You and your puny salary
You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 9, 2008
Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh Ambani, the fifth wealthiest man in the world.
Behold, you and your puny little life and your minuscule little salary and tiny little human skeleton are mere scraps, crumbs, dust mites on a dog when compared to this giant petrochemical stud. Forbes estimates Ambani's net worth at about $43 billion, below Bill Gates and Warren Buffett but above God and Shiva and most of the major planetary constellations, and his wealth is almost enough to power the entire Iraq war for a month. So you know it's a lot.
Of course it's all from petrochemicals. Of course it's all in Mumbai. Of course you've never heard of him or his company, Reliance Industries, because it's one of those nefarious megapower supercorporations that block out all life and own entire governments and hold presidents in their pockets and yank the levers that make the world spin and tilt and groan. Therefore plebes like us know as much about its true weight and influence as an army ant knows about a whirlpool galaxy.
Here's what you need to know about Ambani's new home: It is no home at all. It is actually a tower, 27 stories high, ultramodern gleaming glass and steel and completely unprecedented weirdness.
Oh yes, and here's the other thing: It is the world's first billion-dollar personal residence. Actually, $2 billion. Imagine the fanciest, most ridiculously overpampered, seriously egomaniacal hotel you can possibly think of, and dip it in solid gold. Then sprinkle it with diamonds and Bugatti Veyrons and the fine, tender pelts of a million baby seals. That's the parking garage.
Bill Gates' cute little 66,000 square-foot spread in Seattle? Oprah's lavishly bloviated $43 million palace in Montecito? Larry Ellison's $300 million orgy of land in Woodside and Malibu? Pshaw! Child's play. Barely enough to pay for the unicorn-skin hand towels stacked in the bathrooms of Ambani's shiny little stick in the ground.
Two billion dollars. This is not "money is no object." This is "money is the only object," so ostentatious and obscene it quickly flies past arrogance and absurdity and becomes this fascinating case study, a bizarre artifact of extreme capitalism, otherworldly and strange, like some sort of giant bioluminescent octopus that dominates the ocean floor and swallows sperm whales whole and tries to scare all the other little fishies but is still just, you know, a big ugly cephalopod.
So you stare at these photos and read the article's details and you start getting dizzy from the sheer scale of it all, from the lack of perspective and coherence and reality, as you realize just one of the sofas on just one of the floors of Ambani's tower costs what you make in an entire year, and your head begins to spin and the nausea begins to swell until you close the damnable magazine and slam yourself back to the reality, shaking and mumbling, yes, well, but is there anything at all resembling happiness there?
It's the thing you have to ask, lest you go just a little insane: Really, isn't a life like Ambani's just a bit silly, a glittery charade, full of backslapping and sly business deals and giant inheritances, and do you really want that? Really? Here is your billion dollars to spend on your new home. Fun! For about a week. Then it's all, OK, so I can line my nine pools in solid Venetian marble and own 40,000 plasma TVs and have one entire floor dedicated to my taxidermied giraffe collection. Yawn.
It all makes delightful contrast to the recent, awkwardly titillating article in this very newspaper that revealed the annual salaries of various Bay Area workers, from the head of the University of California school system ($591K) to the San Francisco police chief ($250K) to all those surprisingly well-paid firefighters (well over $200K), on down to the guy who runs the city's pothole-filling crew (over $100K and absolutely worth every penny because oh my God, potholes), and on back up to one of the pitchers for the Giants, Barry Zito, who rakes in a cool $14 million per season because, well, he's a pro athlete. They're supposed to be caricatures of real humans.
So, you get to compare and contrast. You get to look up and down and sidelong, from Ambani to the local police lieutenant to your local barista and then down at your own paycheck, or trust fund, or stock portfolio, or complete lack thereof, and wonder how you fit in and what it all means, and with any luck you quickly realize the futility and the danger of measuring yourself in this way because, well, what then? Do you measure your success, your life against Ambani? Against the guy who administers the San Francisco Health Department? The average American? Or how about the average citizen of India, Ambani's homeland?
Because here is the bottom line, same as it ever was: No matter what you do in life and no matter where you go and how much you make and how many harems of strippers you can afford to have standing by, there's always someone who makes and does and lives far more exotically and expensively and ridiculously than you. I mean, obviously.
And at the same time, if you're reading this column right now with your $5 latte and your clean running water and functioning limbs and intact teeth, you can rest assured that there are roughly 3 billion people on the planet who subsist on about a dollar a month who see you just about exactly as you see Ambani. Which is to say: pampered and wealthy in the extreme.
And then you realize, of course, that money is no measure of anything that truly matters, really. It's merely another form of energy, a nice expression of ego, either all-consuming and destructive or capable of tremendous joy and good. Often, it's both.
And while dumping $2 billion on a single home is certainly a curious and perhaps slightly sad ethical choice — despite how it is, of course, the ultimate expression of capitalist ego — to me, tattooing a dollar sign anywhere on your life pretty much guarantees you a life lived on Macbethian terms: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and diamond-crusted toilet seats, signifying nothing.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing.
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