Here’s a guy who made a BAJILLION dollars in a down economy, gained many times more in one quarter (in a down economy) than I’ll ever see. Did he earn that money? Well, kinda. More to the point, he’s got a little rock star status, he refuses to manage by committee and focus group, he’s intensely secretive, incredibly savvy, and money makes money.
But, hey, 282 million? How can that possibly feel? What does buying a happy meal ($3) feel when you earned $282,000,000.00 in the last little chunk of time? Yikes! He’s down to $281,999,997! Oh, wait, in the time it took to write that, he made another HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.
ETA: Sorry, bad at math. He had $5,500,000,000 in the bank, not $282 mil, still, do those numbers even compute in your head?
The thing that I never understand is why all these people carry on working.
Take the guys on Dragons’ Den, for instance. They’re nowhere near the Bill Gates league, of course, but I look at someone like Duncan Bannatyne, who has a personal fortune of more than £300,000,000, and I think - WHY? Why do you still put on a suit and tie, have boring meetings in offices, and so on and so on?
There are so many things I’d like to do and see in my life that I know I will never have time (or money) to do because of WORK. So it boggles my mind that someone with that much money would devote any proportion of their life to work!
It’s like these people that win the lottery and then carry on with their job in a warehouse “because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself otherwise”. WHAAAAAT? Have you so little imagination that you think the alternative to stacking pallets of kitchen towels and dog food is slumping on your sofa watching Trisha? Give me that winning lottery ticket and belt up, morons!
Meetings may not be so boring if you’re the one in charge, especially if you get to hand off the minutiae of your workday to executive assistants. Perhaps, for such individuals, fulfillment lies in continuing to exercise power over such large organizations, and deriving a sense of self-worth (as opposed to sustenance) from the continued high income. If the company is paying them $10M a year, they feel valued. Already got $10 billion stored up in the bank from a successful career? That’s great, but what have you accomplished lately?
You can run a company successfully for one year, earn $30M, and disappear/retire to some tropical paradise.
OR
You can continue to run a company successfully for a couple of decades before retiring, at which point you’re able to say to yourself, “I presided over Boeing/HP/Microsoft/Ford for a couple of decades. In that time I guided them through the introduction of several new products and an ongoing growth/expansion that resulted in thousands of new jobs for people.”
So…a sense of self-worth through continued accomplishment, and a sense of self-worth as measured by the huge salary that you continue to pull in.
Really, though, isn’t that work ethic and that devotion to something what got them rich in the first place? At least usually. From what I can tell, with most of these people, the thrill is in the work and in the chase, not in the money. I know I personally will never see even a fraction of that kind of money because I simply don’t have that burning drive.
In the creative fields, I image that it’s the desire to create. It takes a helluva a lot of passion and drive to get anywhere as a writer/singer/songwriter/actor/whatever, and you just can’t turn that off once you have enough money.
I guess that’s why I’ll never make a fortune. If the point comes where I’ve got enough in the bank to comfortably see me out, I’m not working a damn day longer! Work, for me, is just what I do to get money to live. It doesn’t define what I am or give me a sense of worth, particularly.
I mean, I edit copy and write headlines etc that are seen by maybe two or three million people a week; and occasionally write articles too. Sure, I get a small amount of pride from seeing my work in print (although as a copy editor, I don’t get a byline or anything). But I certainly don’t have the drive and ambition to get to the top of the ladder, whatever that might be.
Yes, but what do you enjoy doing? What defines you? (Lets assume it’s, I dunno, painting.)
Now lets say someone likes your painting and pays you $50, under duress.
Then you find people lining up for your paintings, and you don’t want to be a painting factory, so you limit yourself to 1 painting a year. It takes you 9 months to make a painting.
Your paintings then go for $1.5 million dollars a piece.
My father is one of these people who acquires a lot of wealth.
His father was a hard worker and worked from dawn to dusk to provide for his family, giving them just enough to survive.
My dad is of the attitude that he wants his kids to have more than he had, and he’s giving us that. He doesn’t work anywhere near as hard as his father did but he makes a ridiculous amount more than him.
From the time he first realised he could make money he never wanted his children to work a day in their life. He saw his father working and he never saw his father. He knew his children were smart and wouldn’t turn in to Paris Hilton if they were all given a platinum Amex, so that’s what he aimed for. He aimed to give his children a blank cheque on life, literally.
He didn’t think of the reality of the situation, his children having hobbies, and plans of their own, which seem like work to him.
He looks at one of his sons running a radio station and thinks his son is working, when really his son is following his dream.
He sees another son bankrolling small films and thinks the same.
My father makes more money than him or his children can spend, but he does it because he can, and because he wants to take that worry away from us while he still can. Ideally he’d love for every descendant of him to be as fortunate as his children. It’s unrealistic but that’s how he see’s it.
And if he has the ability, why not?
Well, I’d say that’s a pretty special case. Very, very few people are lucky enough to get paid for doing what they love. And even fewer get paid millions for it. The thing I love most is skiing (and mountain-biking or hiking in summer). The chances of anyone paying me to do that are pretty slim (despite my best efforts to cripple my ski editor and take his job!). Besides, with something like that, once it becomes a job it often ceases to be fun. (Going back to said ski editor, I hear him moaning about having to go off to the mountains again when he could be at home in London…)
It was a simplistic example. If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.
I feel bad for the folks that think a job is something they do to keep the lights on and keep a roof over your head. There are jobs like that, and I’m damn glad I don’t have one.
Think of it this way: Say you work from 20 to 65. During that 16425 day period, you’ll sleep 5475 days, you’ll work 5475 days, and if you have a one hour commute, you’ll spend 935 days in a car.
That leaves 4,540 days, or 12 of those 45 years to do everything else.
But if you like your job, you’ll be spending 27 years, doing something you like.
For the vast majorty of my working life, my job has been challenging and interesting. I’ll look back on a career and see stuff I liked doing. Flipping burgers and folding clothes at Hot Topic would not be the way I’d like to waste 15 years if my life.
Will it have made me rich? Nope. But I made the conscious decision to work at a stable place (government) and do so in a way that means that when I’m not at work…I’m not at work. MY work is not my identity, and yet, part of what makes me who I am is enjoying the stuff I do at work.
It’s like driving a hot car. If your commute sucks, it sucks a little less in a car you enjoy. If you hate driving during your commute, but like to read, then taking the bus or train gives you back valuable time to do so. (take that 1 hour commute, that’s 10 hours a week, or more than a full shift at work, that you could get back for yourself.)
Unspendable is hard to define. I might make my first $50 million. That gets me a nice house, private jet and homes in Newport, Las Vegas and Paris.
But then, like many sports fans, I really would like my own team. My preference is the Reds, but I will consider other franchises. Even a bad team is going to run me $300$400 million. And I probably have to spend some dough to make it a good team. Not much point in owning a team if you can;t have a good one.
If I prove to be a lousy owner, I might have to find something else to do. One thing might be to find failing businesses and try to turn them around. Its a challenge and should keep me occupied for a little while.
Eventually I will have to think about giving some of it away. I don’t have any kids, and I can’t have the state taking all of my cash when I die.
If I get up to Bill Gates money, I might decide that I have too much.
As far as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates goes, would you ever ask Jack Nicholson why he’s still acting? Or Steven Spielberg why he’s still directing? Surely they have all the money they’d ever need! Guess what? They do it because the love the creative process. And they’re fabulous at it, whether they are creating software, directing a movie, or envisioning a new way to listen to music. And, in the process, they’ve put thousands of people to work and made life more enjoyable for all of us. So why would they retire?
Antonio Catalan is one of those people whose name won’t be familiar to pretty much anybody.
He comes from a family which have had hotels since inns became hotels. Before that, they had inns. He wanted to have hotels that would be different from what was being offered; he bought his first hotel borrowing money from his father and uncles; his NH chain didn’t just become one of the most succesful in the world, it changed the way Spanish hotels make business.
At one point he got bored. He’d enjoyed the time when it was a startup, when he had to claw and beg for every cent, when the people from the big chains looked down on him. Now he was the big chain.
So he sold the majority of NH and started AC. Which, again, is a different model and, again, is forcing other chains to change how they do things.