We Want Our Tech Visionaries to Be Unscripted, Not Unbalanced

A secretive driverless-car company called Zoox Inc. fired its chief executive officer last week. Investors had just handed over $500 million—yet another nose-bleeding amount for a company with no actual product. The ouster by the company’s board was “Silicon Valley up to its worst tricks,” tweeted the dismissed CEO, Tim Kentley-Klay, and it came “without a warning, cause or right of reply.”

But there was, in fact, a warning, in the form of my colleague Ashlee Vance’s revealing profile of Zoox in the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek a few weeks ago. In the piece, Kentley-Klay comes across as a bit of a flimflam artist, a 43-year-old former ad guy who bought a $16,000 Sub-Zero fridge for the office because he thought it looked cool, popped dextroamphetamine before an important presentation at Google and had no actual background in technology or AI before he started the company. “The jury is still out on whether I am full of sh-t,” Kentley-Klay told Vance, perhaps handing the prosecution Exhibit A with that delicious quote.