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This place was special to Ross for many reasons. When he wasn’t in Texas as a child, he had
come of age here, exploring the jungles with his sister, sitting on the porch with his mother, listening
to the howler monkeys, and learning how to surf on a mini foam surfboard with his father. But Ross
loved Casa Bambu for a more salient reason: it had been one of the influences that led him to start the
Silk Road. Twenty years earlier his parents had fallen in love with the area while on vacation and
decided to build a family holiday home in the pasture. Ross’s dad (along with a few friends and
locals) built four cabanas that made up a tranquil solar-powered Swiss Family Robinson retreat. The
Ulbrichts rented the space to tourists part of the year, so paradise paid for itself, and then some. This
accomplishment had made Ross want to pursue a similar goal of starting something from scratch.
And boy, had he ever.
Ross had confided in Variety Jones about some of his lofty earlier dreams and how they now
seemed within reach. Specifically Ross shared a silent declaration he had made to himself in 2004,
that by the time he was thirty years old, he would be worth $1 billion.
For so long it had seemed he would fail dismally at that quest. Yet now, two months after he
turned twenty-eight, the goal wasn’t so out of reach anymore. As Ross said to VJ in one of their long
conversations, when he looked at the current trajectory of the Silk Road, if he calculated the future
sales of the enterprise, “it could happen.” He could very well be a billionaire in two years.
When Ross showed VJ the latest Excel spreadsheets outlining the revenue and projections of the
Silk Road, VJ responded with a shocked “Fuck me!” then added, “A hundred million is starting to
look lite for 2012! On for a billion in 2013!”
“Giddy up,” Ross replied.
To get there, though, they would need to continue expanding. DPR and VJ had been experimenting
with different ideas to grow the site, including a “4/20” contest where people could enter a raffle and
win different illegal things, and some legal ones, including an all-expenses-paid vacation with some
additional spending money.
But Variety Jones and DPR both knew it wasn’t contests and the Silk Road alone that would get
Ross to his coveted billionaire status. The site needed to diversify into other markets and to reach a
larger set of customers. They discussed an entire genre of underground Web sites that would borrow
from the Silk Road brand. SilkDigital could be for downloadable digital goods, like stolen software
and tools for hackers. SilkPharma would be for pain meds, uppers, or downers. Maybe they could
build a site for weapons, they reasoned. But these expansions would take work. So Ross had decided
to come down to Costa Rica, to his parents’ patch of paradise, to focus on this exact problem.
His mother and father didn’t have a clue what their son was working on. How can you look at
your own flesh and blood, who was once a Boy Scout, then a physicist, who donated books to the
local prison in his early twenties, and think, Oh, maybe he’s becoming one of the most notorious
drug dealers alive? You can’t. It doesn’t enter the mind. When Lyn and Kirk looked at their son, they
saw a brilliant and idealistic twenty-eight-year-old who spent so much time on the computer because
he was trading stocks.
Ross believed the day would come when the movement he’d launched would become
unstoppable and prove to the U.S. government that the only way to win the war on drugs was to
legalize them completely. Then, and only then, would the Dread Pirate Roberts be able to remove the
mask, and Ross Ulbricht would step out onto the world’s stage and take a bow. His mother would