In 2014, Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to acquire the ubiquitous video game Minecraft, making Marcus “Notch” Persson a billionaire. 

Shortly after this, Notch outbid Jay-Z and Beyonce for a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion, at the time the highest price ever paid for a home there. Notch gained fame well beyond the technology world.

From founder of one of the biggest video games in history, to a successful exit with one of the biggest corporations in the world, to celebrity status, this story would seem to have a happy ending. 

But in late August of 2015, Notch spilled his guts in a series of tweets that attracted a lot of attention, particularly in the technology industry. 

“The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.

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.

When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.

Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead.

I would Musk and try to save the world, but that just exposes me to the same type of assholes that made me sell minecraft again.”

His raw openness triggered a cascade of reactions online - some sympathetic, but many critical. People pointed at his wasteful mansion (noting the cost of the luxury toilets in the 15 bathrooms) and his partying in Ibiza. Many just asked for money. 

The reactions themselves revealed a lot about what separates the wealthy and financially successful from the rest of society. In particular, people who don’t have money think that having money will solve all of their problems. 

Of course, people with money know that this isn’t true at all. 

But it’s hard for those struggling to pay their bills to feel any sympathy for billionaires, even if their hardships have nothing to do with their wealth. Notch, in particular, was public about the mental illness prevalent in his family, including his father’s suicide.

Most troubling in his tweetstorm were the interactions with former employees. After the sale, he gave each employee a 2 million kroner after-tax bonus (equivalent to about US$250,000). Of course, he didn’t have to do this. The employees may have contributed to the value of the company and the ultimate sale price, but they didn’t take the equity risk that he did, and weren’t all there at the beginning. But even after making this generous gesture, many criticized him as “cheap.” He said that only 3 people thanked him. And the bitterness came out in the tweets, as he lashed out at one individual for not reaching out to him after the sale - “fuck all of you,” he wrote. “Fuck you so hard.”

Many of the replies offered varied suggestions to Notch: create another game, try out philanthropy, lose weight, or turn to religion. But the feedback that turned things around for him were the many post-exit entrepreneurs who reached out to him  - both on Twitter and privately - and explained that what he was feeling was perfectly normal - that they had gone through similar phases. 

After a short while, he tweeted:

“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!”