The Valley's Golden Boy

Singaporean Jonathan Teo Has Not Only Placed Some Savvy Bets on the World’s Top Social Networks Including Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, but He Has Also Made It His Life’s Work to Make the World a More Connected Place.

- Karen Tee

It is not every day that someone buys a Boeing 747 as a gift. But that was exactly what Jonathan Teo did last year, when he gathered a group of Silicon Valley tech titans to purchase a used plane and donated it to Burning Man, an annual experimental art festival held in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.

The impetus, says the Burning Man regular who first attended the festival in 2006, was to create an inclusive project that everyone could have access to. To get the project off the ground, a group of leaders in the technology and creative industries, including Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb; Guy Laliberte, CEO of Cirque du Soleil; and board members of Tesla and SpaceX, collaborated to conceptualise and execute this vision: to turn a plane into a performance and meeting space. This is the same group who purchased Fly Ranch, a US$6.5million property and gifted it to Burning Man.

The 36-year-old co-founder and managing partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Binary Capital says of his generous endowment: “We thought, ‘Could we create a gift to the Burning Man community that’s so large it has to be worked on by multiple groups and can be enjoyed by everyone?”

At the 2016 festival, the group debuted their “art car”, the front fifth of the 747, which had been remodelled into a massive lounge space featuring a rooftop deck that festival attendees were invited to “board”. The remaining four-fifths of the plane is still in the Mojave Desert, awaiting the group’s next great idea for this year’s festival. What will happen to it is anyone’s guess, depending on what the collective envisions. 

THE EARLY ADOPTER