This brilliant man, Tony Hseih, now haunts me. Eventually, it was drugs and alcohol that got him. Another thread from the article. https://twitter.com/kushkatakia/status/1333292889950994432

About two weeks before http://Zappos.com  Inc. co-founder Tony Hsieh died from injuries in a November house fire, one of his closest friends in Las Vegas got a phone call. “Tony is in trouble,” the caller told Philip Plastina, the founder of an electronic dance music group.

Mr Plastina said he texted 2 phone nos he had for Mr Hsieh and sent several emails but received no response. Mr Plastina never reached his friend. Mr Hsieh, 46 yrs old, died on Nov. 27, nine days after firefighters were called to a home in New London, Conn., where he was staying.

Mr Hsieh spoke often about partying as a central feature of his work and life, and his drinking increased after he retired and grappled with the isolation enforced by the pandemic, those close to him said. He began experimenting with drugs, such as mushrooms and ecstasy.

That was only one component of increasingly extreme behaviour. A long-standing fascination with fire intensified, friends said. A real estate agent who sold him a mansion in Park City and visited the house shortly afterward estimated Mr. Hsieh had 1,000 candles there.

Mr Hsieh became fixated on trying to figure out what his body could live without. He starved himself of food, whittling away to under 100 pounds; he tried not to urinate; and he deprived himself of oxygen, turning toward nitrous oxide, which can induce hypoxia

Mr Hsieh at one point said he was going to a shed that was attached to the home, and asked the people in the house to check on him every five minutes, by the people’s account. They said Tony used a heater in the shed to lower the oxygen level.

It isn’t clear what started the fire. When the others at the house tried to get to him, they couldn’t. One emergency worker was heard telling others he was barricaded inside. Mr Hsieh died from complications of smoke inhalation

Mr Hsieh blended his personal and professional lives into a quest for spiritual union with his colleagues and sought to make both more about fulfilling personal dreams and novel sensations than piling up money.

His approach to life earned him wealth and many admirers. It also contributed to his final, tragic months.

When Mark Guadagnoli, currently a prof at the University of Nevada, took a break from his academic career to work for a couple of years at Zappos, Mr Hsieh gave him the title of “zookeeper.” He was charged with creating Zappos University, the company’s culture training center.

Mr Hsieh was annoyed when people referred to the area where he sat as “executive row”. Dr Guadagnoli said he began calling it Monkey Row, and Mr Hsieh loved that idea. Mr Hsieh arranged for camouflage netting to be put up and suspended stuffed monkeys and other creatures.

For one New Year’s Eve party at his 3,500-square-foot loft in San Francisco, he rented a fog machine, which ended up setting off a fire alarm. He had to apologize when two firetrucks showed up. Alcohol-fueled parties were frequent at the company.

Mr Hsieh wrote in “Delivering Happiness” that shots of Grey Goose vodka were a company tradition. He told Playboy mag in 2014 he wrote the book in part fueled by coffee beans soaked in vodka. He went through a period in which he was obsessed with the Italian liqueur Fernet.

“Ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life,” he wrote in the 2010 book. Mr Hsieh wrote that the Zappos culture was all about the pursuit of fun. “When you need to party, you party. When you need to produce, you produce,” he wrote.

Mr Hsieh ran experiments on himself—limiting his sleep to 4 hrs a day and climbing the three highest peaks in S California in one day.

He tried a 26-day diet, eating only foods that started with the letter “A” on the first day and progressing through the alphabet each day. Some letters offered indulgences. The final “Z” day amounted nearly to fasting

Mr Hsieh was a frequent attendee at the Burning Man music festival in the Nevada desert, bringing art from the festival back to downtown Vegas. A 40-foot praying mantis that shoots fire is on display outside his “Container Park” development in Las Vegas.

At one annual event, Mr Hsieh saw an electronic dance music performance group who called themselves the “Dancetronauts” perform. He fell in love with the group and insisted they become part of his plan to revitalize Las Vegas, said Mr. Plastina, the head of the group.

Earlier this year, Mr Hsieh began buying properties far from Las Vegas, in the Utah resort town of Park City, with a similar mission of transforming its downtown. The centrepiece was a 17,350-square-foot mansion with a private lake that he bought for about $16 million.

Mr Hsieh was uncomfortable in one-on-one settings, friends said, and the pandemic closed off much of his social scene. His drug use increased. That same month, Mr Hsieh’s retirement from Zappos exacerbated his downward spiral.

Mr Hsieh’s estate is likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In a court filing, family members have said it appears Mr Hsieh died without an estate plan.

The family said they planned to “carry on his legacy by spreading the tenets he lived by—finding joy through meaningful life experiences, inspiring and helping others, and most of all, delivering happiness.”