'Parasite' tech VCs roasted for days-long 'tantrum' demanding Silicon Valley Bank bailout

Many big-name venture capitalists spent their weekend angrily demanding that the government fully guarantee the bank deposits that they or their friends had placed in Silicon Valley Bank, which was taken over by the FDIC on Friday.

Their pleas caught the attention of Slate writer Edward Ongweso Jr., who mocked many of the rugged individualists in the VC community for immediately throwing "baffling online tantrums" and running to the government when their own money was threatened by the collapse of their bank.

"Early Saturday morning, the famous activist investor Bill Ackman used his Twitter Blue subscription to pen a 649-word rant predicting an economic apocalypse if every single depositor was not made completely whole," he writes. "You... saw famous venture capitalists like PayPal co-founder and Elon Musk buddy David Sacks begging the Federal Reserve to force a merger or a bailout, then insisting he was not asking for a bailout while again asking for a bailout. This may have seemed a bit strange considering Sacks’ previous disparaging of handouts (specifically to Ukraine) and reactionary vitriol for liberalism itself."

What makes this all particularly galling, writes Ongweso, is that the Silicon Valley VCs haven't exactly given the average person any great invention that would be worth the cost to make them whole on their deposits.

READ MORE: 'All sick fake news!' Trump unleashes furious all-caps tirade against legal probes

"For the past 10 years venture capitalists have had near-perfect laboratory conditions to create a lot of money and make the world a much better place," he writes. "And yet, some of their proudest accomplishments that have attracted some of the most eye-watering sums have been: 1) chasing the dream of zeroing out labor costs while monopolizing a sector to charge the highest price possible (A.I. and the gig economy); 2) creating infrastructure for speculating on digital assets that will be used to commodify more and more of our daily lives (cryptocurrency and the metaverse); and 3) militarizing public space, or helping bolster police and military operations."

Given all this, he likens Silicon Valley VCs to a "parasite that has so thoroughly wrecked the body and environment of its host, all while trying to convince the host that it is deserving of praise and further accommodation."