The Telephone Directory
Once a year, when a new telephone directory landed on the doorstep of a house in the Penylan district of Cardiff, a boy named Michael Moritz would immediately flip to the "M" section, searching for evidence that his family was not alone. There were no other Moritzes in Wales. None that he knew of in all of Britain, save for an uncle's family in Manchester. The directory confirmed, each time, what the boy already sensed — that he existed in a country where his name was a kind of solitary signal, a frequency no one else was broadcasting on. He would not find other Moritzes in a telephone book until decades later, when he discovered an online archive of Munich directories from the 1930s. Six listings: a doctor, an innkeeper, a graduate student, a piano teacher. His grandfather, Maximilian Moritz, telephone number 37 23 47. The same number appeared in the 1938 and 1939 editions. By 1940, there was no longer a listing.
This is the arithmetic of erasure — the way a family disappears first from a page, then from the earth. And it is the arithmetic that shaped, in ways both visible and subterranean, the man who would become arguably the most successful venture capitalist in history, the person whose $12.5 million bet on two Stanford graduate students would return roughly $2 billion and whose four decades at Sequoia Capital would touch companies now controlling more than $1.4 trillion in combined stock market value. Michael Moritz — Sir Michael, since 2013 — has written five books, given away hundreds of millions of dollars, co-authored a study of leadership with Sir Alex Ferguson, funded the Booker Prize, built a Tuscan estate with 1,000 olive trees and a showroom of vintage Italian cars, penned acid New York Times op-eds about San Francisco politics, and quietly managed a rare, incurable blood cancer diagnosed in 2006. He has been called "the
Michael Jordan" of venture capital. Forbes ranked him first on its Midas List in 2006 and 2007. His personal fortune is estimated at roughly $5.7 billion. He lives in a San Francisco house overlooking the bay, rises at 5 a.m., swims or cycles, picks up a strong coffee and a cream-cheese bagel, then drives thirty miles to Menlo Park, where for nearly four decades he sat in conference rooms listening to people describe futures that did not yet exist.
But the telephone directory — that childhood ritual of searching for one's own name and finding nothing — is the image that keeps returning, the one that explains the restlessness beneath the accomplishments. "When your family goes through such an experience," Moritz once said at a Stanford conference, "it paints everything in a dark cloud of fear and anxiety that one day your world will fall from under your feet." The insecurity is not incidental to the success. It is the engine.
By the Numbers
The Moritz Record
$1.4T+Combined market value of Sequoia-backed companies
$12.5M → ~$2BReturn on Sequoia's Google investment
38Years as a Sequoia Capital partner (1986–2023)
$5.7BEstimated personal net worth (2024)
£75MRecord donation to Oxford University (2012)
#1Forbes Midas List ranking (2006, 2007)
5Books authored
The Refugee's Son
The facts of origin are these: Michael Moritz was born on September 12, 1954, in Cardiff, Wales, to parents who had both fled Nazi Germany as children. His father, Ludwig Alfred Moritz, escaped in 1937 as a teenager, won scholarships to St. Paul's School in London and then to Oxford, and eventually became a professor of classics at Cardiff University, later rising to vice principal. His mother, Doris Rath, arrived in England through the Kindertransport rescue effort — one of roughly 10,000 Jewish children evacuated after Kristallnacht and placed with foster families in Britain. Alfred's parents, Max and Minnie, were not so fortunate. Their trail ends on April 4, 1942, when they boarded a train to Poland. The Nazi manifest listed them as "B 102" and "B 16." Their middle names had been changed to Israel and Sara, in accordance with the regulation that all Jews carry these identifiers. They were murdered.
Neither parent spoke of what they had witnessed or whom they had left behind. The silence was itself a kind of inheritance — not the absence of a story but the presence of a story too enormous to articulate. When Doris died in 2019, she left a secret trove of letters, photographs, post office books, and luggage tags. Moritz used them as the foundation for Ausländer, his 2026 memoir, whose title — German for "outsider" — captures the condition that has defined his life: the permanent sense of not quite belonging, of having a name that appears in no telephone directory, of being a Jew in Wales in the 1960s where the shopkeepers, dentists, teachers, and neighbors were all, as Moritz later wrote, asking themselves — "for, on the whole, it was never said to your face" — what a nice Jewish boy was doing among them.
The First Minister of Wales once asked Moritz, at a lunchtime meeting in a San Jose restaurant, "What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in Silicon Valley?" Moritz's skin shrivelled. "All my feelings about being Jewish in Wales in the 1960s came flooding back." The First Minister then used pauses in conversation to ask why there were no great Jewish rugby players and why Moritz, as the eldest son of Jews, had not become a doctor. It was 2001. Moritz had already invested in Google.
What emerges from these details is a portrait of a childhood defined by dual registers: the intellectual richness of a home presided over by a Oxford-educated classicist, and the psychic compression of belonging to a family whose existence felt provisionary, contingent, perpetually at risk of revocation. Moritz attended Howardian High School, an "ordinary comprehensive" in Cardiff that has since been demolished. He was the only pupil in his year to gain admission to Oxford. The trajectory — Cardiff comprehensive to Christ Church, Oxford, to Wharton, to Time magazine, to Sequoia Capital — is, on paper, a frictionless upward arc. But the engine driving it was not ambition in the conventional sense. It was the refugee's imperative: the understanding, absorbed before it could be articulated, that the world can be taken from you.
The Journalist's Eye
He arrived in America in 1976, the year he graduated from Oxford with a degree in history. "This was at a time in the mid-1970s when all of Britain seemed to be on strike and the lights kept going out and the future seemed rather bleak," he later told BBC Wales. He never expected to stay more than a few years. He is still there, nearly five decades later.
At Wharton, he earned an MBA as a Thouron Scholar. Unlike most of his fellow MBA alumni, he chose journalism — a decision that, in retrospect, looks less like a detour than the most consequential preparation imaginable for a career in venture capital. Time magazine sent him to San Francisco, where he rose to become the bureau chief covering the emergence of something that didn't yet have a consensus name: the personal computer industry, the software revolution, Silicon Valley.
It was at Time that Moritz met
Steve Jobs. The relationship began with extraordinary access and ended in mutual fury. In late 1982, Jobs was widely expected to be named Time's "Man of the Year." Moritz wrote the profile. But the magazine's editors changed course, honoring "The Computer" as "Machine of the Year" instead. Jobs felt betrayed. The situation worsened when the published piece revealed a detail Jobs had wanted suppressed: that he had an illegitimate daughter, Lisa, whom he refused to acknowledge or support. "Steve erupted and I quit," Moritz later recalled, though the sequence is somewhat compressed — the eruption and the quitting unfolded over months, with Jobs reportedly threatening to fire any Apple employee who communicated with the Welshman.
The experience left a wound that never healed. Jobs died in 2011 without the two men reconciling. Moritz has said that one of his deepest regrets was "not healing the rift." But the rupture also generated two things of lasting consequence. First, Moritz wrote
The Little Kingdom, published in 1984, the first authoritative history of Apple Computer — a book the
New York Times called "a fascinating story" and
Business Week praised for its "superb reporting." Second, the experience at Time crystallized a resolution: "I would never again work anywhere I could not exert a large amount of control over my own destiny or where I would be paid by the word."
This is the journalist's paradox: the same qualities that made Moritz a brilliant reporter — the sharp eye, the willingness to pursue uncomfortable truths, the instinct for the telling detail — made him, in the world of Silicon Valley access, a dangerous commodity. Journalism gave him the skills. Journalism also showed him its limits. He co-founded Technologic Partners, a technology newsletter and conference company, but the real pivot came in 1986, when a man named Don Valentine took a risk on him.
Valentine's Gamble
Don Valentine was a former Fairchild Semiconductor salesman who had founded Sequoia Capital in 1972 in Menlo Park with the conviction that the semiconductor revolution would generate an ecosystem of companies requiring patient, intelligent capital. Valentine — gruff, blunt, legendary for his impatience with vague thinking — had already backed Atari and Apple by the time Moritz knocked on his door. His famous dictum about founders: "If a man comes into my office and says he wants to be a millionaire, I'm bored to death. If he says he wants to make a billion dollars, I say, 'Tell me about it,' because if he comes close we're all going to clean up."
Valentine's decision to hire a journalist with no investing experience, no engineering background, and a history degree was itself a species of the contrarian bet that would define Sequoia's culture. What Valentine saw in Moritz was not technical expertise but something rarer: the ability to listen, to rapidly synthesize unfamiliar material, to form judgments about people under conditions of radical uncertainty. These are journalistic skills. They are also, it turns out, the essential skills of early-stage venture capital, where the spreadsheet is useless because there is nothing yet to spread on a sheet.
Moritz joined Sequoia in 1986. By the mid-1990s, Valentine had given control of the firm to Moritz and
Doug Leone — a pairing that was itself a study in productive contrast. Leone, born in Genoa, Italy, had emigrated to the United States as a boy, studied at Cornell, cut his teeth selling technology at Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, and brought to Sequoia the intensity and operational instincts of a former salesman. Where Leone was voluble and aggressive, Moritz was watchful and laconic. Where Leone worked the phones and the boardrooms, Moritz worked the silences.
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia's great rival, observed: "He doesn't talk a lot. In a board meeting he says relatively few things and people really listen."
The two men ran Sequoia together for roughly two decades, and the firm's record during their tenure is, by any reasonable measure, the most extraordinary in the history of venture capital. Sequoia-backed companies came to account for nearly 20 percent of the total market value of Nasdaq. The list of investments reads like a catalog of the digital age's essential infrastructure: Apple, Google, Oracle, Nvidia, PayPal, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Stripe, Airbnb, Klarna.
Yesterday is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether or not you won a game last week, your stock's at a high or whatever. All of that is in the past, and it can all get swept away.
The Art of Listening to the Future
The word Moritz uses most frequently when describing his method is not "analysis" or "diligence" or even "conviction." It is "listening." "All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible," he told BBC Wales. He described the investment process at Stanford as being "much like being a journalist. To be able to start on an endeavor where you know nothing; where you gather a lot of materials and facts, distill those facts, and then form a cogent opinion and make a decision."
This makes the work sound almost passive, which is precisely the misconception Moritz exploits. The listening he describes is not the polite nodding of a banker reviewing a pitch deck. It is the aggressive, pattern-seeking attention of a reporter working a story — the kind of listening that registers not just what is said but what is avoided, not just the business model but the body language of the founders, not just the idea but the depth of obsession behind it.
Consider the day Larry Page and
Sergey Brin walked into Sequoia's offices. Moritz later described the encounter to a Welsh delegation: "Unlike others looking for funds, there was no business plan and no elaborate PowerPoint presentation, just enthusiasm, an enormous intelligence, and a working prototype search engine that was based on the combined research of both these PhD students from Stanford University." Sequoia invested $12.5 million. Within five years, that investment was worth roughly $2 billion. Google's IPO in August 2004 — a rare co-investment with John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins — cemented Moritz's reputation as perhaps the sharpest investor in the venture capital game.
But the Google investment was not an anomaly. It was the expression of a consistent method. Moritz looked for what he called "the unexpected" — companies that "don't fit in a convenient bucket." Airbnb: "What bucket would you have put three couch surfers in in 2008?" DJI, the Chinese drone company: "Nobody imagined at the time we invested that it would do $2 billion in sales last year. It seemed like a little consumer toy at the beginning." The pattern is always the same: something that looks small, strange, or implausible to most observers, but that Moritz recognizes — through some combination of journalistic instinct, immigrant paranoia, and sheer accumulated pattern recognition — as the early tremor of a seismic shift.
He also invested in things that went nowhere. Webvan. eToys. He is frank about this. "I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I hadn't made lots of mistakes." He passed on Netflix — a fact he has publicly acknowledged as a "rare misstep," though the word "rare" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
When Foreign Affairs asked Moritz in 2014 what qualities he looked for in a start-up, his answer was six words: "Remarkable people on a mission that is not widely recognized by others." Had that changed over time? "It's exactly the same as 25 years ago, with the one big exception that there are far more opportunities today than there were a quarter of a century ago, because of the digitization of everything."
The phrase is characteristically compressed. Unpack it and you find an entire investment philosophy. "Remarkable people" means Moritz bets on founders, not spreadsheets. "A mission" means the founders must be driven by something beyond the desire to get rich. "Not widely recognized by others" is the crucial qualifier — it means the opportunity must exist in a space where conventional wisdom has not yet arrived, where the idea looks strange or unbackable to the average investor.
When we help organize one of these companies at the beginning, it never looks like the world's greatest idea. I think it's the marketing and PR department that rewrites history and tells you that it was always the world's greatest idea. What they don't say is that at the very beginning there was great uncertainty and a great lack of clarity. It was murky and confused and messy circumstances.
"We just love them," he said of the determined entrepreneurs who embrace frugality and look, to other investors, unbackable. "Particularly people who perhaps to others look unbackable. That has always been our leitmotif of doing business."
The description of his hiring preferences is more pointed: "When people ask what type of person we like to hire, I'll say, somewhat glibly, 'An insecure overachiever who has an overbearing mother.'" The self-portrait embedded in the quip is not accidental. Moritz has always been transparent about the psychic architecture that drives him — the refugee's son who can never quite believe the world is stable, who works with the intensity of someone who knows the telephone listing can disappear.
He told the Mercury News in 2009 about investing in Flextronics, a manufacturing-services company: "For many years in the '90s, people were puzzled about why I invested in a company called Flextronics. The commonly received wisdom was that this is not a fruitful place to invest for a variety of reasons. As circumstances played out, that entire industry blossomed." The pattern: invest where the conventional wisdom says don't, then wait for reality to catch up.
The Ferguson Method
There is a photograph somewhere — the kind Moritz dislikes — of Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Michael Moritz, two men who share a title, a knighthood, and an obsession with what makes organizations endure. The book they co-authored, Leading, published in 2015, is ostensibly about football management. It is actually about how a single personality can imprint itself on an institution so thoroughly that the institution becomes an expression of that personality.
Ferguson — born in 1941 in Govan, Glasgow, the son of a shipyard worker — managed Manchester United from 1986 to 2013, winning thirteen Premier League titles and two Champions League trophies. Moritz, a lifelong United fan (though "I don't qualify as a diehard fan," he writes), approached Ferguson with the book idea because "there was a lot that had not been said. Most people had written about football, and the winning teams that Sir Alex had been able to build, rather than about the story behind that — about how you build an organisation that is a winner."
The book's thesis — that leaders are obsessives who shape organizations in their own image — is also Moritz's thesis about venture capital, about Apple, about Sequoia itself. "Winning organisations tend to be expressions of the personalities at the top," he told the London Evening Standard. "Anyone who does anything remarkable in any walk of life has to be obsessed. There are lots of other people interested in the same pursuit and, although luck clearly plays a part, it is obsession that propels you forward."
Ferguson was famous for his "hairdryer treatment" — delivering close-up, high-decibel rebukes to players who failed to meet his standards. The analogy to Silicon Valley founders is not subtle. Steve Jobs had his own version. So did Larry Page. So, in a quieter register, did Moritz himself, who was known at Sequoia for an intensity that expressed itself not in volume but in precision — the devastating observation delivered in few words, the question that exposed the flaw in an argument.
What fascinated Moritz about Ferguson was the longevity. Most organizations — most venture firms, most football clubs, most companies — have a period of excellence followed by decline. Ferguson maintained United at the top for twenty-seven years. The question of how he did it was, for Moritz, the same question he had been asking about Sequoia: How do you prevent institutional decay?
Building What Lasts
At a Y Combinator dinner in 2016,
Sam Altman asked Moritz the question directly: How has Sequoia stayed dominant for so long? Moritz's answer, which Altman found so compelling that he released it publicly — the first time YC had ever done so for an off-the-record dinner — was essentially a meditation on institutional mortality.
"If you go back and look around Silicon Valley and ask yourselves, 'What companies succeeded and prospered in the '70s that are still doing that now 40 years later?'" Moritz said. "It doesn't matter whether they're companies with names like Digital Equipment or Data General or Silicon Graphics or Compaq Computer or Lotus Development or Software Publishing… or you go into the venture business and rattle off a string of names of venture firms that had moments of sunshine upon them in the '70s or '80s or '90s or the first decade of 2000s, and are either out of business or have lost their stride or purpose and are only a shadow of what they used to be."
The answer, Moritz said, was mundane — which was precisely the point. "It all sounds very, very mundane. You can read a book about the principles of high performance, or great leadership, and it'll all sound very straightforward and rudimentary. The difficulty is doing it every day, doing it every week, month, quarter, year, and keeping that beat up."
The principles he articulated: treat yesterday as irrelevant. Maintain paranoia about competitive threats. Hire people who are better than you. Never let internal politics calcify. Keep the firm small enough that everyone knows everyone. And — the one that sounds most like the refugee's son talking — never assume that your current position is secure.
Sequoia under Moritz and Leone operated with a leanness that was almost monastic. The U.S. firm had only eleven partners as of 2016. The offices in Menlo Park were modest. The culture was deliberately anti-hierarchical, at least in theory — though Moritz's force of personality and track record gave him an authority that transcended any organizational chart.
The Blood and the Wallpaper
In 2006, Michael Moritz was conducting an important meeting in a San Francisco conference room when he collapsed to the floor. The diagnosis: a rare form of blood cancer, more common among those of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. When shown the microscopic images of his faulty red cells — abstract, pale magenta — the keen collector of modern art thought the pattern would make a good wallpaper design.
The diagnosis was, in Moritz's own understated phrasing, "a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable." He stepped back from day-to-day management at Sequoia in 2012, assuming the title of chairman, though he continued sitting on boards, making investments, and playing active roles in companies including LinkedIn, Klarna, and Stripe. "I am a disciplined sort of person," he told the Sunday Times, "which maybe has something to do with my background."
The illness also accelerated his philanthropic activity. In 2012, he and his wife, Harriet Heyman — an American novelist and sculptor whom he met in San Francisco in the mid-1980s — donated £75 million to Oxford University, the largest single gift in the university's history, earmarked specifically for scholarships for students from low-income families. The motivation was personal: "I wouldn't have been at Oxford had my father not been given scholarships when he was a child, both for school and then for Oxford. There was no way that he would have been able to afford either. He was a German refugee and was found schooling at St. Paul's but it was 100 per cent on scholarships from people he didn't know."
"I have zero interest in having a name on a building," Moritz told the Times. "The idea is that Oxford serves as a beacon for dozens of universities elsewhere."
He and Heyman signed the Giving Pledge in 2012 —
Warren Buffett and
Bill Gates's initiative to commit the majority of one's wealth to philanthropy. "Since our wealth — like all fortunes — rests so heavily on the intelligence, work and contributions of others," they wrote, "it seems only right that we voluntarily give most of it to causes that help improve the lives of people we do not know." Through Crankstart, their San Francisco-based foundation, they have distributed more than $570 million in grants between 2020 and 2022 alone. Crankstart funds the Booker Prize, educational programs, environmental initiatives, and what Moritz describes as efforts to help "those who might otherwise be left behind."
The man who once searched for his name in a telephone directory has spent his later years trying to ensure that others — the scholarship students, the unfunded founders, the children of refugees — are listed.
The Klarna Wars and the Sequoia Fracture
In December 2020, Moritz was named chairman of Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company and Europe's most valuable private fintech. The appointment represented Moritz's deepening engagement with Klarna, which Sequoia had backed, and with the European technology ecosystem more broadly — Sequoia had opened its first European office in London in 2020.
But by 2024, the Klarna chairmanship had become the site of an extraordinary and public schism within Sequoia itself. In February, reports emerged that Sequoia was looking to oust Moritz from Klarna's board — a startling move against the firm's former senior partner and one of the most respected figures in venture capital history. The dispute, reported by the Financial Times, involved "discontent over governance" as Klarna prepared for an IPO.
The episode exposed tensions that had been building since Moritz's July 2023 departure from Sequoia after nearly four decades. He remained active in Sequoia Heritage, the wealth-management subsidiary he had launched in 2010 with $150 million of his own money and $400 million in additional investment. By April 2023, Heritage's assets under management had grown from $4.2 billion to $16.4 billion. But the separation between Heritage and the main Sequoia fund, and between Moritz's generation and the new leadership, was not clean.
Sequoia ultimately reversed course. "Upon a fuller assessment," the firm said it "fully supports" Moritz. The language was careful, the retreat unmistakable. But the episode illuminated something about the difficulty of institutional succession — the very problem Moritz had spent decades studying in companies from Apple to Manchester United. When the founding personality departs, the organization must either internalize the personality's principles or develop new ones. The transition is never seamless.
The Civic Combatant
In his seventh decade, Moritz has become an increasingly vocal participant in San Francisco civic life — a role that has generated as much controversy as his investments generated returns. He is the sole funder of the San Francisco Standard, a digital news outlet launched to cover the city's politics and governance. He backs Together SF and Together SF Action, political groups pushing moderate candidates and causes. He has written multiple New York Times op-eds attacking what he sees as the progressive politicians responsible for San Francisco's drug crisis, homelessness epidemic, and hostile business environment.
His October 2024 op-ed, "The Progressive Politicians Who Failed San Francisco," was aimed squarely at Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin — accompanied by an illustration of an enormous Peskin playing with the city skyline like TinkerToys. Moritz described Peskin as the exemplar of "a generation of local politicians who have burrowed themselves into the city and used its resources to execute their devotion to a polarizing ideology that embraces a knee-jerk opposition to progress, a deep-rooted antipathy to many forms of law enforcement and a belief that higher taxes are a cure for all evil."
Peskin's response was characteristically blunt: "This is a guy who wants San Francisco to be a monarchy." The barb carries a certain irony — Moritz, the son of refugees from a regime that destroyed democratic institutions, accused of wanting to replace democratic governance with the will of a single powerful actor.
The San Francisco engagement reveals a tension that runs through Moritz's entire career. He believes, genuinely, in the meritocratic promise of Silicon Valley — the idea that talent and obsession can overcome any barrier of class, geography, or background. He believes this because he has lived it. But the same conviction that talent should be allowed to flourish unfettered can shade, in the civic realm, into a billionaire's impatience with the messiness of democratic governance, with the "byzantine governance structures" and "arcane legislative and procedural rites" that Moritz sees as obstacles to rational progress.
He is also involved, alongside Laurene Powell Jobs,
Marc Andreessen, and others, in an ambitious plan to build an entirely new city on rural land in Solano County, north of San Francisco — a project that seems to embody both the Silicon Valley faith in building from scratch and the discomfort with inherited institutional complexity that has characterized Moritz's worldview from the beginning.
If you think of who's done more to increase prosperity in the United States — Silicon Valley or the US government — it's clearly Silicon Valley. Imagine what would happen if the lights were turned off at Alphabet and Amazon and Meta.
The Outsider's Return
On a visit to Israel in 2024, Moritz told an interviewer that it was "my first visit to Israel for non-business purposes since I was a 5-year-old boy." He came, he said, because "the sentiment against Israel is so negative. I heard from my acquaintances and friends how abandoned they feel here, and I decided to come." The attacks of October 7, 2023, had left him shaken in a way that connected directly to his family's history — "just the latest expression of hatred for a people who make up less than 0.2 per cent of the people on earth."
Moritz is 71 now. The rare blood cancer persists, managed but incurable. His focus has shifted increasingly to philanthropy and to writing. Ausländer, published in January 2026, interweaves his memories of growing up in postwar Cardiff with his investigations into his parents' and grandparents' lives in Nazi Germany. The book emerged from the trove of documents his mother left behind — the letters, the photographs, the luggage tags that trace the journey from Munich to Cardiff to extinction. Reviewers have compared it to Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. The Sunday Times called it "a memoir which ranks alongside" that masterpiece.
"Occasionally I receive reminders that, because of my ethnicity, others are eager to hasten my demise," Moritz writes of the antisemitic hate mail that sometimes reaches his San Francisco home. The sentence carries the compressed fury of a man who has spent his life building wealth and giving it away, who has created jobs and backed technologies that changed how billions of people live, and who still, at 71, receives letters informing him that his existence is unwelcome.
Of Trump, Moritz is characteristically direct: "an absurd buffoon." He "made the case as politely as possible" to friends in the venture-capital industry that "character comes first when you pick a leader." It "fell on deaf ears." He views the tech industry's embrace of Trump not as a movement but as a protection racket: "He's running a protection racket and they've got to pay for protection."
He spends ten to twelve weeks a year at Borgo Pignano, the Tuscan hilltop hamlet he and Heyman restored from dereliction — parts of which date to the Etruscans — into an estate with vineyards, beehives, a sustainable forest, and a quarry-hewn swimming pool. The rest of the time is San Francisco, Menlo Park, Sequoia Heritage. He does not eat bread, potatoes, pasta, or rice at lunch. Salad with lean protein. A disciplined sort of person.
The way his life has turned out, Moritz once told BBC Wales, "sometimes seems like a voyage to another planet."
In a Munich telephone directory from the 1930s, a listing: Maximilian Moritz, 37 23 47. In a San Francisco house overlooking the bay, his grandson — the boy from Cardiff who found no other Moritzes in all of Wales — collects modern art and reads the morning papers and prepares, as he has every day for decades, to listen to someone describe a future that does not yet exist.
