The Rich Are Different: They Can Walk Away: Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

Erik Sherman, forbes.com

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald a few years before the Great Depression became the Great Leveler. “They are different from you and me.”

He was right. And when Ernest Hemingway mentioned during a 1936
 lunch that he was getting to know the rich, the Irish writer Mary Colum
 said, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the
rich have more money.”

Google GOOGL +0.42% CFO Patrick Pichette is, by any reasonable definition,
a rich man. Perhaps he is the same deep down as anyone else, but he can
treat the future differently than most. Pichette has decided to retire
 and “spend more time with his family,” as he wrote on Tuesday. The
triggering event was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with his wife, Tamar, who wanted to keep traveling.

I remember telling Tamar a typical prudent CFO type response- I would love to keep going, but we have to go back. It’s not time yet, There is still so much to do at Google, with my career, so many people counting on me/us – Boards, Non Profits, etc

But then she asked the killer question: So when is it going to be time? Our time? My time? The questions just hung there in the cold morning African air.

Their time. A few weeks later, Pichette thought through what he had invested and given up. The kids? Grown and “most of the credit” raising them went to Tamar. They have been married almost 25 years and she wanted, finally, time with him. And so, Pichette will, at 52, step down from one of the most powerful finance positions in high tech, allotting ample time to help make ready the next CFO.

No need to worry about the financial future of the Pichettes. According to the 2014 Google proxy statement, Pichette saw compensation of $62.2 million from 2011 through 2013. Of that, $19.6 million was in stock options. Take out the “other” compensation types, including 401(k) matches, holiday gifts, and other perks, and that still leaves nearly $42.6 million in cash and outright stock grants. None of that counts 2014 compensation, unavailable until Google files its 2015 proxy statement. The total also ignores that Pichette held executive positions in other companies before, presumably with significant compensation packages, even if not Google-sized.

“In the end, life is wonderful, but nonetheless a series of trade offs, especially between business/professional endeavours and family/community,” Pichette wrote. “And thankfully, I feel I’m at a point in my life where I no longer have to have to make such tough choices anymore. And for that I am truly grateful. Carpe Diem.”

Quite the exit speech. Grand and gracious, like the last dream of the protagonist of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, who imagined flying off to beauty as he actually lay dying of gangrene.

Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.

The Masai call the western summit of Kilimanjaro “Ngaje Ngai” — the House of God. Pichette and his wife can find their own Ngaje Ngai, or any other part of Kilimanjaro. They can go to India, the Himalayas, Bali, Australia, Antarctica — any of the places Pichette’s wife said she wanted to visit and more.

This is the high tech dream of building a company, achieving dominance, and amassing the type of fortune that allows one to do, to be, almost anything. Pichette wrote of “25-30 years of nearly non-stop work” and a frenetic pace of always being on, “even when I was not supposed to be.”

The lament falls hollow to many because of the legions who trudge on at a frenetic pace, trying to keep the wolf from the door, raise the kids, and, please, just get a few moments of peace. Quiet time is interrupted by screaming thoughts of how to make enough money, how to meet obligations to family, how to keep their world from falling apart. It’s the life of the entrepreneur struggling to keep a business solid and employees in paying jobs. It’s the working poor, who piece together bits of employment and depend on every morsel of help they can get from the government. It’s the middle class (Can we honestly use the term anymore?) families that put everything into their children, trying to give them enough of a start so they can keep their heads above water.

The median U.S. household income is $53,046. It would take that family 1,173 years to match three years of Pichette’s income. Middle-class Americans have saved $20,000 for retirement, according to a Harris HRS -0.32% poll conducted for Wells Fargo WFC -0.17%, and that assumes a median income of $63,000, even more than people actually have.

Not that most of the population begrudge someone who can have a luxurious life. But there was once a sense that if you worked hard, even if you didn’t achieve wealth, you could have enough. Yes, there was poverty, but also the vision of an ascending ladder. That vacations and owning a home and making sure your children had a better chance than you were possible. That you could eventually retire and take some comfort in your accomplishments.

Things are different today. As the profits from continued productivity accrue upwards, the sacrifices go not for your future, not for the next generation, not for the next guy who needs a hand up the ladder, but to the wealthiest who already have more than they can ever use.

Those like Pichette, and the ones who are far richer, may as well have descended from Jupiter as from Kilimanjaro. For virtually everyone else in the country, life is either years of toil — whether or not you and your spouse have enough time together, whether or not the time with kids is blurring by your eyes — or it is despondent despair, abandoning hope and praying that the government checks and benefits come in on time.

The experience of the elite, tech or otherwise, is so far removed from the rest of humanity that one might wonder if we were all the same species. Only a handful ascends to the House of God and then looks down on the masses, proclaiming what the little people, still working hard, should do: learn to write code, use their own cars to chauffeur the better off, vacate their beds so they can rent them to vacationers, or put in more hours of work and be thankful that you have it. The most fundamental and dangerous problem of the widening inequality gulf is that it shreds the social fabric and seeds fury.

The super rich are already planning their escapes with private airstrips and remote farms and ranches, according to the Guardian’s reporting from the 2015 Davos conference. If the realities of income inequality come down hard and the pitchfork-wielding masses come for the plutocrats, as billionaire Nick Hanauer has warned could happen, they will be ready.

But, ultimately, there is nowhere to hide. There is no place so far away that it cannot be found by an angry mob. The beautiful dream is in reality the gangrenous societal arm with a sickly sweet odor promising death to the whole body.

Image: Flickr user Stig Nygaard