The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Drug Dealers

Just over two years ago, a federal jury convicted Ross Ulbricht, the then-30-year-old creator of the online marketplace Silk Road, of conspiring to distribute narcotics, among other charges. In announcing that Ulbricht had received a life sentence under the so-called kingpin statute, the Department of Justice compared his transgressions to those committed by crime bosses in the offline world. “Make no mistake,” said Preet Bharara, at the time the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which oversaw the prosecution, “Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions.”

In American Kingpin (Portfolio, $27), a potboiler recounting of Ulbricht’s exploits and eventual capture, journalist Nick Bilton suggests an alternate archetype for understanding his subject: the Silicon Valley chief executive officer. Bilton, who covers tech for Vanity Fair, writes that Silk Road was “no different from Facebook or Twitter,” in that it was a web-based marketplace that tolerated bad behavior on the part of its users. Except instead of inadvertently facilitating, say, fake news in the case of Facebook or hate speech in the case of Twitter, Silk Road was optimized for the trade of drugs and weapons.