8 ms·

So I only see three reasons to be famous: 1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category. 2. T

by cletus 7y ago

So I only see three reasons to be famous: 1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category. 2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and 3. To convert that fame into money. Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree. So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing. The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier. I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable. And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't. You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile.

sergioro 7y ago
An extra reason for being famous (could be included in #2 of the above list) is to amplify your positive impact in the world. E.g. if Bezos wasn't famous i'd probably never learned about his business strategies (costumer first, risk taking & innovating, etc). IMO this is the best reason for being famous.
- bshoemaker 7y ago
  Yep. This seems like the obvious one to me.
- airocker 7y ago
  Bezos possibly does not want all consumers to know his name or he would have named Amazon "bezos" much like "ford". --bezos fan
  - graeme 7y ago
    Ford motors. It was still a descriptive name. “Bezos everything store?” Harder to start. Amazon allowed flexibility. Can’t infer from choice.
    - airocker 7y ago
      Bezos Books! Sounds good to me.
      - graeme 7y ago
        You’re joking, right? It’s a great name for a bookstore. But you’d have to change it once it grew. And you’d retain the book brand longer than amazon did. The Ford motors name worked for generations because Ford stayed in motors.
    - bumby 7y ago
      Interesting tangential fact: Ford Motor Company was not Henry Ford's first automotive company. He previously started the (less descriptive) Henry Ford Company (his second automotive venture) which was bought and turned into the Cadillac brand.[1] Cadillac would eventually become General Motors. Combine that with the split between the Dodge brother investors, and all the Detroit "Big Three" manufacturers can be traced to Henry Ford. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
  - dmitriy_ko 7y ago
    Bezos named it Amazon so it would appear high in alphabetical order. In pre-search engine world of 1994 it was a big deal. New sites would be found by consumers through site directories.
- tuesday20 7y ago
  What is so special about customer first? I work for a small unknown company, my product managers and support team do “customer first”, I doubt any of them are reading Bezos biography or philosophy. This is just common sense and being nice to customers, that’s all. I hope people don’t learn his “work employees to death” and related philosophy ...
JKCalhoun 7y ago
4. Fame is an unavoidable byproduct of your pursuit to reach/help a larger audience.
jborichevskiy 7y ago
Good analysis, I think. > And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't. I found this Reddit comment [1] insightful on that front. Don't know to its validity but have seen it linked to in a few different places. > $1billion > I am going to exclude the $10b+ crowd, because they live a head-of-state life. But at $1b, life changes. You can buy anything. ANYTHING. In broad terms, this is what you can buy: > Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer. Mind blowing. The same is true with access to almost any Senator/Governor of a billionaires party (because in most cases, he is a significant donor). You meet on an occassional basis with heads-of-state and have real conversations with them. Which leads to ... influence ... (continued) [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_insanely_wealthy_people_buy_that_ordinary/cnnmca8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...
- ghaff 7y ago
  Even just in terms of money. $20 million invested is--depending upon your assumptions--something like $1 million/year ~risk-free without touching the principle. (OK, a diversified portfolio is probably going to do better than that but that gives something of a baseline.) Obviously that's a pretty nice passive income stream. But it's not really have a couple nice homes in prime locations, hire full-time assistants, fly private jets everywhere, etc. sort of money.
  - bosswipe 7y ago
    $1 million/year without working is very rich. You could definitely have multiple houses and full time assistants. I have two houses and part-time assistants at an income of $300k. And most of my time is dedicated to work at someone else's company, owning all of your own time makes them much more wealthy than me.
acoustep 7y ago
Fourth reason: To be to be remembered after you’re gone.
- m3kw9 7y ago
  Thing is, nothing matters to you after you are gone. Unless we become ghosts that can observe. Unlikely
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Just because the results of it are non-observable (fair assumption) to the person leaving some sort of legacy behind them, doesn’t mean that doing so isn’t valuable to them. It is the satisfaction you get while still living, knowing that after you are gone, some (hopefully positive) remnants of you will still live on.
  - dcolkitt 7y ago
    Thought exercise: A malicious but trustworthy djinn appears to you. He tells you that one minute after your death, he's going to release magically faked evidence that you were a violent pedophilie. All of your remaining friends and family will believe this, and the case will be so bad that your name will become associated around the world for the sheer heinousness and reprehensibility of the things you supposedly did. However the djinn is willing to bind himself to not doing this, but you have to pay him $1 right now. If "nothing matters after you are gone", then you wouldn't even be willing to pay $1 to avoid this scenario.
    - shuckles 7y ago
      While I’m alive, I would gladly pay $1 if it would avoid a traumatic experience for my friends and family (or even a stranger). I don’t see how this hypothetical changes that. In particular, it’s not about the memory of me, it’s about how that memory affects the lives of those who might care about me.
      - dcolkitt 7y ago
JeremyNT 7y ago
> And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't. At $20m you can shape your own world, and your family's. But at $2bn you can change society. You can buy a lot of influence both by directly spending the cash to accomplish goals and by bribing politicians to act on your behalf.
throw18374 7y ago
Isn’t it possible to become a billionaire without anyone knowing? What if you just get there quietly through private investment? Not a billion, but I’ve built up a decent chunk myself and nobody seems to know or even suspect that about me. Nobody begs me for anything more than spare change, no sycophants, nobody trying to impress me. Marketing for luxury goods doesn’t even reach me. I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades just through private investment, and there must be thousands of people doing the same. I imagine there are many more who have earned millions publicly, then sold their stake and went to a billion privately. So how does everyone find out about them?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tartoran 7y ago
  Whats your endgoal? I was thinking the other day about fortune, wealth and becoming wealthy. I’d very much prefer to not pursue becoming wealthy and concentrate on a diferent goal. I don’t think I could change the world in a financial sense, I might as well contribute positively from a different angle that is not from a wealthy position. That’s why I am asking you what your endgoal is since you chose anonimity and not to flaunt your wealth. I suspect you don’t need any kind of validation or any other ego tickling so do you have an endgoal that you’d like to pursue through your acumulated wealth?
  - throw18374 7y ago
    I plan on following in Warren Buffett’s footsteps. Without his influence, I would be working the graveyard shift at a gas station right now. End goal career-wise is to amass as much wealth as possible by giving smart and capable people a path to building new things that benefit everyone, and then direct that amassed wealth toward the betterment of humanity before I die. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that. I actually think most philanthropic organizations do more harm than good. I think an effective non-profit would probably look like a boring faceless middleman, affecting positive change by influencing capitalistic markets to serve the underserved. By serve I mean serve, not provide goods to. I also have my own idea of what it means to better humanity. I think there are better ways to feed and shelter people than feeding and sheltering them. Whatever I do, it’ll probably be really boring, won’t provide for any photo ops, and there’s a good chance it might even seem pointless and ineffective to most people.
nathanvanfleet 7y ago
My understanding of the question of "why want to be a billionaire" is that it ultimately comes down to the circles of people you associate with. You might own a small company and might take in $1 million in income a year. Great. Well if your friends are making $5 million a year and have X Y Z you might want to push yourself to get there. Imagine being friends with Jeff Bezos, you wouldn't really ever feel like you're successful enough. It's probably the worst for people born into being rich, because they get born into that world and get friends and family who are already bought into being at whatever that level is. And they have to either reject it or try and get there.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I think the same problem exists at pretty much all income levels. I'm having sort of the opposite problem currently. I make considerably more money than most of my friends, mainly just because I was a cs major and they chose other paths. I can afford to go to nice restaurants, bars, whatever, but my friends can't and I don't make quite enough to pay for all of them to go with me. I do find myself wondering what the point is sometimes. for now I'm happy to have people over and pay for pizza/beer, but it seems a little awkward.
philippoi 7y ago
> I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable. That's been the reality of Denmark's richest family (richest ever since CF Møller, head of Mærsk, died a few years ago). They've had numerous run-ins with people after a slice of their wealth. This lead them to keep as far from the public eye as possible (according to one piece I read) until they were the most talked about Danes of the season last year, as they tragically lost 3 of their 4 children in a bombing that was aimed to wipe them out. It's hard to imagine a worse scenario to survive as a parent or sibling. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/three-children-of-danish-billionaire-killed-in-sri-lanka-attacks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/three-children-of-danish-bil...
ChuckMcM 7y ago
It is a good analysis. There is no way to escape the envy and judgement from your "friends" even if you are just a "little" rich. A friend of mine, who is a former Googler, and keeps a "low key" lifestyle just tries to keep all the "triggers" that people use to recognize wealth out of their life because they value their friendships.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
The only wildcard in USA is lawyer fees in case of criminal charges, divorce and such. Make it $30-$50 mil, just in case and you'll live like a king without anyone knowing your networth, unless you want them to
Aperocky 7y ago
> Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. That's assuming that rich people don't want _more_ riches, which I would guess to be not true in more cases than not. 20M isn't quality of life wise too different from 2B, but if you got the chance to get 2B, legally and even morally, would you not? Frankly, All people with a annual income of either $1B, $10M, or $100K likely live in closer and better quality of life than some medieval king. I'm thankful for our times.
flashman 7y ago
Here's the view I subscribe to: "Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day." (https://twitter.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888 https://twitter.com/Merman_Melville/status/10885276937573498...)
csomar 7y ago
$20m is not really that much. You can spend that buying a new nice house in LA or a new penthouse in New York. If you have a large family (say 5) and your kids are adults/studying then $20m networth is not really that much to make them live the good life. (Not that I’m saying it’s a good thing to do so). $25m @ 10%/year (assuming your actively investing a have no real estate) can afford you a good baller life around US most expensive cities if you are single or just a couple.
collyw 7y ago
How about "because you are curious"? I was always tempted to do a reality TV show where you get outside and are famous for a few months then forgotten about, for the reason that you could hopefully experience what fame is like and hopefully be forgotten about if you didn't like it.

by cletus 7y ago

sergioro 7y ago

An extra reason for being famous (could be included in #2 of the above list) is to amplify your positive impact in the world. E.g. if Bezos wasn't famous i'd probably never learned about his business strategies (costumer first, risk taking & innovating, etc). IMO this is the best reason for being famous.

bshoemaker 7y ago
Yep. This seems like the obvious one to me.
airocker 7y ago
Bezos possibly does not want all consumers to know his name or he would have named Amazon "bezos" much like "ford". --bezos fan
- graeme 7y ago
  Ford motors. It was still a descriptive name. “Bezos everything store?” Harder to start. Amazon allowed flexibility. Can’t infer from choice.
  - airocker 7y ago
    Bezos Books! Sounds good to me.
    - graeme 7y ago
      You’re joking, right? It’s a great name for a bookstore. But you’d have to change it once it grew. And you’d retain the book brand longer than amazon did. The Ford motors name worked for generations because Ford stayed in motors.
  - bumby 7y ago
    Interesting tangential fact: Ford Motor Company was not Henry Ford's first automotive company. He previously started the (less descriptive) Henry Ford Company (his second automotive venture) which was bought and turned into the Cadillac brand.[1] Cadillac would eventually become General Motors. Combine that with the split between the Dodge brother investors, and all the Detroit "Big Three" manufacturers can be traced to Henry Ford. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford_Company [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- dmitriy_ko 7y ago
  Bezos named it Amazon so it would appear high in alphabetical order. In pre-search engine world of 1994 it was a big deal. New sites would be found by consumers through site directories.
tuesday20 7y ago
What is so special about customer first? I work for a small unknown company, my product managers and support team do “customer first”, I doubt any of them are reading Bezos biography or philosophy. This is just common sense and being nice to customers, that’s all. I hope people don’t learn his “work employees to death” and related philosophy ...

JKCalhoun 7y ago

4. Fame is an unavoidable byproduct of your pursuit to reach/help a larger audience.

jborichevskiy 7y ago

Good analysis, I think. > And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't. I found this Reddit comment [1] insightful on that front. Don't know to its validity but have seen it linked to in a few different places. > $1billion > I am going to exclude the $10b+ crowd, because they live a head-of-state life. But at $1b, life changes. You can buy anything. ANYTHING. In broad terms, this is what you can buy: > Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer. Mind blowing. The same is true with access to almost any Senator/Governor of a billionaires party (because in most cases, he is a significant donor). You meet on an occassional basis with heads-of-state and have real conversations with them. Which leads to ... influence ... (continued) [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_insanely_wealthy_people_buy_that_ordinary/cnnmca8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...

ghaff 7y ago
Even just in terms of money. $20 million invested is--depending upon your assumptions--something like $1 million/year ~risk-free without touching the principle. (OK, a diversified portfolio is probably going to do better than that but that gives something of a baseline.) Obviously that's a pretty nice passive income stream. But it's not really have a couple nice homes in prime locations, hire full-time assistants, fly private jets everywhere, etc. sort of money.
- bosswipe 7y ago
  $1 million/year without working is very rich. You could definitely have multiple houses and full time assistants. I have two houses and part-time assistants at an income of $300k. And most of my time is dedicated to work at someone else's company, owning all of your own time makes them much more wealthy than me.

acoustep 7y ago

Fourth reason: To be to be remembered after you’re gone.

m3kw9 7y ago
Thing is, nothing matters to you after you are gone. Unless we become ghosts that can observe. Unlikely
- filoleg 7y ago
  Just because the results of it are non-observable (fair assumption) to the person leaving some sort of legacy behind them, doesn’t mean that doing so isn’t valuable to them. It is the satisfaction you get while still living, knowing that after you are gone, some (hopefully positive) remnants of you will still live on.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Thought exercise: A malicious but trustworthy djinn appears to you. He tells you that one minute after your death, he's going to release magically faked evidence that you were a violent pedophilie. All of your remaining friends and family will believe this, and the case will be so bad that your name will become associated around the world for the sheer heinousness and reprehensibility of the things you supposedly did. However the djinn is willing to bind himself to not doing this, but you have to pay him $1 right now. If "nothing matters after you are gone", then you wouldn't even be willing to pay $1 to avoid this scenario.
  - shuckles 7y ago
    While I’m alive, I would gladly pay $1 if it would avoid a traumatic experience for my friends and family (or even a stranger). I don’t see how this hypothetical changes that. In particular, it’s not about the memory of me, it’s about how that memory affects the lives of those who might care about me.
    - dcolkitt 7y ago

JeremyNT 7y ago

> And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't. At $20m you can shape your own world, and your family's. But at $2bn you can change society. You can buy a lot of influence both by directly spending the cash to accomplish goals and by bribing politicians to act on your behalf.

throw18374 7y ago

Isn’t it possible to become a billionaire without anyone knowing? What if you just get there quietly through private investment? Not a billion, but I’ve built up a decent chunk myself and nobody seems to know or even suspect that about me. Nobody begs me for anything more than spare change, no sycophants, nobody trying to impress me. Marketing for luxury goods doesn’t even reach me. I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades just through private investment, and there must be thousands of people doing the same. I imagine there are many more who have earned millions publicly, then sold their stake and went to a billion privately. So how does everyone find out about them?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tartoran 7y ago
Whats your endgoal? I was thinking the other day about fortune, wealth and becoming wealthy. I’d very much prefer to not pursue becoming wealthy and concentrate on a diferent goal. I don’t think I could change the world in a financial sense, I might as well contribute positively from a different angle that is not from a wealthy position. That’s why I am asking you what your endgoal is since you chose anonimity and not to flaunt your wealth. I suspect you don’t need any kind of validation or any other ego tickling so do you have an endgoal that you’d like to pursue through your acumulated wealth?
- throw18374 7y ago
  I plan on following in Warren Buffett’s footsteps. Without his influence, I would be working the graveyard shift at a gas station right now. End goal career-wise is to amass as much wealth as possible by giving smart and capable people a path to building new things that benefit everyone, and then direct that amassed wealth toward the betterment of humanity before I die. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that. I actually think most philanthropic organizations do more harm than good. I think an effective non-profit would probably look like a boring faceless middleman, affecting positive change by influencing capitalistic markets to serve the underserved. By serve I mean serve, not provide goods to. I also have my own idea of what it means to better humanity. I think there are better ways to feed and shelter people than feeding and sheltering them. Whatever I do, it’ll probably be really boring, won’t provide for any photo ops, and there’s a good chance it might even seem pointless and ineffective to most people.

nathanvanfleet 7y ago

My understanding of the question of "why want to be a billionaire" is that it ultimately comes down to the circles of people you associate with. You might own a small company and might take in $1 million in income a year. Great. Well if your friends are making $5 million a year and have X Y Z you might want to push yourself to get there. Imagine being friends with Jeff Bezos, you wouldn't really ever feel like you're successful enough. It's probably the worst for people born into being rich, because they get born into that world and get friends and family who are already bought into being at whatever that level is. And they have to either reject it or try and get there.

leetcrew 7y ago
I think the same problem exists at pretty much all income levels. I'm having sort of the opposite problem currently. I make considerably more money than most of my friends, mainly just because I was a cs major and they chose other paths. I can afford to go to nice restaurants, bars, whatever, but my friends can't and I don't make quite enough to pay for all of them to go with me. I do find myself wondering what the point is sometimes. for now I'm happy to have people over and pay for pizza/beer, but it seems a little awkward.

philippoi 7y ago

> I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable. That's been the reality of Denmark's richest family (richest ever since CF Møller, head of Mærsk, died a few years ago). They've had numerous run-ins with people after a slice of their wealth. This lead them to keep as far from the public eye as possible (according to one piece I read) until they were the most talked about Danes of the season last year, as they tragically lost 3 of their 4 children in a bombing that was aimed to wipe them out. It's hard to imagine a worse scenario to survive as a parent or sibling. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/three-children-of-danish-billionaire-killed-in-sri-lanka-attacks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/three-children-of-danish-bil...

ChuckMcM 7y ago

It is a good analysis. There is no way to escape the envy and judgement from your "friends" even if you are just a "little" rich. A friend of mine, who is a former Googler, and keeps a "low key" lifestyle just tries to keep all the "triggers" that people use to recognize wealth out of their life because they value their friendships.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

The only wildcard in USA is lawyer fees in case of criminal charges, divorce and such. Make it $30-$50 mil, just in case and you'll live like a king without anyone knowing your networth, unless you want them to

Aperocky 7y ago

> Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. That's assuming that rich people don't want _more_ riches, which I would guess to be not true in more cases than not. 20M isn't quality of life wise too different from 2B, but if you got the chance to get 2B, legally and even morally, would you not? Frankly, All people with a annual income of either $1B, $10M, or $100K likely live in closer and better quality of life than some medieval king. I'm thankful for our times.

flashman 7y ago

Here's the view I subscribe to: "Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day." (https://twitter.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888 https://twitter.com/Merman_Melville/status/10885276937573498...)

csomar 7y ago

$20m is not really that much. You can spend that buying a new nice house in LA or a new penthouse in New York. If you have a large family (say 5) and your kids are adults/studying then $20m networth is not really that much to make them live the good life. (Not that I’m saying it’s a good thing to do so). $25m @ 10%/year (assuming your actively investing a have no real estate) can afford you a good baller life around US most expensive cities if you are single or just a couple.

collyw 7y ago

How about "because you are curious"? I was always tempted to do a reality TV show where you get outside and are famous for a few months then forgotten about, for the reason that you could hopefully experience what fame is like and hopefully be forgotten about if you didn't like it.