A Billionaire's Legacy of Thoughts

I admit to being a workaholic. Here I am on holiday in Africa without files to work on, and without a connection to the office, so I feel compelled to make work for myself. It occurred to me today that now is the perfect time to write down what has been forming in my mind for some time. Although I created a company out of nothing, and helped to create four children, my company and my children are not me, and they will probably survive me. My thoughts are the only things that truly belong to me, but they have no physical existence unless I give them form. Therefore my legacy will be a legacy of thoughts that I have committed to paper.

When I was ten years of age, my father went to work and didn't come home. He suffered a massive heart attack from a congenital heart defect that he neglected to mention to my mother. I don't have many memories of my father, and can't recall any sense of loss at his death, but one memory stands out. A few weeks before he died, he took me to work with him. While he worked, he gave me a task: I was to place zippers into boxes of twenty. Although my nickname at school was "Grandpa" because I was perpetually lethargic, I performed the job my father gave me with gusto: I wanted to please him.

When he checked in to see how I was doing, he was surprised to see that I had filled many more boxes than his paid staff would have filled in the same amount of time. He proceeded to select a few boxes to verify that I had counted correctly. I recall being extremely offended that he had doubted my accuracy.

A few weeks after my father's death, a substitute teacher chastised me for daydreaming in class. My homeroom teacher then chastised the substitute teacher, saying that I had experienced a "recent family tragedy" and should be excused for my inattentiveness. I remember wondering if she was correct, that my father's death was the reason for my inattentiveness.

As a child I was physically awkward, socially introverted, and not a good student until I discovered later in high school that I was exceptionally skilled in science and mathematics. Embracing my abilities, I became more motivated and competitive, and won first place in a national physics contest for high school students.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my Ph.D. thesis in systems engineering was two hundred pages of mathematical analysis on controlling the orientation of a satellite in the earth's orbit, a process that I patented. My grade point average at M.I.T. was perfect.

My background in science and engineering has informed my approach to understanding life. Nobody has been able to give me a reasonable explanation for the existence of God other than as an attempt to give meaning to life and ease the apprehension of death. Neither observation nor logical deduction can prove the existence of God, and without an intelligent being having an intent in mind, life has no meaning or purpose.

I believe that life has no meaning or purpose.

You may wonder why I am motivated to work hard, to succeed and achieve in the absence of meaning or purpose. That's easy. There is no difference between me and a lion on the savannahs of the Serengeti. Both of us are driven by our instincts to survive, to eat, to drink, to copulate, to protect our young, and to cooperate for mutual advantage. In the absence of meaning, our happiness lies in the pursuit of the satisfaction of these instinctive drives.

As a successful founder of a successful company, I have given millions of dollars to philanthropic causes, but my philanthropic acts are not acts of kindness, generosity or altruism, nor are they rooted in morality. The pursuit of happiness is always the pursuit of self-interest. I have amassed billions of dollars in wealth, therefore I have the opportunity to derive an extra measure of happiness by acting to help others.

I behave to maximize my happiness as dictated by my instincts. We may wish it to be otherwise, and may have "feelings" that make us believe that we have the freedom to make choices in life, but we are no different from automatons made of hardware and software. People are nothing more than complex structures consisting of mass and energy programmed to behave according to the laws of physics. We therefore, as random mass-energy bundles that adhere to observable laws, have no free will. Every event of the future, every future thought or action, has been predetermined in the present.

One day I will be found dead with my wife at my side. This has been predetermined.