The billionaire who paid $100,000 to hang out with Guy Fieri
Many think it takes being truly broken inside to become a billionaire, and the ultra-wealthy are profoundly strange individuals who have made insane amounts of money due to being wired differently.
While many do appear to have been absolutely broken, it’s most likely not in the way you might think. Power, of course, corrupts, but the issue is that absolutely no one is normal. Think about it for a second, there are absolutely no restrictions on the life of someone that rich, which can lead to wild decisions being made.
Anything they could ever wish for is available to them at the drop of a hat. Not to get all Protestant about it, but if everything you could ever want comes to you without any effort whatsoever, that tends to change a person for the worse.
More importantly, that urge lies in all of us. All of us have craziness inside and wild schemes that we’d do if we had the resources. As a billionaire, resources would no longer be an issue. Not to mention the fact that, let’s be real here, our lives would be so stiflingly boring that the only way we could feel something is by doing something stupid with our money.
You could build a functioning helicopter entirely out of Red Leicester, or buy the Cavern Club in Liverpool and fit it out with a fully animatronic replica of The Beatles. Or even purchase Twitter.
Fortunately, there are some billionaires who are slightly more chill about the mad things they want to do with their money. Turns out not all of us want to skull-fuck democracy via a micro-blogging social media site, that really is just him.
People like Steve Cohen, who had a somewhat different dream of spending his money. Namely, he paid Guy Fieri $100,000 to “be his friend for a day” and eat their way through Connecticut with him on a pretend episode of Fieri’s TV show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.
This sounds like it could have made for some of the most awkward food related conversation since the “Dear Lord, what a sad little life, Jane” episode of Come Dine With Me, yet it apparently worked like a charm. Fieri and Cohen have had a working relationship ever since, with Fieri’s ‘Flavour Town’ brand partnering with the New York Mets, the MLB team that Cohen owns, to sell food at their home stadium, Citi Field.
Sounds strangely charming on the surface. However, before you start thinking that there can be such a thing as a “good billionaire”, it’s worth remembering that Cohen’s version of skull-fucking democracy takes the form of donating multiple millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Billionaires may have the same urges that all of us have, but it sure doesn’t make them human, make no mistakes.