What do I have in common with Belle Burden, Steve Jobs, Paulina Porizkova, Sam Altman, Tori Spelling, and thousands of laid-off workers?
We all learned that security can look permanent right up until someone else changes the terms.
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Security Can Be Borrowed
Belle Burden came from wealth, graduated from Harvard, earned a law degree from NYU, and spent 20 years in what appeared to be an idyllic, financially secure marriage. In her memoir Strangers, she writes about how abruptly that life unraveled and how much of the financial management she had largely left to her husband.
Burden was not left penniless. In fact, subsequent reporting based on divorce records showed that she had substantial personal wealth and trust interests. That’s not the part of her story I find cautionary. What struck me was that even a wealthy, legally trained woman could reach the end of a long marriage and discover how little attention she had paid to the financial structure underneath it, including what belonged to whom and how the prenup would work if the marriage ended.
Steve Jobs helped create Apple and still lost his place inside the company he founded. In 1985, after a power struggle with CEO John Sculley and Apple’s board, Jobs was stripped of his operational responsibilities and eventually resigned. He still had substantial personal wealth, but founding the company did not give him permanent control of his position inside it.
Paulina Porizkova spent decades married to rock star Ric Ocasek. After his death, she discovered that he had excluded her from his will. A life surrounded by considerable wealth did not mean she controlled that wealth.
In November 2023, OpenAI’s board abruptly fired Sam Altman as CEO. He was reinstated days later after employees and investors revolted. At the time, Altman reportedly held no equity in OpenAI. He was already independently wealthy, but his firing showed how quickly even one of technology’s most powerful executives could lose control of the position he occupied.
Tori Spelling grew up in one of Hollywood’s wealthiest families, the daughter of television mogul Aaron Spelling, yet inherited only a small fraction of his enormous estate and has spoken publicly for years about her own financial struggles.
In December 2024, Intel’s board gave CEO Pat Gelsinger a choice: retire or be removed. He stepped down after less than four years in the role. Running one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies still did not make the CEO chair his to keep.
Then there are thousands of people with none of the celebrity, power or family wealth.
Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in January and made additional cuts in its AI organization this summer. Across tech, more than 125,000 jobs have already disappeared in 2026.
We tend to look at these layoff stories as news but behind each are real people.
Like Mike Prinke. The 38-year-old Epic Games employee with terminal brain cancer was among roughly 1,000 people laid off in March 2026. His wife said the family lost not only his income but his employer-provided life insurance, and because of his condition he could not simply replace that coverage. The viral post got CEO Tim Sweeney’s attention, and Epic said it would work with the family to resolve the insurance problem.
When Security Depends on Someone Else
Different lives, same structural risk: someone else could change the terms.
Different circumstances, same vulnerability: something important to their financial or professional security was ultimately controlled by someone else.
Most employees don’t think of their salary, health insurance, life insurance, retirement contributions and equity as one income source, but structurally, they often are. One employer controls all of them.
Wealth around you is not the same as wealth you control.
A great salary, status, a successful spouse, a prestigious employer or even a thriving business can all feel like security. But if too much of your life depends on one person or institution continuing to cooperate, some of that security is borrowed.
I Learned This the Painful Way
For years, I had many of the things we’re taught to associate with having made it: a successful career, a beautiful home, a marriage, a title and a good income.
At 38, after leaving the agency I had helped build, I spent nearly two years trying to get hired and submitted more than 200 applications before accepting that the stable paycheck I assumed I could replace might not be coming.
The money mattered, obviously. But that wasn’t the deepest wound.
The wound was realizing how much of the life I thought I had built actually depended on structures I didn’t completely control.
Suddenly I wasn’t thinking philosophically about financial independence. I was asking very practical questions: Can I afford to leave? What happens if the income stops? How long can I keep this going? What if nobody hires me?
And eventually, a harder one:
What exactly is still mine?
We spend decades accumulating things that look like professional wealth: titles, salaries, impressive companies on our résumés, colleagues, access and status.
Then one day the company email gets shut off and you find out what actually came home with you.
I think we measure financial security too heavily by income and not enough by control.
How much of your financial future can someone else change without your permission?
One employer controlling your entire income is concentration risk. So is one client funding most of your business, having most of your net worth tied up in one company, or building a creator business entirely dependent on somebody else’s platform.
Investors aren’t exempt from this either. A portfolio can look diversified while still being dangerously concentrated in one company, sector, asset class or platform. Market crashes expose one kind of risk; failures like FTX and other crypto platforms exposed another: sometimes the asset itself isn’t the only thing you’re betting on. You’re also betting on whoever holds it, manages it or gives you access to it.
Concentration Risk Changes Shape
Entrepreneurship comes with its own concentration risks.
A founder can still have nearly all their wealth locked inside one company, answer to a board, lose operational control, get diluted, or watch the valuation collapse.
I’ve met agency owners who couldn’t lose two clients without panicking, consultants earning excellent money who had essentially built themselves another job, and creators with huge audiences who couldn’t contact those people without going through an algorithm.
I’ve made versions of these mistakes myself. I’ve tested 12 income streams and pivoted six times, and eventually I learned that simply adding more ways to make money isn’t necessarily freedom either.
If you have five income streams and every one requires you to keep pedaling, you’ve just built five bicycles.
These days, I care much more about portability: skills I can take anywhere, a reputation attached to my name, relationships that survive a job, intellectual property I own, ways to reach people directly, different ways to earn, and assets that can become more valuable over time.
I also want enough runway that a bad client, bad boss, bad relationship, layoff or business failure doesn’t immediately decide what I have to do next.
What FU Money Means to Me
The cliché version is millions in the bank and a dramatic office exit. The useful version is much quieter: enough control to make an important decision without fear making it for you.
It means having enough control over your own financial life that you can make an important decision without fear making it for you.
You can say no when something is wrong, leave when something is over, survive when somebody else changes the rules, or start again without feeling like everything you spent years building disappeared with the old life.
Before I call something financial security now, I ask myself a few questions:
If my primary income disappeared tomorrow, how many months of runway would I have?
Who can materially change my financial life without my permission?
What assets and earning capacity would still be mine?
What am I building that can grow without requiring proportionally more of my time?
Those are the questions behind my FU Money Plan and the work we’re doing inside Creator Paybook.
Nobody needs to quit a good job or collect seven side hustles to do this.
I think more of us need to build enough professional and financial ownership that one person’s decision cannot dismantle our entire life.
I learned to pay attention to that much later than I wish I had.
Now, whenever something in my life looks like security, I ask a much less comfortable question:
If this disappeared tomorrow, what would still be mine?
If you’re thinking about how to build more financial control into your career and life, subscribe to FU Money Plan. I write about reducing dependence on any one employer, client, platform, relationship, or income source, and building enough ownership and optionality to make decisions on your own terms.
If you want to go further and actually figure out what you could build next, Creator Paybook is my live four-week program for designing a business and income model around your skills, goals, and version of success.