Me, a Billionaire?
A fictional short-short story
Yeah, my parents were poor, yeah I went to crappy schools, but I knew I’d be someone. I just didn’t know how much of a someone.
In the first grade, the teacher called-in my mother and me and, oh so politely said that I was “challenging” and she suggested I see a doctor about Ritalin. When I protested, “I’m just bored,” the teacher threw a patronizing glance at my mother that said, “He’s just a child. He doesn’t know.” My mom, wiser, averted her eyes.
I was bored throughout school but the teachers seemed to care mainly about the dumb kids. Yes, that’s the right term, not “learning challenged,” “differently abled” or any other obfuscatory, woke term. I had had enough of silly school and so dropped out.
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My epiphany occurred when I started having to recharge my phone’s battery every day. I googled “battery research” and learned that the most promising replacement for lithium-ion was aluminum, but there were problems.
Researchers all over the world were trying different aluminum compounds, electrodes, and electrolytes but fairly, ahem, atomistically, too-much in their own silos. So I decided to ask AI platforms — Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Co-Pilot, and Claude for the most promising combinations of aluminum compounds, electrodes, and electrolytes, across the myriad being tested, not just for iPhones but for high-payoff batteries like for EVs and especially the power grid. The results I got seemed promising but still not fully solving, so I tweaked them a bit, patented the resultant model so I wouldn’t lose my intellectual property and then both posted it on an open-access Nature journal and emailed it to a dozen luminaries working on aluminum batteries.
They made suggestions and, voila, while not quite a breakthrough, the model offers a major improvement in storage capacity, temperature tolerance, and power retention. I gave a free non-exclusive license to the contributors to the model and sold non-exclusive licenses to utilities and top battery manufacturers — I am now worth almost a billion dollars.
What next? I’ll use a similar approach to discover the genetic basis of reasoning ability and then of altruism.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
This is the sort of thing Marty Nemko would do if starting over. Meanwhile, he’s a career and personal coach, and author of 36 books including Thought Experiments. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com
