time has come!”

Blizzy, Tony’s dog, whom Brown and Tony referred to as a “spiritual guide,” had become almost a mythical figure for the group. The glass wall at the end of the dining room at the Ranch featured photos of Blizzy posing with celebrities. Everything carried Blizzy’s name, including the newsletter that Brett Gorman produced, which also gave updates on the small terrier mix: “Blizzy had dog food for his first meal and decided to have chicken and rice on the side,” read one story after Blizzy had returned from a trip with Tony. The group conceptualized a new property development called the Blizzy Hotel and Ice Bar. Soon most of the group referred to the mansion on Aspen Springs Drive as Blizzy Ranch. They planned to set up a livestream of the dog, to be called the “Blizzy Cam.” Though some people treat their pets like children, Tony’s devotion to Blizzy was on another level entirely. Blizzy was his only dependent, his one constant, having been enmeshed in his life for the last five years. He had adopted Blizzy, who was now more than ten years old and had been sick and half blind for some time. One day, the dog disappeared. The group went searching for him around the Ranch but couldn’t find him. They assumed that he had gone off by himself to die. Tony was devastated. He and his employees began planning a special memorial befitting an animal of such stature.

Jewel continued to worry about Tony after she left, and she couldn’t reach him. From Aspen, where she was staying for the summer, she sent him a two-page typed letter, alternating between serious concern and tough love. “I need to be clear,” she wrote. “You sound like a crazy person when you are talking and no one seems to be telling you. Its because you are also very smart. And they are used to you being eccentric. What you are saying isn’t smart. Its mental. And very smart people see through you and know the difference. Your brilliance for creating connections is killed by the fantasy world you are living in. You can’t even connect with me or anyone who comes to the house. It’s sad. I find it incredibly sad, and I don’t think this is your time to die.” She continued, “You need to ask yourself one question: do you want to die this year or next—Are you done helping the world? If you can die and not feel like you have failed, then I cannot stop you from slipping further into your selfmade fantasy world until your organs fail. But if you have any hint that it would be an embarrassing waste of human talent to let yourself die in your underwear and on a ranch surrounded by 25 security guards and staff because your ego wouldn’t let you see you need help, then let’s turn this around before there is no coming back. “Please get grounded,” she wrote in conclusion. “If you want to save the planet, come back to earth and get to work in a way that will make a difference. “I say this with love, and as possibly the only person in your circle who is not on your payroll.” Jewel worried that if she mailed the letter, someone in Tony’s group would intercept it. She didn’t trust anyone in Park City, but at least she and her team knew Justin Weniger, having worked with him previously in his role organizing the annual Life Is Beautiful music festival in Las Vegas. When she had visited, Weniger kept assuring Jewel and her team that he was trying to help and that he was sticking by Tony to keep him safe from the others. Jewel’s team sent the letter to him in Park City, with strict instructions to hand deliver it to Tony privately, when no one was around. Jewel’s letter ended up posted at the Ranch for all to see, on a window looking out into the backyard of the property. Someone arranged blue and pink sticky notes all around it and scrawled lines from the letter in bubbly

handwriting. “I don’t think you’re well…” was written on one. “It was great seeing you!” said another and “I am going to be blunt.” The group was mocking it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE CULT OF TONY HSIEH

Park City, August–October 2020

Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you. —Tony Hsieh

It was November 2010, and Tony was on his Delivering Happiness bus tour,

stopped in Los Angeles. His skin glowed, and his eyes were clear; his black hair was shaved close to his head. His body was a normal weight, and he wore his trademark T-shirt and jeans. He was surrounded by a small group of friends and employees, all of them relaxed and happy. In one corner of the large bus, a twoman band called Rabbit! had set up to play. Ashton, the guitar player, wore a furry hat that looked like a bear’s head. Devin, who sang, held a small orangeand-white keyboard in the shape of a grinning cat. The keys were the cat’s teeth, and pressing them produced a “meow” sound. “We hope you enjoy the meowsic,” Devin told Tony and his friends, who sat around the duo inside the bus. Tony loved the band, which was like a cross between the children’s musician Raffi and the comedy team Flight of the Conchords, because their lyrics were always positive and upbeat. Happy. He later used their songs for Zappos’ customer service hold music. That day, Rabbit! played a silly, catchy song called “Possibility” that Tony had actually helped write after Ashton had texted him, at a loss for a specific lyric: We can go swimming on the moon

We could live inside a big balloon Plant a garden underneath the sea We could give our love and still be free Everything’s a possibility, when everything’s a possibility.

Tony held a rattle in the shape of a bee—a baby’s toy—shaking it as the musicians sang on the Delivering Happiness tour bus, smiling his mischievous grin, the one that meant he was happy. Everyone around him shook rattles, too, laughing and swaying to the music. That memory of Tony is one that Mark Guadagnoli can still see clearly, as if it had happened the week before instead of a decade earlier. Dr. Guadagnoli, a longtime professor of neuroscience at the Kerk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had been on the bus with his two children, who referred to Tony as their uncle. They all ended up in a video of the production by Rabbit! Tony somehow always engineered moments like these—spontaneous minutes or hours of joy that would evaporate into the humdrum of everyday life but would always be remembered. In the summer of 2020, Dr. Guadagnoli became one of several of Tony’s friends outside Park City who say they called the local police, trying to get them to help Tony, as word of his worsening condition spread among his friends in Las Vegas. Several of Tony’s friends had visited and found the situation very upsetting. Dr. Guadagnoli had met Tony through Fred Mossler in the early 2000s. Mossler and Guadagnoli’s sons were friends and had competed in a math competition together. At an introductory lunch with Mossler, Tony, and Alfred Lin, Dr. Guadagnoli told the group about his universal learning theory: if you studied or practiced something a certain way, you could learn things three or four times faster. Tony, keenly interested in his ideas, had promptly offered him a job. At Zappos, then still located in Henderson, Nevada, Tony charged Dr. Guadagnoli with creating what was then known as Zappos University, an organization that would teach other companies about Zappos’ culture and happiness mission, as well as fun classes, such as yoga and photography, for

employees. Guadagnoli sat with Tony, Mossler, and Lin in an area of the company known as “executive row.” Tony hated that name; it was far too corporate. When Tony was grumbling about it one day, Dr. Guadagnoli suggested, “Let’s call it ‘monkey row’ instead.” Tony thought it was a great idea. Dr. Guadagnoli and another employee had netting strung above the row of desks and filled it with stuffed monkeys and other creatures. Tony later added more decorations, so it looked like a jungle. As a result, he bestowed the title of “head zookeeper” on Dr. Guadagnoli. Dr. Guadagnoli stayed at Zappos only a couple of years before returning to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but he remained friends with Tony over the ensuing two decades. He occasionally did favors for him—coming up with metrics to measure the Downtown Project’s success, working on the holacracy integration—but he never charged Tony. He believed that a person should just naturally help his or her friends, unlike some of the people he observed around Tony. In mid-August 2020, ten years after the Delivering Happiness bus tour, Dr. Guadagnoli was living in the same house in Henderson, Nevada, when he called the Park City Police Department, around the time Jewel was visiting the Ranch. He hadn’t physically seen Tony in months, but he knew something was very wrong with his old friend. The problems had started in the spring. When Dr. Guadagnoli had texted Tony to say hi, as was normal, he had received responses that increasingly didn’t sound like Tony. After two decades of messaging his friend, the new replies sounded as though they were from an imposter, and Dr. Guadagnoli began to suspect they had been written by Tony’s new assistant, Elizabeth Pezzello. Tony, about to embark on his digital detox, had introduced the two of them over text so Pezzello could arrange a visit to Park City for Dr. Guadagnoli. Because he had been separately texting her, he recognized the cadence in her replies from “Tony.” Every time Dr. Guadagnoli tried to plan his trip to Park City, he was told by the assistants that Tony was suddenly out of town. But he knew his friend would never be so flaky. He planned multiple trips, each one canceled at the last

minute. He thought about just showing up without warning but shied away after other friends of Tony’s in Las Vegas described confronting a “security force” at the Ranch that would likely block him. He considered contacting Tony’s brother, Andy Hsieh, whom he had worked with at Zappos nearly two decades earlier. But mutual friends of Tony told him that Andy Hsieh might not help, because they weren’t sure if “he was part of the group,” he recalled later. Finally, from the bedroom office of his home in Henderson in August 2020, he called the Park City Police Department and implored officers there to make what’s known as a welfare check on Tony. Welfare or wellness checks are initiated by family members or friends of a loved one who are concerned about their well-being: an elderly relative is living alone and can’t be reached; a parent is worried about an adult child. In other cases, loved ones are concerned that a person might be hurt by or hurt themselves or others. This is part of the routine work of the police force. No federal laws govern how a police officer should respond to a welfare check request. Across the country, each police department handles them differently, explained Ron Bruno, a retired longtime police officer in Salt Lake City, who is now the executive director of CIT International, an advocacy organization for best practices in crisis response. The organization assists communities to develop programs to reform police response, including teaching certain patrol officers how to make welfare checks and respond to mental health calls. Some police departments train every officer how to respond; others seek volunteers from among their ranks. Responding to a call relies heavily on the discretion of the officer who is dispatched, said Bruno. If someone has called in because he or she can’t reach a friend or family member, one officer might undertake an extensive search of the premises, such as checking the mailbox for stacked-up mail or looking in windows, while another might knock on the door and leave if no one answers. In recent years, some agencies have been considering building civilian task forces to handle the calls instead. In early 2021, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in Park City became among the first in Utah to launch a mobile crisis outreach team for psychiatric calls, putting the onus of response into the hands

of trained mental health experts rather than deputies at the agency. Although deputy sheriffs go through training to handle the calls, “we’re not the appropriate professionals to deal with a mental health crisis,” said Lieutenant Andrew Wright at the sheriff’s office. “Our role is to protect the public.” The sheriff’s office had been limited to two options: taking a person to a mental health crisis unit at a hospital for a forced stay or to jail if there had been a criminal violation. The new team connected those in crisis with trained professionals who could stabilize people on-site and direct them to outpatient mental health resources. A similar pilot program offered in New York City in 2021 reduced hospitalizations, early data showed. Even if Summit County’s new team had been in place, Tony’s properties fell under Park City police jurisdiction, so the sheriff’s office would not have responded to any calls. When Dr. Guadagnoli reached the Park City Police Department in August, he told an officer that he wanted them to perform a wellness check on a friend who lived there. The officer, whose name he wrote down and subsequently lost, first asked him a series of questions about himself before turning to Tony’s situation. Dr. Guadagnoli filled him in on his concerns, including that the people around Tony might not be helping him, and the officer agreed that the police department would do a wellness check, he recalled later. The officer promised to call Dr. Guadagnoli back in an hour, after it was done. Dr. Guadagnoli asked for his cell phone number so he could reach him more easily, but the officer said to call the main dispatch line instead. Still, Dr. Guadagnoli thought he might finally get some answers about what was going on with Tony. An hour passed, then two. After three hours, Dr. Guadagnoli called the dispatch line again. When he was patched through to the officer, he learned that he had not visited the house in search of Tony. “I know somebody at the house, and they told me everything is fine,” the officer told Dr. Guadagnoli, he recalled later. Unbeknownst to Dr. Guadagnoli, the officer had called Suzie Baleson, who didn’t live with Tony, but told him that Tony was going through some life changes and didn’t want to be contacted, according to Park City police. Baleson

assured the officer that Tony was fine and under the care of a doctor. He would be happy to meet with the police, she added. On the call, Dr. Guadagnoli’s frustration was mounting. “Let me get this straight,” he told the officer. “You called somebody to talk to them about Tony instead of going there?” “I know the person,” the officer explained, “and I trust them, and they said everything is fine.” The officer didn’t give Baleson’s name. Irritated and concerned, Dr. Guadagnoli hung up to plan his next move. “That’s when things got very weird,” he said later. Shortly after he hung up with the police department, Dr. Guadagnoli got a text from one of Tony’s assistants in Park City. Suddenly, after weeks of trying to schedule something without success, Tony wanted to see him, and he was free that very weekend, the assistant wrote. “Great,” Dr. Guadagnoli typed back, ignoring the coincidence. “I’ll be there Friday.” Immediately the assistant texted that they would send a bus to drive Dr. Guadagnoli to Park City. He declined, not wanting to ride a bus with a lot of people during the pandemic, and said he preferred to fly. The assistant assured him that it would be a private bus that they would send to Las Vegas. They were insistent. (The group also took that strange approach with others who tried to visit Park City, regardless if the person was a longtime acquaintance of Tony or a newcomer.) Dr. Guadagnoli had no idea why they would pressure him to take a private bus, but the whole episode made him very concerned that something nefarious was going on. It seemed clear to him that there was some kind of communication between the police and the people in the house. He certainly wasn’t getting onto a bus alone at that point. It was starting to sound as though he himself might be in danger somehow. He stopped texting with Tony’s assistant and called his personal attorney, outlining the events that had just transpired. His lawyer advised him, for his own personal safety, to stop engaging with the group. So he did. The Park City police did end up going to check on Tony, according to the police department. Much as he had done during his parents’ intervention attempt two weeks earlier, Tony assured officers he was fine. With his brother,

Andy Hsieh, and his head of security, Shawn Kane, by his side, he complained about the police constantly checking on him and asked for privacy. The Park City Police Department never told Dr. Guadagnoli that they had talked to Tony. As he spoke about the incident almost a year later, Dr. Guadagnoli said he felt physically ill recalling the series of events, and was sickened to learn the police department had never followed up with him. He felt he had never reached Tony. By the end of the summer of 2020, Suzie Baleson was getting frustrated with the attempts by outside friends to try to reach Tony through the police. She explained to two of Tony’s friends who were visiting from Las Vegas that the calls created more work for her. Every time someone called the police, she had to go over to the Ranch if she wasn’t already there—she was living in one of Tony’s rental properties nearby—and clean up the nitrous oxide canisters and trash. She also had to make sure that Tony was dressed, as he was usually just in his underwear now. Meanwhile, Baleson was angling for projects with Park City leaders. Park City mayor Andy Beerman had heard earlier in the year that Tony had moved to town and was buying up properties across the city. Some of the business owners had told him about the 10X plan and how Tony was floating them. Especially in the midst of a global pandemic, a wealthy benefactor such as Tony could be a godsend to the small town. Mayor Beerman, who oversees a liberal town in a conservative state, took office in 2018 after serving as a city councilor. A skilled rock climber, he had planned to summit Mount Aconcagua in Argentina if he didn’t win. He and his wife, Thea, have lived in Park City since the 1990s and once operated the Treasure Mountain Inn on Main Street. Tall, with a shock of blond hair falling over his forehead, he is a longtime “Parkite,” as the locals call themselves. In Park City, the city manager actually runs the town, with the police department reporting to them. The mayor oversees the city council and the mayoralty is a part-time position, although it often becomes full-time work. The

police department and other city agencies report to the city manager, who keeps the mayor and his office in the loop on important events. At around the time Mayor Beerman heard about Tony in the summer of 2020, he was under fire after City Hall had subsidized artists to paint several murals including the words BLACK LIVES MATTER across Main Street. Soon after, vandals painted over the BLACK and the fist that served as the dot of the i in one of the three-hundred-foot-long murals, sparking polarizing, heated debates among community members during the ensuing days. One of Park City’s deputy city managers, Sarah Pearce, had been introduced to Mimi Pham by a Sundance Film Festival contact and wrote to her in late July, “We are thrilled to learn of Tony’s interest in Park City and welcome an opportunity to engage with him. Mayor Andy Beerman is particularly interested in connecting.” Tony’s group began inviting Mayor Beerman to the Ranch, but he demurred. “He’s an enigma, and I’m playing a little hard to get,” Mayor Beerman wrote Pearce about Tony. “They’ve been trying to get me to attend parties, and I want a sit-down.” By the start of the fall, Baleson was working with the mayor on the wellness initiative that would get residents together to practice yoga at the town’s wide, grassy square off Main Street. The community classes would be a mix of power yoga and something known as a “Wellth Session,” named for Baleson’s Wellth Collective. The classes would combine meditation and healing music and be led by Branden Collinsworth, the performance coach who had been in town in August 2020, at the same time as Jewel. Mayor Beerman was enthusiastic about Baleson’s plans. After a tour of the Ranch with his wife, Thea, he emailed Baleson in late September, thanking her for the tour and the visit. Clearly the Ranch had been cleaned beforehand. “It was nice to meet everyone and learn more about what you’re doing,” he wrote. “I’m excited by all [the] new and positive energy in such a crazy time. Your ‘stoke’ reminds us of why we are so lucky to live here.” Mayor Beerman invited Baleson to a fundraiser for his friend Congressman Ben McAdams, and Baleson promised that she and Justin Weniger would attend and contribute. He also invited her to his house for dinner with him and his

wife. Baleson, meanwhile, called Mayor Beerman “very inspiring” and “an agent of change as both a citizen and mayor” in an email to him. Baleson and Weniger did attend the fundraiser for McAdams but do not appear to have made a donation to his campaign. “We are all so grateful to be in a town led by people who care so much and put their heart into what they do,” Baleson wrote to Mayor Beerman. “Thank you for spending so much time with us.” In private meetings about the group’s business development plans in the late summer and early fall of 2020, Tony was often incoherent, detailing ideas that increasingly made little sense or agreeing to pay for other of the group’s outlandish plans with no vetting. He was paranoid and spoke quickly. He thought his parents were watching him and feared that Tyler Williams was going to show up at the door. Sometimes, usually when he wasn’t doing nitrous oxide, Tony was sharp, like his old self. But those moments were becoming fewer and farther between. He still refused to sleep, and he continued to lose weight. Tony had spent his whole life giving, often receiving nothing in return but love and friendship. It had worked for years, because he had usually been surrounded by true friends, people who truly loved him. Now his generosity took a darker, more sinister turn: he was being thoroughly exploited. The plans detailed on sticky notes no longer had much to do with world peace, or if they did, the connection was a tenuous one. They also included ideas to supply Tony and his entourage with more alcohol and drugs, at a time when he clearly was using too much of both. Across Tony’s fleet of buses, the group wanted to design a drone that could fly between the seats, carrying Fernet to passengers. Psychedelic mushrooms were harder to buy during the pandemic, so they researched how to grow and cultivate them at the Ranch using Uncle Ben’s instant rice as a bed. Their other ideas included procuring gold somehow, and in fact they had hidden gold throughout the grounds of the Ranch. The group wanted to set up a livestream of a goldfish in a bowl being fed. In India, they found a commune

that seemed to operate with like-minded ideas about spirituality and drugs, marking it for a possible partnership. They targeted a geothermal site in Joshua Tree National Park in southern California for future growth. They made lists and lists of movie stars and directors who might somehow want to help build a movie studio: Keira Knightley? Jerry Seinfeld? Tony had told some visitors that rather than just continue with his digital detox on his own, the whole group would go completely offline. No one would be able to reach them. Inside the Ranch, the group installed mirrors everywhere and built a giant iguana exhibit, ostensibly to replace Blizzy. After disappearing earlier in the fall, Blizzy came back one day, sick and skinny, wandering in during the special memorial that the group was holding for him. Tony and Rachael Brown were thrilled. At least some of the people around Tony seemed to realize how sick he had become. At one point, the group, at the direction of Justin Weniger, had tried hiring an in-house doctor for Tony. But, much as Jewel had, the doctor had warned that if Tony didn’t stop taking drugs and improve his physical condition, he would die within months. Tony declined to follow his advice. The doctor quit. Some members of the group, most notably those who had known him a long time, were caught up in Tony’s charisma, and due to that and their devotion to him, they almost didn’t seem to be able to realize the severity of the situation, particularly as he continued to claim that he didn’t have a problem. His moments of clarity helped convince them that he was okay. This was a person they had idolized for so long and put on a pedestal. Tony kept reminding some of his friends that the last phase of his “metamorphosis” in Park City involved sobriety and they would have to wait only until he reached that stage. Others, such as some of the new assistants and employees who hadn’t known Tony previously, seemed to believe that everything around them was normal—it didn’t, after all, sound much different to them than the stories they had heard about his early years in Las Vegas, including the sticky notes. Everyone feared to some extent being exiled from the group, as Tyler Williams, Ryan Doherty, and even Tony’s parents had been. Andy Hsieh’s

presence helped normalize everything. If Tony’s brother was there, surely everything must be okay? Tony used a rating system, tallied on sticky notes around the Ranch under each individual’s name, to show who was in favor at the moment. No one wanted to fall short. There were scores for consistency, authority, and stress. “Job offer on hold for any new people until Mimi gives a score of 100,” one sticky note read. The groups closest to Tony made several attempts to try to help him, but each one was stymied by infighting among its members or by Tony’s psychosis and drug addiction. No one really knew the best way to get through to him. One morning in the late summer of 2020, Tony told Don Calder, who was living with him at the Ranch, that he needed to go to the hospital. But as Calder, Andy Hsieh, and the others sat in the waiting room, they suddenly saw Tony run out of a room, down the stairs, and out the front door. He had been fairly lucid going in, but once outside, he complained that the wait had been too long and he could design a far better hospital than the one they were at. He started listing all the design flaws of the building. He demanded that the group take a photo in front of the hospital and then take him home. Meanwhile, Suzie Baleson believed that she could help get Tony back on track in a holistic way. She had decided to turn the ground floor of the Ranch into a wellness center with yoga teachers and meditation sessions, much like a smaller, more targeted version of what she was planning for Park City with Mayor Beerman. She tapped Collinsworth, the performance coach, who agreed to help plan the center for a consulting fee, not the outrageous salary Tony had earlier offered. He commuted from Las Vegas instead of moving to Park City. He began hiring high-end fitness instructors from around the country and organizing equipment: Pelotons, kettlebell sets, and an air compression device to help with blood circulation that cost nearly $1,000. The costs stacked up, and the total price of the wellness center might have approached $1 million. Because the organizer of each of Tony’s development projects received at least a 10 percent commission, Baleson was in line to collect as much as $100,000.

But then, just as the project was nearing completion after many weeks, it fell apart. Mimi Pham, still concerned about the roughly $500,000 in unexplained expenses, found out about the project and was angry that Baleson would receive the commission instead of her. The wellness center, an attempt to help Tony, was abruptly canceled. Baleson and Pham often butted heads as they vied to be in charge of Tony’s projects and the funding of them. One sticky note at the Ranch under “Tony want” advised, “Don’t piss off Mimi”; another under “Suzie need” said, “Don’t piss off Suzie.” Pham, who had worked closely with Tony for much longer than Baleson had, told Tony that he would have to pay a “disloyalty penalty” of $30,000 for every day that Baleson remained on Tony’s properties. She began invoicing Tony for the additional money in mid-September 2020. After eight weeks, he owed her $1.8 million. He ended up paying $420,000 for the right to keep Baleson involved in his plans. Pham had her own ambitions during the summer and fall of 2020. In July, during the same week Tony’s parents witnessed their son’s manic behavior, Tony struck a $10 million movie deal on a Post-it note with Pham’s boyfriend, Roberto Grande. Along with Tony’s recent obsession over live video streaming, he wanted to invest in documentary filmmaking. He asked for a meeting with the leaders of a respected company in Los Angeles, XTR, founded by Bryn Mooser, whom he’d met at a downtown Las Vegas event years earlier. Mooser’s previous producing work included two films that had received Academy Award nominations for best short documentary. “Lifeboat” in 2018 had profiled volunteers saving North African migrants escaping from Libya by sea; “Body Team 12,” released in 2015, followed a Liberian Red Cross worker tasked with collecting bodies during the Ebola outbreak. Mooser and another XTR rep went to Park City to meet with Tony, Pham, and Grande to talk about the future of documentaries and how Tony could invest. Ultimately, Tony agreed to spend $10 million to support various films,

along with the launch of a new streaming service, Documentary Plus. The deal was sketched out on a sticky note, including a $1 million commission to be paid to Grande. Tony didn’t know Roberto Grande well. Grande was a lawyer who had moved into entertainment marketing in Los Angeles, including cofounding a small firm in 2014 called Tier Zero Agency that offered “forward strategy and innovation” as well as some small-time movie producing. But a friend of Pham was a friend of Tony. Tony extended his trust in Pham to her boyfriend and also spoke about him heading up other projects in Park City. Pham and Grande would later file a lawsuit over the XTR deal, involving the Hsieh family. Tony’s family said later in court filings that she had “seriously overstated” her boyfriend’s experience in the entertainment industry. By the fall of 2020, the investment agreement between Tony, Pham, and Grande had increased to $17.5 million—in turn increasing Grande’s 10 percent commission to $1.75 million. “Tony is one of the most visionary entrepreneurs of our time and we’re thrilled to have his big ideas and passion at the table alongside us,” Mooser said in October 2020 when announcing the deal to the website Deadline. XTR and Mooser were unaware of his declining health and never had direct contact with him after the initial meeting. According to the Hsieh family, XTR held up its end of the investment agreement, while Pham and Grande provided few actual services, which the couple deny. Tony had already spent tens of millions of dollars on real estate and investments in the roughly six months he had lived in Park City. By comparison, in Las Vegas, he had committed $200 million of his $350 million Downtown Project to real estate and urban development, and that amount was expected to last several years. In Park City, Tony’s spending quickly escalated, with Post-it notes showing tens of millions of dollars more on contracts, hiring, and business ideas. For every new project proposed, it seemed, a new LLC was created and added to a complex web of companies associated with Tony’s name. In October 2020, no longer the CEO of Zappos, Tony bought the elevenstory Zappos headquarters in downtown Las Vegas—the former City Hall building—for $65 million from an ownership group that included other Las

Vegas developers. They had bought the building from the city in 2012 for $18 million and leased it to Zappos. Among the owners was Andrew Donner, who also managed real estate for the Downtown Project and was a longtime friend of Tony. “Tony is one infectious guy,” Donner once said. “I’m a believer.” The property had been listed for sale since at least April 2019, with no listing price. Tony paid nearly four times the price of the 2012 deal, and it’s unclear why he agreed to spend that much. He told his friends in Park City that he wanted to buy the property essentially to stick it to Amazon. He was still upset over his breakup with the company, unable to see his own role in the situation. If he owned the property, Amazon couldn’t really get rid of him; he would be the landlord of Zappos. That sort of vindictive behavior—buying a building to get back at someone—was unlike Tony, who wouldn’t have considered a move like that even a year earlier. The investment, on the one hand, could be viewed as a safe bet with a tenant such as Zappos, a successful company so intertwined with the building and with Las Vegas. But on the other hand, the US office building market was flailing in 2020 given the large number of employees working from home during the pandemic and companies suddenly reevaluating how much physical office space they really needed. Still, Tony’s $65 million deal was signed on October 20. By that time, he was almost entirely disconnected from his family and close friends in Las Vegas. Some of his friends who had moved to Park City but didn’t live at the Ranch had trouble seeing him. Tony had long since stopped answering texts or emails, and Pezzello, who was in charge of his communications, often failed to do so on his behalf. At one point during the summer of 2020, Pham, increasingly frustrated with the situation and with Baleson, had insisted that Tony show up to regular FaceTime calls with her. He didn’t often make those. She finally cut off the group’s credit cards, which were funded by Tony, but still the spending continued. Even Tony’s driver, Steve Moroney, who was still in Park City to work for Tony, had been shut out. He was living at the DoubleTree hotel, still being paid but with nothing to do. As the weather turned cooler in October and the peak of the stunning fall foliage passed, Tony’s group planned the kind of childlike events they thought

would make him happy: pajama nights, comedy nights, and family sushi nights. There was a week of activities for Halloween, including pumpkin carving and trick-or-treating. They planned to build Tony a soup bar. Tony had always loved soup.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE SHED

Park City, October 2020 New London, Connecticut, November 2020

I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time. —James Baldwin

Andy Hsieh pounded on the door of the pool shed, trying to rouse his brother.

It was freezing outside in the middle of November 2020 in New London, Connecticut, and the backyard of the house at 500 Pequot Avenue was dark, the rectangular pool covered. The residential street abutting the Thames River was silent. Tony had locked himself into the three-hundred-square-foot shed attached to the house with only a thin blanket and a propane space heater to keep him warm. He nestled among a jumble of lawn chairs, beach floaties, and pool toys, his whippets lying next to him. He lit a candle. The Hsieh brothers, along with Daniel Park, Elizabeth Pezzello, and Brett Gorman, were staying at Rachael Brown’s house, leaving for Hawaii in the early morning of Wednesday, November 18. The Mercedes vans hired to take them to a nearby airport were waiting outside on the dimly lit street. A private jet stood by to fly the group to Maui. Tony had not wanted to go to Hawaii, an odd departure for him. Hawaii was one of his favorite places, and he usually went several times a year. But when

Pezzello and Gorman had pitched the trip in Park City in the fall of 2020 with a cute PowerPoint presentation explaining why a group trip would be a good idea, Tony had been skeptical. He had asked them how much it would cost. He, of course, would be paying. About $250,000, they told him. Possibly this was another attempt, however expensive, to get Tony out of Park City, where he might start to recover in a different environment. But whatever the reason Pezzello and Gorman wanted to go, Tony told them no. The discussion might have ended there, but then Brown had taken up the case, telling Tony that she wanted to go and that they all needed a break from Park City. Grudgingly, Tony had agreed. Because of his resistance, the previous day at Brown’s house had been tense. Brown and Tony had bickered nonstop until finally, late at night, their annoyance at each other had erupted into a full-blown fight. Brown was also annoyed about the state of her house. She preferred it clean and was upset that Tony left candles, trash, and nitrous oxide canisters everywhere he went. The New London Fire Department had been called in the middle of the night earlier that week in mid-November 2020 when a fire alarm had gone off, triggering an automatic call for help from Brown’s security system. Eight firefighters, including the battalion chief, two fire engines, and an ambulance had been dispatched to Brown’s house—a typical but very resource-intensive response. At the door, one of Tony’s employees traveling with the group had assured them the alarm had been due to a cooking accident and they didn’t need assistance. Then, within an hour, the alarm had gone off again. This time the firefighters had insisted on going inside, despite the group imploring them not to investigate. In the basement, firefighters had found “a slight smoke condition,” they later wrote in a report of the incident. Light smoke had filled the air. There was melted plastic on the stove top and cardboard that was hot to the touch. Firefighters had noted an unattended candle in “an unsafe location.” They had put it out. As the homeowner, Brown had been forced to deal with the situation in the middle of the night. She had worked with the firefighters to cool all the hot objects in a bucket of water.

All of that might have been tolerated at the Ranch in Park City, but this was Brown’s personal space. Finally, as night fell on Tuesday, November 17, she ordered Tony out of her house. Tony told Brown that the beach wasn’t part of her property, and she couldn’t make him leave. So he wandered outside the fence from Brown’s backyard to the small beach abutting the wide Thames River. At night, it would have been almost pitch black, the moon a thin sliver in the sky. Andy Hsieh and Brett Gorman tried to mediate the fight. One of them suggested that Tony stay in the shed for a few hours until it was time to go to Hawaii. Tony sometimes used it as a space in which to meditate. At about 3:30 a.m., after Tony had been in the shed for several hours, Andy Hsieh went to check on his brother for the last time. Tony told him that he needed five more minutes before they left for the airport. Andy Hsieh agreed and went back into the house. Soon he came outside again with Gorman and began walking across the yard toward the shed. Suddenly a strange hissing noise filled the darkness, like a valve releasing pressure. A nearby carbon monoxide alarm started beeping. They ran to the wooden structure and tried to pull the door open but found it locked. They needed a key code they didn’t have. They yelled for Tony, but he didn’t answer. Andy Hsieh dashed back into Brown’s house, trying to find a heavy object to help get inside. Smoke poured through the cracks in the shed door. Next door, one of the neighbors on Pequot Avenue, Patricia Richardson, woke up when she heard screaming outside. “Tony!” her neighbors yelled. “Tony! Tony!” A month earlier, in late October 2020, Tony had decided he wanted to fly to Alaska. A friend of his, Brock Pierce, was campaigning for US president in the upcoming national election as an independent, and Tony told his employees in Park City that he wanted to go help him. Pierce is a former child actor, appearing in both Mighty Ducks films in the 1990s and starring alongside Sinbad in First Kid, where he played the rebellious thirteen-year-old son of the president. Later in life, Pierce had invested heavily in Bitcoin and

cryptocurrencies, appearing at one point on Forbes’ list of Cryptocurrency’s Wealthiest People, with an estimated fortune of $1 billion. Pierce had met Tony years earlier and had sometimes visited him in Las Vegas. The two shared a love of Burning Man. After moving to Puerto Rico, Pierce had aspired to help the US territory recover from a debt crisis and the damage caused by Hurricane Maria. A 2018 Rolling Stone profile took a more whimsical view of his plans, saying he wanted to build a “Burning Man Utopia,” a characterization Mr. Pierce disagrees with. Much as Tony had done in Las Vegas with entrepreneurs, Pierce enticed crypto startups to move to the Caribbean island. “In nearly 10 full days together, I rarely saw him sleep in a bed or eat a full meal,” the Rolling Stone reporter observed of Pierce. “He crashed on random couches, in the back seat of cars, on tables at bars. He gave away necklaces, bracelets, food, money, time, tequila, you name it.” He and Tony, Pierce said later, were kindred spirits, “visionary pioneer types.” “We don’t see the world for what it is, but what it can be,” he observed. They also seemed to share the same childlike optimism about the people around them. Pierce told Rolling Stone that he didn’t know some of the people he invited to join his business ventures. “If you are making that effort, I’m gonna trust you,” he said. Pierce’s quixotic campaign, in the midst of the contentious race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, barely made headlines. Later Pierce explained that he had run as “an exploratory mission to understand the mechanics of our political system.” With his shoulder-length blond hair tucked under a trucker’s hat, Pierce based his campaign on a platform of crypto, criticism of the two-party system, greater use by government of technology, universal basic income, single-payer health care, and the legalization of marijuana. He drove a tour bus through Iowa and to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and across the country to New York City. “I’d start by pardoning and expunging every person in our criminal justice system for nonviolent cannabis-related crimes,” he said in one campaign video on Instagram.

Tony heard what Pierce was up to and told him on a phone call in the fall of 2020, “I want to come see that.” In October, he and several members of his Park City group flew to Anchorage, where Pierce was in town for a few days. They followed him on the campaign trail, where he was pulling eighteen-hour days meeting with locals and legislators. Pierce said that Tony and his group hadn’t technically helped him campaign and had been more of a distraction than anything else. Along the way, Tony’s group took hits of nitrous oxide, even in public at a restaurant. At one point, Tony visited a rabbi at a nearby synagogue for reasons that were unclear. Pierce didn’t think that Tony’s drug use was the cause of the problems he was facing, but the result. Instead, he thought, Tony wasn’t “grounded.” “People like Tony, they’re surrounded by people who are generally lying to them because everyone wants something,” he said later. “So you start to become disassociated from reality. I deal with this as well. It’s very easy to be disconnected when you’re not grounded. He didn’t have a clear vision of what his next thing would be.” Riding on a bus with his entourage and Pierce one day, Tony stood up and proclaimed that he would give them all $1 million each. It didn’t sound like his normal generosity, though. It sounded more like the stunt he had pulled in Montana, when, high on mushrooms, he had texted his friends and offered them a $1 million reward for finding him. In Alaska, some of his employees looked pleased at the offer. Pierce brushed it off. “Aww, man, I don’t need your money,” he said, laughing. Tony, though, kept a straight face. The visit lasted only a few days, and then Pierce headed to New York. He knew he would see Tony soon, though; he had just invited the group to his fortieth birthday party in Puerto Rico, in a few weeks’ time. Since Jewel had left the Ranch in August 2020, she and her team had stayed in touch with Andy Hsieh. Calling quietly from his room or an empty bus, Andy Hsieh secretly delivered updates on Tony. As experts on mental health, Jewel and

her team wanted to help the Hsieh family try to figure out what to do about their son. Jewel’s team decided to revive the efforts the Hsiehs had gone through over the summer to initiate a conservatorship. The new plan relied heavily on getting Tony to a hospital under the guise of another issue, at which time a mental health professional could evaluate him. They hoped that the issue would arise organically, because Tony typically refused any medical help at all. Because he always walked around barefoot, maybe he would step on a piece of glass, cut himself, and need to get treated, for example. As in the Hsiehs’ plan from early August, when they had attempted the intervention that had failed, Jewel’s team counted on putting Tony on a temporary psychiatric hold, at which point the family could file paperwork for a conservatorship and Tony could get the treatment he so clearly needed. It was hard to pin Tony down, though, in the fall of 2020. He suddenly seemed to always want to travel, as if he knew there was a plan to intervene. During the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic emerging across the United States, Tony’s group flew mostly on private jets, lessening the risk somewhat. After the Alaska trip, they planned to fly from Park City to Rachael Brown’s house in New London, Connecticut, then to Pierce’s house in Puerto Rico and then back to New London in mid-November. From there, they would go to Hawaii. Tony usually went somewhere warm such as Hawaii for his annual Thanksgiving trip with his family, but he still wasn’t speaking to his parents. Andy Hsieh, Park, Pezzello, Gorman, and Anthony Hebert flew to Connecticut and then Puerto Rico in early November. The rest of the group stayed behind in Park City. In another last-ditch effort to help him, Don Calder, Tony’s housemate at the Ranch, had recently convinced him to try another biohacking regime called NAD therapy. The expensive therapy, not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, involves intravenously receiving nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), a compound found in living cells. The treatment is supposed to help drug and alcohol users especially, because their natural level of NAD is depleted. Tony had begun the therapy just before he left Park City, so the group hired a traveling nurse to go with him and continue providing the IV infusions.

As he was leaving Park City for the last time, to go to the airport, Tony FaceTimed Calder and his childhood friend Janice Lopez. Lopez, devastated by Tony’s deterioration, had been unsure of what to do and how to help him. In recent weeks, Tony had become suspicious of some of the people around him. He had hired the court reporters to make sure he had records of what was happening. Tony Lee, the former banker who had been brought on over the summer in Park City by Andy Hsieh, had been reviewing Tony’s myriad new deals: the hot-air balloon business, the Zappos headquarters deal, the leasing of the tour buses, and the recent plans to procure gold. Andy also asked Lee to help identify and remove people in Tony’s inner circle who were taking advantage of him. It’s unclear if anyone was removed. It still didn’t seem like enough. At some point, the group had actually moved Tony out of the Ranch and into his mansion across the street, the “truffle shuffle,” to try to get him away from some of the employees and contractors he had hired. During the FaceTime call, a strange look came over Tony’s face. Then he warned Calder and Lopez, “Don’t trust anyone here.” In Puerto Rico, Pierce—known locally as “Mr. Bitcoin”—planned a big celebration for his birthday in mid-November, with dozens of friends, some of whom had also flown in. Tony didn’t make it to the party, though. He had been in San Juan only a couple days before Blizzy, who always traveled with him, grew even sicker than he had been in the previous months. He and his group cut their trip short and returned to the East Coast instead. Once back at Brown’s house in New London, one of the assistants took Blizzy to a nearby vet, where he had to be put down. Tony was despondent. He believed he had lost his one true partner. Earlier in 2020, he had interpreted his friends’ efforts to help him as abandonment after his years of giving to them. Now, as his mental health struggles and drug issues reached another peak, he seemed to feel there was no one left who loved him. The group buried Blizzy in Brown’s backyard and placed a stack of white rocks on top of the grave and an arch decorated with fake flowers between the rectangular swimming pool and a neighbor’s fence.

In Las Vegas, Phil Plastina was among the group of Tony’s longtime friends who hadn’t seen him during the pandemic. For most of 2020, Plastina and his Dancetronauts group had been sidelined as all their performance venues were shut down. Burning Man organizers canceled that year’s event. Plastina’s art car, the one with the electric siding and the jack that lifted the stage into the air, had been parked outside his house in the Las Vegas suburbs, unused. Consumed by his own situation, Plastina knew that Tony was living in Park City but hadn’t been able to visit him. One of the last times Tony had texted him had been on July 4, 2020, only a few days after his breakdown at the Empire Avenue house. Plastina had had no idea that Tony was struggling or that he had just been in the hospital. Tony hadn’t told anyone. “When are you able to travel?” Tony texted Plastina. “We are throwing a big $1 million Covid safe party tomorrow 10 a.m. to midnight in Park City across multiple venues if you’re able to make it here tonight or tomorrow morning! Do you guys want to perform?” It was very common for Tony to text friends shortly before a party or trip, hoping to whisk them away at the last minute. “Oh geez, that sounds amazing,” Plastina texted back, although he demurred, as he was visiting relatives in Florida. He texted Tony a selfie by the pool. In response, Tony sent Plastina a giant spreadsheet detailing his plans for the earlier Airbnb scheme that had since gone nowhere. It was one of the last times Plastina heard from him. Months later, in mid-November 2020, Plastina received a startling call from a mutual friend. “Tony is in trouble,” the caller, another old friend of Tony, told him. He explained what he knew about Tony’s mental state and his heavy drug use. Not knowing that Tony was actually in Connecticut, Plastina’s friend advised him to go to Park City right away. “He needs to see a familiar face,” the caller said. Plastina immediately texted Tony and waited. No response. He texted a different number he had for him. Still no response. He tried Tony’s email address. He sent several more emails. Tony had never in his life been unreachable to his friends. Plastina never heard back from him.

From Brown’s house in New London around the same time, Andy Hsieh frantically called Jewel’s team in Las Vegas. Tony was extremely paranoid, he told them, and was acting self-destructive. The group, after leaving Puerto Rico early, would be in Connecticut for a few days in mid-November 2020. It would be the opportunity to implement their plan to get Tony real help. Jewel’s team had been in touch with a doctor she knew, Blaise Aguirre. Dr. Aguirre is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, a nationally recognized Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital outside Boston. Dr. Aguirre, who typically works with highly suicidal patients, is a friend of Jewel. The two had spoken on a virtual mental health panel hosted by Time magazine three months earlier, in August 2020, just before Jewel had visited the Ranch for the first time, and they also knew each other from other events. Dr. Aguirre hadn’t met Tony, but he knew that Jewel was very worried about him and agreed to help as a favor to her. He is often asked to intervene in similar situations, when a patient seems to have lost touch with reality or is possibly suicidal. Jewel’s team thought that Dr. Aguirre could go to New London, Connecticut, and use his expertise to talk to Tony at Brown’s house, to help calm him down. He could then facilitate Tony getting to a hospital nearby, where an emergency room physician could place him on a temporary psychiatric hold. Dr. Aguirre couldn’t do that himself because of his out-of-state medical license. While Tony was in the hospital, the family could file for conservatorship. The Hsiehs had much of the paperwork ready and were working with Jewel’s board president, Ryan Wolfington, to find an attorney. “The brother was beside himself,” Dr. Aguirre recalled later. Andy Hsieh believed that Tony was deteriorating quickly and was very concerned about him. Soon after, in the early morning of November 18, 2020, Tony’s employees took turns checking on him in the shed. He had moved out there around midnight after fighting with Brown all day. The Mercedes vans were scheduled to drive him and his entourage to the airport several hours later, around 3:30 a.m.

Through the shed door, Tony requested that items be brought to him: water, pizza, cigarettes, a protein shake, more whippets. The employees, primarily Brett Gorman and Anthony Hebert, went back and forth constantly throughout the night, padding across the dark lawn from the house, taking Tony the food and water and drugs he wanted. Each time they checked on him, they wrote the time on a sticky note and posted it on the shed door. Sometimes, for reasons that are unclear, he locked the door after they left. A New London police report would later note the apparent normality of the strange scene: employees being asked in the middle of an East Coast winter night to deliver items to their wealthy benefactor who was staying in a storage shed. “There appears to be no concerns between Hsieh and his employees,” the report said. Tony used the propane space heater in the shed despite the objections of some of his employees. The space heater, two large, round coils attached to the propane tank with a hose, was clearly intended for outdoor use only. At one point, Anthony Hebert noticed a candle burning near Tony’s blanket. The blanket looked charred and was smoldering. “You’re going to smoke yourself out,” he warned Tony about inhaling the fumes. “That’s poison.” “It’s poisonous, but I used it to light a fire,” Tony replied. He did extinguish the candle, though. Around 3:15 a.m., Tony peered out of the shed. No one was around. For several minutes, he was alone in Brown’s backyard—all of his employees were inside the house. He wheeled the propane heater out of the shed, perhaps finally acknowledging that it was a danger to use inside. But the long hose of a pool cleaner that was also in the shed had become wrapped around the outside of the propane heater, making it hard to maneuver. As he opened the door of the shed, wisps of smoke drifted into the air, and it appeared that a small fire was burning behind him. Tony tried to close the door of the shed, but the pool hose prevented it. So he dragged the propane heater back inside. Once he was back inside the shed, the door clicked. Tony had locked it again. To get in, someone would need the code. Later, rescue officials would say he had been “barricaded” behind the door.

Andy pounded on the door several minutes later and told him it was time to leave for Hawaii. He didn’t see any smoke, possibly because Tony had shut the door tightly. Tony told his brother that he needed five more minutes. Andy and Gorman were again walking toward the shed after giving Tony the time he requested when they heard the hissing noise from across the yard around 3:30 a.m. Now smoke was pouring out of the cracks around the door. They raced to get into the shed. They called Tony’s name over and over, but he didn’t respond. From inside the house, Hebert smelled burning plastic and ran outside. He tried to pull open the shed door himself, but this time, the handle came off. From inside the structure, he could hear groaning noises. Tony still wasn’t responding to the group’s calls. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Pezzello, who had been inside the kitchen getting ready for the Hawaii trip, heard Andy Hsieh calling his brother’s name outside and then saw him run into the house, looking for something to pry open the door of the shed with. She called 911. “911. What’s the location of your emergency?” the dispatcher asked her. Pezzello, who hadn’t yet been outside, sounded calm as she gave the address and explained the problem: “We need help as soon as possible. Someone is locked in a room with a fire.” “There’s a fire?” “Yes.” “500 Pequot Avenue, and they’re trapped in a building?” Suddenly there was a burst of commotion on the line as inside the house, Pezzello called for Brown and asked her for the code to the storage shed. Because everyone there except Brown was an infrequent visitor, no one else knew how to operate the lock. “We really need help,” Pezzello told Brown as the dispatcher listened in. “Tony’s locked in there.” Shouting erupted in the background. The dispatcher interrupted the exchange: “Where in the building are they? Where—” “We just need you to come quickly,” Pezzello interrupted, her voice rising with panic.

“They’re on their way,” the dispatcher assured her, but Pezzello had turned away from the phone and was shouting the code of the storage shed door to everyone outside. “Is it 514?” the dispatcher asked, confused. He thought Pezzello was calling out the address of the house. “No, no, no, 500 Pequot!” Pezzello shouted into the phone. “Can you get the other people out of the house?” the dispatcher asked, his voice intensifying as well. The situation was quickly becoming desperate. He asked, “So how many people are trapped?” “It’s a storage unit outside of the house,” Pezzello replied. Outside, Tony’s employees and his brother pushed the numbers of the code over and over, but the door still wouldn’t open. Police later found that the right code might have opened the door, but it was hard to tell with so much damage to the shed. The group might have entered it incorrectly in their rush to get to Tony. Pezzello again shouted the code to the group trying to get inside the shed: “1014! 1014! 1014!” “500 Pequot Avenue, structure fire, report of a person trapped,” the 911 dispatcher said, speaking to rescue units in the background. “Tony!” someone screamed in the background of the 911 call. And then: “Get the shovel!” “They’re on their way,” the dispatcher reassured Pezzello, who was still on the line. He asked her name. “Elizabeth,” she told him and spelled her last name. Still on the phone, she walked down to the basement on the ground level, where sticky notes covered the surfaces like wallpaper. The shed and the basement shared a wall with a window facing into the basement, although it did not provide a view into the shed. It faced only Sheetrock. Pezzello shouted to the others, “Can we go through this way?” and then “Guys, there’s a window, there’s a window here!” Daniel Park, who had run downstairs, found a brick and threw it at the window, breaking the glass and the Sheetrock. Fire shot into the basement. Park found a fire extinguisher nearby and sprayed it over the flames, mostly putting them out. Still, he couldn’t see Tony through the smoke.

A chorus of voices screamed, “Tony! Tony! Tony!” There was complete chaos now. “Elizabeth,” the dispatcher asked sternly on the 911 call, over the din in the house. “The person barricaded themselves?” “Yes,” she said, frantically. “Yes, yes, yes.” “Why did they barricade themselves? Are they trying to harm themselves?” “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” “How old is the person?” “Um, about forty-five years old,” she said, missing Tony’s age by a year. “Please hurry up, please hurry up,” she implored desperately. “This is urgent, this is really urgent.” She broke down and started to cry, wailing into the phone. “This is so bad, oh, my God.” Within minutes, the New London fire and police departments had arrived at the house. They descended on the scene, quickly taking charge. They bashed in the door of the shed using special tools that weren’t available to Tony’s employees and kicked a propane heater out of the way to reach him. He was lying on his back, his right arm draped over his chest. He was surrounded by whippet chargers and small bottles of Fernet. A charred plastic bag of sticky notes lay nearby. The fire in the shed was not devastating, and the firefighters put it out quickly. Soon, Vernon Skau, the fire marshal, would take pictures of everything inside: the propane heater, the candle wax, and the whippets. The shed was charred, many of the items still smoldering. Tony was unconscious but not badly burned. The firefighters quickly pulled him out. He was loaded into an ambulance and transported to the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, just minutes from Brown’s house. Andy Hsieh jumped into the ambulance with him. Soon after, a helicopter flew Tony to the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, about sixty-five miles away from New London. In the days that followed, some of Tony’s friends in Las Vegas heard what had happened, but it hadn’t yet been made public that the former Zappos CEO had

been involved in a fire. Even though Tony remained unconscious, many of his friends expected him to recover, in part because he hadn’t been badly burned. Mark Guadagnoli, the longtime friend who had tried to initiate a welfare check with the police in Park City over the summer, heard that Tony’s condition had improved from critical to stable and for the first time felt hope. He thought that maybe the fire would finally be the wake-up call that Tony needed to get better. He would be extricated from the hangers-on around him. “He’s going to be forced into recovering,” he thought. Other Las Vegas friends thought the fire was a fake story, made up by Tony’s entourage in Park City. They believed that Tony had actually overdosed and the group was covering it up. At Brown’s house in New London and in Park City, Tony’s followers continued, unabated, with their plans. One entry from Hebert’s schedule noted, “Cleaned after the fire, dealing with police and fire department…. Priorities this week: getting a quote on wrapping the tree on the patio with LED lights, would really add to the space.” For nine days, Tony lay in a hospital bed at the Connecticut Burn Center at Bridgeport Hospital. He had been hooked up to a ventilator, and he appeared to be sleeping. His injuries were not severe. He was still for the first time in years. His family—Richard and Judy and his brothers, Andy and Dave— surrounded him, but no one else was there. They kept vigil during his long sleep. The smoke, soot, and fire had caused a cerebral edema, in which the brain swells, causing pressure. Brain edema can sometimes be treated, but it can also cause irreversible damage. Tony Hsieh, the beloved man who had tried so hard to bring happiness to everyone around him, would never wake up the same. On the ninth day, November 27, 2020, Richard and Judy Hsieh opted to remove the ventilator. Tony was gone.

EPILOGUE

In the end, it turns out that we’re all taking different paths in pursuit of the same goal: happiness. —Tony Hsieh

Forty-nine days after Tony’s death, the Hsieh family held a private Buddhist

ceremony for their oldest son. Tony was also Buddhist, a fact not many people knew about him. He wasn’t devout. But he ended Delivering Happiness with a quote from Buddha: “Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” In Samsara, or the cycle of reincarnation, a person goes through an intermediate stage between death and life. While waiting for rebirth, a person’s spirit can be frightened by apparitions that slow down the path to enlightenment. People pray for their loved ones to realize what’s not real and move on to their next place in the universe, a transition that can take up to fortynine days in some Buddhist traditions. For Tony, that day of rebirth was January 15, 2021. On that day, with the pandemic still ongoing, the Hsiehs held the memorial online. Tony’s mom, Judy Hsieh, performed a traditional Chinese dance for her son, who had always loved to dance. She also sang a song from The Phantom of the Opera, “Think of Me.” She is not a formally trained singer, but her prerecorded rendition was haunting. Tony’s cousins spoke, as did his best friends from high school and other close friends from over the years. Judy Hsieh was the only immediate family member

to do so. She hadn’t seen Tony alive and in person since early July 2020, six months earlier. At the memorial, she kept referring to him lovingly as “my boy.” From around the world, memorials poured in during the days and weeks after Tony’s death. Hundreds of Tony’s friends, politicians, business leaders, actors, and an endless number of fans wanted to honor the beloved entrepreneur through videos, songs, letters, and social media posts. It was a collective outpouring of grief that connected loved ones from all different backgrounds with a new, shared mission: remembering Tony. He would have been proud of the synergy, even though he had hated being the center of attention. His death was publicly announced the day he passed away, November 27, 2020, in a public statement by Zappos CEO Kedar Deshpande. “The world has lost a tremendous visionary and an incredible human being,” he wrote. He offered few details about how the forty-six-year-old had died. On Instagram, Amazon’s then chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, wrote, “The world lost you way too soon.” “I treasure every conversation I ever had with Tony Hsieh,” former president Bill Clinton, who had met Tony years earlier at a speaking engagement, tweeted. He had immediately reached out to the Hsieh family after Tony’s death to offer his condolences and later also spoke at the family’s private memorial. “He was fascinating, brilliant, and inspiring, and his unwavering efforts to spread happiness—and enthusiasm for mentoring young entrepreneurs—touched countless lives for the better,” he wrote. Ivanka Trump, fresh off her father’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, offered her praise of Tony, sharing photos of them together over the years, including on the Delivering Happiness tour bus. In one, Tony is stiffly dressed in a suit and tie, his hair cut short, standing in front of the White House with Ivanka, wearing a half smile. In another, he grins from the middle of a group of people, including Ivanka and her husband and former White House adviser, Jared Kushner, in what looks like a casino. “Tony was a deeply original thinker always challenging me to reject conformity & follow my heart,” she wrote. Many of the hundreds of messages received by the Hsieh family came from Tony’s fans who didn’t know him personally. They often began, “I’ll never meet Tony, but he’s had a major impact on my life,” as Alfred Lin, Tony’s longtime

business partner and good friend, recalled in his own public letter to Tony. “As you watch the world turn from above and debug some metaphysical anomaly that you’ve just observed, I hope you also notice the impact you’ve had on so many lives,” Lin wrote. Fred Mossler, who had been friends with Tony for more than two decades, recalled the unusual way Tony had viewed his business rivals in an interview about his friend’s death with an industry trade publication, Footwear News. If the competition copied Zappos’ model of free shipping, Tony believed that could only be a good thing. “It was never about what was best for Zappos,” Mossler said. “It was about what was best for the human condition.” In his tribute, Tony’s former business partner Nick Swinmurn described Tony’s odd practice of rating his friends’ happiness on a scale of 1 to 10 and wrote briefly about how he had drifted apart from his old friend in recent years because of their different lifestyles. “He was a complex puzzle,” he wrote, “much too complicated for me to completely understand, which I felt was exactly how he wanted it.” In Las Vegas, on East Fremont Street, a board appeared outside one of the Burning Man art sculptures Tony had imported, the tower of twisted semitrucks in front of the Fergusons Downtown art complex. On it, people posted dozens of sticky notes with messages remembering Tony, checkering the board with faded neon squares: “Will do my best to continue spreading empathy and delivering happiness now that you won’t be around physically.” “Your obsession with post its always annoyed me but your inspiration could never be contained to one idea (which I love).”

In front of the Downtown Cocktail Room, where Tony’s plans for Las Vegas had begun to percolate a decade earlier, the Cornthwaites, who had long before introduced Tony to downtown Las Vegas, hung a poster of his grinning face and one of his favorite questions: “What if?” Zappos also unfurled giant wraps over two sides of its downtown office tower with a photo of Tony and the words “THANK YOU, TONY.” Internally, Zappos, whose employees were still working remotely, held an online memorial,

including a video curated from thousands of hours of footage of their chief executive officer that the company had collected over the years. Tony’s name and photo appeared along the downtown section of Las Vegas’s Fremont Street lined with old casinos and tourist attractions. Months into 2021, many of the businesses and street signs still featured remembrances for Tony: painted portraits of his likeness, silly llama drawings, or his most inspiring quotes on billboards: “No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future.” A petition appeared online calling for a street to be named after him. But Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, a longtime fan of Tony, didn’t like that idea. At a city council meeting just days after his death, she told the public that his memory shouldn’t be confined to a boring roadway. Instead, his ethereal being should be celebrated through naming a park after him or through a public artwork, such as a piece of sculpture that moves. “A street is so perpendicular and horizontal, that’s so un-Tony,” she said in a radio interview. (As of September 2021, a memorial had not yet been established.) Several months after his death, one of Tony’s longtime friends told us about a dream they’d had about him, one of those dreams that is so clear that it appears to be happening in real life. In it, Tony was checking on his friend, and he asked about everything that had happened since he left. As usual, even in death, he was more concerned about everyone else than about himself. The friend talked about how Tony had died and how all his friends had been so devastated—and still hadn’t recovered. They described the gaping hole that all of them walked around with, that would never be filled. Still, Tony was laughing in the dream—that infectious laugh of his—and he hugged his friend. He appeared happy. On December 1, 2020, Jewel turned on the camera and stared at the lens. She wore a colorful shirt and a cowboy hat, a piece of fabric patterned with flowers and animals draped behind her. She held her guitar. “Hey, it’s Jewel here,” she said. She smiled, but there was sadness behind the smile, her eyes tinged with red. The hat was the same one she had worn when she

had played the private concert at the Ranch in Park City several months earlier. She told the audience on Instagram that she had sat for a while before pressing “Record,” trying to find the right words to describe her good friend Tony Hsieh and her feelings about his death. “For somebody who writes for a living, and is fairly verbose, I didn’t really know what to say,” she said. She paused. “I don’t think anyone knows what to say at times like this.” The world didn’t yet know about Jewel’s efforts to save Tony and how close she had come to reaching him. Perhaps if he had entered the shed in New London, Connecticut, one night later or delayed his trip to Hawaii for some reason, the doctor whom Jewel and her team had recruited might have been able to convince him to go to a hospital. The Hsieh family could have finally intervened successfully. Instead, in her elegy, she recounted how she had met Tony on Necker Island in 2015 and how she had been riveted by him and his ideas for holacracy. “That’s never happened at a company that I’m aware of,” she said. She described his great ability to empower everyone, even her. “And I’m a folksinger!” Tony had once posed a question to Jewel that he liked to ask people: “What’s your definition of success?” Jewel couldn’t recall her own answer, but she remembered Tony’s. “His answer was the willingness to lose it all. “I guess that’s what it really takes—because you have to put your whole heart into something you believe,” she told her audience. “To believe with that much conviction is a rare gift—to give yourself to it. That really is a beautiful definition and that really is how I think of Tony—very brave.” She began to sing a rendition of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” her deep, soulful voice emanating from the screen. After a few minutes, she stopped in midlyric. Her eyes filled with tears, some streamed down her face, and she had to pause for several moments before continuing with her elegy. Before she turned the camera off, she spoke to her friend for the last time: “Tony, may you be over the rainbow with the bluebirds, and your worries far behind.”

In New London, Connecticut, the fire and police departments immediately launched an investigation into the shed fire. The fire department was overwhelmed with worldwide media attention once the news broke that Tony had been the unidentified man pulled from the shed and that he had died in a nearby hospital. The attention was so intense, with reporters camping out at Rachael Brown’s house at 500 Pequot Avenue and Fire Chief Thomas Curcio fielding dozens of calls weekly, an enormous number for a small department, that the fire officials organized a meeting with New London’s mayor. They discussed not only how to handle the constant requests for information but also how to proceed carefully with their examination into what had caused the fire. No one famous had ever died so publicly in New London before. City, police, and fire officials all agreed that their internal inquiry would be no different from the many others they had conducted over the years, regardless of Tony’s stature. There would be no leaks to the media, no preference given to any party as information was uncovered. Vernon Skau, the longtime fire marshal, remembered thinking he had wished that that much attention would be bestowed on the many problems city officials faced in the poorer neighborhoods of New London. Skau headed up the joint investigation, an effort that would take the better part of two months and fill a thick binder. All fires are similar, he said, but each examination comes with different details, twists and turns that will reveal themselves over time. “Every fire investigation—you have a different flavor,” he said later. On the night of the November fire, he and members of the police and fire departments had taken dozens of pictures of the inside of the shed and everything that could have caused it: the whippets, the Tiki torch fluid, the candle and its wax, the propane heater, and Tony’s cigarettes. The shed was filled with so much beach equipment and other house junk that it was hard to sort through the wreckage. One photo showed a jumble of paint cans and rollers, fold-up beach chairs, and stacks of soda boxes, much of it charred from the fire. In another, a ball of extension cords and foam rollers for the pool crisscrossed a smoke-stained white blanket. One of the photos would

end up framed for a time at the fire station, where photos of some of New London’s most famous fires hang on the walls. Skau and his team spent the next six weeks analyzing the many shed photos, trying to find the potential cause. He returned once more to the house at 500 Pequot Avenue to examine it, as well as to study the door-locking system that Tony’s employees couldn’t get to work. He walked around the outside of the building, noticing every detail. He analyzed grainy footage from Rachael Brown’s home camera system, which faced the yard and the shed, to piece together the last few hours of Tony Hsieh’s life. He and his team saw the multiple trips that Tony’s employees had made to take him nitrous oxide, pizza, and water, and he saw the wisps of smoke escape the shed when Tony had opened the door around 3:15 a.m., what looked like a small fire burning behind him. He couldn’t tell what was fueling it. He watched as Tony dragged the propane tank with the vacuum hose wrapped around it outside the shed and then back inside, his last moments in the outside world, alone. It was hard to tell from the videos if Tony had been acting strangely in any way. (Investigators never figured out why Tony had dragged the heater outside and then back in.) Skau heard the door lock behind Tony for the last time. In partnership with the police department, the New London Fire Department had interviewed everyone at the scene, taking detailed statements from all of Tony’s employees who had been there. Only Andy Hsieh’s statement was missing; he had jumped into the ambulance with Tony directly after the fire, and Skau felt they already had enough witnesses. Skau had thought the Mercedes vans outside of the house at 500 Pequot Avenue were bizarre, but the employees who had been waiting inside the vehicles carried the same expressions he was used to seeing after an emergency: disbelief and shock. When interviewed, Anthony Hebert told police that Tony was retired because of mental health concerns and a “midlife crisis,” although he said he was not aware if Tony had been diagnosed with anything. He said that Tony had been “distraught” over the death of Blizzy three days earlier.

That was a familiar theme; the nurse who had recently been traveling with Tony to give him the NAD infusions also noted that he had been depressed over the death of Blizzy, as did Brett Gorman. Tony had been “despondent,” Gorman told police. By the end of January 2021, Skau and his team were ready to release their findings. Already, the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had ruled the death an accident following an autopsy, saying that Tony had died of complications of smoke inhalation. The office declined to release the autopsy or specify why it believed that the death had been an accident. In dozens of interviews with Tony’s close friends for this book, very few believed that Tony would have intentionally hurt himself. The New London fire and police departments released witness reports, videos, photos, 911 calls, and incident notes from the scene. Together, the records painted a heartbreaking, detailed picture of Tony’s last hours, including his friends’ and brother’s last attempts to save him. Over and over, they had tried to get into the shed but couldn’t reach him. But Skau ultimately couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of the fire, in part because there were so many objects in the shed that could have caused it. The joint report was inconclusive. Skau wrote that it was possible that the heater had come into contact with some sort of combustible, such as a piece of paper, that would have started a fire. Then that fire would have heated the propane tank, triggering a release valve, causing gas to rush—likely the hissing noise Andy Hsieh and Brett Gorman had heard when they were walking across the lawn to the shed. Possibly that was why Tony had tried to roll the propane heater out of the shed earlier in the night. Still, there seemed to have been a small fire burning in the shed already, so Skau wrote that there was a “low possibility” that the portable heater had caused the fire. Another option was that Tony’s cigarettes or marijuana—a pipe was also found in the shed—could have caused it, but the report concluded that that was also unlikely. “A lighted cigarette will only occasionally set fire to dry fuel,” it read. Having observed several candles in the shed, Skau wrote that it was possible that using them in an improper way could have started the fire. The candles

“could not be eliminated as a cause of this fire,” he concluded. The report noted all the objects around Tony, including Fernet bottles and whippets, which led investigators to believe that he might have been “impaired or intoxicated” at the time of the fire. “It is possible that carelessness, or even an intentional act by Hsieh could have started this fire,” Skau wrote. There wasn’t enough evidence to state that conclusively, though. At a press conference at the end of January 2021, Skau, Chief Curcio, and Captain Brian Wright from the New London Police Department fielded dozens of questions from reporters about their findings. Many asked about Tony’s mental state at the time and what had led him to be in the shed. Officials hewed closely to the findings in their report. The police and fire departments had determined that it was not a criminal act —that none of Tony’s employees, or Tony himself, was to blame. Skau said that there were no other state or local agencies looking into the events of that night, as far as the New London Fire Department knew. At the time of this writing in September 2021, there were still no government agencies examining the fire or the events leading up to it in Park City, Utah, or New London, Connecticut. Skau was asked at the news conference whether the fatal fire could have been avoided. “Any situation such as this,” he replied, “things can be prevented.” The battle over Tony’s fortune began swiftly afterward. Tony died without a will, a startling fact that was revealed in court filings in Las Vegas just a few days after his death. He had left no plan for his vast estate, which had become convoluted in the last year of his life as he had spent money rapidly in Park City, often through dozens of other friends, employees, and contractors. Many of the contracts were written on the thousands of multicolored sticky notes stuck to the walls and windows and doors of the Ranch, many signed like contracts. Tens of millions of dollars in real estate—the houses and other properties in Park City and Las Vegas—were shuffled among limited liability companies and held by shell companies. The transcripts produced by the court

reporters held more verbal contracts initiated by Tony, sometimes as he was clearly not in the right state of mind. All of that would have to be unwound. “You’re going to have to look at each specific sticky note and decide if it’s a contract—is it binding?” one attorney, Justin H. Brown, who deals with estate planning, told us in December 2020. “Was he in the correct state of mind—did he have the capacity to even enter a contract?” At the heart of Tony’s estate resolution was one crucial question: How much was he actually worth? No one seemed to know, not even those closest to him. What was known was that Tony had earned $32 million from the 1998 sale of LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million. He had then catapulted further with the $1.2 billion all-stock deal to sell Zappos to Amazon in 2009. He had owned Zappos shares along with an interest in his venture fund Venture Frogs, which also owned shares in Zappos after investing in the company long ago. Estimates of Tony’s fortune have varied over the years,I with some journalists using $840 million as his net worth. Some friends estimated that the figure was likely much higher because he had a number of other investments, some undisclosed, including a stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Tony hadn’t lived an opulent lifestyle, at least not before moving to Park City. But he had committed to spending huge sums of his fortune, such as the $350 million promised to downtown Las Vegas. His mission to spread happiness often manifested itself in spending on others, a pattern throughout his life. In Utah, he had bought about $70 million in real estate. Wealthy elites were scrambling to leave crowded coastal cities in the pandemic for spots such as Utah’s mountain towns, driving up prices. And Tony hadn’t been afraid to spend even more to get what he wanted, particularly in his diminished state. He had been running through his cash on hand. Within days of his death, Tony’s father, Richard Hsieh, and brother Andy Hsieh were appointed special administrators and legal representatives of Tony’s estate, by a judge in Las Vegas. The judge found that Tony’s personal and business affairs “require immediate attention to prevent loss to the estate,” the court records disclosed. As part of their legal team, the Hsiehs hired Vivien Thoreen, a Los Angeles attorney who also represented Jamie Spears, the father of superstar Britney

Spears, in the #FreeBritney movement over her conservatorship. They began the process of trying to untangle Tony’s estate right away, traveling to Park City. They asked friends and employees staying at the Ranch and Tony’s other properties to leave. The move by the court to appoint Andy Hsieh in charge of his brother’s assets was intensely controversial among some of Tony’s close friends. Andy Hsieh had lived at the Ranch with Tony, directing dozens of contractors and employees, eventually rising to become part of Tony’s “core” group. He had been forming his own business, a tequila company, funded ostensibly by his brother, while Tony had clearly been deteriorating. All of that had taken place after his own family’s failed intervention attempt in August 2020, when Tony had exiled his parents and agreed to pay Andy $1 million to stay, despite his persistent abuse of nitrous oxide. Andy Hsieh had himself stored whippets for Tony in his room. He had worked to keep Park City Police Department officers off the property. Years before, he hadn’t spent much time around Tony and his old group of friends. But Andy Hsieh had also quietly remained in touch with Jewel and her team, a fact not many around him knew, keeping her up to date on Tony and trying to form a plan with her to save him. Of the many people around Tony in August 2020, he appeared to Jewel’s team to be the one with the most compassion. Andy Hsieh had told some of Tony’s friends and employees that he stayed close to his brother to make sure he was safe. In early 2021, Mimi Pham sued Richard and Andy Hsieh as the administrators of Tony’s estate who now controlled Tony’s businesses and filed claims for payments with the estate. As Tony’s longtime assistant, she claimed that she was owed more than $90 million from various ventures remaining from her long friendship with Tony. That included an estimated $75 million for what she said was the anticipated profit from documentary movie streaming deals. She claimed another $7.5 million from a project in Park City to revamp an old lodge. To mount the legal fight, she hired the high-profile Las Vegas legal team of David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, known in part for their high-profile criminal defense work representing wealthy and famous clients who get into trouble in Las Vegas, such as Paris Hilton and Bruno Mars. Chesnoff was part of

the legal team of the real estate heir Robert Durst during his 2021 murder trial. (He was convicted of murder.) Some close friends of Tony’s thought that Pham’s filings were heartless, particularly given the timing. She wanted access to items from a warehouse of Tony’s, including Burning Man supplies, furniture, two golf carts, artwork, and bicycles. Many of the belongings had sentimental value. But some of Tony’s friends questioned why Pham would take legal action, forcing Tony’s family to respond so soon after the tragedy. In court filings, Pham emphasized her closeness to Tony over Andy and the Hsieh family, contrasting her intimacy to the icier relationship between Tony and his father and brother, as she described it. In court filings, her attorneys pointed out that Andy Hsieh had moved to Park City with his brother, but “that is not an indication of a familial bond as he was offered a $1,000,000 annual salary in exchange for said move.” Tony’s family shot back, describing Tony’s physical and mental decline over the months before he died and the way the estrangement of close friends and family had left him vulnerable in the end. Pham and her boyfriend, Roberto Grande, were among those who had exploited him, the family claimed. During that time, Tony’s health had become so poor that a health care provider had said he wouldn’t have longer than six months to live without an intervention. In court, the Hsieh family noted that it had been obvious to Pham and her boyfriend that Tony was “physically and mentally unwell, and that he was in no condition to consider, let alone approve, significant investments or contracts for investments. Witnesses who saw Tony at this time describe him as having lost a tremendous amount of weight. Witnesses describe a belief that Tony’s death was imminent.” Pham and Grande have denied the family’s claims about them in court. Meanwhile, others from Tony’s past also came forward claiming the estate owed them money. An artist named Toshie McSwain filed a claim for $40,000 for a prototype for a sculpture of a brain that was to have been built and installed on a ceiling. Mark Evensvold, the restaurant manager from Las Vegas who had agreed to manage Tony’s in-house bars in Park City, filed a claim for $12.5 million, citing his sticky-note contract. Tony Lee, the old family friend

convinced by Andy Hsieh to leave Fort Worth for Park City to work for Tony in the last months of his life, filed a nearly $6.9 million lawsuit after he was notified that he would no longer be paid by the Hsiehs. In court filings, Lee argued that Andy Hsieh had picked out Lee and other people around Tony as “scapegoats,” while Andy Hsieh actually conducted much of the acts that he has accused others of. That included, according to Mr. Lee’s filings, that Andy Hsieh plied his brother with alcohol despite knowing he suffered from cirrhosis, “arranged for the purchase of thousands of canisters of nitrous oxide at an alarming rate,” and asked Lee to “divert millions of dollars from Tony Hsieh’s holdings to Andy himself.” Suzie Baleson, through her company, filed a nearly $8.8 million claim, saying she was owed for services on Tony’s projects including a “magic castle” in Park City that involved performers and live streaming. By December 2021, the Hsieh family had come up with a preliminary estimate for the remaining value of Tony’s fortune: about $500 million. Tony’s entourage in Park City scattered, many of them continuing their lives as if nothing had happened. Justin Weniger went back to Las Vegas to help plan the Life Is Beautiful music festival in September 2021, in which he and Baleson organized a group meditation session at the start of the event, led by Deepak Chopra, in honor of Tony. Otherwise, there were few public tributes of Tony at the biggest public celebration in downtown Las Vegas since his passing. Rachael Brown stayed in her New London, Connecticut home where Tony had tragically been trapped in the shed. Don Calder moved back to Los Angeles to operate a T-shirt company. Anthony Hebert’s whereabouts are unknown. Daniel Park continues to tour and play music. Elizabeth Pezzello and Brett Gorman got married in Park City but moved back to Naples, Florida, to open a business called Vitamin Bar Naples, which delivers vitamins to customers intravenously. An Instagram post from March 2021 shows the couple smiling in matching white T-shirts, holding a sign for their new business. Tony did not leave a will and also appeared not to have used other planning techniques often employed by the wealthy to shelter their heirs from having to pay steep federal estate taxes, such as moving assets into trusts. The Hsiehs told a judge that they would need to raise cash to pay a looming tax bill, possibly by liquidating the estate’s stocks or obtaining a loan. They also filed notices in court

saying that dozens of Tony’s properties in Las Vegas could be put up for sale, including undeveloped lots and more thriving downtown assets such as Container Park. The move set off a controversy in Las Vegas, even though the Hsiehs vowed they weren’t looking to dismantle Tony’s legacy there. “Tony Hsieh’s Family to Sell Off Much of Las Vegas Real Estate Empire,” a headline in the Las Vegas Review-Journal read in February 2021. But some people in downtown Las Vegas welcomed the idea of new owners bringing more diverse ideas to the city’s future who would be like a “Tony Hsieh 2.0,” said Las Vegas councilwoman Olivia Diaz. “His fingerprints will always be on that part of town,” she remarked. On a beautiful evening in May 2021, a crowd of people surrounded Tony’s praying mantis sculpture in front of Container Park, clapping and cheering as the insect blasted fire from its antennae. Inside the development, kids happily tore through the tree house playground as their parents sipped wine at nearby tables; a guitarist tuned his instrument, gearing up to play a concert at one end of the park. Tourists and locals filled the walkways, restaurants, and nearby candy shop. It was exactly as Tony had hoped. At a nearby restaurant, someone had scribbled in big letters across several windows: WE LOVE TONY. In Delivering Happiness, Tony described a magic trick he had once taught himself: how to take a coin and make it seem as though it could dissolve into a piece of rubber. He had always been fond of magic tricks, basking in the amazement of his audience when pulling off a seemingly impossible feat. In the end, he brought joy to people around him while performing his most challenging sleight of hand: throughout his life, he kept up the appearances of eternal hope and infallible optimism, even as he suffered privately from mental health and substance abuse issues. When we began reporting on Tony in the fall of 2020, we kept hearing a similar description of Tony’s life story from the people we spoke to, many of whom said they had seen and interacted with Tony regularly over many years.

The story line was a simple one: there had been nothing wrong with Tony until the fall of 2019, when he had begun taking ketamine. Many months of research into his life revealed how Tony, who had poured his life into experiences for other people, ultimately felt alone. He had severe social anxiety. He drank alcohol to diminish it, turning it into another quirk of his personality and part of his giving to others through parties and Zappos events. He struggled with facial blindness, and so he learned to recognize friends’ voices and relied on a select few to guide him. He wondered if he had some form of autism but was never diagnosed. It’s not surprising that few people really knew this other side of Tony and the many issues with which he struggled. Tony was many things to many people: the party organizer; the audacious entrepreneur; the humble boss; the investor in other people’s dreams; the quirky neighbor in an Airstream trailer park, living with his pet alpaca. His audience was eager to believe in that picture. When the Hsieh family filed court documents as part of his estate battle in 2021, it was the first time anyone had publicly acknowledged that Tony had drunk as a coping mechanism, even though his heavy daily drinking had been well known by his friends and colleagues. “Tony’s mind moved at an incredible speed, and Tony described using alcohol as a social lubricant to alleviate his social anxiety and to allow him to better communicate and make deeper connections to the people around him,” the Hsieh family’s attorneys wrote. But the gulf between how people viewed Tony and his private struggles exposes a much greater societal problem: the taboo surrounding mental health problems and addiction. Both issues are still discussed in whispers, willfully ignored, unacknowledged even when they are in plain view. Without a dialogue surrounding addiction and mental illness, those who are suffering must do so alone, hiding their problems and putting on happy faces. They use drugs and alcohol to mask their pain and anxiety. Tony embodied that lonely struggle. After the tennis player Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open in the spring of 2021 to focus on her mental health, she wrote in an essay for Time that she had been struck by the outpouring of messages she had received. “It has become apparent to me that literally everyone either suffers from issues related to their mental health or knows someone who does,” she wrote.

People who are suffering don’t make it easy for others to help them, and Tony was the epitome of that problem. He was skilled at explaining away concerns and shied away from confrontation and criticism. He continued to perform at a high level. Even when his good friend Jewel brought a mental health program to Zappos, he still managed to avoid the conversation. He normalized first his heavy drinking and later his drug use, his coping mechanisms to deal with the people around him. He handed friends books and showed them TED Talks to explain himself. Even if anyone had thought to question his drinking, it was an even farther leap to wonder why he needed so much alcohol: What was the underlying issue? As the therapists at Cirque Lodge say, drug or alcohol abuse is always covering up another issue. Tony didn’t invite that kind of examination from even his closest friends, and certainly his adoring fans, particularly later in his life, wouldn’t have examined any problems. His character, full of so many contradictions—awkward but exceedingly fun, unfailingly generous but lacking empathy—was so unusual anyway that it was even easier to explain away any inconsistencies. As Ali Bevilacqua, Tony’s ex-girlfriend, put it, “People give a lot of excuses in a room for people who are geniuses and eccentrics.” Tech founders such as Tony are even more susceptible to this sort of toxic idolization complex because Silicon Valley doesn’t just accept strangeness from its titans, it expects and celebrates it. But some of the same traits—mania, magnetism, and almost singular focus—that can catapult leaders to stardom can ultimately spell their downfall. In recent years, countless tech CEOs have been exalted only to suffer a steep downfall, Travis Kalanick at Uber, Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, and Adam Neumann at WeWork among them. In each of these cases, the executives were later revealed to have presided over ruthless cultures or to have behaved recklessly, if not potentially criminally. Tony, who led with a sense of purpose, doesn’t fit into this narrative, but he was put onto a pedestal in a similar way, only to come crashing down later. His death exposes the pitfalls of putting so much blind faith in our leaders, no matter how inspiring they may be, and the vast disparity between the public persona and private life of celebrity, a status Tony had achieved by the end of his life.

Additionally, the tech community has embraced biohacking, experimenting with ways to push one’s body beyond human limits, to operate like a machine, by using ice baths, fasting, changing sleep patterns, microdosing LSD. It can quickly spiral out of control, as Tony’s last years illustrated. The idea of solving one’s own health problems without therapy or traditional medication can mask deeper struggles. Tony ignored his own self-care even as he worked so hard to spread happiness to those around him. We may never know exactly where that desire came from or how it originated. Did his strict childhood make him crave anything lighthearted and fun? Was he an extreme people pleaser, unable to stop himself from giving? Was he so scared of what he might find inside himself that he refused to look inward? We have asked ourselves, and others, these very questions over these many months. Tony—whether trotting through the office in his T-shirt and black Asics sneakers or going out with friends with a mohawk and sequined jacket—always valued each person’s inherent “weirdness” and individuality. In many ways, his values, his fast-paced curiosity, and his appetite for risk kept him open to the world—to other people, new ideas, and a hopeful future. If we had a similar culture around mental health, one of acceptance and openness, maybe Tony could have found healing. If admitting one’s pain wasn’t stigmatized, if we acknowledged our common internal struggles, maybe the people around Tony could have recognized the warning signs. Maybe Tony could have put down the magic tricks and stepped off the stage. In August 2021, I (Kirsten Grind) called the customer service line at Zappos for the very first time. I had bought a pair of Cobian flip-flops earlier in the summer to wear when I took my dog swimming at the beach near my house in the San Francisco Bay Area. But after only a few weeks with my new shoes, one of the flip-flops disappeared. I knew the culprit immediately: my dog, a two-year-old chocolate lab named Charlie. He will eat and chew on anything. Out of curiosity, I called Zappos’ customer service line to see if they could do anything and see what kind of service I might receive.

The first automated prompt asked me if I would like to press five to hear a joke before proceeding. Of course I did! “What do ghosts eat for supper?” “Spookghetti!” A cheery customer service representative came on the line immediately after and introduced herself as Hallie. I explained to her what had happened: my dog had literally eaten my flip-flop. Hallie started laughing. “Oh, no, little pup, I’m so sorry,” she sympathized. It took us many minutes to find my account, as I had listed it under an old email address, and Hallie stood by patiently until I finally found my confirmation email. “We will figure it out!” she exclaimed at one point. Once we had accessed my order, Hallie told me she would investigate what Zappos could do. “While we’re looking, how’s your day going?” she asked as though she were speaking to a friend. I told her it was fine, that the weather in the Bay Area was unfortunately cooler than I would have liked for summer, 65 degrees and cloudy. “I’m working in Las Vegas,” Hallie told me, where “it’s very hot.” The day had flown by, though, “talking to some great customers,” she continued. “It’s been a pretty good day if I do say so myself.” Later she told me she was working at home in her pajamas and slippers. “It’s so great, I love it,” she added. After almost no time at all and no holding, she told me that Zappos would send me a new pair of $31 flip-flops for free. When she checked on the delivery date, about a week from when we were speaking, she said, “Let me see if I can get that quicker.” In return, she asked if I could please send my extra flip-flop—the one Charlie hadn’t eaten—to Soles4Souls, an organization that Zappos partners with to donate shoes and clothing. She sent an email to me with the link, signed with her name, and told me that Zappos would pay for the shipping. “What’s your dog’s name?” she asked before I hung up, and soon we were talking about her own pet, who had unfortunately passed away in 2020 after a decade together. Now it was my turn to sympathize. “Have a great night with Charlie,” she said to end the call. “Give him lots of kisses for me!”

A year had passed since Tony had stepped down from Zappos and more than two decades since he had redefined the meaning of customer service. Zappos was still fulfilling his mission. The call was almost textbook what Tony would have asked from his customer loyalty team and echoed dozens of stories Katherine Sayre and I had read and heard about Zappos’ customer service as we reported this book. Hallie’s Personal Service Level, the metric Tony employed to judge personal connection, was off the charts. Even the joke of the day, which Tony had launched at Zappos years earlier, having often called 976-JOKE during his childhood, was still in place. Tony liked to say that Zappos wasn’t a shoe company—it was a service company that sold shoes. That was clearly still true. But among Tony’s close friends and even at Zappos, there has been a realization that the search for happiness shouldn’t just be that—a relentless quest to cultivate joy all around you. The path starts inward. It is built on confronting our human struggles with the help of trusted people who are on journeys that parallel ours. Zappos’ management is still trying to maintain the happy workplace that Tony had established, although it has paused holacracy and market-based dynamics as it has focused more heavily on what it has always done: selling shoes. In the summer of 2021, with temperatures soaring in Las Vegas, the company launched a program to deliver air conditioners to workers whose units had failed. Most Zappos employees were still working from home because of the pandemic, so it was particularly important that they be able to do their jobs comfortably. It was a small gesture but exactly the sort of thing Tony would have done to help his workforce be happy. Some aspects of workplace culture are changing at Zappos, though. Following Tony’s death, executives realized that employees need to focus on their own needs first before those of others, something Tony was never able to do for himself. The company is therefore encouraging its employees to think about health and wellness. It is focused more now on what some executives are calling “the whole human,” much like Jewel’s prior work there: encouraging things such as taking mental health days and limiting work hours. Parties and happy hours have died down anyway because of the pandemic.

In December 2021, Zappos employees were again facing a management transition, when Kedar Deshpande said he would step down after only a year at the helm of Zappos to take the CEO role at Groupon. In an internal email to Zappos employees he wrote, “One of the things Tony instilled in me and strived to instill in every employee, was the importance of Delivering WOW—not only while at Zappos, but anywhere our futures may lead us.” Deshpande said he would carry on the tradition. Tony ended his own book with a wish. He hoped to bring the reader happiness, to have it passed on to others, even one day to get the entire world moving in that direction. “I don’t have all the answers,” he wrote. “But hopefully I’ve succeeded in getting you to start asking yourself the right questions.” I. We found various reports ranging from $780 million to nearly $1 billion as Tony’s net worth, though the figure used most recently was $840 million.

APPENDIX MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, calling 911 might be necessary; callers should notify operators that it is a psychiatric emergency and ask for police officers trained in crisis prevention and psychiatric emergencies, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It connects people to a nearby crisis center, which can provide counseling and referrals to mental health care. Call 1800-273-TALK (8255) or 1-888-628-9454 en español. Crisis Text Line connects with a trained crisis counselor twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Text 741741 in the United States and Canada. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration offers an information line to connect to local treatment: 1-800-662-HELP (4357). The National Institute of Mental Health also recommends speaking with a primary care practitioner about mental health to discuss concerns and get referrals for further treatment. The National Alliance on Mental Illness is a nonprofit mental health organization that includes more than six hundred local groups and forty-eight state organizations working in communities, supporting people with mental health concerns and their friends and families. More information, including a

live chat with a specialist, can be found at www.nami.org or by calling the helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book is a monumental challenge, and it would have been impossible

in this case without the help of Tony Hsieh’s many friends and loved ones. We talked to dozens of them over the course of this reporting, but a handful of his close friends went above and beyond, spending hours and hours with us to make sure we clearly understood Tony’s thinking and his actions over the years, especially because we didn’t have the ability to ask him ourselves. Some of them spoke despite the threat of legal action and other circumstances that put them at personal risk. You know who you are, and we can’t thank you enough for all your help, and patience, over many months. This book originated out of our investigative reporting for the Wall Street Journal about the circumstances surrounding Tony Hsieh’s death, and would not have been possible without that foundation. We’d like to thank our trusted editors, Brad Reagan and Liz Rappaport, for their extensive work on those stories, and for initially understanding the importance of Tony’s life and death. We have a masterful enterprise editing team at the WSJ led by Matthew Rose and Tammy Audi, and we were lucky enough to work with Sam Enriquez and Dan Kelly, who helped polish our narratives in two of our longer stories, as well as Ethan Smith in Exchange. Other editors to thank: Jamie Heller, for her exuberance and unwavering support; Jason Dean, one of the hardest-working editors we know; and our executive editor, Matt Murray, a strong supporter of this kind of work. Some of our WSJ colleagues helped us along the way, including Bob Hagerty, who worked with us on our first story after Tony died, and Kate King, who was on the ground in Connecticut. Others who gave us great advice, or listened to various quandaries related to book reporting, include

Erich Schwartzel, Greg Zuckerman, Jennifer Levitz, Colin Barr, Eliot Brown, and Tripp Mickle. We could not have found a better home for this book than Simon & Schuster and in our editor, Stephanie Frerich. Stephanie’s enthusiasm for Tony’s story and clear vision for the narrative helped us immensely, as did her deft edits and questions, which always improved our writing significantly, and helped us sharpen our framing throughout the story. Her editorial assistant, Emily Simonson, has been hugely helpful throughout, explaining details large and small. Our copyediting manager, Jessica Chin, and our lawyer, Jeff Miller, also provided much-needed assistance. Thank you also to Michael Nagin, cover designer; Erika Genova, interior designer; and Alicia Brancato, production manager. This book might not have happened at all without the keen eyes of our agent, Todd Shuster at Aevitas Creative. He and another editor, Daniella Cohen, were hugely helpful in initially shaping the format of the book, and pushing us to figure out the best way to lay out Tony’s story. Allison Warren at Aevitas was fast and proactive about selling movie and documentary rights, and we look forward to Tony’s story being shared again in new ways. From Kirsten: There is no way I could have taken on a project like this while raising two small children without the full support of a heroic partner like my husband, Steve Grind. He patiently took care of the kids on weekends and nights for months as we wrote and reported this book, all while starting a new job. He listened to me talk about Tony and his story nonstop and had great advice on how to handle different aspects of the book. Thank you endlessly, Steve. The last time I wrote a book I didn’t have kids, and my two sons, Ellis and Wesley, had to sacrifice a lot of mom time over the months we put this together. They were very patient, and also excited about the prospect of their mom writing a book, even though it wouldn’t have pictures. Our pandemic dog, Charlie, actually appears in this book, and was a trusted—if not somewhat annoying—companion during the long days when everyone was back at work and school except me. I have some really good friends who are amazing journalists and who helped enormously through this process, in particular

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, who continually goes above and beyond to support me in anything I take on, and will take a panicked phone call day or night despite her own small children. My former editor at the WSJ, now at the New York Times, David Enrich, was a wise counsel on this project, especially early on. Sue Craig listened to me time and again rattle on about various aspects of this story and always has sage advice. Other longtime friends whom I love dearly and always help me, even from afar: Kimmy Torch, Kelly Kennedy, and Karen Johnson. Even though we were separated by the pandemic, my WSJ row mates and fellow Alcatraz swimmers Georgia Wells and Bob McMillan in San Francisco still managed to offer counsel and support, even when I bailed on our last swim—sorry again! Last but certainly not least, my parents, Pat Orsini and Klaus Meinhard, are always so supportive of me in whatever I take on, and are always so proud of my career accomplishments. My sisters, Sonja Revilla and Iman Rosario, are always there to encourage me, even when we can’t all be together. From Katherine: Thank you to my parents, Barbara and Jon Lindenmayer and Alan and Terri Sayre, for your love and encouragement. A special thanks to Terri for helping me get started on my best professional adventures. Mom, you taught me empathy, a gift in life and in journalism. I am grateful for a family of past editors and reporting colleagues whom I’ve learned much from, in particular my investigative pals Manuel Torres, Jonathan Bullington, and Rich Webster. To everyone from the former NOLA newsroom, all of your endeavors continue to inspire me. You have all given me a life lesson in resiliency. I’m in awe of the amazing fact-checking skills of Mandy Tust and Sara Sneath, who spent many hours backing me up on this book. My family of friends, in New Orleans and beyond, whom I have missed dearly in recent years, have been there for me across the miles through the writing process. Chelsea Brasted’s steady faith in me, and her joyful spirit, were invaluable. Sara Brownlee is a true best friend—thank you for always listening, even when it felt like Groundhog Day. Thanks most of all to my husband, Mike Joe, the best dog-dad to Sandy and Ziggy, whose love and support, in so many ways, have carried me all the way.

More from the Authors

The Lost Bank

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

© NICOLE MERCADO

Kirsten Grind is an enterprise reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she has worked since 2012. She has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation for her coverage of the financial crisis, and a Loeb Award for her coverage of the downfall of a famous bond fund manager. Her first book, The Lost Bank, about the collapse of Washington Mutual during the financial crisis, was named the best investigative book of 2012 by the Investigative Reporters & Editors association. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. @KirstenGrind

© ERICH SCHWARTZEL

Katherine Sayre is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, where she has worked since 2019. As the gambling reporter, she writes about the Las Vegas Strip, the rise of betting on sports in the US, and the global casino industry. Before joining the Journal, she was a lead reporter for the Times-Picayune’s investigative team in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her reporting on failures in the state’s mental health care system won a national prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists. In reporting stints around the South, she has covered courts, crime, real estate, and Gulf Coast communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She lives in Los Angeles. @KatherineSayre SimonandSchuster.com @simonbooks www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Kirsten-Grind www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Katherine-Sayre

Also by Kirsten Grind The Lost Bank

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NOTES

Many people spoke to us on background only, not for attribution, because of

confidentiality agreements, ongoing litigation, or other reasons preventing them from speaking on the record. Other sources of information are noted below. Prologue: “A Freak Accident” As a kid, he pretended: Greg Smith, “Curcio Takes the Reins at New London Fire Department,” The Day, September 12, 2018, https://www.theday.com/article/20180912/NWS01/180919805. at an official ceremony: Ibid. “He’s barricaded”: Lee Hawkins, “Before Tony Hsieh’s Death, Firefighters Rushed to Burning Home with Trapped Man,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-tonyhsiehs-death-firefighters-rushed-to-burning-home-with-trapped-man-11606691000. Curcio moved on: Interviews with Chief Thomas Curcio, May 2021 and September 2021. Soon Curcio’s phone lit up: Ibid. Naomi Osaka: Naomi Osaka, “Naomi Osaka: ‘It’s O.K. Not to Be O.K.,’ ” Time, July 8, 2021, https://time.com/6077128/naomi-osaka-essay-tokyo-olympics/. Simone Biles: Alice Park, “How the Tokyo Olympics Changed the Conversation About Mental Health,” Time, August 8, 2021, https://time.com/6088078/mental-health-olympics-simone-biles/.

Chapter 1: “A Very Optimistic, Innocent Time” Cirque Lodge charges most patients: Interviews with Cirque Lodge staff, May 2021 and September 2021. about $64,000 a month: Ibid. Big-name former clients: Claudia Wallace, “Rehab for the Rich and Famous,” Fortune, October 20, 2009, https://archive.fortune.com/2009/10/16/news/companies/cirque_lodge.fortune/index.htm. Called the Laundry Room: “Legend of the Laundry Room,” The Laundry Room, https://www.laundryroomlv.com. “A fake protest”: Reyhan Harmanci, “Interested in the Jejune Institute? It’s Too Late,” New York Times, April 21, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/us/22bcculture.html. would also have just ended: “2020 Sundance Film Festival Schedule,” Sundance Institute, https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/2020-sundance-features-announced. Beck and Losee early on: Interview with Dave Beck, May 2020. Oracle’s business is not exciting: “1970s: Defying Conventional Wisdom,” Oracle, May 2007, https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/profit/p27anniv-timeline-151918.pdf. was bringing in: Reuters, “Company Reports; Oracle Corp. (ORCL, NMM),” New York Times, June 23, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/23/business/company-reports-oracle-corp-orclnnm.html. The $40,000 salary: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 30. His parents, Richard and Judy: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 8. he wanted to build something: Ibid., 10. no one was tracking: Ibid., 31. Richard Hsieh told him: Ibid., 37. only about 3 percent: “Americans Going Online… Explosive Growth, Uncertain Destinations,” Pew Research Center, October 16, 1995, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americansgoing-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/. Oracle became one: “1970s: Defying Conventional Wisdom,” Oracle. Demand for the stock: Adam Lashinsky, “Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web,” CNN Money, July 25, 2005, https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/. the first one had launched: Ryan Singel, “Oct. 27, 1994: Web Gives Birth to Banner Ads,” Wired, October 27, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/10/1027hotwired-banner-ads/. When an important: Julia Angwin, “Internet World Is a Stage / Startups Hope to Catch Eyes at the Largest Web-Users Convention,” SFGATE, March 12, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Internet-World-Is-a-Stage-Startups-hope-to-2849478.php. A San Francisco Focus: Author and title unknown, San Francisco Focus, August 1997. Named for: “Yahoo History—Complete History of the Yahoo Search Engine,” History Computer, July 15, 2021, https://history-computer.com/software/yahoo-history-complete-history-of-the-yahoosearch-engine/. Yang wanted to buy: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 42. Sometimes parties took place: David Garber, “Meet the Renegade DJ Crew Who Helped Bring Rave Culture to the West Coast,” Vice, October 18, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x88gq/wickedsan-fransisco-anniversary-feature. The warehouse was massive: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 78. “As someone who is”: Ibid., 79.

Hundreds of people: Julia Angwin, “Where Wuppies Gather / DrinkExchange Draws Hundreds Every Month,” SFGATE, September 6, 1997, https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Where-WuppiesGather-DrinkExchange-draws-2808693.php. One clunky online invitation: “NOTE: DrinkExchange on October 30!!!,” DrinkExchange, October 11, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/19991011095757/http://www.drinkexchange.com:80/sanfran/. a financial crisis in Russia: “IPOs Roar Back to Life,” CNN Money, December 1, 1998, https://money.cnn.com/1998/12/01/investing/ipo/. sparked in part: Peter Delevett, “Partovi Twins Quietly Emerge as Top Silicon Valley Angel Investors,” Mercury News, March 7, 2014, https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/03/07/partovi-twins-quietlyemerge-as-top-silicon-valley-angel-investors/. paid $265 million: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 49. “Against the backdrop”: Paulette Thomas, “Rewriting the Rules,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2000, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB958491110748477546. eBay, the online auction site: Aaron Lucchetti, “eBay IPO, Priced at $18, Breaks a Long Dry Spell,” Wall Street Journal, September 24, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB906553299573701000. He would have earned: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 49.

Chapter 2: Treasure Mountain Park City nearly disappeared: Tina Stahlke Lewis, “How Park City Survived the Ghost Town Years of the 1950s,” Park City Magazine, December 8, 2018, https://www.parkcitymag.com/arts-andculture/2018/12/how-park-city-survived-the-ghost-town-years-of-the-1950s. that become biking routes: “Open Space & Trails,” Park City, https://www.parkcity.org/about-us/bus-bikewalk/open-space-trails. like those of other: “Mining Towns in the Western United States,” Western Mining History, https://westernmininghistory.com/map/. The town was home: Alison Butz, “Park City’s History,” Historic Park City Utah, October 13, 2010, https://historicparkcityutah.com/news/park-citys-history. survived big fires: Jami Balls, “History of Park City,” History to Go, https://historytogo.utah.gov/historypark-city/. catastrophic mine collapses: Tom Clyde, “Tom Clyde: The Second Daly West Mine Disaster,” Park Record, May 15, 2015, https://www.parkrecord.com/opinion/letters/tom-clyde-the-second-daly-west-minedisaster/. were boarded up: Lewis, “How Park City Survived the Ghost Town Years of the 1950s.” appeared in a guidebook: Ibid. 1,150 people still lived there: “Park City History Timeline,” Park City Museum, https://parkcityhistory.org/park-city-historic-timeline/. set on a new course: “Dying Mining Town to Become Ski Resort,” New York Times, April 15, 1963, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/04/15/102285644.html?pageNumber=98. Treasure Mountain ski resort: Shontai M. Pohl, “The Way We Were: Treasure Mountain Inn,” Park Record, June 9, 2015, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city/the-way-we-were-treasuremountain-inn/. about 8,400 people: “Park City city, Utah,” United States Census Bureau, https://data.census.gov/cedsci/profile?g=1600000US4958070. More than 100,000 people: Bubba Brown, “Sundance 2019 Dipped Slightly but Still Brought In $182.5 Million and More than 120K Attendees,” Park Record, May 31, 2019, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/sundance-2019-dipped-slightly-but-still-brought-in-182-5-millionand-more-than-120k-attendees/. walk the press line: Tiffini Porter, “Park City’s Beloved George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center Celebrates 20 Years,” Park City Magazine, December 15, 2017, https://www.parkcitymag.com/artsand-culture/2017/12/stage-of-many-players. current booming industry: Jeff Dempsey, “Park City Area Real Estate Had a Banner Year in 2020,” Park Record, February 14, 2021, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city-area-real-estate-had-a-banneryear-in-2020/. reported the first known: Bubba Brown, “First Known Instance of Coronavirus Community Spread in Summit County Discovered (Updated),” Park Record, March 14, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/officials-announce-first-instance-of-coronavirus-communityspread-in-summit-county/. In the following days: “Declarations/Announcements,” Park City, https://www.parkcity.org/government/covid-19/declarations-announcements.

foresaw an economic crisis: Leia Larsen and Tony Semerad, “With Sales Taxes Down Sharply Due to COVID-19, Utah Cities Face Painful Budget Choices,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 8, 2020, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/06/08/with-sales-taxes-down/. arts and culture district: Sean Higgins, “Park City Council to Revisit Arts and Culture District Funding This Week,” KPCW, February 24, 2021, https://www.kpcw.org/post/park-city-council-revisit-arts-andculture-district-funding-week. thrown into question: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Funding for Arts District Questioned amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” Park Record, December 23, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city/park-cityfunding-for-arts-district-questioned-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/. 1000 Van Ness Avenue: Cindy, “The Don Lee Building,” Art and Architecture, June 20, 2013, https://www.artandarchitecture-sf.com/the-don-lee-building.html. originally designed: “National Register #01001179: Don Lee Building,” NoeHill in San Francisco, https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/nat2001001179.asp. Developers were converting: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 55–56. the group eventually owned: Ibid., 56. OpenTable: “OpenTable Dines Out on $10 Million,” OpenTable, January 8, 2000, https://press.opentable.com/news-releases/news-release-details/opentable-dines-out-10-million/. a native of England: Nathan Mollat, “Dragons FC Soccer Swoops into Burlingame,” San Mateo Daily Journal, December 9, 2014. unable to find: “Who We Are,” Zappos, https://www.zappos.com/about/who-we-are. Tony would later recount: Tony Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-i-did-itzapposs-ceo-on-going-to-extremes-for-customers. offered up some statistics: Jay Yarow, “The Zappos Founder Just Told Us All Kinds of Crazy Stories— Here’s the Surprisingly Candid Interview,” Insider, November 28, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/nick-swinmurn-zappos-rnkd-2011-11. wearing board shorts: Katie Abel, “A Friendship for the Ages: Fred Mossler + the OG Zappos Crew Share Untold Tales About the Incredible Tony Hsieh.” Footwear News, December 21, 2020, https://footwearnews.com/2020/business/retail/tony-hsieh-zappos-friends-legacy-1203085996/. Tony urged Swinmurn: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 58. found Fred Mossler: Abel, “A Friendship for the Ages.” spent eight years: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 60. once Venture Frogs agreed: “Zappos.com, World’s Largest Shoe Store, Receives $1.1 Million in Financing,” PR Newswire, January 19, 2000. he quit: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 61. “Owning the loft”: Ibid., 77. “wasn’t just dumb luck”: Ibid., 89. Tony emailed Zappos staff: Ibid., 94. a round of layoffs: Ibid., 95. faster shipping methods: “20 Years, 20 Milestones: How Zappos Grew Out of Just Shoes,” Zappos, June 5, 2019, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/zappos-20th-birthday. live there rent-free: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 97. before selling the loft: Ibid., 115. posted $70 million: Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers.”

Zappos would give them: “20 Years, 20 Milestones: How Zappos Grew Out of Just Shoes.” Amazon would launch: Jason Del Rey, “The Making of Amazon Prime, the Internet’s Most Successful and Devastating Membership Program,” Vox, May 3, 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/3/18511544/amazon-prime-oral-history-jeff-bezos-one-dayshipping. it had become difficult: Hsieh, “How I Did It.” New hires were offered: Katie Canales, “Tony Hsieh, the Late Former CEO of Zappos, Famously Pioneered the Concept of Paying New, Unhappy Employees $2,000 to Quit in Order to Maintain a Happy, Productive Workforce,” Insider, November 30, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-paid-new-workers-to-quit-the-offer-2020-11. toy cars racing: Rice Sport Management, “Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Featured on 20/20,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfp9LHFIXfI. “We really want”: CBS Sunday Morning, “From 2010: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” YouTube, November 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSHG3EU1EZ4. $635 million: Sarah Lacy, “What Everyone Made from the Zappos Sale,” TechCrunch, July 27, 2009, https://social.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/what-everyone-made-from-the-zappos-sale/. “an e-commerce powerhouse”: Tony Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos,” Inc., June 1, 2010, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html. Some early investors: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 210. “Tony’s social experiments”: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” “The board wanted me”: Ibid. relied on revolving credit: Ibid. had unsuccessfully approached Zappos: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 212. launched its own competitor: Alistair Barr, “Amazon to Close Fashion Website endless.com,” Reuters, September 18, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-amazon-endlessidUKBRE88H1DF20120918. an encounter he described: Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos.” In the video: 07272009july, “Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. “In 20 years”: Matt Rosoff, “Tony Hsieh: Don’t Rule Out a Zappos Airline,” Insider, September 28, 2011, https://www.businessinsider.com/in-20-years-there-could-be-a-zappos-airline-2011-9. he had invented: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 94. His wife had taken: Yitzi Weiner, “Why Zappos Has a Chief Fungineer,” Authority Magazine, January 31, 2019, https://medium.com/authority-magazine/why-zappos-has-a-chief-fungineer-e1bfa283d011. statistics showed: Motoko Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 8, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. So Williams made: Michael Gaskell, “Tyler Williams—Zappos! Core Values,” YouTube, January 24, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uevQ0LYMBo. Called “Porta Parties”: “Meet Porta Party, the World’s Most Reimagined Outhouse,” Zappos, https://www.zappos.com/portaparty. Tony asked him: The Employees of Zappos.com and Dagostino, The Power of WOW, 95. the people who succeed: Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success & Happiness (Lake Dallas, TX: Success Books, 2013). The book outlines: Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, Stealing Fire (New York: Dey Street Books, 2017).

called biohacking: Sigal Samuel, “How Biohackers Are Trying to Upgrade Their Brains, Their Bodies— and Human Nature,” Vox, November 15, 2019, https://www.vox.com/futureperfect/2019/6/25/18682583/biohacking-transhumanism-human-augmentation-genetic-engineeringcrispr. One biohacker described: Ibid. Biohacking started gaining popularity: Roc Morin, “The Man Who Would Make Food Obsolete,” Atlantic, April 28, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-who-wouldmake-eating-obsolete/361058/. described it as tasting “rancid”: Keith A. Spencer, “What Soylent Tells Us about Silicon Valley,” Salon, May 28, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/05/28/what-soylent-tells-us-about-silicon-valley/. raised over $70 million: Craig Giammona, “Soylent Rolls Out Its Drinks to More 7-Eleven Stores, Touting Them as Fast Food,” Hartford Courant, February 5, 2018, https://www.courant.com/la-fi-tn-soylent20180205-story.html. “the most joyless”: Farhad Manjoo, “The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable,” New York Times, May 28, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/the-soylentrevolution-will-not-be-pleasurable.html. “calmer, thinner, extroverted:” Stefanie Marsh, “Extreme Biohacking: The Tech Guru Who Spent $250,000 Trying to Live for Ever,” Guardian, September 21, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/21/extreme-biohacking-tech-guru-who-spent250000-trying-to-live-for-ever-serge-faguet. He detailed his procedure: Serge Faguet, “I’m 32 and Spent $200k on Biohacking. Became Calmer, Thinner, Extroverted, Healthier & Happier,” Hacker Noon, September 24, 2017, https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-became-calmer-thinner-extrovertedhealthier-happier-2a2e846ae113. a drug frequently used: “Lithium for Bipolar Disorder,” WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/bipolardisorder/guide/bipolar-disorder-lithium. “the embodiment of”: Marsh, “Extreme Biohacking.” own annual conference: “8th Annual Biohacking Conference,” Upgrade Labs, https://biohackingconference.com/. the antithesis of an executive: Kirsten Grind and Georgia Wells, “Twitter’s Jack Dorsey: A Hands-Off CEO in a Time of Turmoil,” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/twittersjack-dorsey-a-hands-off-ceo-in-a-time-of-turmoil-11603822774. Dorsey’s practice involves: Molly Longman, “Twitter’s CEO Only Eats One Meal per Day,” Refinery29, January 22, 2020, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/01/9265628/twitter-jack-dorseyintermittent-fasting-one-meal-per-day. He starts his day: Julia Naftulin, “Jack Dorsey Drinks a Concoction Called ‘Salt Juice’ Every Morning, but There’s No Proof It Does Anything Beneficial for Most People,” Insider, May 6, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/why-jack-dorsey-drinks-salt-juice-every-morning-2019-5. He takes ice baths: Grind and Wells, “Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.” its benefits are mixed: Allison Torres Burtka, “Do Ice Baths Work? Why Most People Can Skip the Cold Post-workout Soak, According to Athletic Trainers,” Insider, April 15, 2021, https://www.insider.com/ice-bath. Another time he went: Kirsten Grind, James R. Hagerty, and Katherine Sayre, “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, December 6,

2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-andextreme-behavior-11607264719. The author Michael Pollan discovered: Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (New York: Penguin, 2018). “What was missing”: Ibid., 7. drowned in a flotation tank: Amber Tong, “ ‘Biohacker’ Traywick Accidentally Drowned, Official Confirms,” Endpoints News, July 2, 2018, https://endpts.com/biohacker-traywick-accidentallydrowned-bloomberg/. A relative told: Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Death of a Biohacker,” New York Times, May 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/style/biohacker-death-aaron-traywick.html. Months before his death: Facebook Live video, News2Share, https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/? ref=watch_permalink&v=1668713259903223. Summit Series founders had organized: Paul Lewis, “Welcome to Powder Mountain—a Utopian Club for the Millennial Elite,” Guardian, March 16, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/powder-mountain-ski-resort-summit-eliteclub-rich-millennials. owners in financial distress: Leigh Kamping-Carder, “In Utah, These Entrepreneurs Are Creating Their Own Version of Eden,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/inutah-these-entrepreneurs-are-creating-their-own-version-of-eden-11568905597. “The folks that are here”: Ibid.

Chapter 3: Collisions The festival started: “Welcome to the Burning Man Timeline,” Burning Man, https://burningman.org/timeline/. a startup called Google: “Doodles,” Google, https://www.google.com/doodles/about. “If you haven’t been”: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” Vox, April 3, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/4/3/11625260/at-hbos-silicon-valley-premiere-elonmusk-is-pissed. a term coined by: Jillian D’Onfro, “How Zappos CEO’s Obsession with Raving Helped Him Create a Billion-Dollar Company,” Insider, October 31, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-whyzappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-was-obsessed-with-raving-2014-10. “When you experience it”: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” April 16, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20150829011059/https://www.playboy.com/playground/view/playboyinterview-tony-hsieh-zappos?page=4. “ignited a light”: “Tony Hsieh’s Legacy Reminds Us All of the Importance of Community,” Burning Man Project, December 10, 2020, https://journal.burningman.org/2020/12/news/global-news/tonyhsieh-legacy/. “Gluing a few tchotchkes”: “Art Cars on the Playa,” Burning Man, https://burningman.org/culture/history/art-history/perspectives-on-playa-art/art-cars-on-the-playa/. “What Happens Here”: “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, https://www.lvcva.com/destination-marketing/advertising-campaigns/what-happens-here-stays-here/. fascinated by poker: “What Poker Taught Tony Hsieh About Business,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/what-poker-taught-tony-hsieh-about-business. later taking weekend trips: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 68. “I realized that once”: Ibid., 69. “Most tourists never see”: Timothy Pratt, “What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas,” New York Times Magazine, October 19, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/magazine/what-happens-inbrooklyn-moves-to-vegas.html. The 2008 financial crisis: Caitlyn Belcher, “How We Stack Up: Financial Experts Weigh in on Las Vegas’ Recovery,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 26, 2016, https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/specialfeatures/neon-rebirth/how-we-stack-up-financial-experts-weigh-in-on-las-vegas-recovery/. “human collaboration is the central”: Edward L. Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human (London: Pan Books, 2012), 15. Bob Coffin likened the project: Dave Toplikar, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal Bringing Zappos Downtown,” Las Vegas Sun, February 1, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/01/las-vegas-city-council-approves-final-deal-bringin/. before dawn on a train: “Howard Hughes,” Online Nevada Encyclopedia, https://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/howard-hughes. checked into a penthouse suite: Mary Manning, “Howard Hughes: A Revolutionary Recluse,” Las Vegas Sun, May 15, 2008, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2008/may/15/how-vegas-went-mob-corporate/. “the largest single property owner”: Stefan Al, The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 151. Hughes bought six casinos: “The History of Gaming in Nevada, 1864–1931,” Nevada Resort Association, https://www.nevadaresorts.org/about/history/.

having never ventured out: Tim O’Reiley, “Howard Hughes Changed Vegas,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 28, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/uncategorized/howard-hughes-changed-vegas/. Tony convinced dozens: Aimee Groth, “Five Years in, Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project Is Hardly Any Closer to Being a Real City,” Quartz, January 4, 2017, https://qz.com/875086/five-years-in-tonyhsiehs-downtown-project-is-hardly-any-closer-to-being-a-real-city/. ten thousand new residents: Pratt, “What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas.” it had a headline-grabbing goal: Ibid. Tony came up with: Erica Breunlin, “Zappos CEO Seeks ‘Return on Community,’ ” BizTimes, April 22, 2013, https://biztimes.com/zappos-ceo-seeks-return-on-community/. Downtown Project would create: Figures provided by DTP companies. Tony bought the Gold Spike: Benjamin Spillman, “Downtown Project Buys Gold Spike, Casino to Close on Sunday,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 12, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinosgaming/downtown-project-buys-gold-spike-casino-to-close-on-sunday/. The number of strollers: Kindra Cooper, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on the Evolution of a Billion-Dollar, Mission-Driven Brand,” CCW Digital, July 3, 2019, https://www.customercontactweekdigital.com/customer-experience/articles/tony-hsieh-ccw-vegasdowntown-project. Before he met Tony: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. Plants filled one: Sarah Feldberg, “At Home with Tony Hsieh: Post-its, Llamas and an Indoor Jungle,” Las Vegas Weekly, October 2, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2014/oct/02/home-tony-hsieh-postits-llamas-and-indoor-jungle/#/0. Energy drinks: Aimee Groth, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Incredible Apartment in Las Vegas,” Insider, October 2, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-apartment-las-vegas-20129. He rented fifty: Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune, January 23, 2012, https://fortune.com/2012/01/23/tony-hsiehs-new-350-million-startup/. had proven herself indispensable: Court records filed by attorneys representing Mimi Pham in Las Vegas say that Pham was Tony’s assistant, “right hand person,” and friend for seventeen years before his death, including their sharing an address on their driver’s licenses, his using Pham’s number as his main phone number, and having utilities in her name. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, A-21-828090-C, Eighth District Court of Nevada. With an investment: Nolan Lister, “Film Studio to Spotlight Downtown,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 24, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/film-studio-to-spotlightdowntown/. quit her job: “From International Accountant to Wellth Expert with Suzie Baleson,” Blair Badenhop, March 4, 2018, https://blairbadenhop.com/podcast/international-accountant-to-wellth-expert-withsuzie-baleson/. “Tony collects people”: Sara Corbett, “How Zappos’ CEO Turned Las Vegas into a Startup Fantasyland,” Wired, January 21, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/01/zappos-tony-hsieh-las-vegas/. whom she described: Deepak Chopra said in a statement that Suzie Baleson had been a friend for close to a decade. “We have a friendship and have worked together,” he said. “One can only imagine”: “From International Accountant to Wellth Expert with Suzie Baleson.”

Even her account: Ibid. In a photo: michael_atmore, “Village People,” Instagram, October 14, 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BLi6ubHjz7_/. “produce fitness and wellness-focused events”: Wellth Collective, https://wellthcollective.com/. Airbnb itself: Kirsten Grind, Jean Eaglesham, and Preetika Rana, “Airbnb’s Coronavirus Crisis: Burning Cash, Angry Hosts and an Uncertain Future,” Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnbs-coronavirus-crisis-burning-cash-angry-hosts-and-an-uncertainfuture-11586365860. Airbnb went public: Noor Zainab Hussain and Joshua Franklin, “Airbnb Valuation Surges Past $100 Billion in Biggest U.S. IPO of 2020,” Reuters, December 10, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/airbnb-ipo-idUSKBN28K261. canceled the event: Jay Hamburger, “Tour of Utah, a Big Summertime Event in Park City, Canceled amid Spread of Coronavirus,” Park Record, April 7, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/tour-of-utaha-big-summertime-event-in-park-city-canceled-amid-spread-of-coronavirus/. Next came the shutdown: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Approves Return of Silly Market After 2020 Coronavirus Cancellation,” Park Record, May 1, 2021, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/parkcity/park-city-approves-return-of-silly-market-after-2020-coronavirus-cancellation/. could be in “limbo”: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Summer Tourism Seen in ‘Limbo’ Caused by Coronavirus,” Park Record, April 3, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/park-city-summertourism-seen-in-limbo-caused-by-coronavirus/. bringing back sales tax revenues: Jay Hamburger, “Park City Economy Roared as Coronavirus Raged, City Hall Numbers Show,” Park Record, September 7, 2021, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/parkcity/park-city-economy-roared-as-coronavirus-raged-city-hall-numbers-show/. began helping Tony with: People familiar with Justin Weniger and Suzie Baleson said that they had not been running the 10X project. an annual music festival: Justin Weniger said that Life Is Beautiful is “a community revitalization project aimed at shifting the focus from the problems of our community to the possibility of our community.” never quite earning: Justin Weniger said that he had separated from some of the people in Tony’s inner circle “for a variety of reasons” but that he and Tony had always been “very, very close.” a possible sale: Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Rolling Stone magazine, did not return a request for comment. Weniger was eager: Justin Weniger said he had had “zero interest” in Tony’s Park City business plans. “Utah friends, anyone”: Shaun Kimball, Facebook, July 24, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/shaundiego/posts/10156931155041626.

Chapter 4: Delivering Happiness “backup brain”: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), xv. In just eight days: Motoko Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 9, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. at Tony’s party loft: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 106. they worked on the book: Katie Abel, “Reading Tony Hsieh,” Footwear News, June 1, 2010, https://footwearnews.com/2010/business/news/reading-tony-hsieh-76614/. “We tried coffee”: Ibid. Zappos had reached $1 billion: Jeremy Twitchell, “From Upstart to $1 Billion Behemoth, Zappos Marks 10 Years,” Las Vegas Sun, June 16, 2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jun/16/upstart-1billion-behemoth-zappos-marks-10-year-an/. “So, in terms of this book”: Jack Covert, “Review: ‘Delivering’ Happiness,” Inc., July 1, 2010, https://www.inc.com/articles/2010/07/book-review-delivering-happiness.html. “It is hard not to like”: Paul B. Carroll, “Getting a Foothold Online,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704002104575290742364322212. “We only hire happy people”: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely, and Laura Winig, “Zappos.Com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture,” Harvard Business School Case Study no. 6100015, June 27, 2011. Zappos was named: “100 Best Companies to Work For: Zappos.com,” Fortune, 2015, https://fortune.com/best-companies/2015/zappos-com/. within five to seven years: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 197. averaged 160 hours: According to Zappos. The starting pay: According to Zappos. had hired only 250 people: Tony Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-i-did-itzapposs-ceo-on-going-to-extremes-for-customers. “Job interviews took place”: Noah Askin, Gianpiero Petriglieri, and Joanna Lockard, “Tony Hsieh at Zappos: Structure, Culture and Change,” INSEAD, August 26, 2016, 7. The application forms included: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely, and Laura Winig, “Zappos.Com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture,” Harvard Business School 9-610–015 (June 27, 2011). his staff listed dog day care: Stephen J. Dubner, “PLAYBACK (2015): Could the Next Brooklyn Be… Las Vegas?! (Ep. 205),” produced by Greg Rosalsky, Freakonomics, December 6, 2020, https://freakonomics.com/podcast/playback-tony-hsieh/. if you can do your laundry: nodesireusername, “Google’s HQ—Googleplex, CA,” YouTube, March 25, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sOtjBDPQdU. Zappos encouraged managers: Kai Ryssdal, “Zappos CEO on Corporate Culture and ‘Happiness,’ ” Marketplace, August 19, 2010, https://www.marketplace.org/2010/08/19/zappos-ceo-corporateculture-and-happiness/. “A lot of companies talk”: David Gelles, “At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,” New York Times, July 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-selling-shoes-and-a-vision.html.

another of the reasons: 07272009july, “Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos,” YouTube, July 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. A customer in Florida: Jennie Bell, “Zappos Employees Reveal What Customers Really Call Them About,” Footwear News, May 6, 2019, https://footwearnews.com/2019/business/retail/zapposcustomer-service-stories-calls-1202778070/. “Party with your peers”: Derek Noel, “Driving Company Culture with a Little Bit of Luck,” Zappos, March 24, 2016, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/driving-company-culture-with-a-little-bit-ofluck. The next year: Julianna Young, “Come One, Come All: Annual Vendor Party Runs Away with the ‘Untamed Circus,’ ” Zappos, August 25, 2016, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/untamedcircus. Drai’s Beachclub and Nightclub: Drai’s Beachclub and Nightclub, https://draisgroup.com/las-vegas/. “So if I am around”: Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?” “Is this a cult?”: “Tony Hsieh,” The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, aired August 1, 2011, https://www.cc.com/video/mqbxt0/the-colbert-report-tony-hsieh. “Ideally psychology:” Martin Seligman, “The American Psychological Association 1998 Annual Report President’s Address,” American Psychologist 54, no. 8 (August 1999): 537–68. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.8.537. “pop positive thinking”: Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 168. Eastern philosophies: Daniel Horowitz, Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 104. Cultural movement: Ibid, 7. Positive psychologists tried: Ibid., 148. embraced methods echoing: Ibid. including publishing books: Ibid., 149. it was about happiness leading: Ibid., 158. “Happy, or positive, people”: Ibid., 159. The book argues: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 272–73. “comes from between”: Ibid. achieving a longtime goal: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 231. winning the lottery: Some research has connected winning the lottery with increased overall life satisfaction. See, e.g., Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, and David Cesarini, “Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being,” Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2018, https://doi.org/10.3386/w24667. “The question for you to ask”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 231. Lim, with the help of Tony: Jenn Lim, “How to Achieve (and Keep) a Great Company Culture,” Inc., October 21, 2015, https://www.inc.com/jenn-lim/how-to-achieve-and-keep-a-great-workculture.html. spun off Delivering Happiness: Sindy, “Keeping 2011 SXSW Happy,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/keeping-2011-sxsw-happy. The consulting team would grow: “Meet the Team,” Delivering Happiness, https://www.deliveringhappiness.com/meet-the-team.

Jolly Good Fellow: Steve Lohr, “Hey, Who’s He? With Gwyneth? The Google Guy,” New York Times, September 1, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/technology/01google.html. He developed a mindfulness course: “About,” Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, https://siyli.org/about/. “Imagine two human beings”: Carolyn Gregoire, “Google’s ‘Jolly Good Fellow’ on the Power of Emotional Intelligence,” HuffPost, September 29, 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/googlesjolly-good-fellow_n_3975944. McDonald’s named its mascot clown: Stefano Hatfield, “Lovin’ Every Minute? Not Likely,” Guardian, September 3, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/sep/03/comment. “the latest, creepiest job”: Josh Kovensky, “Chief Happiness Officer Is the Latest, Creepiest Job in Corporate America,” New Republic, July 22, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118804/happiness-officers-are-spreading-across-america-why-its-bad. can have the paradoxical effect: Iris B. Mauss et al., “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11, no. 4 (August 2011): 807–15, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010. In one experiment: Ibid. In a separate study: Iris B. Mauss et al., “The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be Lonely,” Emotion 12, no. 5 (October 2012): 908–12, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025299. Daniel Horowitz, a historian: Horowitz, Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America. Ibid., 274. “hedonic treadmill”: Jennifer Senior, “Happiness Won’t Save You: Philip Brickman Was an Expert in the Psychology of Happiness, but He Couldn’t Make His Own Pain Go Away,” New York Times, November 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/happiness-depression-suicidepsychology.html. Brickman committed suicide: “Professor’s Death Is Termed Suicide,” Detroit Free Press, May 16, 1982. “The best way off”: C. B. Wortman and D. Coates, “Obituary: Philip Brickman (1943–1982),” American Psychologist 40, no. 9 (1985), 1051–52, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092212. Some research has linked: Brett Q. Ford, Iris B. Mauss, and June Gruber, “Valuing Happiness Is Associated with Bipolar Disorder,” Emotion 15, no. 2 (April 2015): 211–22, https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000048. and depression: Brett Q. Ford et al., “Desperately Seeking Happiness: Valuing Happiness Is Associated with Symptoms and Diagnosis of Depression,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33, no. 10 (December 2014): 890–905, https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2014.33.10.890. high levels of positive emotions: June Gruber, Iris B. Mauss, and Maya Tamir, “A Dark Side of Happiness? How, When, and Why Happiness Is Not Always Good,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (May 2011): 222–23, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691611406927. said he had become convinced: Amir Mandel, “Why Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman Gave Up on Happiness,” Haaretz, October 7, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israelnews/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-nobel-prize-winner-daniel-kahneman-gave-up-on-happiness1.6528513. He suffered from: A court filing by the Hsieh family in Las Vegas in August 2021 said, “Despite his professional successes, Tony struggled with significant social anxiety.” Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada,

August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). a developmental disability associated: “Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD),” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 25, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/facts.html. Oliver Sacks wrote devastatingly: Oliver Sacks, “Face-Blind,” New Yorker, August 23, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/face-blind. He took Adderall: A Las Vegas court filing filed by the Hsieh family in August 2021 described the medications Tony had taken. Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). a medication generally associated: “Adderall—Uses, Side Effects, and More,” WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-63163/adderall-oral/details. It should not: “Dangers of Mixing Adderall and Alcohol,” Healthline, February 4, 2019, https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/adderall-and-alcohol. a cross-country road trip: “Delivering Happiness Bus Tour—Tour Map,” Delivering Happiness Bus, September 24, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100924043821/http://deliveringhappinessbus.com/tour. Starting in Las Vegas: “Delivering Happiness Bus Tour—City Stops and Dates,” Delivering Happiness Bus, September 24, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100924005133/http://www.deliveringhappinessbus.com/stops. sack races in Colorado: “Happy Wrap” (video), Delivering Happiness Bus, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/happy-wrap. a happy hour: Jeff Slobotski, “Behind the Scenes of the Delivering Happiness Bus Tour,” Silicon Prairie News, September 7, 2010, https://siliconprairienews.com/2010/09/behind-the-scenes-of-thedelivering-happiness-bus-tour/. hula-hooping in Rhode Island: “Happy Wrap.” caught up with the actor: Amy, “Delivering Happiness with Ashton Kutcher,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/delivering-happiness-with-ashton-kutcher. in a later interview: DeliveringHappiness, “Delivering Happiness with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore —Part One,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-K0r5821Kw. Zappos employees rode: DeliveringHappiness, “Delivering Happiness in Times Square,” YouTube, September 9, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFQL3Yj8QZk.

Chapter 5: The Ghost in the Machine Sold for about $7 million: “2636 Aspen Springs Dr, Park City, UT 84060,” Zillow, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2636-Aspen-Springs-Dr-Park-City-UT-84060/68846639_zpid/. was listed for $14.9 million: Ibid. He offered to pay: Kirsten Grind, James R. Hagerty, and Katherine Sayre, “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-and-extremebehavior-11607264719. “explained to me”: Ibid. lived in the $4 million: “1422 Empire Ave, Park City, UT 84060,” Zillow, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1422-Empire-Ave-Park-City-UT-84060/89095788_zpid/. trails that can reach: “Open Space & Trails,” Park City, https://www.parkcity.org/about-us/bus-bikewalk/open-space-trails. On those long walks: Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage: Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques to Help You Become Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter (New York: William Morrow, 2016). SpaceX had launched two astronauts: Andy Pasztor, “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts into Orbit,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-triesagain-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001. He began repeating: Adrienne Burke, “Why Zappos CEO Hsieh Wants to Enable More Collisions in Vegas,” Forbes, November 15, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2013/11/15/whyzappos-ceo-hsieh-wants-to-enable-more-collisions-in-vegas/. “Cities have stood”: Wharton School, “Tony Hsieh | 2016 Wharton People Analytics Conference,” YouTube, June 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81uYlpLzuJY. Tony’s thinking seemed inspired: “Video: Watch Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Talk on Urban Renewal in Santa Fe,” Santa Fe Institute, September 30, 2014, https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/hsiehtalk-announce. Geoffrey West: Luis M. A. Bettencourt et al., “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 17 (April 24, 2007): 7301–06, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0610172104. His and others’ work: Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, “A Unified Theory of Urban Living,” Nature, October 21, 2010, https://www.nature.com/articles/467912a. as a city doubled in size: Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times, December 17, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html. a 15 percent rise: Ibid. crime, traffic congestion: Bettencourt and West, “A Unified Theory of Urban Living.” more than three-quarters: Zack Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on Getting Rid of Managers: What I Wish I’d Done Differently,” CNBC, September 13, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/13/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-the-thing-i-regret-about-getting-rid-ofmanagers.html. “I think of my role”: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 131.

about two hundred corporate leaders: Conscious Capitalism, “A Look at the 2019 CEO Summit,” https://www.consciouscapitalism.org/story/2019-ceo-summit. Conscious Capitalism offered an answer: Rachel Emma Silverman, “At ‘Conscious Capitalism’ Gathering, CEOs Say Business Isn’t Bad,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-conscious-capitalism-gathering-ceos-say-business-isnt-bad1477408088. as having a rebellious streak: HolacracyOne, “Brian Robertson’s Personal Journey with Holacracy®—at Zappos’ All Hands,” YouTube, April 1, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vstsmA_cc7o. after he had nearly crashed: TEDx Talks, “Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management | Brian Robertson | TEDxGrandRapids,” YouTube, July 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=tJxfJGo-vkI. with only twenty hours: TEDx Talks, “Why Not Ditch Bosses and Distribute Power: Brian Robertson at TEDxDrexelU,” YouTube, June 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR-8AOccyj4. “How do I build”: TEDx Talks, “Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management.” “Research shows”: Brian J. Robertson, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), 15. Holacracy is a form: Holacracy, https://www.holacracy.org. “where all members”: Davi Gabriel da Silva, “Holacracy: Quick Beginner’s Guide,” Target Teal, March 1, 2017, https://targetteal.com/en/blog/holacracy-quick-beginners-guide/. Problems are called “tensions”: Chris Cowan, “Holacracy® Basics: Understanding Tensions,” Holacracy, May 25, 2018, https://blog.holacracy.org/holacracy-basics-understanding-tensions-98fc3c032acf. Each circle holds governance meetings: “Governance Meetings,” Holacracy, https://www.holacracy.org/governance-meetings. The Ghost in the Machine: Steve Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy,” Forbes, January 15, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-andholacracy/. things that are simultaneously independent: Kurt C. Stange, “A Science of Connectedness,” Annals of Family Medicine 7, no. 5 (September 2009): 387–95, https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.990. known as a holarchy: Denning, “Making Sense of Zappos and Holacracy.” “It captured the spirit”: Brian Robertson, “History of Holacracy®,” Holacracy, July 28, 2014, https://blog.holacracy.org/history-of-holacracy-c7a8489f8eca. He announced the change: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Is Going Holacratic: No Job Titles, No Managers, No Hierarchy,” Quartz, December 30, 2013, https://qz.com/161210/zappos-is-going-holacratic-no-jobtitles-no-managers-no-hierarchy/. The event also included: Ibid. a 4,500-word email: Tony Hsieh, “CEO Letter: A Teal Organization,” Zappos, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/a-teal-organization. Laloux created an overview: Frederic Laloux, “Reinventing Organizations,” Excerpt and Summaries, Change Factory, March 2014, https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/uploads/2/1/9/8/21988088/140305_laloux_reinventing_ organizations.pdf. wisdom of emotions: Ibid. “Like all the bold steps”: Hsieh, “CEO Letter.” In early May 2015: Rachel Emma Silverman, “At Zappos, Some Employees Find Offer to Leave Too Good to Refuse,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-zappos-some-

employees-find-offer-to-leave-too-good-to-refuse-1431047917. That number increased: Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on Getting Rid of Managers.” Tony felt frustrated: Gregory Ferenstein, “The Zappos Exodus Wasn’t About Holacracy, Says Tony Hsieh,” Fast Company, January 19, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3055657/the-zappos-exoduswasnt-about-holacracy-says-tony-hsieh. founded more than four hundred: According to a spokeswoman for Virgin. “The most extraordinary people”: VirginLimitedEdition, “Richard Branson’s Story of Necker Island,” YouTube, April 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STCqSXCbbcw. He and Tony had crossed paths: Richard Branson, “Tony Hsieh Remembered,” Virgin, November 30, 2020, https://virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/tony-hsieh-remembered. “I love you,” Tony thought: Inspiringchildren, “Tony Hsieh & Jewel Conversation @Zappos All Hands,” YouTube, February 15, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_8e5BNBwA. Jewel Kilcher had relied: Jewel, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2015). after Tony invited her: Inspiringchildren, “Tony Hsieh & Jewel Conversation @Zappos All Hands.” Jewel had herself struggled: Jewel, “My Life’s Work Has Not Been About Music. It Has Been About Solving for Pain,” Vogue, May 27, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/jewel-mental-health. “an urban version of Burning Man”: Noah Kulwin, “Tony Hsieh Wants Us to Forget the Zappos Drama and Behold the ‘Rainforest,’ ” Vox, May 18, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11698856/zappos-tony-hsieh-holocracy-video-code-commerce. “world’s largest living room”: Alan Snel, “Different Sites in Downtown Las Vegas Both Feature Airstream Trailers,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 3, 2015, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/different-sites-in-downtown-las-vegas-both-featureairstream-trailers/. Five cats lived there: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 94. he had spontaneously adopted: Ibid., p. 97. Sarah Jessica Parker posed: Ibid. Tony was suffering from: A filing by the Hsieh family in August 2021 in a Las Vegas court confirms that Tony suffered from “significant social anxiety.” When Tyler Williams was asked: Yitzi Weiner, “Why Zappos Has a Chief Fung-ineer,” Authority Magazine, January 31, 2019, https://medium.com/authority-magazine/why-zappos-has-a-chieffungineer-e1bfa283d011. have limited access to care: Azza Altiraifi and Nicole Rapfogel, “Mental Health Care Was Severely Inequitable, Then Came the Coronavirus Crisis,” Center for American Progress, September 10, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/disability/reports/2020/09/10/490221/mental-health-careseverely-inequitable-came-coronavirus-crisis/. as violent, unpredictable: Julio Arboleda-Flórez and Heather Stuart, “From Sin to Science: Fighting the Stigmatization of Mental Illnesses,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 57, no. 8 (August 2012): 457–63, https://doi.org/10.1177/070674371205700803. Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry launched: Mary Louise Kelly, Elena Burnett, and Courtney Dorning, “Oprah and Prince Harry on Mental Health, Therapy and Their New TV Series,” NPR, May 21, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999229547/-this-is-a-service-to-the-world-oprah-and-princeharry-on-new-mental-health-seri.

“You see everything”: Kanye West on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, Netflix, aired May 31, 2019. around 17 million at the time: Michael Sheetz, “Elon Musk Asked His Twitter Followers for Tesla Feedback—Here’s What They Said,” CNBC, December 26, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/26/elon-musk-asked-his-twitter-followers-for-tesla-feedback--hereswhat-they-said.html. “The reality is great highs”: Elon Musk, Twitter, July 30, 2017, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/891710778205626368. while hosting Saturday Night Live: Rebecca Elliott and John Jurgensen, “Elon Musk on ‘SNL’ Says He Has Asperger’s, Jokes About Dogecoin,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-quips-about-his-aspergers-to-kick-off-snl-host-gig11620534790. a study that continued: Michael A. Freeman et al., “The Prevalence and Co-Occurrence of Psychiatric Conditions Among Entrepreneurs and Their Families,” Small Business Economics 53, no. 2 (August 2019): 323–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-0059-8. “Are entrepreneurs touched”: Michael A. Freeman, Sheri L. Johnson, Paige J. Staudenmaier, and Mackenzie R. Zisser, “Are Entrepreneurs ‘Touched with Fire?’ ” Pre-Publication Manuscript, April 17, 2015, https://www.michaelafreemanmd.com/Research_files/Are%20Entrepreneurs%20Touched%20with%2 0Fire%20(pre-pub%20n)%204-17-15.pdf. one in five people experiences: “You Are Not Alone,” National Alliance on Mental Illness, 2020, https://www.nami.org/NAMI/media/NAMIMedia/Infographics/NAMI_YouAreNotAlone_2020_FINAL.pdf. committed suicide: “RSS Creator Aaron Swartz Dead at 26,” Harvard Magazine, January 14, 2013, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/rss-creator-aaron-swartz-dead-at-26. “I feel ashamed”: Aaron Swartz, “Sick,” Raw Thought, November 27, 2007, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick. He told people: According to a Las Vegas court filing by the Hsieh family in August 2021. Though the parade: “Kalispell, Bigfork Fourth of July Parades Canceled,” Daily Inter Lake, June 2, 2020, https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2020/jun/02/kalispell-bigfork-fourth-of-july-parades-6/.

Chapter 6: A Creative Solution Tony had enticed: Aimee Groth, “Five Years In, Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project Is Hardly Any Closer to Being a Real City,” Quartz, January 5, 2017, https://qz.com/875086/five-years-in-tony-hsiehsdowntown-project-is-hardly-any-closer-to-being-a-real-city/. commitment to spend $350 million: “$350M Investment,” DTP Companies, https://dtplv.com/breakdown/. One of the first to move: Jennifer Robison, “With Boom Over, Las Vegas Enters Era of Normal,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 28, 2012, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/with-boomover-las-vegas-enters-era-of-normal/. The Vegas Tech Fund: Alyson Shontell, “A Grave Financial Error Sank a Startup and Contributed to Its Founder’s Suicide,” Insider, April 24, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/jody-sherman-ecomomand-a-grave-financial-error-2013-4. For Ecomom, that included: “Ecomom and David Arquette Help Fight Hunger in the U.S.,” Ecomom, May 30, 2012, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ecomom-and-david-arquette-help-fighthunger-in-the-us-155701935.html. Sherman died: Andrea Chang, “After Jody Sherman Death, Tech Community Seeks Dialogue on Suicide,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-feb01-la-fi-tn-jody-sherman-death-20130201-story.html. the company had burned: Shontell, “A Grave Financial Error Sank a Startup and Contributed to Its Founder’s Suicide.” shut Ecomom down: Sarah Lacy, “Ecomom Is Liquidating and Shutting Down; Investors Are Stunned,” Pando, February 14, 2013, https://pandodaily.com/2013/02/15/ecomom-is-liquidating-and-shuttingdown-investors-are-stunned. a public mental health discussion: Chang, “After Jody Sherman Death, Tech Community Seeks Dialogue on Suicide.” the pressures: Patrick Clark, “After Suicide of Jody Sherman, a Call to Talk About the Emotional Strain of Life at Startups,” Observer, January 31, 2013, https://observer.com/2013/01/after-suicide-of-jodysherman-a-call-to-talk-about-the-emotional-strain-of-life-at-startups/. died by suicide: One of the suicides was listed as an apparent suicide. See Nellie Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?,” Vox, October 1, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/11631452/the-downtown-project-suicides-can-the-pursuit-ofhappiness-kill-you. “a jarring moment”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?” had launched a manufacturing company: Ingrid Lunden, “Tony Hsieh, Vegas Tech Fund Put $10M into Factorli, a Factory for US Hardware Startups,” TechCrunch, May 21, 2014, https://social.techcrunch.com/2014/05/21/tony-hsieh-vegas-tech-fund-put-10m-into-factorli-afactory-for-us-hardware-startups/. Her company was even mentioned: “Remarks by the President at the White House Maker Faire,” The White House, June 18, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2014/06/18/remarks-president-white-house-maker-faire. “I just trusted Tony”: Nellie Bowles, “Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project,” Vox, September 30, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/11631412/factorli-an-early-casualty-ofthe-las-vegas-downtown-project.

Factorli shut down: Alan Snel, “Downtown Tech Manufacturer Factorli Closes,” Las Vegas ReviewJournal, August 12, 2014, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtown-tech-manufacturerfactorli-closes/. and other businesses there were closing: Bowles, “Factorli, an Early Casualty of the Las Vegas Downtown Project.” had decided to move away: Joe Schoenmann, “Joe Downtown: Is Romotive’s Departure a Sign of the Future?,” Las Vegas Weekly, March 20, 2013, https://lasvegasweekly.com/column/joedowntown/2013/mar/20/joe-downtown-vegastechfunds-romotive-silicon-valle/. Tony had picked up detractors: Leah Meisterlin, “Antipublic Urbanism: Las Vegas and the Downtown Project,” Avery Review, http://averyreview.com/issues/3/antipublic-urbanism. without consideration: Joe Schoenmann, “Joe Downtown: Gentrification or Positive Progress? The Great Downtown Debate,” Las Vegas Sun, June 20, 2013, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jun/20/joedowntown-not-everyone-embracing-downtown-proje/. Downtown Project stopped using: Joe Schoenmann, “Joe Downtown: Hsieh Says Downtown Project Not a Charity, Can’t Solve Every Community Problem,” Las Vegas Sun, February 7, 2014, https://vegasinc.lasvegassun.com/business/2014/feb/07/joe-downtown-hsieh-says-downtown-projectnot-chari/. There are a lot: “Downtown Project: Collisions, Co-Learning, Connectness,” Evernote, February 7, 2014, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/sh/66aed622-6730-4009-86b02d2ffe7ea26f/0fca9f01d630275220b4caea45a4bb41. and instead turn to: Ibid. Downtown Project laid off: Alan Snel, “Downtown Project Lays Off 30 Workers; Hsieh Role Unchanged,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 30, 2014, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtownproject-lays-off-30-workers-hsieh-role-unchanged/. called a “bloodletting”: Las Vegas Weekly Staff, “ ‘Bloodletting’ at Downtown Project with Massive Layoffs,” Las Vegas Weekly, September 30, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-seeit/2014/sep/30/breaking-bloodletting-downtown-project-layoffs/. “a collage of decadence”: Las Vegas Weekly Staff, “An Open Letter to Tony Hsieh from Former DTPer David Gould,” Las Vegas Weekly, September 29, 2014, https://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-seeit/2014/sep/30/david-gould-letter-resignation-tony-hsieh-DTP/. Vox noted that: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?” “I’m not on the board”: Snel, “Downtown Tech Manufacturer Factorli Closes.” “Suicides happen anywhere”: Bowles, “The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?” skipping out on shifts: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019). Zappos said that for a short time in 2015, the challenge had been “having enough team members available during certain windows to fill them,” not workers’ skipping shifts. not enough resources: Bethany Tomasian, “Q&A with John Bunch: Holacracy Helps Zappos Swing from Job Ladder to Job Jungle Gym,” Workforce.com, March 29, 2019, https://workforce.com/news/qawith-john-bunch-holacracy-helps-zappos-swing-from-job-ladder-to-job-jungle-gym. meetings in each “circle”: Virginia Heffernan, “Meet Is Murder,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/meet-is-murder.html. had given it up: Andy Doyle, “Management and Organization at Medium,” Medium, March 4, 2016, https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9.

which the company blamed: Ibid. “If every circle”: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Has Quietly Backed Away from Holacracy,” Yahoo! Quartz, January 29, 2020, https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacracy090102533.html. Amazon’s famously aggressive: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruisingworkplace.html. he dashed one off: Ben Bergman, “Former Amazon Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke on Why He Left, Unionization and ‘Nomadland,’ ” GeekWire, May 3, 2021, https://dot.la/jeff-wilke-2652855402.html. “You’re tired”: Patti Greco, “What Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Does All Day,” WeWork, September 17, 2019, https://www.wework.com/ideas/professional-development/management-leadership/what-doeszappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-do-all-day. at least seven hours of sleep: “Sleep and Sleep Disorders: Data and Statistics,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 2, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html. Tony had long before: Zappos said that the company has a drug-and alcohol-use policy that prohibits illegal drug use in the workplace and requires that alcohol consumption in company offices or at work-related events be done responsibly. He had even built: The Employees of Zappos.com and Dagostino, The Power of WOW, 49. At Cirque Lodge: During the author Kirsten Grind’s visit to Cirque Lodge in May 2021, Cirque provided several therapists for her to speak with about the facility and drug and alcohol addiction in general. its website asks: “Understanding Alcohol Use Disorder,” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, April 2021, https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Alcohol_Use_Disorder_0.pdf. “Psychedelics are really”: Rick Doblin, “The Future of Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy,” TED2019, April 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_doblin_the_future_of_psychedelic_assisted_psychotherapy. rather than arrest him: Weniger said, “Clearly, neither Suzie or I could have any influence in directing law enforcement or medical personnel.” He said that he and Baleson had worked with police “to build a profile of who Tony was and how he was thinking and what the best potential tactic in approaching him might be.” Instead, the house was cleaned: Some parties involved dispute that the house was cleaned.

Chapter 7: The Family Business read a December 1987 headline: Cinda Becker, “Local Boy Has Got What It Takes!,” San Rafael News, December 1, 1987. Tony had launched: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 13. Tony mailed them back: Ibid., 13. Customers found him: Ibid. What caught the local reporter’s: Becker, “Local Boy Has Got What It Takes!” enrolled in a US university: The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed that Chuan-Kang Hsieh, known as Richard, enrolled in 1969, and Shiao-Ling Lee Hsieh, known as Judy, enrolled in 1968. The registrations did not include their names Richard and Judy. that banned or severely limited: D’Vera Cohn, “How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History,” Pew Research Center, September 30, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2015/09/30/how-u-s-immigration-laws-and-rules-have-changed-through-history/. In the early 1960s: Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts About Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/. signed into law: “Signing of the Immigration and Nationality Act, October 3, 1965,” LBJ Presidential Library, https://www.lbjlibrary.org/object/text/signing-immigration-and-nationality-act-10-03-1965. It set a cap: “Overturning Exclusion, Limiting Immigration,” United States House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/APA/Historical-Essays/Exclusion-toInclusion/Overturning-Exclusion-Limiting-Immigration/. The new system had preferences: Ibid. students from Taiwan: Kevin O’Neil, “Brain Drain and Gain: The Case of Taiwan,” Migration Policy Institute, September 1, 2003, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/brain-drain-and-gain-casetaiwan. a nine-thousand-person demonstration: “Student Life at Illinois: 1960–1969,” Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois, https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/researcheducation/timeline/1960-1969/. Taiwanese students created: Salvatore De Sando, “Illini Everywhere: Taiwanese Illini, Since 1922,” Student Life and Culture Archives, University of Illinois, February 28, 2018, https://archives.library.illinois.edu/slc/taiwanese-illini/. a doctoral degree in chemical engineering: The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed that Chuan-Kang Hsieh had earned a master’s of science in chemical engineering in June 1971 and a doctor of philosophy in chemical engineering in June 1973. He had been known as Richard, though the university did not have the name Richard on file. a master’s degree in social work: The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed that Shiao-Ling Lee Hsieh had earned a master’s in social work in 1971. She had been known as Judy, but the university did not have the name Judy registered. She would later earn: “Qualifications,” Dr. Judy Hsieh, http://www.drjudyhsieh.com/qualifications.html. “your typical Asian American parents”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 7. being called “doctor”: Ibid., 9.

learning to play musical instruments: ABC News, “The Mastermind of ‘Delivering Happiness,’ ” YouTube, August 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OBZFVwu1s. The Hsiehs socialized: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 8. “That was just part”: Ibid. studied piano, violin: Ibid., 9. played tape recordings: “From 2010: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh,” Sunday Morning, CBS, https://www.cbs.com/shows/cbs-sundaymorning/video/FKDsNLkN8DgpY6XUIa_yrCgegIpzFdod/from-2010-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh/. “I always fantasized”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 10. Today, Branson charges: “Admissions FAQ,” The Branson School, https://www.branson.org/admissions/faq. studied Japanese, Spanish, French: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 18. he also joined: Ibid., 18–19. He got another paying gig: Ibid., 20. using the computer lab’s dial-up system: Ibid., 16. an earthworm farm: SBN Staff, “Zappos’ Tony Hsieh on the Role of Fun in a Company’s Success,” Smart Business Network, April 1, 2015, https://www.sbnonline.com/article/zappos-tony-hsieh-on-the-roleof-fun-in-a-companys-success/. the Delivering Happiness bus visited: Amy, “On a Worm Farm… Where It All Began,” Delivering Happiness, https://blog.deliveringhappiness.com/blog/on-a-worm-farm-where-it-all-began. a magic tricks kit: James R. Hagerty, “Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Dies at 46 from Injuries Connected to House Fire,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-dies-at-46-11606572300. received hundreds of mail orders: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 14. He missed his last dance: Motoko Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?,” New York Times, April 9, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html. In his senior yearbook: The Branson School, http://gencat.eloquentsystems.com/branson_permalink.html?key=382. When the New York Times asked: Rich, “Why Is This Man Smiling?” Asian Americans are less likely: Michael S. Spencer et al., “Discrimination and Mental Health–Related Service Use in a National Study of Asian Americans,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 12 (December 2010): 2410–17, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.176321. high cultural expectations: Koko Nishi, “Mental Health Among Asian-Americans,” American Psychological Association, 2012, https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asianamerican/article-mental-health. the myth of the “model minority”: Connie Hanzhang Jin, “6 Charts That Dismantle the Trope of Asian Americans as a Model Minority,” NPR, May 25, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/999874296/6-charts-that-dismantle-the-trope-of-asian-americansas-a-model-minority. Tony stood onstage: Aimee Groth, The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia (New York: Touchstone, 2017), 213. managed a pan-Asian restaurant: GraceAnn Walden, “Venture Frogs Leaps on the Scene,” SFGATE, April 12, 2000, https://www.sfgate.com/insidescoop/article/Venture-Frogs-Leaps-on-the-Scene2764663.php.

with Silicon Valley references: “Venture Frogs Restaurant,” Venture Frogs, https://web.archive.org/web/20010211030141/http://www.vfrogs.com/restaurant/press_release.html. “I’m not opposed”: Alex Williams, “Dating Profiles of High-Tech, High-Worth Bachelors,” New York Times, June 7, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/06/07/fashion/20120607BACHELOR-ETTES/s/20120607-BACHELOR-slide-Z2XQ.html. Willow Smith: “Willow Smith Opens Up About Being Polyamorous,” BBC News, April 29, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-56852099. “I think it’s pretty hard”: David Hockman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 16, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20150829011059/https://www.playboy.com/playground/view/playboyinterview-tony-hsieh-zappos?page=4. The last time: Nick Swinmurn, “RIP Tony,” Medium, November 28, 2020, https://nickswinmurn.medium.com/rip-tony-6e99695ae3de. Tony seemed confused: Ibid. Tony agreed to pay Andy: Attorneys for Mimi Pham have stated this $1 million agreement in court records. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh, and Andrew Hsieh, No. A-21-828090-C. He’d gotten bachelor’s and master’s: Andrew Hsieh, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhsi3h/. Andy Hsieh tried: Jessica Guynn, “Facebook IPO Fuels Bay Area Spending Boom,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2012, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-may-17-la-fi-facebook-boom20120517-story.html. So in 2013: Kristy Totten, “Lux Delux Now Delivering Meals by Bicycle,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 3, 2013, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/lux-delux-now-delivering-meals-bybicycle/.

Chapter 8: Utopia “The wiser course”: “A Human Approach to World Peace,” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, https://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/a-human-approach-to-world-peace. He dispatched: According to schedules viewed by the authors. “The employee’s sphere”: Pravir Malik, “Forbes Articles on Light,” Medium, November 13, 2020, https://pravirmalik.medium.com/forbes-articles-on-light-ef3e8f469fc8. Frankl wrote: “Statue of Responsibility,” Statue of Responsibility Foundation, 2021, https://www.statueofresponsibility.com/. Daniel Park Elmhorst: “I Tried Out for America’s Got Talent!,” Daniel Park Music, January 15, 2012, http://www.danielparkmusic.com/news/2012/01/15/americas-got-talent. Victoria Recaño: “Victoria Recaño,” Inside Edition, https://www.insideedition.com/bios/victoria-recano. she had cofounded and designed: Janice Lopez, application to the Weber County Ogden Valley Planning Commission, June 25, 2019, http://www.webercountyutah.gov/agenda_files/G4%20%20OVPC%20Packet%20to%20County%20C ommission.pdf. Rachael Brown: Michael Boley, “Meet The Women Who’ve Changed Zappos History,” Zappos, March 5, 2019, https://www.zappos.com/about/stories/womens-history-zappos. A cellist, Brown had trained: John Katsilometes, “Vegas Musician Owns House at Center of Tony Hsieh Incident,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 29, 2020. https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/kats/vegas-musician-ownshouse-at-center-of-tony-hsieh-incident-2195958/. Tony’s “soul mate”: Rick Lessard, “OCME Says Smoke Inhalation from New London Fire Killed Zappos Founder,” FOX61, November 30, 2020, https://www.fox61.com/article/news/local/man-dies-as-aresult-of-new-london-fire/520-28ae7356-d2f5-4cf4-992e-c93f67818536. the house she had purchased: Some people interviewed by the authors said Tony had purchased the house for Brown and transferred the title to her. Brown’s $1.3 million house: Taylor Hartz, “What Happened Nov. 18 at 500 Pequot Avenue?,” The Day, October 10, 2021, https://www.theday.com/article/20201205/NWS01/201209647. her parents still live nearby: Property records of Rachael’s parents, Lynn and Jean Brown. a real-life Schitt’s Creek: Kirsten Grind, “Schitt’s Creek, but in Real Life: Owner Tries Selling California Desert Town,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/schitts-creek-but-inreal-life-owner-tries-selling-california-desert-town-11622126653. which wanted to build: Derek Hawkins, “Cannabis Company Aims to Turn California Ghost Town into an Oasis for Weed Lovers,” Washington Post, August 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/08/cannabis-company-aims-toturn-california-ghost-town-into-an-oasis-for-weed-lovers/. He wanted to get involved: “Don Knight—Cannabis Connoisseur and Entrepreneur,” Pfeiffer Law, September 26, 2018, https://www.pfeifferlaw.com/entertainment-law-blog/don-knight-cannabisconnoisseur-and-entrepreneur. estimated years earlier: Peter Holley, “Why This CEO Is Worth Almost $1 Billion but Lives in a Trailer Park,” Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theswitch/wp/2015/07/21/why-a-ceo-worth-840-million-lives-in-a-trailer-park-with-his-pet-alpaca/.

$30,000 per month: The family of Tony Hsieh claimed in court filings that Pham’s compensation had increased to that amount in 2020 after she had previously been paid a $9,000 monthly fee. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, n.d. when Tony wanted to retrofit: Pham filed a claim against Tony Hsieh’s estate through one of her companies, Baby Monster LLC, related to the bus retrofitting contract. See In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Creditor’s Claim, Baby Monster LLC, March 3, 2021, Case No. P-20-105105-E, Eighth Judicial District Court, Clark County, Nevada. her business: “What We Do,” Wellth Collective, 2017, https://wellthcollective.com/get-wellthy/. who called herself: Emails obtained from city officials in Park City describe Suzie Baleson as Tony Hsieh’s business manager, and she said the same to others in Park City; a spokesperson for Baleson disputes that she held that role. now referred to himself: Weniger disputed in fact-checking that he had referred to himself as Tony’s bodyguard. As an organizer: Justin Weniger 3rd, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-weniger-16472a10/. a former competitive swimmer: “USMS Individual Meet Results for Elizabeth M Pezzello (11 Swims),” U.S. Masters Swimming, https://www.usms.org/comp/meets/indresults.php?SwimmerID=071YZ. Miss New York USA contestant: Elizabeth Pezzello, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/leeza_piza/? hl=en. she had briefly worked: Elizabeth Pezzello, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-pezzello5ba07aa7/. an investment manager: Brett Gorman, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-gorman9a9a443b/. For that job and several others: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. The glossy newsletter: We reviewed newsletters produced by Gorman. Tony’s brother Andy: Grind and Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers.”

Chapter 9: Good and Evil Reconciled Into this pervading genius: Quoted in Adam Green, “Oh Excellent Air Bag”: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920 (Cambridge, UK: PDR Press, 2016), 89. The sound of running water: The video “The Nitrous Oxygen Advantage” was viewed by the authors. uses her soothing, trained voice: Much of Victora Recaño’s script was copied directly from Dmitri Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,” Atlantic, May 1996, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/. discovered two centuries ago: Mark A. Gillman, “Mini-review: A Brief History of Nitrous Oxide (N2O) Use in Neuropsychiatry,” Current Drug Research Reviews 11, no. 1 (February 26, 2019): 12–20, https://doi.org/10.2174/1874473711666181008163107. sometimes leads to hallucinations: Matthew Mo Kin Kwok, Jane de Lemos, and Mazen Sharaf, “DrugInduced Psychosis and Neurological Effects Following Nitrous Oxide Misuse: A Case Report,” British Columbia Medical Journal 61, no. 10 (December 2019): 385–87, https://bcmj.org/articles/druginduced-psychosis-and-neurological-effects-following-nitrous-oxide-misuse-case-report. it fades away: James P. Zacny et al., “Time Course of Effects of Brief Inhalations of Nitrous Oxide in Normal Volunteers,” Addiction 89, no. 7 (July 1994): 831–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.13600443.1994.tb00986.x. alleviate the symptoms: Jim Dryden, “Laughing Gas Relieves Symptoms in People with TreatmentResistant Depression,” Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, June 9, 2021, https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/laughing-gas-relieves-symptoms-in-people-with-treatment-resistantdepression/. and labor pain: Shawn Collins et al., “Nitrous Oxide for the Management of Labor Analgesia,” AANA Journal 86, no. 1 (February 2018): 72–80, https://www.aana.com/docs/default-source/aana-journalweb-documents-1/journal-course-6-nitrous-oxide-for-the-management-of-labor-anesthesia-february2018.pdf?sfvrsn=442d42b1_6. One pure hit can cause: Jan van Amsterdam, Ton Nabben, and Wim van den Brink, “Recreational Nitrous Oxide Use: Prevalence and Risks,” Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 73, no. 3 (December 2015): 790–96, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yrtph.2015.10.017. can make a person disassociate: “Nitrous Oxide,” Alcohol and Drug Foundation, https://adf.org.au/drugfacts/nitrous-oxide/. William James: Jane S. Moon, Catherine M. Kuza, and Manisha S. Desai, “William James, Nitrous Oxide, and the Anaesthetic Revelation,” Journal of Anesthesia History 4, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janh.2017.10.012. who went on to become: “William James,” Department of Psychology, Harvard University, https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/william-james. “Nevertheless, the sense”: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Digireads.com Publishing, 2011), 213. he first used the term: “Stream of Consciousness,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/stream-of-consciousness. while high on nitrous oxide: Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher.” “What’s a mistake”: Quoted in Adam Green, “Oh Excellent Air Bag”: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920. profoundly influenced James’s thinking: Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher.”

who suffered from bouts: Peter Gibbon, “The Thinker Who Believed in Doing,” Humanities 39, no. 1 (Winter 2018), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/winter/feature/the-thinker-who-believed-indoing-0. wondered whether nitrous oxide: Moon et al., “William James, Nitrous Oxide, and the Anaesthetic Revelation.” after being introduced: Tymoczko, “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher.” Rolling Stone profiled: Robin Green, “Nitrous Oxide: After Acid, Wha’? Researches Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide and Its Respiration,” Rolling Stone, July 3, 1975, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nitrous-oxide-234197/. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: William E. Schmidt, “U.S. Indicts Oregon Guru and Says He Tried to Flee Country,” New York Times, October 29, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/29/us/us-indictsoregon-guru-and-says-he-tried-to-flee-country.html. Rajneeshpuram: Hugh Urban “Rajneeshpuram Was More than a Utopia in the Desert. It Was a Mirror of the Time,” Humanities 39, no. 2 (Spring 2018), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2018/spring/feature/rajneeshpuram-was-more-utopia-desert-it-wasmirror. had a special dental room: Swami Devageet, Osho: The First Buddha in the Dental Chair: Amusing Anecdotes by His Personal Dentist (Boulder, CO: Sammasati Publishing, 2013). “His dentist, a follower”: Ibid. wrote down the meandering thoughts: Rusty King, “Minisode 3: Noah’s Ark,” Building Utopia: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, January 20, 2019, https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9idWlsZGluZ3V0b3BpYXBvZGNhc3QubGlic3lu LmNvbS9yc3M? sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwiQ4uWmxZjzAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&hl=en; Devageet, Osho the First Buddha in the Dental Chair. He called the dental chamber: Devageet, Osho the First Buddha in the Dental Chair. published as three books: King, “Minisode 3: Noah’s Ark.” “It must be absolutely unprecedented”: King, “Minisode 3: Noah’s Ark.” in 1984, his followers committed: Scott Keyes, “A Strange but True Tale of Voter Fraud and Bioterrorism,” Atlantic, June 10, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/a-strange-but-truetale-of-voter-fraud-and-bioterrorism/372445/. poisoning more than 750 people: Ibid. The FBI learned: “Rajneeshee Bioterror Attack,” Homeland Security Digital Library, https://www.hsdl.org/c/tl/rajneeshee-bioterror-attack/. law enforcement scrambled: “Information Bulletin—Raves,” National Drug Intelligence Center, Department of Justice, April 2001, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs/656/656t.htm#History. three people died: Michael Connelly, “Deaths of 3 Men, Source of Gas Tanks Investigated,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-10-me-3490-story.html. Fliers for raves: Ibid. in 1998 a video game developer: “Video Game: Sony PlayStation N2O: Nitrous Oxide,” Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/video-game-sony-playstation-n2o-nitrousoxide/LAFuj8dleUwHMg. with promotions that declared: Michael Colton, “To Some Critics, N2O’s Not a Gas; Ads for Video Game Featuring Nitrous Oxide Evoke Drug Culture,” Washington Post, June 18, 1998,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/nitro.htm. Figures wearing gas masks: Vysethedetermined2, “N2O: Nitrous Oxide Game Sample—Playstation,” YouTube, December 18, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohp3Ix_KWww. One online nitrous oxide supplier: “Burning Man Festival Customer Information,” CreamRight, https://web.archive.org/web/20160226213245/http://www.creamright.com/category/burning-mandiscounts.html. “Whipped cream and Burning Man?”: Ibid. The use of laughing gas: Ezra Marcus, “Nitrous Nation,” New York Times, February 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/style/nitrous-oxide-whippets-tony-hsieh.html. particularly between 2014 and 2019: Mathias B. Forrester, “Nitrous Oxide Misuse Reported to Two United States Data Systems During 2000–2019,” Journal of Addictive Diseases 39, no. 1 (December 1, 2020): 46–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/10550887.2020.1813361. according to the annual Global Drug Survey: A. R. Winstock et al., “Global Drug Survey 2020 Psychedelics Key Findings Report,” Global Drug Survey, 2021, https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wpcontent/uploads/2021/03/GDS2020-Psychedelics-report.pdf. Nitrous oxide use ranked: Adam Winstock, “Global Drug Survey 2020 Key Findings Report, Executive Summary,” Global Drug Survey, 2021, https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/wpcontent/uploads/2021/01/GDS2020-Executive-Summary.pdf. experts say: Marcus, “Nitrous Nation,.” Drug overdose deaths surged: “Drug Overdose Deaths in the U.S. Up 30% in 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 14, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20210714.htm. Nitrous oxide robs the body: John Williamson, Saif Huda, and Dinesh Damodaran, “Nitrous Oxide Myelopathy with Functional Vitamin B12 Deficiency,” BMJ Case Reports 12, no. 2 (February 2019): e227439, https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2018-227439. spinal degeneration: Stephen Keddie et al., “No Laughing Matter: Subacute Degeneration of the Spinal Cord Due to Nitrous Oxide Inhalation,” Journal of Neurology 265, no. 5 (May 2018): 1089–95, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-018-8801-3. weakness, numbness: Alexander G. Thompson et al., “Whippits, Nitrous Oxide and the Dangers of Legal Highs,” Practical Neurology 15, no. 3 (June 2015): 207–09, https://doi.org/10.1136/practneurol-2014001071. loss of bodily control: “Nitrous Oxide,” Alcohol and Drug Foundation, October 6, 2021, https://adf.org.au/drug-facts/nitrous-oxide/. can cause asphyxiation: Charles L. Winek, Wagdy W. Wahba, and Leon Rozin, “Accidental Death by Nitrous Oxide Inhalation,” Forensic Science International 73, no. 2 (May 1995): 139–41, https://doi.org/10.1016/0379-0738(95)01729-3. lead to accidental injuries: Forrester, “Nitrous Oxide Misuse Reported to Two United States Data Systems During 2000–2019.” Mimi Pham jokingly called: This is a claim made by Tony Hsieh’s family in court filings. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh, and Andrew Hsieh, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaints and Demand for Jury Trial, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, No. A-21-828090-C, August 23, 2021. Attorneys for Pham have denied this in a court filing. sells whipped cream cartridges: Whip-It!, https://whipit.com/.

through Amazon: A spokeswoman for Amazon said, “Nitrous oxide is commonly used to create whipped cream and other foods, and is sold by many major retailers. Unfortunately, like many products, it can be misused. Our detail pages clearly notify customers that the products are intended only for food preparation and our Conditions of Use limit shopping on Amazon to customers 18 and older.” See also “Whip-It!,” Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/A4F0C69E-1F26-45AD-A0B348EE90619E5F. A case of 600 cartridges: “Whip-It! Elite 100 Pack, Case of 600: Industrial & Scientific,” Amazon.com, https://www.amazon.com/Whip-Elite-100-Pack-Case/dp/B092MSP6W8?ref_=ast_sto_dp. the company was ordered: “Nitrous Oxide Distributor to Pay Civil Penalty for Failure to Verify Age and Provide Health Warnings,” Office of the District Attorney County of San Diego, October 21, 2020, https://www.sdcda.org/content/office/newsroom/tempDownloads/45cf8e42-ed1a-4677-b3a710220f515b33_Nitrous%20Oxide%20Whip%20it%20News%20Release%2010-21-2020.pdf. had identified United Brands: Ken Stone, “Nitrous Oxide Seller Whip-It! to Pay $50K for Not Warning Minors, SD DA Says,” Times of San Diego, October 21, 2020, https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2020/10/21/nitrous-oxide-seller-whip-it-to-pay-50k-for-notwarning-minors-sd-da-says/. under its authority: “Authorities Charge Four Individuals and Shut Down Businesses Across SoCal That Allegedly Sold Nitrous Oxide as Recreational Drug,” United States Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, March 22, 2013, https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/authorities-charge-fourindividuals-and-shut-down-businesses-across-socal-allegedly. Utah law: Section 76-10-107.5, Utah Code, https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter10/76-10S107.5.html. “is exceptionally skilled”: “Welcome,” RMA, https://www.drhallerman.com. She is herself: Ruby Warrington, “Elisa Hallerman Offers the Newest Trend in Recovery: The Personalized Rehab Manager,” Observer, July 31, 2014, https://observer.com/2014/07/elisa-hallerman-offers-thenewest-trend-in-recovery-the-personalized-rehab-manager/. “If we were to reframe”: “Welcome,” RMA. He was suspended: Ellen Gamerman, “As Britney Spears’s Father Is Suspended from Conservatorship, Supporters Target Larger Reform,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-britney-spearss-father-is-suspended-from-conservatorship-supporterstarget-larger-reform-11633020435. is typically a last resort: Spencer Bokat-Lindell, “Britney Spears and the Last Resort of Mental Health Care,” New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/britneyspears-conservatorship.html. In early August: This account of the intervention attempt is based on interviews with many of the parties involved or people who knew about the intervention, public records from the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, and video and police reports viewed by the authors. The Park City Police Department declined to release records related to the intervention. The police found Tony: The sale of the house had not been finalized at the time police arrived. A limited liability company associated with Tony Hsieh, 2635 Aspen Springs LLC, purchased the house at 2635 Aspen Springs Drive in a sale that was recorded in Summit County, Utah, records on October 21, 2020. The seller signed the sale agreement on October 15, 2020, according to county records. It’s not clear what arrangement was made for Tony to move in prior to the sale closing.

Chapter 10: Save Your Soul Showers and sinks ran: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. the algorithm for world peace: Ibid. Jewel had observed: David Konow, “Jewel Reveals How She Learned to Combat Anxiety, PTSD,” The Fix, April 4, 2017, https://www.thefix.com/jewel-reveals-how-she-learned-combat-anxiety-ptsd. she later wrote: Jewel, Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016). “I saw that no one”: Ibid., 25. Baleson said she ran: This process was confirmed by a series of sticky notes in a photo viewed by the authors. “But from the first notes”: Teri Orr, “Teri Orr: One Shoe, Two Shoes—Red Shoe, No Shoes,” Park Record, December 11, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/opinion/teri-orr-one-shoe-two-shoes-red-shoe-noshoes/. He didn’t say anything: Justin Weniger said it wouldn’t have been his place to talk about the intervention to Jewel and others. sat with Tony: This interaction between Mark Evensvold and Tony is based on a court reporter’s transcript of the meeting, filed as part of Evensvold’s claim against Tony’s estate. See In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Creditor’s Claim, Mark Evensvold, Eighth Judicial District Nevada, P-20-105105-E, June 1, 2021. Evensvold would take: Mark Evensvold’s legal claim asks for 20 percent of Tony’s share in Nacho Daddy; the transcript of their meeting says Evensvold agreed to take 20 percent and leave Tony with 5 percent. On August 24, 2020: Bailey Schulz and Richard N. Velotta, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Champion of Downtown Las Vegas, Retires,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 24, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-champion-of-downtown-las-vegasretires-2102935/. The short Review-Journal story: Ibid. A longer follow-up story: Eli Segall, “Ex–Zappos Chief Tony Hsieh on Homebuying Spree in Utah,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 28, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/ex-zappos-chieftony-hsieh-on-homebuying-spree-in-utah-2107177/. “traveling salesman problem”: Erica Klarreich, “Computer Scientists Find New Shortcuts for Infamous Traveling Salesman Problem,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/2013/01/traveling-salesman-problem/. Some computer scientists: Ibid. the company held a tribute: It’s unclear if Tony himself made an appearance during the tribute. a minimum of twelve weeks’ pay: Details from Zappos. Zappos’ senior leaders: Zappos said that senior leadership had been told in advance, and it was not true that select employees had been receiving calls. took the offer hard: Zappos disagreed with the description of employees’ reaction to the offer. trying to get rid of: Zappos said that that had not been the intent of the buyout offer. In 2017, Park City: Lee Davidson, “Park City Is Now the Nation’s 2nd Wealthiest Small Urban Area, with Average Incomes $27,000 More than in Salt Lake City,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 6, 2017, https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/12/07/park-city-is-now-the-nations-2nd-wealthiest-smallurban-area-with-average-incomes-27000-more-than-in-salt-lake-city/.

told the police department: The Park City Police Department released some records and video related to incidents at Tony’s properties in Park City through a Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA) request but declined to release all of them. One night in early September: Park City Police Department reports. The Park City Fire District: Katija Collins, “Park City Bans the Use of Fireworks and Open Fires,” FOX13, July 22, 2020, https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/park-city-bans-the-use-offireworks-and-open-fires. she didn’t have a license: In a statement, Puoy Premsrirut said that Utah counsel had also been engaged to “address any issues, citations, or if matters escalated.” When Andy Hsieh came out: Park City Police Department reports. This time: Park City Police Department video of the incident. After one of the incidents: Ibid. they didn’t go inside: According to the records and video released by the Park City Police Department. which could catch fire: Carter Williams, “Most of Utah Is Now in an ‘Extreme’ Drought,” KSL.com, September 18, 2020, https://www.ksl.com/article/50018933/most-of-utah-is-now-in-an-extremedrought. “This is not a Burning Man community”: Interview with Police Chief Wade Carpenter, September 2021. an ecstasy drug bust: San Mateo County, California, court records show that Mimi Pham was arrested after her boyfriend sold MDMA pills to an undercover police officer in Redwood City on January 16, 2001. According to court records, she was a passenger in the car, while her boyfriend, the driver, made the transaction. She later pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance. She was sentenced to four months, to be served in a work furlough program, and was credited for three days already served, according to a judge’s order. In 2016, the conviction was dismissed under California expungement law, according to court records. See The State of California v. Jennifer Michelle Pham, Superior Court for the County of San Mateo, Docket Number SC48966. Just one night after: Park City Police Department reports. the police showed up: Park City Police Department video. the police forwarded: Park City Police Department email records. Tony Lee: Tony Lee’s account of events in the summer and fall of 2020 were laid out in a lawsuit filed by his company, Pelagic LLC, after Tony’s death. See Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A-21-833547-C. competed to convince: Ibid. He stored dozens of boxes: Photos of the Ranch viewed by the authors and interviews with people familiar with the nitrous supply. nitrous oxide: Mr. Lee later said in court filings that Andy Hsieh arranged for the purchase of nitrous oxide for his brother. “Plaintiff/Counter-Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss PCVI LLC’s Counterclaim,” Pelagic LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, October 11, 2021. stacked neatly on the shelves: Photos of the Ranch viewed by the authors. urges readers to journey: Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (New York: New Harbinger Publications, 2007). according to her website: “About Alana,” Alana Fairchild, https://alanafairchild.com/about-alana/. Jewel’s team sent: Justin Weniger confirmed that Jewel had sent him the letter but said he didn’t know who at the Ranch had posted it.

Chapter 11: The Cult of Tony Hsieh “a high number of calls”: Sawyer D’Argonne, “Summit County Sheriff’s Office to Launch Second Mental Health Response Team,” Summit Daily, September 1, 2020, https://www.summitdaily.com/news/summit-county-sheriffs-office-to-launch-second-mental-healthresponse-team/. A similar pilot program: “NYC’s Non-Police Mental Health Pilot Increasing Rate of Those Getting Aid, Data Show,” NBC New York, July 22, 2021, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nycs-nonpolice-mental-health-pilot-increasing-rate-of-those-getting-aid-data-show/3165520/. the officer had called: In an interview, Police Chief Wade Carpenter said that the officer had found Suzie Baleson to be listed as involved in a prior incident. according to Park City police: Summit County Sheriff’s Office records confirm parts of Dr. Guadagnoli’s account, stating in dispatch summary that the officer was told by someone close to Tony that everything was fine and “he is on a business call right now.” Park City Police Department declined to release the police report of the incident. Suzie Baleson was getting: In a statement to the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2021, Suzie Baleson said, “The allegations about me are shameful and without a scintilla of truth.” She also said in the statement that “it has been unbearable to witness the exchange of gossip, innuendo and outright lies after Tony’s untimely passing.” had told him about the 10X plan: Mayor Andy Beerman said he knew little about the 10X program, but he did hear from several restaurant owners that Tony and his entourage were patronizing and supporting local restaurants. he had planned to summit: Jane Gendron, “From the Crag to City Hall: One-on-One with Mayor Andy Beerman,” Park City Magazine, June 18, 2018, https://www.parkcitymag.com/news-andprofiles/2018/06/from-the-crag-to-city-hall. operated the Treasure Mountain Inn: Sean Higgins, “Park City Mayor Andy Beerman Says He Intends to Run for Second Term,” KPCW, April 30, 2021, https://www.kpcw.org/post/park-city-mayor-andybeerman-says-he-intends-run-second-term. subsidized artists to paint: Jay Hamburger, “Artists Paint Giant Black Lives Matter Mural on Main Street (Updated),” Park Record, July 7, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/artists-paint-giant-blacklives-matter-mural-on-main-street/. Soon after, vandals: Jay Hamburger, “Black Lives Matter Mural Vandalized, Triggering Discourse and Vow to Repair Damage (Updated),” Park Record, July 10, 2020, https://www.parkrecord.com/news/blacklives-matter-mural-on-main-street-apparently-vandalized/. but he demurred: Mayor Beerman said, “I was not interested in parties or social invites and declined several invites.” was working with the mayor: Mayor Beerman said that the wellness initiative had been “discussed, never pursued.” Mayor Beerman invited Baleson: Mayor Beerman said that Baleson had expressed an interest in becoming more involved in politics and he had invited her along with a hundred other people to the fundraiser. Their other ideas included: According to photos of sticky notes viewed by the authors. Some members of the group: In the fall of 2021, nearly a year after Tony’s death, some friends and employees still believed that his drug abuse and mental health issues had been “overblown.”

Tony used a rating system: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Bankrolled His Followers. In Return, They Enabled His Risky Lifestyle,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-hsieh-zappos-death-entourage-11616761915. “disloyalty penalty”: Attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh recount this “disloyalty penalty” in a court filing. Attorneys for Pham have generally denied the Hsiehs’ claims in court. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A-21-828090-C, August 23, 2021. He ended up paying: Attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh recounted that “disloyalty penalty” in a court filing. Attorneys for Pham have generally denied the Hsiehs’ claims in court. See ibid. He asked for a meeting: The events around the Bryn Mooser meeting are recounted in a court filing by attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh, who are being sued by Mimi Pham. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021, 20. Mooser’s previous producing work: “Bryn Mooser,” IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1666274/. Tony agreed to spend: Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021. Tony extended his trust in Pham: According to attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh. See ibid. Pham and Grande would later file: Mimi Pham, Roberto Grande, and their company, Mr. Taken, filed a lawsuit in 2021 against Richard and Andy Hsieh as the administrators of Tony’s estate who held control of Tony’s businesses after his death. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada. in turn increasing: The financial terms of the deal are described in court filings by Richard and Andy Hsieh. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A-21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021. “Tony is one”: Peter White, “Non-Fiction Studio XTR Secures $17.5M Investment from Ex–Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh to Bolster Doc Plans,” Deadline, October 7, 2020, https://deadline.com/2020/10/xtr-175m-investment-former-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-1234592707/. while Pham and Grande provided: According to attorneys for Richard and Andy Hsieh. See Mr. Taken LLC v. Pickled Entertainment v. Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, A21-829006-B, Eighth Judicial District Court, Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Affirmative Defenses, Counterclaims, Third Party Claims and Demand for Jury Trial, May 25, 2021, 25. Tony bought the eleven-story: Eli Segall and Subrina Hudson, “Zappos’ New Landlord Is a Familiar Face,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 22, 2020, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-newlandlord-is-a-familiar-face-2158031/. They had bought the building: According to the deed of sale recorded in Clark County, Nevada, on April 3, 2012. “Tony is one infectious guy”: Caitlin McGarry, “Nevadan at Work: Developer Has No Doubt Downtown Will Thrive,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, August 26, 2012,

https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/nevadan-at-work-developer-has-no-doubtdowntown-will-thrive/. The property had been listed: Eli Segall, “Zappos Office Building for Sale in Downtown Las Vegas,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 2, 2019, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/zappos-office-buildingfor-sale-in-downtown-las-vegas-1631589/. Tony paid nearly four times: Dave Toplikar, “Las Vegas City Council Approves Final Deal Bringing Zappos Downtown,” Las Vegas Sun, February 1, 2012, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/feb/01/las-vegas-city-council-approves-final-deal-bringin/. it’s unclear why: In 2012, Zappos said it was undertaking a $40 million renovation of the building. Benjamin Spillman, “Zappos Renovating Old City Hall for Future Use,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, April 14, 2012, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/zappos-renovating-old-city-hallfor-future-use/. Tony’s group planned: According to photos of sticky notes viewed by the authors.

Chapter 12: The Shed The Shed: The details of the shed fire and the hours leading up to it are based in large part on dozens of incident reports, videos, and photos released by the New London Police and Fire Departments in 2021 as part of their investigation into the November 18, 2020 fire, as well as the report itself. The authors also talked through each detail with members of the New London Fire and Police Departments who were on the scene and who contributed to the later report on the fire’s causes. Other sources are noted in the narrative or in the endnotes. “I have always felt”: Maria Popova, “A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe,” Literary Affairs, https://literaryaffairs.net/a-lifeline-for-the-hour-of-despair/. the moon a thin sliver: “Waxing Crescent on 17 November 2020 Tuesday,” Lunaf.com, https://lunaf.com/lunarcalendar/2020/11/17/#:~:text=Waxing%20Crescent%20is%20the%20lunar%20phase%20on%2017%2 0November%202020%2C%20Tuesday%20. Pierce had invested heavily: Neil Strauss, “Brock Pierce: The Hippie King of Cryptocurrency,” Rolling Stone, July 26, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/brock-pierce-hippie-kingof-cryptocurrency-700213/. took a more whimsical view: Ibid. Tony heard what Pierce: Interview with Brock Pierce, March 2021. not approved by: Jake Harper, “Addiction Clinics Market Unproven Infusion Treatments to Desperate Patients,” NPR, August 22, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2019/08/22/741115178/addiction-clinics-market-unproven-infusion-treatments-to-desperatepatients. The treatment is supposed: “NAD Therapy,” Addiction Center, https://www.addictioncenter.com/treatment/nad-therapy/. had been reviewing: Tony Lee’s account of events in the summer and fall of 2020 was laid out in a lawsuit filed by his company, Pelagic LLC, after Tony’s Hsieh’s death. See Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, First Amended Complaint, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A-21833547-C. known locally as “Mr. Bitcoin”: Strauss, “Brock Pierce.” took Blizzy to a nearby vet: Schedules of Tony Hsieh’s employees in Park City and elsewhere viewed by the authors. “When are you able to travel?”: Text message viewed by the authors. “Tony is in trouble”: Kirsten Grind, James R. Hagerty, and Katherine Sayre, “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-zappos-tony-hsieh-a-spiral-of-alcohol-drugs-and-extremebehavior-11607264719. The door clicked: The New London Fire Department as part of its investigation reviewed security camera footage around the property and wrote about it in their later report. “barricaded”: Lee Hawkins, “Before Tony Hsieh’s Death, Firefighters Rushed to Burning Home with Trapped Man,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-tonyhsiehs-death-firefighters-rushed-to-burning-home-with-trapped-man-11606691000. She called 911: Recording of 911 call released by New London Police and Fire Departments.

The smoke, soot, and fire: A report from the New London Police Department states, “Investigator Pellamargio reported the deceased had brain edema from the actual fire from the hot gases, soot, and was placed on a vent. The deceased was extubated at the request of the family.” in which the brain swells: Beth Roybal, “Brain Swelling,” WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/brain/brainswelling-brain-edema-intracranial-pressure. On the ninth day: A New London Police Department report states that the “deceased was extubated at the request of the family.” Sources have told the authors that the decision would have been made by Richard and Judy Hsieh. Tony was gone: It’s unclear how much time elapsed between Tony’s being taken off the ventilator and the time he died.

Epilogue a transition that can take: “Death and the Afterlife: How Buddhist Funerals Reflect Beliefs about the Afterlife,” BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zyhmk2p/revision/4. “The world has lost”: Matthew S. Schwartz, “Tony Hsieh, Former Zappos CEO, Dies at 46,” NPR, November 28, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/28/939697651/tony-hsieh-former-zappos-ceodies-at-46. “The world lost you”: Jeff Bezos, “The world lost you way too soon @downtowntony. Your curiosity, vision, and relentless focus on customers leave an indelible mark. You will be missed by so many, Tony. Rest In Peace,” Instagram, November 28, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CIJYUQhHzLq/. “I treasure every conversation”: Bill Clinton, Twitter, November 30, 2020, https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/1333578663380520961?lang=en. offered her praise of Tony: Ivanka Trump, Twitter, November 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/1332719265900879872. “I’ll never meet Tony”: Alfred Lin, “My Final Letter to Tony Hsieh,” Forbes, Dec-ember 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/12/01/my-final-letter-to-tony-hsieh-by-alfred-lin/? sh=107d8d44239b. “As you watch the world turn”: Ibid. “It was never about”: Katie Abel, “A Friendship for the Ages: Fred Mossler + the OG Zappos Crew Share Untold Tales About the Incredible Tony Hsieh,” Footwear News, December 21, 2020, https://footwearnews.com/2020/business/retail/tony-hsieh-zappos-friends-legacy-1203085996/. “He was a complex puzzle”: Nick Swinmurn, “RIP Tony,” Medium, November 28, 2020, https://nickswinmurn.medium.com/rip-tony-6e99695ae3de. Zappos also unfurled: Mick Akers, “Zappos Remembers Longtime CEO Tony Hsieh with Massive Building Wraps,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 5, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/zappos-remembers-longtime-ceotony-hsieh-with-massive-building-wraps-2242847/. A petition appeared online: “Honor Tony Hsieh’s Legacy with a Memorial Art Installation in Las Vegas!,” Change.org, https://www.change.org/p/honor-tony-hsieh-s-legacy-with-a-memorial-art-installation-inlas-vegas. his memory shouldn’t be confined: Caroline Bleakley, “Mayor Goodman Said Hsieh Talked of Plans to Bring a 747 to Downtown Las Vegas,” KLAS, December 2, 2020, https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/mayor-goodman-said-hsieh-talked-of-plans-to-bring-a747-to-downtown-las-vegas/. “A street is so perpendicular”: Morty, “M&C Talk to Mayor Carolyn Goodman on the Passing of Tony Hsieh,” 96.3 KKLZ, December 1, 2020, https://963kklz.com/2020/12/01/mc-talk-to-mayor-carolyngoodman-on-the-passing-of-tony-hsieh/. Jewel turned on the camera: Jewel, “Elegy for Tony Hsieh,” Instagram, December 1, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQ_i8bnZIu/?hl=en. The world didn’t yet know: Jewel’s letter to Tony in Park City was first reported by Forbes in early December 2020 and the details of her intervention attempt by the Wall Street Journal in March 2021. told us in: Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, “Sorting Out Tony Hsieh’s Estate, from LLCs to Thousands of Sticky Notes,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2020,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorting-out-tony-hsiehs-estate-from-llcs-to-thousands-of-sticky-notes11607715492. Tony had earned $32 million: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 49. $1.2 billion all-stock deal: “Amazon Closes Zappos Deal, Ends Up Paying $1.2 Billion,” TechCrunch, November 2, 2009, https://social.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/amazon-closes-zappos-deal-ends-uppaying-1-2-billion/. with some journalists using: Peter Holley, “Why This CEO Is Worth Almost $1 Billion but Lives in a Trailer Park,” Washington Post, July 21, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theswitch/wp/2015/07/21/why-a-ceo-worth-840-million-lives-in-a-trailer-park-with-his-pet-alpaca/. Within days of his death: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20-105105-E, Order Granting Application for Appointment of Special Administrator, for Issuance of Letters of Special Administration with General Powers, December 4, 2020. “require immediate attention”: Ibid., 1. agreed to pay Andy $1 million: Attorneys for Mimi Pham have stated this $1 million agreement in court records. See Baby Monster LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh, and Andrew Hsieh, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, No. A-21-828090-C, January 20, 2021. Mimi Pham sued Richard and Andy Hsieh: Ibid. owed more than $90 million: Mimi Pham and her associated companies, Rove and Whim LLC, Baby Monster LLC, and Mr. Taken LLC, filed claims against Tony Hsieh’s estate in 2021 for more than $90 million. See In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20105105-E. an estimated $75 million: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20-105105-E, Creditor’s Claim, Mr. Taken LLC, March 3, 2021. another $7.5 million: Ibid. They were part: Charles V. Bagli, “Robert Durst Found Guilty of Murder After Decades of Suspicion,” New York Times, September 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/us/robert-durstmurder-trial.html. “She wanted access”: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, P-20-105105-E, Creditor’s Claim, Jennifer Pham, March 3, 2021. “that is not an indication”: Mr. Taken v. Pickled Entertainment LLC., Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Verified Complaint for Injunctive Relief and Damages, and Plaintiff’s Demand for Jury Trial,” A-21-829006-C, February 5, 2021. Tony’s family shot back: Mr. Taken v. Pickled Entertainment LLC and Pickled Investments LLC v. Thirdparty Defendants Jennifer “Mimi” Pham, Roberto Grande and Baby Monster LLC, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Pickled Entertainment’s Answer, Counterclaims and Third Party Claims, A21-829006-C, May 25, 2021. “he wouldn’t have longer”: Ibid. physically and mentally: Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). Toshie McSwain: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, TMLabs dba wigcraft.vegas, P-20-105105-E, June 22, 2021. Mark Evensvold: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, Mark Evensvold, P-20-105105-E, June 1, 2021.

Tony Lee: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, Pelagic LLC, P-20-105105-E, June 22, 2021. In court filings: Pelagic LLC v. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, Plaintiff/CounterDefendant’s Motion to Dismiss PCVI LLC’s Counterclaim, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, A21-833547-C. Suzie Baleson, through her company: In the matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Creditor’s Claim, The Wellth Collective LLC, P-20-105105-E, November, 11, 2021. Daniel Park continues: Daniel Park, “Night 1 at @descendonbend,” Instagram, September 10, 2021, www.instagram.com/p/CTpdlFCpmnv. An Instagram post: Vitamin Bar Naples, “The Vitamin Bar Naples is proud to serve,” Instagram, March 11, 2021, www.instagram.com/p/CMR6eDggqbN. The Hsiehs told a judge: In the Matter of the Estate of Anthony Hsieh, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, Ex Parte Petition to Transfer the Estate Accounts, All Personal Accounts, and Wholly Owned Entity Accounts of Anthony Hsieh Held at Morgan Stanley and Other Financial Institutions to Different Financial Institutions of the Co–Special Administrators’ Choice, Authorizing Liquidation of Stocks and Securities and/or Obtaining Loants to Pay Federal Estate Tax, P-20-105105-E, July 29, 2021. including undeveloped lots: Eli Segall, “Tony Hsieh’s Family to Sell Off Much of Las Vegas Real Estate Empire,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 17, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/tony-hsiehs-family-to-sell-off-much-of-las-vegas-real-estateempire-2283365/. “Tony Hsieh’s Family”: Ibid. “Tony Hsieh 2.0”: Eli Segall and Shea Johnson, “Downtown Sell Off: Family of Tony Hsieh Looks to Unload His Vast Holdings,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 13, 2021, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/downtown/tony-hsieh-property-sell-off-couldenergize-downtown-las-vegas-2300617/. Tony’s mind moved: Baby Monster LLC vs. PCVI LLC, Richard Hsieh and Andrew Hsieh, A-21-828090-C, Eighth Judicial District Court Nevada, August 23, 2021, PCVI LLC’s Answer to Second Amended Complaint, Counterclaim, Third Party Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial (n.d.). “It has become apparent to me”: Naomi Osaka, “Naomi Osaka: ‘It’s O.K. Not to Be O.K.,’ ” Time, July 8, 2021, https://time.com/6077128/naomi-osaka-essay-tokyo-olympics/. Even the joke of the day: The Employees of Zappos.com as told to Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work, Your Community, and Your Life by Putting Service First (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2019), 48. “I don’t have all the answers”: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, 240.

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