I’ve never met a billionaire before. And this isn’t how I imagined it would go. Don’t get me wrong: his brightly lit Manhattan office is pleasant, but not unusual. The pipes are scalding hot. As his assistant leads me through to the meeting room, I’m fairly sure I can spot discarded paper plates from pizza slices poking out of the kitchen bin. In other words, it is similar to most of the city’s workplaces.
I’m here to meet Jim McKelvey, somebody Forbes will tell you has roughly £1.3bn to his name from co-founding the payment app Square. Jim is straight off a flight from Tokyo, I’m told. He enters the room and shakes my hand politely, but soon seems agitated. I’m not sure whether it’s his lack of sleep or if this is just how people who make more money during power naps than you earn annually deal with potentially having their time wasted. In other words, I’m going to have to ease my way in gently.
