Ross, jump off a cliff.”
Ross Ulbricht stood there with a slightly dumbfounded look on his face as he peered over the edge of the bluff. Below him, Austin’s Pace Bend Lake curled into and around itself, leaving a forty-five-foot drop into the frigid water below.
“What?” Ross said with a goofy smile as he lifted his hands and pointed to his wide chest. “Why me?”
“Juuust do it,” his sister, Cally, replied, pointing at the rocks. Twenty-four-year-old Ross was a foot taller than her, so he bent his neck downward as he considered her command. Without warning, he shrugged, yelled “Okay,” and ran off the ledge and into the air, shrieking before plunging into the lake with a thundering splash.
The video camera clicked off.
It was just the beginning of a long day of filming a reality TV show audition tape that the brother-and-sister duo had been scripting for weeks, with help from their mother, Lyn. The plan was to start with the cliff scene and go from there. Ross’s older sister would take the lead, introducing the Ulbricht siblings by noting that they were “willing to do anything to win The Amazing Race, even jump off a cliff.” After blithely doing just that, the plan was to traipse around Austin putting on an over-the-top act for the camera to try to convince the producers of the show that Ross and Cally Ulbricht would be the perfect contestants.
As Ross looked up from the water to his sister and the rocks he had just leaped off, it was clear that this wasn’t the way he had imagined spending this summer off from college.
There was a movie in Ross’s head of an altogether different summer. In that film he had saved up for a ring and proposed to his perfect Texas girlfriend. In the script in his mind, she said yes (of course). Then the two lovebirds would graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas, him with a physics degree, and spend the next few months planning their wedding. They’d land good jobs, Ross as a researcher or theoretical physicist. They’d pop out a couple of babies, go to birthday parties and weddings. Grow old together. Live a happy life. The end.
But that version of Ross Ulbricht’s life never made it past the opening credits. While Ross had saved up for the perfect ring with which to propose, when he romantically asked his girlfriend for her hand in marriage (Say yes, please say yes), she instead said she had to tell Ross something (Well, this doesn’t sound good). At which point she admitted that during the past year or so she had cheated on him with several different men. (Several? As in more than one? Yes. Several.) To make matters worse, one of them was one of Ross’s best friends.
Fade to black.
At the base of the cliff, Ross scrambled out of the water and the Ulbricht family set off to their next shooting location. When the camera clicked back on, Ross and his sister stood in front of Austin’s skyline, taking turns explaining who they both were. Ross was “the brains” of their operation, his sister explained, and went on to say that he had studied physics and material science and even won a world record for creating the clearest crystal formation on earth.
As his sister spoke, Ross stared into the distance, a million thoughts climbing around in his mind like an animal lost in an elaborate maze searching for something. It was evident that there was something about this moment where Ross found himself that didn’t seem right. And yet it was unclear what it was or how this had happened.
He had been born in that very city, and even before he could utter the words “Mama” or “Dada,” it was instantly apparent to Lyn and her husband, Kirk, that there was something different about their son. As a toddler he was contemplative and understood things way beyond his years. He was never told, “Don’t run out into traffic!”; he just somehow knew not to, as if he came into the world with an instruction manual that other people didn’t have access to. At a young age he knew answers to mathematics questions his parents didn’t even understand. And while, as a teen, he engaged in normal kidlike activities—sports in the park, board game marathons, and ogling pretty girls—he often preferred to read about political theory, existentialism, or quantum mechanics.
But it wasn’t just that he was smart. He was genuinely kind too. As a boy he rescued animals. As an adult he opted for people. Yes, Ross was the person who would stop midsentence in a conversation and rush off to help an old lady cross the street, carrying her bags and stopping traffic as she slowly dawdled through an intersection.
Some who met him thought his overly altruistic attitude was a bit of an act. “How can anyone be that nice?” they’d say. But it was real, and it didn’t take long for the people to learn just how magnanimous he was. This was evident simply from the way he spoke, often sounding painfully folksy, using words like “golly,” “jeez,” and “heck.” If he had to curse, he would always say “fudge” in lieu of “fuck.”
He had his vices too. As a teenager he had discovered a penchant for mind-altering experiences, at least mild ones. He loved heading into the nearby woods with his pals, lighting up a joint, taking his shirt off, and climbing trees. At a house party after his high school prom, he drank so much beer that his date found him floating on an inflatable raft in the homeowner’s pool, still wearing his tuxedo, sneakers (he didn’t own dress shoes and had worn old tennis shoes to prom), and a pair of sunglasses.
Still, the smartest guy in every room was now standing there next to his sister in a park in Austin, competing to be on a reality TV show.
But what choice did he have? It wasn’t like he could go out west to Silicon Valley and get a job at a start-up. After the bubble had popped a few years earlier, companies that had been built on a wing and a prayer had siphoned people’s retirements into thin air and collapsed, leaving San Francisco a metaphorical no-fly zone. What about going east? Wasn’t there opportunity on Wall Street for someone as clever as Ross? No way. The banks were collapsing from the housing market crash. And he certainly couldn’t settle down and live happily ever after with his girlfriend; his dream of marriage and a white picket fence had been bulldozed by several other men.
That left graduate school, or jumping off a cliff.
He imagined reality TV fame and a pile of money as a slight detour on the way to some larger accomplishment. Ross was sure he had a grander purpose in life, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it would be. Maybe one day he’d figure out what that purpose was.
Just not today.
As the daylight faded and the Amazing Race shoot came to an end, Ross and his sister stood in front of the camera along the streets of Austin. He had slipped on some dark sweatpants and a thick black sweater to keep the evening cold at bay.
“Ross,” his sister asked, “what are you going to do with your half a million dollars when we win?”
He pretended to think for a moment and then said, “Oh, I think I’ll just throw it on the ground and roll around in it for a little while.”
“Well,” Cally replied as she lifted her hand to give her brother a high five, “we have to win The Amazing Race first.”
The camera clicked off again. While Ross stuffed the equipment from the shoot into the family car, he daydreamed about the opportunity that lay ahead and about the half a million dollars that he would surely win. He didn’t know that chance would never arrive. Ross would not be chosen to compete on the reality TV show—the first of many failures to come. And yet, as he hopped into the car next to his sister, he also didn’t know that in just five years he would be making that amount of money in a single day.