love.

actual entrepreneurs released Titstare, “an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits.” In a recent episode, Gavin Belson asks his lawyers to invent novel legal strategies that can silence a blogger who has treated him roughly. Again, given the timing, this couldn’t have been a response to the legal actions that the provocative venture capitalist Peter Thiel has taken against Gawker, but it certainly felt like one.

In the first season, in the show’s most direct portrayal of a real person, Thiel was lightly fictionalized as Peter Gregory, a smart but socially graceless V.C. “I’m sure he was offended by it, because he’s offended by everything,” Swisher told me. “It’s amazing how thin-skinned some of these people are.” However, Thiel later invited some of the show’s creators to a party he was hosting in L.A., and he treated them politely. “He said he liked the show, which we were surprised to hear,” one of the producers told me. “He was not nearly as awkward in person as we’d been led to believe.” Maybe Thiel actually likes the show. Maybe he wants to prove that he can take a joke, even if he can’t. Maybe, calculating that it would be difficult to sue HBO out of existence, he prefers to hold his enemy close. Or maybe it’s like any other relationship in Silicon Valley: part personal, part business; part genuine, part transactional; part carrot, part stick.

Peter Thiel, top, was fictionalized as Peter Gregory in season one. Top Photograph: Raphael Huenerfauth / Photothek / Getty. Bottom Photograph: HBO / Photofest

Roger McNamee, who has been a successful tech investor since the late eighties, told me, “When I first met Mike, I asked him, ‘What’s the gestalt you’re going for with this?’ His answer was, ‘I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.’ I had never articulated it that well myself, and I lived it!” McNamee recently wound down his most recent venture fund, which he co-founded with Bono; he now spends most of his time touring the country with his two jam bands, Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System. He continued, “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”

In an upcoming episode, McNamee’s name appears in a soliloquy about the dopaminergic rush of competitive fund-raising. I was on set while this scene was being filmed, and T. J. Miller, the actor performing the speech, had to stop several times, having mispronounced “McNamee” or “Vinod Khosla.” “Are these real people, or are you fucking with me?” Miller asked a script supervisor. By the sixth take, he was inventing proper nouns: “I talked to McMeenan Bartman Associates and let a call from Jim Goebbels go straight to voicemail.”

When the scene was finished, Miller walked back to his trailer, where he used a steam inhaler to lubricate his throat. “Because of this role, I now intersect with the tech world in weird ways,” Miller said. “You never know how they’ll react. By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror. Some of these guys look in the mirror and go, ‘Fuck, we look silly.’ Others look in the mirror and go, ‘Wow, I am so fucking handsome.’” Miller plays Erlich Bachman, a pot-smoking blowhard with ludicrously sculpted facial hair whose house in the Valley is a tech incubator. Because Richard founded Pied Piper while living in the house, Erlich, without doing much work, is entitled to a minority stake and a seat on the board. “Multiple people have told me, ‘I’m the Erlich of my company,’” he continued. “I actually tell them, ‘You know that’s not a good thing, right?’”

The first public screening of “Silicon Valley” took place in Redwood City in 2014, with dozens of tech luminaries in attendance. At an after-party, while caterers passed trays of hors d’oeuvres, Elon Musk delivered a negative review to a group of people, including a reporter from Recode: “Most startups are a soap opera, but not that kind of soap opera.”

A “Silicon Valley” writer later told me, “The more self-important these people are, the more likely they are to elide the difference between a sitcom and a documentary about their lives.” But the writers seem to want to have it both ways: when they get something right, they brag about the show’s verisimilitude, but when they don’t they mock anyone who would mistake a comedy for facts.

“Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the sh

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