Larry and Sergey: a valediction

Photographer: “How ’bout we do the shoot in a hot tub?”

Larry and Sergey: “Sure!”

Never such innocence again.

Can billionaires be tragic figures? Lear must have been worth a billion or two, in today’s dollars. And surely the family fortunes of Hamlet and Macbeth crossed the magical ten-figure line. I’d go so far as to suggest that, these days, you have to be a billionaire to be a tragic figure. The most the rest of us can aspire to is pathos, our woes memorialized by a Crying Face emoji.

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