Jerry Brown’s Ranch: Where Old California Meets Silicon Valley
The ranch is a bit tricky to find. In this part of California, less than two hours from Silicon Valley, the internet connection disappears, rendering GPS useless. And no gas station sells road maps anymore, an archaism in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). After driving a little over 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of San Francisco, through parched hills and fields covered in solar panels, you eventually find the small road where stagecoaches once traveled in the 19th century.
This is where the ancestors of former California Governor Jerry Brown, who came from Germany in 1849, ran a relay station where horses were changed. “Before,” he recounts, “the arrival of the railroad killed the small road, its inn, and completely changed the game.” A century later, Jerry Brown transformed the old relay station into a country house. At 87 years old, he is a handsome old man, in the chic and cultivated style of the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) of the Democratic Party, who reads political essays and produces oil extracted from the olive groves along the valley. In other words, a piece of the old world, less than two hours from the tech kings.
He knows them well. “They almost all gravitated around me, as they always have around power,” he asserts. Mark Zuckerberg and the giants of Apple have long financed his campaigns. “After all, they said they cared about the country and were among the richest.” Jerry Brown inaugurated the headquarters of their companies, including Tesla’s in Palo Alto, even though “Elon Musk was one of the few who never really responded” to his fundraising campaigns for the California Democratic Party, he admits.
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