Character Analysis
Hiro's buddy, and the owner of hacker metropolis The Black Sun, Da5id is a guy who knows where he stands in life. First, there's his heritage: "His folks were Russian Jews from Brooklyn and had lived in the same brownstone for seventy years after coming from a village in Latvia where they had lived for five hundred years" (7.33). Sounds like a lot of stability and tradition to back him up.
Da5id is also "an only child who had always been first in his class in everything, and […] got his master's degree in computer science from Stanford" (7.33). In other words, a real idiot, this one. He married Juanita, who worked for him for a while, but their relationship ended in divorce, and after Da5id started The Black Sun and got rich, he moved into "a modernist castle with a high turret on one end" (24.69) located near the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. Da5id and Hiro and their hacker buddies used to party there.
After Da5id had to let Hiro go from the company, he's looked out for Hiro, feeding him tidbits of useful knowledge and letting him use company resources. This makes it all the more a shame when he assumes his computer's defenses will keep his brain safe from Snow Crash, and suffers a stroke. Sadly, it doesn't seem likely that he'll recover.