The LinkedIn founder runs a pretty successful business networking site. He joined PayPal early, and made seven figures when the company went public, and then sold to eBay. He's rich. But now a couple of peons from the money transfer service — one of them a fucking web designer, for chrissakes — are googlerich after selling their video sharing site to Google.

"It's kind of embarrassing," said Mr. Hoffman, 39, whose start-up, a business-oriented social-networking site called LinkedIn, is almost four years old. "You started a year or two earlier, and they start after you and then this thing zips right past you and gets the golden results."

It's the key quote in the latest cringeworthy New York Times exploration of Silicon Valley money. I always thought that envy was one of those emotions that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs suffered in private, while expressing bland you-go supportiveness in every public uttering. But whatever.

In Web World, Rich Now Envy the Superrich [New York Times]