It began with a pill.
Pacha is the mecca for Ibiza clubbers, and that night master blaster DJ David Guetta was the caliph. The setting for Pacha is unlikely, even tacky. The neighbourhood has the feel of a decrepit US suburban strip mall, complete with a sprawling parking lot across the street. The building itself is a cavernous warehouse. A Costco logo might seem in character, but what you get instead is an entrance flanked by faux palm trees, with a giant neon sign flashing Guetta’s message of universal love. f*** me, i’m famous. Once inside, more dazzling signage, T-shirts worn by a few, and pink psychedelic phallic objects wielded by many combine to drill the slogan into your brain. A message as loud as the techno beats, as ludicrous as it was ubiquitous. FMIF.
It was a few days after Nikesh’s wedding. Maya and I, along with a small group of friends from London, had joined Nikesh and Ayesha (his wife) in Ibiza. Our day had been long, starting with a boat in the blazing sun out to Formentera for lunch on the beach at the retro shack Juan y Andrea, where we washed down seafood paella with rosé before dipping into the turquoise water. The evening began with dinner at the voyeuristic Cipriani, where Paris Hilton and her entourage of beautiful people eyed each other with carnal fascination. And then the dénouement at Pacha, where the action begins after midnight. At 1 am there was still no sign of our famous and eager-to-copulate headline act.
My friend Jonty, a burly former South African army officer who escorted Nelson Mandela off Robben Island, must have noticed my stifled yawn. He put his arm around me and whispered in my ear, in his hoarse Afrikaner accent. “You need this, mate,” he said, pressing a tiny pill into my hand. “Let’s ditch this VIP lounge horseshit, let’s get down there and rock.”
Jonty’s energy was uplifting, and Ibiza that kind of place. Brandishing a fluorescent pink f*** me, i’m famous baton and sporting a black Eyes Wide Shut mask, Jonty parted the sea of gyrating bodies and led me to the promised land in the middle of the arena. The molly began to kick in, the volume of those pulsating techno beats cranked up in my head. First gradually, then suddenly.
Am I missing something? Someone read my mind and handed me a fluorescent pink baton. Wielding a stick seems to activate a dormant Neanderthal gene, and the f*** me, i’m famous logo weaponised the tool in a way only Freud could explain. I felt like the empowered ape in the opening of Space Odyssey, at one with the sea of primates on the dance floor, all of us jumping up and down, banging an invisible nail with our pink phallic hammers.
I have a hallucinogenic recollection of being dragged away at some point in the morning, pink baton still in hand. Nikesh invited us to his terrace suite at the Ibiza Gran Hotel to watch the sunrise, as one does after a night out in Ibiza. We stretched out on the recliners on the terrace, overlooking the marina and Ibiza’s fortified Dalt Vila old town in the distance. It was past 5 am, and I was fixated on the early morning hustle on the marina. Fishermen, I assumed, grinding out a living while the bon vivants at the Gran Hotel were tucked under their silky Frette bedsheets.
“Alok,” asked Nikesh, “do you think you could go back to your old life, work sixty hours a week, on the road all the time?”
Something in his tone jerked me out of my musings. Conversations with Nikesh were like chess games, you had to think a few moves ahead before speaking. Not easy in my current state.
“I’m not sure man, been there, done that,” I said.
We both smiled knowingly.
Back in our hotel room a short while later, the seed Nikesh had planted was germinating.
“I think Nikesh might offer me a job,” I told Maya.
“Seriously? You would consider that, working for a Japanese bank?” was her incredulous reaction.
“It’s not a bank,” I said, amused at her predictable reaction. We had been together thirty years, and she is my life hack, her upright intelligence and dazzling smile always shining a light into my darkest corners. (She does occasionally spout irritatingly kitschy clichés like “you are what you are”—I mean, what the fuck else would you be? – but when your favourite Stones track is “Paint It Black,” her kind of luminosity is existential.) Maya had never been a fan of Wall Street, always urging me to trade the money for a simpler life. She had turned down Wharton herself, opting for a degree in arts administration and a job at the New York Philharmonic that had the incidental benefit of elevating my standing in the cultural Dow Jones.
I explained what SoftBank and Masa Son were about, a unique combination of global telecom operator and racy technology investment company. Its name came from its origins as a software distributor – a “bank for software.” Masa wasn’t even Japanese, he was Korean, as well known in Silicon Valley and Wall Street as he was in Tokyo, where the company just happened to be headquartered.
“Maybe worth thinking about, I know you’re restless,” she responded wearily, but now ready to hit the bed.
Excerpted with permission from The Money Trap: Grand Fortunes and Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble, Alok Sama, Pan Macmillan India.
