Jim Clark is perpetually dissatisfied. In most people this trait is an affliction, but in people like Clark and other prominent Silicon Valley innovators, it's a strength-at least from an economic point of view. What Michael Lewis calls "the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet" has been powered by engineers convinced that something in the world needs fixing.

Lewis went to Silicon Valley to understand what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter would have labeled the "creative destruction" of the old economy by the new. It was natural that he should gravitate to Clark, whose own lust for change led him to found three of the Valley's heaviest-hitting companies: Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon.