If I were a rich man

I was sitting in a bar the other day with a bulldog named Cannonball Adderley, drinking the heart out of a beautiful day, reflecting on what I might do if I were a rich man. Not rich like your accountant calls you up and says your net worth just exceeded ten million for the first time kind of rich. I mean giga-rich. Buffet rich. And it hit me.

I'd do exactly what the Red Bull guy did. I mean, how much fun is this guy having? I was sitting in the bar, absentmindedly staring at the television, which had no sound on, and realized that I was watching one of those airplane races where they drive between pylons floating on huge rafts in the Hudson (This was, of course, pre-Irene. The pylons are gone by now, I'm sure). And one of the planes was festooned with the now (if you are a Formula 1 fan) familiar red, white and blue Red Bull colors.

I mean, how much fun is this guy having?

Prolly not so much. The problem with guys like the Red Bull guy--whose name I don't even know, but he's Austrian so it might be something like Gerhard Richter or something like that--is that if you are driven enough to become giga-rich, you're less inclined, from a personality profile kind of a way, to kick back and enjoy the peripheral stuff. Like going to every F1 race on the planet.

Were it me, I'd hire the best number two guy in the world (which is hopefully what Steve Jobs has done) and see if I could get a ride in one of those planes.