Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Fabulous Realities -- God particles and Black Tech Billionaires

Last update: Tuesday 7/28/15
This afternoon while reviewing tweets from business sources about today's news, I was stunned by a photo in a tweet from Business Insider about a "tech billionaire" who had had a "lavish wedding" because the text appeared above a picture of of a middle aged Black man and a young White bride ... wait ... he's Black ... and he's a tech billionaire ... click the link to the article ... more pictures of a man in his fifties in wedding garb who has my color, my lips, and my hair ... who's a Tech billionaire ... who I never heard ... maybe he's really Italian or Greek or from India and his photographs just look Black ... no ... that man is Black ... 

You get the point. My mind was boggling. So I googled his name, his company, and the word "black" ... and Google returned a link to a NY Times tech blog that had been posted in October 2014 that confirmed that Robert F. Smith really is a self-made Black billionaire who made his billions by founding a private equity fund that invests in enterprise software ... Damn!!! ... Both parents had doctorates ... his undergrad at Cornell (engineering), masters at Columbia (business), double Ivy!!! ... early career at Goldman Sachs ... just what I would have expected from a Black unicorn ... if any really existed ... like Higgs bosons ... I always knew there had to be a few out there. Talent being equally distributed among races, there had to be a few Brothers and Sisters way out there on the tails of the distributions, whose talents were so fantastic, they could scale the highest walls of prejudice and discrimination ... :-) 

But how come I never heard of Mr. Smith until I read this silly article about his absurdly expensive wedding? Surely I noticed the Times tweet when it  appeared last October ... about yet another (presumably White) tech billionaire ... but if there were no pictures in the tweet ... Nah, I wouldn't have clicked the link to the tweet because White tech billionaires are a dime a dozen nowadays.  So I would not have read the article or seen the pictures of Mr. Smith in the article ... But today's tweet had pictures; and the linked article had lots more pictures ...  Of course. A Black man marries a White Playboy centerfold, young enough to be his daughter, of course there were pictures. On the other hand, if a Black man is arrested or worse, even the shortest tweets with no pictures would begin something like, "Robert Smith, 50 year old Black man, arrested for ..." or more recently, "Robert Smith, unarmed Black man shot by 15 cops at point blank range ... "

So I am embarrassed, but delighted to declare the Times seven month old blog to be the "top story" of tomorrow's issue of my "TECH Daily" blog ... ICMY ... because if I missed it, I'm sure that lots of my readers also missed it when it first appeared those many months ago. IMHO Mr. Smith's achievements as noted in the Times article are inspirational. Spoiler alert: Smith is a Black businessman who succeeded in the highest, most sophisticated realms of tech AND whose commitment to diversity has been expressed by his use of sophisticated search procedures to recruit qualified Black, Hispanic, and female staff who would usually be overlooked ... Enjoy!!! ... :-)

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