I suppose it goes without saying, but please do not share this gossip (below) outside of Silklist. It's tangential to the question of the humanity of billionaires, but you may find it amusing.
I reside on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, USA, a place where many people have (second or third. . .) vacation homes. In times when I didn't have income from freelance technical writing, I have worked for my friend Lou, a general contractor, on construction/home-remodelling jobs. Over the years I've done a lot of work — a couple of months — on a house that belongs to Harvard professor Dan Goleman. Most of this work was done during the colder months when Goleman wasn't there. It was a nice but not a grand house. Four bedrooms, 3 bathrooms. It needed *a lot* of maintenance. It had a view of Vineyard Sound and the Elizabeth Islands, which made it worth millions. >From wikipedia: *The term [emotional intelligence] became widely known with the publication of Daniel Goleman's 1995 book: Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ. Goleman followed up with several similar publications that reinforce use of the term. Late in 1998, Goleman's Harvard Business Review article entitled "What Makes a Leader?" caught the attention of senior management at Johnson & Johnson's Consumer Companies. The article argued that EI comprised the skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. Johnson & Johnson funded a study which concluded that there was a strong relationship between superior performing leaders and emotional competence, supporting theorists' suggestions that the EI is a distinguishing factor in leadership performance.* According to Lou, Goleman and his wife purchased the house in partnership with another Harvard professor & his wife. Alas, Goleman evidently did a poor job assessing this couple — his EQ failed him? — and he ended up getting swindled by them and losing a lot of money. Goleman also bought a fixer-upper house on the New Jersey palisades, and lost a lot of money on that project. Which is why he was always hustling to make as much $$ as he could from his status as the Guru of Emotional Intelligence. I met Goleman only once. Lou introduced me to him saying 'John's a writer, like you.' Goleman was nice enough but didn't strike me as especially emotionally astute. He asked if I would give him one of my books, and offered to sell me one of his, lol. I also spent nearly a year working on the trophy house of David Wetherell, who was, very briefly, a billionaire. In 1999 his company CMGI was the poster child for 'the new economy' — later better known as 'the dot-com bubble.' When I was working on his house the CMGI stock price was ~$300/share. Two years later it was fifty cents and the stock got delisted from NASDAQ. I wrote an essay for *Salon* about that experience — *How I destroyed the New Economy <https://www.salon.com/2002/10/23/wetherell/>*— in which I hypothesized that the reason the bubble burst was because I had helped to build Wetherell's mansion on an ancient Wampanoag burial ground. In my very brief encounters with Wetherell, he did seem to conform to the 'billionaire == arrogant jerk' stereotype. My main job on that site was moving heavy stuff from point A to point B — hard, dirty, grunt work, which made me virtually invisible. Wetherell barely registered me as a fellow human. But he did notice the essay, lol. It still rankled him five years later when he threatened to sue me and *Salon*. "Whenever anybody searches for me on the internet, that damn story is the first thing that comes up!" But everything I had written was true & I had witnesses (including the Wampanoag tribal genealogist & tribal medicine man) who backed me up & *Salon* stood by the story. Wetherell did not sue. jrs P.S. The Wetherell stuff is not confidential ;^) On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 5:46 AM Udhay Shankar N via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 3:59 PM Manar Hussain via Silklist < > [email protected]> wrote: > > I had a long chat with an SF friend last year about the challenge of >> maintaining a meaningful healthy relationship with his best friend who went >> from modest to billionaire over the last few years. Despite the friendship >> remaining mutually strong and important to both of them, he's found himself >> *silently* self editing what he does and says to keep it workable. This is >> the progressive adaptation, ecosystem change, that fuels the emerging new >> reality for his billionaire friend that ratchets down awareness of what it >> is to be "ordinary folk"... lower empathy, lower EQ by default. >> > One thing I have observed with the few billionaires I have worked with in > the past is that, outside of a small subset of their pre-existing > friends+family network, almost EVERY SINGLE interaction with a human being > has to do with said human being asking them for money. That is also one > major factor in warping their worldview. > > > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist > -- *Sundman figures it out! <https://johnsundman.substack.com/>* — an ongoing autobiographical meditation.
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