It came easy, and it went just as fast

Plenty of folks I know did something at least a little foolish with their money at some point in life. Took the trip, bought the car, went to the show, splurged on the bracelet, picked up the tab, when they couldn't really afford it. Most of this happened when they were young and didn't have that much to begin with, so there was only so much damage they could do. 

Although once credit cards took off, you could do a lot more damage by rolling up the debt. Fortunately, credit cards weren't that big a deal when I was young and occasionally dabbling in dumb spending.

Probably the dumbest thing I ever did with my money was buy a baby-blue suede blazer on sale at Ann Taylor. I was in my early twenties and I pretty much spent the rent money. This meant that, in order to make sure I had the rent, I spent the rest of the month scrambling. I rolled my coins and spent a week subsisting on a bag of oranges, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread.

Ah, youth. (By the way, I loved that jacket and it was well worth it.)

Not that I haven't done dumb things since. It's just that, when I do dumb things now, I have more money and thus have the financial resilience to survive without resorting to subsisting on a bag of oranges, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. (C.f., the rowing machine I bought last October and still haven't used. I will say that it's more or less paid for itself in that, if ever I have a day when I'm reluctant to get my miles in, all I need to do is glance at the rowing machine and realize that, if I don't start stepping, I have to sit down and row. That gets me moving.) Plus there is definitely a dollar limit on what I'm willing to do that's dumb-ish. And it doesn't go much higher than $1K. (And rarely gets anywhere near that amount.)

Anyway, I don't think I'm constitutionally capable of blowing through $400 million - even if I had $400 million around to blow through.

But I'm not Scott Jones, who has seen his $400 million fortune sift like sand through his fingers. He now has a little over a thousand bucks in checking - wonder if he's interested in an unused rowing machine? - and has credit card debt amounting to $140K. (Gulp!) Oh, yes, and he owes his parents over $1 million. Jones is in his early 60's, so his parents have to be in their eighties. So they're probably not going to make that retirement shortfall up on their own anytime soon. (Gulp! Gulper! Gulpest!)

So how did he get there?

At 25, he was a founding partner in Boston Technology, the company that made voicemail stick. He later founded Gracenote, the music search company he sold to Sony for $260 million and some of the technology that powers iTunes. He was an early investor in Art Technology Group, the ecommerce giant that Oracle would later purchase for $1 billion. And in 2005, he was the mind behind ChaCha, the human-powered, text-based search engine backed by Jeff Bezos and whose data was acquired by either Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. (Jones won’t say which one.) (Source: Adam Wren in Indianapolis Monthly)

That's how he made his money.

So where'd it all go?

Some of it went to his Indianapolis mansion. A place that, in 2009, was chosen "House of the Decade" by MTV, beating out Mariah Carey and Hugh Hefner for the honor. The award was presented by none other than Kim Kardashian. One of the key features Chez Jones: 

A spiral mahogany slide that took a boatmaker a year and a half to build once deposited riders to a well-stocked bar at the bottom of the run. “Some people would take the slide to get to the bar,” he once mused, “and others had to get drunk at the bar to do the slide.”

Wheee!

The slide was only part of the grandeur:

Furnished with a $9,250 Tyrannosaurus rex skull and a Steinway grand piano, the home featured an indoor basketball court, a 25-foot-long saltwater aquarium, and a knock-you-down waterfall shower. Walls hid secret passageways. A 4,000-pound brass tub sprawled across the master bathroom. In addition to gracing several MTV Cribs episodes, the Jones manse made appearances on a variety of HGTV shows and Mega Mansions. It took seven years and $20 million to build and millions each year to operate.

Plus he's in the middle of a hellacious and costly divorce - his third. Oh, and, in February, he had his electricity cut off. (Jones says it was an oversight. He does have a reasonably hefty income by anyone else's terms - $21K/month -  from his work as head of a non-profit coding academy.)

Scott Jones also spent a ton in contributions to Indiana (Republican) politicians, and working on initiatives like getting Indiana to adopt Daylight Savings Time. (That worked.)

And he lavished just a bit on himself, like hiring Ray Charles to perform at his par-tay when he turned 40. (When I turned 40, we waited a month and then flew to Berlin to help tear down The Wall.) And when he flew back to Indy after a trip, he had one aide to pick him up and quickly get him back home, and another to wait to collect his baggage. (Now that might be worth having an aide for...)

Jones was also philanthropic, "funding the roller coaster at the Indianapolis Zoo."

Then there were those divorces, which cost him plenty.

The latest divorce is an ongoing saga that's been particularly tawdry. 

One of the high points - make that low points - was his wife's Tweet attacking a woman she accused of sleeping with her husband. One tweet read:

You blew him for a michael khors bag? Bitch I would’ve got you a MK bag just to leave us be… Jeeesh.

The woman sued "and won an undisclosed settlement." Likely for more than the cost of a Michael Kors bag.

And we all think of Indiana as reserved, Mike Pence strait-laced. 

Anyway, the house is a goner. And all the stuff in it was offered up in an "everything must go" sale. And I do mean "everything must go."

Half-empty bottles of Windex went for 50 cents.

Scott Jones doesn't even have his own car any longer. He's tootling around Indy in his father's 2008 Toyota Tundra. Kind of pathetic when you think of a guy in his sixties asking his dad if he can have the keys. Hope he at least fills it up when he puts it back in the driveway.

But Scott Jones is still thinking big:

"I will earn between a billion and $100 billion in this next decade. Watch me.” 

But he's also offering himself up as something of a cautionary tale: 

Jones now counsels other entrepreneurs to avoid the kind of high-profile spending he built a reputation for. Don’t own so much that your stuff owns you, he tells them. “I was feeling like my stuff owned me at that point.”

There's a classic Honeymooners episode in which Ralph Kramden finds a suitcase stuffed with money. When no one claims it, he goes on a spending spree, only to find out the that money was counterfeit. He had fun while it lasted, and there's a great scene in which, snapping his fingers, he talks to his wife Alice about his two days a millionaire. "I had it, and I went with it...It came easy, and it went just as fast..."

I'm sure that Scott Jones' fortune didn't come easy. He built it as an entrepreneur, rather than finding it in a suitcase. 

Ralph and Alice Kramden never made it out of their dump of a cold-water flat, let alone into a place anywhere near Scott Jones' crazy house in Indiana. But, as I read this story, I couldn't help thinking about Ralph.

"It came easy, and it went just as fast..."