Wish you a Merry Christmas, We wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
My New Year brought me a headache that would run me over like a mack truck in full speed. Wall street had finished its analysis.
The number leaked before the sun was fully up on New Year's Day, which felt, in hindsight, like an appropriately undignified way to find out.
A financial wire service had gotten an early, unauthorized look at a preliminary net-worth estimate one of the big valuation houses had been quietly compiling since December.
Those were the same houses that fed the numbers Forbes would eventually run officially two months later — and someone on the desk had decided a holiday-morning scoop was worth the risk of running it unconfirmed.
By 7 A.M. Eastern, "eleven-year-old surpasses Gates" was already climbing the wire, and by the time Ron came downstairs in his robe to make coffee, there were two vans parked across the street with satellite dishes on their roofs.
News stations had got ahead and the moment I step foot off the house, I was gonna be bombarded by flashes and mics. Maybe time to call the news agencies and have a little chat.
$107.2 billion & Climbing.
That was the unofficial estimate as close as they could get. Thats what the climbing meant.
Ahead of Gates for the first time since anyone had bothered publishing a list.
Mum read the headline off the kitchen counter's little television.
She was standing very still in the way she stood still whenever the world outside our house did something she hadn't been given time to prepare for.
And then she turned around and looked at me the way she'd looked at me the morning I stood up in my crib eleven years before.
As if I was mad. The mad one whose idea changed the world.
The call from Gates came a little after nine, which surprised me more than the number itself had.
I'd expected, if anything, silence — the specific silence of a man who'd spent a quarter century at the top of a list and had every reason to resent the kid who'd just knocked him off it in a single unconfirmed news cycle.
"I hear congratulations are in order," he said instead, dry, unbothered in the specific way of someone who'd already decided a long time ago that net worth was a scoreboard and not a personality.
"Eleven years old. I was twenty when I dropped out of Harvard and it still took me two decades to get where you got in eleven years. Either I did something very wrong or you did something very right."
"Bit of both, probably," I said. "I had less to unlearn. You had to figure out an entire industry didn't exist yet before you could build in it. I got to walk into rooms you'd already built the doors for."
"Diplomatic answer." A pause, the kind that meant he was deciding how much of the next sentence he actually meant.
"The foundation work — the malaria stuff, the vaccine distribution — that's not going anywhere regardless of whatever a wire service decides to print on a slow news morning." He paused.
"If half of what I'm hearing about Infinite's charitable arm is accurate, you already understand that a number like this only means anything if it moves toward something valuable to mankind. Call it advice you didn't ask for."
"I'll take advice from anyone who's spent that much of his own number moving it toward something," I said.
We talked for another few minutes about nothing in particular — operating systems, patent trolls, a shared low opinion of a mutual competitor's customer support line — and when he hung up I sat with the phone in my hand for longer than the conversation had actually lasted, turning over the strange fact that the man who'd defined an entire era of computing had just spent nine unhurried minutes treating an eleven-year-old like a peer instead of a headline.
Enron was still the story underneath every other story that week — the bankruptcy filing from the previous month working its way through Congress and the SEC in real time.
Arthur Andersen's auditors were under a spotlight that would end the firm's century of existence within the year.
A national conversation about what happens when the numbers a company reports and the numbers that are actually true stop being the same thing. Though I think most companies inflate their valuations. Its to the investors to slap them back to reality.
I read every piece of coverage I could find that week, not for the schadenfreude, but because it was the clearest possible lesson available in real time.
A fortune built on numbers nobody can independently verify is a fortune built on borrowed time. One wrong move and the bubble will burst.
And mine, whatever else was true about how I'd built it, needed to survive an audit I couldn't personally rig if it was ever going to survive the next fifteen years.
I had Skye run a full internal review of Infinite's books that same week — genuinely blind, structured so that even I couldn't see the working papers until the two outside firms had signed off independently — and told her, when she asked why I wanted it done in the one week of the year every accountant in the country was on vacation, that a number this size only meant anything if it could survive someone else checking it.
"Because Enron," she said back, "showed you what it costs when the valuations remains inflated instead of a fact."
"Because Enron," I agreed, "showed me exactly what people do to a company that gets that particular lesson wrong. I'd rather learn it on paper this January than live it in a courtroom in five years." I took a pause.
If I had a cigar, I would be letting out a huge puff at this point.
"Dealing with a senate hearing would be of no use and I need a solid position when trouble arrives. It would be a bloodbath otherwise." I wasn't called a trouble magnet for nothing after all.
Prime is gonna bring me a whole lot of headaches when he arrives and a Senate hearing is gonna be disastrous to deal with.
By the following morning, the vans across the street had thinned to one, and by the weekend that one was gone too. Threatening news agencies, especially those who owned them works.
The phrase - 'money talks, money walks' ain't for show after all.
The news cycle moved on to a story with more villains and fewer paradoxes than an eleven-year-old about his own bookkeeping.
The rich show their wealthy. The wealthy use that wealth to hide themselves. - A wise man once said.
I went back to school on Monday, technically, on paper, the way I always did, and let the number sit where numbers belong: recorded, audited, and mostly beside the point.
After all, why change the normal days when you can have them.
Enjoy your time, when you have it.
- Samuel James Witwicky