Gavin Belson

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

In an early scene, the Thiel character—who is known in the show as Peter Gregory and who shares Thiel’s affectless demeanor, his love for seasteading, and his disdain for elite universities—is successfully manipulated by a promising engineer who threatens to go to back to college. The show’s writers had been unsparing with other tech figures, incorporating aspects of the Google founders and Oracle’s Larry Ellison into the villainous Gavin Belson—a greedy big tech executive with a persecution complex and full-time spiritual adviser—and savagely mocking the investor and NBA team owner Mark Cuban, whose fictional double is obsessed with his own net worth and a failed but financially remunerative tech product he created in the 1990s. The Thiel character, on the other hand, comes off as sweetly innocent, more out of touch than conniving.

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Thiel’s interest in parabiosis led to wild speculation—and lots of snark. Gawker heard a rumor that he had been paying $40,000 to get quarterly infusions from an eighteen-year-old. The following year, HBO’s Silicon Valley dedicated an entire episode to the subject, having the show’s evil corporate character, Gavin Belson, receive transfusions from a strapping “blood boy”—or as Belson described him, “my transfusion associate.” (The actor who’d played the Thiel character had died during the series’ first season, and some of Thiel’s quirks found their way into Belson.) In late 2018, during his last interview with a major U.S. media outlet before the pandemic hit—at The New York Times’s annual DealBook conference—Thiel addressed the issue.

The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty
by Ethan Sherwood Strauss
Published 13 Apr 2020

The deal has long since been done, and the Warriors’ suffering is a distant memory. “Maybe I should eat something so I can be human,” Joe Lacob says, indicating that he just might be in on the joke. The joke, of course, is that Lacob is more machine than man, that he cannot fathom the utility of social graces, that he is a parody of the already parodic Gavin Belson of HBO’s Silicon Valley. The other billionaires in the building likely aren’t in a joking mood. We are at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas, and Lacob is about to step into the NBA’s annual Board of Governors meeting, the league’s high court of petty grievances. That ballroom will contain some twenty-odd ownership groups who’ve no hope for a championship.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now
by Sergey Young
Published 23 Aug 2021

He had lived a relatively normal life and had even continued to play his favorite sport of basketball—backpack, artificial heart, and all. NEW (AND OLD) IDEAS IN REGENERATION While some of these ideas for regenerative medicine are pretty “out there,” they aren’t even the strangest. If you are a fan of the HBO series Silicon Valley, you may remember a 2017 episode wherein antagonist billionaire Gavin Belson receives a blood transfusion from a strapping young man, right in the middle of a business presentation. This was a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at the practice of heterochronic parabiosis, more commonly known as “young blood” transfusions. As the theory goes, regularly receiving blood plasma transfusions from a young and healthy person can benefit an older person through reduced inflammation, proliferation of stem cells, reduction of the amyloid plaques that correspond to Alzheimer’s disease, and other preventative benefits for cancer and heart disease.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Berrent had joined the company from WilmerHale, a white-shoe law firm, and was there to allay the concerns from Case employees that WeWork intended to claim ownership of their personal projects, which Case had encouraged them to pursue freely before. Berrent referenced HBO’s Silicon Valley, which was then in its second season. The show’s villain was Gavin Belson, an unfeeling business titan running a company called Hooli, who was constantly followed around by a spiritual guru and had recently laid claim to a piece of technology that one of his former employees had built. “Look,” Berrent said. “We’re not Hooli!” * * * AT THE END OF 2015, WeWork had lawyers from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom start quietly making early preparations for an initial public offering.