Spitballing

My Exit Strategy

First a story…

A while ago someone sent a private jet to take me somewhere.¹ Yeah, not naming names here, but while aboard I casually picked up a glossy magazine. The cover showed a private jet, and the display ads all showed happy families playing board games aboard private jets. Yes, super rich kids playing Monopoly with no irony involved. Other ads touted different services for fueling and catering private jets. The very casualness of it all was dazzling: Concierge service for your dogs while on the tarmac, doctors who’d meet your jet at the airport for “house calls,” jet car washes.

Then I saw the cover price of the magazine. One copy cost fifty dollars. I dropped the issue on the floor of the cabin, then quickly and carefully lifted it and placed it back on the jet’s sleek coffee table before the flight attendant could see. When there’s only one passenger and one flight attendant the odds of this skyrocket.

My take-away is that I’m in the wrong business. Instead of doing something and hoping that many people will pay a little to use it, I’m now going to do something that a very small customer base will pay a butt load to “enjoy.”

Thus my new magazine Modern Billionaire is born.

What is there for you in you in Modern Billionaire?

Well, frankly, nothing. Not unless your name is Musk or Zuckerberg or Walton.

The subscription price will be fifty million dollars, but that will be a lifetime rate. The single issue—newsstand—price will be a paltry ten thousand bucks. This loss leader will be offset by retail display ad rates of around fifty grand per column inch, or a half million per full page. The back cover will go for a flat two million.

Our advertising sales team will reach out to the billionaire-servicing industry. Primarily high-end escort services, catering, drug cartels, luxury car manufacturers, polo player horse breeders, rehab clinics. Who cares what’s inside!? It’s that cover masthead that will sell copies. Modern Billionaire.

Every aspiring EVERYTHING and every upwardly mobile DOUCHE² will want to be photographed while carrying a copy! When celebrities try to block their faces from the paparazzi, they’ll do so with the latest issue of Modern Billionaire.

Not to mention what people will PAY to appear on the cover. Taste will not be a factor in any decision-making process. It will be glam, power, now, immediate gratification. Nothing sustainable. Nothing free trade. And we’ll put out a new issue every fifteen minutes for maximum planned obsolescence. No pretentious social climber will dare be caught reading³ last hour’s outdated issue!

Think no proffreading. No pesky copy editting. Zero spelcheck. Who needs any pissy quality control with a name like that: Modern Billionaire. We can print this thing on old East German toilet paper and rich people will still buy it.

Best yet, we’ll pay our writers and photographers, like, a thousand dollar word rate. And the pictures, well, who cares? Quality won’t really be a factor because, who cares?! It’s all about creating a high-status-signaling commodity that’s instantly thrown away.

Because, duh, the title. Who care what language we’ll use? Modern Billionaire does not need translation. All those Russian oligarchs and Crazy Rich Asians and tech bros will rush to buy it. Every private jet will carry a copy. Every mega yacht.

My Vision

I will be the new Miranda Priestly of publishing. A well-paid team of assistants will be at my beck and call. Join me!

Get in on the ground floor!

First, share this! Let’s get this shit viral, and then we’ll all quit our day jobs. We can write fiction for the fun of it! Really good fiction, not shit. We can all kick back and pay each other a million dollars for our stories, and then self-publish in a beautiful magazine that actually sells! It will be fun.

Let’s get busy!

1. This has happened only four times in my life, and it’s never been for sex work. Just to make that clear.

2. This is strictly an in-house marketing term, not to be used outside of our offices.

3. AS IF THEY READ! Hah! They’re billionaires!