The Richest Girl in the World, Part 4/4
Katrina the Business Empress
If you missed any of the previous instalments in Katrina’s burbling, then you have links to Part I there, here is Part II, and this one is Part III.
Obviously, most people think Katrina is a delusional fantasist, but in this final instalment, she will at least give you potentially reasonable explanation for how she got to be the richest girl in the world.
Even if it isn’t true, I hope you will agree that it’s fun to at least imagine.
There’s some more images from her movie career for you too, courtesy of the Great Image Generator.
Enjoy.
So then, where were we? Right. Economics and money. Well, we have a population of around seventy million. The per capita, as an average, net worth is around 300,000. So that’s 30 times the Cost of Living Allowance per person. Yes, people do have colourful vernaculars for the COLA. Cocaine is decriminalised, by the way, thanks for asking. As is brothel-keeping. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another time (it was Cynthia Payne’s idea – she was elected Green Party MP for Streatham in 1992).
The Bank of Britannia accounts for some 75% of all retail/commercial banking, with the remaining 25% taken up by a wide range of private banks and finance companies (like the aforementioned Nathaniel Morgan, who, with around 130 million, is in the top ten rich list – yeah, I own 10% of his business…), all of which are subject to a kind of ‘firewall’ with regards to their casino banking adventures – meaning nothing they do there can ever have a damaging effect on our real economy (Bob, of course, is barred from casinos, for his – and our – own good – he only knows the real economy).
How’s that done? Easy. Every British citizen gets a national bank account when they’re sixteen (linked with their national insurance number – that should please all you anti-immigrant types). You are not allowed to open a private bank account unless you reach a minimum of 100,000 in your national bank savings account, from which the initial transfer must be made (see how easy it is to gather data and prevent corruption?). Further, you are not allowed to invest in the aforementioned casino banking (the exclusive domain of private banks) until you have a minimum of one million in your private bank savings account, at which point they set you up with an investment account, make a transfer, and the rest is at your own risk.
Thus, as people get richer, the greater the number of people who can afford a private bank account, with the increased benefits that brings. Interest rates being a good example. The base rate is fixed at four percent. The national bank can go up to seven percent (for long-term savings), whilst the private banks can go up to ten. So the rich get richer, but hey, nobody cares because we don’t have any poor people. That’s just human nature. If you, as a normal person, are doing perfectly fine – which you will be if you have a job – then why should you give a fuck what stupid rich people like yours truly get up to? (Unless it’s with Nathaniel in the boardroom once the meeting’s over and everyone else has exited the building, hehe; yes, of course there are rumours in the tabloids).
Obviously there’s a lot more to it than this, but that’ll do for now, or I’ll be in yet more danger of you screaming ‘Red!’ at me. Thus it behooves me to release you from your bonds.
So, in view of this exchange rate, erm, yeah, if my net worth in my world is around five hundred billion – dollars – then – triumphant supervillain cackle – in your world I’m a fucking trillionairess.
As you can imagine, that’s the point when my acquaintances absolutely decide that I’m a fantasist.
Well, you just hold on a minute right there. If I told you how I became the world’s richest communist (as Frankie Boyle delights in endlessly repeating), then it might just make a little more sense to you. That’s to say it would become, I suppose, at least possibly believable.
People want me to explain the Frankie Boyle reference. Ok – on my streaming service we have a comedy panel show called Dogpile, in which we take the piss out of the dumbest shit on social media. It’s presented by David Mitchell (with whom I was in Cambridge Footlights once upon a time), and both me and Frankie are regulars. At one point, in Season One Episode Three, Frankie decided to start laying into me about being the world’s richest KGB spy, so I foolishly riposted with ‘oh, is this some new segment of the show, like Dogpile on Kat or something?’ to which Frankie replied ‘what a fucking great idea!’, so David went with it and said ‘right then, audience, welcome to our new – and sure to be regular – segment Dogpile on Kat! In which we all (he looks at me pointedly) without fear of KGB repercussions, totally pile on to the world’s richest socialist!’ And so it became a regular thing. Sometimes it gets to me, you know, because I give so much of my money away – and not for the sole purpose of making myself look good, like philanthropists in your world do – and I do care; although part of the point of Dogpile on Kat is that everyone knows this about me; so other times I just go along with it and have fun, and I can give as good as I take. Anyway – there’s the explanation of that reference.
One of the funniest things we indulged in was consequent to taking the piss out of this brainless moron American Trump supporter:
And you can imagine my delight when I discovered that this guy also exists in your world! So I can show you the genuine photo! Anyway, we thought we would take this guy’s advice and, yeah, get ourselves a Brian Moran. To wit, we basically just scoured the phone book for anyone called Brian Moran in Britannia (and Ireland, as it turned out). We had a Dylan Moran, but no Brian. So that was soon rectified when a number of Brian Morans proactively got in touch saying they’d love to be on the show. The best one was this 12-year old cheeky chappie from Liverpool, who was just fantastic. Another one was the science teacher from Macclesfield, who was pretty much coerced into it by his students, who was nervous as hell until we slipped some MDMA into his drink in the Green Room before the show. Obviously I drew the short straw for the spiking, given my KGB associations.
Anyway, this is a really successful and popular show and I do love doing it.
Hmm. Now you’re thinking what a reprobate I am, eh? Honest – I do not spike people’s drinks with positive neurotransmitters on a regular basis. But once a KGB, always a KGB, you know…
So then, my largest source of income is my streaming service. If I told you we have around a billion customers worldwide, each paying five quid a month and generating us a net profit of around fifty quid each a year, then simple mathematics tells you that’s fifty billion a year. Sure, we have to pay some tax on that (not as much as you do in your world, I hasten to add – we have a much, much lower tax burden), but we’ve had our streaming service since 2004/5, following the Lizzies hell-for-leather rollout of high-speed broadband. So we had the ‘first mover’ advantage, and that lasted for a good four or five years. My company, by the way, is called PAWS. It encompasses all manner of entertainment and culture – starting off with a record label then branching out into a production company, a printing press/publisher, then one of the first ISPs, then social media and streaming.
Social media is another massive income stream. No, it’s not like your version which relies on stealing your data and selling it off. Ask Bezos about that. Yeah, that fucker does exist in my world. Elon I don’t mind at all, even if I do continuously tease him that the only reason he’s got loads of money is because he got bailed out by NASA when our new space race kicked in. Likewise with the EVs. That was another thing the Lizzies invested in from 2003 – the intention being to make Britannia the world leader in electric vehicle technology (we don’t need lithium by the way – we use ultracapacitors, like Nikola Tesla did). That and space technology (yep, we do have a rotating artificial gravity space station – Tsiolkovsky, thank you very much). And medical research – wholly owned by our beautiful NHS, by the way. Maglev too – now that really is cool. As fast as a commercial airliner and available on the hour to take you from, say Edinburgh to Beijing, now the Chinese have connected up their BRI with our European network. Do you like Sci-Fi? Well, then you’d love my world.
I do. And I miss her every day.
And not just because, in the greatest of ironies, I arrived in your world with, quite literally, not a single penny to my name. Well now, that just means I get to start again on my great adventure.
Social media. Right. Well, I am not so superciliously socialist that I’d refuse to beat the capitalists at their own game. So, in anticipation of the predictable (and deliberately orchestrated, as usual) so-called dotcom bubble in 2000, I acquired a few choice companies, the owners of which, clearly, didn’t really understand the Internet at all. Bezos, incidentally, is an exception to that rule. As it happens I do have a begrudging kind of respect for the man. When I offered to take Amazon off his hands he cannily said ‘ah, now then, Katrina – if you think my company is worth buying then clearly my company is worth holding on to, eh?’. Yeah, ok.
I was, however, utterly delighted to outbid the wankerous fucker for MGM. Aside from anything else, as a filmmaker they knew it would be in good hands – or paws, rather – if they sold it to me. Bezos would’ve just milked it as a cash cow, with no regard whatsoever for aesthetics. Yes, he isn’t much different in my world. Hell knows what’s going to happen to your Bond movies now he’s gotten creative control.
Not so Netflix. In what must rank as one of the most monumentally stupid business decisions in the history of monumentally stupid business decisions, they panicked and offered their company to Blockbuster (remember them?) for fifty million bucks. Blockbuster, in the second most monumentally dumbass decision, refused. So, in steps yours truly and offers them sixty million. To sweeten the pot I also offered them ten percent of the profits for the first five years. They said yes. So that got me their entire customer list and a virtual monopoly on online movie rentals in the States.
Their problem was, as was the case with practically everyone who fell foul of the dotcom bubble, they didn’t understand that the success of an online company depends entirely on connection speeds. And in the – again, deliberately orchestrated – absence of the rollout of high-speed broadband (again, blame Thatcher’s privatisation of BT), their business models were doomed, because they quickly reach the maximum saturation point. What I did, however, find utterly astounding was their total ignorance of the basic concept of ‘streaming’. That’s to say, instead of them sending you the physical DVD by post, you simply download the data to your computer. With sufficient speed, you can watch that in real time. In other words, you can just watch the fucking movie on your own device. What the fuck is so hard to understand about that? Duh!
Anyway, so that’s Netflix. After the five years (they did, as it happens, make a goodly amount from their ten percent in the end), this was incorporated into our PAWS streaming service. Given that we also had the production company and the ISP, what you’ve got there is a beautiful little thing called ‘vertical integration’. Yep, I love vertical integration. And not just in the bedroom, haha (ask Nathaniel – he’s a financier – we have an understanding).
By the time of the ‘global financial crash’ in 2007 (we had that too), I’d entered the top ten in the rich list. A year later I was number one. Solely because the other nine had private shareholders and collectively lost at least a third of their net worth virtually overnight. Fuck that shit. If you need private shareholders – ‘outside investment’ that is – then you don’t have a viable business model. Well, either that or you live in a rampantly monstrous capitalist system in which any means necessary becomes the order of the day and you are forced to float your company simply to, well, stay afloat. Not so me. Always a limited company – that’s a golden rule. Followed by the second golden rule, which is always grow your company solely using the profits you make. PAWS, then, in my world, is owned sixty percent by me, ten percent by my business partner (and former bedroom associate, aka boyfriend) Nathaniel Morgan, and the remaining thirty percent is owned by the employees. Told you I’m a socialist.
I get this business approach from my dad, I should add by way of clarification (Meyer Electronics, I believe I mentioned that already). That and my precocious understanding of the Internet. My wonderful father understood the concept of the Internet way back in the late sixties when he studied electronics engineering and dreamed about one day making his own computers and every house and every business would have them, all of them connected together and sharing information. Aside from anything else – that’s called democratic socialism. In your world, of course, it’s been ‘captured’ by (mainly American) neoliberal organisations with nefarious ties to the so-called American Deep State. Google and Facebook, for example, which were effectively founded by the CIA. It does make me laugh, that ridiculous mythologising of ‘The Social Network’. Believe that and you’ll believe anything.
Anyhow, to cut a digressionary story short (you’re welcome), my dad, armed with Alan Sugar’s customer list (pilfered by a then seventeen year old white hat by the name of Alex who, after becoming my dad’s security software programmer, got headhunted by MI5) was finally able to achieve that ambition in 1986, when I was thirteen. His computers were – and still are – excellent machines and the market leader in terms of price vs. processing power. To begin with, these were aimed primarily at businesses and savvy programmers. They retailed around the 1500 mark (and at least twice as good as the equivalently priced IBM), so if you imagine a small company buying twelve of them (25k thank you), all interconnected via ethernet, which also gets them free upgrades and personalised assistance and maintenance and, yes, teaching your office staff how to get the most out of them, not to mention the best security software around (included in the package, sir, courtesy of the groovy Alex), then you can understand that for that kind of small company, 25k is never going to break the bank and you will get a massive return on that investment. It’s what the Americans would call a no-brainer.
So, his precocious daughter knew everything there was to know about computers and the Internet before it was even called that. We also got into correspondence with Tim Berners-Lee, meaning we got hold of beta versions of his software and were able to hit the ground running when the so-called World Wide Web came online in 1993. ISP followed 1994. And exponential growth.
So there you have it. Well, obviously there’s a bit more to it (there always is), like making some damn cool movies and releasing some damn cool music, but that’s the secret in a nutshell. Ah, yes, that and social media. I forgot about that one. Now I know you won’t get this one, because your version of ‘MySpace’ was something of a flop. Not so my version. Ours, for which subscribers pay, again, our usual five quid a month, not only get the kind of social media you would be familiar with, but they also get a whole load of web space along with it.
And that’s the key innovation. Most of you familiar with Substack will get this.
PAWS MySpace, which is now called ‘My-Paws’ (or mew-paws or miaow-paws as a lot of people affectionately call it) is exclusively for ‘creative types’, by the way, so it doesn’t have a monopoly. But if you are a creative, and you’re not on the platform, then you’re shooting yourself in the tail. So all those unsigned bands out there, who suddenly have enough space to upload a dozen demo tapes and maybe the shaky video of their intriguing set in the local pub to an audience of unsuspecting punters (plus dog), snippets of which, song by song, can also be included in the video sharing function of the site, and who are also entitled to royalties every time someone (other than themselves and their friends – don’t even try it, our metadata algorithm is much better than you think, boyo) streams their stuff, well, like I say, if you’re not on the platform you’re a dork.
There is, then, a marketing element to it as well (take that, Bezos); we can print books or press limited edition vinyl for you, if you want (vinyl sounds better, you know). Some bits of the site are public, of course, like that aforementioned band’s profile page, and whichever demos they might select, but the social media aspect of it depends entirely on the user’s privacy settings. Fans of course are allowed to interact, obviously, but it’s likewise possible to have totally private, members only stuff. In that sense, it’s perhaps more reminiscent of your ‘Mastodon’ platform, than something like ‘Twitter’ (both of which we do have, incidentally).
The same thing, of course, also applies to other creatives – artists, illustrators, photographers, writers and so on. That makes it a little like your ‘Substack’, although members of the public wouldn’t have to pay in the same way. It is a little like YouTube, I guess, although we predated that by several years, and allowed real-time streaming right from the start (your YouTube didn’t do that until 2011, I hear, by which time it had been bought by the CIA; sorry, I mean Google of course; I suppose I could’ve bought YouTube for the 1.3 billion they wanted but I couldn’t be bothered, and there would’ve been future monopoly issues anyhow).
So non-members do get free access to the platform for ‘view only’ purposes, but it’s very limited, and if they want to, say, download a demo or a series of photos or poems and so on then they have to become a subscriber, which will cost them the aforementioned five quid a month, which gives them 100 free downloads a month – and we pay the creators royalties (1 pence per download – might not sound much, but believe me, it adds up; they can be bought coffees too of course). So there is a ‘sort-of’ publishing element to it. A creative type who puts the effort in will definitely make more money back than their own ten quid a month subscription (which also includes 200 downloads a month). Anyhow, My-Paws has about four hundred million subscribers worldwide, half of whom are also creators. So you do the math.
Oh - by the way - I just heard that your Substack has hit the 5 million paid subscribers mark! Well whoopie-fucking-do!
Hmm, yes. That’s something I should mention – the ‘worldwide’ thing. I previously said we have a very prosperous population – well, that’s everywhere, now. Everyone can afford five quid a month. A billion streaming customers, as I said (compared to your Netflix’s 250 million – and ours don’t have to put up with awful adverts, either). Those formerly ‘developing’ countries have, well, developed. Meaning their populations also have disposal income and a decent infrastructure and finally have the means to fulfil their own ambitions. They are just as creative as anyone else, and just as desirous to experience other cultures as we are in the northern hemisphere. Localism, then, is a growing part of our business success. We work with content-producers pretty much everywhere. And we never exploit anyone. We pay our taxes in the country where we make the profit, and most of that profit remains in that country. Call that a franchise model if you like, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Still, here’s a happy ending for you. When I returned home for ten days, I decided to set my affairs in order. I kind of knew, instinctively, that I would be coming back here, once I’d done all that. Originally, I had decided to give away nearly all my share to my employees on my fiftieth birthday, making it the largest majority employee-owned company in the world – told you I’m a socialist. But as it happened, I thought, why the hell am I waiting until I’m fifty? What’s the fucking point in that? Aside from anything else, it might just shut Frankie up (no such luck, as it turned out). And I’m tired of being filthy richer than Croesus, so I’ll do it now.
So, given my forty-ninth birthday was approaching, I simply arranged to bring it forward a year. Except I woke up here again before I could see it happen.
So technically, by the time I write this and you read it, I am no longer the richest girl in the world.
But I don’t care.
Because I am loved.
And that, in the end, is what truly makes me the real richest girl in the world.
Oh, reader dear – can I capture that smile your wearing now, please…?
Uncanny, huh, this telepathy thing?
Ciao, Bella!
Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao!