I'm not sure exactly how to make this happen. I honestly don't know if I could do it all by myself. I think I would need help.
Maybe that sounds un-American to you. Maybe all the people who've said that there are some self-made millionaires but no self-made billionaires, and not even actually very many self-made millionaires, that we're mostly talking about rich kids here -- maybe they all sound un-American to you.
If a very beautiful, very nice and extremely wealthy woman fell madly in love with me, and I with her, and she insisted on marrying me without a pre-nup and that we share everything, and she had a net worth of $36 billion, then, bam, I think I'd be done, and it'd be all like, "Okay, now I HAVE $18 billion. Now what? What do I DO with it?!" What if I was actually too in love to even care about all those wheelbarrows and trucks full of cash -- wouldn't that be ironic?
If Larry King and Oprah and Rachel Maddow and Harold Bloom and Thomas Pynchon and Quentin Tarantino and Jennifer Lawrence and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Martin Scorsese and Adele and David Letterman and Salman Rushdie and Stephen Hawking all starting following me on Twitter and re-tweeting all my links to my blog posts and speaking and writing about how awesome my blog is, that would be awesome. That would very likely lead to some very lucrative book deals. But $18 billion worth of lucrative? I don't know. Don't get me wrong: if all of those people, plus Pamela Anderson and Conan O'Brien and Barack and Michelle Obama and Hillary and Bill Clinton and Alec Baldwin and Chris Matthews and every single living Nobel Literature laureate and Kanye West and Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr and T Bone Burnett and Sir Anthony Hopkins all started talking me up in a very big way all at once, that would be very nice. That would be a very great encouragement.
How big of a gold nugget would I have to find in order for it to be worth $18 billion? About 500 tons, if I'm figuring accurately. How big is the biggest gold nugget ever found so far? A little over 150 pounds, it seems, if you measure only the gold content.
Hmm. How about the biggest platinum nugget? Seems that platinum nuggets as large as 1/4 ounce are extremely rare. On the other hand, it's often found alloyed with other valuable metals, and that is nice.
On the other hand, I don't own a mine of any kind.
This isn't exactly easy!
On the subject of gold and platinum: as far as I know, the heaviest wristwatch made is the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore, 18k gold case and band, just about exactly one pound. Platinum is heavier than gold, but that 18k Audemars Piguet is the heaviest wristwatch I've been able to find. The heaviest watch of any kind I've ever heard of -- and believe me, I've done a bit of web-surfing on the subject -- is the Patek Philippe Calibre 89, released in 1989, an enormous pocket watch, 89 millimeters in diameter (it's been described as hockey-puck-sized) made in both gold and platinum, which weighs 1100 grams, around 2 1/2 pounds. But they only made 4 of them, and I'm not surely that any of those 4 is what you'd call for sale. Maybe for around $6 million. Or maybe not. (A newer pocket watch, the Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260, has surpassed the Calibre 89 as the world's most complicated watch, but it barely breaks the 2-pound mark. Pheh!)
In conclusion: no man is an island.
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