The Myth of Fuck You Money
chrisryan.substack.comIt's weird right?
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 are on Hacker News and so a billion dollars ought to be rather easy to visualize for VCs and hackers: it's the compensation of the equivalent of ~350 L4 developers from Google for ten years. What could one do with ~3500 man-years of developer time at their disposal? Rather a lot and that's the point. Immense quantities of money are not about personal consumption but about the ability to do things and more money means more and bigger things can be done.
I guess I meant in a "personal finance" sense.
I can visualize a few million dollars as about an order of magnitude more than I'm worth now. If someone gifted me a million dollars, I have a reasonably good idea of how I'd spend it. I'd pay off the house, pay off the credit cards, maybe move somewhere that isn't the cesspool of NYC, and invest the rest into a low-risk index fund. Boring, easy-to-digest stuff.
If someone gave me a billion dollars, I have absolutely no idea how the hell I'd spend it. It wouldn't be radically different than someone giving me a trillion dollars, at least not at first; they're basically infinite quantities of money to me. It seems almost trite to just dump it all into a Vanguard account.
The subject heading of Avi’s first message is: “Guideline 1.”
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”
The truth is, there is no such thing as “fuck you money.” It’s a myth, optimized like most of the other American myths, to make the hamsters spin the wheel just a little faster.
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
Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame) was one of them.
His response to a billionaire was 'I have something you will never have - enough'.
perfect, just perfect!
The author completely misunderstands what Fuck You Money is. It represents the amount of money you need to leave the rat race and do whatever you want -- the ability to say Fuck You to your boss, your investors, whoever it is that is controlling your life using your need for money.
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.
I think the author forgets just who the "you" in "fuck you money" is supposed to refer to. It isn't a statement among fellow billionaires.