I recently had lunch at a discreet, unlisted farm-to-table establishment in Palo Alto with a senior executive at a major social media conglomerate. We were dining on responsibly sourced heritage radishes, but he barely touched his plate. His hands, adorned with the subtle calluses of a man who spends his days aggressively swiping through engagement metrics, were shaking. He looked at me, his eyes wide with the specific, haunting terror of a man whose stock options are vesting in the third quarter, and he asked me what we were going to do about Jimmy.
Jimmy Chilimigras is eighteen years old. He graduated high school at the age of twelve. Last May, he became one of the youngest law school graduates in American history. By all accounts, he is a brilliant young man with a boundless future. And yet, instead of using his formidable intellect to do something productive for society—like joining a white-shoe corporate defense firm to help fossil fuel companies obscure their offshore holding structures—Jimmy has decided to launch a cruel, unprovoked assault on the most defenseless members of our business community.
He has publicly announced his intention to litigate against social media companies. His reasoning? He claims these platforms design their products to be addictive, and therefore harmful, to youths.
I must confess, when I first heard this, I nearly choked on my sparkling water.
Let us unpack the sheer arrogance of this teenager. Jimmy has the audacity to stand before the American public and declare that social media platforms are "extremely predatory." He insists that tech companies are sending out products knowing they are harmful, and "not really taking any action to reduce the harm or address it."
To this, I must ask a very simple, very grown-up question: since when is giving the consumer exactly what they want considered a crime?
Addiction is such an ugly word. I prefer to call it "sustained brand loyalty." The fact that teenagers are spending fourteen hours a day scrolling through algorithmic feeds of hyper-targeted micro-content is not a public health crisis. It is a triumph of American engineering. Do we sue the people who manufacture particularly comfortable mattresses just because we find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning? Do we haul the chefs of Michelin-starred restaurants before a congressional committee because their sauces are too compelling?
Of course not. We reward them. Yet when a tech company spends billions of dollars and employs thousands of the brightest behavioral psychologists on earth to ensure a fourteen-year-old feels a mild sense of existential dread whenever they close an app, suddenly we are talking about class-action lawsuits.
What Jimmy fails to understand, likely due to his tragic lack of real-world corporate experience, is the immense pressure these companies are under. It takes an astronomical amount of server power, algorithmic tweaking, and venture capital funding to successfully monetise the fragile self-esteem of an adolescent. The executives at Meta, ByteDance, and Alphabet are working around the clock to provide value to their shareholders. To have a teenager swagger into the courtroom and try to dismantle that delicate ecosystem is not just insulting; it is a profound misunderstanding of the social contract.
It is frankly terrifying that a young man who has only been an adult for five minutes believes he has the right to interfere with our constitutional right to harvest the psychological decay of his peers.
Furthermore, the sheer entitlement of Jimmy's campaign is staggering. He is weaponising his youth. By being eighteen, he assumes he speaks for the youth. But I have spoken to many youths—mostly the children of my colleagues at the country club—and they all assure me that they greatly enjoy having their attention spans fractured into infinite, monetisable shards.
But Jimmy's reign of terror does not stop at the gates of Silicon Valley. In his recent media appearances, this boy has also threatened to use his law degree to reform United States tax law.
This is where I must draw a line in the sand.
It is one thing to attack the shiny new tech companies. It is quite another to assault the sacred, labyrinthine tapestry of the US tax code. Our tax laws were not thrown together overnight. They were carefully, painstakingly woven over decades by generations of dedicated lobbyists, all working in bipartisan harmony to ensure that the people who own the social media companies do not have to pay for the roads Jimmy drove on to get his accelerated law degree.
The tax code is a beautiful, complex ecosystem. It is full of delightful little loopholes and offshore havens that require a team of highly paid professionals to navigate. To suggest that it needs "reform" implies that the system is broken. But the system is not broken. It is working exactly as intended for the people who matter most: those who can afford to buy an opinion column in a major publication.
Jimmy claims he wants to find "an area to do some good." This is the most chilling statement of all. "Doing good" is a terrifying concept when wielded by a prodigy with a JD. Historically, whenever someone in a suit decides they want to do some good, a billionaire loses a yacht. I am not prepared to live in a world where the visionaries who invented the infinite scroll are forced to downgrade from a Gulfstream G650 to a G550 just because an eighteen-year-old thinks teenagers should occasionally look at trees.
I remember being eighteen. I was arrogant, foolish, and entirely unaware of how the world actually functioned. I thought I could change things. I thought fairness was a tangible metric rather than a marketing buzzword. Jimmy is suffering from the exact same delusion, only he has passed the bar exam, which makes him infinitely more dangerous.
We must ask ourselves what kind of country we want to live in. Do we want to live in a nation where multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates live in fear of litigious teenagers? Where the brilliant minds of Silicon Valley are forced to consider the moral implications of their engagement metrics? Where the tax code is simplified so that ordinary working people are no longer disproportionately burdened?
I, for one, say no.
I implore Jimmy to take a step back. Take a gap year. Go backpacking across Europe. Find yourself. And when you return, perhaps you will have gained the maturity necessary to understand that the truest, noblest calling for a legal prodigy is not to tear down the predatory institutions that run our society, but to bill them a thousand dollars an hour to write their Terms of Service.