BILLIONAIRE SAYS BEING RICH HAS RUINED HIS LIFE

Almost a year after he sold Minecraft to software giant Microsoft for $2.5 billion, Markus Persson, 36, has this week posted pathetically plaintive messages online. He wants his 2.5 million Twitter followers to know about the horrors of being mega-rich. It has left him desperately lonely, unmotivated and unable to form meaningful relationships, he says.

In one tweet, he wrote: ‘The problem with getting everything is that you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.’

Minutes later, he sent out another: ‘Hanging out in Ibiza with famous friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I’ve never felt more isolated.’

Warming to his theme, he added: ‘Found a great girl, but she’s afraid of me and my lifestyle and went with a normal person instead.’ Even his old friends back in Sweden don’t have time for him, he moaned. He describes how he has to sit around ‘watching my reflection’ waiting for them to finish work before they can entertain him.

For most people, not having to head to work every day is their dream. But, as many British Lottery winners will testify, not having a job or challenges results in a struggle to stay motivated.

Once your reason for getting up each day — be it earning a daily crust or to realise a lifelong ambition — is taken away, it is difficult to find a new purpose. Many Lottery winners — bored of endless holidays-of-a-lifetime — have returned to work.

The more clued-up dotcom billionaires, such as Elon Musk, devote their fortunes to saving the planet. But poor Persson says that would ‘just expose me to the same assholes that made me sell Minecraft’.

Mr Persson seems aware he sounds faintly ridiculous. After the media reported his gold-plated navel-gazing, he caught a dose of humility, tweeting: ‘To people out there with real problems: I’m sorry the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours. Stay strong.’

Unfortunately, it would be easier to sympathise with Persson if he hadn’t used his money so spectacularly moronically.

Persson — known to his fans as ‘Notch’ — has treated his overnight fortune with all the maturity one might expect of a self-confessed nerd who has spent most of his life hunched in front of a computer.

He splashes out in Las Vegas, reportedly spending over £100,000 in a night of partying. He likes to throw the sort of bashes which lure royalty — in 2011, Prince Harry was reported leaving a Persson ‘do’ in Vegas.

Persson once flew all his staff to Monte Carlo in private jets for a three-day splurge involving helicopters, Ferraris and a rented yacht. But his greatest indulgence is his home — the most expensive property ever listed in Beverly Hills.

Persson — who also has homes in Sweden — snatched the eight-bedroom, 23,000 sq ft property from under the noses of pop’s king and queen, Jay-Z and Beyonce.


Persson admits the worst temptations of fame and fortune were particularly hard to resist for a man who had never got out much.

‘I’m a little bit making up for lost time when I was just programming through my 20s,’ he said earlier this year. ‘Partying is not a sane way to spend money, but it’s fun.

‘When we were young we did not have a lot of money, so I thought, if I get rich I’m not going to become one of those boring rich people who doesn’t spend money.’

In 2011, he married long-term girlfriend Elin Zetterstrand, a young computer programmer, but their marriage lasted just a year, with Persson blaming the pressures of his success.

They have a daughter, Minna, and Persson pays £4,000 a month in child maintenance. Now he is single, lonely and seemingly unable to trust those who do befriend him.

Some insist that producing so many multi-millionaires overnight is one of the internet’s great virtues. Others will point at Markus Persson, belatedly discovering that money doesn’t bring happiness and making a prize chump of himself in the process, as evidence of precisely the opposite.