Working for a Billionaire Worth It?

What started as a dream job began to look increasingly like a nightmare.

- By Carrie Sun

At 7:48 p.m., I texted a friend who asked me how my first day of work went: No time to even pee. I thought it was the best job in the world. I was the sole assistant to the billionaire founder of the hottest hedge fund on Wall Street. My boss, let’s call him James, said he cared about ethics. My recruiter had told me that by all accounts, James was the nicest, and I was to manage his life.

I had spent much of my first day sitting across from James in his office, listening to him explain things to me and nodding my head. One nod after each of the ninetysomething responsibilities listed in my job description, which demanded that I be kind, proactive, sensitive, and efficient—above all, positive!

Could I be a lion in ambition and a gazelle in poise?

Three years before, I had dropped out of Wharton, worried that I’d been wasting my life. I grew up with very little—my parents were graduate students from China, working odd jobs to pay for tuition. In college, I’d majored in math and finance; I craved financial independence. After graduating, I worked as an analyst and was soon making over $300K a year. Yet the more I was surrounded by wealth, the more I found myself recoiling from it all. I couldn’t pinpoint why. But I knew I wanted to change careers. I started taking classes in philosophy, literature, creative writing. While I was in New York taking a summer fiction workshop, a recruiter reached out to me.