If you’re an entrepreneur, you would of course feel like this is a proposition with potential for growth. You see potential. Maybe even a scalable business. So you calculate the weight of a finger (about 50 grams), divide that by your weight (about 80 kilos, so 1600) and multiply that by a million, which brings you to a totally defendable but pretty amazing conclusion: your net-worth is now 1.6 billion.

The problem just before the dotcom bubble burst (and Tulip Mania in February 1637, and pretty much every financial crisis ever since) was that you can’t extrapolate stuff that easily: if you happen to find one rich-but-disturbed-individual who’s willing to buy one finger from you, that doesn’t mean they are also interested in the rest of your body. And it also doesn’t mean there’s a whole lot more rich-but-disturbed-individuals buying up body parts left and right.

In fact, you havent sold your finger yet, you’ve only had a discussion with one rich-but-disturbed-individual who mentioned a million for a finger. You might even have a memorandum of understanding, but unless the money is in the bank, you’d be ill advised to start spending your million.

Yet, that’s a mistake repeated many times over by people smarter than you and me throughout history and all over the world. People fund startups, or sell companies, or get loans, or crash financial markets, because they love to extrapolate, and any spreadsheet will help them prove they’re right.

I personally experienced an example of this when I sold my first company, and found myself sitting on 660.000 shares that were selling for $20 a piece when I received them (that’s a net worth of 13.2 fingers). Unfortunately my shares were held in escrow and there was nothing I could do except watch them decline in value day by day. By the time my lockup expired, they were down to 50 cents per share (0.33 fingers, so roughly one phalanx on the capitalist finger scale).

The dotcom bubble had burst and I wanted to cash out, so I called my banker, and took only some delight in finally being able to shout into my telephone: “sell them all!”

I don’t think banker saw the humor in that, or he hid it well because he knew he had some bad news. His reply: “to whom?”

Turns out the volume of shares sold and bought every day for my company was somewhere between 10.000 and 15.000 shares. Over the course of a year, every time I tried to sell a few thousand of them, it would lower the share price for the whole company.

Now, I’m not in the habit of defending billionaires, and I’m very much in favor of tax reform, but I also cringe when I see people talk about rich people and how easy it would be to distribute their wealth.

The GOAT version of this is this tweet by Mekita Rivas, posted on march 3, 2020:

Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over. I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for most people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.

Just in case you’re wondering how wrong the math is: the result would not be $1 million per person but rather $1.53. She was only off by a factor of 650.000. And if you feel like I’m stating the obvious, maybe watch how the seemingly not-too-dumb people at MSNBC covered it:

Now, Mekita Rivas knows how to do math and didn’t really believe that 500 million divided by 327 million equaled 1 million per person. Her tweet was just a casual tweet, and the math amounted to not much more than a typo. Unfortunately, the concept seems persuasive and resilient. I still meet startups who defend outrageous valuations simply because they extrapolated a variable that probably isn’t really extrapolatable. This tendency to confuse a single datapoint for a scalable reality reminds me of a joke I heard as a kid.

A man pulls up to a gas station and walks over to the attendant. “Hey,” he says, “could I get just a few drops of gasoline? I need them for my lighter.”

The attendant raises an eyebrow. “A few drops? Sure.”

“How much do I owe you for that?” the man asks.

“Oh, nothing,” the attendant says. “I don’t charge for drops.”

The man nods slowly, glances back at his car, then opens the fuel cap. “Well then…” he says, stepping aside. “Start dripping — I’ll take a full tank.”

I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t a knee-slapper of a joke. It stuck with me not because it was funny, but because as a kid it taught me a lesson about scalability and its limits.

It’s capitalism in a nutshell: a seemingly clever request, an exploitable loophole in logic, the belief that if something’s free once, it must scale indefinitely.

So, who’s in the market for a finger or two?

According to Newsweek, the cost of the wedding ceremony was estimated to be between $47 million and $56 million. This seems like an outrageous number by any standard, unless you take Bezos’ standard of living into account, and then it turns out to be a meager 0.0193 to 0.0230 percent of his estimated $244 billion net worth.

Jeff spending $50 million on his wedding is like you or me spending $12 on our wedding.

It isn’t easy to put anything in perspective when we’re comparing apples to billions. Still, the consensus online seems to be that it's morally repulsive to spend this much money, even if it's a fraction of your wealth, on a wedding while people all over the world are living in poverty.

I understand the sentiment, but I think there’s a case to be made for the opposite position. Namely, that Bezos spending tens of millions on a lavish party is one of the first socially and financially responsible things he's done in a while.

Compared to underpaying his line workers to a point where they can’t take toilet breaks and have to sleep in their vans, overpaying wedding planners, hotels, private jet companies, and flower girls feels to me like a refreshing turn of events.

It is a weird line of logic, from relatively poor people towards rich people, I've never understood. Society generally dislikes the rich, and for good reason. Not a lot of rich people get rich by working hard, treating their employees with respect, and paying them a reasonable living wage.

The majority of fortunes are inherited. To be more precise, 30 to 40% of the world’s wealthiest people have inherited their wealth.

The rest is semi-self-made, and has earned their money in fashion, food and beverage, or the tech sector, and it is beyond the scope of my story to explain which ones have made their money ethically and fairly. But the point is: rich people aren’t contributing fairly to a better world, and we’ve seen the richest people get disproportionately richer in the past few decades while poverty is on the rise. Something feels off, and the online masses voice this feeling of discomfort.

Now, I think it’s reasonable to lobby and even fight (but let's not literally eat the rich) for an economic system that creates a more equal playing field. I’m fine with rich people, and consider myself, and you, one of them. If you (Yes, you, the reader) have food in your fridge, clothes to wear, a home and a place to sleep, you're among the top 25% richest people in the world. If you’re even wealthier and have cash in your wallet, and can afford to go on holiday this year, you are among 18% of the world’s richest people. The problem is that the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the world are increasing their wealth exponentially compared to the bottom 50%. To be exact, of all the wealth accumulated in the past decade, about 65% of that wealth went to the top 1% and less than 2% of all that wealth went to the bottom 50%. It’s an obscene and unethical difference in wealth distribution that shows no sign of stopping.

Back to Bezos’ $56 million wedding. Why the outrage? Is spending millions on a party while underpaying your workers unethical? Well, definitely, but this isn’t a zero-sum game, and one doesn’t exclude the other. Yes, Amazon should pay its workers a fair(er) living wage and explain to its shareholders that building a healthy company in a healthy society where people can afford housing and healthcare and not live on the street would benefit everybody in the long run. A healthy society with a larger segment of people with disposable income means more potential happy customers.

But apart from that, society also has more to gain from people spending money than from having them sit on their money. I learned this one day when I was having lunch with a banker in London. Now I realize that some people hate bankers even more than rich people, but bear with me for a moment. At one moment, a Bentley parked right in front of our noses, and I was just appalled by the sheer audacity. I complained out loud and questioned how we can justify living in a world where some people are homeless and other people are driving Bentleys. The banker, always inclined and happy to defend the wealthy, had an answer ready:

“Warren Buffett has been driving the same old car for 30 years. That’s not noble. It just means he’s not an active participant in the economy.”

When someone buys a Bentley, they’re not just paying for a car. They’re funding the steelworker, the leather supplier, the factory janitor, and the mechanic who’ll service it years from now. That one transaction activates an entire web of livelihoods, stretching from luxury showrooms to industrial towns. Warren Buffett is applauded for leading a frugal life, driving his $50k Cadillac for nearly a decade. Still, he’d have a more positive effect on the economy if he had bought a Maserati, Bentley, and Rolls-Royce every other year and totaled a few of them for good measure.

We should actively encourage wealthy people to spend more of their money. Of the $50 million Bezos spent in Venice, I’m assuming the majority went into the local economy. Local flowers, local security, local party venues and hotels, local cabs, buses, and limousine drivers, local restaurants, and food and beverages. Even the 95 private jets that flew to Venice had to pay for landing fees and refueling costs, and the pilots and other staff had to stay at a local hotel and eat in local restaurants. There were maybe 250 guests at the wedding, but these are the people who bring personal assistants, bodyguards, and managers with them. If we estimate the total number, we get closer to 1500 people. The direct impact of those tourists averages at $2400 per day. The indirect effect, however, can be multiplied by four, which means that the positive economic impact of that party, besides Bezos’ $50 million investment, would be another $14 million for Venice and its inhabitants. If it were up to me, Bezos would throw a lot more parties for a lot more people in a bunch of other places. Spread that money around. Make it rain!

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There’s also always a chance of the happy couple getting bored with each other in a few years, and then they’ll be able to organize another party, this time to celebrate the divorce. Hopefully, they will marry without a prenup, and then his future ex-wife can take half of Bezos's money and donate the majority of it to charity. I'm not just making that up. Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle, received $36 billion after the divorce and has since donated $16 billion to charity. I guess that’s an even more efficient way to distribute wealth than a $50 million wedding.

But we’ve got to start somewhere. And complaining about rich people spending their money is not the right step towards distributing wealth. We should do the opposite: let rich people throw more parties, with more attendees, in more places around the world. Have them spend all their money on it. Make their money trickle down to the rest of us in a torrent of stale champagne laced with confetti, crumpled banknotes and shattered pearl necklaces.