At some point it would become clear that I was not well. The people who would see it first, they saw it and had no reason to care. The people who should have seen it next, they were in no state to notice. Yet somewhere, at some point, I would see it myself. Probably I could have seen it all along. But then, back then, I was not seeing anything very clearly at all. I was Robbie Case, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and largest single shareholder of Core Communications, a new world company that had, in just thirty-six months, become the de facto highway for the nation’s critical financial information. Twothirds of U.S. mortgage lenders, half of the insurance companies and three-quarters of the nation’s pensionprocessing centers passed information over the Core network. Aerospace, automotive, defense industries—all used our network to transfer their most important information. Maybe, looking back, it was our offhand arrogance that I regret most. We were not techies. We employed no geeks. Instead we were the work-obsessed. Work has meaning. The money is secondary. Being here I find a kind of personal joy. At least that’s what it felt like at Core. Because by the year 2007, Core had turned the tediously complex, the horribly mundane, the deathly boring into something so technically cutting-edge and so financially lucrative that potential new employees had to enter a lottery to be considered for a job. And investors and banks undercut each other in the most inappropriate ways for a chance to place ever larger amounts of money with Core. “We could announce the creation of electricity,” Whitley had once said to me, “and the investors would line up to hand us their cash.”