Why I Give Away My Money

Many  bundle of US 100 dollars bank notesI’ve always found it pretty easy to make money. Lots of lots of money. I made my first million at 12 years of age selling Ice Cold Lemonade at the Minnesota State Fair. I had so many return customers that I got to know them by name and I soon discovered that the more I used their name, the bigger the tips I seemed to received.

It took several more years but even with the normal teenage chores of grass-cutting and homework I was able to parley that first million into nearly 10 million dollars by the time I graduated from high school. Truth be told, it would have been exactly $10,000,000 if I hadn’t had to repay my dad for the $12 in seed money he loaned me to start the lemonade stand.

I mostly invested that money during my college years but some of those investments really paid off and by the time I had a college degree I also had 25 millions dollars to go with it.

Speaking of college, I watched my classmates invent stuff for something called “the Internet” and World Wide Web and I had no idea what that was. It just didn’t seem like something that would catch on to me and I’m still wondering if the whole Internet thing isn’t just a passing fad.

They laughed at me when I invented a little blue pill in the science lab but I got the last laugh…. I sold that formula for 100 million and still get royalties for it to this very day.

Sometime in my twenties it became apparent that I would always have more money than I would ever need, so I started giving it away. I figured I’ve given away almost 300 million so far. I’ve given money to almost every “cause” you can think of.

I gave 20 million to a guy in Australia that I met on a plane. He was doing research to determine if it was possible to use ants to turn turbines that would generate enough energy to power Sydney without the additional use of energy from the power grid.

I’m not sure has that worked out, but when I was in Sydney I had electricity in my hotel room so maybe he pulled it off.

I gave a college kid out east 50 bucks several years ago to start some social networking thing… He called it Face something…. I wonder how that turned out for him?

I still give away loads of money today. As you can imagine there are lots of people who need help. So many in fact that I just can’t verify the legitimacy of their request. Because of those limitations I limit the amount I will give to an initial amount of $500,000. If they do well with the initial investment I give them more. If they don’t make money with it or let me know how they are doing I can get very stingy in a hurry. They won’t get more from me.

My one regret is that it can take a while for me to respond to everyone. Sometimes a week or more. So if you have a request please be patient and in the meantime, have a wonderful April Fools Day!