Confessions of a researchaholic

My wife told me that my Stanford “classmate” (we both worked in the CS building and attended piano lessons together), who later cofounded one of the most successful companies in human history, is going through his second divorce recently.

I didn’t know about this and my wife told me that she learned about that via TechCrunch (instead of some paparazzi source).

Which made me wonder if he is happier than I am. I think it is highly unlikely, but I wish the best for him.

How much you can earn matters much less than how little you must spend.

From Is having children worth it?

Milton Hershey and Mrs. Hershey wanted to have children. They could not, for whatever reason. And they gave all of their money – like, their entire inheritance, to a philanthropic trust – it’s not hard to make the connection here – literally to create a school for orphan children. There are all these pictures of Milton Hershey and Mrs. Hershey with these orphan boys at the time. It’s since become co-ed, and you don’t have to be an orphan, but you come from, essentially, a place where you can’t safely live, so you come to live at the Hershey school, which is a boarding school. Because Hershey has done so well as a company, and because this trust was basically built on Hershey stock, this school, I think, has the highest per-capita endowment of any institution in the world, including Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T., and Princeton. So anyway, that would just be an example, I guess, of people who don’t have children – so, who are you going to pass your money down to?