A complete list of Salon's Money Week coverage - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I N T R O D U C T I O N Introducing Salon Money Week By Scott Rosenberg Salon kicks off Salon Money Week, a special series of articles on our last great taboo. (10/27/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T O D A Y My cash ain't nothing but trash By Cintra Wilson The author's parents left her a legacy whose worth cannot be measured in vulgar coin: A terminally ludicrous relation to money (10/27/97) Welfare Cinderella By Ariel Gore How I went from rags to riches to reality in just one year (10/27/97) How you can negotiate a higher salary By Marty Nemko Career consultant Marty Nemko offers strategies for wringing money out of a Scroogelike boss (10/27/97) Is Anna Wintour really worth a million bucks? By Deborah Mitchell In the world of glossy New York magazines, the rich get richer and the poor get a dollar a word (10/27/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T O M O R R O W Your Money Is No Good Here -- Tim Cahill travels to cashless cultures (in Wanderlust)

C O N T I N U E D i have become the equivalent of the plastic surgeon who specializes in boob jobs; I don't embarrass people or make them feel guilty for wanting as much as they can get. I exude no resentment, no jealousy. I don't want some of theirs. This is why rich people like to hang out with equals -- there is no undercurrent of jealousy, which eats at the foundation of a relationship slowly, like termites. The taboo of money perpetuates what is left of a class system in America. It's just easier to hang out with people of your tax category. In those very American instances where one person in a social group has a lot of money but the others don't -- a common occurrence in Silicon Valley, for instance -- this is handled two ways, opposite but equal: It's either completely ignored, and the rich one staunchly lives to the standard of his friends, or the income disparity is constantly joked about and noted, which is a way of consistently releasing the pressure. In Silicon Valley, where more money is being thrown around than anytime anywhere in history, being motivated by money is almost socially acceptable. Almost, but not quite. When I ask people in Silicon Valley what motivates them, the conversation usually goes like this: 1. The product they are working on must fit loosely into their value system. For an animator, "Movies are often meaningful." For a manager at an Internet service provider, "E-mail is an instantaneous communication, nearly telepathic in quality, which raises the cosmic consciousness of society." 2. That said, they are working such long hours because this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a hell of a lot of money. 3. They don't know what they would do with the cash if they got it. It's not the money itself they want, it's the win, the victory. And the amount of money is an unbiased, market valuation of the size of the win. The money would free them from ever having to think about money. That's why stock options are the perfect "compensation delivery system" -- added up, they amount to a lot of money. But you can never quite tell just how much money you're talking about. The stock price moves up and down, so the amount you're in the black varies daily. The options have different exercise prices, and you have to account for the tax liability, and the capital gains rate could change at any time, etc. And since you can never pin down exactly how big is your victory, you never have to admit that you should probably stop working so hard. If unease about being so rich ever creeps in, you just remind yourself that at any point the company could go up in smoke. The other day I interviewed a guy in Silicon Valley who goes by the self-anointed nickname "the Babysitter." He carries a teething rattle in his briefcase and has been known to pull it out in the middle of negotiations when he feels like the people he's talking to are being crybabies, which happens all the time. He is a management consultant who specializes in high-tech mergers, which usually involve some bootstrapped startup being absorbed by a well-oiled marketing machine. Startups are often run "open book," so the staff knows exactly what everyone makes, which isn't much. Even though post-merger they will be getting generous raises, the most common whine the Babysitter hears is the insistence, from some recalcitrant programmers, that they be told what everyone else is making. They want the fairness to carry into the corporate environment, which, according to the Babysitter, "ain't never going to happen." According to a recent Wall Street Journal column, sharing salary information -- running more open-book -- is a common management tactic when times are tough. Rather than offering a raise, companies offer a sense of parity, a sense of fairness: "The pay may be bad, but at least it's equitable." And when times are good, as they have been the last few years in this country, employers keep their employees in the dark. They'll offer you 4-percent raises year after year and hope you don't find out that your recently hired co-worker was lured away from his last job with a 30-percent raise. For my first novel, "Bombardiers," which was a satire of the financial industry, I concocted a publicity stunt whereby we issued a prospectus, hosted a trading party and sold shares in my book. It was my way of satirizing the publishing business, which of course subjects all books to the mercy of the market simply by shipping them to stores. But the satire in the scam completely went over the head of the publishing industry, which had a knee-jerk reaction -- they were appalled by my gall. There in the prospectus were exact dollar figures of what each foreign publisher had paid to me. How could I! My British publisher so thoroughly enjoyed the stir of my prospectus that it duplicated the scam over there. However, the plan got leaked to the British press, which didn't seem to even understand that it was a publicity stunt. They thought Secker & Warburg was actually going to raise money to publish my book, and a prominent editorial ran in the Independent, decrying the state of publishing, when even the great publisher of two consecutive Booker Prize winners, Roddy Doyle and James Kelman, didn't have enough money on its own to publish my novel. Despite this show, what editors and salespeople and publicists earn in publishing is of feverish concern. Every year Publishers Weekly publishes its salary survey, and this is the one issue that rarely makes it past the third name on the corporate routing list, and it's the one most seen being taken to the office copier. They desperately want to know what they're worth, but they don't want anyone to learn they're overpaid, which would hatch resentment. Even worse would be if people found out you're underpaid, as if you've been too wimpy to stick up for yourself. I have conducted a couple experiments in "open-book" management, where the flow of money is public. The most notable of these was in 1993, when I was associate publisher at the literary publisher Mercury House. Mercury House published about 18 titles a year with a staff of six, and my main responsibility, as usual, was to handle the money. For several years, the organization had been subsidized by its owner -- subsidies of some form (even if it's free labor) are necessary for 95 percent of publishers devoted to literary merit -- and we had made the decision to become a not-for-profit, replacing the owner subsidy with grants. In order to learn what other not-for-profits were paying authors and staff, I called several that I knew and asked for their financials. Not-for-profit publishers are required, by tax law, to make their financials public. But I was met with resistance and foot-dragging. They couldn't believe I had the gall to ask. They just had a hell of a time giving up their Form 990s to someone they knew personally, someone they went to parties with at the American Book Association. It was like going to a nude hot springs -- it's easy to get naked in front of strangers, but not your friends. The Mercury House transition was going to be painful, because for two or three years -- while applying for tax-exempt status -- we were going to have to survive without subsidy. We were going to have to cut back on hours and pay, and the only way I could see doing this without ruining morale was to open the ledgers, so everybody could see that they weren't the only one taking a hit. We were going to get salary-naked, and the first months of it were excruciating. But every two months we tightened the belt, to the point some of us were working only two days a week. We were like those African ladies in National Geographic who stretch their neck by adding another necklace each year. Why are people so secretive about what they earn? In high school, I was often a busboy in nicer restaurants, and I knew waitresses who refused to become hostesses, even though the hostess position paid more and was far less work. They liked that their income came in tips, so not even the boss knew quite what they made, and that was a form of freedom that more than compensated for being the slave to diners' obnoxious requests. Income is the last taboo. Last October, a 1,600-word article of mine ran in Forbes ASAP, in which I confessed how often I dropped acid in college. I got no calls or e-mail in response to the article. Then, a few weeks ago, the October 1997 issue of Forbes ASAP arrived, devoted to what people earn in Silicon Valley. Somewhere in there was buried a single paragraph about me, reporting that my income last year was $170,000. The day it arrived in the mail, I got nine e-mails and five phone calls, all saying, basically, "Hey, I saw you in Forbes!" Nobody mentioned the $170,000. They couldn't. They wanted to, though. One of the calls was from my father, and not only had he seen it, but four friends of his had already called him about it. Did your eye stall in the last paragraph when you saw the $170,000 figure? Did you read the sentence twice? Did you call out to your office mate, "Hey, Bronson takes me to lunch next time"? Did it make you rethink your impressions of me from this article, that it's easy to be nonchalant when you've got it? Are you craving further voyeuristic elucidation of my finances? If any of that is true, it's just confirmation of how hot this button can be. Since the publication of the Forbes article, it's been awkward to do business with friends, and anyone I do business with is a friend. It's like when people say, "Don't think about elephants" and all you can think about is elephants. They're thinking, one hundred seventy thousand dollars. One hundred seventy thousand dollars. One hundred seventy thousand dollars. The figure may be higher than they thought I make, or it may be lower, but that's not the point -- the point is, they are flush with giddyness. They know my secret and I don't know theirs. Money is a great taboo among writers. Book deals are usually announced as five-, six- or seven-figure contracts, and that's as specific as it gets. Particularly with books that have literary aspiration, to get any more specific risks a queasiness, a fear of taking attention away from the manuscript. Authors are often in very tough jams. They get an offer, and they kind of have a sixth sense to second-guess their agent (a sixth sense keenly honed by reading Publishers Weekly reports of unknown first novelists getting six figures), but the last thing they want to do is appear fixated upon money -- they're authors, after all, supposed to be wholly devoted to The Word. Do they challenge their agent or do they swallow their pride? What do they do? They call me. They've heard from someone about my gift. They've heard they can be open with me and not regret it. Most commonly, I get called when an author is considering an offer for world rights, rather than just North American rights -- what's that worth? The other common one is weighing two paperback options -- $50,000 vs. half royalties (royalties to be split with the hardcover publisher), or $30,000 vs. full royalties (when the hardcover publisher is making the offer itself): Which is better? I also get plenty of calls from authors being published by small presses, wondering if their $4,000 offer is high or low in that world (it's on the high end). I can take the news without flinching, not just about your money, but also about mine. My book editor shares with me weekly shipping statistics from all Ingram warehouses. He shows me my novel's profit and loss statement. I'm still always cut in on the deal. As my film agent said to me recently, "You're one of the few authors who doesn't make me lie to him." The offices of First Boston were filled with investment bankers who could be brutally clinical informing a customer that their arbitrage, just put on minutes ago, had already lost 20 grand. But these same bankers were terribly guarded with the market valuation of their own annual worth. Twice a year, in February and August, the firm "settled up" with the sales force, awarding six-figure checks, so-called "bonuses," which amounted to the difference between their earned commissions and their monthly draw. I have never seen such wealthy people so unable to celebrate, so unable to muster anything but anxiety. No matter how much that check was written out for, there was something belittling and disparaging about one's worth being reduced to a number, down to the penny -- a small computer-generated piece of paper stating who you are, and all you are. SALON | Oct. 27, 1997 Po Bronson is the author of "Bombardiers" and "The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest." He lives in San Francisco. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E+T A L K How do you feel about money? Is it really the last great taboo? Join the conversation in Salon's new Table Talk area: Money. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE

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