EDITOR'S LETTER

The eRevolution

The New Establishment, which Vanity Fair inaugurated in 1994 to identify the leaders of the Information Age, seems every year to become more and more like the Old Establishment. The men and women named in the five annual Top 50 rankings since then are no longer mavericks and outsiders. With their entrenched wealth, Gulfstreams, private charities, and networking summits, the New Establishment titans have eased into the trappings of rarefied success that Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Carnegies enjoyed a century before.

This month we introduce a new group, the 50 members of the eEstablishment. Think of it as the New Establishment's juniorvarsity team—with a couple of extra zeros added onto everyone's net worth. The explosion of business on the Internet has been so dynamic that winnowing the original list of 80 or so candidates down to 50 took some doing for our eEstablishment team, headed by editor-at-large Matt Tymauer and San Francisco-based contributing editor Alan Deutschman. If, like me, you missed out completely on the tech-stock run-up of the past three or four years, the stories of the people who make up the eEstablishment will either depress you no end or fill you with admiration for the marvels of American capitalism. The tales generally fall into three categories:

(a)Twenty-seven-year-old surf-shop slacker buys first computer three years ago, comes up with interesting tech breakthrough, takes company public, and is now worth $4.6 billion.

(b)Brilliant 12-year-old who whips through Stanford in, like, half a year, goes to work for dicey-sounding technology start-up for stock options in lieu of salary and, when company goes public, sees net worth skyrocket to $4.6 billion.

(c)Middle-aged employee of old-line technology firm falls victim to downsizing, rethinks life, comes up with e-commerce idea, gets backing, makes it work, takes it public, and is now worth $4.6 billion.

It's all happening very fast—or so it seems, until you remember the seismic changes our grandparents and great-grandparents lived through. Compare the opening of the 20th century with the last quarter century. In just a few decades, you had, let's see: the advent of electricity, the automobile, the airplane, the phonograph, the telephone, motion pictures, radio, air-conditioning, and the internalcombustion engine. Oh yes, and the suffragette movement, the First World War, and the Russian Revolution. In the last 25 years we've seen the fall of Communism and the birth of genetic engineering, personal computers, cell phones, the Internet, and the Fox Network. A company that allows you to bid on Pez dispensers or stained Beanie Babies isn't a dramatic agent of change, just a minor convenience. And it's barely that. —GRAYDON CARTER