But at a certain point—perhaps by the fourth billion, definitely by the fifth—the boredom had descended and solidified around him, like something gelatinous he could never fully slough off.
Now forty-six years old, Plottner had bought everything he could think to buy, visited everywhere he felt like going, done the requisite rich-guy things: fast cars, fast people, golfing in Antarctica, flying in zero gravity, shuffling through various extravagant hobbies, all while continuing to amass a fortune that grew faster than he could spend it.
The boredom remained.
Take these visits to his alma mater. Plottner was always a little uncertain who the dog was in the dog-and-pony show the Dartmouth development people put on whenever he came to campus.
He was pretty sure the staff member—or the student, or the gymnasium, or whatever it was he had come to visit—was supposed to be the dog.
But half the time, he was the dog. Like they were actually showing him off.
Check out this loaded alum we’ve got, Professor! See how he follows us like he’s on a leash?
Hey, kids, this is what a multibillionaire looks like! Wanna hear him bark when we ask for money?
Most of the time he just went along with it, nodding and smiling—because that was appropriate behavior, because his family’s name was on a dorm, and because it beat just sitting around one of his six houses.
None of it was actually interesting.
Until, suddenly, on the first Monday morning in February, it was.
He felt like it had been a long time since he had heard something new, seen something truly exciting, or met someone who shifted his eyes away from the mundanity of his billions and prodded his thoughts toward something more profound.
And it happened in the most unlikely place:
A physics professor’s lab.
Matt Bronik was the guy’s name. Plottner didn’t know physics, but he did know people. And Bronik had that rogue brilliance, that spark, that ineffable quality that Plottner had made his billions by being able to sniff out.
The professor had grown up in, of all places, Clinton, North Carolina, a podunk town that revolved around hogs—both the rearing and rendering of them. Bronik had told the story of how his elementary school was downwind from the hog-processing plant. On hot days, the stench was so overpowering they had to let school out early.
Local farmers said it smelled like money. Bronik insisted it smelled like dead pigs.
The Bronik family owned a diner, and Matt had spent his childhood helping out in the kitchen. Except where everyone else was slinging hash or making sweet tea, young Bronik was seeing Fibonacci sequences every time he cut an onion.
Plottner got the rest of the tale from the development people: Bronik won his first national mathematics competition when he was eleven. Then he won a bunch more. That, in turn, led to a full scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a PhD in physics from Princeton; and a postdoctoral fellowship at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands; and, ultimately, his current appointment, a tenured professorship at Dartmouth College.
It was the kind of quirky backstory that, in Plottner’s experience, evinced true genius. Not the run-of-the-mill kind. The once-in-a-generation kind.
This was what he had been waiting for—and who he had been waiting for—without even realizing it.
It went to something he had been thinking about a lot lately: legacy. It was one thing to be rich. It was quite another thing to be someone the world would keep talking about long after you were dead.
Like Carnegie. Or Rockefeller. Someone whose vision and future-focused pioneering drove the country forward and defined an age.
Philanthropy was part of that, of course. How many libraries had Carnegie given? How many buildings carried Rockefeller’s name? Etch yourself into the stone, and they can never forget you.
But generosity alone wasn’t enough. Anyone could stroke a check.
Plottner wanted to be part of something that was bigger than money or fame, something that would make him a part of a larger narrative.
The story of humanity itself.
Matt Bronik just might be able to do that for him.
And so even now, with the dog-and-pony show over, Plottner couldn’t stop thinking about what he had seen and heard in that lab. For the first time in ages, he was feeling that old restlessness, the way he used to get when he wasn’t sure whether a deal was going to come together.
It was unsettling.
And invigorating.
“Theresa,” he called out.
Theresa D’Orsi, his omnipresent personal assistant, who had been with him earlier that day for Professor Bronik’s presentation, appeared.
“Theresa, what do you say we get into the physics business?”
“Sir, before you dive in headfirst with Professor Bronik, why don’t we reach out to someone who knows physics—someone not connected to Dartmouth—who can tell us a little more about this?”
“That’s a fine idea,” Plottner said.
He said it like this was an unusual occurrence. It wasn’t.
Theresa disappeared. Plottner felt himself bubbling over like newly opened champagne.
The boredom was definitely gone.
CHAPTER 3
I knew it was bad when they wouldn’t let me in to see him.
Everything I learned came from a series of updates, delivered to me in the intensive care unit waiting area at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center by a succession of harried health care providers.
With all of them, I gestured to my hearing aids, so they knew about my condition, then stared hard at their mouths so I wouldn’t miss a word.
Even still, each update begged more questions than the last.
It started with the emergency room doctor, the first to see Matt when he was admitted. According to her, Matt’s eyes had been alternating between open and closed, and he was “agitated”—enough that the EMTs had strapped him down, to keep him from hurting himself.
He was rambling (all nonsense) but wasn’t responding to commands. She couldn’t determine whether he was in some minimally conscious state or a coma, nor could she say when he’d come out of it.
My next update came from a cardiologist, who said the most immediate issues were Matt’s heart rate and blood pressure, both of which were dangerously low.
I asked whether he had suffered a heart attack. The cardiologist said Matt’s initial enzyme levels suggested no, but it was something they were still considering. Both the cardiologist and the neurologist wanted to give him a CT scan, but they couldn’t do that while he was moving around so much—and they didn’t dare give him something to settle him down while his blood pressure was so low.
The update after that came from the neurologist. His name was Dr. Reiner, and he seemed just as baffled as everyone else. Matt had finally responded to the fluids and norepinephrine he had been given, but he still wasn’t snapping out of whatever spell he was under.
“What are you thinking happened?” I asked. “Did he have a stroke?”
“We don’t think so,” Dr. Reiner said.
“You don’t think so?”
“Strokes tend to be hemispheric. They impact one side of the body or one part of the body. We’re not seeing any evidence of that right now. Our biggest concern at the moment is that his oxygen levels were very low when he first got here. It’s possible he’s still suffering the effects of that.”