Chris Larsen began installing cameras to combat car break-ins. He had no idea how far his influence would go.
By
Lauren Smiley,
a San Francisco–based features writer
Chris Larsen, co-founder of the crypto company Ripple Labs and the 252nd-richest person on the planet, is studiously unostentatious. He speaks in an even voice with analytical efficiency, calibrating whether to politick or pounce. He considers schmoozy events a waste of time and disappears from appointments at precise moments in a black SUV. Although he’s called Silicon Valley’s “fetish for disruption” self-indulgent and “Trump-like,” he prefers to move with speed. “I don’t like that Giving Pledge thing at all,” he tells me. “It’s slow money. You make an announcement, but the money doesn’t get out. So I think it’s like, Go, go, go fast.” He’s recently written checks to a range of pressing causes: $3.5 million to Alex Bores, the New York congressional candidate who wants to federally regulate AI; $2 million to study how the oil-and-gas industry can transition from, well, oil and gas. An ongoing target of his impatience is his hometown. “A frustrating thing about San Francisco: Everything just takes forever because of the bureaucracy. So anything we can do is just go, go, go.”
