It's not easy being a billionaire - By Michael Johnson

"Time, they would find, is a much more valuable commodity than money."
-- Dr. Wachtel


It's not easy being a billionaire

By Michael Johnson
April 2, 2008
Source

BORDEAUX, France: ASeattle billionaire I once worked for ran into money trouble a couple of years ago when his business went sour.

He had to sell his private island and get rid of his yacht (one of the world's largest) as he slid into relative poverty.

My former employer, a cell phone magnate, has now dropped off the bottom of the most recent Forbes magazine list of billionaires as he struggles to get by. He has only a few hundreds of millions left and he is not a happy man.

Despite the extraordinary wealth of this entrepreneur and others in his league, it never seems to bring them serenity. They know how fast it can be lost, and that makes them ask, "Why isn't enough really enough?"

Even custodians of old fortunes are plagued by this question. A consultant friend of mine who once advised Nelson Rockefeller remembers hearing him complain of his recurring bouts of insecurity.

Rockefeller's personal net worth was about $3 billion. Asked how much he would need in order to relax, Rocky paused briefly and took a stab: "Four billion ought to do it," he said.

The Rothschild dynasty had similar problems. On assignment for Business Week, I once met separately with the French, British and Swiss branches of the family. I was struck by the family bickering over how they had turned their large fortune into small fortunes.

A member of the Swiss branch of the family confided to me his utter disgust over his French relatives, who managed to lose money in French real estate. "To do this," he said, "you really have to try."

I suspect there is no such thing as having enough money. In fact, many of the super-rich agree that the more you have the more you worry about it. Their stories emerge in a great book, "Richistan," by Robert Frank.

Frank quotes one American entrepreneur identified only as George as saying he and the other billionaires (1,125 of them at last count by Forbes) are afflicted by a combination of greed and fear. "If people stay worried, it's part of what motivates them," George is quoted as saying. "We're always worried."

Certainly it's no longer enough to be a millionaire. The Forbes teams says there are more than 8 million Americans on that list, so what matters now is the billionaires list, if only as a spectator sport. Some of Microsoft's competitors enjoyed seeing Bill Gates get knocked off the top spot this year by the Omaha investor Warren Buffett ($62 billion) and Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim Helú ($60 billion). Gates is lagging in third place at $58 billion.

The billionaires are not only Americans. Indians, Russians and Chinese are emerging in growing numbers among the super-rich.

But with great riches can come great unease, according to people who have studied the psychology of wealth. The overriding problem is affluenza - nagging guilt about the chasm between the very rich and everybody else.

A second pitfall is a compulsion to continue to accumulate even more. Dr. Paul Wachtel, professor of psychology at City College and City Graduate Center of New York, examined this problem in his landmark paper, "Full Pockets, Empty Lives," in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Wachtel acknowledged that money can be a symbol of success, but he identifies envy and greed as the hidden drivers behind the yearning for more and more money.

"The pursuit of money and material goods as a central aim in life comes at a rather high price," he writes. Studies have shown that money plays "a strikingly small role" in a person's real happiness or well-being. In fact, intimacy and family life are often sacrificed in the name of providing for one's family.

And envy feeds the greed impulse, argues Wachtel: "We may want not just what others have but more than others have, or more for more's sake."

I spoke to Dr. Wachtel recently and asked him where the wealth culture was leading. People in the six-figure income range have trouble controlling the quest for more, he said: "They become slaves to supporting the material level they have gotten themselves into. It becomes a pleasureless treadmill."

He had some advice for the unhappy rich. "If the upper 5 percent of earners would work two-thirds as much, and earn two-thirds as much, their lives would be immeasurably richer," he said. "Time, they would find, is a much more valuable commodity than money."

Michael Johnson is a former Business Week writer who lives in Bordeaux.