The man with the billion-dollar brain Analysis/Commentary James H. Clark, known to his friends as Jim Clark, started life poor in the small town of Plainview, West Texas. Today, at 55, he's worth $1.8 billion. How did he do it? Answer: he harnessed the brain power of Silicon Valley. There's something rich in those thin wafers of silicon from that valley that stretches beyond San Francisco. Jim Clark first discovered Silicon Valley gold by abandoning his job as computer sciences professor at Stanford University and founding Silicon Graphics, the first of his billion-dollar brainchildren. Clark was new to the billionaire's game in the early nineties. He soon found himself locked out of the decision-making at Silicon Graphics. So he moved on, leveraged the investment power of the Sand Hill Road venture capitalists, and created Netscape, the browser that revolutionized the Web. Michael Lewis, a technology journalist, tells the saga of Jim Clark's road to riches in The New New Thing, one of the hottest books of the year. His subject doesn't hold still very long, and the book offers a sketchy record of a restless capitalist-inventor in motion, a residual image at once comi-tragic and daunting. "Rich men are different," Scott Fitzgerald once waxed. "Yeah," replied Hemingway, "they have more money than we do." They also have restless demons who beg to be explained but seldom hold still long enough to satisfy examination. By the time Lewis had begun to understand Clark, or think he did, Clark was morphing anew, wrapping himself in a thick cocoon before reappearing in butterfly raiment. Even as Lewis was completing The New New Thing, Clark had begun to sell his Netscape shares to AOL. Clark's newest spawn, Healtheon, now belongs to a Microsoft subsidiary, while Clark himself labors at establishing a new corporation called MyCFO. MyCFO is about conjuring a pret-a-porter battery of beancounters for the extreme and financially unsophisticated rich. Like Alice in Wonderland, Clark inhabits a topsy-turvy world that renews itself constantly, finding improbable segways to a climax always on the verge of closure. Which, of course, conforms to the mystique of Silicon Valley, where esse est percipi -- the perceived is real -- and money on the make is as good as the gold in your pocket. April 26, 2000