“Internet wealth has given hundreds of lucky, hard-working people the chance to forget about their bills and live it up a little,” Brown wrote. But, she observed, it also created a community where “grossly skewed expectations, measured in terms of dollars, define personal success.” She found Silicon Valley to be a place where “inner peace isn’t free” and “people with money ooze self-esteem” while those without have a “panicked look in their eyes.” The Netheads told her, “‘It’s not about the money.’ (And they say that a lot.)” she wrote. She added: “It’s all about the money.”

There are clear parallels to today. Already in 2026, a record 10 new billionaires under 40 years old have joined Forbes’ wealth list, seven of them hailing from the Valley’s latest boom—AI. Four of them are from one company alone, the leading AI frontier lab Anthropic, which is still on course to IPO in 2026, while its great rival OpenAI has said it likely won’t go public until next year. 

The scale is different in the AI era. Brown found some of her under-40s doing napkin math on vesting schedules over lunch, hoping for millions or tens of millions. Today, the four aforementioned Anthropic cofounders, Tom Brown, Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, and Sam McCandlish, can boast $15.5 billion apiece. You need $4.4 billion in 2026 to even crack the Forbes 400. 

Brown’s sharpest material was about the economy circling all of the money in the dot-com era. A 30-year-old she calls “Josh,” a “top guy at a well-known website with real, live customers,” fretted that he would miss his “limited window of opportunity” if it didn’t IPO in time. Then there was the estate planner watching internet parents cap their kids’ inheritances and predicting the children would grow up resentful, muttering, “I can have $100 million and still be a good person!”