What are the things on your bucketlist that being a billionaire would make no difference?
When I was in Berlin at the end of last month, I was chatting with my pal Mo, and noted a sticker I’d seen that said “ELON MUSK DIDN’T GET INTO BERGHAIN” with a QR code that linked to: https://berlinguide.de/money-cant-buy-you-love-the-story-behind-elon-musks-berghain-rejection/
Mo has been to Berghain, and I shared that especially after hearing that a billionaire was rejected, I put it on my list: go clubbing at Berghain.
Having completed my responsibilities for July (hosting the W3C Advisory Board at Mozilla Berlin), I started to focus on my next big goal, finishing (or attempting to finish) a 50k that Sunday (3 days from then).
I realized those two goals had something in common: being a billionaire makes no difference to achieving them. Being a billionaire won’t help you achieve them.
You can’t buy your way into Berghain, you have to show up with an authentic vibe that feels right to the bouncers.
You can’t pay someone to do the work of running a 50k, you have to personally train consistently, train hard, show up, and run it yourself. Or any other race distance.
I told her these two things inspired me to come up with the idea of:
The anti-billionaire bucketlist (I’d prefer a better, positively framed phrase)
And filtered my prior goals accordingly.
She said I should post about it.
At the time I had only a few things in mind:
* Run the Skyline 50k (August 3rd)
* Get into Berghain
* Finish a 50 mile race
* Finish a 100km race
I checked that first one off (https://tantek.com/2025/216/t1/finished-skyline50k-ultra — still writing up my race report) and am reflecting on others.
What’s on your anti-billionaire bucketlist?
When I was in Berlin at the end of last month, I was chatting with my pal Mo, and noted a sticker I’d seen that said “ELON MUSK DIDN’T GET INTO BERGHAIN” with a QR code that linked to: https://berlinguide.de/money-cant-buy-you-love-the-story-behind-elon-musks-berghain-rejection/
Mo has been to Berghain, and I shared that especially after hearing that a billionaire was rejected, I put it on my list: go clubbing at Berghain.
Having completed my responsibilities for July (hosting the W3C Advisory Board at Mozilla Berlin), I started to focus on my next big goal, finishing (or attempting to finish) a 50k that Sunday (3 days from then).
I realized those two goals had something in common: being a billionaire makes no difference to achieving them. Being a billionaire won’t help you achieve them.
You can’t buy your way into Berghain, you have to show up with an authentic vibe that feels right to the bouncers.
You can’t pay someone to do the work of running a 50k, you have to personally train consistently, train hard, show up, and run it yourself. Or any other race distance.
I told her these two things inspired me to come up with the idea of:
The anti-billionaire bucketlist (I’d prefer a better, positively framed phrase)
And filtered my prior goals accordingly.
She said I should post about it.
At the time I had only a few things in mind:
* Run the Skyline 50k (August 3rd)
* Get into Berghain
* Finish a 50 mile race
* Finish a 100km race
I checked that first one off (https://tantek.com/2025/216/t1/finished-skyline50k-ultra — still writing up my race report) and am reflecting on others.
What’s on your anti-billionaire bucketlist?
The slushies were a hit at Grilled by Bike!
All loaded up for tomorrow! Slushie machine on the back rack, sink on the front rack!
Nice and crispy!
Believe it or not, I was not the bleepiest or bloopiest on the Bleeps and Bloops ride. These are some amazing rigs!
Today I had a crew come and replace the water heater! The old one was from 2008, and apparently at the end of its expected lifetime. Rather than wait until it blew up and turned into an emergency, I had it replaced.
The new one is a heat pump water heater! And since it's in the same room as my servers, it acts as an air conditioner for the space too! It will always have an abundant supply of warm air from the servers in the room, and I will always be happy to have it cool the space down.
The new one is a heat pump water heater! And since it's in the same room as my servers, it acts as an air conditioner for the space too! It will always have an abundant supply of warm air from the servers in the room, and I will always be happy to have it cool the space down.
