253 minutes with …Jeffrey Wernick

The 65-year-old Parler investor is caught up in a technological, legal, and political debacle of the highest order.

- BENJAMIN WALLACE

In the summer of 2019, Jeffrey Wernick, then a 63-year old investor and self-described anarcho-capitalist, was living above a hotel in midtown Manhattan and hosting regular lunches at Fred's at Barneys, where he’d extol bitcoin and rue the sunset of free speech in America. It was at one of these gatherings that he got to talking with John Matze, 26, the libertarian who had recently founded Parler—a Twitter alternative for conservatives fed up with what they considered to be the suppressive policies of mainstream social media.

Wernick doesn’t particularly like social media (“It’s antisocial,” he told me), but he appreciated Parler’s purity: The platform showed posts in simple chronological order with rather laissez-faire content moderation. A few months after the encounter, Wernick invested in the start-up and became a strategic adviser. “I thought it would be really perverse if the World Wide Web existed without there being a real public forum,” he said. “The town square has been hijacked by private actors, and a public square no longer exists.”