FTA:

> Adding to his woes, the government seized roughly $80 million from him.

That to me means that he was distinctively rich

> Presumably the guy is distinctively not rich, or he wouldn't have gotten involved in such risky business to make money.

The more I watch the behavior of the wealthy the more I see that either 1) there is never enough to satisfy them or 2) (more likely) getting it is the thing they enjoy — so why would they stop at some arbitrary point?

I think his wealth or lack of is orthogonal. The article in fact mentions his motivations being more along the lines of enjoying living on the edge, living dangerously (see his documentary work).

What I got from the article is that there's levels of rich, and always someone richer. Also, that a lot of stuff he felt in hindsight he should have paid attention to he dismissed as normal at the time because weird is normal in those circles, and stuff gets weirder as you get into richer circles, at least certain types of them. In other words, he didn't see it as risky business because risky means weird, and it's always weird business.

He was a member of the band The Fugees. Their album The Score sold 22,000,000 copies.

> We meet in his sparsely furnished 4,500-square-foot SoHo apartment with floor-to-ceiling views of lower Manhattan

I mean, can't be doing all _that_ badly.

People don't get involved in criminality, in general, out of desperation, but because they enjoy the lifestyle. Hence the hundreds of successful e.g. rappers who end up in prison (or dead) even long after they had far more than enough money that any sense of wanting was far behind them.

Wealthy people are fairly anonymous to most people unless they actually got their wealth via fame (influencers, actors, entertainment talent). Without looking it up, do you have any idea who the CEO of Coca Cola is? Would you be able to spot him/her (I dont' know either) on the street? Now imagine the armies of $XM annual comp high earners in finance and they're even more anonymous.

Surely secret money comes with it's own pressures and paranoia?

Secret money is hard at a certain scale. Money is property rights and people have to believe your rights exist for them to actually exist. Elon Musk is not physically strong but simply the beneficiary of forces that have convinced the world’s mindless executors of one arbitrary thing in his favor, but could have just as easily convinced them of any arbitrary thing out of his favor.

It’s better to have $5 million than to be broke. That absolutely true. But there is a level of wealth and position where you absolutely must participate in the most evil parts of society to stay where you are. The level of money that you can quietly have is not one that rich people are impressed by. There is a higher level, which you cannot have without the support of society, and the support of society is something you do not get unless you are actively participating in terrible things, either as a willful actor or, more likely in this case, a patsy who usually has no idea what’s going on.

I do wish this article had been more concrete about what those terrible things were, though. And I have no sense of where the man was truly a criminal or just way out of his depth. When people in the arts and sciences get caught up in these things, it tends to be the latter.

Celebrity can be used to create ripples in the ideation of the masses, however, but that's a hard row to hoe, and only a rare few have the wisdom or good intentions to know where to begin. As well, the forces that facilitate celebrity tend to promote those who fit this modern apotheosis of vapid desire.

William Gibson, as usual, summed it up perfectly in Idoru:

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

Recent events, especially here in America, only ever prove Mr. Gibson's understanding of the widespread lowness of the human condition. But all his "prescience" is really due to his profound humanity.

No, no, it is much too burdensome. Let me take this burden that it does not crush you, brother world2vec.

Many were horrible people before they became celebrities, you just didn’t hear about them.