Fuck You Bill Joy

Bill Joy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. And for my 400th post on The Drama 2.0 Show, I’d like to point out that he’s also a major douche.

At an event at the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, he spoke of cheap oil’s impact on “clean energy.” The short summary: it’s a problem and the United States government needs to help.

According to Joy, “Not only is oil cheap but coal is also cheap. So we have to make a societal decision at some level about whether we’re going to protect the innovators somewhat from this cyclic nature [of the commodities markets].”

For someone who has made money as a capitalist and who invests money like a capitalist, Joy sure doesn’t sound like a capitalist. Instead, it sounds like he’s caught a case of corporate welfare-itis.

Note to Bill: innovation doesn’t need help. If you can build a better product and/or a cheaper product, there will be demand for your product and consumers will buy your product.

If all of the “clean technology” you’ve been funding can’t compete on price or quality, it isn’t fucking innovation, Bill. Understand?

It takes a lot to upset me but the current economic situation is upsetting. Not because a bunch of financial institutions that forgot the meaning of “risk management” are insolvent. Not because lots of people, many “innocent”, are losing money.

No, the most upsetting thing about the current economic clusterfuck is the fact that people are being economically raped by governments, politicians and special interests. Governments are taking on unrepayable debts. Politicians are burdening the citizens they represent with debt and taxes because they never learned how to balance a checkbook. And special interests are scrambling to get a piece of the Ponzi.

Let’s be clear here: when Bill Joy talks about a “societal decision” to “protect the innovators”, what he’s really talking about is a societal sham to protect his shitty investments.

Unfortunately for taxpayers, the “protection” he speaks of doesn’t protect against a bleeding anus. And judging by how much taxpayers are being asked to pay and risk in the United States (and other economically doomed countries in Europe), there are a lot of bleeding anuses today.

Everyone wants their go, from investment bankers to auto execs to entrepreneurs and VCs who sell a greener form of snake oil.

The reality is that most of the clean technologies hyped by assholes like Joy aren’t commercially competitive. Most aren’t even commercially viable at scale. Period. You only need to listen to Joy utter the words “we just don’t have the chemistry to do that…we have to find that chemistry. And it may not exist but at least it potentially exists and that’s the kind of thing we would hope the entrepreneurs would be looking for.”

Is this what taxpayers are supposed to subsidize? Hope? Potential? Voodoo chemistry?

I have one message for Bill Joy and all of the other eco-dipshits: fuck you and your startups. Stop pretending that you’re doing the world a favor and shut the fuck up.

Innovators innovate; scam artists sit on plush couches and talk about “societal decisions.”