Counting to a Billion

Last week, Forbes published its list of the richest people in the world. This list, in the suggestive words of Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swan, is “the big-banana index—simple, primal, direct”—a purely objective measure of who has more money than whom. But it’s more than that too. In their book about the Forbes 400, which ranks the richest Americans, the two financial journalists go on to describe it as “a powerful argument—and sometimes a dream—about the social value of wealth.”

There are a few problems with this narrative. Like the numbers, which are a lot more subjective than Forbes lets on. I know this because I spent two years working on a similar list, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which was created by two Forbes alums, Matt Miller and Pete Newcomb.

Calculating someone’s net worth is a mix of reporting, math, intuition, and unwritten tradition, because very few are willing to turn over anything so precise as bank statements or tax returns. And without access to these, some information is simply unknowable. The easy part is tallying up shares in companies that trade on the stock market. It’s a matter of public record that Warren Buffett owns nearly three hundred and ten thousand shares of Class A Berkshire Hathaway shares, and that each of these shares trades for $205,000. Multiply the two numbers and you get $63 billion. Most of a typical billionaire’s net worth exists only on paper, but I also spoke to analysts who could put a value on assets in the physical world—like Ralph Lauren’s $250 million classic-car collection, or Steve Cohen’s art. The task of pegging someone’s holdings in cash and stocks and bonds is trickier; Bloomberg created a calculator to simulate the appreciation of an imaginary portfolio, and if we changed one allocation, the net worth could fluctuate by tens or hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.

Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, an assemblage of old cypress planks and corrugated steel covered in hand-painted signs, sits on the edge of a cotton field outside of Merigold, Mississippi. Willie “Po’ Monkey” Seaberry, now in his mid-seventies, still farms the fields that surround it, and lives in a room in the back. He doesn’t own the fields, or the house, though on Thursday nights, when he opens its doors to the public for a $5 cover charge, it’s easy to think otherwise. On a suffocating July night, Seaberry, nearly six feet tall and solidly built, perched inside the door of his house. Dressed in suspenders, a magenta dress shirt, and a black tie, he greeted the guests who came to listen to blues and soul music—locals from Cleveland and Mound Bayou, and Teach-for-America volunteers, and teachers on a professional development trip—though he didn’t so much talk to his guests as nod approvingly while chewing on an unlit cigar.

Run by Seaberry since 1963, Po’ Monkey’s is one of the last of the Mississippi juke joints (derived from a Gullah word, “jook” or “joog,” meaning disorderly) that once peppered the cotton fields and plantations of the Delta region. These roadside barrelhouses offered rural blacks a place to drink, dance, hear live music, and gamble, at a time when they were forbidden from patronizing white establishments. Traditionally housed in shacks like Seaberry’s, juke joints flourished in the South before World War I, but the Great Migration began a process of significant decline. Seaberry is one of the last in a line of sharecroppers, and today much of the land in the Delta has been given over to agribusiness: Monsanto and Dupont signs mark the fields of corn and soybeans along Highway 61, while fast-food chains and Walmarts have pulled commerce away from downtowns and closer to the highways.

If this sound of this song makes you feel old it means you probably are. Sorry/enjoy.

★★★ Clear light came in around the shades, but not for long before clouds cut it off. The landscape was maximally colorless, dried and faded by the full length of winter. One yellow crocus poked out of the bank above the driveway, keeping its brightness to itself, while pale snowdrops filled the rest of the slope. A hawk, spotty and juvenile in its plumage, chased a chickadee fruitlessly around and around the holly that was the only green thing standing. The scenery by the Susquehanna lay under a miasma, some sort of gray fog or haze, as if the dullness were leaching out of the scenery into the air. The huge stainless steel Virgin Mary on the west bank of the Delaware had lost all its usual shine till it looked like coarse white-and-black marble. Just over the bridge, though, the sun suddenly came through. Clouds got smaller and sparser, against wider and wider expanse of blue. Deep warm tones wakened in the rust brown of highway overpasses and sign poles. The reflective strips on the rest stop sign threw back rainbows. Manhattan was attended by only tiny clouds, like blimps. Sun poured into the glass buildings on the West Side and glimmered down in among the ramps and underpasses, where the tunnel emptied into the city.

Maybe you’ve had this experience: You throw a bay leaf into a broth, and it doesn’t do anything. Then you throw the rest of the bay leaves you bought into the broth, too, because you only bought them for this, and you’ll be damned if you don’t taste a bay leaf, and they don’t do anything, either. What could be the cause of this? I’ll tell you. Bay leaves are bullshit.

What does a bay leaf taste like? Nothing. What does a bay leaf smell like? Nothing. What does a bay leaf look like? A leaf. How does a bay leaf behave? It behaves as a leaf would, if you took a leaf from the tree outside of your apartment building and put it into your soup. People say, “Boil a bay leaf in some water and then taste the water if you want to know what a bay leaf tastes like.”

No.

In search of confirmation, as well as freedom to ignore the bay leaf portion of future recipes I might encounter, I reached out to a number of chefs and asked them, “Are bay leaves bullshit?”

It’s hard to fathom living in a world where one cannot witness for himself the downfall of an American icon completed by a grainy, thirty-second video of them being absolutely terrible at sex, but that is what’s at stake in the Gawker-Hogan trial.

Every Monday I’m like, “Ugh, the new week, let’s just keep our heads down and quietly try to get through it,” and every Friday I’m like, “Thank God, the week is ending, let’s just keep our heads down and quietly try to get out of it,” and then the two days off (really just one day if you factor in exactly how much of those 48 hours Sunday dread eats away) barrel by and you’re back here hoping I have something better to tell you than, “Ugh, the new week, let’s just keep our heads down and quietly try to get through it.” (You’re putting A LOT OF PRESSURE ON ME, and I’m not sure it’s fair.) But what’s the point of it all? What are we doing to ourselves with this five-days-of-agony/two-days-of-slightly-less-agony wheel we find ourselves running? How could it possibly be worth it? I don’t know. I can’t think of a solution. Better minds than mine have tried and failed. All I can tell you is this: Spring is coming. Spring is so close you can almost feel it on your skin when you walk out in the air. Let’s just get to spring and then we’ll figure it out together, okay? Until then keep your heads down and quietly try to get through it. We’ll let Mitski do our shouting for us.