Knuth on money and dropping out of graduate school

Then in the middle of graduate school I was offered to drop out of college and write compilers for a living at an annual salary of $100,000 in 1962 dollars. That would correspond to about $10,000,000 a year now or something like that, not quite as much as a CEO — but anyway

I was offered, leave graduate school and get rich, and

I decided, you know, I really wanted to spend my life not maximizing the total amount of money that I got.

I wanted to do things that were interesting to me, that I thought would be useful to others.

And I found that money was a threshold function.

If you don’t have enough of it, you need it; but after that point, then it’s just a problem because you really have to enjoy having money and figuring out what to do with it responsibly, which is something that I never wanted to do.