Zo dan maar
Hi my name is Kurt,
Let me begin in the nineties, I was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. The Internet was booming, stock prices went through the roof and many internet startups became multi-millionaire overnight. Me, I was in the middle of it. I earned tons of dollars in commissions and because of knowledge of the market and how to play the market with reinvesting my salary I was part of this so called crème the la crème society as well.
Life was in the beginning good and sweet, working your ass of during the weeks with 100 hours or more were nothing. In the morning Japan closed and during the day London and Frankfurt were the playground for the rich. At 3.30 Wall-street, read NASDAQ came alive and closed at ten GMT.
You were sleepless because of the adrenaline, but man it was fun. The weekends were different, Ibiza, Puente del Este, LA. Monaco, parties, Champagne, drugs, wild women you name it. If there was a party in Argentina on Saturday you took the late Amsterdam Friday flight and you were back on Monday morning. It was killing but you did not care. Work Hard/ Play Hard was the favorite yell to the surrounded gold diggers Sunday Morning six o clock at Pacha. Living La Vida Loca! It felt then like many hilarious anecdotes but now less important.
Life went on, not to know that your life became more and more meaningless and you needed every-time harder kicks to feel. If it was not heavy enough or brand new you did not wanted it because you could not be interested. I became a snob, harsh and bored.
At that moment, a girlfriend of mine, senior level within Bertelsmann Group, searched for candidates for a new multi media format to go life on television. The concept of a pressure cooker combined with Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Negroes. The public had the right to vote by SMS-text. Their option was the difference between stay in the program to the next round or leave. The winner was going home with millions of price money. In her words, she knew my private and corporate life. I was the perfect candidate and a very good player to win the game.
At first I rejected the offer; the feeling of exposing my private life via streaming video and to millions of TV viewers during the days of the show was risky and could effect my position which I had at that moment. Besides the “stardom” of being a celebrity I saw only the opportunity of a gamble with my life/career as the lottery ticket. If you have read so far you can understand that 90 % of the population would say no to the offer, but me, I was dumb and reckless….. But I rejected the offer.
A month later I met with Bertelsmann CEO Klaus von Schwarz because a division went public (with an estimated market price of 8 Billion Dollars). Our team was working day and night blah blah. After our presentations I told him some personal stuff and also told him that I was hunted for their new format. He said that I was going to be an excellent candidate and he was asking me to join.
This man, build the company from scratch to the global operating company with above mentioned price. The price of the IPO was mainly build on the strong projected income figures of the new show. This man personally asked me for his flagship, I felt flattered.
When I walked out the door I was sold and I quit my job, I wanted to win the 4 million dollar price money and stupid enough I wanted to show the world how bright I was.
This is where the story begins how I sold my soul to the devil.
I will not tell everything about the show but it was an instant hit and every night on prime time, millions of viewers tuned in to see how the battle between the contestants went on.
During the show the company went public and stock prices were rising. After 5 months the show was going into the grand final, so far I survived using my wit, stamina and mean tricks learned on my schools before I was born in the slumps went to INSEAD became a financial wizard and felt king in the Ibiza clubs but with al this, It was tough. Like all other contenders I had difficulty dealing with the 24 hours stress of having camera’s on my back and to understand what was fiction and what were facts.
Meanwhile the revenue but foremost the profit for the company was enormous. At almost no costs, automated processes, very profitable SMS/ pager text income made the company a fortune. It was a hit!
A small calculation; The company had an overall estimated annual revenue of 1 Billion Dollars and due investments a slight negative profit (ebitda positive). Because of this format the company made an instant 100 Million Dollars profit and the revenue went to 1.2 Billion Dollars. The market was positively shocked about this money machine and prices of stock went through the roof.
Again back to the Megalomania format. I came in second, won nothing but a tap on my shoulders. I was dizzy, disillusioned disappointed and it did cost me weeks to understand how I lost. I did not and believe me you can not. This is not a pre defined race, the rules changed every night just to fuck you up. It was against my nature but I had to live with it. Not everybody did understand it but for me it felt like a defeat although 19 others were behind me. I Went to the Seychelles and than wanted to go back to my corporate life. Goldman Sachs did not want me back, not because of my performance but I was no longer Low Profile. I worried a bit but I had powerful friends so what could go wrong… Everything!
A month later, I was curious about how the show went; I started to watch the video tapes my friends made. What I saw was that I my character was a quite popular contestant, but survived each knock out round narrowly. I was always runner up second to be the first to be expelled. I was surviving each voting round with a 1 to 2 percent range from the last. Viewers spent a lot of money to keep me in the game.
Those weeks I received funny calls about how Bertelsmann was cheating the concept and I received pdf files from disgruntled Bertelsmann employees that weekly exits of characters were already pre-cooked days in advance as story boards. How did they knew that in advance? The lines were open until the minute before the exposure. and a man came to my home address and said that the whole show was set up mainly to collect SMS phone calls. This was nothing new to me but than he said that no matter how you voted, the viewer had no access to rankings or could decide who stayed or who was sent home. During the conversation the man said that I won the show and he had the Operator- listings to prove that people voted for other contestants than the ones who survived. Sometimes they were more important for the format than what the viewers wanted.
Actually during the whole program I was always third, second or first in ranking and never near the termination bench. This only to push people to send SMS and pager texts and spend more on their idols.
He showed millions and millions of telephone records from AT&T, MCI, Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica etc. I was angry and stunned. He offered me to buy the records for 200.000 Euros since he was sure that the evidence was of value for me. I rejected because I did not wanted a lawsuit against the most powerful media Moloch in Europe.
I left it, at what it was, and wanted desperately my personal life back before I joined the program. This never happened because nobody wanted me anymore in a seriou