[foldr]

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.

[tptacek]

He attempted a hip-hop dad joke and faceplanted. That's the entire story.

[foldr]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[foldr]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[foldr]

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.