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To your point, I remember 50cent (the rapper) talking shortly after he made $400 million on his Vitamin water investment. He said he ran into some Coca-Cola ex

To your point, I remember 50cent (the rapper) talking shortly after he made $400 million on his Vitamin water investment. He said he ran into some Coca-Cola executives after they purchased the company and he was sort of crowing about all the money they had just made him. I guess two of the executives were like, "Huh, $400 million, not a bad start Curtis. Let us know once you get in the $800 million or even the billion dollar range." He said it made him a little more humble, but at the same time, he said there's a sort of pissing game when you're at those income levels with people like that.

jimbokun 10y ago
Meh, he could have replied "let me know when you have a stadium full of people screaming your name."
- brownbat 10y ago
  Hmm, at first I thought: If you have a billion dollars you can get 50,000 people in a stadium screaming your name. I mean, you could get me to scream your name for $20k easy, and I don't even like stadiums that much. But, ok, that's a fairly prohibitive expense. Musicians can get that and have the audience pay for the privilege. They can do so repeatedly, which certainly qualifies as some kind of asset. So call it a type of capital, a social capital, maybe... ability to muster crowds? It would be interesting to see a graph of how much "muster" varies across a given population. Follows Zipf's Law like everything else, I'd wager. Most people would have to buy an audience. A tiny few can get audiences to pay. There's a growing middle-class sitting at the zero-pivot--emerging indie bands and popular academics--they pull in audiences, but only for free. Once we formalize all that we'll of course need some sort of exchange rate for muster, USD:MST, before we can get down to the important work of comparing the relative capital of a superstar and the super-rich. Take note young econ grad students: the to-be-written papers on the liquidity of muster are the stuff careers are made of!
  - bryanrasmussen 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

jimbokun 10y ago

Meh, he could have replied "let me know when you have a stadium full of people screaming your name."

brownbat 10y ago
Hmm, at first I thought: If you have a billion dollars you can get 50,000 people in a stadium screaming your name. I mean, you could get me to scream your name for $20k easy, and I don't even like stadiums that much. But, ok, that's a fairly prohibitive expense. Musicians can get that and have the audience pay for the privilege. They can do so repeatedly, which certainly qualifies as some kind of asset. So call it a type of capital, a social capital, maybe... ability to muster crowds? It would be interesting to see a graph of how much "muster" varies across a given population. Follows Zipf's Law like everything else, I'd wager. Most people would have to buy an audience. A tiny few can get audiences to pay. There's a growing middle-class sitting at the zero-pivot--emerging indie bands and popular academics--they pull in audiences, but only for free. Once we formalize all that we'll of course need some sort of exchange rate for muster, USD:MST, before we can get down to the important work of comparing the relative capital of a superstar and the super-rich. Take note young econ grad students: the to-be-written papers on the liquidity of muster are the stuff careers are made of!
- bryanrasmussen 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie