| In early December, Kai Lenny, water-sports polymath, stood on a small surfboard with foot straps, held onto a tow rope connected to a Jet Ski, and got pulled into a gargantuan wave at the break known as Pe'ahi, near his home on Maui. As Lenny let go of the tow rope and began to ride that big wave, he lit a flare in one hand that trailed pink smoke, revealing the gender of his soon-to-be-born twins. (Girls!) The stunt was streamed as a 57-second video to Lenny's million-plus followers, perfectly capturing Lenny's unique combination of prodigious technical skill, egoless good cheer, and deft sense of social media. All that, plus Lenny's mastery of big-wave riding—he recently won the annual big-wave contest called the Nazare Tow Challenge, in Portugal, for the second time—has made Lenny a favorite not only with surf fans, but also with tech CEOs. Most notably, Mark Zuckerberg. In his profile of Lenny for WIRED, Daniel Duane—who has been surfing and writing about it for over 30 years—explains, "I could see his appeal to the Zuckerbergs of the world. The nearest cultural antecedent to Lenny—the other obvious choice for a billionaire's water-sport man crush—was Lenny's own childhood hero, Maui big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton. But Hamilton was the living archetype of the blond, muscle-bound surfer-god, with giant shoulders and cold green eyes—way too reminiscent of the high school bully who pushes around the budding computer genius before the latter flips the script and becomes richer than God." Lenny, on the other hand, reads more like the smart (privileged) outsider kid, going his own direction and getting teased at times, even shunned, by the cool crowd. Sound familiar? Now Lenny's become something of, as Duane writes, a "virtuoso of versatility." Read Duane's story for a fun ride-along with Lenny, the young and extremely talented spirit animal to the world's tech elite. Maria Streshinsky | Executive Editor, WIRED |
