Rich, Grumpy VCs Got Angry Over This Entrepreneur’s Post About Stealing From Whole Foods

There are two kinds of people in this world — those who can take a joke, and those who blow even the smallest things they don’t understand out of proportion … Okay, not totally out of proportion, but you won’t not be able to smirk and shake your head at how ridiculous some humans of the internet can be.

This is a tale that starts with rich grumpy white men who can’t compute satire or take a joke, and it may just end with a rap collaboration between notable venture capitalist Ben Horowitz and planet Earth’s very own controversial Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam.

It all begins with a humorous satirical post on Thought Catalog, of all places. If there’s anything you need to know about the internet, it’s that Thought Catalog is an open blogging/confessional/sounding-off platform for all works of art that have been typed out. You get titles like “I’m a Woman Who Cheated On Her Deployed Husband, This Is Why I Did It,” “Please Stop Trying to Make ‘Lumbersexual’ Happen,” or this post by Mahbod Moghadam titled, “How to Steal From Whole Foods.”

Mahbod’s post, as the title implies, has to do with “stealing” from any Whole Foods market. Well, technically he’s still paying for some portion of the food, so while it’s not the full price being paid, people love playing the immorality card and calling out a thief when they can (they’re perfect human beings themselves).

Taken literally, yes, it’s a well-written, detailed manual outlining all the instances where you can cut corners when buying food at Whole Foods. It’s so detailed, in fact, that if you imagine it in your head as a scenario directed by Wes Anderson, it’s f*cking hilarious — as it was meant to be.

But of course, there were some who took the post literally. The self-righteous among us furiously took to their keyboards to voice their moral anguish under the actual article (not to mention all the commenters that think themselves above “stealing,” yet have no moral standard when it comes to racism).

Then, a Twitter dialogue went down on between Upfront Ventures’ VC Mark Suster, self-righteous software engineer Paul Roales, Rap Genius investor Ben Horowitz, and finally Mahbod:

 

As a side note, Sophia is Ben Horowitz’s daughter.

At the end of all of it, perhaps only one person came out with some words of wisdom over the whole matter. What kind of person gets offended by a humorous post about stealing from a Whole Foods? As blogger-with-a-bone-to-pick Stephen Corwin elegantly put it, “a total goober.” Corwin also kindly gives definitions for what a goober is in his post. He makes a great argument for exactly the type of people who feel obligated to open their mouths and spew their version of righteousness in order to start something, just because.

So when will Mahbod and Ben Horowitz’s collaboration album be released? It’s TBA for now, but Mahbod did end on this note:

Truth y’all.