To the moon!
American billionaires around the world had trouble sleeping last night as they knew Forbes would be releasing its definitive guide to some of the world’s richest people in the early morning. Who would rise? Who would fall? Who would be feted and who would be deeply shamed, unable to show poverty-stricken face in polite society again?
Well, let’s all stand and cheer professional surfing’s grand patron, the one and only Dirk Ziff who soared up one whole place to land at equal 160.
The spike can only be attributed to the most watched season in World Surf League history.
Numbers, still trickling in, are robust though very much denied by correspondent JP Currie who called them “ludicrous” and declared it a “campaign of such deliberate misinformation and manipulation that it amounts to sheer lies.”
Forbes, though, knows this sort of game better than we do and must have weighed those 8.3 million viewers for Final’s Day, there on Lower Trestles cobbled stone, accurately. Assigning each real value. Launching wealth. Ziff, and his brothers, are each worth $5.7 billion and while I don’t know where his brothers invested their riches I know surfing and I know stratospheric surges and I read chief strategist Dave Prodan discuss the reality of boom.
To the moon.
Speaking of, Elon Musk took the number one slot with his $251 billion, a whole $100b over number two Jeff Bezos. Surfing’s Mark Zuckerberg fell to eleven.