Burning Benjamins

It's no secret that my firm has more money than it knows what to do with, but it tends not to advertise this fact, even within the company. Last Thursday was a glaring exception. The entire staff was invited to the Rainbow Room for a talk by a celebrity, whose identity was revealed shortly beforehand.

Even though this blog's readership could probably be accounted for with the fingers on one hand, I think it would be unwise to disclose the name of the celebrity. Let's just say he was a prominent member of Monty Python's Flying Circus. An internal source told me he knew how much the speaker was charging. [He discovered this fact by holding the envelope contatining the check up to a light.] The amount? $225K. The number didn't shock me. In fact, I had previously guessed that the fee was $200K. But when I stop and think about that amount of money, it seems utterly ridiculous. I have no idea what the average annual salary for U.S. workers is, but at a conservative estimate, it must be somewhere in the ballpark of $30-60K. It's hard to describe the feeling I get when I think about how an hour's work for a celebrity is valued at 4 to 8 times the cost of a year's work for an average American.

Add to that the cost of renting out the Rainbow Room for an entire evening, and a Cipriani catered dinner with premium open bar, and you have yourself an event with a tab that hovers around half a mil. More to say, but no time right now.