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He was now running a real business. He had almost a dozen employees rewriting code,
monitoring the forums, and dealing with support issues. Variety Jones was by his side helping to steer
the ship, and Ross was starting to comprehend that the Silk Road was going to be bigger than anything
he had ever imagined. More important, Ross had recently had an epiphany that this—this Web site,
which had begun as a tiny dream—would be his life’s work.
And what a magnum opus it was turning into.
Still, Ross reasoned, it couldn’t hurt to reply to this Nob character, whoever he was, and see
what he was willing to pay for the site. If this were a start-up in Silicon Valley, a financial offer
would be one way to gauge its worth. After all, what was the worst that could happen? He could
receive a lowball offer from Nob, and that would be the end of the conversation. Ross clicked the
“reply” button on his computer, typed a very short eleven-word response, and hit “send.” “I’m open
to the idea,” the e-mail said. “What did you have in mind?”
As he waited for word from VJ about the mutiny, Ross went about his day, preparing for a
camping trip he was about to go on with his old buddies from high school.
Ross had returned to Texas a couple of weeks earlier. As he had promised Variety Jones, he was
meditating in the early mornings or late afternoons, then working for a few hours on the site. To keep
his sanity, and to keep his fears of law enforcement in check, he would socialize after work like any
other normal programmer with a nine-to-five job. He went on hikes in the forest just outside Austin.
He smoked some weed with his high school friends and went rock climbing with others. And he had,
thankfully, avoided running into Julia since he’d returned to the Lone Star State.
A few days went by before Ross heard back from Nob. But the e-mail was perplexing. Nob said
that in order to make an official offer to buy the Silk Road, he would need to see financials, including
“monthly gross sales from the site, net sales, percentage charged to sellers, total sellers, total buyers,
site maintenance and upgrade costs (?), salaries for the administrator and monitors.”
Ha! That’s never going to happen!
There were only two people on earth who had seen those numbers; one was named Dread Pirate
Roberts and the other was Ross Ulbricht. Even Variety Jones didn’t know all those details.
DPR politely declined to share the numbers with Nob, citing the risk that such sensitive
information could easily fall into the hands of law enforcement. But still, he decided to throw out a
potential sale price for the site to see if the buyer was even remotely interested in an acquisition. At
the very least, it was titillating to ponder the value of his creation. Facebook was now being valued at
around $80 billion; Twitter was worth some $10 billion, and that place was run like a clown car.
Surely the Silk Road offered something that, if not quite at their value (yet), was at least in the range
for the right buyer. “I think an offer for the entire operation would need to be 9 figures for me to
consider it,” Ross wrote to Nob.
As this conversation continued, Variety Jones returned with whispers in his ear and reports ready
for the Dread Pirate Roberts. It seemed the rumors about the mutiny were indeed correct. A group of
dealers on the site weren’t happy with the new commission fees and they were weighing what to do
next.
Option one for these mutineers, Ross learned, would be to jump ship to a new, much smaller
competing Web site that had recently come on the scene called Black Market. Then there was option
two: for those behind the rebellion to go off and literally build a competing drug site that had much
lower fees. Or finally, the worst-case scenario was not too dissimilar to what happens daily in real-