Prosōpon (greek): “face,” “mask,” or the role assumed by an actor upon the stage.

────────────────────────────────────────────────────

                  x x x x x

────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Vanity Fair | June 20th, 2005

The Symposium Begins: Inside Adonai Ezra’s Grand Experiment to Celebrate Human Excellence

By Vanity Fair Staff

There are few moments in history when an event announces itself as something more than another gala, another awards ceremony, or another gathering of the wealthy and well connected. This evening, beneath the grand columns of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, one cannot help but feel that history is unfolding in real time. Long before the first speeches have been delivered or the first glasses of champagne have been raised, the sidewalks outside the museum are already crowded with journalists, photographers, curious onlookers, and hundreds of admirers who simply wish to witness the arrival of what many have already begun calling the most extraordinary guest list ever assembled.

Olympic champions ascended the famous steps alongside renowned physicists. Pulitzer Prize winners exchanged greetings with concert pianists, pioneering surgeons, celebrated architects, Academy Award winners, chess grandmasters, astronauts, entrepreneurs, poets, philosophers, and innovators whose work had quietly reshaped the modern world. There were no campaign donors, no hereditary aristocrats, no socialites whose primary claim to prominence was wealth or lineage. 

Every invitation represented an achievement. Every guest had reached a summit within their respective discipline during the previous year. Together they formed the inaugural gathering of the Symposium - an annual celebration founded upon an idea that would have seemed almost impossibly idealistic had it originated from anyone other than the twenty two year old visionary responsible for convening them. Humanity, Adonai Ezra has argued repeatedly throughout the past year, possesses no shortage of ceremonies celebrating power, politics, celebrity, commerce, or military triumph. It possesses remarkably few devoted solely to the highest expressions of human potential. Tonight, that omission is being corrected.

It is difficult to overstate how unusual it is that the architect of this gathering is only twenty three years old. In scarcely five years, Adonai Ezra has transformed himself from an unknown teenager into perhaps the most discussed figure in global technology, one of the youngest billionaires in history, a renowned painter, an increasingly influential investor, and the founder of an expanding constellation of companies whose ambitions appear to encompass nearly every pillar of modern civilization. The list of epithets attached to his name has become almost as remarkable as his achievements. Depending on the publication, Adonai Ezra has been hailed as the Father of the Information Age, the Prometheus of the Digital Era, the Architect of the New Millennium, the Last Renaissance Man, the Billionaire Polymath, the Oracle of Innovation, the Boy King of Silicon Valley, the Medici of the Twenty First Century, the Great Synthesist, and the First Citizen of the Twenty First Century, each title capturing only a fragment of a figure who has become increasingly difficult to describe through any single profession or accomplishment.

His rise began in the autumn of 2000 with the launch of Facebook - a social networking platform that initially appeared to many observers as little more than an interesting experiment in digital communication before rapidly evolving into one of the fastest growing internet services in history. Messenger followed soon thereafter, permanently changing expectations surrounding instant communication across the internet. The following year witnessed the arrival of YouTube, a platform that many media executives initially dismissed as an amusing novelty before realizing that millions of people were suddenly watching ordinary individuals broadcast themselves to the world. LinkedIn emerged shortly thereafter, redefining professional networking for an increasingly interconnected economy. Twitter soon introduced an entirely new form of public discourse built upon brevity and immediacy, while the explosive popularity of Instagram has demonstrated that photography may yet become the dominant visual language of the internet.

WhatsApp and Gmail further cemented Ezra’s growing ecosystem of communication, allowing personal correspondence, business, entertainment, and information to flow through platforms that all seemed, almost uncannily, to anticipate what society desired before society itself recognized those desires. Alongside these remarkable achievements sits another fact that continues to fascinate financial analysts. Ezra quietly accumulated one of the largest private stakes in Google during the company’s formative years, leading many within Silicon Valley to joke that nearly every meaningful corner of the modern internet somehow leads back to the same remarkably young individual. Whether those jokes remain jokes for much longer is becoming an increasingly open question.

Technology alone, remarkable though it may be, fails to explain the peculiar fascination surrounding Adonai Ezra. Silicon Valley has produced visionary founders before. History has known brilliant industrialists, gifted inventors, celebrated artists, and exceptional scientists. What unsettles observers is that Ezra appears unwilling to remain confined within any single category. Last year the twenty one year old stunned the international mathematical community by publishing a monograph introducing what has since become known as the Ezra Framework for Statistical Intelligence, an ambitious body of work seeking to unify information theory, probability, optimization, geometry, and statistical learning beneath a single mathematical language. Senior professors who have devoted decades to these disciplines openly admit that they are still working through its implications. Others have gone considerably further, arguing that Ezra may have quietly laid the mathematical foundation for entirely new forms of artificial intelligence whose practical applications have not yet been imagined. It is extraordinarily rare for mathematicians to indulge in grand predictions. The fact that so many have chosen to do so speaks volumes. One distinguished professor from Princeton remarked to Vanity Fair that great mathematics often answers questions humanity has not yet learned to ask, before adding with a smile that Ezra seems intent upon asking those questions decades in advance.

His ambitions, however, extend far beyond software or abstract mathematics. A year ago Ezra unveiled Odyssey Aerospace, a private aerospace company whose stated objective would have sounded fantastical only a decade ago. Its mission is nothing less than reducing the cost of access to space through the development of fully reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft while laying the technological foundation for humanity to become a true spacefaring civilization. Company documents describe future orbital transportation systems, reusable rockets capable of repeated launches, advanced propulsion technologies, and long term ambitions extending well beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Many aerospace veterans have greeted these announcements with understandable skepticism, pointing to the immense technical and financial barriers confronting such endeavors. Others, however, remember that many of the same objections were once directed toward Facebook, YouTube, and Ezra’s other ventures before they permanently reshaped their respective industries.

Alongside Odyssey Aerospace stands another equally ambitious enterprise. Ambrosia Biotech, founded earlier this year, has adopted a mission statement remarkable for both its simplicity and audacity. Its stated purpose is “to eliminate diseases that civilization has accepted as inevitable.” The company has announced ambitious research initiatives in cancer immunotherapy, messenger RNA technologies, gene therapy, personalized medicine, regenerative medicine, antiviral treatments, and artificial organs. Few expect such goals to be realized quickly. Fewer still doubt Ezra’s willingness to pursue them. Throughout his remarkably brief career he has cultivated a reputation for embracing projects that appear impossibly ambitious until they begin succeeding.

If Ezra’s technological accomplishments inspire admiration and his mathematical work commands intellectual respect, his paintings provoke something far more difficult to classify. The unfinished series of paintings, unofficially christened The Seven Deadly Sins by the public despite the artist’s repeated refusal to confirm either the title or the subject, has become one of the great mysteries of contemporary art. Those fortunate enough to witness the exhibitions describe experiences bordering upon the indescribable. Distinguished critics have spoken openly of weeping uncontrollably before the canvases while others claim they were overcome by profound nausea or overwhelming dread. Religious organizations have condemned both the paintings and their creator, accusing Ezra of producing images whose emotional intensity borders upon the profane. Psychologists have speculated endlessly regarding the extraordinary reactions provoked by the works. The paintings have been publicly exhibited only twice. During their second appearance they were auctioned for charity, each selling for approximately fifty million dollars to anonymous collectors whose identities remain among the art world’s most closely guarded mysteries. The scarcity of public viewings has only magnified their legend. Already comparisons have been drawn to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, though such comparisons perhaps reveal more about our need for familiar reference points than about Ezra’s singular creations.

Perhaps the most fascinating consequence of Ezra’s rise has been the emergence of what many commentators have begun calling a new golden age of innovation, driven in no small part by the extraordinary competition his success has inspired. If Adonai Ezra has become the defining software visionary of the new millennium, then another young genius appears determined to redefine hardware itself. Since 2001, industrialist Tony Stark has astonished both engineers and consumers through a succession of technological breakthroughs that have dramatically accelerated the evolution of personal electronics. Touchscreen interfaces once regarded as impractical curiosities have entered the mainstream under Stark’s direction, accompanied by increasingly sophisticated smartphones and portable computers that many believe have fundamentally altered expectations regarding consumer technology. 

Industry observers increasingly describe the relationship between Stark and Ezra as one of the defining rivalries of their generation, though neither man has publicly characterized it as such. Whether mutual admiration, quiet competition, or simple coincidence lies behind their remarkably parallel trajectories remains known only to the two innovators themselves. What is beyond dispute is that the opening years of this new century have witnessed an extraordinary acceleration of technological progress driven in large part by two exceptionally gifted young men whose approaches differ almost as dramatically as their personalities.

Extraordinary admiration has inevitably been accompanied by extraordinary concern. As Ezra’s platforms continue weaving themselves into the daily routines of hundreds of millions, an increasingly vocal chorus of privacy advocates and policymakers has begun raising difficult questions about the unprecedented concentration of information under the stewardship of a single individual. Every photograph uploaded, every message exchanged, every search performed, every professional connection established, and every social interaction mediated through his companies contributes to an expanding reservoir of personal data unlike anything previously assembled in human history. Ezra himself has remained characteristically elusive, granting relatively few interviews and offering little reassurance beyond broad philosophical statements concerning humanity, communication, and the responsibilities accompanying innovation.

Perhaps that very elusiveness explains why so much attention tonight remains fixed not upon the celebrated guests ascending the museum’s steps but upon the man waiting somewhere beyond them. Adonai Ezra has cultivated an unusual relationship with public attention. He neither seeks constant visibility nor actively avoids it. He simply appears when he has something worthy of unveiling before vanishing once more behind laboratories, studios, boardrooms, and workshops where rumors invariably flourish. Those closest to him describe an individual as comfortable discussing Renaissance painting as orbital mechanics, information theory as classical sculpture, often within the span of a single conversation. Whether such accounts represent truth or carefully cultivated mythology has become increasingly difficult to determine.

Which brings us back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the first guests continue ascending the marble staircase beneath the evening lights. The Symposium may have been conceived as a celebration of humanity’s highest achievements across science, medicine, literature, sport, music, theatre, philosophy, and the arts, yet it also marked something larger. But It also represents the arrival of a generation increasingly unwilling to accept inherited limitations. If the twentieth century belonged to institutions, then the twenty first may yet belong to individuals bold enough to imagine entirely new ones. Whether history ultimately remembers Adonai Ezra as an entrepreneur, an artist, an industrialist, or something for which no satisfactory word presently exists remains to be seen. For now, as the world’s most accomplished men and women pass beneath the towering columns of the Metropolitan Museum of Art bearing invitations signed by a single twenty two year old polymath, the question no longer seems whether Adonai Ezra has changed the world but how much further he intends to change it.

…

POV: Christine Everhart

The barricades along Fifth Avenue had begun filling before sunrise, which Christine Everhart privately considered one of civilization’s more curious habits. Human beings had once risen with the dawn to harvest crops or wage wars. In the year 2005 they awoke before daylight for the privilege of photographing rich people climbing museum stairs. Progress, she reflected dryly as she adjusted the cuff of her charcoal coat, was evidently a matter of perspective.

Around her gathered the familiar ecosystem of modern journalism, a profession she loved too dearly to romanticize. Reporters clustered in impatient knots, each pretending profound indifference while surreptitiously watching everyone else’s positioning, every one of them convinced they alone possessed the perfect question that would produce tomorrow’s headline. A surprising number of journalists had already drafted the articles they intended to publish before their subject had uttered a single word. They merely required an accommodating quotation to validate whatever conclusion their editors had settled upon over breakfast.

She knew the game because she had played it herself often enough.

A few, Christine suspected, had received quiet encouragement from rival corporations eager to see the evening’s celebrated host portrayed as an overindulged prodigy whose success owed more to fortunate timing than uncommon intellect. One particularly eager correspondent from a cable network whose relationship with nuance had long ago ended in an acrimonious divorce seemed positively delighted at the prospect of asking questions whose answers had already been written for him. It was journalism reduced to fishing with dynamite. Throw enough explosives into the water and eventually something floated to the surface.

Christine Everhart had little patience for such people. 

She distrusted concentrated wealth on principle, especially when it accumulated with the velocity presently associated with Adonai Ezra. The notion that one twenty two year old could exercise meaningful influence over how hundreds of millions communicated and increasingly understood the world struck her as something that deserved scrutiny rather than applause. History possessed no shortage of brilliant men who eventually concluded that brilliance entitled them to reshape civilization according to their own preferences.

But she would have been lying, both to herself and to her readers, had she claimed she was not excited. Like nearly everyone present, Christine had never seen Adonai Ezra in person.

There were photographs, naturally. Interviews remained infuriatingly scarce. Public appearances rarer still. Genius was a word journalists dispensed with embarrassing generosity. Ezra represented one of the few occasions where restraint seemed intellectually dishonest.

The low murmur that hung over the museum steps dissolved almost instantly.

Every head turned toward Fifth Avenue. A black Rolls Royce Phantom emerged from the slow moving procession with the measured dignity of a vessel entering harbor, its polished bodywork reflecting the floodlights scattered across the museum façade. Christine found herself smiling despite herself. She had expected something louder. A Ferrari or Lamborghini or perhaps even one of those absurd stretch limousines favored by the nouveau riche. The Phantom suggested something altogether different. 

Well played, Mr. Ezra. The choice was almost irritatingly appropriate.

The chauffeur emerged first. Impeccably dressed, expression composed, he circled the vehicle and opened the rear passenger door with deliberate calm.

Nothing happened.

For perhaps three seconds the doorway remained empty. The anticipation among the assembled photographers became almost physical. Hundreds of camera lenses trained themselves upon a single opening while the shouted questions began colliding into one another until they dissolved into an indistinguishable roar.

Then polished black Oxford shoes appeared beneath the doorway, followed by impossibly long legs, broad shoulders, and finally the man whose name had dominated newspapers for four years.

Adonai Ezra stepped from the Phantom with the effortless composure of someone entirely indifferent to the spectacle surrounding him. He paused only long enough to fasten the single button of his midnight blue dinner jacket in one fluid motion before lifting his gaze toward the crowd. The resulting storm of camera flashes illuminated the entrance almost continuously. 

Good Lord.

Christine considered herself a rational and intelligent woman. She considered herself entirely immune to the sort of superficial reactions that caused otherwise sensible people to lose all cognitive function in the presence of attractive men. Unfortunately, reality appeared determined to challenge those assumptions.

He was absurdly handsome. No…he was stunning!

Tall enough to tower over most of the people surrounding him, broad shouldered without appearing cumbersome, possessing dark hair and bright green eyes that seemed almost unnaturally vivid beneath the afternoon light. Those eyes laughed before his mouth ever did, lending him an almost mythic vitality that photographs had consistently failed to capture. 

She found herself briefly entertaining several deeply unprofessional thoughts regarding the man. She had interviewed many famous individuals before without once entertaining the deeply inappropriate impulse to discover whether they looked quite so handsome from considerably closer proximity. She silently informed herself that biology was a profoundly unserious discipline whenever attractive men were involved and resolved never to mention the matter, even to herself, again.

Her attention shifted as another figure emerged from the Rolls Royce, drawing a fresh chorus of excitement from both photographers and spectators alike. Alison Blair descended the museum steps with the effortless poise of a woman long accustomed to occupying the center of attention. Her blonde hair shimmered beneath the museum lights while the pale blue silk of her gown seemed to borrow its color from twilight itself. 

Better known to the world as Dazzler, she had become one of the defining voices of a generation after the extraordinary success of her Grammy winning debut album in 2002, followed by an equally celebrated sophomore release scarcely a year later. Dazzler had earned her invitation to the Symposium independently through her own musical excellence, a distinction Eleanor suspected Blair valued considerably more than any rumor presently circulating through celebrity columns.

The inevitable stampede began the instant Adonai crossed the carpet.

“Mr. Ezra! Mr. Ezra! Over here!”

“What inspired the Symposium?”

“What does tonight mean to you?”

“Is this intended to become an annual event?”

The questions arrived in overlapping waves until one reporter finally succeeded in raising his voice above the rest.

“Why did you choose the name Symposium, Mr. Ezra?”

Ezra smiled. “Please, call me Adonai. ‘Mr. Ezra’ makes me feel as though I've somehow become a responsible adult, and I would hate for such rumors to spread.”

The surrounding reporters laughed, the tension dissolving almost immediately.

“As for the name, I borrowed it from the ancient Greeks, though I confess I have taken a few creative liberties. A symposium, at least to the Greeks, was where people gathered to exchange ideas. Somewhere along the way we became convinced that the best thinkers ought to remain inside their own professions. Scientists speak to scientists, artists to artists, entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs. I have always suspected that some of history’s best conversations never happened simply because the right people never happened to share a table. Besides,” he added with a grin, “if you invite enough remarkable people to dinner, statistically speaking someone is going to change the world before dessert.”

Another ripple of laughter moved through the press.

A reporter from WHIH World News stepped forward, notebook already open.

“Mr… Adonai. Philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued that history is ultimately shaped by extraordinary individuals whom Carlyle famously called Great Men, figures like Caesar and Napoleon. Men who redirected civilization through force of genius and will. Many commentators have suggested you are attempting something similar. Do you consider yourself one of history’s great men destined to lead this new millennium?”

Christine almost sighed. 

There it was. The trap had arrived exactly on schedule.

Affirm the proposition and tomorrow’s headline would declare him intoxicated by his own legend. Reject it too aggressively and the article would inevitably become Young Billionaire Dismisses Hegel and Carlyle. Either path delivered precisely the story the question had been designed to manufacture.

Ezra seemed almost amused.

“Far be it from me to correct minds as formidable as Hegel and Carlyle,” he said pleasantly.  “They were considerably better philosophers than I shall ever pretend to be. Still, I have always found the notion of history being guided by a handful of extraordinary individuals to be a rather lonely view of civilization. History is a collective project. Every man weaves his own thread into a tapestry whose pattern none of us is capable of seeing in its entirety. 

“Some threads are brighter, certainly. Some bear greater weight than others. But remove enough of the ordinary ones and the whole fabric begins to unravel. Caesar did not build Rome by himself nor did Napoleon start the revolution by himself. Even the greatest among us inherit languages we did not create, knowledge we did not discover, and institutions we did not build. We arrive halfway through a conversation that began centuries before we were born and, if we’re fortunate, we contribute a sentence worth remembering before leaving it to someone else.”

He smiled again, a glint of quiet mischief entering his green eyes.

“Besides,” he continued with a grin, “Hegel also observed that these so-called great men seldom enjoy their greatness very much, that their lives become labor and sacrifice in service of some consuming purpose, and once that purpose is fulfilled they fall away like empty husks after the kernel has been taken. That sounds like an absolutely dreadful career plan if you ask me. I would much rather remain employable.”

Laughter erupted from every side. Even Christine found herself chuckling. He was quick-witted, educated, and just self-deprecating enough to be charming, and most importantly, he had sidestepped the trap without ever appearing evasive, which made him a very interesting man indeed. 

Several more reporters attempted variations of the same strategy, probing his wealth, his influence, the rapid expansion of his companies, and the growing concerns surrounding online privacy. Ezra answered each with the same combination of humor, grace, and thoughtful restraint, never allowing himself to be cornered into the sort of inflammatory remark so many clearly desired.

Eventually Christine found herself at the front.

“Adonai,” she began. “There has been no shortage of speculation regarding your relationship with Alison Blair. Some insist she is your muse, others your partner, and a few have already begun planning the wedding despite the absence of any engagement. Would you care to settle the matter this evening?”

Ezra chuckled softly before glancing toward Blair, who remained engaged in her own conversation several yards away.

"Alison and I are very good friends, which should surprise absolutely nobody who has ever met her. Friendship with Alison Blair is one of those things that seems to happen to people naturally. She possesses the deeply unfair combination of beauty, talent, intelligence, and kindness, and I have always considered it both a privilege and a pleasure to know people who excel at their craft.

"I have always believed that civilization is sustained by three great pillars. The first is science, which explains the world. The second is philosophy, which helps us understand our place within it. The third is art, which makes the whole experience considerably more bearable. Engineers can explain how bridges stand. Economists can produce very convincing charts explaining why everything is either improving or collapsing depending on the quarter. But when people fall in love, suffer heartbreak, celebrate triumph, or endure tragedy, they rarely turn to spreadsheets for comfort. They turn to stories, paintings, poems, and songs. Alison happens to be extraordinarily gifted at creating those things. A natural born Dazzler!"

He was eloquent, Christine had to admit, and possessed the rare ability to answer difficult questions without ever sounding rehearsed. By the end of the evening, she suspected he would have half the press corps eating out of the palm of his hand. Whether any of it was genuine, however, remained another matter entirely. Wealth had produced no shortage of men who knew exactly how to perform decency whenever a camera was pointed in their direction, only to reveal something altogether uglier once the lights had gone out.

“And what is the point of all this?” she asked, her tone sharpening ever so slightly. “You’ve amassed an extraordinary fortune and built companies that dominate entire industries at a scale we’ve never seen before. To what end? What is it you’re actually trying to achieve?”

Adonai was silent for a moment.

“I once came across a line whose author I’ve unfortunately forgotten,” he said at last. “Let the welfare of the people be the ultimate law. I’ve always thought there was something profoundly beautiful about that. If a man is fortunate enough to possess talent, influence, or wealth, then surely the highest use of those gifts is to leave the world kinder, healthier, and a little more beautiful than he found it.

“Civilization is, at its heart, a long conversation between generations. Every generation inherits the work of those who came before, adds something of its own, and leaves the whole affair to those yet to come. We inherit roads we did not pave, discoveries we did not make, and sacrifices we did not bear. It seems only proper that we should leave something in return.

"I would like to leave the world more connected than I found it, healthier than I found it, more curious than I found it. If technology can bring friends separated by oceans into the same room, if medicine can spare a family the grief of burying someone they love, if science can carry us beyond this small world and into the stars… Every company I’ve built, every investment I’ve made, has been another step toward that same destination.”

A faint smile returned to his face, carrying a warmth that made Christine’s traitorous heart skip a beat.

“A paradise on Earth if you will…” He gave a quiet chuckle. “Though I suspect that is a project considerably too large for one lifetime. Still, every paradise has to begin somewhere.”

AN: For someone who gave a whole speech about originality back in Chapter 2, Adonai sure does spend an impressive amount of time stealing other people's IPs, even if those IPs technically haven't been invented yet. Truly, he is pioneering the exciting new field of preemptive plagiarism.

Adonai doesn't quite sound or feel like Adonai in this chapter, does he? Think back to the Greek word mentioned at the beginning. There's a reason for that.

The Great Man Theory of history, as discussed by Hegel and Carlyle, is going to be fairly relevant to Adonai's character, and a few others, as the story progresses. So don't worry, this isn't just me rambling about philosophy because I forgot how to advance the plot. Well, not entirely, anyway.

I'm curious what you guys think about the direction the story is taking. And if there are any future IPs, inventions, trends, or other opportunities you think Adonai could capitalize on to expand his influence, feel free to share them. It's a free realstate!