Sublime

To new employees, the idea of wrapping a gift bought at a competitor’s store is so absurd, so far outside the bounds of their existing notion of “service,” that the story stops them in their tracks. Their guessing machines have been broken. Their old “good service” guessing machine would never have produced the idea of altruistic gift-wrapping.

Three years into his career at Jane Street, he remained fully committed to generating as many dollars as possible and channeling them into the causes that saved lives most efficiently. He’d given away most of the money he’d made on the trading floor to three charities identified by the Oxford philosophers as being especially efficient at saving liv

Morgan’s famous testimony to Congress that character came before money or property.

We were not the kind of company that ruined people’s Christmases because of a lack of availability—not under any circumstances. So we went out and bought four thousand pink iPods at retail and had them all shipped to our Union Street office. Then we hand-sorted them, repacked them, and shipped them to the warehouse to be packaged and sent to our cu