Betcha it's not waterproof...

Well, threats of jail-time will do that...

Speaking of Mark "Facts Are too Woke, and Also, I Suddenly Realized That I Like Trump Now That He Won" Zuckerberg and his preposterous $900,000 watch. Huh? What watch? Didn't you read my last--doesn't matter. The other day while explaining that his company, Meta, would be backing away from any kind of fact checking on their social media platforms, Zuckface was wearing a watch people have identified as a hand made, one-of-a-kind Greubel Forsey. But what even is a Grubel Forsey?

I'd never heard of them until today. That's how rich he is. There's like a whole separate world for the ludicrously wealthy (you might recall the $3 million Batmobile), and I went to the company's website to read their story:

Disappointingly, as far as I can tell, these two are business partners
and the sacred union the text refers to is about forming a corporation.

It seems like a real missed opportunity 
that they didn't get Cate Blanchett to
narrate their story in character as Galadriel

It's hard to read, I know, allow me to quote:

"It was the end of a century, even the end of a millennium. Two entrepreneurs who had trodden unconventional paths decided to combine their talents. They envisioned an extreme, uncompromising approach to fine watchmaking that would reimagine, one by one, each of the technical and aesthetic fundaments established over the previous 200 years."

-The Grubel Forsey website, 

no, really, it says all that

"Yeah, it's around the hundred billion mark."

-Elon Musk (actual quote)

Is there a level of wealth at which one is no longer able to hear the nonsense that tumbles out of them? They're making watches, a five-hundred year old technology that has long since been rendered obsolete by digital watches, then smart phones, then AI boxes that listen to your every word, thought and bodily function to better sell you socks with your pet's picture on them. I love a well-made piece of hand-crafted whatever as much as the next person, but have some perspective. 

I am seriously asking: what does 

Mark Zuckerberg do that justifies a wrist

watch worth what thirteen teachers do?

Which brings us back to the nine-hundred thousand dollar (yes, of money) watch they made for a kid who slithered his way into billionaire-dom by backstabbing his college roommates. For some much-needed perspective, $900,000 is roughly: 

The average salary of thirteen teachers

The average debt of ten American households

Two houses at the median home price of $420,000

And honestly, that last one was a little surprising to me. I kind of though he was walking around with five or six houses on his wrist, but then I remembered that in America, the housing market is an impossible hellscape laid waste by Airbnb and real-estate investors. 

"We'll take it! Honey, how much does one tip the
realtor on a forty dollar home? Four dollars? Five?"

-preceding generations

"Impossible! I don't detect a single fuck.
It's like there aren't any to give..."

-some scientist

Also, should Mark Zuckerberg for some insane reason decide to spend his entire net worth of two-hundred and eleven billion dollars on one-of-a-kind Greubel Forsey watches, he could buy 234,444 and a half of them. And yes, I know that he earned his money (if money making more money can be called earning) and that the net worth of these kajillionaires isn't like, sitting in a money bin somewhere waiting to be swum around in. But the degree to which I don't care is mathematically insignificant and undetectable by any instrument devised by human ingenuity, and we--scientists, that is--can detect water in the atmosphere of planets in other star systems.

Look, there's rich and then there's offensively, toxically wealthy and nine-hundred thousand dollar wrist watches fall firmly into the latter category. There has to be such a thing as a tipping point to our tolerance for this, and I've got to think we're getting close.

Look out McDuck, the center will not hold.