Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff

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       LUNCH

      NOW, my lunch companions that spring afternoon were both accomplished men—ambitious, high-end achievers who had become significant figures of the great boom.

      They had transformed themselves from striving hacks into men of wealth and affairs. They were not just journalists, but had become players in the media business, working the levers of association and finance and business theory.

      So of course when they unexpectedly faltered in their transformation—when the reinvention seemed to be reduced to mere overreaching—a certain degree of pathos and Sammy Glicksterism quickly attached to them.

      This was, I suspect, part of the reason I was on their lunch list. I, too, had overreached—my Internet business had risen and fallen—but had, surprising nobody more than me, come back from the edge.

      The media business—at least if you knew how to work the media business—turned out to be regenerative. The notoriety that attached to you going down could become, with a little craft, the added notoriety that was needed to take you back up.

      John Heilemann, a journeyman magazine writer who had gotten himself a million-dollar advance for his first book, and John Battelle, who a few years after graduating from journalism school had become the CEO of a multimillion-dollar publishing company, were now just two unemployed guys in the middle of a nagging recession in more or less urgent need of a paycheck.

      At the same time, they were, I didn’t doubt, planning their rehabilitation and resurgence.

      Lunch with me, I was not displeased to sense, was part of their plan.

      Heilemann was the more forceful of the two, although, interestingly, the more dependent—he needed Battelle to be the business guy, the feet-on-the-floor guy. Heilemann was the showman.

      He was major-sport-athlete size—although he obviously wasn’t an athlete—with a stud and two hoops in his left ear. He seemed like something of a sight gag: Too big to be smart, too big to need to be smart. Like a blond bombshell in kludgy glasses.

      He’d already had, by the age of 30, an impressive journalism career, first at the Economist, then at the New Yorker, and then at Wired magazine, writing about media, politics, and technology—but all the time seeming way too large for those jobs. Those were for intelligent scriveners, whereas Heilemann was taking his measure not against other writers, but against the big men he was writing about.

      In 1997, as the decibel level of the great boom had unmistakably begun to build, Heilemann wrote a profile of John Doerr, the greatest of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for the New Yorker. It was one of the first formal introductions of Doerr and of the Valley financial phenomenon (“the greatest legal creation of wealth in history,” in Doerr’s famous, and regrettable, phrase) to the East Coast audience. On the basis of the Doerr profile, Heilemann had gotten his million-dollar advance to write the story of Silicon Valley. Heilemann promptly moved to San Francisco and almost immediately became a prince of the Valley himself, a celebrity second only to the highest levels of Valley celebrities themselves—indeed, he courted and was in turn courted by those same celebrities, famously, ostentatiously, consorting with Doerr and cohorts up and down the Valley.

      Once, during the boom, at a party in San Francisco—and during this time everything was a party in San Francisco—Heilemann was telling a small group of people, confidentially, that he had just met with Jim Clarke, the co-founder of Netscape, who had confided something startling to him. Should he take Clarke seriously? Heilemann was wondering aloud. I, who had already failed as an Internet entrepreneur, said obviously not. Heilemann, from his great height, said, with what I remember as quite impressive scorn, that he was certainly inclined to give a man who had founded two billion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt.

      I’d been reduced to a sour-grapes sort, and Heilemann elevated to part of the new, muscular, elite corps of technology intellects—and for several years we didn’t like each other very much.

      But then the boom ended (without Heilemann having finished his book—indeed, Heilemann’s lack of writing had become legendary too) and since then there had been no reason for us not to get along. It was possible that some of the same kind of credit that Heilemann awarded Clarke for founding two billion-dollar companies now accrued to me for getting out (even if by failure) of the technology business before the bust.

      If Heilemann was too large and imposing to be a mere journalist, his cohort Battelle—Heilemann and Battelle were often billed as a Stan and Ollie or Lewis and Martin combo in Silicon Valley—was too handsome. He was distracted, it sometimes seemed, in the particular way of a too-handsome person—concentrating on people looking at him, rather than concentrating on other people.

      Partly because of his distraction, and his failure to ever make eye contact, I had no real insight into whether he was secretly thoughtful or genuinely obtuse. His pure momentum, the imperviousness of the way he moved ever forward, might mean there was another dimension here—or not.

      If there was anyone who had been close to achieving a version of professional perfection, even in an era when so many people had been close to achieving that, it was Battelle.

      He had lost his no-hitter on the last at-bat.

      He’d come out of journalism school at Berkeley in the early nineties to become the number two on the launch of Wired magazine. After a period of wild success, when Wired was thought to be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars and Battelle himself worth various millions, he had then started the Industry Standard, a business magazine about the Internet, promoting himself from mere editorial type to CEO and publisher. I cannot recall anyone initially thinking the magazine had any promise. (I briefly wrote a column for the magazine, while at the same time thinking it had no promise—and figuring that, as soon as I could, I had better find something else.) But the Standard promptly became the most successful magazine of all time in the quickest amount of time, before it, too, crashed—with Battelle being arguably responsible for both its great success and inevitable failure.

      Heilemann and Battelle were badly beaten up—but standing. Their wounds contributed to a certain dashingness (a lasting stiffness in the leg, and hint of a limp).

      At any rate, here they were, both of them fully aware that everyone else was aware of their hubris and fall, formally calling on me, someone they had reason to believe might be taking some pleasure in their circumstances.

      Heilemann began the specific business presentation.

      Heilemann is an inarticulate monologist. He can’t stop talking, can’t find a clear way to an end point. He is always restating. There’s a constant quest for synonyms, for adjectives, for new ways to emphasize. It’s a form of buildup, of preface, of drumroll:

      He and Battelle were going to hold a conference.

      They had together staged some of the most grandiose gatherings of the technology boom, and now… drums… they were back, СКАЧАТЬ