The Rich Douchebag’s Approach to Basic Income

I don’t give a shit about poor people. And I don’t just mean the people I step over on the street — the ones sleeping in doorways, stinking like piss and rum and vomit. I mean you. I don’t give a shit about you. If you trade your time for money and use that money to pay rent and buy clothes for your kids, you’re poor, and I don’t give a shit about you.

It’s not just because I’m rich. And I am rich. Rich as fuck. I grew up in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue when I wasn’t summering in the Hamptons when I wasn’t dropping $30k for a night on some billionaire’s Caribbean island when I wasn’t firing off spit-soaked wads of paper at my elementary school teacher — a public school teacher because my parents wanted me to know how good I had it… nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you. I went to an expensive-as-shit private school.

We don’t give a shit about poor people because it’s bad for us. By us I mean the rich, the wealthy, the 1% (really we’re the 0.1%, but 1% is more poetic). See, we don’t have to earn our wealth. We were born with it. We just manage it, which is easy. Easy as fuck. So long as you don’t give a shit about how you manage it. The key is to stay diversified. The hardest thing about staying diversified when you’re rich as fuck is finding enough things to be diverse. Perhaps a few of the real 1% can maintain their meager fortunes investing in concentrated frozen orange juice and pork belly futures, but those of us at the top, the rich as fuck, we trade mostly in poor people.

You’d be surprised at how many ways there are to do this. Well, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be that surprised. We don’t buy stocks, we buy board seats — board seats that come with preferred shares that pay higher dividends when we “save the company” by laying off twenty-thousand poor shits. Layoffs caused by recessions that we engineered by duping idiots into thinking they could live the dream by buying tech stocks they didn’t understand, houses they couldn’t afford or handbags at 25% interest. Idiots that could be duped because we bought their congressman and made him vote to deregulate the fuck out of whatever industry we decided to run our scam through.

And then there’s venture capital. Venture capital is my absolute fucking favorite. I love venture capital because it takes advantage of the smart poor, the clever poor, the choke-down-another-100-hour-work-week-focus-till-their-eyes-bleed-ramen-eating-couch-sleeping-because-they-want-to-be-me poor. I spend thirty minutes listening to their spiel and write them a check and hop a private jet to Milan to fuck a super model. They spend three years and their next 10,000 waking hours killing themselves to get me a 10x (that’s 10 times my money) return. It’s fucking beautiful.

But it wasn’t perfect. Whenever one of these poor fucks would stumble upon some serendipitous lottery ticket — a gold mine, an oil well, an app that gets you laid, then they’d be rich as fuck. I mean, sure, I could usually fuck over their employees with arcane vesting rules or moratoriums on selling their company stock until after I popped the bubble, but the ramen eater with the matted hair still got rich as fuck. And that ate me up. That’s my fucking money you used. You should be making me more rich and thanking me for the opportunity to do so.

So one day I was sitting on my balcony, gazing out over Central Park, grinding my teeth trying to figure out how to undo this annoying reality, and a buddy of mine, a fellow rich-as-fucker, texted me an article on Basic Income. He wanted to get a misinformation game plan together so that it never got big enough to catch fire. I was halfway through the article, thinking of financing movies about families pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, or mobilizing talk radio hosts, or using my board seat at a major publisher to greenlight another entrepreneur biography, and it hit me square between the eyes. This was the answer to my problem. This was how I could keep those un-showered, hoodie-wearing pricks from getting rich off my fucking money.

The Power Law on Steroids

I may be a rich asshole, but I’m a well-educated, self-aware, rich asshole. If you’re making bank on venture capital, you’re using the power law. Fellow rich-as-fucker Peter Thiel taught a class on it. Basically, you want your best investment to make your nut for all your other investments. You invest in 10 companies, each of them having a reasonable chance of giving a 10x return. One of them pays off big, and everything else is fucking gravy.

If you look at history, most of the big names are rich-as-fuckers. There’s no examples of indentured servants discovering gravity or serfs writing The Divine Comedy. If you want to change the world, you need time to do it, and if you spend twelve hours a day grinding rye, you’re spending the rest of your time sleeping or banging your poor wife to make more poor people. There’s no time left to stretch out a canvas, let alone paint The Last Supper on it.

And that was my investment thesis: Stop the rat race and collect the spoils. I needed to invest in people who had a reasonable chance of a return multiple equal to the size of the investment pool. I’d give them the money they needed to live, but I’d keep all their economic output. But how could I identify reasonable investments? I came up with simple critera:

• Earning close to the Median Income The first thing I was looking for was competency. Showing up to work everyday and avoiding termination when one of my rounds of layoffs swept through was a good indicator of competence, not just at work, but also in paying their bills and managing their debt. The other thing a median income tells you is that they’re basically slaves to their job — they don’t have the capacity to earn any extra money like someone earning more, so it’s possible if you give them capacity, they will earn more. Finally, they have to work a lot. If they suddenly don’t have to work for money, they aren’t likely to stop working simply from inertia. So what will they work on instead? That brings me to my second criteria.
• Delusional I wanted people who believe there was a way out of the rat race they were stuck in. Of course, there isn’t, I wouldn’t be a seventh generation, trust fund, rich-as-fucker if there was, but I wanted people who believed there was. If they believed it, they were even more likely to work on their pipe dream regardless of the fact that I was going to be keeping any money they made on it. It was my extra insurance that they wouldn’t just sit around and get fat on my cash.

Armed with this thesis and these criteria, I decided to do a test run on ten people. I bought ten grad students (close-to-slavery rates, of course) and told them we were going to study Basic Income for two years. I was going to invest $1mm in 10 people, dispersed in $1000 checks on a weekly basis over two years. The subjects (who I call ‘whores’, more on that in a minute) could do whatever they wanted with the money, but any money that they made was mine.

I setup a shell corporation in the Caymans and linked it to a Swiss bank account that was registered with a merchant services company in Jersey (the island in the English channel, not America’s armpit). When my whores made their money, they had to take payment by credit card on readers my grad students gave them, or if they were collecting online, they had to link (through various intermediaries, of course) to the Swiss bank account. A few people tried to take cash under the table, but I hired some goons to find them and straighten them out. Nobody ever needed a second visit to use card readers.

As for the whores, I call them that because my top earner ended up being one. When my grad students found her, she was working sixty hours a week as a nurse, struggling to pay student loans and feed a kid she had with some guy who took off. She was giving hand jobs on the side for fifty bucks a go to buy groceries.

It turned out she really liked giving hand jobs, she got a thrill out of it. When she started getting my weekly stipend, she saved it for designer dresses and shoes. After a few months, she quit her job and spent four hours a day in the gym. Halfway through year one, she went from giving fifty-dollar hand jobs in the alley behind the hospital to sleeping with multi-millionaires (some of them friends of mine, some of them me) at the Four Seasons for $10k per night. She deposited just north of a million dollars into my account the first year. Three million the second year. All on a $100k investment — a 40x winner.

You bet your ass that I kept my pro-rata rights on her when she opened a brothel after the second year.

I hadn’t expected when I started this thing that I was basically going to find myself in the pimping business, but that’s basically what this is. So now I call all of my investments ‘whores’. At first it was behind their backs, but over time it’s become a face-to-face term of endearment.

That first experiment went great; better than I could have imagined. Out of 10 people, six returned at least a 2x, and only one of them ended up failing to break even. He was a brick layer who wanted to get into real estate speculation. I think he might have worked out, but a steel I-beam fell on him. Crushed him dead. So the ROI on my whores wasn’t perfect. Since then, I’ve been hedging my whores with life insurance policies.

The thing about venture capital and the power law, though, is that it doesn’t work so well when you invest in 100 companies, because it’s impossible to find 100 companies with a reasonable chance of giving a 100x return.

But during another brainstorming sesh sitting on my balcony, occasionally dropping a loogie on one of the plebs scurrying off to whatever wage-slave gig she was late for, I wondered if this concept wasn’t ripe for disruption. Perhaps there were more Newtons, more Dantes, more Henry Fords and Warren Buffets, all untapped because they couldn’t escape the grind. Maybe I could assemble a pool of 50,000 basic income whores, each with a reasonable shot of a 50,000x return. The idea seemed as crazy as all of the 10x investments I’d made. Maybe I could disrupt traditional investment thinking and put the power law on steroids.

50,000 Whores

50,000x is an insane multiple. To deliver a return like that, it takes an insane idea. So I had to alter my criteria a bit:

• Earning close to the Median Income Where they Live To find 50,000 people, I was going to have to look outside of Manhattan. In fact, I was planning on going international. Different places have different median incomes, so I localized the number, which also increased the pool of potential whores.
• Massively Delusional To get a 50,000x return, you need to introduce a significant change to the world. This takes several orders of magnitude more delusion than simply escaping the rat race. I needed some crazy fucking whores.

So I took the profits from the first experiment and setup an infrastructure. I hired more grad students, mixed in some accountants and a few qualified operations personnel, and we started the search. We scoured the world looking for deluded, middle-income whores. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think. Just like every village has an idiot, every village also has a pie-in-the-sky dreamer collecting trash for a living. Usually it’s the same person. I had my people infiltrate churches and mosques, charities and schools. The truly delusional people tend to earn their median income salary at places like these, and more often than not they’re working on creating more delusional people.

I also wasn’t about to dole out $5 billion of my own money. I made a dozen phone calls and raised it from some friends.

Then there was anonymity. If you’re rich as fuck, you’d prefer that people not know you’re rich as fuck. My forefathers learned this lesson the hard way during the French Revolution. And it’s hard to stay anonymous if you suddenly start giving no-strings money to a mass of people. So I set up a series of phony banks to manage the payments.

Finally, we didn’t normalize the $100,000 for the location. We just gave the same amount to everyone. Obviously, the $50k/yr went further in some places than others.

It took about six years, but I found and financed my fifty thousand whores. We found whores waitressing in Europe that wanted to end hunger, whores teaching in Africa that wanted to end corruption, whores working as mechanics in the Americas that wanted to end poverty, and assembly line whores in Asia that wanted to spread democracy. We financed thousands of novelists, musicians, actors, dancers and painters — all of them convinced they could eradicate suffering or fear or war with their art.

Profit

So how did it work out? It worked fucking great, of course. What’d you think I was just going to throw my money away on some humanitarian mission?

Here were some of my top earners:

• 10,000x A novelist in Germany who wrote a series of books about a race of aliens that came to earth and disguised themselves as children and assimilated into elementary schools where they learned to make friends and excelled at soccer. It was on best-seller lists for months and inspired several motion pictures and many, many lines of merchandise.
• 30,000x An entrepreneur in Vietnam who figured out how to desalinate water with graphene and fire. I think he sold out too soon.
• 60,000x A priest in Africa who armed his parishioners and protected them from warlords. More people came for protection, and more people meant more fighters. He ended up rallying most of the population of his country to his cause, dispelling the warlord dictator who was oppressing them. He considered stiffing me, but I told him about some friends who had helped bankrupt some neighboring countries, and we worked out a 10-year payment plan based on tax revenue and mineral extraction.

Something like 20,000 of the kooks ended up being just that, kooks. They spent two years spinning their wheels on a pipe dream that didn’t come close to panning out. But I don’t hate them too much. The fund ended up doing a 7x and I took my 20% and jumped a couple of spots up on the list of rich as fuckers.

My phone is ringing off the hook these days. Every rich as fuck person I know wants to invest in my next Basic Income fund. By 2061, 47% of all current jobs will be automated, and 25% of the work force will rely on funds like mine for sustenance. As it happens, that 25% is the same amount of corporate profits that will be invested in my Basic Income funds.

So who wants to be a whore now?

Author’s Note: Thanks for reading “The Rich Douchebag’s Approach to Basic Income”. If you’re curious about non-douchebag approaches to Basic Income, or just more Basic Income ideas in general, please read the Wikipedia article or Reddit’s Basic Income Wiki. The Basic Income sub-Reddit is also a great source of information and discussion.