To kick off the weekend, the group met in the Solomeo theater, where everyone went on stage and told their personal backstories, an event Cucinelli characterized as “emotional.” “Brunello’s role was much more an inspirer-r than he was a moderator,” says Tolia. “The stated goal [of the weekend] was to engage each other in conversation about how we can make the world better.” One could argue that some of the guests shouldn’t need a weekend of vibey soul searching to figure out how to very quickly make the world a better place for a lot of people. But Tolia is quick to add that “It wasn’t hifalutin. No one was full of themselves. It wasn’t nine hours of discussions every day. There were no Powerpoints.” Just languorous Italian meals and nature walks—opportunities for the relentlessly-scheduled executives to connect with the rhythms of the Italian countryside.

A moment on one such walk with Bezos stuck out for Cucinelli. “We were taking a stroll, and there was a guy delivering the fruit to the local market, the only store there, and what he always does is he stops and he gives me two peaches or whatever he has in the cart,” he says. “Jeff was moved by the simplicity of the gesture that somebody could stop and just give you two peaches like that.” Cucinelli says that he connected on a deeply human level with the group. “For me, the value was extremely high of these days spent together because of the intimacy of what we were able to exchange.”

Cucinelli’s trademark aesthetic Venturelli

Though some of his guests were rich enough to buy Brunello Cucinelli a dozen times over, Tolia says Cucinelli wasn’t interested in impressing them with his business. “We all wanted to visit the factory, but Brunello was like no, no, you’re not here to learn about my business, you’re here to have three authentic days, and that means we get together as friends, we share great meals, we’re outside in nature. He was like, ‘I’m not giving you a promotional tour of Brunello Cucinelli and hope that you buy stock or something.’ Can you imagine that? He had an opportunity to tell us all about his business. Instead he told us about how he grew up poor, as a farmer.”

So did the group jet back to Silicon Valley with newfound resolve to introduce humanistic principles into their work? Assolutamente! Cucinelli declares. “Everybody was motivated by the conversations and inspired all at the same level, not by me telling them what to do, but more everyone feeding off each others’ commitment and energy toward the same goal.”

But as anyone who’s been on a corporate retreat knows, goals set over pasta don’t always materialize over a sad desk salad. Will the Silicon Valley elite start investing in San Francisco’s vast underclass? Will they think about their workers first, even if it means curtailing their designs on automation? Will they consider work-life balance, living wages, privacy, and cultural access to the extent that Cucinelli does? It’s hard to not be cynical about Silicon Valley, where good intentions often yield terrifying results, and an Umbrian vision quest won’t fix our country’s broken privacy and antitrust laws. But as technology fails to solve the problems technology has created, its inventors could do worse than spending a few days communing with a billionaire entrepreneur who also happens to be a humanistic philosopher king. Put it in this very Silicon Valley way: “Knitting sweaters by hand is not scalable, and I don’t think the robots are coming to Solomeo anytime soon,” says Tolia. “But I think Brunello’s version of scale is inspiring others. So if he inspires Marc Benioff, Marc Benioff has a huge platform. If he inspires Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos has a huge platform.”

The real question is: did Cucinelli’s guests raid the company store before they left? “The clothes are a vehicle that transport you back to Solomeo,” says Tolia, who has a Cucinelli collection for that very purpose. “But there were people who didn’t buy anything.”

UPDATE (6/12/19): An image provided by a Brunello Cucinelli representative that did not meet GQ’s editorial standards was removed from this story.