Normally I’d say we don’t need an article about a tweet, but considering he blocked me years ago, I assume for liking the wrong reply to one of his tweets, this actually serves a purpose.
You'd think Mike Judge would have permanently taught our culture the lesson that nerdy tech types should just never deadpan rap lyrics like they are "hard."
Just in case anyone doesn't click through and isn't familiar with this name, this isn't just a tech CEO of some random org, but the CEO of Y Combinator itself.
Was not familiar actually. It also seems that Y Combinator, the legendary Silicon Valley startup accelerator is no longer there! It had moved to San Francisco :-o !?!
Looking a bit more at it, I wish Gary Tan would succeed in his beginnings to make SF more livable. Hope that this work and his other personal life wouldn’t interfere or distract him from up-keeping our Silicon Valley engine of innovation.
YC is playing a critical decision making role. As once the company is accepted to YC it gets to allocate significant amount of shared resources.
> Fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label and as a motherfucking crew
And if you want to be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too
Chino XL, fuck you too
All you motherfuckers, fuck you too (take money, take money)
All of y'all mother fuckers, fuck you, die slow, motherfucker
Tweet
> Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew ... And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too ... Die slow motherfuckers.
Follow the list of YC alums, and you'll see many companies that directly fly in the face of many of the values that are common to many HN users, like analytics, etc.
Garry Tan is an accomplished individual without a doubt. But he is also thin skinned and can’t seem to stand even a slight differing of opinion on political matters.
Not someone I would put in a position of power in a political role.
If you or another reader has a Lobste.rs account, would you mind sending me an invite? I've been curious to join for a long time. My email is in my bio.
It seems that there's enough of a divide between HN and YC. As I posted elsewhere, look at the common values expressed on HN, and you'll find plenty of YC startups that are diametric opposites of those values. In the many years I've participated in online forums, I still find HN to be the most well-moderated I've ever experienced.
Many YC-founded companies simply cannot afford a negative press cycle or let alone the press face-time outside of e.g. Techcrunch so it’s unfair to compare their “values” with Garry Tan’s established desire to be TK-style divisive and disruptive. So don’t assume YC Founders speak for the HN readership despite their outsized HN moderation influence (as evidenced by this post getting flagged).
In this case, I suppose we can satisfy that rule by taking [flagged] off the post and leaving the sensational title instead of editing it the way we normally would.
I'm one of the people who flagged it because it's mostly just boring partisan pissing contest. It doesn't pass the "intellectual curiosity" test.
I'm fairly relaxed about this sort of thing (e.g. some stories about Gaza and such should definitely on HN), but "firebrand says firebrand-y thing" ... yeah, that doesn't really fit. It's neither especially interesting or especially notable and we could have a story about this every week; perhaps even multiple.
What would be on-topic would be a an in-depth profile about this person, or something like that.
I don't know if I buy this. He did a death threat, he's the CEO of YC, that seems like something that belongs on HN, YC's community forum.
You might not be interested, that's totally fair, then don't upvote.
But flagging it so that people don't know the CEO of the community is expressing death threats? I feel like we should know. We shouldn't be learning about YC/HN from other sites and have it censored/flagged within the community.
It wasn't a a death threat but it would be safe to say that it expresses his sentiments. Being drunk is a partial excuse but it's a serious faux pas and he should own it rather than pretend it never happened.
I haven't lived in SF for years but the city government is legendary for it's ability to not serve its constituents (which obviously isn't unique).
Look, this Tan person seems unpleasant, but that doesn't mean it's on-topic here. Not everything related to YC is on-topic, and that there's a gap between HN and "YC-the-company" is exactly why I post here in the first place.
Dan unflagged it for the look of things, and I would have done the same, but I resent the accusation that I'm "censoring" things. I told you why I flagged it: it's just a silly off-topic "tit-for-tat of the day" type of thing that could quickly overrun the site if left unflagged because there's countless stories like that every day. Entire sites are dedicated almost exclusively to reporting this sort of thing, and if you're interested in that then follow sites that report on that type of thing.
HN is about "intellectual curiosity". It's not a "tech site" or "YC community forum" or "SF daily news site" or anything else.
And the fact that this post got flagged inside of an hour speaks to how biased HN has become. Move to Lobsters and let YC Founders have their TK wannabe techbrosf.org
From a cursory glance, the quality of conversation appears to be nearly as high (or higher) than HN but that doesn't matter if most posts see less than 5-10 comments.
I think this was posted many hours ago. Was it first deleted?
Either way, I understand why he’s frustrated. SF local politicians are extremely corrupt. They’ll do anything to get poor people to vote for them so they can continue to stay in power to siphon money from the wealthy and tech population. Big problems never get solved in this city.
That said, the tweets were poor taste from Tan. Could be a fireable offense. Sad.
Just check out Garry Tan’s site techbrosf.org and that’s all you need to know about the TK-pugnacious wannabe. Divisive personalities are pretty common in VC but YC was originally intended to be a bit less divisive.
> I would hope HN has a policy not to censor negative information about YC
I don't use the word "censor" because it means different things to people, but yes: literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I call it the first rule because it was the first thing that pg firehosed me with on the morning that I walked into moderation "training" with him. He was yelling about it (not in a mean way - in a "you absolutely need to know this" way) before I'd had a chance to grab a chair. And we've stuck to it ever since.
That isn't enough to stop some people from saying we do nefarious things, but it does allow us to answer such claims in good conscience. That alone makes it worth sticking to. More importantly, it seems to be sufficient to earn the provisional trust of the community, as long as we keep answering questions when they come up.
The one nuance I sometimes point out is that "moderating less" doesn't mean "suspending all moderation and doing nothing at all" - that would leave too large a loophole. It means that we take whatever standard practice we would normally apply in a situation, and then do something less than that.
In the present case, I would normally have left the post [flagged] and/or edited the sensational title, but because it was YC related, I turned off the flags and left the title intact—even though that title is about as silly as describing someone who quotes "to be or not to be, that is the question" as "contemplating suicide". Normally we'd never let that stand on HN, but first rule is first rule.
When I was in high school in the early/mid 2000s, there was a series Tupac bootlegs going around. Makaveli 1 - ¿10ish? That's all on YouTube now and probably torrents. Songs getting leaked on message boards too. He put out so much good material in such a short span of time. He was working on collabs with Boot Camp Clik and some other east coast guys and was supposed to do more stuff with Bone Thugs. He had a compilation album he was working on called One Nation that was supposed to end the stupid East/West thing. Which reminds me, it blew my mind when I could get on myspace and talk to one of the guys from Boot Camp Clik about it.
As a Tupac fan and lover of print news, I think this article encapsulates what's wrong with modern media: the selective use of context to engender a political stance, from which outage is engendered
The problem isn't social media or long-form print news, but the 24-hour news cycle in my humble opinion. As we saw in the case of that shocking bombing of a Palestinian hospital, I've increasingly felt that once reputable media companies have prioritized returns (eyeballs) over news. Indeed, many of these paragraph long 24-hour updates reuse the same sentence structure I noticed.
It’s buried and incidental when it should be the lede.
Invoking an artistic expression of “I can’t find words strong enough to convey how much I loathe what you stand for” is very different from making a literal death wish.
Didn’t read the article because of the paywall, but I’d be surprised if the article mentions this. Mission local is a very pro the board of directors, and if you don’t live in SF, they are absolutely terrible. They don’t deserve to die, but they absolutely deserve to be kicked out.
Downvoted for stating the obvious? Did anyone read the article?
> On Saturday morning, Tan apologized about the death wish in a subsequent post, saying he was simply referencing a lyric in Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up,” but that it “wasn’t a good call” regardless. The notorious diss track famously added fuel to the fire of East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry, leading to Tupac’s murder in a drive-by shooting just three months after its release.
The distinction you make would be significant if that article was about Tupac and his justification or lack thereof in writing the lyrics, but it is completely immaterial to an article where what is relevant is Tan and his reference to the lyrics.
The article’s central claim is that to quote these lyrics is to “wish death” on the people you’re naming. The context leads me to the exact opposite interpretation: it’s a righteous condemnation of others for wishing death on you.
I'm don't mean to defend Tan here, he already apologized. I'm simply reiterating that the article doesn't come close to saying what I said: Tann was obviously quoting Tupac, and wasn't just using that as a post-hoc excuse for the choice of words.
> The article’s central claim is that to quote these lyrics is to “wish death” on the people you’re naming. The context leads me to the exact opposite interpretation:
It leads me to the conclusion that the wish in the original lyrics was understandable and provoked, not that it wasn't literally what it says. Which certainly affects the view of Tupac writing and performing it, but not so much that of Tan referencing it.
Framing this as "awkward" is so stupidly disingenuous. I surely hope you are not serious, though this is HN so I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this line of commentary given the audience and people involved.
> In the past, Tan has not been receptive to jokes about him: When commenting on San Francisco community organizer Julian La Rosa, who had said that “millionaires and landlords should be guillotined,” Tan seemed to take the jest deadly seriously.
> “This is not a joke,” he posted. “This guy wants to guillotine people.”
The reputational harm clause that is surely in his employment contact was just beached. The board should fire him within days.
The culture of a company is the behavior you tolerate. If the board doesn't act, they're condoning toxic culture, which is ultimately a threat to their institution.
> On Saturday morning, Tan apologized about the death wish in a subsequent post, saying he was simply referencing a lyric in Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up,” but that it “wasn’t a good call” regardless. The notorious diss track famously added fuel to the fire of East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry, leading to Tupac’s murder in a drive-by shooting just three months after its release.
I didn’t get the reference but obviously don’t think Garry Tan wants the supervisors to die. That said, I don’t have a lot of empathy for him given his behavior when the roles were reversed:
> In the past, Tan has not been receptive to jokes about him: When commenting on San Francisco community organizer Julian La Rosa, who had said that “millionaires and landlords should be guillotined,” Tan seemed to take the jest deadly seriously.
> “This is not a joke,” he posted. “This guy wants to guillotine people.”
> “This kind of stuff should have zero place in San Francisco politics,” he later said. He has repeatedly gone back to La Rosa’s joke as evidence of violence among San Francisco’s left.
I personally can say I’ve never felt the urge to tell people to die (seriously or jokingly) on social media
What lyric is “millionaires and landlords should be guillotined” from?
Do you actually think a left-leaning, self avowed socialist who “wants communism” (quoted from his own tweet) was really just kidding when he said this?
I’m a YC alumna, and didn’t find this acceptable at all. Comments like these only hurt the cause. YC and its leadership should be a pillar of civic discourse in a respectful, impactful manner.
YC - calling on you to take action and hold Garry Tan accountable.
Not sure what you're finding difficult about this. I don't think anyone thinks that Garry Tan was literally planning to murder people. If your defense is "but I wasn't literally planning to murder people", then something has gone significantly wrong with your communication. It looks bad for any organisation to be run by a loudmouth with poor judgment. Seems fair for others associated with the organisation to complain about how this reflects on them.
That's not really inconsistent with what I said or what the OP said. It's disgraceful and embarrassing behavior which would be more than enough to get many people in public-facing jobs fired. But if YC want to continue to be represented by this mook, that's their choice.
Also, while I don't think that a serious threat was intended in this case, there is absolutely no logic to the idea that something cannot possibly be construed as a threat if it's a quotation from song lyrics.
It's disgracefully bad joke execution, but that's par for the course for dad humor. What's cringier to me is the attempt to extract more meaning from it than that. Nobody in the world construed this as an actual threat; even the people who didn't realize it was a quote from an extraordinarily famous hip-hop track (but clearly do now).
But, I mean, calling this "disgraceful" is narratively a lot more fun than just acknowledging that social media affords us all the opportunity to faceplant publicly with age-revealing pop culture humor. I'm sorry to be captain fun vampire, but the narratively-most-interesting interpretation of a story is very rarely the truest.
For the CEO of a company to even joke about killing elected representatives is far outside the bounds of acceptable behavior. With all due respect to Tupac, the particular words that Tan selected do not exactly push the limits of hermeneutic complexity. Tan chose to make his absurd death threats via a laughably off-key appropriation of hip-hop. That's a double fail. Neither idiocy cancels out the other.
In your second paragraph you seem to suggest that I only hold my point of view because it makes for a good story. That seems a bit patronizing. Perhaps in return I could offer my own diagnosis: that you spend a lot more time on Twitter than I do. Maybe this stuff starts to look 'normal' once you've been in that particular bubble long enough. All the more reason to stay away, in my opinion. If I ever start drunk-tweeting death threats at members of my local government, then I hope that my friends will not run to my defence but make it clear to me that I have a problem.
You and I are not having the same conversation. My perspective, which I think is, uh, quite well supported by the evidence, is that this was a drunken hip-hop dad joke where the "killing" reference is literally the lyrics to one of the more famous Tupac songs. Your perspective suggests that, had I made an image meme of Homer strangling Bart and labeled it the wrong way, I'd be "even jok[ing] about killing elected representatives".
Yes, I think you hold your point of view because it makes for a good story. Sorry that's patronizing.
Mostly this whole story is just very stupid and I'm embarrassed to be commenting on this thread at all, but I made the mistake of sticking my toes in it and now I can't resist well-actuallying.
You're going a little overboard with the snark. It must be nice to exist on a higher plane than the other participants in the discussion. But if you freely choose to descend to our level, it's bad form to complain about it.
I cannot recall the Simpsons episode where Homer kills Bart. I suppose you could use the image to make a joke about cartoonishly strangling someone.
If Tan wasn't joking about wishing death on the people he listed then I have to wonder what exactly he was joking about. He wasn't the original author of the words in the tweet (a point that I think you're overly fixated on), but he chose them and knew what they meant. However, to me, the interesting question here isn't exactly what Garry Tan was thinking (I'm guessing the answer is "not much" – he was clearly off his head). It's how the CEO of YC is someone who could apparently take lessons in effective communication and good judgment from 14 year olds on TikTok.
I thought the headline might be exaggerating with "menacing" but no, if anything that's actually an understatement:
> “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.”
Tweeting death threats at local government officials? That'd have you arrested here.
Given that it's apparently a rap reference from one (subsequently) murdered rapper to another (subsequently) murdered rapper during some kind of "blood feud", I'd contend that taking it as an implied threat (assuming you got the rap reference - I didn't) isn't that far-fetched.
By the thinnest of threads. He knows exactly what he's doing, it's very Trump-eque. People in power don't make direct threats, because their following knows exactly what they mean. "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest" rhetoric.
155 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadAnd yet, it keeps happening.
Big Musk energy - and on checking, of course he has quoted Eminem in one of his stupid fights.
https://www.billboard.com/business/legal/elon-musk-eminem-ly...
YC is playing a critical decision making role. As once the company is accepted to YC it gets to allocate significant amount of shared resources.
> Fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label and as a motherfucking crew And if you want to be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too Chino XL, fuck you too All you motherfuckers, fuck you too (take money, take money) All of y'all mother fuckers, fuck you, die slow, motherfucker
Tweet
> Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew ... And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too ... Die slow motherfuckers.
Most bay area politicians are like that though.
When's the last time you've talked to someone on the opposite political aisle on the internet and did you leave it with a higher opinion of them?
Stay classy.
Reddit? Twitter? TruthSocial?
It's the internet equivalent of Mad Max out there. Except with more toxic waste.
There's plenty of toxicity here but the s/n ratio is pretty damn high.
Now that I've seen it I suppose I need to figure out what we should do in this case. The general principle is that we moderate less, not more, when YC is part of a story (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
In this case, I suppose we can satisfy that rule by taking [flagged] off the post and leaving the sensational title instead of editing it the way we normally would.
I'm fairly relaxed about this sort of thing (e.g. some stories about Gaza and such should definitely on HN), but "firebrand says firebrand-y thing" ... yeah, that doesn't really fit. It's neither especially interesting or especially notable and we could have a story about this every week; perhaps even multiple.
What would be on-topic would be a an in-depth profile about this person, or something like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XASNM1XEQPs
You might not be interested, that's totally fair, then don't upvote.
But flagging it so that people don't know the CEO of the community is expressing death threats? I feel like we should know. We shouldn't be learning about YC/HN from other sites and have it censored/flagged within the community.
I haven't lived in SF for years but the city government is legendary for it's ability to not serve its constituents (which obviously isn't unique).
I can't believe I'm defending a tech bro....
Dan unflagged it for the look of things, and I would have done the same, but I resent the accusation that I'm "censoring" things. I told you why I flagged it: it's just a silly off-topic "tit-for-tat of the day" type of thing that could quickly overrun the site if left unflagged because there's countless stories like that every day. Entire sites are dedicated almost exclusively to reporting this sort of thing, and if you're interested in that then follow sites that report on that type of thing.
HN is about "intellectual curiosity". It's not a "tech site" or "YC community forum" or "SF daily news site" or anything else.
From a cursory glance, the quality of conversation appears to be nearly as high (or higher) than HN but that doesn't matter if most posts see less than 5-10 comments.
This is schemescape signing off.
Either way, I understand why he’s frustrated. SF local politicians are extremely corrupt. They’ll do anything to get poor people to vote for them so they can continue to stay in power to siphon money from the wealthy and tech population. Big problems never get solved in this city.
That said, the tweets were poor taste from Tan. Could be a fireable offense. Sad.
Happy to see YC take the current site down and say they don’t actually think TK brought positive change to SF.
> I would hope HN has a policy not to censor negative information about YC
I don't use the word "censor" because it means different things to people, but yes: literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I call it the first rule because it was the first thing that pg firehosed me with on the morning that I walked into moderation "training" with him. He was yelling about it (not in a mean way - in a "you absolutely need to know this" way) before I'd had a chance to grab a chair. And we've stuck to it ever since.
That isn't enough to stop some people from saying we do nefarious things, but it does allow us to answer such claims in good conscience. That alone makes it worth sticking to. More importantly, it seems to be sufficient to earn the provisional trust of the community, as long as we keep answering questions when they come up.
The one nuance I sometimes point out is that "moderating less" doesn't mean "suspending all moderation and doing nothing at all" - that would leave too large a loophole. It means that we take whatever standard practice we would normally apply in a situation, and then do something less than that.
In the present case, I would normally have left the post [flagged] and/or edited the sensational title, but because it was YC related, I turned off the flags and left the title intact—even though that title is about as silly as describing someone who quotes "to be or not to be, that is the question" as "contemplating suicide". Normally we'd never let that stand on HN, but first rule is first rule.
> F** Mobb Deep! F** Biggie! F** Bad Boy as a staff, record label, and as a motherf**' crew!
> And if you wanna be down with Bad Boy, then f** you too! Chino XL, f** you too! All you motherf**s, f** you too!
> All of y'all motherf**s, f** you, die slow!
https://genius.com/89450
https://youtu.be/2Fwg1W_C28E
High Til I Die is another good one, not a diss track https://youtu.be/LxNTvHSNIYQ
When I was in high school in the early/mid 2000s, there was a series Tupac bootlegs going around. Makaveli 1 - ¿10ish? That's all on YouTube now and probably torrents. Songs getting leaked on message boards too. He put out so much good material in such a short span of time. He was working on collabs with Boot Camp Clik and some other east coast guys and was supposed to do more stuff with Bone Thugs. He had a compilation album he was working on called One Nation that was supposed to end the stupid East/West thing. Which reminds me, it blew my mind when I could get on myspace and talk to one of the guys from Boot Camp Clik about it.
The problem isn't social media or long-form print news, but the 24-hour news cycle in my humble opinion. As we saw in the case of that shocking bombing of a Palestinian hospital, I've increasingly felt that once reputable media companies have prioritized returns (eyeballs) over news. Indeed, many of these paragraph long 24-hour updates reuse the same sentence structure I noticed.
Invoking an artistic expression of “I can’t find words strong enough to convey how much I loathe what you stand for” is very different from making a literal death wish.
I see it's flagged, too. tbh, flagging Twitter drama's probably a good thing in general. I mean, he deleted and apologised.
> On Saturday morning, Tan apologized about the death wish in a subsequent post, saying he was simply referencing a lyric in Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up,” but that it “wasn’t a good call” regardless. The notorious diss track famously added fuel to the fire of East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry, leading to Tupac’s murder in a drive-by shooting just three months after its release.
People tried to kill Tupac, then Tupac went off on them, then people killed Tupac.
The article summarizes this as “Tupac said mean things and it got someone killed.”
It leads me to the conclusion that the wish in the original lyrics was understandable and provoked, not that it wasn't literally what it says. Which certainly affects the view of Tupac writing and performing it, but not so much that of Tan referencing it.
This is legitimately not okay. He needs to step down.
lol, step down? From what, the cellar comedy stage?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiCjD5qVV_U
> Fuck Mobb Deep! Fuck Biggie! Fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label, and as a motherfuckin' crew!
> And if you wanna be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too! Chino XL, fuck you too! All you motherfuckers, fuck you too!
> All of y'all motherfuckers, fuck you, die slow!
This world has too many politically correct corporate drones. And their work is boring.
An actual relatable human in charge? Sounds like an edge.
> “This is not a joke,” he posted. “This guy wants to guillotine people.”
They always knew it wasn't a death wish but knew they could frame it this way for clicks.
The reputational harm clause that is surely in his employment contact was just beached. The board should fire him within days.
The culture of a company is the behavior you tolerate. If the board doesn't act, they're condoning toxic culture, which is ultimately a threat to their institution.
Stupid? Yeah but whatever. Garry actually wants to see changes in SF.
All I know is my biometric breathalyzer unlock for social media apps is getting funded this summer. Right Garry?
> In the past, Tan has not been receptive to jokes about him: When commenting on San Francisco community organizer Julian La Rosa, who had said that “millionaires and landlords should be guillotined,” Tan seemed to take the jest deadly seriously.
> “This is not a joke,” he posted. “This guy wants to guillotine people.”
> “This kind of stuff should have zero place in San Francisco politics,” he later said. He has repeatedly gone back to La Rosa’s joke as evidence of violence among San Francisco’s left.
I personally can say I’ve never felt the urge to tell people to die (seriously or jokingly) on social media
Do you actually think a left-leaning, self avowed socialist who “wants communism” (quoted from his own tweet) was really just kidding when he said this?
YC - calling on you to take action and hold Garry Tan accountable.
Also, while I don't think that a serious threat was intended in this case, there is absolutely no logic to the idea that something cannot possibly be construed as a threat if it's a quotation from song lyrics.
But, I mean, calling this "disgraceful" is narratively a lot more fun than just acknowledging that social media affords us all the opportunity to faceplant publicly with age-revealing pop culture humor. I'm sorry to be captain fun vampire, but the narratively-most-interesting interpretation of a story is very rarely the truest.
In your second paragraph you seem to suggest that I only hold my point of view because it makes for a good story. That seems a bit patronizing. Perhaps in return I could offer my own diagnosis: that you spend a lot more time on Twitter than I do. Maybe this stuff starts to look 'normal' once you've been in that particular bubble long enough. All the more reason to stay away, in my opinion. If I ever start drunk-tweeting death threats at members of my local government, then I hope that my friends will not run to my defence but make it clear to me that I have a problem.
Yes, I think you hold your point of view because it makes for a good story. Sorry that's patronizing.
Mostly this whole story is just very stupid and I'm embarrassed to be commenting on this thread at all, but I made the mistake of sticking my toes in it and now I can't resist well-actuallying.
I cannot recall the Simpsons episode where Homer kills Bart. I suppose you could use the image to make a joke about cartoonishly strangling someone.
If Tan wasn't joking about wishing death on the people he listed then I have to wonder what exactly he was joking about. He wasn't the original author of the words in the tweet (a point that I think you're overly fixated on), but he chose them and knew what they meant. However, to me, the interesting question here isn't exactly what Garry Tan was thinking (I'm guessing the answer is "not much" – he was clearly off his head). It's how the CEO of YC is someone who could apparently take lessons in effective communication and good judgment from 14 year olds on TikTok.
> “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.”
Tweeting death threats at local government officials? That'd have you arrested here.
The tweet, while obviously inappropriate, contains no threat whatsoever.