Sublime

Back in 1966, a goateed Stanford professor named Bill Sharpe developed a formula that has since become as common in investment-speak as RBIs are in baseball-speak. The formula looks like this:

worth literally trillions, which he claimed he could put toward EA-related causes. Who knows what the limits were; he’d even told Ellison there was a 5 percent chance he could become president of the United States. His utility function was “closer to linear,” he explained; the trillionth dollar really was almost as good as the first. Technically sp

the paper that referenced the “Gambler’s Ruin problem,” a theory that no matter how much money you have in a betting scenario, the casino (or house) has an infinite amount of money, and therefore, if you keep making bets, the house will eventually win.

And there was one other ingredient in this piquant stew. Bezos decided that the digital versions of the most popular books and new releases would have a flat price of $9.99. There was no research behind that number—it was Bezos’s gut call, fashioned after Apple’s successful ninety-nine-cent price tag for a digital single in iTunes and based on the

Cipolla, Carlo M. The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. New York: Doubleday, 2021.

Vilfredo Pareto is said to have noticed that 80 percent of Italy’s land was owned by just 20 percent of its people, and that 80 percent of the peas yielded by his garden came from just 20 percent of his peapods.

the pursuit of wealth is always a cover story.