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low price of 2 cents each. When all the transactions closed and the dust settled, sales by Fanning and the company left Fanning with 4.9 million Junior Preferred shares, Shawn with 3 million, Chicago financier Jim Gidwitz with 896,000, and Bales with 733,000. Richardson, Adrian Scott, Aydar, and Chess.net consultant Brian McBarron brought up the rear, while Parker and Ritter got only options. (Later they got stock as well. Both Shawn and Parker would sell some of their shares to other investors, buying Mazda RX-7s with the proceeds.) Fanning remained chairman of the board and was not shy about giving advice to Richardson and the others. And he had the power to back up his words, since he still had enough shares to veto any new class of stock, which would be the standard method for bringing in a venture-capital firm.

One of Kessler's first hires was contractor Daphne Dembo, a longtime engineer and Amazon.com veteran who had a son about Shawn's age. One of her first missions, in turn, was to hire still more people. In that effort, she had no shortage of eager applicants. “I got five e-mails a day from people willing to volunteer. I had never seen anything like that,” Dembo said. Napster being what it was, the hiring boom produced what she called “a most unusual collection of people.”

More than one of the new staffers appeared to be transgender, and at least one used first the men's bathroom and then the women's. Many were under twenty-one and looked it. The sight of odd-looking employees was so commonplace that when a few teenagers sporting Mohawk haircuts were hanging around late one night, the Xtime employees in the adjoining cubicles thought nothing of it. Later, they were compelled to explain their reasoning to incredulous local police: It turned out the punks were exactly what they might have appeared to be to outsiders—street thugs interested in stealing Napster's computers.

There was one new Napster employee who admitted that he was sexually obsessed with young boys. The confession disgusted the core people, but they were just too busy to fire him. Better hires included senior marketing executive Liz Brooks, a Bales recruit who had been director of A&R, or artist and repertoire, at Sony and Virgin. Under her worked an immensely built man named Mark Hughes, an M.B.A. who referred to