of Lotus 1-2-3).
Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street analyst and venture
capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor was the founder and CEO of Lotus, one of
the most spectacularly successful business ventures of the later
twentieth century.

He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he actually knows how
much money he has.

"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."

How much does he actually have, then?

He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I talk about.
Issues of money and class are things that cut pretty close to the
bone."

I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might presume, impolitely,
that Kapor has at least forty million--that's what he got the year he
left Lotus. People who ought to know claim Kapor has about a hundred
and fifty million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings.
If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and rival Bill
Gates has stuck with his own software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor
would likely have much the same fortune Gates has--somewhere in the
neighborhood of three billion, give or take a few hundred million.
Mitch Kapor has all the money he wants. Money has lost whatever charm
it ever held for him--probably not much in the first place. When Lotus
became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far from the true sources of
his own satisfaction, Kapor walked. He simply severed all connections
with the company and went out the door. It stunned everyone--except
those who knew him best.

Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough
transformation in cyberspace politics. In its first year, EFF's budget
was about a quarter of a million dollars. Kapor is running EFF out of
his pocket change.

Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself a civil
libertarian per se. He has spent quite some time with true-blue civil
libertarians lately, and there's a political-correctness to them that
bugs him. They seem to him to spend entirely too much time in legal
nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in the
everyday real world.

Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he prefers his
involvements direct, personal, and hands-on. "The fact that EFF has a
node on the Internet is a great thing. We're a publisher. We're a
distributor of information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node
carries is back issues of Phrack. They had an internal debate about
that in EFF, and fin