The Long 2010s, Part I: Activity Without Action

The trial of Charlie Javice closes the door on a sordid decade

Charlie Javice departs federal court in Manhattan

A Proper Charlie

I forgot about Charlie Javice until last week, when I saw her trial had started. I remembered the general contours, as Matt Levine had covered the story in Money Stuff, but subsequent events had fallen off my radar. I spent a few hours refreshing my memory, and I realized her scandal illustrated some broader phenomena about the last decade and half, the Long 2010s of 2008 to 2024, that I have been thinking over. Let me give a brief summary of what Javice did, and then I will explore what her example says about the changes in the zeitgeist.

In 2021, Charlie Javice sold Frank, her startup for navigating college financial aid, to JP Morgan Chase for $175 million and took a job at the bank as a managing director. Not bad, but it was a fraud. When JP Morgan attempted to contact the 4.5 million users whom Frank claimed to have registered, most of the emails bounced, and even fewer were opened. JP Morgan fired Javice and sued her. The bank alleged that Javice and her Frank colleague Olivier Amar had faked the contact information for these 4.5 million users, using “synthetic data” techniques that involved both paying off a data science professor to manufacture false user profiles and the wholesale buying of contact information from data brokers, and that the true number of users Frank had was a meager 300,000. The Department of Justice subsequently indicted Javice and Amar on fraud charges, and the trial to adjudicate these charges began last week.

Thanks to back issues of Money Stuff, I quickly recalled the basics of the case, and then I did some more reading on Javice. Two items stand out: a lengthy “unauthorized profile” of Javice in Fortune, and an anonymous Reddit post by someone claiming to be a former intern at Frank (I have no reason to doubt this individual was lying). Let me turn to the Reddit post first. The quotes from the former intern are sublime:

She was obsessed with the aesthetics of being a CEO of a tech company, but never spent as much energy as she should have trying to make money, or a product that people would actually pay for. Nor would she pivot into something that could actually work. She also tended to fire anyone who disagreed with her.

Inevitablly [sic] shit wouldn’t work out and she would lie to investors about progress to keep the lights on and raise more money.

I guess she thought selling the thing to JP Morgan would be a good way to clean up the mess she made and make the other investors a decent return on the way out.

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At one point she fired every single person I worked with (after I was gone) because most had enough of her ego and she wanted to start over fresh. She had no hard skills and even less business sense and that was plainly obvious to everyone except for her investors apparently.

The Fortune piece by Luisa Beltran is not as cruel, but it gets close. Writes Beltran, “People who knew her at the time describe her as a normal teen, neither extremely nice nor extremely mean,” a line that summons up the Westchester banality of Javice and her tony French-American private school.

Beltran also relates an amusing incident from Javice’s college days at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where she participated in the final round of competition of the Thiel Fellowship, a scheme cooked up by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel that awarded $100,000 to young entrepreneurs in exchange for dropping out or forgoing college. Javice’s previous startup venture was known as PoverUp, an entity she founded in high school for college résumé-padding that no one seemed to understand (it had something to do with mitigating poverty through the mysterious synthesis of soup kitchens and microfinance and social networking, per a bloviating piece in a Philadelphia business journal). At one point in the competition, contestants were instructed to give a presentation about their startup at a lectern for two minutes. Javice instead wandered away from the lectern to the middle of the stage and started rambling; she went over the allotted two minutes and had her microphone cut off. This did not endear her to the judges, who criticized her lack of humility as well as her predilection for name-dropping. She did not win the Thiel Fellowship, which may have been fortunate given the underbaked reality of that program. Even Javice must have realized how incoherent PoverUp was, because she quietly stopped working on it in her senior year of college¹ and started the company that would become Frank, which brings us back to 2025 and her trial.

Activity without Action

One gets the impression that Charlie Javice was an ambitious but incompetent tryhard. This type of individual is a common sight in the tier 1 cities of America. Last week, I talked about escaping the crowded center for the open hinterland, but people like Javice are the ones jampacking the center and either experiencing involution themselves or forcing involution upon their competition. The former is called “burning out,” the latter “winning.” The New York metropolitan area is a vicious place, but Javice was winning: private high school; Ivy League university; fintech startup acquired for $175 million; JP Morgan managing director at 30 years old with millions in the bank. Too bad “convicted felon” does not fit in this sequence, but if it were not for the small problem of her alleged fraud, she was set to take her place among the gilded ones at the center.

Why did I say Javice’s trial closes the door on a sordid decade? The obvious comparison for her is Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried, fellow millennial entrepreneurs who founded companies valued at obscene amounts before being exposed as frauds, and their cases are paradigmatic for making sense of the Long 2010s. The problem is Theranos and FTX were playing with billions, in comparison to the paltry millions of Frank, and the vaulting sociopathy displayed by Holmes and Bankman-Fried places them at too high an elevation for useful analysis. Javice is odious too, but she is nowhere as outlandish. In a word, she is suitable because she is boring, yet not so boring that she cannot serve as a useful example. She is just ridiculous enough. This era’s tendencies crystallize in her career in a way that is easy to observe, and as her trial kicks off in 2025, it just so happens to provide a bookend for the Long 2010s.

Here are five theses that characterize the Long 2010s, and I’ll be elaborating on these points as I publish subsequent parts of this series. For today, we’ll content ourselves with understanding how the five theses correspond with Javice’s illustrious career.²

Thesis 1: Ambitious yet incompetent. People with more desire than good sense are hardly new phenomena, and yet they have never found more success during these years. Javice offers a perfect example. Despite her lofty goals, her ability to execute those goals was severely lacking. As her former employee said on Reddit, she failed to “make a product that people would actually pay for,” and she was obsessed with projecting the “aesthetics of the CEO of a tech company” above anything else. The mismatch between ambition and competence was further encouraged by a society awash in cheap money (more on that below) but lacking in discretion. This decade also saw the elevation of certain economic sectors that lend themselves to flimflam behavior—finance, consulting, “technology” detached from solid know-how—and reward confident bullshitting over quiet proficiency. Now, the fetish for pure technocracy has its own pitfalls, but there is something to be said for rewarding genuine technical ability over gum-flapping sophistry. The former has use in any society, the latter none. This alchemy that people like Javice do, attempting to transform raw ambition and frenetic activity into competence, produces calamity.

Thesis 2: Educated but unintellectual. The ambitious yet incompetent cannot help but be attracted to the prestigious institutions. Javice marched through the cursus honorum of the American meritocracy, collecting her expensive degrees and eight-figure payday. “Prestigious” means illusionary, and that is how we ought to evaluate her, beyond the alleged fraud itself. The usual talk around “scams” concentrates on the aberration of the scammer: “How could someone from such a good background who attended the Ivy League do a scam?” is the question most commentators repeat. This discourse is tedious. It ignores that these prestigious institutions of education, and the entire apparatus of the so-called meritocracy in general, now have very little to do with inculcating true intellectual abilities and very much to do with dispensing precious stamps of relative distinction to the winners. The bearer of the stamp is considered distinct from the common herd, entitled to higher social status and a greater allotment of social goods, but is not necessarily in possession of any absolute excellence. Historian Erik Baker provides a cogent analysis of this change in education among the ruling classes: The changing political economy of the United States, which saw a move away from the manufacture of real goods to the inflation of financial assets, meant that elites-in-training no longer needed to learn substantial intellectual skills or self-denying virtues to maintain their rule as they once did.

This change in education, paralleling the change in political economy, was well underway in the decades preceding the Long 2010s, but the Long 2010s saw a greater divergence between the formal trappings and the actual substance of education, as the hollow shell of the degree-granting institution took ever-greater primacy over the real learning.³ Before dropping out to found Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes had only two semesters’ worth of chemical engineering, but that was irrelevant, as the stamp of Stanford became the only relevant factor in her ridiculous narrative of entrepreneurship. Failure of the so-called meritocracy is evident in its devolution into a stamp-collecting exercise. Unlike Holmes, Javice collected her degree, but classmates told Fortune she more or less spent her time collecting stamps, as she finagled her way into a prestigious incubator for entrepreneurship that the university hosted. “Harvard is a hedge fund with a liberal arts college attached,” the joke goes, indicating the shell company nature of the modern university that valorizes the return on the endowment over education. Along the same lines, one might quip, “Going to college is a four-year exercise in brand-building with a diploma attached.” I will have more to say about this in a future installment.

Thesis 3: A vague do-gooderism. With an incoherent identity politics at its bosom and the finance and technology sectors as its sinews, a sickly-sweet disposition was everywhere during the Long 2010s. Both of Javice’s ventures, PoverUp and Frank were founded on this flimsy premise. After all, the notion that the skillful application of ill-defined fintech widgets would solve intractable social problems was a key delusion of the Long 2010s. Claiming to help “underprivileged students” navigate financial aid, Frank laid a veneer of altruism over a core of avarice, complete with a sob story from the founder herself, who told investors that her family struggled with financial aid which in turn motivated her to start a company to help other people navigate that byzantine system. Javice herself was hardly in such dire economic straits, but it is notable that Javice seemed to lack any clear vision of how to realize her avarice until J.P. Morgan was foolish enough to pay her $175 million, a testament to this reigning vagueness.

That said, Javice was smart to focus on the higher education sector, as the panacea of higher education was the linchpin. The Long 2010s saw the continuation of the charade that social mobility might be achieved through the endless funneling of people into the university system, all underwritten by student loan debt. By doubling down on education, this would preclude any serious changes to the political economy of the country. Obamaism might be a pithier name for this tendency, and the Long 2010s might very well be called the Age of Obama. I do not want to get into the ridiculous entity known as effective altruism, let alone the so-called rationalist movement, which notoriously influenced Sam Bankman-Fried, but its stated philosophy of “earn to give” has clear roots in the Obamaian milieu.

Thesis 4: The corrupting influence of zero interest rates policy (ZIRP). “Scam” discourse—think of the multiple miniseries filmed about Elizabeth Holmes, the infotainment documentaries about Fyre Festival, the deluge of books about Sam Bankman-Fried—during the Long 2010s attempted to make sense of the explosion of fraud, but it did not go far enough. The efflorescence of scams can be directly tied to the post-Great Recession environment of near-zero interest rates. With little yield to be found in traditional quarters like Treasury bonds, this ludicrously cheap money was funneled into a lot of unproductive investment. Startups peddling questionable wares bloomed like algae in a pond. It is why we are cursed with half a dozen variations on food delivery apps, dating apps, and streaming apps, not to mention speculation in cryptocurrency and digital media. This cheap money coarsened our culture. Javice would not have raised money from venture capitalists for her own questionable enterprise if it were not for ZIRP. Cash was trash, so why not see if a stupid college financial aid advice company could do better than trash?

Thesis 5: Incoherence and half-measures. This era was the Obama Era, and the signature legislation passed during this time, the Affordable Care Act, was a paragon of incoherence and half-measures, another example of the Obama predilection for the “public-private partnership,” an inescapable buzzword. Obama himself called the ACA “a starter home,” and he liked to use the phrase “half a loaf is better than none,” admitting his administration’s lack of heft. An abominable hybrid, the ACA undoubtedly improved things, but even today no one loves the ACA. Much has been said about the failures of the Obama presidency, but even its successes were qualified.

Javice’s two companies of PoverUp and Frank were similarly half-assed. No one, perhaps not even Javice, knew what PoverUp was supposed to do, and Frank was a totally insubstantial entity, a toy company led by an immature CEO, that had to resort to fabricating millions of customers in order to land the payday from J. P. Morgan. In fairness, the incoherence of Javice stemmed from the general incoherence of the time. For example, Javice originally used the URL frankfafsa.com to advertise her company, but she was compelled by the Department of Education to change the website name because it was misleading people about Frank’s connection to the department, which did not exist. A reasonable mandate from the government, but the underlying incoherence that the government allowed regarding financial aid deserves blame too, not just the unscrupulous and idiotic entrepreneur.

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A general sense of muddling and stagnation reigned during the Long 2010s, where those who could afford to purchase securities, bloated by the aforementioned cheap money, thrived, and those who could not languished. The decade saw plenty of frenetic motion, but no movement. Even if Frank had not forged its userbase, what contribution would it have made to society? J.P. Morgan got to indulge in a fantasy about selling more checking accounts to college students, a spoiled Ivy Leaguer became a millionaire, worthless money changed hands, but what happened? Nothing. This era saw ostensible progression that was really regression, accompanied by all too real decay outside the exalted corridors.

Even J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who pushed his underlings to finalize the acquisition of Frank in 2021, seems to understand that nothing has been happening. In a profane address to employees this February, Dimon dismissed work-from-home arrangements and demanded employees return to the office, citing the decrease in efficiency and creativity that work from home engendered. Too bad he has no idea how to make something happen. He benefited considerably from this state of nothing happening, becoming a billionaire in 2015 thanks to the appreciation of his shares in the bank. As the CEO, he gets to be creative, and his spirit gets to expand, but most of the work done by his employees is rote work, and their spirits contract accordingly. J.P. Morgan probably does not need fourteen committees in wealth management, but culling a vice president there and a managing director there is just more activity without action. The action that he aches for will not happen unless things get interesting, and as the allegedly Chinese saying goes, “May you live in interesting times.”

1. Still, give her credit for sticking with it for so long. Many people who found startups or nonprofits in high school to get into college abandon these entities as soon as that coveted acceptance letter arrives. I don’t blame them: their nonprofits were probably useless.

2. I appreciate the irony of using the listicle format, the characteristic format of the Long 2010s, to criticize the Long 2010s, but I had the misfortune of growing up through this time, and I cannot deny its influence.

3. Shamus Khan shows this change in his ethnographic work on prep school life.