Extreme Wealth – Episode 3: Jennifer Risher and the Limits of Sudden Wealth
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2024
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The author and philanthropist Jennifer Risher continues our series on extreme wealth by telling the story of her ear-popping rise from a middle-class Microsoft employee in the early '90s to an unexpected multimillionaire. The stock options she accrued with her husband, David — a fellow Microsoft employee who went on to join Amazon and who is now the CEO of Lyft — gave Jennifer immediate entry to a world of privilege that, as the child of a working-class household, she'd never expected to join. Her experience showed her the peculiar nature of personal wealth: an agent of tremendous power that, she finds, does more to amplify people's character than to alter it.
Jennifer Risher is the author of "We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth," which aims to illuminate discussions of money that are often cloaked in taboo, guilt, and secrecy. She and her husband founded the #HalfMyDAF movement, which seeks to encourage wealthy people to make greater charitable gifts in their lifetimes.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's a lot of chasing. |
| 0:05.2 | Yeah, there's a lot of chasing. |
| 0:07.4 | You can see how people kind of get into that mode, |
| 0:10.3 | and you can never stop. |
| 0:12.5 | The fact that you can spend your whole life looking for more. |
| 0:15.7 | It's not going to help you. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not going to help society. |
| 0:18.3 | It's really unproductive. |
| 0:21.3 | I think it was Rockefeller who said at $3 billion, okay, $4 billion ought to do it. |
| 0:26.3 | Like, there's, you can always be that person. |
| 0:30.9 | Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle or steel. |
| 0:34.0 | I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we bring you another in our ongoing series about the |
| 0:38.2 | impact of extreme wealth. As in past episodes, we're speaking with guests who have a unique |
| 0:43.3 | portal into this world and have been willing to share their thoughts on how it changes the |
| 0:48.1 | rules that people live by. |
| 1:11.2 | Thank you. Today we're continuing our discussion of extreme wealth with our guest, Jennifer Risher. |
| 1:15.4 | Jennifer is the author of We Need to Talk, a memoir about wealth. |
| 1:16.7 | Jennifer, thank you for joining me. |
| 1:17.8 | It's great to be here. |
| 1:18.6 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:26.6 | One of the things that really comes through starkly in your book is the people at Microsoft or Amazon come from very different backgrounds. And so bring different perspectives with respect to money, baggage, with respect to money |
| 1:32.8 | to this new wealth. |
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