Tech Wives is a Silicon Valley marriage novel about two women, Sam Yang and Cecily, whose college friendship becomes sisterhood, family, rivalry, and moral reckoning. It moves between their early-1990s friendship at Hamlin College and their lives in 2017–2019 as women married into, or born alongside, enormous tech power. The novel is less about technology itself than about what tech wealth does to intimacy: how it buys silence, bends ethics, turns family loyalty into corporate strategy, and makes even “good” people complicit.
Sam Yang is forty-four, a doctor and medical director at Healthcare for the Homeless in San Francisco. She is pregnant with her first child, nicknamed Bean, and has just married Luke Bryant, the billionaire founder of Hub, a social media platform. Luke is nine years younger than Sam and, at first, seems different from the tech titans she has avoided for years. He is sweet, curious, sentimental, goofy, and apparently grounded. Sam knows tech wealth well because her brother, Winston Yang, founded Everest, an Amazon-like company, and her best friend Cecily married him. But she believes Luke might be different.
The novel opens on Sam and Luke’s honeymoon. Luke has planned everything as a surprise. Sam imagines rainforest hikes or temples, but the trip begins with a private jet Luke has named “The Indefensible.” Inside, she is served champagne, gourmet food from restaurants connected to their relationship, and zero-proof cocktails for her pregnancy. She is touched by the thoughtfulness but appalled by the waste. They land in Bora Bora, where Luke has booked out an entire luxury resort so they will be the only guests. Staff line up and wave mechanically to greet them. Sam says it is too much. Luke is hurt because he intended the whole thing as a romantic gift.
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