I did note that many of my peers where COMPLETELY freaked out by my decision that I mentioned above. My choice to step back from the game freaked them out. No over aggression but a mix of outright confusion as well as somewhat confused jealousy.
He said he ran into some Coca-Cola executives after they purchased the company and he was sort of crowing about all the money they had just made him. I guess two of the executives were like, "Huh, $400 million, not a bad start Curtis. Let us know once you get in the $800 million or even the billion dollar range."
He said it made him a little more humble, but at the same time, he said there's a sort of pissing game when you're at those income levels with people like that.
But, ok, that's a fairly prohibitive expense. Musicians can get that and have the audience pay for the privilege. They can do so repeatedly, which certainly qualifies as some kind of asset.
So call it a type of capital, a social capital, maybe... ability to muster crowds?
It would be interesting to see a graph of how much "muster" varies across a given population.
Follows Zipf's Law like everything else, I'd wager. Most people would have to buy an audience. A tiny few can get audiences to pay. There's a growing middle-class sitting at the zero-pivot--emerging indie bands and popular academics--they pull in audiences, but only for free.
Once we formalize all that we'll of course need some sort of exchange rate for muster, USD:MST, before we can get down to the important work of comparing the relative capital of a superstar and the super-rich.
Take note young econ grad students: the to-be-written papers on the liquidity of muster are the stuff careers are made of!