Posted on 02/18/2024 7:34:50 AM PST by Red Badger
The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found deceased at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday. His grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, confirmed the devastating news in a Facebook post.
The student, identified as Marco Troper, was discovered unresponsive in his dorm at the Clark Kerr Campus, a student housing complex, around 4:23 p.m. local time. Despite immediate life-saving attempts by the Berkeley Fire Department, Troper was pronounced dead at the scene.
The University of California Police Department (UCPD) stated that there were no signs of foul play discovered, according to the New York Post.
The heartbroken grandmother took to Facebook to express her grief:
Tragedy hit my family yesterday. My beloved grandson Marco Troper, age 19 passed away yesterday. Our family is devastated beyond comprehension.
Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun and beautiful human being. He was just getting starting on his second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley majoring in math and was truly loving it.
He had a strong community of friends from his dorm at Stern Hall and his fraternity Zeta Psi and was thriving academically. At home, he would tell us endless stories of his life and friends at Berkeley.
Marco’s life was cut too short. And we are all devastated, thinking about all the opportunities and life experiences that he will miss and we will miss together.
Marco, we all love you and miss you more than you will ever know.
Details surrounding the cause of Marco’s death remain unclear. Still, Esther Wojcicki suggested to SF Gate that she suspects a drug overdose took her grandson’s life.
The family awaits the toxicology report to confirm the specifics.
“He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it,” she said. “One thing we do know, it was a drug.”
“We want to prevent this from happening to any other family,” Esther Wojcicki added.
Susan Wojcicki was the Youtube CEO from 2014 to 2023. She resigned the day after the House GOP issued subpoenas for Big Tech CEOs at Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. While YouTube is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Wojcicki was not listed on the list of subpoenaed CEOs.
Under Wojcicki’s leadership, she urged more governments to enact speech laws to crack down on ‘unapproved’ online speech.
“Our recommendations for governments who want to have more control over online speech is to pass laws to have that very cleanly and clearly define such that we can implement it. There are times we see the laws being implemented or being suggested that they are not very clean or possible for us to cleanly interpret them. And we’ve also seen laws just passed for the internet as opposed to for all speech. And I do think that’s a dangerous area when we start to get in and say oh sure you can say something like this for a magazine or on TV but you can’t say it on the internet,” she said.
In April 2020, Wojcicki announced that anything said about COVID that contradicted the WHO talking points would be taken down. Now we know that the WHO, like the CDC, was lying all along.
Wojcicki was also responsible for the Infowars YouTube account being suspended again.
Wojcicki said that “a commitment to openness is not easy. It sometimes means leaving up content that is outside the mainstream, controversial or even offensive. But I believe that hearing a broad range of perspectives ultimately makes us a stronger and more informed society, even if we disagree with some of those views.”
This led to InfoWars’ War Room host Owen Shroyer making a new YouTube account, as her position should also apply to him.
In a sarcastic video, Shroyer announced that YouTube had announced that their InfoWars ban is lifted, of course, it wasn’t really. Still, based on Wojcicki’s statement, the team at InfoWars promptly made a new War Room account.
The account remained active overnight, with the video he posted getting widely shared across other platforms. The account was promptly removed when Vice News decided to write about it. An update to their article seems to humble-brag about their role in the censorship: “Shortly after this story was published, YouTube deleted Infowars’ War Room channel,” it says.
Yeah, Mike Judge is funny. I just avoided the series because:
1. I was working 90-100 hour weeks at a startup when it was on, and
2. the subject matter is probably too close to home for me to have a, uh, “impartial observer” viewpoint that would let me watch it as entertainment.
(If point 2 means I have a thin skin... well... maybe!)
Some of the reviews of it were from people who claimed
to be Silicon Valley denizens they thought it was dead on. One said it was like watching himself through a window. Of course could be fake reviews.
“I think she married a Google exec, then got the YT job (surprise!)”
Not quite. Here’s the deal.
There are three Wojcicki sisters: Susan, Anne and a third one who’s apparently not in tech. Their mother is Esther and their father apparently is or was a physics professor at Stanford.
Susan rented garage space to Larry Page and Sergey Brin wherein they started Google.
When the Google business took off, Susan went to work for her tenants as their employee. She was eventually promoted to running YouTube after Google acquired it. She’s undoubtedly a gazillionaire just on GOOGL stock.
Meanwhile, Anne married Sergey Brin and had one or more kids with him, and all her rich peeps (husband, sister etc) set her up with the “23 and Me” DNA business. Eventually, Anne and Sergey broke up. For a while, she was dating A-Rod of the NY Yankees.
Last I heard, “23 and Me” was flirting with bankruptcy.
And now Susan’s kid kills himself with drugs a few days ago.
All of which tends to suggest that the Wojcickis’ fame and fortune only gets them so far...
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