The privatization led by Clinton and Gore enabled the dot-com boom of the 1990s as well as the bust that followed. Once more, the best-connected insiders emerged from the chaos in an even stronger position. Ghazi was working as an investment analyst during the boom, but his former company promoted him to VC only after the bubble popped. This meant he missed his first chance at easy money. In 2005, there was another great inflation, this one fueled by social media companies like Facebook. The dot-com boom had lasted only five years. The social media boom—which was called, for a while, Web 2.0, and closely followed Google’s massive 2004 initial public stock offering—was going strong for more than a decade by the time I met Ghazi. Some things hadn’t changed since he first arrived in the Valley. It ran on the same old mix of government-subsidized research, cheap labor, and a regulatory outlook inherited from the Ronald Reagan era that permitted corporations to unload the costs of doing business on customers, employees, taxpayers, and the ecosystem.