And what a magnum opus it was turning into.
Still, Ross reasoned, it couldn’t hurt to reply to this Nob character, whoever he was, and see what he was willing to pay for the site. If this were a start-up in Silicon Valley, a financial offer would be one way to gauge its worth. After all, what was the worst that could happen? He could receive a lowball offer from Nob, and that would be the end of the conversation. Ross clicked the “reply” button on his computer, typed a very short eleven-word response, and hit “send.” “I’m open to the idea,” the e-mail said. “What did you have in mind?”
As he waited for word from VJ about the mutiny, Ross went about his day, preparing for a camping trip he was about to go on with his old buddies from high school.
Ross had returned to Texas a couple of weeks earlier. As he had promised Variety Jones, he was meditating in the early mornings or late afternoons, then working for a few hours on the site. To keep his sanity, and to keep his fears of law enforcement in check, he would socialize after work like any other normal programmer with a nine-to-five job. He went on hikes in the forest just outside Austin. He smoked some weed with his high school friends and went rock climbing with others. And he had, thankfully, avoided running into Julia since he’d returned to the Lone Star State.
A few days went by before Ross heard back from Nob. But the e-mail was perplexing. Nob said that in order to make an official offer to buy the Silk Road, he would need to see financials, including “monthly gross sales from the site, net sales, percentage charged to sellers, total sellers, total buyers, site maintenance and upgrade costs (?), salaries for the administrator and monitors.”
Ha! That’s never going to happen!
There were only two people on earth who had seen those numbers; one was named Dread Pirate Roberts and the other was Ross Ulbricht. Even Variety Jones didn’t know all those details.
DPR politely declined to share the numbers with Nob, citing the risk that such sensitive information could easily fall into the hands of law enforcement. But still, he decided to throw out a potential sale price for the site to see if the buyer was even remotely interested in an acquisition. At the very least, it was titillating to ponder the value of his creation. Facebook was now being valued at around $80 billion; Twitter was worth some $10 billion, and that place was run like a clown car. Surely the Silk Road offered something that, if not quite at their value (yet), was at least in the range for the right buyer. “I think an offer for the entire operation would need to be 9 figures for me to consider it,” Ross wrote to Nob.
As this conversation continued, Variety Jones returned with whispers in his ear and reports ready for the Dread Pirate Roberts. It seemed the rumors about the mutiny were indeed correct. A group of dealers on the site weren’t happy with the new commission fees and they were weighing what to do next.
Option one for these mutineers, Ross learned, would be to jump ship to a new, much smaller competing Web site that had recently come on the scene called Black Market. Then there was option two: for those behind the rebellion to go off and literally build a competing drug site that had much lower fees. Or finally, the worst-case scenario was not too dissimilar to what happens daily in real-world businesses when a CEO is ousted by the board. In this scenario the dealers were talking about hacking into the site (given its massive security vulnerabilities) and commandeering the Silk Road.
But more disconcerting than any of these options was the other piece of intelligence that Variety Jones had discovered during his reconnaissance mission. The problem, as VJ explained to DPR, wasn’t just that people were upset about the high commission fees on the site. There was a much bigger issue looming. One that Ross could never have envisioned when he had the idea for the Silk Road years earlier.
Chapter 27
A BILLION DOLLARS?!
Carl sat at his laptop reading the e-mail from the Dread Pirate Roberts. “It’s a tough question. This is more than a business to me, it’s a revolution and is becoming my life’s work,” it began, and then proclaimed a price: “I think an offer for the entire operation would need to be 9 figures for me to consider it.”
Nine figures! Carl almost choked when he read that number. That could mean as low as $100 million or as high as $999 million, and he knew full well it wasn’t going to be on the low end of that spectrum. But he was also baffled at how big the Silk Road must be.
Until now, everyone on the Baltimore task force and those inside the DEA had assumed the site was a relatively small operation, but this valuation seemed extraordinarily high. DEA agents had imagined that the site might be worth a few million. At the highest maybe—just maybe—Carl believed it was worth $25 million, tops. But nine figures?
Now Carl was gleeful that he had to figure out how to respond to this high number.
Carl had become particularly excitable as of late. He was almost erratic in his temperament, constantly flipping between a buzzing enthusiasm and an irritable stress about the case. These feelings were only exacerbated by the time he had to wait for DPR to respond to his e-mails, which was sometimes days.
To relieve this stress, Carl sometimes exercised—well, sort of exercised. While he occasionally ran on the treadmill in the DEA office gym, he would also relieve stress by wrestling with his coworkers. As if they were in some sort of secret fight club, he would roll on the ground with other grown men as they tried to pin each other to the floor of the Baltimore offices of the DEA. Then, panting and breathless, it was back to his laptop to see if DPR had replied.
Technically, by writing back to DPR, Carl was breaking protocol again. He had recently been given a talking-to by his boss, Nick, who said that whenever Carl spoke to DPR, he must liaise with the Baltimore team (which had been nicknamed the Marco Polo task force) and that he should run any correspondence by the higher-ups. But Special Agent Carl Force had been on the job fourteen years, and he hated two things: one was authority, and the other was authority from people younger than him (which included everyone on the Marco Polo task force).