254. The outsider’s edge: How Sir Michael Moritz built a billion-dollar empire

І нос хату incite a mob, and today. He needs to be able to always have the attention focused on him. I had forgotten how exhausting and draining it was to have Trump as president because he cannot stand. not being in the centre of any news cycle. Put yourself in the position of say Tim Who runs Apple or Saturn Modella at Microsoft? They're in a terrible position. They're dealing with a mobster. They're dealing with a shakedown artist.

who, like Tony Soprano, is a bully and thug. If they cross this man He will seek vengeance in one way or another and he has all the tools of state and policies in which to damage their enterprises. Make sure you're not surrounded by people from Britain. Right. What so what does that mean? That means We're delighted to say that this year the rest is money is being powered by Octopus Energy. And that means we get to welcome back the founder of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson, now CEO of it.

Uh time for a quick fire question. What's the one bit of advice you give a young entrepreneur? Maybe it's stuff that people don't normally talk about. Don't be arrogant, but do be confident. Almost by definition, as an entrepreneur, you're doing stuff that other people didn't think is going to work or that they've discounted or dismissed. So you have to be confident to uh believe in your own ideas and your ability to deliver them.

But you should still listen to everyone else and learn from them and not be arrogant. I think that is the secret to being able to build something special uh but successful. Well cheers Greg and thank you for powering this episode of The Rest is Money.

Hello and welcome to The Rest is Money with me, Steph McGovern. Now, today I am chatting to Sir Michael Moritz. He is a Cardiff-born venture capitalist. He started life as a journalist and then went on to become one of the most successful venture capitalists.

in the world. And to put some numbers on that, he's got a personal fortune of about four point four billion pounds, according to the Sunday Times rich list. He spent nearly forty years running Sequoia Capital, through which he was an early investor in companies like Google and PayPal, Yahoo, Airbnb, YouTube, and that's just a few of them. So there's loads to talk to him about in terms of investment, growth, AI, Trump and geopolitics.

But I started the interview by asking about his new book Oslander, which is all about his family's escape from Nazi Germany. Here's my interview with Sir Michael Morritz. Thank you so much for joining us'cause I know you're on a a busy schedule at the minute promoting your book. And and obviously you I mean you've spent decades building Silicon Valleys. yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n

Tell me wh why did you decide to write a book which is kind of your you know, a deeply personal family history? Well, I I'd I'd been asked to write a book about uh Sequoia or about uh Silicon Valley, but I just didn't really have any interest in doing that. and uh there are a lot of books about Silicon Valley and I'm not sure that I had anything particular to add to it. And I actually this book, Outslander, was accidental. I never set out to write it. And

To some extent I you now that it's out, I'm surprised that it's out because I didn't have any grand plan to write a book about my uh family. But it came about didn't it, because After your mum died, you you found lots of documents and things? Uh first of all, my my mum died at the age of ninety-five and just a few weeks before COVID. And my mother who was always predicting doom of some sort.

um she would have been really dismayed to have missed out on COVID because it was one of the disasters she'd been predicting for the previous fifty years. Anyway, so she died at a grand old age and then

lockdown happened. My sister uh had cleared out the f um, you know, uh family house and she'd found a bunch of papers and documents and old passports and visas and photograph albums and everything that every family has in uh and they they k uh and she shipped them off to me in California and they're in four box you know four g four cardboard boxes.

And I had time on my hands because y y everybody remembers when lockdown occurred, suddenly you weren't rushing hither and yon. There was no commuting. And I wasn't traveling. And so suddenly I had all these hours in the day and I began to rummage through uh these cartons. And I didn't think it was gonna take me all that long to go through the cartons. But then I kept coming across document or one object after another.

And I began to get very curious. I I I knew obviously the g the m you know, the outlines of my family history about Germany and the thirties and the forties and the Nazis and World War Two. I had no idea of the particular details. I had no sense of what it must have been like to go through that experience. And so I began delving and just sort of satisfying my curiosity more than anything else. And that

step by step wound up with the book. Yeah. I mean,'cause that must have been really emotional as well, doing that. Fair degree of detachment. There were certainly some emotional vignettes and some uh emotional moments associated. uh with it. But I found the whole mystery tour of trying to figure out you know, I began like lots of people who are interested in their families, I began with ancestry dot com and then it's astonishing how much information is digitized and

and stored in a digital archive somewhere. Did it change your understanding of yourself then, do you think? Uh very much so. Yeah. I I'm gonna be seventy two years old this year, so some of it is just being at a different stage of my life and perhaps not being in a grand rush anymore, some of it is regretting and reflecting on some of the things that uh I may have done as a teenager while I was growing up, but everybody has all that sort of stuff and you know, things you're embarrassed or

or ashamed about. But um it certainly made me understand uh how somehow in in some aspects of my life, like all of us, I was echoing the behavior of one or other of my parents and had inherited for good and for bad uh what it was that they uh that they brought and

um I sort of began to mimic. Yeah,'cause you you talked on you in the book about inherited despair. Mm-hmm. So g what do you mean by that? Like how did that manifest in you, do you think? That particular generation, it's like all refugees. It doesn't matter where they came from, you know, m maybe mm these days they might come s from Senegal or Afghanistan or wherever or Sudan or wherever people Somalia wherever people are persecuted. The feelings of what it is like.

To be marked, to be unwanted, to be hunted. uh leaves a very deep imprint on people. Uh and both my parents were fairly young. My fat they were both about fourteen when they got out of Germany. Much of our family was murdered. on both sides of our family. So They were always worried. They were always concerned about a repetition of those sorts of events, no matter

the fact that we were living in Wales in the fifties and sixties. That sort of sense of impending doom hovered over everything. It was and my my parents understandably uh were part of, you know, their their co uh connections in Cardiff, even though they were very well assimilated, but their closest connections were in the Jewish refugee community and they all shared this

bond of having got lived through these painful experiences. There's a really interesting um thing you see with lots of business leaders where often the most successful ones have had

I I don't know, it makes you take more risks in life, whether it makes you have just a different way of viewing how you then

take on your career in life. Would would you say that's part of it then this inherited despair has made you maybe has made you as successful as you've become. I think being an outsider perhaps helps. But there are a lot of people who've been through terrible times either themselves or via their families who have then not led extraordinary lives like, you know, the leaders say of some of these companies that everybody knows the names of. If you're on the outside.

And you have to forge your own destiny, and nothing is handed to you. You then have to Work very hard to make the best of yourself as opposed to living in a very comfortable setting where um you know, the greatest risk that you're ever gonna make or the greater yeah, sometimes I chuckle w um when I interview people and I ask them, So, tell me, what's the greatest risk you ever took? Well

It was deciding whether to go to Harvard or Stanford. It doesn't qualify. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's so interesting'cause, you know, as you say, you're talking about outsiders and that that's essentially the the title of your book, isn't it? Um German foot foreigner or outsider. So you've that's how you felt then in your your life and very much so. And you know, I grew up in Wales and uh I don't know when it was first when it first dawned on me that I was

different from all the other kids I I knew. Uh but, you know, m my parents used to insist that we went to synagogue on a Saturday morning, which was pretty irritating when you're growing up and you want to go out and play football with your with y uh with your pals. But you know the thing that struck home most of all is in the days when uh people used to get telephone directory. Uh once a year a fresh telephone directory would arrive.

And I remember this. So we get the directory for The Yellow Pages. So the book had arrived. And I remember doing this for several years. I would flick through the uh directory to the M's, and I'd look down, hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping, that there were other Moritzes. in the telephone book. But we were the only Morritts in the telephone book. And of course there were pages and pages of Evans's and Davis's and Hughes and Thomas's and Williams. But to me the telephone directory said

you're very different from everybody else. Yeah. Gosh, that's fascinating that it came from you looking so how old were you when you were looking at the telephone book for all the probably twelve or thirteen, I'd imagine. Yeah. You know, impressionable young teenage years.

But it really struck home. Yeah. And so and and do you think that's carried on for you then throughout your career? Very much so. Yeah,'cause you obviously you became a journalist new and worked for Time magazine and then joined Sakoya Capital and

That was unusual for you to be taken on as a coy, wasn't it? Because wasn't it the guy running out of the time wanted to try and be a bit more diverse and you were diverse and that rolls you a history? He wasn't thinking about being diverse, he he uh the the I was very lucky to get hired. Uh because I didn't have the background that you'd expect for somebody going into the venture business. And because I was a journalist and I had a humanities background.

and n no science background, no work experience in a in a technol but um no, it wasn't a question of diversity as much as he couldn't figure out w what would make a successful venture capitalist because he felt that the people he thought would be successful venture capitalists They hadn't succeeded. The few that had been very successful had unlikely backgrounds. So that was the reason. It wasn't because

I came from Britain or represented anything else. It was just he c he he wasn't quite short. So he took a flyer. And it obviously worked. Uh, yes, I I'm not complaining. Yeah. And and and that do you think then that that's because you looked at it differently from other people?'Cause you know, I've heard you talk about Mae'n rhywbeth yn ymwneudol, yn ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol yn ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol. Mae'n ymwneudol.

I didn't realise it at the time because I felt very much out of place in the venture business because I didn't have the conventional stripes on my arm that you'd expect for someone in the venture business. And I think most of uh the peers of Don Valentine, who was the founder of Sequoia, who hired me, thought he had lost his marbles. Uh but I had two big advantages.

which I only discovered in retrospect. The first was Oxford and the second was journalism. And both taught me the same skills. And when I went to Oxford Um, I you know, I was brought up under the tutorial system and we were assigned a topic, I studied history, about which we knew nothing at the beginning of every week.

assigned a bunch of books, had to come back a week later with a twenty five hundred, three thousand word essay where we had to pretend to a certain degree of mastery over the particular topic. Fast forward to journalism You get assigned a story about a topic or a subject you know nothing about and you've been through this you've had to you've had to read this book. Yeah. And you you you plunge into it.

And you've got to you've got to figure out who's pulling the wool over your eyes, who the charlatans are, who the honest brokers are. You've got to assimilate all the information very quickly. And then in the case of journalism you have to write a story or or host a host a podcast uh with a point of view.

That's the same as investing. Mm-hmm. Very much the same as investing. You know, you you meet an entrepreneur and you listen to his or her um description of Uh first of all you don't know them. You listen to the description of the business that they're uh trying to start. You you're trying to figure out as much as possible about whether the individual and the business make sense.

And you never have all the information that you want. If you have all the information that you want, it's too late. And so so then, given the companies that through Sakoya you invested in, you know, we're talking about all the biggest players. your Googles, you know, your YouTubes, your Airbnbs and everything else.

Was there something w in those moments of meeting those those founders, those uh entrepreneurs I mean,'cause you talk, don't you, about how it's a long process. It's not overnight success and y you know, it it takes a a long, long time so and that's a big commitment, especially in a world where we're very much plugged into short termism, whether that's politics or shareholder pressure or whatever it is. So how do you know who to commit to? You don't.

I want the secrets to become a billionaire. Come on. Particularly when somebody's twenty or twenty one years old, twenty two years old. You have no idea how they're going to develop as an individual. Well, I didn't understand this at the beginning, but again there's a bit of a pattern that runs through it. So The first thing I think that becomes a distinguishing mark is the ability of somebody Who on the whole is fairly young? Not always, but on the whole is fairly young.

who can educate you about something that you know very, very little about or who sees something extremely differently, and who also has mastered the And So you can go back to the beginning, say I'll give you one example of this of the personal computer business. Bill Gates got interested in personal computers when he was twelve or thirteen years old. He knew more about personal computers than all the big muckety mucks running all the computers.

And so I think first of all it's the humility that you need to show as, say, a forty year old or a fifty year old to somebody who's twenty two, but who knows a lot more about one particular topic than you. Second thing that you need from that individual. a sense that they can communicate very clearly because so much of the challenge or so many of the challenges associated with a company.

are all associated with being able to describe what it is and how you see your company evolving over time. Because you've got to persuade somebody, some bright engineers to leave a job some You've got to persuade perhaps more investors later on to invest in your company. You've got to persuade customers to buy a service that or product that they didn't know that you need. So being able to lucidly

describe the benefits of this product that you've concocted. This service you've concocted is very important. And then the third thing is this sort of unquench unquenchable hunger and drive and tenacity and resilience and persistence. And often these people aren't the easiest sorts of people to deal with or or communicate with because they're very strong will.

But you need a strong willed person. It's so interesting that because I guess getting all three of those things is quite rare because for example, you know, with communication. It's not something you essentially get a qualification in. It's you know, I I think often, particularly in the UK, the education system falls down on

on any kind of training around communication. It feels like it's it's classed as a soft skill, which does my head in as a phrase'cause I think it's the most important skill, quite frankly.

And so to get all of those three together feels like it's probably rarer. It's very, very difficult. Now, it doesn't mean that they necessarily have to be evocative storytellers. Right. in the way that would hold the attention of a podcast audience for thirty minutes. But I'll give you you know, w one example. So

And Larry Page, who is one of the founders uh this enormously talented man, one of the founders of Google. And, you know, I asked I and it took me I didn't get it straight away, it took me some time. I said, you know, what what is it that you see in the future of Google? And he said, I want to put the internet. Today. Obviously Google has put the internet on a whole bunch of

servers and data centers all over the world. But the internet is there on Larry's hard drive, on running hundreds of maybe millions of computers all over the world. That was in nineteen ninety eight, ninety seven. Yeah. And it's and it's true today. And then you have other people, the m the most well known example in the most mesmerizing storyteller, and this is a man who um could hold an audience in the palm of his hand for thirty minutes, and Larry's a very, very

Shy introverted fellows. Steve Jobs Mesmerizing storyteller. Absolutely mesmerizing. And uh he could persuade anyone to do anything. Yeah. Steve was a bit of an outlier b in many respects, but one of the ways in which he was an outlier was that he had a the sensibility of a liberal arts

graduate, although he d never graduated from college. But he was interested in in writing, in poetry, in culture, in It's no accident that um Apple many years later produced a documentary about Bob Dylan that Steve had come up with. Hi and he had a a poetic sensibility that uh most of the other founders in Silicon Valley that I've come across don't don't come close to possessing. Steve was

Without doubt the most mesmerising s storyteller that I've ever seen in Silicon Valley. But Michael, this is absolutely enthralling. There's loads more to ask you, but let's sit tight for a quick Nu har vi med oss Sandra. Du och familjen fick punka på bilen innan ens hann till djurparken. Ja, det blev häng på erfarenhets rastplats istället. Men vi fick ju se några äckorar i alla fall. Hoid dess naturliga habitat och allt. Dagens hjälper lite att presenteras av IF, som hjälper det mycket.

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It feels like the common denominator is again linking back to the title of your book, the it's the outsider and I I often wonder this'cause, you know, not to compare myself to you, uh, you know, incredibly successful

entrepreneurs and things. But I um, you know, I come from a working class background, joined uh because it was an engineer when I started out. I was one of very few women, so I was the outsider from that perspective. Then when I joined the media I was the only one with a regional accent in the BBC, uh, doing national news and that was a big thing and people were like, How can she possibly be intelligent with that voice and all that just

Yeah. But it became my superpower because then you get underestimated, I think. And that is like your you're like, Come on then, underestimate me and let's see what I do next. And I wonder if that's the sense I got from what you're talking about in terms of outsiders is I mean you can sink or swim, can't you, as an outsider. But it's how you choose to There's also benefit as you as you were suggesting, that you know, the e the expectation that others have for you are so low. Yes. That um

Uh maybe for for me when I got into the venture business, for you when you got into journalism uh originally, um, that there's really only one way to go. Yeah. Um I think it's a bit different for for the entrepreneurs. Uh because there they're doing something beyond just building their own life. I mean they're building a company along along with it. And that's a much harder undertaking than what I've done um as an individual.

We often talk on the show about tech in the UK and investment in the UK and how we can encourage more of it and why is it? if we do set up a great tech company here, it's often the Americans who come in and buy it. The example being obviously Google Deep mind is one of the ones we talk about. If you were, you know, talking to a a young tech entrepreneur now, would you still say to them,

would you say to them to go to America? Is it still Silicon Valley where it's at?'Cause you know, I know I've heard you talk about when you were starting out as a journalist and it was Evelyn War, wasn't it, the Tech entrepreneur now. Well it's it's a little nuanced, but what I would say I think is I think if you Want to start your company. Look, Demis at um DeepMind did this brilliantly up to a certain point, obviously, when he sold his company.

to to Google. I think if you intent on starting a company in Britain, what you need to do is ensure that the people around you Please don't. Make sure you're not surrounded by people from Britain. Right. What so what does that mean? That means a mindset or a it means Hiring people who've had who come from uh uh companies that where they've experienced great success or they know what great success tastes like. It means not having a British border.

It means having Americans largely and maybe you'll find, you know, people from elsewhere, but make sure you have a US dominated border. Starting your business. Because they've had success more than we ever have, so therefore I've got the experience. Right. And they can lift the aspirations. That's depressing though, that hearing that. Like you've got to have Americans on board in order to do well. Like do you see a point where we can change the balance so

You know, what what do we need to do? We I guess we just need to have some mega successful companies that we don't sell to the Americans and then Yeah, and then that can I mean that's certainly what happened in Silicon Valley, which is and it's like anything else. I mean n any time you have

uh a sort of great cultural flourishing. It doesn't matter whether it's in Flor Florence or Amsterdam or perhaps today in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. You have patterns of success and incredibly successful people all the way around you. Yeah. And you're just surrounded by And they're prepared to answer an email, have a breakfast with you, have a coffee with you, share advice.

Um all of that sort of stuff, which is invaluable if you're building a company. And you can't, if you're building a young tech company. be surrounded, particularly on a board of directors, by people who may be very well meaning, they may be very smart, but their only experience in life is as um having come from a career in a large m multinational company. Yeah. It's a different milieu. So if but I guess the other argument to this is it could be

British people go to America, get the experience, come back. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Th I think there's some examples of that. Can I ask you about Trump? Because obviously, you know, you you've the the context of your book, um and and the you know, you talk about this Convolusive context, don't you, of Trump's America, the hatred, the intolerance. uh and the kind of parallels you see mm i in history with what your family went through.

Can you just tell us a bit more about that?'Cause that is, you know, obviously something that's deeply concerning the rise of anti Semitism in the UK and in the US is is Again, d I mean it's really depressing. It's kinda scary. And how does that feel for you? It's very kind of you. I think as a nondue to say that. Um so I'm very careful in the book not to fall into the trap of labelling Trump or his Acolytes as fascists. I don't call them Nazis. I don't think Trump himself is an anti-Semite.

And even though he doesn't care or give a whit about what happens to these people who get detained in these terrible raids.

or get deported. He doesn't care about what happens to them or the circumstances into which they get shipped. I don't for a moment think he wants to set up slave camps or The thing that frightens a minority and it doesn't matter whether in America you come from Somalia or you come from China or Latin America or you're Muslim or you're Jewish is that Trump has a one of his gifts is He is able to pray.

on the anxieties and the frustrations and the jealousies of people who feel that they've been ignored, that they've been dispossessed, that they've been left behind, and he knows how to incite a mob. A mob is the most terrifying prospect for any minority. And we all saw it on January the 6th with the uh onslaught. on the Capitol. Yeah. We've seen it recently, even though shamefully these people came dressed in uniforms of federal officers in Minneapolis.

I see it occasionally on the streets of San Francisco where you have Ice. uh uh you know, clusters of ice on the street. But for me it started with fr like a lot of other people in America. Um, it started with this March, I think it was in 2017 in Charlottesville, where you had people brandishing torches. um yelling, chanting, the Jews will not defeat us. And that, you know, that had obviously echoes of what had come a long time before. And Followed by the fact.

that Trump himself wouldn't condemn the behaviour, which again, if you're a minority, leaves you feeling very vulnerable. Yeah. Yeah,'cause there's that I mean we're seeing it across the world, aren't we? playing to, you know, popularism coming from playing to people's unease and then legitimising it and popularising it and it's really dangerous. I think it's the trait of authoritarian leaders through history. Yeah. And and I know in the book you talk about it's kind of a ratings thing.

It's Trump He doesn't govern. He programs. He's a TV programmer. And uh forty years ago he couldn't bear the prospect of opening the New York Post and not finding his name. preferably on the front page. And today he needs to be able to always have the attention focused on him. So it doesn't matter whether the topic is

Venezuela or or Green. Greenland or whatever it is. Today I think the Chagos Islands or um Ukraine or anything else. It's got to be newsworthy. It I had forgotten how exhausting and draining it was to have Trump as president because he cannot stand. not being in the center of any news cycle. Yeah.

But I mean it's been I mean you you know, you the way you talk about Trump, there's not many business leaders that are doing that. You know, people are shying away from calling out the thing. I'm in a much easier position. So put yourself in the position of, say, Tim Cook who

runs Apple or Sundai Peachai who runs um Alphabet or Saturn Adela at Microsoft, they're in a terrible position. They're dealing with a mobster. They're dealing with a shakedown like Who, like Tony Soprano, grew up in Green uh in Queens and is a bully and thug. And they know full well that they that if they cross this man He will seek vengeance in one way or another and he has all the tools of state.

and policies in which to damage their enterprises. Their responsibility is to look after the welfare of their business. They know who he is. They know that he is an absurd buffoon.

And they're just wanting to protect their business as best as they can. But at what cost to humanity? Um Because there must be a point where as a business leader, but you see I I think there's a big difference, say, between the business leaders in America today and the business leaders in Germany in the nineteen thirties. It's not as if the business leaders are Employing slave labor. It's not as if they're developing chemicals to gas people.

It's n uh and all the other enabling things that believe Siemens and Krupp and BMW and Bayer and all those other German large German companies did The the US business leaders are not doing that. They're they're trying to survive uh without um bringing damage uh damage upon that. So it doesn't it doesn't I I don't know, disappoint or worry you that n there aren't more people speaking out against him. Uh

I think maybe I'm too optimistic here. I like an optimist though, so go on. Oh uh good. But I think His power is beginning to wane. And um you can already see the fractures in this MAGA Republican base. You have these nutcases like this Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who was very convinced that, you know, the Jews operated lasers from space and controlled everything on Earth. And she has turned her back on Trump. I think after the elections in uh November, the midterm election.

When everybody when all the candidates are vying for Trump's mantle. So this could be J D Vance or Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis or Ted Cruz. They're gonna turn on each other like a pack of hyenas. And I also don't think that they will be able to intimidate and bully and threaten uh and terrify so much of their

constituency as Trump has been able to do. I just don't think they're gonna have that power. So will common sense prevail? Do you think n let's hope so. And I think I hope for common sense to prevail. without some of the extremists from the left, because I think in their own way

Even though they stand for different things, they're as bad for America as some of the rightists. Yeah. In discussing this we you've obviously mentioned some of the so called magnificent seven. So the you know, these top companies who are absolutely flying in terms of market valuations and everything else. Some people are talking about whether that's a bubble, whether we're too dependent on AI and we've got all this hope in AI and actually when it shakes down it won't be the

biggest thing to change the world as everyone thinks it's gonna be. What what's your thoughts on what on all of that? I think this is the third and probably AI third and maybe the fourth most significant technology shift that I have lived through. although you know, I wasn't really around so much for the uh to some extent I was for the birth of the microprocessor that just lit up everything. And then you had the big personal computing wave and then you had the

uh the internet and all the connectivity associated with the internet and mobile phones. AI is Uh builds on all of those as factors. And as a result of the fact that you have so many devices connect to the internet, AI has taken off uh faster than any of the other I i in the history of of Silicon Valley and technology evolution, every succeeding wave accelerates faster than the previous because the foundation on which they are layered is deeper and richer and bigger.

Um so I think it's gonna have profound consequences. Th and uh it will wind up with probably, you know, the emergence of a new breed of companies. There'll be one or two very, very significant companies that emerge. I think there are companies, particularly Alphabet, that will become even stronger as a result of of uh of the emergence uh

of AI and then you're gonna have a lot of carnage. That you get a lot of investors are gonna lose money. A lot of these companies that are high flies with preposterous valuations at the moment. are gonna collapse by the wayside. Right. And what do you think is the kind of time frame for all this then when do you think it's I think it happens over the next five years. Right. Okay. Th where the new, younger, bigger winners emerge and the rest begin to drown.

Yeah. I'm like bells down. I know that's what I'm thinking with everything going on, all the political turmoil you're predicting and the uh and also everything going on with tech. But I mean, i it can I just ask before we wrap things up then?

What is it that kind of motivates you now and what is it that you, you know, y you've done so much. What's next and what motivates you? Oh, I'm a And uh you know, investing is part of it, writing is part of it. Um I'm deeply involved in San Francisco both politically and also I started with another fella, media business in San Francisco. Um we operate a couple of luxury hotels and uh high end boutique hotels in Tuscany. I have my Manchester United Fialty

in the summer I like to paint and cycle. So I'm involved in too many things, none of which I'm and this isn't you know, i i i it sounds like false modesty, but it's not like I do any of these other things brilliantly. I'm uh I'm just spread too thin, but Uh there's no absence of amusements at the beginning of every day.

And does it and this is a bit of a weird question and you might be like it does Where's she coming? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what does it feel like to be a billionaire?'Cause like I just think that's the most surreal Ca and you know, I know you've talked as well about I've I've heard you talk about your mum not being bothered about your money and things like that. Oh well no, she was convinced I was a crook.

I mean if the policeman had knocked on the door she would have said yeah he's guilty and here's his telephone number. Weird because you're in this tiny minority of people and you know, we I I I just can't ever imagine what that's like. Does it do I mean to constantly have people asking you for money for a start? Well Harriet and I uh Harrit, my wife and I have decided we're gonna try and give away as much of our money

while we're around Yeah, because she'll never spend it off for a start. Around us. Uh uh no, to to give it away. Yeah. To charity, philanthropic you do a lot of philanthropy. Organisations. And you know, we've done a bunch of uh most of what we do

uh is in the in the uh San Francisco Bay area, but we've done uh a few things here that because we've been so lucky and we started a big scholarship program sixteen, seventeen years ago at Oxford, fourteen percent of the undergrads at Oxford are now on the scholarship. uh collection post nineteen hundred. So that's basically the big things that we've done in Britain. But um then we're deeply investing the community in

in San Francisco. And yeah, I know everybody al always asks this question. You know, th the great relief and the great freedom associated with having money is Is you're alleviated from Yeah. Yeah. And it's so it's liberating. You don't have to worry whether you're gonna make your rent payment. You don't have to worry whether or not you can afford to

buy two or three books or a n fancy bottle of wine or something. It's it's those things that that make the difference and But you know, both Harriet and I still When we go grocery shopping or something, you know, and we're buying raspberries, we're still staggered at the bill of

The right thing. I think I think that's what makes people wealthy too though is you're not you you're not forgetting, you know, y I bet you look at the receipt in a restaurant as well and check you haven't been overcharged for a Yeah so I also and you know that's one of the lucky things today. You can afford to leave um a generous tip. Yeah. And uh no, it's very mu look, I remember when I had no money and uh and what it was like to, you know, have So I remember that.

I've got great hope in the fact though that you said the traits of making a good journalist is what makes you a good investor as someone who's small time investing. That uh that fills me with great joy. Yeah. Read the road signs carefully. Yeah. Amazing. Michael, thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy to chat. It's been real fun. Thank you. Yeah, and your book is out now, isn't it? But thank you very much for coming in. Loved it.

Cheers, bye bye. And that's it from us on the rest is money. Bye bye.