Reading fail
I'm obviously not up on the executive world. I read that headline, assumed it was an attempt at a Scots accent and wondered why Yahoo! employed cows in the first place.
Yahoo! has refused to deny that its chief operating officer Henrique de Castro was sacked by the Purple Palace's boss Marissa Mayer. Kara Swisher reported on re/code, citing a leaked internal memo, that Mayer had in fact fired the web company's COO. Yahoo! revealed on Wednesday that de Castro would leave the biz today – …
Set up a VC fund
Buy a(nother) 737
Buy a mega-yacht (that's $300m right there)
Buy an island
Buy another really, really big house in a prime area
Keep paying the flunkies and servants who work in all the other houses
Have a holiday on the ISS (...my personal favourite)
$100m sounds like a lot, but all those essential expenses soon add up.
That's what everybody says, but it rarely works that way. People nearly always live up to the level their income will support, and at least a step beyond.
Wealth that you create (as opposed to inheriting) has always created a bit of a paradox. As a rule, the people capable of making a few million dollars are not the sort who rest on their laurels. They've got a hyperactive sense of underachievement and can never be satisfied. Those who would retire to an island hoping to die from overexposure to an army of naked umbrella drink girls rarely find themselves in a position where they could make enough money to do that.
I believe it comes down to personal philosophies on life. Making a lot of money isn't 'hard', it is making a lot of money and still having a close family, morals non-sociopaths can live with and not generating hatred everywhere you go that's tough.
Rich people are (in)famous for making exceedingly stupid decisions and the public believes it is the money that's responsible. The truth of the matter is that those people have always made stunningly bad decisions where they were mindlessly risking everything, all the time. A few just get lucky and get rich as a side effect of being to a greater or lesser degree completely unhinged.
Sure, there are exceptions. Warren Buffett is a good one. He's calm, deliberate and calculating as well as being just an all around gentleman with manners and respect for all people. Those kinds of wealthy people are exceedingly rare. Most ultra wealthy people are more like Larry Elison. The kind of person who if you were alone with in Trafalger Square you'd feel trapped and be looking for an exit, hoping he doesn't notice you.
That's not to say Larry Elison is a bad or evil guy (we've never discussed his morals) but he's hyper aggressive and sees the world in a completely different way than normal people. If he says 'good afternoon' it activates your evolutionary survival instincts. A 'good afternoon' for people like him can fall anywhere between 'a good afternoon for drinks on the roof' and 'a good afternoon to buy an island and play Jenga with the bones of the natives that lived there until about 3mins ago'.
My point in all that is that people aren't changed by money so much as people who have a lot of money tend to display their true nature, which let them get the money to begin with, more openly. If there were no Oracle, Larry Elison would still be exactly the same person except you wouldn't take him to the pub because he's guaranteed to accidentally/on purpose start a fight with some girls boyfriend, or something suitably dumb like most hyper aggressive people do.
That in no way was intended to insinuate you have to be dangerously unstable to get rich. I was attempting to clarify why some people can never have enough money. No insults or slights intended.
You said it very well but I would add two classic quotes here :
"What good is money if it can’t inspire terror in your fellow man?"
and
"I’ll keep it short and sweet — Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. When opportunity knocks, you don’t want to be driving to a maternity hospital or sitting in some phony-baloney church. Or synagogue."
- Montgomery C. Burns
One of the biggest disappointments of my adult life was discovering that my childhood plans for global domination through the magic of compound interest wouldn't work.
You can't draw interest on large sums of money, banks have all that capped. You have to convert your money into some other vehicle and collect interest and/or defer taxes that way. Most of those other instruments aren't easily convertible (or if they are they've got shit for returns) so you end up borrowing money from the bank against those other instruments. If everything works out right you can offset the fees and interest on those loans with the returns on the various instruments your money lives in.
It's really weird, and very counterintuitive, but the more money you have, the further you are away from it. Unless you are insane & keep mountains of cash around you end up having to pay to use your own money.
Really? Are you sure?
Because I worked out that I'd need a bare four million bux to do the same at age 42 and maintain the roof over my family's head, and I'd be living carefully with no real reserve for hurricane-sorry-superstorm Sandy-like events or deal with a major medical event.
And I did those sums in 1995.
If you live off the interest from £4m, you get a modest yearly income forever. If you burn through the capital, you can live high on the hog for a short time. I, too, did those sums in the 1990s at a younger age and thought I would have to be frugal if ever I won the lottery. Now I'm old enough to burn through the capital. Sadly, the lottery has decided to withhold itself from me, presumably because of my hubris, or merely because the numbers are randomly selected. And I don't often buy a ticket.
I think we need a belt-feed, multiple barrel exclamation point delivery system along the lines of the M61 Vulcan. Icon --> Well... because!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Let no phrase or word be un-exclaimed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But its not just exclamation marks anymore ... its animated exclamation marks that spin into place ... at least that what I noticed the Yahoo! logo on the UK finance page does now - may have been doing this for ages but I only noticed it a couple of days ago and now I can't stop noticing it as its bloody annoying!
You wouldn't per chance be a [soon to be] former employee?
>apparently the Yahoo! Board disagrees
As does the stock market (probably explains the board's point of view). And her former employer didn't really have much use for her either. Wasn't her job to make the place seem like less of a sausage party? Or was it running the search page? I can never remember.
I'll bet the blond bimbo has skills that neither you, the board, nor I will see. And in my case, at least, that is a shame indeed.
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