Ken,
I received that email on 5/11/99, but for some reason my friend Scott was angered by its “obvious” stupidity and forwarded it as a rant. I did some calculations and replied:
*Thank you, dear friend Scott!
I appreciate your sharing the wealth with me, giving me a chance to become RICH RICH RICH beyond even my wildest megalomaniacal dreams. (Actually, since keeping it secret for yourself would defeat the purpose, I guess I should only thank you for having kept me in your email address book. Thank
you.)
As I calculate it “Tom Q. Watson”* [or in your case Pamela D.] is a loser, at only $800. I am immediately sending this to 165 of my closest friends. Even assuming that they and theirs have only an average of 80 friends each, I FULLY expect to see a Microsoft check for $1,096,425 (1655 + 165803 + 1658080) in my mailbox a month from now. And I expect my wife to get a similar check, plus two more checks for our AOL accounts. (Okay, maybe they’ll catch on to that last dodge, but still, $2 mil ain’t bad.)
In fact, unless my arithmetic has abandoned me, by the time one of these gets back to me from the East Coast, at approx. 7 linkages, we will already have raided Microsoft’s coffers of approximately $43 trillion dollars, a mere 120 times its market capitalization, 2200 times its cash on hand, or slightly more than the total yearly economic production of the planet.
So pass it on!
David Forster, Esquire.
P.S. Why EXACTLY did you call this unrivalled and eminently fair opportunity “a bunch of crap?”*
Just today I received the [substantially] same email , except the amounts are now $245, $243, and $241, and the witness received $24,800! Man, I like that math even more!
Go for it!