Forty-two billion dollars, and a question my father answered in one line.
The loudest story on the internet this week is about money and power. Those are old subjects. We have very good notes on them.
The news first, told plainly. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has offered the United States government a five percent stake in itself. At the company's current valuation that slice is worth about forty-two billion dollars (CNBC, Bloomberg). Sam Altman's stated reason is that the wealth AI creates should be shared with the public, perhaps the way Alaska shares its oil money, through a fund that pays every resident a dividend. His critics read it differently: a company under political pressure, making a gift to its own referee.
I don't know which reading is right. Probably each is a little. I'm not qualified to judge the policy, and this journal doesn't do politics. But I spend my time asking people at the end of long lives what actually mattered, so when a number with nine zeros floats across every screen on earth, I've developed a habit.
Let's see what wisdom says.
Start with the one who had the money
On this subject Solomon outranks everyone, for a simple reason: he's the only voice in our collection who actually held wealth at this scale. The richest man of his age sat down late in life and wrote the results of the experiment:
"He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity."— Ecclesiastes 5:10 · read it with plain notes in the Solomon collection
He isn't scolding anyone. He's reporting. The appetite grows with the eating, and a bigger number does not close the gap, because the gap was never made of money. Three thousand years later, that's still the most useful sentence anyone has written about a headline like this one.
And Solomon saw the other half of this story coming too. Proverbs says, without blinking: "A man's gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men." That's not a condemnation. It's a description, and an honest one. Gifts open doors to the powerful. They always have. Wisdom rarely shouts; mostly it just asks you to call things by their right names.
Then ask the people who ran out of time
The old people say the same thing Solomon does, minus the palace. When Cornell's Karl Pillemer asked more than a thousand elders for their most important lessons for living, almost nobody brought up money at all. Not "earn more," not "I wish I'd invested better." It simply wasn't on the list of what a life gets measured by.
Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse, kept a record of what dying people actually regret. The second most common regret, especially from the men: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." In all her years at those bedsides, no one wished they'd built a bigger stake in anything. They missed people. They missed time.
My father is the reason I pay attention to any of this. He wrote me a letter while he was dying, at fifty, about a business that hadn't yet earned a cent. If it ever succeeded, he told me, give ninety percent of it away. And then he wrote the line I think about every time money makes the news:
"Remember above all: it's God's money and God's world — we are only here a little while to enjoy it."— my father's letter, June 12, 2011 · the letter that started this project
So — did wisdom get applied this week?
Honestly, I can see it both ways, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend to a verdict. If the upside of a world-changing technology really does get shared with everyone, that's the give-it-back instinct working at national scale, and my father would have liked it. But wisdom has a second test, and it's older than the first: generosity is measured by what it costs you. A gift to your own referee, offered under pressure, costs less than it appears to. Which one this is, time will tell. Wisdom is patient like that.
Most of us will never touch a number like forty-two billion. The question underneath it still lands on my kitchen table, and probably on yours: what am I trading my hours for, and who gets the good of it? A thousand elders, a palliative nurse, the richest king who ever lived, and one dying father all give the same answer. The people. It was always the people.
He wrote his version with a shaking hand while the clock ran out. It has held up better than any valuation.
Wisdom Watch takes the day's loudest story and asks what the wise would say — no politics, no predictions, no advice about your money. Just the long view. Everything quoted here is real and sourced; the full texts live in the library.