The “b” word
Is billionaire a dirty word?
When I turned 30, I set four goals for the decade, all centered on creation (compared to the goals of my 20s, which were all centered on exploration). I want to create an enduring brand (a company of consequence), a family (defined as getting married and raising, if not necessarily birthing, children), a published book, and financial independence.
I defined financial independence as four million dollars in the bank. I wanted to hit 30 countries by 30 (which I did, with a grace year for the pandemic), so it felt poetic to set the goal of a $4M net worth by 40. The math was simple. With $4M in cash, at a three percent interest rate, I could earn $120,000 in interest a year. In other words, I was guaranteed a $10,000 a month salary for the rest of my life. I never had to work for money again.
I feel like I’ve had so many ideas for things, like worker-owned nail salons or new Broadway musicals, that I think should exist in the world, but are not going to pay my bills until years after inception, if at all, so separating how I invest my time from the requirement to earn an income feels like true freedom.
I was recently listening to The Secret on audiobook (thank you, New York Public Library!), and it mentioned that the universe knows no size. Manifesting $1 is the same effort as manifesting $1,000,000. It made me wonder — why was I setting my floor for financial independence as my goal? What if I wished for *gasp* a BILLION dollars?
I feel like the past few years have been a healing process with my relationship with wealth. In the wake of the pandemic, I saw greed literally rob people of their lives. While building a worker cooperative, I was in leftist spaces that demonized wealth accumulation and even my business education.
Yet, the fact remains that cooperatives and other social justice projects are often reliant on rich people or their foundations for donations and investments. The New York Times published a profile on Ownership Works last week. This non-profit is dedicated to advancing employee ownership through movement building and hands-on guidance among institutional investors, namely private equity firms. It was founded by Pete Stavros, KKR Co-Head of Americas Private Equity, with $10 million of his own money. That sounds amazing — being able to conceive an idea and bring it to life with your own investment, rather than having to kneel at the feet of foundation program officers.
I’ve since developed a more nuanced view of wealth, namely that wealth in and of itself is not evil, but it matters how you make it, and it matters how you spend it. So firstly, let’s talk about how you make it. I personally love looking to billionaires in the arts, because it’s wealth generated from creation and expression, rather than arbitrage and exploitation. On Instagram, I saw an account highlighting that Taylor Swift was now officially a billionaire with the caption, “normally it’s eat the rich but sometimes…the rich ate.” Taylor made her money writing and performing songs that spoke to the human experience. I’m all for her getting her bag.
Taylor is also a role model in how she spends her wealth. In August, Forbes revealed that Swift gave bonuses of more than $55 million to those working on her Eras tour, including dancers, riggers, sound technicians, and truckers. Many of those bonuses topped $100,000 (and all came with a handwritten note). Deepak Chopra in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success shares that,
“Money is like blood; it must flow. Because your body and your mind and the universe are in constant and dynamic exchange, stopping the circulation of energy is like stopping the flow of blood. Whenever blood stops flowing, it begins to clot, to coagulate, to stagnate. That is why you must give and receive in order to keep wealth and affluence–or anything you want in life–circulating in your life.”
When wealth is stagnant in trusts or index funds or sunk into status assets like boats and second homes, it loses its meaning. When it is reinvested into manifesting dreams for the world held by yourself and others, it assumes meaning.
Last year, my husband and I did a Southern road trip. My favorite stop was in Montgomery, Alabama. While there, we went to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Both were stunning testaments to racial terrorism and a powerful call for social justice. The brainchild of one of my role models, Bryan Stevenson, the museum and memorial cost $20 million to construct, raised from private foundations. Like Ownership Works, the museum and memorial are a testament to what money can give birth to when it is allowed to flow, to circulate into causes that change the conversation.
From Oprah to Sara Blakely of Spanx to Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani to Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, there are examples of billionaires who leverage the platform and independence afforded by that stratospheric amount of wealth to advance racial justice, women’s empowerment, employee ownership, environmental conservation, and other worthy causes.
The path to becoming an ethical billionaire is not straightforward. Staying grounded in gratitude and generosity is essential. Perhaps the healthiest mindset is to release rigid attachment to any monetary figure and allow wealth to emerge organically as a byproduct of a realized vision. My point is more so maybe billionaire isn’t necessarily a dirty word, and we should make efforts to not block our blessings.
