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It’s fair to say Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, was having a bad day on Saturday. The 36-year-old took to Twitter to vent about what a terribly boring time he was having being a billionaire.
The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
The brains behind the virtual world builder made his fortune when he sold 71% of Mojang, the Stockholm-based studio that runs Minecraft, to Microsoft last year for 2.5 billion US dollars (over £1.6 billion).
But riches haven’t paved the way to billionaire bliss for Persson. Not even being able to blow 180,000 dollars (£117,000) during one night in a Las Vegas club (allegedly), or having celebs like Selena Gomez and skateboarder Tony Hawk visit his LA home.
In fact the Swedish computer programmer seems very lonely.
In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
One thing that has clearly troubled Persson since he sold Minecraft is the soured relationship with his former employees.
Unusually for the tech industry, the 40 or so staff at Minecraft were not equity holders, and the sale only benefited the founders.
The game now has an estimated 100 million users, and Minecraft-themed videos got four billion watches on YouTube in May alone. That’s a big pie not to have a slice of.
When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
Persson is a school drop-out who taught himself to code. In a recent blog he complained he’d become a “symbol”.
“I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me,” he wrote.
“I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m a nerdy computer programmer.”
But Persson isn’t the first person to find that money doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Since his Twitter outburst, others have clearly been giving him advice.
People who made sudden success are telling me this is normal and will pass. That's good to know! I guess I'll take a shower then!
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
His legions of fans, who warmly refer to him as Notch, have also been kind in the face of comments which may have appeared more than a little self-indulgent to many.
I really appreciate all the offers to hang and talk and all. As an introvert, new friends is hard to do even when fine, but it means a lot!
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 29, 2015
Although Persson has railed against the media, upset with speculation about his possible depression and for the fact they flagged his comments up at all.
fwiw, while there are articles about my depression because I had a bad day and vented on a trend I saw, I'm sitting here having a nice day.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 31, 2015
Journalism /ˈdʒəːn(ə)lɪz(ə)m/ noun 1. Browsing twitter, speculating, and making up some shit. 2. (archaic) Accurately describing reality.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 31, 2015
Having now progressed to a “nice day”, this billionaire adrift had some final words to say about the weird cult of celebrity that’s been thrust upon him, and a message to those worse off than him.
To people out there with real problems: I'm sorry the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours. Stay strong.
— Markus Persson (@notch) August 31, 2015
