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Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do If You Were Suddenly Wealthy?
An anonymous reader writes: There are a few articles floating around today about comments from Markus Persson, aka "Notch," the creator of Minecraft. He sold his game studio to Microsoft last year for $2.5 billion, but he seems to be having a hard time adjusting to his newfound fame and wealth. He wrote, "The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance. ... Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead. I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of a$#@%&*s that made me sell minecraft again." While he later suggests he was just having a bad day, he does seem to be dealing with some isolation issues. Granted, it can be hard to feel sorry for a billionaire, but I've wondered at times how I'd handle sudden wealth like that, and I long ago decided it would make the human relationships I'm accustomed to rather difficult. So, how would you deal with Notch's problem? It seems like one the tech industry should at least be aware of, given the focus on startup culture.
Buy land and start a small hobby farm (very small). Animals and crops require constant attention, you can't ignore them for even a day. Keeps you busy, keeps you grounded, even if you do still get most of your food from a grocery store. He's got enough to bring internet access out from nearby town or city, so he can stay up to date and work for fun instead of a living, until he figures out what he'd rather do instead.
Stop "solving" all your problems with money and pick up a few that require attention and care instead of cash. You can buy the animals, buildings, and tools, but YOU still have to use them or you fail and things die.
The first thing I need to do is hire an accountant so I know how much I actually have. If I do anything else first, I have a feeling a significant portion of the fortune would be gone before I have any kind of understanding of what my tax burden is, and I'd fuck myself right back to poverty.
Next thing I do (after buying a house, of course) is start studying accountancy, because if I've learned anything from reading the news the past several years, it's that NOBODY can be trusted with that many zeroes.
After that, I've got friends who need help, and who deserve it much more than I do. I want to see them happy. Then I can start worrying about businesses and philanthropy and shit like that.
I'd skim a little off of the top to make sure that I never needed to work another day in my life ever again and then give the rest away. Start with my favorite charities and then, if any was left, spread it amongst some of the more obscure operations.
Then I could do what I wanted rather than what's needed to put food on the table.
It really is difficult to feel for Notch when, by his own admission in that series of tweets, he shows that having the material possessions and lavish experiences that is typical of filthy rich people has been his primary focus. It's myopic, depressing to the point of repulsion, and all-too-typical of the rich.
As for the human interaction element, that's of his own doing and merely an extension of the HAVING ALL THE RICH DUDE THINGS mentality. I wouldn't really care to hang around someone regularly who has some obnoxious, resource-guzzling mansion, replete with luxuries that, frankly, no person really needs. It all feeds into a mental sickness, and the only way he can snap out of it is by his own sheer will--to question himself and why he feels so empty. The answers, while not that difficult, tend to elude those who have relinquished critical thinking regarding their own lifestyle in favor of, "Well, I sure am having a shitty week... time for a weekend bender in Ibiza!"
I hope he's able to successfully reflect on his current life situation and realize that to have "normal" human interaction, you can't flaunt wealth and economically divide yourself from your peers in the numerous ways the rich tend to.
When I was in college, there was a guy who was really wealthy (no idea how much, not billions, but millions I'm sure) --- his parents died young, I think it was an accident of sorts, and he inherited a fortune, or got a settlement.
Anyway... people used him for free beer, parties, food, anything they could get from him. I knew him tangentially because he was a pen and paper gamer, and ran some D&D sessions so we had some common friends.
The poor guy seemed miserable, knowing most people were only hanging out with him for his money, etc. Seriously, he was just a sad sack, seemed depressed and lonely in that existential kind of way. I know people say 'aw.... poor little rich boy', but I really felt bad for the guy. He seemed like a decent enough person, but the money didn't seem to make his life really that much better. Sure he didn't have student loans like I did, didn't have to work like I did -- but I had some good friends, who certainly didn't hang out with me for money (or lack thereof)
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Yeah, I was going to say "put aside enough money to live relatively comfortably for the rest of your life, then give most of it away". That way you probably won't have to work if you don't want to, and you aren't isolated.
Or just do random acts of kindness - pay off a whole neighborhood's mortgages, or something. Help some disadvantaged kids get better teachers, provide clean water or infrastructure in developing countries, donate money to interesting research projects. Help unemployed people learn new trades. There's plenty to do, and it might help with his social isolation as well.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
"I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of a$#@%&*s that made me sell minecraft again."
You don't have to try to be Musk. If you don't feel the need to get into that or be that sort of creative, at least you can recognize the people who do/are. Call him. You don't need to buy public shares when you have that kind of money. You invest in other people who are trying to change the world.
Keep some for yourself and enjoy your life while knowing that your money is helping to change the world. Don't like what Musk is doing? He's just an example. Fine something you believe in and invest.
I would blow it on something I found ridiculously cool. Like hardened, high-speed em-drive interstellar probes or something. But to each his own.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
For starters you would never see my fat ass again. I would never post another thing to /.. My ass would be laying on some beach somewhere with some bronze honey fanning me with one of those palm leaves and other serving me cold drinks out of a coconut cup.
Some people say, "if I ever get rich I won't quit work." Screw that, may ass would be out of here. It would be the last thing you ever saw of me as I ran out the door.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Your title started out nice enough. But "stop reading slashdot" is not what I would do, it is what I wouldn't do.
Assuming I were no longer constrained by money, the "suddenly wealthy" mentioned in the headline, bettering myself and others would probably be the next set of goals as I checked off items from my bucket list.
The daily money earned off $2.5 billion is going to be about $50K-$100K, which would be pretty fun. Every day you can spend what most american families earn as annual income. Personally I wouldn't be throwing out multi-million-dollar grants to organizations, but I would enjoy traveling while trying to spend $50K per day.
Spending the big money quickly on things would only be fun for a short term. Owning things would help a bit with the comforts of home, being suddenly wealthy means no longer being constrained by financial resources. There would be a few places I'd want to visit -- maybe tour castles and visit a bunch of countries -- but having virtually unlimited funds spread over time could be enjoyed with others who are less fortunate.
So I think if I was suddenly a multi-billionaire, of course an accountant would be one person I'd hire, and I'd put together a small account for daily spending, say $50K, added daily to an account for everyday spending. Then I would look to spend that much and no more, especially not dropping off millions for an endowment to some organization. At least until I reached old age and was ready to donate large bundles to other groups doing good in the world.
I would look to my own hobbies and activities that bring joy to myself and others. For me, that would mean turning my artistic hobbies of watercolor and photography into bigger parts of my life, not so much as moving on to my next career as it is developing my self. (Of course, I'd similarly pick up some of my wife's hobbies, but we share many of them.) We could enjoy life as a global tourist being generous with funds, buy new clothes and leave old ones to the local donation centers. I'd spend time doing other hobbies that are purely for fun, like kite flying, and with all that money that means visiting assorted beaches and kite festivals around the globe, enjoying the benefits of money while trying to appear as a normal but generous tourist. As I developed myself, I'd look to develop others as well. Why pay a professional to tutor just me when I can help develop the talents of others as well? Pay for classes in the subject and invite a few lucky winners with a similar skill level, and participate as just another person in the class. (I might make it known that I was the one paying for the class, depending on how much one-on-one time I wanted, or maybe just remain an anonymous member.)
Maybe go spend a few months on the endless beaches of Chile, along with my wife. Hire some people to help learn the language from our current skills into full fluency. Hire some art teachers to teach both myself and a lucky group of a dozen other similarly-skilled natives (where I pay their regular wages so they can attend the class) as we paint on site for a few days at each location, perhaps providing art supplies they could take home at the end of the week paid for by my accumulation fund. For my kite flying hobby, when I wasn't out practicing art, I'd probably have a bunch of various sport kites delivered to that week's hotel (which of course would be directly on the beach), and bring a crate each of solidly-built deltas, some thick-sparred revolutions that will survive the inevitable beginner crashes, and a some single-string kites for the unskilled. The lucky strangers who happened to be at the beach that day could pick one up, enjoy it for the day, and take it home. Maybe enjoy time doing whatever skill building my wife also enjoys, or maybe letting her enjoy her classes without me, both so we can enjoy our own individual interests and also so we have things to talk about. Then maybe move on to mountains and beaches of Peru and Colombia, again spending around $50K/day on grou
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
With 2.5 Billion Dollars? I'm too lazy to do the real math, but im guessing you could pick one random person and give them $100,000 every day for the rest of your life and still have enough money to live comfortably.
OR you could hire enough people to completely buy out the next iDevice release on opening day, and light the whole batch on fire, just to watch the hipsters cry about it. 453 retail Apple stores, 100 people per store, 20 devices per person, $700 average retail would cost you just over $634M. You wouldn't completely buy them out, but it'd be enough to make a pretty little dent. (This seems to be an XKCD "What if" submission waiting to happen... "What would it take to buy every iPhone available on release day? And what could I do with them once I bought them")
The first thing you do is hire manservants.
If I had $250,000/year income, I could do my own dishes, tend my own yard, and so forth. I probably would tend the bees; but I'd get out of gardening. I'd have a gardener. Someone else would clean my house.
There is no faster way to create jobs with some $200k/year of disposable income than by paying some teenage wench to clean your house, and some old fuck to tend your trees. There just isn't.
If you have millions of dollars, that's great! You can start businesses; but can you create jobs? Well, kind of. If you find a way to produce something currently in production, but with *less* labor, you can produce that product more cheaply. That means you can undersell your competition, outcompeting them, and *eliminate* jobs. More unemployed.
With more unemployed, but cheaper common goods, people generally have more money after buying all the shit they need (except the unemployed, who are struggling to get by). That means you can now spend your millions to expand some niche market--say, smart phones, which still cost $600 and bump your bill by $30/month, but now everyone has more than $600 on hand, whereas before they had the ability to spend an extra $50 on shit they wanted--and make a shitton of profit. That, of course, requires workers--this is why it costs money--so you wind up creating jobs, although only about the amount you displaced in the first place.
This is why we always have unemployment, and why population tends to expand: you create wealth by making things cheaper to produce; you make things cheaper to produce by reducing the total invested labor-hours in production. All those layers of profits added on every good (coal to make steel, steel to make bolts, bolts to make cars) are just aggregate price; bulk purchase can negotiate that down, and direct competition can force it down, but only to the aggregate human labor costs of everything put together. When you reduce the labor cost, you wind up increasing the total buying power--same number of humans produce more things, thus the same percentage of the total income (of everyone and every business) purchases more--which means you can re-employ the same amount of displaced labor (not necessarily the same people) elsewhere, and everyone can buy more shit.
It also means the cost of high amounts of production drops. Producing 10 things costs $100 per unit because of inefficient methods (you wouldn't open a million-dollar production facility to make ten chairs; you'd do it in a slow, inefficient manner that costs less than a million dollars in labor); producing producing 10 million costs $10 per unit, because you can use better methods; and then producing 10 billion starts relying on things like fertilizer and artificial irrigation to grow trees for wood, which is more expensive than simple tree farming, and so it costs $50 per unit. You can actually support a bigger population as you raise wealth in this way, because suddenly everyone can afford that $50 per unit good, since they're spending $50 less elsewhere on other goods; of course, then the population grows and keeps its 4%-8% unemployment, because low unemployment is restrictive on total population wealth and weird shit happens.
So yeah. I'd have tutors, manservants, and landscapers. I might have a purser, but uh... look, my finances are better than yours. Financial management is a side hobby that's reached such a point of acuity for me that I scare bankers and accountants. Their balls shrivel up and die when we talk. I'm hoping our interest rates will go up to 14% median on mortgages so I can start an information campaign to eliminate the 30-year mortgage, since high interest rates make 10-year mortgages accessible for most people who can afford a 30-year mortgage (you wind up only having to tip in $100-$200 more per payment, instead of $2,000+ more; and you pay overall less for the same house). I was going to kill my mortgage in three years, but decided to stretch it to four or five so I cou
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If he can't keep a woman around while being a billionaire I'd say that mental illness is called "ego".
I knew someone who was a "mere millionaire" who had the same problem.
It's not ego. Women don't come labeled with tags that say "sincere" and "gold digger" so you can tell who loves you because you're a wonderful person and who merely loves your wallet.
That's the real ego problem. Most of us would like not to have the "love" leave when the money does. Or, for that matter, when a higher "bidder" comes along.
Not only that, but being friends with people of a different social status is not easy. I wasn't always very successful, but now I am at the point where I live a very comfortable life. The more successful I get, the more it seems that there are people who "want something" from me. It starts small, with people wanting to use my apartment complex's pool or other facilities. It has a way of snowballing into the expectation that my family will do all the driving and hosting of get-togethers. These problems only occur with friends who are of a lower economic status than us. If they reciprocated, we wouldn't care. I understand those friends aren't flush with cash, but a platter of home cooked baked chicken isn't that expensive, and some of them can't even be bothered with that. A cooler of cheap beer is within just about everyone's monetary reach; especially if I will offer you the same at a later date. But that isn't what I get out of many friendships with lower class people.
We don't have this problem with people on the same income level. They always reciprocate. I don't think about who is "up" and who is "down" monetarily, because they make an effort, and that is enough. Poor people don't seem to think about what I want in return for helping them. I don't count dollars, because I have plenty of my own. The effort in keeping a friendship is all I want to see returned. Sadly, that's very hard to find.
Rich people must struggle tremendously with the problem of someone always trying to get something from them for nothing. You see all the worst and selfish behaviors of humanity. If I were as wealthy as Notch, I would have to dress like a bum, travel the world inconspicuously, and hope nobody notices me. I don't think I would be able to handle all the "help a brother out" BS that he probably has to deal with. It must be exhausting.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Interesting. So I have a friend who has done very well. We've been acquaintances since Gr7 and good friends since University. Our sons are good friends. Now he is quite well off and no longer needs to work. I still have to work for a living and hope for eventual retirement...
So the problem I have is whenever we go anywhere either as a family or even just the two of us, he always insists on paying which makes me feel uncomfortable... So I always refuse and insist we split it. We seem to have reached some sort of silent consensus that we'll just split it from now on... See, I want to hang out with him and his family because we enjoy their company, not because they're well off... I think he thinks he's helping by offering to pay all the time...
Anyway, it's not a real problem... But an annoying thing that's developed since he became 'very comfortable'...
What would I do?
Well, I'd leave work so fast the door wouldn't come within a mile of my ass hitting it on the way out. While I *might* stay long enough to be a nice guy, maybe give the passwords to someone, I'm outta there.
People that say they'd keep working, not me. I don't understand that, I have PLENTY of things I like to do that can keep my occupied for the rest of my life.
I"d likely but a nicer house here in New Orleans...one in maybe Denver, CO to go when too hot here, and maybe one in Key West or somewhere near a beach when I felt in that mood.
Married? Hell no....why get married when you can now be free to chase pussy 24/7...or if nothing else, do the sugardaddy.com thing...cute, good looking girls, and you get to upgrade models at will without having to risk losing half your shit you own.
But more seriously, the world is your oyster if you are that rich. Travel, see things..hell, you can see and do a lot without ever leaving the US.
I have plenty of friends around the US, so, I don't really need more. I'd take care of them and their families (the ones that are married)...and well, just have fun.
I have never understood the lottery winners who'd just keep working. I've got a ton of stuff I'd rather be doing at any point in the day.
Heck, on some long times in between contracts, one time was 7mos...I'd wake up about 8-9am, go walk the dog...maybe jump on my motorcycle and hit the gym daily for 1-2 hours. Home for lunch, then maybe back on the motorcycle (summer/early fall) and go check out a new art museum or something here in NOLA...and maybe catch a fest or meet friends of mine getting off work at a bar for a few about 4pm....come home...lather, rinse, repeat.
Personally I never got tired of that easy life..and hey, if I was rich and got bored, I could always travel somewhere and vacation from that!!!
Yep, I'm sorry, I dunno how someone could be rich and miserable.
If it is so bad, gimme the money and let me take a swing at that type of life. I assure you, I'll have no problems.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........