Maybe they could roll that into a service offering deathbed religious conversions and make it a two-fer.

"Get your deathbed gay marriage and your absolution right here! We'll even do it in the right order so you don't have to do the second one twice!"

If we extrapolate Mike Tyson's fine for biting Evander Holyfield, we see that Bill Gates could afford to devour the entire boxer.

(is 3fingerspointback)

Consider if you will that you are a fan of computer games. If you are 'rich' you can create a computer gaming system in the thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of dollars. However there are comes a point where even if you are 'richer than rich', that you can't really spend more money at buying a better gaming experience.

The difference in lifestyle between a billionaire and a multi-billionaire is one of style vs. substance. At a certain asset level money has less value than time. Therefore you farm out the management of your wealth to others because your time has risen exponentially in value.

I doubt you spend much time getting clean water or assuring for yourself the next days meal. However many people in the world do spend much of their lives engaged in precisely this activity. Wealth management is simply the outsourcing of something which is no longer "core" to someone's lifestyle.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

    Why have someone else manage your money? Well, I'd guess a lot of those folks also don't do their own laundry, or clean their houses, or raise their kids without a little help. There's only so many hours in a day, and the more you have, the more you have to do. And I've also heard that learning how and when to delegate responsibility and work is what separates managers from workers.

    However, it's been that way for centuries

    You could probably make that millenia. Rome was (in)famous for disparities in income, after all, as well as China. Whether or not these are models to follow or avoid remains an open question-- the fact that many of the Founders were influenced by the Romans isn't considered often enough, IMO. And while the actual peacefulness of normal life in the last couple centuries has been better than ever historically, those who lived (or didn't!) through the two World Wars might not agree that everything has been peaches and cream either. The degree to which the rich and ultra-rich had anything to do with the violence I'll leave to radicals like Ezra Pound . . .

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

Well, if I'd just made $100 million selling my high tech company, I probably would have no idea how to invest it.  I was an expert in technology afterall, not investment.

That being said, I am sure most people could probably manage $100 million on their own after getting a recommendation on asset allocation.  Hell, I bet I could buy $1 million chunks of mutual funds online using Schwab.com.  You could probably keep tabs on your money in only a few hours a week, and save loads on service fees and overhead.

Which makes me thing of a funny story.  Recently I rolled over a largish 401k into my Schwab account.  It wasn't an obscene amount of money, but it was the result of many years of 401k investment, and so triggered some sort of threshhold in the call center when I asked how to handle the roll over.  Suddenly they wanted to refer me, 'lil ole me, to some sort of "wealth management" group, that would handle the whole thing for me, so I wouldn't have to trouble myself with the nitty-gritty details.

After a few minutes on the phone, I realized what was going on, and further realized that said services would probably take a healthy chunk out of the roll-over check, and politely asked the girl to walk me through the "nitty-gritty".  It turned out all I had to do was have the check made out specially, and mail it to a particular address.  Wow, I imagine I might have paid somebody $5 to do that for me.  I don't think that was the sum Schwab had in mind...