Over in that Slate e-mail thing between Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen, which has gotten a little more interesting, Andersen, the erstwhile mogul of the late Inside.com, writes:
| If we had put the capital we raised into Treasury bills, we’d have had $1.5 million a year in income, with which we could’ve employed and published our best dozen reporter-commentators forever. |
Well, sure. The problem is, the money Andersen raised at the height of the Internet investment bubble — just like that raised by every other dot-com, of course including (before you start flinging e-mails my way) Salon — wasn’t invested to be put into T-bills. It was invested because the people who chose to invest it had the notion, however hard to fathom from 2002 hindsight, that said investment was going to pay off big — that it would be used by energetic entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses. The people who sought that investment believed it too, right, Kurt? If you told the investors, “Gee, guys, now that you’ve given us your money we’ve decided, come to think of it, that we’re not actually going to make any money from this Internet thing — instead we’re going to take your cash and set up a journalistic trust fund,” you’d be looking at a boardroom civil war, if not an outright lawsuit.
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