This is the story of three different companies brought to the US stock market, each of which came to be valued at more than $1 billion. It is also the story of the Internet and the massive land grab and unbridled greed it has spawned over the past five years. And it is also the story of a $37 million boat (furnished with $20 million dollars' worth of art) run almost totally (except when it stopped) by computers. But, most of all, it is the rollicking, entertaining, disturbing and, frankly, gob-smacking tale of one Jim Clark, geek in chief, anarchic egomaniac, restless master of his universe and creator of the "Magic Diamond".
And who is Jim Clark, you may well ask? Who is this man who merits the book's intriguing subtitle: "how some man you've never heard of just changed your life"? The answer is that Jim Clark is a computer whizz with the alchemist's touch. Everything he touches, or so the denizens of Clarkworld and the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley believe, turns to gold or, more accurately, billions of dollars. He brought the leading computer company, Silicon Graphics, to market in the mid-1980s and made millions.
That would have been enough for most. But typically Clark had a falling-out and went his own way. He teamed up with Marc Andreessen, a student who had come up with the Mosaic browser which opened the previously techie-only Internet to the wider world. Together in 1996 they launched Netscape, a company built on the Internet browser technology of the same name, taking it to the stock market a mere few months later. The market fell in love. It was the start of the investors' passionate affair with the Internet Age - or the future, as most preferred to put it. Riches beyond Clark's wildest dream followed.
This is where we pick up the story. Well, actually, it isn't. We pick up this wonderful tale of modern ambition in the Amsterdam docks when Michael Lewis joins the crew of the Hyperion - "the boat Netscape built" - for its trials in the North Sea. The Hyperion was Clark's dream project. Controlled by 25 powerful Silicon Graphics workstations and a maze of computer code, Clark wanted to create a boat that left nothing to chance. It did have a New Zealand captain, but the computers operated everything, from the heat in the immaculate salon to setting the gigantic main sail on what was then the tallest mast in the world. Clark boasted that so advanced was the technology that he could control the boat from his home in California.
But while the Hyperion went through its unsteady paces, the tall Texan was central to another drama taking place. After Silicon Graphics and Netscape, Clark's next "new thing" was the "Magic Diamond", his frighteningly simple analysis of the "$1.5 trillion" US healthcare industry and how he could make a fortune from it. Anybody else would have been laughed out the door, but such was Clark's reputation at this stage, that the venture capitalists queued up to offer him money for the Healtheon project.
He lured the A-level programmers needed for the project from his old company, Silicon Graphics. These were mostly Indians, who had been groomed for stardom in the elite institutes of technology back home. Now Americanised, they, too, wanted their share of the Clarkworld largesse.
The curious thing is that while billions hung in the balance in the Healtheon project, Clark was otherwise employed writing code for his boat. It is this, and other examples of strange single-mindedness, which leads Lewis to offer the following bizarre observation: that if Clark had not so desired the Hyperion he would not have brought Netscape to market so swiftly; in turn the Internet gold rush would not have happened, and the world would be a different place.
In fact it is clear that the real reason Clark opted to write code for his pet project while Healtheon headed for the stormy waters of a depressed market was that Clark figured he had done his job by providing the big idea and inspiring a team capable of implementing it. In any case he was no lover of organised business. By the time the suits moved in he would be long gone, out on the high seas debugging software or learning to fly helicopters in double-quick time. Clark truly believes that this is the era when the ideas people gain their just deserts, leaving the suits to pick up the crumbs. And although they, too, get rich, Clark makes sure that his software engineers are well rewarded. The days of the bright but dumb boffin are well dead in the Information Age.
Michael Lewis was clearly given great access by Clark. Perhaps it was vanity, but the picture painted of this brilliant entrepreneur is one of sad desperation, a man who cannot rest from his drive to create, to speculate, to accumulate, to compensate for a difficult childhood. Lewis's narrative sparkles with humour and insight; rarely have the worlds of sailing, technology and finance been so entertaining and easy to understand. Though he spares his subject cheap speculation on motives, he sensitively handles the issue of Clark's past. One senses that he likes Clark, warts and all. Funnily enough, in the end I did too.
Joe Breen is an Irish Times journalist. He was founding editor of The Irish Times on the Web in 1994