The day after the New York Times runs a feature article on me titled, The Syndicate: The Midas Touch Writers’ Factory, I am invited for lunch at a New York club with a billionaire who promises he is interested in what we are doing. Decked in a black hoodie vest from Lululemon, he talks about how much water has gone under the bridge since we first met in Sydney in 2004. At the time I was writing a technology and business blog with the grandiose name of Metatech. Equally grandiose, his collaboration software company was named Universl and it was just starting to take off. At the time we both spoke about our desire to see an Australian technology company really take off globally. I wrote about his company as a promising young startup that should be watched. Fast forward seventeen years and I’m the author of a number of bestsellers and the producer of multiple blockbuster Netflix series. His growth has been stratospheric in comparison. His company is listed on the Nasdaq, making him one of the world’s richest men.

We are meant to be discussing a memoir that he wants me to write: unfortunately, he has to leave before we really arrive at the subject. Of course, I’d be delighted to do it. I have the perfect co-writer in mind and had been looking for an excuse to entice her into the syndicate. The billionaire has to rush to the airport as his private jet is already fired up with just enough time to get him to a swanky resort in Switzerland. He is slated to give a talk for a gathering of the world’s elite.

He gives me an outline of his life’s story, unremarkable to begin with, yet ending with him being the confident, yet ultra-casual, man who s across the table from me today. I wonder whether he has an ulterior motive and is mirroring me, with an unsaid desire to be a writer, with the memoir as his entree. I’d met a lot of great writers who’d been sucked into the vortex of other tech billionaires and ended up doing their bidding instead of following their passion. It was not implausible that this tech billionaire thought he could buy himself into being a writer by acquiring the syndicate. I’d been in the black hole surrounding other wealthy men during my pre-writer life and had no intention of being beholden to their metrics of growth and success. We were doing fine thank you very much, and I wasn’t in the business of being anyone’s ghostwriter.

He senses this, and says, “I’d like you to write my story and I’m fine with it being fully in your name rather than being seen as an autobiography.”

He has expanded his sphere of influence well beyond Universl and tells me that he is an outstanding advocate for climate change and new forms of energy. He counts Elon Musk as a close personal friend. In many ways his project portfolio matches the former South Africans, whom I’d met when the billionaire sitting in front of me was in diapers, and Elon was a precocious up and coming Silicon Valley star, who’d just totalled a Ferrari.

He mentions how he has recently questioned the head of the biggest mining company in the world at an Emissions Reduction Summit on their definition of the word ‘ambitious’. The company had suggested they were on goal to reach net zero emissions by 2050, yet were only spending half a billion dollars on sustainability.

“Shit, I told them, I spent more than that last year, and I’m not half your size, so let’s talk about ambition in real terms.”

He continues to regale me with stories of his frequent invitations into the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 to advise them on how not to end up like Nokia. It’s not the time or place to remind him that I used to hold such a role myself. Instead, I let him speak about the increasing pace of change. He says he loves to remind the usually staid directors that the darling of screen streaming, Netflix, pirouetted through four different business models before settling on its current stock market busting approach.

Sometimes he relishes in ruffling feathers, calling to question assumptions that are made by many of these people and their businesses.

I ask him why he does it.

“I kinda get why I’m here - to be an unfettered catalyst. I find it interesting to hear what’s on the minds of the people running the biggest companies in the world.”

He chuckles about what’s been called by the media: an ingenious mix of public service, subtlety and front-row client surveillance in which he has positioned himself as a trusted strategic confidante of the very companies that buy his company’s software products.

I get the power of the position he has carved for himself and feel compelled to genuinely say, “Pure genius.”

He raises his glass of Australian wine and calls for more oysters.

Done with business talk, he shifts to his family. He loves living on Sydney’s harbour side, having bought the country’s most expensive house for one hundred million dollars. His co-founder lives next-door, and they spend free time using the harbour and air space as their playground with a mix of seaplanes and high speed luxury sea craft. He loves spending time with his four children and feels blessed that, besides his busy lifestyle and all the potential distractions that could present themselves to someone with his power and wealth, he has remained faithful to his wife, who he proudly tells me, has blossomed into something of a kick-ass venture capitalist in her own right.

He attributes his faith in family to his parents, who remain happily married to this day.

Time’s up and he nods to the maitre d’ who indicates that the bill will be taken care of, I guess, in the usual way. He is clearly no stranger to one of New York’s exclusive, high-end, discrete private clubs.

I walk back out onto the street and breathe in the energised air. Reality hits and I smile, knowing that the syndicate has just been elevated into a whole other level of operation.

Once word gets out that I’ve published this billionaire’s story, I expect I’ll have a line of prospects as long as a New York city block and then some.

To Ch 1, Part 2