Chapter 74

Dieter Lassenbach is famous among techies for being a recluse. He’s sort of the J.D. Salinger of tech gods.

He’s also infamous for being something of an evil genius… but I don’t think anybody would have pegged him as a serial killer. Which means he has the perfect cover.

As teenage hackers, Mailin and I knew him as one of the legendary antiheroes of the internet. And that was more than a decade after he’d done most of his damage.

Dieter was the only son of immigrants who escaped to the U.S. from East Germany back during the Cold War. A child prodigy and college dropout, he was also one of the first guys to deal in encryption for banking transactions back in the 1990’s. He sold his company for hundreds of millions when he was in his mid-twenties.

During the dot.com bubble era, he was known as a tech Nostradamus who could spot an intriguing startup in its early stages. He’d make an insanely low offer for 51% of the stock, and when he was rebuffed, he would then reverse-engineer the comp