Despite building an increasingly screen-focused world, billionaire tech leaders are keeping their own children away from the tech they helped create.
As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Since then, the trend of Silicon Valley billionaires keeping their families away from technology has become even more pronounced, thanks in part to the rise of social media and short-form video.
At the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival, early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel joined Chen among the ranks of tech leaders who are setting strict limits on screens. Thiel said he only lets his two young children use screens for an hour-and-a-half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience.
Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel. And finally, Musk, who bought the social media company X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to not set any rules on social media for his children.
Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years, the private behavior of the world’s most powerful tech figures stands in contrast to what they’re promoting and building
I used to work at a “Big Data” company that sold browsing data to a ton of companies. One problem the dev team ran into was that the standard ad-blocking plugins that they’d install on their machines also blocked our stuff, so my support team would have to inform them of bugs.
Lots of fun stories from that job.
I love how Elon Musk was the sole fuck up in these examples
Listen, billionaires suck. But if you think tech giants are hypocritical for strictly rationing screen time to their children then you have lost the plot.
Social media, and screen time in general, are bad for you. Everyone knows this now. If you aren’t limiting your child’s access, that’s on you.
Before a child can get addicted, their parents have to give them access. If you can’t live life without looking at a phone, TV, or tablet every free moment, then you’re the reason your kids are turning into morons.
And they’ve convinced you that it’s a-okay for your kids to be using these products, in full knowledge of the harm they cause.
It’s so fucking creepy. It’s not just making people dumber, its literally exposing kids to sexual content and sexualizing children in advertisements aimed at adults.
At what point is it ok for all of society to demand these people either be put in jail or at least exiled from the rest of society?
Meta CEO Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors, court filing alleges
Regulations are keeping your businesses from thriving? The ones you seem to be building to intentionally cater to pedophiles and harm children? Half of these creepy ass broligarchs are already confirmed to be in the Epstein files.
They’re pretty open about what they want the future to look like, and the shit they’ve already got going, like the inescapable 24/7 surveillance where they can pick and choose the victims they want to legally abduct and traffic is just the beginning. And we’re supposed to just pretend we’re all fucking stupid enough to go along with it?
I don’t agree.
I started using the web as a curious 8 years old. I was pretending to be an adult in order to sign up to forums, chat with people, etc.
Yes, I was exposed to porn, gore (remember goatse?) but that didn’t make me dumb or a molester.
But nothing beats what I learned thanks to the internet. Endless days spent on programming forums, reading articles on a newborn Wikipedia, etc.
Even just talking with older people than me made me learn how to deal with things and life.
I don’t think that the internet for a kid is bad per se. I wouldn’t like a blanket ban for kids like the UK. If it was like that when I was a kid, I would probably be a more stupid person.
I think that the real bad thing is the stupid phones and apps that give you dopamine rushes.
I hate to say this, but the Internet is not the same as it was back when I was growing up.
You always had the possibility of stumbling across a bad actor. Now the billionaire tech broligoply who own most social media are the bad actors. How many websites did you visit where the person running the website has been caught repeatedly trying to psychologically manipulate and control the masses via disinformation?
Back in the day, nobody would be doing whatever the fuck it is these people are doing with kids and their pedo adjacent targeted ads and chat bots bc they would be afraid of being sent to jail for cp
Corpocrap scrolley apps exploit you on purpose, but that doesn’t generalize. Not.that non techy people understand that
People get pissed at me but, as a short-term solution, I’m okay with giving up my ID in order to lock kids out. I personally think it is the lesser of two exceedingly great evils.
Ideally, there’d be federal regulation of these platforms in every country banning algorithmically-elevated content, ads, privacy violations, and holding the operators of these platforms accountable for CSAM, but I think that will take decades.
People get pisses at you for good reason
Why does it need to take decades though?
I bet if there were actual consequences for this shit, like in the form of seizing assets from the broligarchs who run these companies, and giving them to the victims of their creations, the issue would be solved very quickly.
Because they know their kids will have an advantage over the stupefied masses if they can keep them unmezmerizes.
Lol I’ve always known this. People are beyond retarded now. Like biggie use to say
" Never get high on your own supply "
Well, they know why. And they know that most of the people are stupid as a stone. This is how they made their money.
This behavior seems to be very similar to NFL stars and how they never wanted their kids to play football.
Everyone involved knows how dangerous social media/football is and many of them are in positions to actually do something about it. But because it benefits them personally, they won’t even rock the boat.
Wow what a surprise. I can’t imagine anyone better to know how unsafe something is other than the lead architects themselves.
Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel.
Seems like these failures suing them & demanding government paternalism
Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years
don’t know how to effectively limit access/use parental controls as tech CEOs claim to do.
Duh. You think the CEO of Kraft feeds his kids mac and cheese from a box?
“Our technology is perfectly safe and harmless for all ages!”
“So you would let your own children use it?”
“Nooo. No no no no no no. God no.”
“Are you kidding? I KNOW how addicting we make that shit. I don’t want my kids anywhere near it.”
YouTube cofounder Steve Chen said at a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business last year that he wouldn’t want his kids consuming only short-form content, noting that it might be better to limit kids to videos longer than 15 minutes.
I hope this is introduced at the LA trial in some form that demonstrates the why.
I should not be amazed, but I still am, at the entire lack of morality that tech entrepreneurs have post dotcom bursting.
Yeah, but the Epstein class wants us conditioned to be as forgetful as their LLMs, and compartmentalized like good robots so we reset to compliance by default without connecting too many dots. Concentration and focus are how you exercise consciousness, which is the opposite of what the ruling class wants. They’ve literally attempted to and in the minds of many individuals they’ve succeeded in framing consciousness as a “mind virus”.
They’re subhumans with no morality or code of ethics whose sights are set on more and more wealth, spiralling them further into the depths of depravity and the cardinal sin of greed.
Greed begets more greed, but unlike gluttony and wrath, the billionaires’ deterioration doesn’t manifest itself physically, so they allow themselves to become evermore corrupted by it until they become a fountain of disease, rotting and decaying everything around them.
Calling someone “subhuman” is the language of a supremacist. They are some of the absolute worst examples of humanity, yes, but they are still human. Referring to them as subhuman abdicates humanity’s responsibility to bring them to justice and to build systems that prevent a disproportionate concentration of power and influence.
This isn’t new. I remember fifteen years ago some Silicon Valley app engineers forbade their children from playing the games that were being developed.
It’s because they’re engineered to use your psychology against you. This is by design.
Hmmm it appears they understand how evil all the tech companies are, harvesting data to the fullest extent. Spying, influencing, etc.
Oh they absolutely know. Zuck’s Meta is on trial right now not only because Instagram creates an addiction for kids, but because it was made delibarately, on purpose. Kids addictron was the goal.
They’ve always known. They just don’t care for the rest of humanity.
Look to the masters, the tobacco industry with additives to make it more addictive (been a while since I researched it and that’s the one that popped up, but they spent 60+ years making it more addictive).
Social media speedran it with something apparently innocuous (‘they trust me, stupid fucks’), and a bunch of corrupt psychologists (and marketers/advertisers also known as corrupt psychologists). Do no harm my ass, wait, that doesn’t apply to psychologists, wait again, that’s more like guidelines for doctors (not an actual vow in most places).
Next bill of rights / constitution needs to address this specifically, there’s a reason why quacks have a special hatred (and if there were one, a special hell)…
Not to excuse that POS, but more on how we got here: You have a product that only makes money when people actively use it. How do you increase your ROI? Make people want to use it and want to use it longer. Do that by making it more interesting, more relevant, more stimulating and appear bottomless so people can use it as long as possible.
Addiction for EVERYONE is the only way FB continues to increase revenue. We just single out Children because they are most easily influenced and impacted.
Oh I’m perfectly aware this is most likely a chain of pressure and responsibility dodging:
- the top demands more users more active,
- the bottom develops some solutions they demo while refusing any responsability for its impact.
- Some middle pressed to meet demand while having only one solution available at the time eventually decide to deploy it, maybe “temporarily”.
Many years ago a grocery store chain, which was rapidly becoming national, had its progress halted by a meat bleaching scandal. They set impossible goals for their meat department, knowing there was zero way to sell the meat at the volume they demanded, so the local stores were left to do illegal things to meet the impossible quotas. The higher ups claimed plausible deniability, while knowing there was but one answer.
What’s even crazier, is the grocery store (Food Lion) sued the journalists who went undercover to expose it, and won. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-01-23-mn-21242-story.html
Fortunately, the damage to their reputation did far greater damage than they won in the lawsuit, but as far as I could find, no legal actions were taken against Food Lion.
I doubt. I think it’s more like they fear us getting to them through their kids.
Imagine doing that to your child. Raising them in an alternate world that doesn’t really exist? That’s not fearing the tech and caring about their kids. That’s control. That’s them proving their children are the same things as a car.
