Billionaire Tim Draper's Mad Plan to Blow Up California

By Joel Stein July 31, 2014

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Photograph by Mathew Scott

Tim Draper is sitting. This is not his natural state. An entire half of his 6-foot-4-inch hulking body cannot express itself. But he’s willing to be immobilized at Los Angeles’s BLD restaurant for breakfast—vegan, and actually his second breakfast since he already had cereal because, come on, it’s 9 a.m.—to promote his big idea. It’s really just one of his many big ideas, but this one requires some serious salesmanship. Draper wants to divide California into six “startup” states that will compete for citizens and businesses. It’s early March, and he says he’s willing to spend millions to get the 807,615 signatures required so his initiative can be on the California ballot by fall. It’s not going to be easy since the interested parties, as of this morning, are roughly the two of us.

A billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist who hit it big funding Hotmail, Skype, Tesla Motors (TSLA), and Chinese search engine Baidu (BIDU), Draper has gone from Democrat to Republican to Libertarian to Draperist; the Draper party (of one) believes that government’s problem is that it lacks competition. “I’ve met every governor since Reagan and they’re all great people. And I’ve met lots of state employees and they’re all great people. So I came to the conclusion that California is ungovernable,” he says.
Accepting bad governance, Draper notes, is old thinking. “Egypt went down because of Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR),” he says. “Tunisia went down because of Facebook and Twitter. Ukraine went down for the first time due to instant messaging. Bad government is not going to be tolerated.” So he plans to use social media, among other things, to found six states. He picked six for some population and economic specialty reasons (Hollywood and movies, Napa and wine), but he’ll tell you that he really did it because six are even better than two, and because 20 states—well, 20 states might make people think he’s crazy. Which many do anyway.

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Draper, 56, might have missed his calling as a Tony Robbins-type self-improver. Even sitting down, he’s all energy and optimism in an oversize suit. He’s got an easy, nervous laugh that erupts after most of the things he says. He discovered long ago that a tie makes a perfect billboard; today’s is for Save the Children, a charity where his mother served on the board for more than a decade. He’s also wearing a friendship bracelet, made by kids he saw earlier at BizWorld.org, a nonprofit he created in 1997 that has taught nearly half a million children the fun of business. Unlike most people with enormous eyebrows, Draper’s don’t lend him Sam the Eagle gravitas. His turn up at the ends, as if he’s perpetually hearing something that surprises him. Probably something he said.
Photograph by Mathew ScottAt Draper University, students are provided with movable desks and chairs
Draper often starts his Six Californias spiel by saying that California’s public schools have gone from first to 47th, its prison situation is untenable, and its business climate the worst in the nation. Trying new tax codes, immigration rules, and regulations would spur on all six states, he says, from what would be the richest state in the country (San Francisco and environs) to the poorest (right next door). Exactly how the six would share resources or divide up the state university system is unclear. He calls two of the six states Jefferson and Silicon Valley. Jefferson is in the northernmost, conservative part of California. Its name comes from a movement dating to 1941. Silicon Valley is home. The others are North California, Central California, West California, and South California. “They can be named whatever. It can be crowdnamed,” he says. And, like an anti-Mason and Dixon, he is unconcerned about boundaries, which the states can also work out themselves.
Many assume that a man with such an improbable plan—even if the ballot passes in California, the 49 other states aren’t eager to endow what was California with 10 more senators—knows nothing about politics. But Draper isn’t without political experience. He served on the California State Board of Education, and he says it was there that he began to lose faith in the system. Nor is Six Californias Draper’s first state ballot initiative. In 2000 he spent $23.4 million to get school vouchers voted on. “After the teachers’ union was finished with it, it went from 80 percent approval to 30 percent. We got clobbered,” he says. “I had no idea what I was in for.” This time, he says, he does.


In immigrant-rich Silicon Valley, Tim Draper is a blue blood, a third-generation Bay Area venture capitalist who grew up riding his Sting-Ray bicycle down the dirt path that is now Sand Hill Road, where the most powerful VC firms are located. Whenever he has a meeting in Menlo Park, he bikes there so he can ride up and down the parking lot ramp he liked as a kid.