Ground control to Myspace Tom

The enduring appeal of the tech bro that got away

In December 2022, Elon Musk polled his considerable Twitter following to ask if he should step down from the CEO job. “Depends who you get to run it!” replied the irrepressible Myspace Tom. In the early 2000s, Myspace Tom — née Tom Anderson — built the world’s largest social media site, sold it to News Corp and peaceably walked away from tech. But Myspace Tom could return at any time, he joked. And since President Donald Trump’s tech bro-studded inauguration, thousands of disillusioned social media users have beseeched Anderson to do just that.

“I don’t think we appreciated you enough back then,” reads one representative post. “More than ever, we need you,” pleaded another. It’s not the first time that Anderson’s followers have flooded him with nostalgic praise or entreaties, either: a review of his Instagram, Facebook and X accounts shows that people have clamored for Myspace Tom’s return after just about every recent social media scandal.

Anderson, in the cultural imagination, is the tech bro that got away. He’s a foil to the Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — the exception that proves their rule isn’t that great. Just take a scroll through Myspace Tom’s assorted feeds, all ironically housed on the social platforms that usurped his influence, and observe the rare, precious sight of a very rich man contentedly minding his own damn business. Since stepping away from the limelight, Anderson golfs. He takes lavish international vacations. He pals around with former “Amazing Race” contestants.

In 2014, when ABC News asked him if he’d ever come back to tech, Myspace Tom humbly demurred. “Why aren’t more tech people like MySpace Tom?” asked a 2020 Cracked article.

In fairness, no one really knows if Anderson would navigate our current social media environment with more or less grace than the current bozos.¹ He left the game in 2009, when social media was still widely and unreservedly viewed as a force for social good. His scandals were of the comical² and momentary sort; his politics — if he has them³ — have always seemed wan and vague.

But the fact that Anderson did retire from tech, and at the tender age of 38, testifies to a political philosophy and a set of values that feel almost radical today. People like Musk and Zuckerberg are hell-bent on amassing unprecedented, indecent stores of power and wealth. Anderson isn’t exactly curing cancer, by comparison … but he’s at least bucked the gospel of infinite extraction.

The story of Myspace Tom

Anderson always made something of an oddball founder — a product of Los Angeles, never San Francisco. As a teenager growing up in Southern California, he reportedly hacked Chase Bank not to steal money, but to level-up his code. He later studied English at Berkeley, attended film school in LA and generally eschewed conventional ambitions. “In college, I’d literally planned to stay poor,” he later told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t want a job and considered being homeless because I wanted to be a lifelong student.”

By 2000, however, Anderson’s passion for learning had inconveniently landed him with lots of student debt. He took a low-paying gig at a data-storage company, which promptly went out of business in the dot-com crash. At that job, however, Anderson befriended the marketing executive Chris DeWolfe, who would soon become his business partner. The pair founded and sold an internet marketing company for several million dollars in 2002, then started tooling around with the idea of launching a competitor to Friendster.

By some accounts, Myspace’s success was “one of the Web’s great accidents.” Neither Anderson nor DeWolfe really knew what they were building — nor did their employer, a company called Intermix. The social network’s earliest distinguishing feature, the ability to jazz up your profile with custom HTML, resulted from an error that its founders let live. Its popularity with musicians and bands, meanwhile, sprung organically from Anderson’s own passion for music.⁴

In just over two years, Myspace grew from a quirky side hustle to an online phenomenon that Wired dubbed “MTV for the Net generation.” By mid-2005, Myspace boasted 22 million users, the most of any site in the U.S.

This is the part of the story where Anderson gets fabulously, though not broligarchically, rich: In 2005, Intermix sold Myspace to Rubert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a cool $650 million. DeWolfe and Anderson would have seen just a fraction of that money, but a fraction of a half-billion dollars is still a pretty good time. Plus, News Corp. reportedly offered both men $30-million contracts to stay on with Myspace, which they did until 2009.

Those four years were rocky ones, in large part because Myspace faced new competition from Zuckerberg’s Facebook. The site underwent a redesign in 2008 in an effort to shed its angsty teenage look. Meanwhile, Anderson and DeWolfe both appeared to chafe under the corporate mandates of Murdoch’s operation, which ranged from new budget reviews and processes to a forced relocation to Beverly Hills. In 2009, several months before their contracts formally expired, Anderson and Dewolfe were both pushed out of the social network that they built.

DeWolfe went on to found a mobile game developer and, after that, an “AI and web3” social platform with backing from Andreessen Horowitz. Anderson, however, took some time off to dabble in residential architecture and travel a bit. In 2011, while attending Burning Man with a photographer pal, Myspace Tom discovered that he wasn’t a bad shooter himself. He didn’t need any more money, and he loved taking photos — so he decided to just do that.

“I’ve divested myself of all other responsibility so I can just travel and shoot,” Anderson told the photography site Petapixel in late 2012. He updated his Twitter bio accordingly: “Enjoying being retired,” it read.

‘Too pure for this world’

Since then, Anderson has apparently flirted with a handful of more-or-less formal gigs, including travel influencer, architectural firm partner and ambassador for a golf apparel brand. He started and abandoned two separate blogs⁵; he briefly considered some sort of podcast.

For most of the past 13 years, however, Anderson has split his time between his homes in Oahu, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, studying photography, taking extravagant vacations and dispensing occasional drips of shambling, feel-good stoner wisdom on his Instagram, YouTube and X accounts. I’ve never spoken to Myspace Tom, myself — this post is drawn from interviews he’s given over the years, as well as his social profiles — but he strikes me as the type of guy who never wears shoes and swears by ayahuasca.

“Taking a good photograph begets joy & serenity in a meditative state,” he once wrote on Instagram.

“This is a workout for the mind, the soul, the heart,” he said on YouTube, about helping one’s friends.

“The unchecked assumption of our culture is that money will make you happy. I don’t buy that,” he told a journalist.

“For the longest time I’ve been satisfied and chill,” he later wrote on IG. “Just at peace with how I am and how the world is.”

In comments like these, I see the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom. Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: more profits, more influence, more data. I think of the image of Musk, Zuckerberg and others at Trump’s recent inauguration. I think, too, of the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen’s claim that mega-successful entrepreneurs are also entitled to public adulation. Nothing is ever quite enough for these people; the trend line must always go up. That Myspace Tom defied that mandate and fucked off to Hawaii feels unusually decent, if not straight-up heroic.

“When MySpace sold, I made more money than I could ever possibly need,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “I love to be focused and working on creative projects, but I’d rather do that in an environment where it’s not a company or a business.”

Alas, like any good comic book hero, Anderson’s disinclined to seek power himself. The very things that make him seem like a cool guy are the things that also made him a short-lived tech executive. In July 2020, as social platforms were roiled by Covid misinformation, hate speech and other woes, one Twitter user grieved the apparent innocence of the Myspace era. Anderson, he wrote, never sold user data or sought to influence elections or lobbied against privacy legislation: “Myspace was just too pure for this world,” @JackDMurphy concluded.

Anderson, meanwhile, responded in typical chill-dude fashion: two heart-smiley emojis and the shaka hand.

Thanks to Kat for inspiring this week’s edition (!!). And thanks to the subscribers whose support gives me time to research stuff like this. <3

1. Anderson has expressed admiration for both Musk and Zuckerberg, though that was years ago. And he was far more enthused about Bill Gates, whom he called “one of the greatest heroes of our time” because of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. For instance: Anderson reportedly lied about his age for years, possibly to help Myspace crack the youth market.

3. Anderson’s social profiles are rigorously anodyne, even on the few occasions when he has addressed politics: sharing this meme of Trump, for instance, or posting open-ended engagement bait during the Obama administration.

4. In the ‘90s, he fronted a band called Swank. Alas: no digital traces remain.

5. The second blog, c. 2017, was called “Stop Working Start Playing” … which almost sounds like an antiwork slogan.