Getting rich quick will look as pointless as taking bodybuilding too seriously

[downsouth]

Nope, like this one.

I'm sure if you ask nicely they'll give you a discount on the helicopter.

http://www.yachtworld.com/boats/2003...in-Islands-(US)

Btw, $174 million! Those in the know reckon that it takes around 10% of the purchase price to run and maintain a mega yacht.

Why on earth would I want to downgrade to that little inflatable when I have this being built

http://uk.yachtworld.com/boats/2011/.../United-States

Just a little bit of loose change £ 334,230,558

[swamp]

That is, without doubt, the biggest pile of tosh I have read this year. I didn't even read to the end. In fact I don't want to dignify the article with any further comment.

[scooterscot]

Ma only goal is to have a period of absence from work every year so I can spend it with family and on study, 5 months a year at present. Beyond that as long as the spa membership continues and culture remains, I'm happy...

I'm sure there are people more well off than I that could never have such riches.

[Doggy Styles]

You don't have solid gold toilets already?

Pah, contractors these days ........

Mine fell through the floor it was so heavy. So I had it plumbed in to the lounge. Makes a nice centre-piece.

[Gonzo]

I'm pretty sure I could spend close to $1billion without getting to the point where I'm buying solid gold toilets and things that pointless.

You don't have solid gold toilets already?

Pah, contractors these days ........

[Churchill]

What, like a Titanic replica or something?

Nope, like this one.

I'm sure if you ask nicely they'll give you a discount on the helicopter.

http://www.yachtworld.com/boats/2003...in-Islands-(US)

Btw, $174 million! Those in the know reckon that it takes around 10% of the purchase price to run and maintain a mega yacht.

[chris79]

What, like a Titanic replica or something?

[bored]

What a load of bollocks.

[Churchill]

I'm pretty sure I could spend close to $1billion without getting to the point where I'm buying solid gold toilets and things that pointless. Beyond that though I don't know what I'd do with it, I have no ambitions to buy a football club or a large corporation...

You can easily spend $150 million plus on a boat...

$15 million a year to run it...

[d000hg]

I'm pretty sure I could spend close to $1billion without getting to the point where I'm buying solid gold toilets and things that pointless. Beyond that though I don't know what I'd do with it, I have no ambitions to buy a football club or a large corporation...

[Doggy Styles]

I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.

Daft sod. I wish he was right though. Less competition.

[Francko]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7808009.stm
Getting rich quick - and having much more money than you ever need - will look as pointless as taking bodybuilding too seriously, says Clive James.
This is my last broadcast until my next spell and I'm in a summing up mood. I have no New Year resolutions apart from the usual one about tidying my office in case the body of my missing cleaner is lying mummified under that pile of magazines.
But I do feel like making a New Year prediction. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit.
I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.
Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse.
Just before Christmas, as if the collapse of some of the world's relatively honest financial institutions had not already been unsettling enough, hedge fund boss Bernard Madoff was accused of swindling the world's smartest investors out of a grand total of $50bn.

How, it was asked, could the world's smartest investors have fallen for this character? The answer, surely, is that they were all like him. They thought they had found a way of making money out of nothing. Unfortunately for them, the ineffable Mr Madoff appeared to have found a way of making money out of nothing. All he allegedly had to do was tell them he had invented something called "a split conversion strategy" and they handed over their money.

But most of them had got their money the same way, by promising vast returns on money from other people who were trying to make money out of nothing.

Many profound articles were written by the financial experts to explain how the whole mad Madoff cycle had been generated, but the question that was never asked is the one that bears most closely on my theme. What was he going to do with $50bn?

Back at the start of this series, I raised the issue of what the multibillionaires who owned yachts were hoping to achieve (see The name's Bond in the Clive James archive, top right). At best, their ridiculous unarmed battleships, permanently parked in the teeming marina of the sort of city where the world's well-dressed dimwits gather to gamble at the casino, were described as floating palaces.
Bill Gates got to the point where he started to look for useful ways of giving some of his money away
What kind of numbskull wants a palace that floats, when he could just have a palace, out of whose front door he could stride with some confidence that he would not plunge face-first into the harbour? I was really asking a question about what you can do with too much money, and the answer was obvious: never enough.
How much money is too much? It's too much when you've already got all you could possibly need, and there's nothing to do with it any more except count it.
[....]

Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece. The free market will continue but any respect for the idea of free money is all over. If you've got it, flaunt it by all means, but if you haven't earned it, forget about it. There isn't going to be a change of consciousness, there's already been one, which is why I can be so confident when I predict it. Until next time.