Money, fame, goofball venture status games — last week, the industry watched in titillated horror, with little gasps and pearls clutched, as famed investors Paul Graham and David Sacks went to total, scorched earth war. In a lengthy back-and-forth on X, Paul told David he was “the most evil person in Silicon Valley,” and David stiffly rebutted: “in the wake of the Gaza debate, you tried to get some Jewish VCs fired from prominent firms,” he wrote, “which at a minimum makes you a bully and maybe something much worse.” With the stench of antisemitism now in play, there was no possible retreat. Prominent figures throughout venture chose a banner, and leapt into battle. Officially, this was all a matter of “ethics in venture capitalism.” But even the casual observer could see that sides had quickly broken along conventional political lines, with MAGA Force on one side, and Dark Brandon Team Coconut on the other. House affiliation was a second, notable factor, with many of David’s founders rising to his defense, and many of Paul’s colleagues from Y Combinator joining his attack. But the most important schism here, entirely ignored, was and remains the Valley’s growing division between men who’ve successfully built or purchased their own influential media entities over the last few years, filling a vacuum left by the industry’s retreating press, and men who have not.

Was politics the catalyst for the battle of the billionaires, or was it more a conflict over status? As our media landscape shifts in favor of tech’s new in-house press (podcasts, newsletters, a sprawling social media landscape), popularity is increasingly minted beyond the hallowed grounds of the New York Times. Sure, venture politics are looking different now, at least in terms of what we’re allowed to say online. But that’s only possible because the industry now learns about itself, in significant part, from itself. Every Silicon Valley billionaire on the internet is an influencer now, and they’re all fighting for attention. Of course, nobody will ever admit they care about such petty things — perhaps not even to themselves.

So we talk about politics.