THE CAPITALIST

"Hey," he says. "Can you figure out this thing with my phone? The damn internet isn't working on it."

I say "sure" and ask to take a look at it. Immediately, I see that "airplane mode" is on. I show him how to turn it off.

He thanks me, then yells at his personal assistant, who's seated across the room. "HEY, REMEMBER THAT ABOUT PLANE MODE. YOU GOTTA FIX THIS SHIT FOR ME NEXT TIME BECAUSE I'M ABOUT TO FORGET IT RIGHT NOW."

He settles, then, into his Eames lounge chair, and begins his monologue.

In America, any retard can make a million bucks. The only thing you need is several million dollars to get you started.

Hey, don't look at me like that. It's true. My dad was a certified moron, but he invested a bunch of other peoples' money into real estate on the east coast in the early 80s. Everybody who did that got rich.

It doesn't take a genius to ride an economic wave. Just pure, dumb luck.

A lot of people say they've never worked a day in their life, and usually that just means that they love what they do. I'm here to tell you that when I say I've never worked a day in my life, I mean it literally. I am the laziest motherfucker alive.

I was born rich. My dad paid for me to cheat my way through college. And then he gave me a nice big pile of money on the day I graduated. He turned over the keys to one of his bank accounts, the same way some dads buy their kid a new car. It had $10 million in. I don't know where the money in that account came from, and I never asked. I assume, of course, that he laundered it somehow so he wouldn't have to pay taxes on it when transferring it to me.

You're hating this, I can tell. Well you'll hate what I did next even more: I took that money and I turned it into more money.

Now, braindead simpletons from Dumbfuck, Iowa or wherever might hear that and go, "Wow, he must be good with money!"

No. I'm just as dumb as my dad was. And unlike him, I'm not even lucky.

Seriously, I mean it. I never once called a big crash or a big jump in the market. I always ignored that stuff. My investment strategy was simple. When I got my hands on that $10 million, it was 1994. That year, the rate of return on 30 year treasury bonds hovered around 7-ish percent. A huge annual return compared to what those things were paying out during the 2000s and 2010s. But people didn't know how good of a deal it would become.

I was a huge pussy, so I took half of my $10 million from daddy and I put it straight into 30-year bonds. Locked 'em in at 7.4%. So from then on out, the federal government sent me a check, twice a year, for about $185,000. My annual income was locked in, right then and there, at $370,000 per year. So that's what I lived off of. Since my dad had also given me a nice apartment in Atlantic City, it was more than enough to get me around.

The other $5 million I took and invested in real estate. Or, rather, I gave that money to one of my dad's flunkies, who invested it in real estate for me.

My investment strategy was not sophisticated. I had one mode: buy real estate, rent it out to people, and use the proceeds to buy more real estate. It didn't matter if the market was up or down. I just bought. When I could get loans from banks on good terms, I'd take them and put that into more real estate.

I cannot stress this enough: I am not smart with money. I never have figured out what the fuck a "diversified portfolio" was supposed to mean. So when I felt that I had to buy stocks, I just bought the S&P 500. I'd get my monthly checks in from my renters, and after paying off my debts and obligations, I'd put the remainder straight into either more real estate or my old friend Standard & Poor's. What a crazy name for an ETF, right? "Poor's!" (Laughs)

I'll admit, I did get a little bit lucky once. I just so happened to liquidated a lot of my real estate in 2006. I was cash-rich all through the big '07–'08 recession, so I was ready to roll and snatch up dirt cheap property by the time housing prices bottomed out in 2009.

Other than that one period, I'd never had a bunch of liquid money laying around. My money was locked up in property, and I was living mostly off of the payouts from my treasury bonds. So I never really felt "rich," you know? Certainly not poor. Obviously not middle class.

But I was no Bill Gates, you know.

Nonetheless, by the middle of the 2020s, I'd turned that original $10 million that my dad left me into about $50 million. And when I found out about the replicators, I managed to turn that $50 million into even more money.

How's that?

Basically, I heard rumors about the reps a couple of weeks before most people did.

I party with some guys in federal law enforcement, and they were whispering about a machine that was spreading like a virus. They said it could literally print money. Like it was some kind of magical device from Star Wars or whatever.

Star Trek.

Yeah, Guardians of the Galaxy, that's what I said.

Anyway, my buddy was with me when we heard about the reps for the first time, and he was like, "Yo, I'm gonna short-sell the S&P 500." I had no idea how that shit worked, so I just gave him a bunch of my money and told him to do the same for me. We made $100 million each between the two of us during that week when the market was crashing. Absolutely made out like bandits buying "puts" or whatever those fuckin' things are called. Most people lost. We won big.

I must say, you've got a much more flippant perspective on money than most people.

Look, I know how this all sounds. I'm hateable. Born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Never done anything to deserve my wealth. I get it. But I'm not ashamed of it.

You gotta love the hand you're dealt, huh?