Forced X Under X
I turned forty-six this year, which puts me six years into being a scoundrel.
That is George Bernard Shaw’s ruling: every man over forty is a scoundrel. The 40 Under 40 lists take the opposite view of the same age, and hold that anyone under forty might be among the most promising people in business. Between them they have split humanity at forty, prodigies on one side and scoundrels on the other, and I find I prefer Shaw’s side. (The most scoundrel-worthy thing I have done so far is buy an annual gym membership and turn up thrice.)
Forbes does run a 50 Over 50, which looked promising until I read that it is for women.
Then I noticed that 40 Under 40 never says forty of what.
So I fixed it. In my version, your list is named after your rank among the richest people on Earth, and you qualify by being under that number in whichever unit of time will have you.
Say you are forty, with a million dollars. You are on Forced 60 Million Under 60 Million Minutes. About sixty million people in the world are that rich, which gives you the 60 Million, and the only question left is the unit. In days you are 14,600, comfortably under. In minutes you are 21 million, still under, and finally a number that sounds like it has done something. In seconds you are 1.26 billion, which is over, and a list you could only make with less than $44,000 to your name. So it is Minutes. You get the last door that opens, and the more money you have, the sooner the doors stop opening.
At forty, it goes like this.
- $100,000: Forced 700 Million Under 700 Million Minutes. A big number, and a lot of checking prices on Amazon.
- $1 million: Forced 60 Million Under 60 Million Minutes. Ten times the money, and all it bought was a smaller number. Welcome to wealth.
- $10 million: Forced 1.8 Million Under 1.8 Million Hours. The first list you could print on a visiting card without explaining it.
- $100 million: Forced 60 Thousand Under 60 Thousand Days. You now count your age the way the rest of us count leave.
- $1 billion: Forced 3 Thousand Under 3 Thousand Weeks, a unit you share with pregnancy.
Find yours. If you are too young, too old or too poor, it will tell you so. It may miss a few edge cases (there is no data on rich babies), but it handles Elon Musk well.
The health maxxers may be onto something, though. Stay alive past 115 and you walk straight onto 115 Over 115, no net worth required. Everyone who makes it to 115 makes the list, and there is never much of a queue.
