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The one thing that is very obvious about money managers is that their self esteem and attitude is heavily dependent on how their performance chart looks each day.
He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.
I spoke to him a few hours after he did this. Technology stocks were collapsing, and a new pessimism had found its way into the heart of the miracle economy. All Clark said was, “I’ll be a billionaire again soon.” And then he returned to the serious business of programming his boat, and to the search for the new new thing.
How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?” Gates asked executives of America Online in early 1996.)
To spend any time at all with Clark you had to foreswear the usual conveniences that come with planning ahead:
A plan was merely a theory of how he might spend his day; at all times it clashed in his mind with half a dozen other theories.
He was not one of those people who can be sustained for long by other people’s fictions. He required his own.
The man chose his own path to madness, and it was the path not of the pessimist but of the utopian.
“On some fundamental level I’m astonished that any of it works.”
In 1998 the manager of Merrill Lynch’s fifteen thousand stock brokers, John Steffans, had called the Internet trading firms “a serious threat to America’s financial lives,” and assured his employees that Merrill Lynch would never do such a thing. The next year Merrill Lynch created an Internet trading department.
He’d even gone and paid twelve million dollars for a 35-bedroom, 32,000-square-foot mansion in Palm Beach, mainly, it seemed, so that he’d have a place to test his software.
Kleiner Perkins had just paid $25 million for a 33 percent stake in a new company called Google.com. Google.com consisted of a pair of Stanford graduate students who had a piece of software that might or might not make it easier to search the Internet.
“I just want to make more money than Larry Ellison. Then I’ll stop.”
Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction?
People who are unhappy with the way things are tend to remain unhappy even after they have changed them. The nature of their unhappiness is such that change does not slake it.
Poor places are slower to change than rich places; perhaps poor people are slower to change than rich people, too.
“Anything you tell me I can remember as long as I pay attention.”
“And you have to understand,” she said, “that when this happened, we were poor. I was ready to cook the cat.” I assumed this was a joke, and laughed. I assumed wrong. She had, in fact, been ready to cook the cat. The Netscape IPO had saved at least one life.
He was a good winner; poor losers often are.
