The Myth of Fuck You Money

A billion dollars is a lot of money. It's an amount of money that I honestly cannot fully visualize. It's about three orders of magnitude more than the largest amount of money that I can easily visualize. If someone gifted me a billion dollars, that would be a lot more than enough to retire, extremely comfortably, pretty much anywhere on the planet.

But it doesn't seem like the $200+ billion that these CEOs have is ever enough. All they ever want is "another billion".

I remember my dad told me a story, when he was 18 (I think), he bet on a horse race and won $5. Instead of being happy with the $5 win, all he thought after that was that now he wanted another $5, and that if he had bet twice as much his profits would have been doubled. The objectively-good thing of winning $5 didn't make him happy because all he could think about was the fact that he should have more (and this realization is why he never really gambled after that).

We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode- - -we can predict that just by looking at age histogram- - -and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon. Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.

This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for “fuck-you money.” It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of “fuck-you money” at a glance.

— Neal Stephenson, “Cryptomonicon”

Hard disagree… I strongly believe (perhaps subjectively as I am surrounded in some ways by them) there are a lot “regular” people who reached FU money and are living their lives to the fullest vs. billionaires who are dick measuring 24/7 with other billionaires

Bezos, Zuck etc. don't have that amount, in spite of their hundreds of billions, or else they wouldn't be doing what they are doing. "Yes, but they have to do this to maintain their businesses that are subject to Trump's whims." No they don't. They could put someone else in charge, take a few dozen billion, and still live fabulous lives, independent of Trump. Let someone else do the ass-kissing. But they choose not to do that.