Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…How happy are famous people? That’s a good question. Obviously, that varies quite a bit. I suppose, actually, to be fair, it probably varies with the billionaires. That was a flippant answer. I don’t think money buys happiness, but the truth is, it buys freedom, so people then can pursue interests and do things like that. The fame — I’ll give an example of someone who I know reasonably well, Sean Parker. He is both famous and a billionaire. I think if he were given the option to choose to give up one or the other, he would definitely give up being famous because the grief he has gotten in his life around his extravagant wedding and things like that are completely not aligned with the things he’s interested in. He’s super interested in cancer research, and he donates money there. Whenever I talk to him, he’s really passionate about certain areas of medicine, not because he’s trying to make money — it’s just that’s what he’s interested in. That makes him happy, and being famous on the side is actually annoying. That’s me assessing him. I haven’t actually asked him that, but . . . How happy are people who have power?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.