If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/23/small-nonprofit-school/#north-country-school

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Now, on the one hand, it's easy to dismiss these guys as very, very, very stupid. After all, they played a game of #PrisonersDilemma in which they were allowed to talk to each other as much as they wanted - and they still sold each other out:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma

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But they still have the commonsense to realize that an America where $10k in student debt cancellation, school lunches for hungry children, and library budgets are out of reach, handing billions to a bank rescue a balance sheet overwhelmingly made up the investments of "high net worth" investors wouldn't be popular.

After all, these guys have been crying about incipient guillotinism for years:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/billionaire-cartier-owner-sees-wealth-gap-fueling-social-unrest

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Sure, they don't compare small rises in the top marginal tax-rate to #Kristallnacht anymore:

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/01/26/266685819/billionaire-compares-outrage-over-rich-in-s-f-to-kristallnacht

But they are locked and loaded for #TheEvent, feathering elaborate subterranean, antipodean nests in the most luxurious bunkers New Zealand has to offer, against the day that the poors come to eat them:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/business/bunkers-new-zealand-intl-hnk/index.html

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So amid the clamor for socialism-for-the-rich, these billionaires went on the hunt for average joes who could serve as the face of the bailout. Like the "Ohio mom with 4 kids and a husband who works in manufacturing, who owns a small business:"

https://www.businessinsider.com/mother-small-startup-ceo-fall-svb-not-1-problem-2023-3

She's ex-McKinsey and raised $4m in VC for a $600/month life-planning app; her husband, another McKinsey alum, is a senior manager at a steel company (that is, he "works in manufacturing").

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Clearly, the ex-libertarian 0.01 percenters begging for relief needed to find someone else. Enter #DavidSacks, a billionaire Paypal mafiosi who waded into the debate with screenshots of an email from a "small, non-profit school" that would miss payroll if the bailout was not forthcoming:

https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1636054055121453057

Sacks held this up as evidence that SVB's depositors were "more diversified than the media narrative has allowed."

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Sacks went on to claim that the bailout saved "innocent bystanders" like "teachers" from being "laid off."

What is this small, nonprofit school? Writing in *The American Prospect*, Luke Goldstein sleuths it out: the "small, nonprofit school" is North Country School, an upstate New York boarding school where tuition runs $62k/year - more than #Harvard or #Yale:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-22-david-sacks-bank-bailout/

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North Country sounds like a great place to get an education. It's got its own private ski-slope. The local city raised a $7m municipal bond on its behalf. There's a rock-climbing range and horseback riding. The school emphasizes unstructured, outdoor education, with "farming, wilderness trips...even maple sugaring":

https://northcountryschool.org/

Let's be honest, this is the kind of education a lot of us dream of our kids having.

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No wonder that the alumna include numerous Rockefellers, and a scion of the Aga Khan family - lineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

As illustrious as the student body is, the trustees are even more gilt-edged. There's a former Jpmorgan managing director, a former Google exec, Austrian nobility, the Welch's grape heir and even JD Salinger's kid. The chair ran a booze delivery company that sold to Uber.

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