Starting from Scratch

(Pacific Palisades, after the fire)

Sometimes you can feel your politics change in an instant. This happened to me the other day while fleeing a fire, only to learn that looters had begun breaking into homes a few blocks away. When I later heard that some of these looters may also be arsonists—setting fires throughout the city so that they can plunder the lives of everyone forced to evacuate—I noticed that the phrase “police death squads” had a nice ring to it. The computers in our pockets give us access to nearly every earthly utterance. What was really happening in my city? Given the squalid state of our information landscape, it was impossible to know.

It has been an astonishing, heartbreaking week to live in Los Angeles.

When the fire started, I was at my desk, on a call with my team at Waking Up. Moments later, I was meditating on the futility of deciding which material things, gathered over a lifetime of acquisitiveness, I most cherished. In the end, I packed our daughters’ favorite stuffed animals, our two cats, a gun, and a bottle of MDMA (“Why the hell not?”). The one object of sentimental value I grabbed on my way out of my office was a mala from my days in India and Nepal. This moment of triage produced a brief reflection on the many years I’d spent traveling along seemingly incongruent paths: How many people understand the value of both a mala and a gun, and can carry each without feeling like a fraud? As I prepared to step out into a city where nearly everyone would soon be bracing for chaos, I was very grateful to have developed both sides of my personality.

After retrieving our youngest daughter from school, Annaka returned to pack for herself and the girls, while I stood at the window in our living room watching the progress of the fire. I find few things more beautiful than perfectly formed cumulus clouds, and the ramparts of smoke now rising in the West were their magnificent, evil twins. After watching this merciless vision evolve for several minutes, I suddenly decided that we had run out of time.

Based on several reports received in the middle of the night, I became nearly certain that we had lost our home. Later evidence has convinced me that it was spared—while two doors away houses were destroyed. We still haven’t been able to return to our street to see for ourselves, but several times a day Annaka and I learn of more friends and acquaintances from nearby areas who have lost everything.

Whatever the state of our home, much of our world has vanished. Our daughter’s school appears to have been burned only partially, and may eventually be rebuilt, but the surrounding neighborhood is now a toxic wasteland. Many other places that have been part of our daily lives for decades were obliterated. I’ve only seen pictures and video, but they reveal a landscape that resembles Hiroshima the day after the bombing. It is hard to imagine how communities that have been so comprehensively destroyed can be rebuilt.

Assessing this wider reality from my phone and computer, the opposing faces of social media have never been more evident. X is an endless scroll of potentially life-saving information, dangerous lies, political opportunism, and patent insanity—punctuated by the unforgivable antics of its owner. I’ve been amazed by the compassion shared between perfect strangers, and just as amazed by the schadenfreude shared by others. Yes, many of the people who lost their homes are rich, or were—we will soon learn that many were uninsured—and some were famous. But many are neither of those things.

The resentment and class hatred on display has been something to behold—and it is, I am convinced, the harbinger of a growing political emergency. People who bought tickets to every film Steven Spielberg ever made now smirk when learning that his house was spared. Lunatics produce maps of tunnels allegedly used by pedophiles to smuggle children to the Getty Villa, which also (suspiciously) escaped destruction. The center of decency and sanity has not held. Perhaps it never quite existed.

Social media and the Internet have been compared to electricity, in that our lives would now be unthinkable without them. But they are only like electricity if the risk of electrocution were vastly greater than it is. Information technology is not going away, but it cannot persist in its current form. Otherwise, our digital lives will make our lives in the real world unbearable.

There will be weeks, months, and perhaps years of second-guessing and recrimination in response to these fires, and we will weigh the contributions of climate change against those of irrational regulation. Whether or not we could have adequately responded to such a catastrophe, there is no question that we must better prepare for the next one.

To that end, I want to appeal to all the wealthy people who have strong ties to Los Angeles: I know that there are scores of billionaires, and hundreds of near billionaires, who love this city and want to see it thrive. This is the moment to recognize what wealth is really for.

We must rebuild, but we must also create a culture of competence and social cohesion—and transform our politics in the process. I believe this must start with historic acts of generosity and civic engagement on the part of the wealthiest residents of California.

Consider, for instance, the case of Stewart and Lynda Resnick: They are both in their eighties and have an estimated net worth of over $12 billion. No doubt, they have taken advantage of every loophole in our tax code and have already transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children and grandchildren, tax-free. I trust that everything they have done to shelter their estate is legal—and being legal, we shouldn’t begrudge any of these machinations. The Resnick’s businesses also consume an extraordinary amount of water (growing almonds, pistachios, and citrus), but there is nothing illegal about this either. However, given the role that water—specifically a lack of investment in water infrastructure—has played in our current crisis, the optics for the Resnicks are terrible. Predictably, they are now being vilified as symbols of all that is wrong with capitalism in America. This is unfair. And there is nothing wrong with capitalism that an ethical relationship to wealth can’t fix.

I have a proposal for the Resnicks, and for every other wealthy person who has deep ties to Los Angeles: Identify the portion of your wealth that has no conceivable impact on your quality of life—I am talking about what is, and will always be, just a number on a spreadsheet—and pledge those residual assets to help rebuild our city. To be clear, I am not asking you to sacrifice anything beyond the idea of how wealthy you are on paper. If you are a billionaire, and you have your heart set on a new Gulfstream 700—by all means, get one and enjoy it. (We can fight about climate change later.) I am simply observing that people who have $1 billion live exactly like those who have $10 billion, or $100 billion. And a similar analysis holds for those who are less rich, but still very well-off.¹ Whatever your level of wealth, there is likely a portion of it that will always remain just a number. Why not deploy these resources now to resurrect the city you love?

If this proposal sounds quixotic, or simply crazy, imagine how you’d respond if Lynda Resnick held a press conference tomorrow and said the following:

Our family has lived in Los Angeles for over 50 years. Stewart and I got married here, built our businesses here, had children and grandchildren, and created a wide circle of friends—and we have become immensely wealthy in the process. The ultimate reason to have amassed these resources—apart from living secure and happy lives ourselves—is to help others. And we have helped many people by providing jobs and economic opportunity throughout our careers. We have also donated a lot of money to important causes. You may have noticed that there are many buildings in this town with our names on them—and I’m happy to say that most of them are still standing. However, the cataclysmic fires that have destroyed so much of this city have led us to think about our responsibilities in a new way. And I can’t adequately express how fortunate we feel to be able to do something useful at a moment like this.

This city and state will be passing through a time of confusion and finger pointing in the weeks and months ahead. But one thing is clear: There is now a golden opportunity to rebuild Los Angeles in a way that makes it one of the most beautiful and functional cities on Earth. And there will be many ways to fail at that task, to the great shame of our wealthiest residents—people like ourselves. The work of cleanup, reconstruction, and repair that needs to be accomplished is almost unimaginable. And there will be countless competing interests.

Needless to say, there will be people who want to get rich in the process—and many of them should get rich. We need our smartest and most energetic people on the case, whatever their motives. But Stewart and I are already rich—and what’s more, we are old. And we want our grandchildren and great grandchildren and the rest of our community to enjoy this amazing city long after we’re gone.

So, to that end, we are immediately donating 90 percent of our wealth—that is, a 90 percent share in all our companies—to the state of California, to be earmarked for the reconstruction of Los Angeles.² Of course, how these resources will be spent remains to be decided. And no one wants to see the money wasted. But we have already begun recruiting the talent and completing the paperwork, and we invite similarly fortunate families, who love this city as much as we do, to join us. Let us raise the necessary funds, and gather the most competent advisors, and make Los Angeles better than it has ever been—perhaps better than it ever would have been, had this calamity not occurred.

How do you think a gesture like this would be received? Would it increase the level of cynicism in our society, or reduce it? The question of how the money should be spent, and who has control over the funds, can be answered later. I am merely suggesting that an historic act of philanthropy could transform, not merely the physical landscape, but the political and cultural one as well. We should all want to live in a society that produces enormous wealth, but we should also want that wealth to be deployed when it is truly needed.

The economic, environmental, and emotional damage still accumulating in Los Angeles is horrific—and much of the reaction to it, from both the right and the left, has been obscene. But all this misery and chaos presents an opportunity to do something remarkable. We should not waste it.

1. For instance, most people who have a net worth of $50 million are not saving to buy a $75 million plane, and they might live exactly as they do now if they only had $40 million.

2. Having read some of the comments to this post, it seems that I have asked the word “earmarked” to do more work than could be reasonably expected of it. I did not mean to suggest that the Resnicks, or anyone else, should be eager to blindly donate to a state government that wants to spend the money on DEI initiatives for lumberjacks. What I imagine is a group of wealthy and highly competent people raising a very large fund, and working with the government to decide how best to spend the money. If push came to shove, the donors would be in a position to say, “Do you want our money or not?” There are many reasons to involve the government, and not merely spend the money privately. There will be a mountain of regulation and competing interests to cut through to get this work done. And I believe we could transform California politics in the process.