The Tech Bro Meltdown Is Beautiful to Behold

SVB? More like LOL.

CBS News

Spare a moment of pity for the poor Silicon Valley tech bros, who are having a rough time of late after their bank of choice—the creatively titled “Silicon Valley Bank”— went ass over teakettle last week, which threw significant portions of the national financial system into something just short of total disarray.

The reason for SVB’s implosion is both extremely complicated and painfully straightforward; I’ll leave the minutiae of shifting interest rates and federally insured deposits to those better versed in economic theory, but the bottom line is that a lot of very venal, self-aggrandizing people got greedy and failed at executing one of—if not the—basic functions of banking: taking people’s money, holding onto it for them, and then giving it back when they ask for it. All this is extremely bad for exactly two groups of people:

1. Ordinary employees of companies—largely tech startups—who chose to run their various payrolls through SVB, and whose abilities to cover for their ordinary cost of living expenses were disrupted as a result.

2. Everyone else on Earth who has now been forced to listen as venture capitalists, startup CEOs, angel investors, and other carbuncles of the tech industry work themselves into an absolute pissy mess—all because they’re the real victims in this whole thing.

The spectacular collapse of SVB has been something of a blessing, if only for being an incredibly clarifying event. It is, I think, the perfect litmus test for determining who are the shittiest people out there. And, as you will see, most of those people happen to be tech assholes.