The Time Lords: Jeff Bezos, a 10,000-Year Clock, and Big Tech's Quest to Seize the Future

A story of Silicon Valley dreams and hubris—and the gap between so-called visionary thinking and its effects on our lives.

The Time Lords tells the story of how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a secretive group of San Francisco tech founders have committed over two decades and $42 million building a monumental clock designed to tick for 10,000 years hidden in a Texas mountain.

The Clock of the Long Now, as it is called, was conceived in the 1990s, a time of utopian hopes about the power of the ...