The Funny Money Game The Funny Money Game THE FUNNY MONEY GAME I was 23 when I wrote this. It is thus resoundingly out of print, though I’ve capsulized the basic outline of the story many times since — boy gets hired straight out of college by hot public company in “go-go” 1968, boy gets his options pegged at 37 a share and watches them rocket to 140 with six months to go before he can exercise them (for about $1.5 million profit in today’s dollars), boy watches the whole thing fall apart, the president and some guy from Peat Marwick go to jail, boy writes book about it and goes off to business school. What was fun was writing a book so young. It got full-page reviews in all the business magazines, excerpted in the Times of London, featured on tons of TV and radio talk shows — people think it’s “cute” when a child writes a book. Then again, it sold only about a dozen copies. “I’m sorry, sir,” bookstore folk would invariably tell me when I asked whether they had The Funny Money Game — “we don’t sell games.” Anyway, for the business-history buffs in the crowd, I hope one day to scan it in for perusal on this site, or find a way to get a few available for sale. A.T.