When you beat the money game, you get to go on side quests. Unless, of course, your goal is to make even more money. Then you re-start the game on hard mode and play again. To try to 10x or 20x your money.
That’s what it feels like Elon Musk is doing. He beat the game three times over and is back for a fourth. I mean, he did tell Joe Rogan that he believes we live in a computer simulation. To me though, all his statement proves is that he’s not simply another rich guy high on life, he’s also a master at getting attention.
And this is not an easy combination to find.
When people get rich, they become conservative and quiet. They have to save face with their rich cronies.
But they can’t escape a fundamental fact: money flows where attention goes.
A business is simply a machine that turns attention into money. If you can’t attract a customer’s attention, you won’t get any of their money. If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, did it make a sound?
So, a healthy business finds itself eventually outsourcing the job of getting attention. The rich owners have too much to lose by doing it themselves.
This creates an inescapable dynamic between money and attention.
Anyone hoping to enjoy life’s true comforts must control either lots of money or lots of attention.
Those are your two choices.
So you have to be clear on which game you’re playing.
If you already have money, you’ll delegate the work of getting attention. It happens if you own a small business or invest in a big company. You provide the money and resources; someone else brings you the ears and eyeballs to sell to.
And if you don’t already have lots of money, the game choice has been made for you. You have to play the attention game.
But rest easy that the attention game is just as vital as the money game.
Think about it: all these influencers on social media are just marketers for hire. That’s how Charli D’Amelio can make $100,000 for a TikTok about Chipotle.
Sure, it takes money to make money, but somewhere in that process, you also need eyeballs.
This is why the arts and business are inseparable in today’s world. Let’s use the publishing industry as an example. In its purest form, what do book publishers sell? They sell dead trees. But to sell dead trees, they need to hire artists—the authors who dream up the words on those pages.
The art draws in the customers. So do the salespeople and marketers who push Stephen King’s books to become bestsellers. Money folks (the owners of the publishers) need to hire attention people (the artists and marketers) to sell what their factories produce. In the same way, artists and salesmen can’t make a living without the backing of moneyed folks. They are ying and yang.
Now, this is where I tell you the uncomfortable truth of how the world operates. So stop reading unless you have a strong stomach.
Suppose you aren’t a money person or an attention person. In that case, you’re stuck in the middle of an organization, and your earning potential is limited. You can still enjoy a decent middle-class life while having a job in the middle, but it’ll be tough to afford the finer things you desire deep down. In the middle, you’re simply trading time for money. Outsized rewards live in one of the outer extremes.
The biggest value forms when lots of money and lots of attention meet in one place. This is why Apple is the highest-valued company on Earth: they put the most money and attention into their products. They fuse electronics and art. Every product launch is an event with millions of eyeballs. They’ve become impossible to ignore. It’s not just great products. It’s great salesmanship.
So now that we all agree on this reality of money and attention, how can we use it to our advantage?
Well, I have another piece of advice. For those of us forced to work in the sphere of attention-getting, our aim should be to flip over to the money side eventually. Being good at getting attention can pay well, but the biggest rewards still go to the money people. Because money people control the machine for turning attention into more money: it’s called a platform.
Amazon is a platform. So is Facebook. WalMart is a platform, too. Fedex as well. A platform, in general terms, is any process that connects producers and users. But any money exchange between those two parties flows through the platform.
Money people need attention people to bring customers to their platform. Yet once they have them, the customers belong to the platform. They use the power of habit, subscriptions, and loyalty rewards to lock them into their ecosystem.
That’s why it pays to invest in building your platform. Attention is short-lived; you have to earn it again every day.
But a platform is sticky. Customers have some degree of loyalty, while fans are fickle.
The music industry from the 90s is a perfect example. On one side, you had artists in charge of attracting attention through the music, and on the other, you had fans buying albums on CD for $15 a pop. In between them, you had the record labels who were packaging the music and taking the lion’s share of the profit.
In 1996, the album CrazySexyCool by TLC had sold over 10 million copies, yet TLC soon filed for bankruptcy. They caused headlines at the Grammys that year when they won two awards and Chili said to the media “we’re as broke as broke can be.” Their contract had them making just 7% of album sales. That’s like 84 cents per album, while the label gets $11. And the group had to split those 84 cents three ways, as well as cover ALL the costs of recording the album, and also pay their manager’s fee. In the end, they took home less than 1% of the total pie.
The record labels keep most of the money because they are the platform. They built the distribution funnel to put the music in people’s hands and ears. Some of you might remember Columbia House, the mail-order club where you would get 10 CDs for a dollar. Then, months later, you ended up paying back like double their full price. It was a nasty scheme. I bet there are still many copies of Mambo No. 5 rotting away in attics today.
The record labels invented this scam as an easy way to sell millions of albums that nobody wanted.
Once an artist is no longer selling, or if they ever step out of line, the record labels just substitute them with a fresh new face. In the business, the artist is replaceable, but the distribution funnel is king.
Today, all our music lives in the cloud; we simply pay for access to stream from it. This was the genius of Spotify; they realized a digital asset doesn’t need physical form. But who do you think owns most of Spotify’s stock? You guessed it, the record labels. The platform didn’t change hands; it just changed forms.
There will always be lots of benefits for those who get attention. But being the platform pays that in multiples.
Every time you post on TikTok or Instagram, the attention you get from friends and followers is monetized by the platform. In this way, we all work for Facebook.
Use the platform, don’t let it use you.
Money and attention will always display this dynamic. Attention uses money to survive, and money uses attention to multiply. So your choices are clear: do you want to survive or to multiply?
This is all just a long way of saying I understand why you want attention. Without attention or money, all you have is a job.
When you have no money, focus on getting attention. But work towards eventually getting on the money side. Work on building a platform you can own.
So don’t lose track of the real goal: what you want is money, not attention. You want to own the platform.
Today’s smartest folks use fame and social media only as a tool to build their own platform. The Kardashians became billionaires by turning their fame into a clothing and makeup empire. George Clooney doesn’t need to make movies anymore; he made $233 Million from selling his share of Casamigos tequila. Trust me, he’s not drunk on fame.
But the smartest celebrity of all is probably Ashton Kutcher. He used his Hollywood connections to befriend Venture Capital folks. They used him to attract more investors to their projects, and he used them to learn the business. Since then, he’s made millions as an early investor in startups like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Warby Parker, and Shazam. He’s no longer asking, “Dude, where’s my car?” He can buy a new one.
Tupac said, “All I want is money, F the fame, I’m a simple man.” This line tells us his plan: get attention to get money, then get out. It’s a shame he stayed in the fame game too long. He got caught up in it, and it killed him.
You and I know better. We know that in the seesaw of money and attention, there’s always one side with the better view. On this ride, the money side always ends up on top.
