Below are some recent photos from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. A railroad, streetcar, and real estate baron left this gift of beautiful gardens and arts to Californians and tourists. Today’s Silicon Valley rich are much richer than Henry Edwards Huntington was. Why aren’t they creating amazing art museums and gardens? A Walmart heiress did that in Arkansas with Crystal Bridges, but I haven’t heard of the tech billionaires doing anything similar. Why not? Is creating a world-class garden and/or museum not sufficiently ambitious for today’s elites? They want to instead say that they saved humanity from disease or landed humans on another planet?
Some inspiring bonsai:
Inspiration for your golden retriever and a room in which to relax after the kill:
An all-gender restroom before you venture out into California gridlock:
Long ago, people with money showed their wealth by making or commissioning beautiful things that everyone could see. Large well-decorated houses in the center of town. Well kept gardens. Ornate clothing. Paintings that look nice. For some reason, this is now out of fashion.
Someone smarter than me looked into this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
There’s definitely no Greenspun art endowment. Art is peculiarly absent from the mindset of a technology billionaire compared to a railroad billionaire, except for maybe buying paintings for a tax deduction. Our CEO collects paintings for a tax shelter. Even when Elon was banging Grimes & tweeting about being an art lover, he wasn’t investing anything in it.
The Bay Area has Filoli and its wonderful gardens, but they were not established by a tech billionaire.
Because pretty gardens are boring af.
It would be something else if you had the ability to gift a city a mini Central Park, somewhere people can exercise, picnic, feed ducks, hang out, etc. That could be worth it.
But a large, delicate piece of land feels pretentious, something you would do only if you wanted to mimic old-timey billionaires from past centuries.
Since most of these wealthy are innovators, it would be incongruent for them to do this.
Because they’re assholes, that’s why.
Creating beautiful gardens and buildings require exqusite taste.
Silly-con Valley nouveau riche lack any taste whatsoever. Just look at their websites and their houses.
The Silicon Valley “elites” have a complete lack of education in the classics/arts.
They became rich by organizing/stealing “content” from the original creators and have never created anything on their own. They don’t know the value of anything (an Oscar Wilde quote applies here …).
Real estate is expensive and billionaires are not usually linked very tightly to any place anymore. Where would the Zuckerberg gardens be? The peninsula? Even he is not that rich. San Francisco, where his employees have made it too expensive to live and he doesn’t go? Hawaii, where everyone hates him for making the real estate crisis worse?
Maybe survival park in reality show television – style in SF?
Tech billionaire David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard) had a marine biologist daughter (Julie Packard) so the Monterey Bay Aquarium was created and funded by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. That’s one!
To be fair, the Aquarium opened in 1984.
So if you’re asking “…but what have they done LATELY?” the next thing that comes to mind is the new Apple campus. It’s got great architecture and gardens. Neither the interior nor exterior gardens are really open to the public – at least not yet – but the visitor’s center across the street has a viewing balcony and constitutes a sort of museum to all things Apple. And there’s lots of video like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFsbkR817g8
There is little thing in Seattle – B and M Gates foundation Discover center. As far I can tell it is at forefront of gender #science