In all of the inevitable questions surrounding the fact that Prince Harry got himself a new, office-based job – has he ever used a printer before?
Does he have any idea how outrageous it would be to microwave Meghan’s caught tuna scraps at work? Does he know what level of pen theft is acceptable? – There is one to which we already have a firm answer: what he will wear.
Harry has found such a gray suit in recent years with such ubiquity that he is either trying to make some kind of Ta-Da gender statement a la Karl Stefanovic, or no one has explained online shopping to him.
If he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex hadn’t done deals north of $ 180 million in the past 12 months, a kind-hearted little-hearted soul might be almost inclined to start a GoFundMe page. Nearly.
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But it might just be time for Harry to hone his style game, or just start with gray hoodies on the palette because Mr. Windsor is on his way to Silicon Valley.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal broke news that the 36-year-old King got the (maybe?) Plum job as chief impact officer at BetterUp, a billion dollar coaching and mental health company.
Harry told the venerable business paper, “I intend to have an impact on people’s lives,” and made history as the first member of the House of Windsor to ever “proactively” use it without a hint of sarcasm.
Here’s the thing: after a year of pushing the boundaries and breaking norms, all of these phrases were necessarily used so often that they got worn out a bit over the course of 2021. However, that doesn’t change the fact that this latest news is – once again – yet another example of a Sussex exceeding expectations and norms.
Because no matter how much the BetterUp marketing team trained Harry to sell that job to empower America’s workforce, let’s just be damn honest here. The Duke does not do this out of the goodness of his heart; This is not a philanthropic endeavor or they would have told us.
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But let’s face it, which in all likelihood is at the heart of this step.
Cash register. And many, many of them, possibly.
(The Mirror has estimated the gig could be worth between $ 900,000 and $ 3.6 million.)
BetterUp CEO Alexi Robichaux declined to “comment on how Prince Harry would be compensated” while speaking with the Journal. If Harry had taken this role out of the goodness of his heart, they would surely have said it and hid their bushel, which wasn’t done anywhere west of Idaho.
Whether he’s taking a paycheck, invested his own new fortune in the company, or received shares in the start-up (valued at $ 2.27 billion), Harry seems highly unlikely to get this out of the Kindness from does his heart and because he has a hole in his schedule between his daily Reiki and his whiteboard-wielding, blue-sky idea sessions with his horde of big-eyed producers.
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When Harry and Meghan first announced their Netflix deal last year and then their Spotify content deal three months later, these shiny new endeavors fit right under their philanthropic umbrella.
The duo, and one would suspect a legion of bright-eyed producers, would produce television series, documentaries, and podcasts, all of which would aim to make the world a better place.
It seemed like the perfect solution to the couple’s financial troubles (as we learned later). As Harry recently told Oprah Winfrey during their two-hour television interview, when he left the royal family, he was cut off financially. The roughly $ 4 million the couple received annually from the coffers of the Duchy of Cornwall from Prince Charles suddenly came to an abrupt halt.
“I have everything my mother left me and without that we wouldn’t be able to do this,” Harry told Oprah. Audiences no doubt nodded at home and could relate to the stress of just having to deal with the millions of dollars he inherited.
So what was a tough Scrabble prince to do?
Thankfully, one of the couple’s quick-thinking friends came to the rescue when he told Oprah, “During COVID, a friend’s suggestion was, ‘What about streamers (content streaming)?'”
“We really hadn’t thought about it before,” added Meghan, and so content history was written.
Harry and Meghan were suddenly able to fund their new California lives, including buying a $ 20 million Montecito property and repaying the $ 4.2 million taxpayers spent renovating their Windsor home, Frogmore Cottage, while they were at night still soundly asleep, knowing that they deserved all these beautiful coins with something that matched their values.
Your integrity would remain intact; their bank accounts, freshly swollen.
Harry’s new tech job isn’t a natural progression from that, however.
No crowd disguising this role in the Flummery of PR Speak or West Coast Pep can hide the fact that this is not a move driven by a purely philanthropic bias.
BetterUp is a commercial company whose clients include Hilton, Chevron, and Salesforce.
If Harry was to focus on psychological wellbeing then there had to be a multitude of charities out there absolutely gagging to get a real king on board to advertise and help fill the hours.
(He doesn’t need to look any further than the Loveland Foundation, which is making therapy easier for black women and girls, and which he and Meghan have selected as one of the few nonprofits the Archewell Foundation has supported.)
For the Sussexes, a couple whose brand is all about the truth, why not just be open about it? If there is one country in the world that not only understands its financial chutzpah, but welcomes it, it has to be the United States.
We get it – really. The Sussex people like and may need cash to keep their entire business going like any other taxpayer soul. Like nice money and want more of it doesn’t affect your ability to make real change and help millions of people for a second.
There’s no shame in wanting or just asking for money. And there is certainly no shame in logging out to get a job to keep your family alive.
So … why not just say that? Why always put a touch of altruism on things?
It’s hard to wonder how all this must feel for the Duke. For the vast majority of his life, thanks to the army and monarchy everywhere, he was provided with lodging, three square meals, and WiFi enough to play Grand Theft Auto. He never wanted or had to worry about his basic needs being met.
Money never seems to have been a consideration in his life until he took the steep step of quitting the job his grandma had given him and painfully found out that actions have consequences. In this case, it meant he suddenly had to raise the millions of dollars it took to fund their family’s lives and pay the entourage of burly security guards.
In this upside-down world, a man who was born third on the British throne somehow embodies the American dream: a desperate soul that has washed up on the shores of the nation looking for a safe haven and the chance to enjoy tons of beautiful dosh do.
Historically, the overlap of the Queen’s family members with blatant commercial endeavors was an embarrassing flop.
Take Princess Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, who did embarrassing 2020 ads for a Chinese dairy company, or his sister Zara Tindall’s support for a COVID app that was redirected to the UK advertising regulator, or whatever Prince Andrew has been through all these years did.
(No one has ever answered satisfactorily how a man who earns just under $ 500,000 a year can afford a Swiss ski chalet valued at $ 33 million.)
Perhaps the real lesson here is that Prince Charles shouldn’t have shut down the cash outlet so energetically and so quickly. Look no further than Andrew’s ex-wife and current roommate Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York for living evidence of the humiliating lows to which a former HRH in dire need of a dollar can sink.
While we may not see Harry and Meghan on the home shopping network chilling juicers for the masses (which Fergie did) or writing a 21st century restart of Dieting with the Duchess (which the scandal-prone former HRH released in 1998) What the trio have in common is that they have to find a way to support themselves.
When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex resigned last year, they pledged that “everything they do will continue to uphold Her Majesty’s values”.
Now, Her Majesty is no better than making money fast. In 2017, the Paradise Papers leak revealed she had invested millions of pounds offshore. As strange as it sounds, she actually needs her own money (as opposed to the money she receives from the government to keep the Crown’s palaces buzzing and chug the royal machine).
Eventually, someone has to pay to heat the 78 bathrooms in their private Scottish Bolthole Balmoral.
But that’s a matter of degrees and this week the dial has been shaken hard towards the greenback.
Again, keep in mind that, according to The UK’s Telegraph, “it goes without saying that Harry will perform at corporate events, too,” creating the previously unthinkable situation where foosball tables and on-demand oatmeal are the newest must-have for American companies – I could be in Be about to become HRH in the C-Suite.
Jeff Bezos will be on the blower in no time. What better way to distract all these disgruntled workers than to get a royal job with over a million employees and union formation at the forefront?
Who would have thought? Harry and the Deal is a match made in Wall Street heaven. As long as he remembers that he doesn’t have a microwave fish.
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and writer with over 15 years of experience working on a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
