Earlier this week I took a little day trip with a friend north of Missoula, where the billionaires play. We drove past Paws Up Ranch, the popular billionaire glamping spot on the Blackfoot river that hosted members of the PayPal Mafia last June, then we drove through Lincoln, where Uncle Ted once lived.
Uncle Ted, for those who don’t know, is Theodore John Kaczynski, the author of Technological Slavery and explosive critic of self-serving scientists selling out humanity to enslave it for their pay-masters, but don’t take that from me (or Ted), take it from Robert Oppenheimer:
To be fair to scientists, the existence of hidden motives lurking behind a person’s stated intentions is simply a part of the human condition, and too often those hidden motives even hide from the conscious mind of the person themselves. That said, even if Tom Siebel really BELIEVED his money could help Montana deal with “the devil’s drug”, the motive shouldn’t matter when the result has been a TOTAL FAILURE.
Instead of honestly reporting on the “philanthropic” motives of a billionaire like Tom Siebel, what local media did two decades ago was help establish this tech-titan’s unearned credentials by opening this 2006 article with Siebel’s unfunny comedy riff about meth labs, as reported by the Independent Record:
In the middle of moving a herd of black Angus cattle from one pasture to another, Tom Siebel dismounts his horse and starts picking up stray pieces of old trash – bailing wire, odd pieces of rusted metal, glass discolored by the years of exposure to the elements.
“Hey, this could be a meth lab from 1929,” Siebel jokes in his gravelly voice.
Coming from anyone else, the statement might earn a chuckle. But for Siebel, the man behind the Montana Meth Project, it carries a weighty message. He has invested more than $10 million into ridding the state of what he calls “the devil’s drug.”
If you continue reading this Independent Record puff piece, like I did, you get more aspirational intent about Siebel’s Deaborn Ranch, which overlooks the Dearborn river, which flows like a rich vein of pure liquid gold from the winter snowpack of the Bob Marshall Wilderness:
“I want this to be the best-run ranch in the state,” Siebel says. Along with his 50,000-acre N Bar Ranch near Grass Range, the Siebel cattle operation ships about 1.5 million pounds of beef a year and puts up about 3,500 tons of hay. “This is a working ranch, but with Tom, wildlife always wins out to cattle,” Harber says.
Siebel and his staff work with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other management agencies to make sure he’s using the best management practices. The 2,000 pairs of cows and calves are kept out of delicate riparian areas and are rotated frequently enough to maintain healthy grasslands.
Parts of the ranch are under FWP’s block-management program, which allows public hunting to those who ask. Harber said FWP has released several rehabilitated wildlife species onto the ranch. There are plots dedicated to upland gamebird habitat and areas where organic means have been used for weed abatement.
One way to understand this parcel of land where “the public” is “allowed” to hunt if they ask is to look up the Montana Cadastral data, which helps show where the protected money to own this parcel comes from:
After perusing this publicly available data, I added “First Virtual Group” to my search strategy in order to get some more fun newspaper context of alleged Siebel intent, like this from The Mercury News:
There’s a lot of distance between a tony office on Palo Alto’s University Avenue and a working cattle ranch in Wolf Creek, Mont. But since he sold his namesake software company to Oracle four years ago, Tom Siebel has been hanging his hat in both Silicon Valley and Big Sky Country.
These days, the billionaire and former CEO of Siebel Systems invests his wealth quietly through a Palo Alto holding company called First Virtual Group. He’s making a bigger splash with his philanthropy, including an in-your-face ad campaign that Siebel initially bankrolled in Montana — and which has since been adopted in other rural states — aimed at warning people away from methamphetamine use.
This article was written in 2009, back when the anti-meth campaign seemed legit. Since then I’ve written about anecdotal evidence that the Montana Meth Project failed people like Craig as it successfully helped Tom Siebel network with politicians and other influential people, like a Sheriff Deputy by the name of John Stevens:
Like Tom, for some reason this friendship with a Cascade County Sheriff deputy really got MY attention, especially when I stopped to check out the public access to the Dearborn river right near Siebel’s ranch:
What do vertical metal poles sticking into the river communicate to the public? Is it a message of “welcome” to the natural water resource they are supposedly guaranteed access to? Or is it something else, something NOT in alignment with the stated intent of this “philanthropist” cracking jokes on his horsey about meth labs?
There were other hints that public access to the Dearborn river at this particular spot is discouraged by design, like the poorly maintained, heavily rutted dirt pull-off for vehicles to park, along with a very narrow, angular access point through a wooden gate to get to the actual river:
Before Tom Siebel built his ranch house on this land, all the way back in 2001, a somewhat critical article (written by Martin Kidston at IR…oh the irony!) did acknowledge the local curiosity over this billionaire’s development. I guess adding an airstrip in rural Montana was difficult to hide:
Silicon Valley mogul Tom Siebel building part-time residence on historic Dearborn Ranch.
The structure slowly taking shape off Highway 287 near the Dearborn River between Wolf Creek and Bowman’s Corner has captured the attention of passersby.
The project is that of Dearborn Ranch owner and California billionaire Tom Siebel, and its details have been kept a secret since the beginning.
“It’s a private residence and they want to keep it that way,” said Bill Muth, site supervisor with Martel Construction of Bozeman.
…
Steve Kilbreath at the county health department said the public septic records show the project is permitted for 12,000 square-feet. The septic permit was issued to Siebel on Nov. 10, 1998, for the address of 6115 US Highway 287.
“The septic is big, but the permit has expired,” said Kilbreath, saying it was unknown what the current size of the project is.
What’s more, pilots have reported seeing a runway near the home, allegedly for Siebel’s private jet, which Business Week Online said Siebel uses to commute between his California residence and the part-time Montana retreat.
Siebel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, was quoted in news stories as saying that he would keep the Dearborn Ranch as it was when he purchased it from Michael Curran in 1997.
Does it sound like Tom Siebel is a liar? Because, at the end of this lengthy excerpt, it certainly sounds like Siebel said one thing, then did another.
Hmmm.
To wrap this post up, let’s connect Tom Siebel to Jack Horner, the dinosaur guy who appears to be the ONLY Montana figure tied to Jeffrey Epstein that our local media wants to talk about. The following excerpt comes from this philanthropy-focused article under the subtitle “The Making of a Dino Prodigy”:
If discerning patterns invisible to others are why Horner isn’t still driving a truck for a living, the discernment of others has also played a role in his success. His mentors looked past his outward failures and saw Horner as Horner could see certain fossils: something remarkable that to everyone else looked common.
It was Horner’s parents who encouraged his love of learning as a boy, and drove him around to fossil-hunting expeditions. It was a Montana geology professor who, blissfully ignorant of Horner’s grades, recognized a budding intellect behind his science-fair project and encouraged him to apply for college. It was a college adviser who wrote letters of support that allowed him to keep re-enrolling each time he flunked out. It was his supervisor at Princeton who saw the scientist in the technician. It was institutions like the Museum of the Rockies, the University of Montana, Montana State University, the National Science Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation that took the researcher who lacked any degree at all and, on the strength of his work, finally admitted him into the circle of academic legitimacy.
And all along the way, it has been philanthropists who underwrote his research even when conventional funding sources closed their doors to him. The NSF provided critical funding in Horner’s early years as head of MSU’s paleontology program, and continues to offer some support. But NSF grants are often capricious and limited to narrow projects. For unproven ideas, for iconoclastic approaches, for general support, Horner (and thousands of other scientists) relies more on philanthropists than on the science funding bureaucracies.
Philanthropy has been especially important in bringing science to the public. While Horner was building a renowned dinosaur research program in the 1980s and 1990s, the museum had no space to display even its most impressive new specimens. Enter Tom Siebel. Siebel was the founder of software firm Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. He is active in philanthropy, giving to numerous scientific, educational, and community programs, and founding the Meth Project, a public education and advertising initiative that helped cut Montana’s meth abuse by two thirds, and has expanded to seven other states (see “Lassoing Montana Meth,” May/June 2007)
When I rhetorically asked in back-to-back posts this week why Montana is a safe space for demons and Christian Zionists, the intent was to show readers how useless labels like “Democrat” and “Republican” are when looking at the Epstein Network and the geopolitics of WWIII. If there are hidden motives behind what I am saying, at least I can say one thing we can remove from the list of possible hidden motivations is making money, because there’s nothing more unprofitable than what I’m currently doing and how I’m currently doing it.
If you’d like to mitigate this extreme unprofitability, my GoFundMe page, as evidenced by a recent donation, does appear to be working, so thank you Mary!
And, as always, thanks for reading.