Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

Wall Street is even simpler than religion. Your entire worth as a human is defined by one number: the compensation number your boss tells you at the end of the year. Pay on Wall Street works as follows: your base salary is actually quite modest, but your “bonus” is where the real money is. That bonus is completely discretionary, and can vary anywhere from zero to a multiple of your base salary. So, come mid-December, everyone on the desk lines up outside the partner’s office, like the Communion line at Christmas Mass, and awaits his or her little crumb off the big Wall Street table. An entire year’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears comes down to that one moment. And the entire New York economy marches to the beat of that bonus drum. Without that number, your privileged place in the New York hierarchy goes away. Gone is the house in the Hamptons. Gone is the duplex on the Upper West Side. Gone is your kid’s $30,000 preschool. And that’s why Wall Street has that roach-motel quality: people check in, but rarely check out. By the time you’ve been through a couple of bonus cycles and seen that wad of cash hit your bank account in mid-January, you can’t imagine a life without it—which is exactly how the senior management at the Wall Street banks like it. If Wall Street investment bankers were dogs, they would flaunt their expensive collars and leashes as marks of status, not realizing their true purpose. My collar was tiny in the scheme of things, but enough to rub my neck raw.