A year later, Wojcicki gave birth to their first child just as Google executives started enjoying life as some of the richest people in the world. Schmidt was a pilot, and, according to the friend, he encouraged other Google executives to indulge their desires for yachts and planes.
.. Schmidt’s wife, Wendy, however, retreated to their compound on Nantucket and didn’t often make the Google social scene. Schmidt, now 58, was sometimes accompanied by younger women, one of whom briefly worked at Google.
What the rich really want. And why we should give it to them
The rich are not, therefore, working to make more money with an eye to spending it. They are making money in order to be liked. They are doing so for the sake of status, as a way of keeping score and letting the world know of their value as human beings. The rich work for love and for honour. They stay up late at the office out of vanity – because they want to be able to walk into rooms full of strangers and be swiftly recognised by those that matter and deemed miraculous and clever for having made fortunes, whose size is carefully recorded by the media the world over.
.. Surveying the problems of Capitalism, the standard response of the left has been to suggest that one simply tax the rich more. But this fails to grasp, and therefore properly to exploit, the real psychological motives of the rich. The rich only pursue money fanatically (to our great collective cost) because wealth appears to be the primary, most objective source of honour in the modern world. If only we can fix how honour is obtained, we will be able to redirect their mania to more socially beneficial ends in ways that don’t demand that the rich become ‘nice’.
.. As Adam Smith put it, “The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.” That is, we should target the vanity of the rich and encourage them to act well from that most powerful of desires: the desire to be loved.