Today’s young Internet barons should use the talents that made them rich to transform the world of giving In the past several decades, there has been a monumental shift in the distribution of wealth on the planet. A new global elite, led by pioneers in telecommunications, personal computing, Internet services and mobile devices, has claimed an aggregate net worth of almost $800 billion of the $7 trillion in assets held by the wealthiest 1,000 people in the world. The barons of this new connected age are interchangeably referred to as technologists, engineers and even geeks, but they all have one thing in common: They are hackers. Almost without exception, the major companies that now dominate our online social lives (Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etc.) were founded by people who had an early association with hacker culture. I still consider myself to be one of them. Once you adopt the mind-set of a hacker, it’s hard to let it go. Hackers share certain values: an anti-establishment bias, a belief in radical transparency, a nose for sniffing out vulnerabilities in systems, a desire to “hack” complex problems using elegant technological and social solutions, and an almost religious belief in the power of data to aid in solving those problems.

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