It’s a real pity. I circulated in the Downtown Tech scene in Las Vegas for a little bit. I felt like it was rather culty, but I also felt he really made people believe in the town’s ability to be more than a tourist destination. At the time, the city was still quite battered from the recession, and there was quite a lot of pessimism. The energy he brought was very needed, and the community he fostered had real energy and hope and value. I made friends then that I still have now, who are very dear to me. I’ve since left town, but I was back last year and walked around the places we all used to hang out… it was very sad to me to see all traces of that community gone, but I was happy I got to be part of it, and to have seen someone with that kind of wealth try to do something to really change their city for the better.

Of course, it had problems, and he was throwing money around to make it all work, and as time went on I think much of that money served to conceal those problems rather than confront them… though I never heard stories back then on the scale of what this article describes as happening in Utah.

I don’t know really how to feel about the information here, other than very, very sad. I hope despite how he wound up, someone else someday is able to draw inspiration from the parts of what he did that worked and created hope and strengthened the local community, and they can move the ball forward. And I hope wherever Tony is now, he’s free from whatever drove him into such a dark place. Rest in peace.

> He vowed that anyone who spent his money would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on the amount they spent. If someone booked out a restaurant and spent $1,000 on the tab, for example, they would earn $100. If they recruited someone to live in Park City, they would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on that person’s annual salary. And if someone could source a real estate deal and spent $1 million on the property, that person would earn $100,000.

This is, quite literally, the stupidest incentive scheme I've ever heard of.

Interesting story. Wonder what caused his downfall into insanity. Was Zappos getting a sudden influx of money, giving him too much sense of power and importance ?

It's also sad that he felt he had to overachieve, our current system values achievements and work, and many times that goes really out of balance, people trying to become the next multibillionare no matter what, risking their personal health and even leaving them insane in the process like with Tony apparently.

This "biohacking your way to 10x" is unfortunately very prevalent in certain circles, and I understand it, but I think as a society and especially in Silicon Valley and in the software development circles we should remember the importance of resting and taking time off. Your body and especially brain can only take so much.

It is actually kind of stupid how little is talked about the importance of resting. Thinking all the time takes an immense amount of energy, trying to push that year over year, even for decades, can lead to some really unpleasant states, where you try to start self medicating and finding ways to circumvent the need for rest.

I wish there was more talk about taking time off and just being, I bet it would save a lot of people from peer pressure to 10x perform all the time.

I think constantly trying to overachieve is one of the sicknesses in our industry, which is not talked nearly enough about.

There's only the testimony of the financial manager (Tony Lee) to imply that Tony Hsieh's brother Andy was "seeking to exploit his brother rather than protect him".

So I think it remains plausible that Andy was, in truth, trying to preserve some assets to return to brother, in the hopes there'd eventually be some bottoming-out, possible rehab, & return-to-sanity.

One of my mentors was an absolute business genius, who around the first dotcom bubble built many many products, many that were very successful. Then around 27 he started going pretty wierd, and 10 years down the line it turns out he's paranoid schizophrenic, and either takes drugs which greatly dimishes his energy and smartness, or he goes crazy.

Many of the crazy money spends and similar of Hsieh sound familiar, it's like the genius just gets more and more wacky ideas until they both get exploited but also destroy themselves.

It's such a crazy story for me personally. There's also so many of these around. There's something about genius up until about ~27 years old that then can go completely insane. Seems to me to be linked to the whole 27 club [1] too. Seems like something really changes in our brain chemistry around then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club

This is just inestimably sad.

His book, "Delivering Happiness" had a massive impact on how I built my companies.

The reads like an elder abuse story, except the guy was 46.

I find it fascinating how permissive openness to new ideas and challenging convention in people like Hsieh is likely both responsible for their success and also their downfall.

Even though Hsieh had moved on from Silicon Valley after the first dot-com boom, it's a characteristic I'd apply to the Bay Area in general. Makes me wonder if the line between the folks attempting to disrupt the status quo with their startup and the folks living in tents and experimenting with drug cocktails in the tenderloin isn't in fact razor thin. And conversely, I wonder if by "cleaning up" places like SF, you might also kill the permissive attitudes that make the Bay Area the place to go when you want to birth a new idea.

R.I.P.

His book delivering happiness is a good one with a shadow story about depression, and inability to find piece and happiness for oneself.

A tragic tale. It is morbidly fascinating from the outside, the results of combining mental illness with lots of money. I hope his family and other loved ones can find peace and closure at some point.

Wow. That gives a lot of perspective on the lack of hindsight from silicon valley apologists who presented Tony and his company as models for everyone to follow. And of course on his book "delivering happiness".

I just read "Delivering Happiness" two days ago and learned about Tony's death later

I met someone claiming to be one of Tony’s best friends who told me that he had his drug induced idea that he needed to burn himself as a death and rebirth thing. That he had a secret death cult he was trying to start.

He also said that the man who ran into the Man at Burning Man a couple years ago had his final conversation with Tony before he self immolated.

The guy who shared was a rather successful entrepreneur and otherwise I had no reason to suspect he was lying.