alt Hacker NewsHe was called a 'terrorist sympathizer.' Now his AI company is valued at $3B
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The title is a non-sequitur.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
well, it's not a high bar – these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action" or "she was murdered by ICE" is called a terrorist sympathizer
Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
I absolutely love the idea of Replit and I think it's an awesome platform and idea.
I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs
As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc
So success buys you ideological latitude
Who in this current political climate hasn't been called a 'terrorist sympathizer'? Feels like 80% of the population qualify
exe.dev is already miles better already than what replit is attempting to do with it's AI things
Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
Replit seems to be another company that doesn't justify it's valuation in this bubble
Public opinion on Amjad shifted quite a bit in 2021 when he threatened to sue a former intern for his open-source project.
I'm not a fan of a guy who builds a brand around politics. It will come around.
> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
"one being so good that anyone can become a software engineer".
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?
So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel: He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
This guy isn't a mold-breaking radical, he's just a garden variety sociopath https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?
Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
This is the way, right?
All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
“Masad insists he speaks up even when it hurts his business. In that regard, ‘I’m probably the only contrarian in Silicon Valley.’”
> Palestinian man is ok working with the Saudis At least it isn't the UAE but... really? Still happy for him though.
interesting puff piece
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A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.
Silicon Valley’s biggest grifter, by a mile, back with another puff piece
It's funny how when talking about Israël's wrongdoings, everything is just "allegedly". Facts already confirms genocide, but hey, they don't want to land in hot water.
I don't understand why the word genocide is quoted, as if it was an odd opinion of the person they are writing the profile about.
Replay will implode once the AI mania cools off
replit is actually quite popular among teenagers and basically third world youngsters trying to spin off a service or a "product" of their own.
- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.
just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county