We did not have a lot of money, said JD Vance, placing hand on heart as he recalled his childhood in Middletown, Ohio in the 1990s. I was raised by a woman who struggled often to put food on the table and clothes on her back.
In early 2024, Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a big venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, posted an article online titled "How AI Will Usher in an Era of Abundance." Since then, and even before, various Silicon Valley types have been tossing the term around loosely. Last summer, Elon Musk even adopted the term "sustainable abundance" for a new Tesla mission statement. (Over Christmas, Musk substituted "amazing" for "sustainable," saying the former term was "more joyful.")
There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley's hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can "do AI,"
Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the "skip college" mantra has evolved from a "hot take" to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot will master before you graduate?
Google has frequently bought properties, large and small, primarily in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, North San Jose, and downtown San Jose over a period of several years. Here are some examples of Google's purchasing activities in recent years: In 2018, Google paid $1 billion for a 51.8-acre, 12-building Mountain View office hub that at the time was known as Shoreline Technology Park.
"When I was at Facebook, the top engineers were like, 'If you had a LinkedIn account, people would be wondering if you're job hunting,' he said. Novati said these engineers don't need to publicly job hunt because of tech's extensive recruiting arm, which he called the 'secrets of the industry.' 'There are very senior, very highly paid recruiters that work at the top companies who have very strong long-term social relationships with a lot of top engineers,' he said."
Don't count on a college degree to land your dream job in Silicon Valley. Increasingly, founders and tech companies are judging talent by how quickly someone can learn, adapt, and build - not on how long they spent in a lecture hall - reshaping traditional pathways into the workforce. Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer science professor widely known as the "Godmother of AI," is one example of this.
Today, Komoroske and a loose group of concerned technologists are releasing The Resonant Computing Manifesto, an idealistic set of principles that attempts to recenter Silicon Valley around the values that have been lost in the scramble to hyperscale and maximize shareholder value. Komoroske and his coauthors are inviting anyone who, um, resonates with this jeremiad to sign it and proselytize those values in the products they create.
What changed? Republicans long characterized Silicon Valley as a bastion of liberalism. But over the past half-decade, many of tech's wealthiest titans rebelled against the Biden administration's criticism and policing of their industry. Last year, many tech barons threw their support behind the GOP, which they saw as more aligned with their often-libertarian ideals and their companies' economic interests.
When he first introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, Sam Altman said, "Language interfaces are going to be a big deal." That has turned out to be a rare understatement from the CEO of OpenAI. In the three years since, the AI chatbot has become one of the most popular tech products in history. As of September 2025, ChatGPT had accumulated nearly 800 million weekly active users.
Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, and Fremont commercial property leases totaled 20.4 million square feet during the July-through-September third quarter, according to a report from the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies that was released in partnership with JLL, a commercial real estate firm. The institute is the research arm of Joint Venture Silicon Valley.
The new hotel is all about nature and playfulness, and has been peddling a reduced rate for California residents (lower on weekends given weekday business travel) including a $50 dinner credit at its restaurant, Valley Goat, which is helmed by a "Top Chef" winner. So, we packed up the dog - he stayed free, another plus - and hightailed it to Silicon Valley on a Saturday morning.
As the host of On With Kara Swisher, her twice weekly podcast for Vox Media, she grills leaders in tech and politics, coaxing them to share the things they may not reveal on any other gabfest. For Pivot, her Vox show with New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, she keeps the banter between herself and her cohost-but still, she doesn't hold back.
Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that "we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age."
Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed "half-assed," and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail. Such discipline is evident in Frankenstein, his adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. It's a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes-as well as some embellishing of Shelley's story-could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.
Downtown San Jose welcomed a new cultural gem with the opening of the Silicon Valley Asian Art Center at 150 East Santa Clara Street on October 17. The midday ribbon-cutting ceremony featured remarks from Mayor Matt Mahan, Councilmember Anthony Tordillos, Assemblymember Ash Kalra, representatives from the San Jose Downtown Association, and owner Jianhua Shu. This event marked the expansion of the center from its original Santa Clara location, established in 2004, which has long showcased modern and ancient artworks.
Among the standout achievements, San Jose State ranks as the number three public university in the West and number three best college for veterans in the region. It also places at number four as a regional university and number nine for best value in the West. These positions come from evaluations based on data from sources like the U.S. Department of Education, highlighting areas such as teaching excellence and accessibility.
After years of always being the perpetual bridesmaid, Lisa Catalano of San Mateo laid down her soft-pink bouquet, hung up her strappy blue satin Maid of Honor dress and drafted a text to her friends: I'm officially announcing my retirement from being a bridesmaid, she wrote. The next wedding I'm going to be in will be with my own groom, TBD. Two years earlier, her fiance had died of a terminal illness.
For decades, Mark Lemley's life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He's a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. "I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical," Lemley tells me. What's more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him. But in January, Lemley made a radical move. "I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness," he posted on LinkedIn. "I have fired Meta as a client."
Every Wednesday he'd head to the nearest Armadillo Willy's barbecue restaurant for the Pit-Smoked Boneless Chicken Sandwich, a juicy thigh topped with jalapeno-spiked barbecue sauce and fresh jalapenos. When I worked for Apple I went to the Cupertino location. Then when I worked for Nest I went to Los Altos. Then Google bought Nest, so we by then it was a group, the VIM, Very Important Meeting lunch club had to come to this location, he said, sitting in what was formerly the Sunnyvale Willy's.
Yeah, it's a great point because, you know, going from, you know, Caltrain where most of the areas around those stations, and certainly in the city, but also in some of the peninsula cities where for those who have not visited the peninsula south of San Francisco and north of San Jose, it's dense in a way, like you might find on the mainline outside of Philadelphia or like a Boston commuter line.
"You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you were immensely powerful and rich like Elon Musk and all these other tech bros and members of that podcast community," the former politico told The Guardian, "that you'd reflect on your good fortune compared with most other people?"
