Meth Mouth: Tom Siebel's Brash Anti-Crystal Campaign

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Photograph Courtesy of Meth Project

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Photograph Courtesy of Meth Project

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As you might expect of a self-made billionaire, Tom Siebel exudes inexhaustibility. It's tiring just being around him. One afternoon last fall, Siebel bounds into the kitchen of his sprawling ranch house in central Montana, and after he takes very firm hold of my hand -- "Tom! Good to see you," he announces, shaking away, as if I might not have learned the name of the man whose 72,000-acre property I am visiting -- he asks, "Want to see some elk?" Siebel is wearing jeans, a plaid work shirt, and nerdy wire-rim glasses. He is out of breath because, in the hour since he stepped off a private jet from California, he has destroyed a round of clay pigeons on his shooting range.

Without waiting for an answer, Siebel goes outside and climbs into the driver's seat of a spotless white Chevy SUV. As he pulls out from the driveway, the golden hills of Dearborn Ranch -- the absurdly calm Dearborn River runs through it -- open up before us. "Isn't this something?" he says, looking out. "Just really something."

Siebel, 56, assembled one of the archetypal fortunes of the software boom. An early hireling at Oracle in the 1980s, he founded Siebel Systems, a maker of customer-relations-management software, building it into an 8,000-person firm with annual revenue of $2 billion before selling it in 2006 for $5.9 billion (to Oracle, tidily enough). He now spends his time plying what he calls "strategic philanthropy," by which he means being kept up by issues at night and, when he can't stand it anymore, attacking them with the same obsessive focus he did business.

His latest obsession is America's crystal-methamphetamine problem. Siebel is the creator, designer, and original financial backer of the Meth Project, a controversial antimeth experiment whose centerpiece is an ad campaign that has, since 2005, inundated Montana's airwaves, newspapers, and billboards with harrowing depictions of the woes wrought by meth addiction.

The project is now the state's largest advertiser, and it is inescapable. Minutes after I left the airport when I got to Montana, I passed a billboard that showed a close-up of a young woman with "meth mouth," her teeth rotted and her lips lacerated. YOU'LL NEVER WORRY ABOUT LIPSTICK ON YOUR TEETH AGAIN, it read. When I logged onto the wireless network at my hotel in Helena, a Meth Project banner ad popped up on my screen. It showed a gorgeous photograph, as immaculately posed and eerie as a Gregory Crewdson tableau, of an older man lying bloodied and unconscious on a floor while a younger man takes his wallet. The copy read: METH HAS A WAY OF MAKING DECISIONS FOR YOU.

Since the Meth Project began, Montana has gone from having America's fifth-worst per-capita meth-abuse rate to the 39th. Meth use among teens has nearly halved. "Tom Siebel," says former Montana attorney general Mike McGrath, "has single-handedly changed national drug-control policy." This is true: Montana, several other states, and the federal government now pour millions in taxpayer dollars into the Meth Project. Siebel is proud of his expanding initiative. Yet it's unclear how effective he and his ads actually are.

"If you look at the great philanthropic institutions in the nation, it's just baffling to me how they mismanage their resources," says Siebel, as we drive along a dirt road, toward an alfalfa field where elk sometimes graze in the evenings. "You look at their annual reports, and they give hundreds and hundreds of contributions over the course of the year: $4,000 to the Women's Quilting Society of Armonk, New York. Okay? I mean, this is insane. They could be changing the world."

Siebel believes, without a hint of embarrassment, that he can change the world. To him, it's a question of proper resource allocation. There is the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Thomas M. Siebel Professorship in Business Leadership at Stanford; a Siebel-funded stem-cell research lab shared by Stanford and UC Berkeley; and the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, which has endowed 10 universities with $2.6 million and puts on conferences. The last one, in 2008, devoted to the impending world water crisis, included a moderating appearance by former Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and entertainment by Bonnie Raitt. During one panel, Siebel, visibly annoyed, stood and announced that the discussion was getting boring. "Come on, guys, get in on this!" he bellowed at the audience. "Get out of your chairs and speak. Don't wait for the stupid microphones!"