The Garrulous Jay – Meaningless Money

Sit down, close your eyes and relax. Now take a deep breath and imagine… Imagine you are one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history.

You have built up and exited several incredible businesses. But you haven’t stopped and you continue to run a number of companies with a worldwide presence. By all accounts you still love the work that you do.

You have already amassed extraordinary wealth from your work. Today you are worth, at least on paper, $365 billion. That’s right, you have a billion dollars for each and every day of the year… If that money was in the bank earning just three percent interest it would generate an income of roughly $1.25 million per hour.

But it isn’t in the bank of course, much of it is ‘paper’ wealth derived from the valuations ascribed to those businesses which you have built and in which you have shares. Shares which you are therefore motivated to see rise in value.

How are you feeling? Good, right!

So now I want you to ask yourself two simple questions… What targets would you want to put in place to keep you engaged? And what incentives would you need to motivate you to strive to hit those targets?

Perhaps those targets would focus on continued growth in your companies’ core areas of operations, and a further expansion of profitability. Targets that nevertheless reflected the fact that the trajectory of growth would attenuate as you scaled up and competition increased.

And maybe, not entirely generously, you would simply settle for the fact that if that growth was forthcoming your already monstrous wealth would further increase as your companies’ valuations expanded further.

Then again maybe I’m wrong…

Maybe what you need is targets that to us mere mortals seem like more of a work of fiction than anything grounded in financial reality… Perhaps, for example, they would involve:
— an eightfold increase in the value of the businesses,
— selling three times the number of units of your core product in ten years than you have sold in the entire history of your business to date,
— shifting millions of units of new products you have scarcely created,
— all leading to your earnings increasing by a factor of 20 to 25 times in ten years.

Would this be what it would take? Are these the kind of outlandish goals that would get you out of bed in the morning? And if so for what reward if not that increase in the value of your shares?

How about $1 trillion?

That’s a big number, but then these are ‘stretch’ targets… But would it work if you already have so much money generations of your family will never be able to spend it?

Maybe. Or might it be that your wealth is such that money has, by any normal definition, become meaningless to you. And if that’s the case doesn’t it render those targets and that incentive scheme meaningless too?

But even if they carried any currency and served as a reason – maybe the reason – for you to turn up at the office, what does it say about the businesses you have built that they so need you there they’re prepared to offer you all that to try to keep you.

Can one person, even one as talented as you, really be that critical to the businesses you have built?

And if you are that important what happens to those businesses if you’re run over by an electric vehicle tomorrow?

It’s OK, you can open your eyes now.