Member-only story
On Money, Not Having It, and Writing About People Who Have a Lot of It
There’s a fine art to reporting on sketchy companies with billions while making $13 an hour
Ihave never had a lot of money. And I’ve also never been particularly good with money. It did not occur to me to get better with having money, perhaps because it did not make sense to me to learn how to be better about handling money I didn’t have.
Why would I learn about investing in the stock market, for example, when every dollar I made was going toward rent or paying off my student loans? Does the stock market let you invest your leftover $40 after taxes and expenses? (Do not answer this question. I still have not put any money into the stock market, in part out of a misguided belief that eventually I will go back to “reporting,” and it will be ethically murky for me to own stock in a company I could potentially cover. Also, again, I do not have any money with which to invest.)
In 2014, when I started covering venture capital funding, multimillion- and eventually multibillion-dollar companies, I was making $13 an hour. A few months later, when I finally got a job offer, it was for $40,000 a year plus the potential of a $5,000 annual “traffic bonus.” Again, it was 2014.
