The money has finally made Sergey nuts

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Look, it happens. You become a billionaire and there’s no way around it — the money fucks with your head. You tell yourself it won’t happen to you. You tell yourself you’re the same person as you were before. But you’re not, and you know it. You’re not an ordinary person. You’re a billionaire. And with those billions comes a great big box of crazy. You can try to keep the crazy tamped down deep inside you, and for a while you might succeed. But eventually the crazy seeps out.

Somehow, for some reason, this usually involves clothing. Here’s what happens. You find a pair of crazy monkey shoes. You say to yourself, can I really wear these in public? You answer yourself, Hey, I’m a fucking billionaire, I can wear anything I fucking want. But then you say, Okay, reality check — if I were not a billionaire, if I were just some putz grad student, would I wear these in public? You say, You know what? I probably would. I would. Okay, then I should wear them now, too, right?

Well, not really. No. Because now you are not just some putz at Stanford. Now you’re going to be on stage and people are going to look at you and take pictures of you and say, Hoo boy, what an asshole that Sergey has become eh? How that boy has changed. Just look at him up there with his monkey shoes, thinking he’s all Mr. Hollywood or whatever. But then again if you don’t wear them you’ll be feeling all weird because now you are changing because of the money, and you told yourself you wouldn’t do that, you wouldn’t let the money change you.

So you see? You can’t win. You can’t. And you know this. So you spend hours and hours agonizing over this at home, and finally, because you’re just so confused and fucked up by the money, you tell yourself, Fuck it, I’m wearing the monkey shoes. And then you go out there and you look like a dickhead.

FYI, in my case this crisis occurred around the bowtie. I know. Big mistake. Also: the John Lennon phase. And the Flock of Seagulls phase. The combover-cause-I’m-going-fucking-bald phase. The “Mr. Rogers from Outer Space” phase. The Devo phase.

And people wonder why I started wearing the same clothes every day. Do you blame me? Sergey, my droog, I feel your pain. Now please for the love of God put away those ridiculous shoes and stop acting like such a douchebag.