Billionaire burnout

Carrie Sun thought working for a hedge fund boss meant living the dream. But despite the designer handbags and luxury spa breaks his constant demands drove her to the brink, until finally her therapist told her, ‘Your job is killing you’

On the surface, 29-year-old Carrie Sun’s highly paid new job as assistant to billionaire New York hedge-fund manager Boone Prescott seemed like a dream: the culmination of years of perfectionism through her pressurised childhood as the only child of pushy Chinese immigrants, whose ambition was that their daughter must have ‘a shot at the American Dream’.

Carrie had desperately wanted this job, breaking off her engagement to her wealthy fiancé Josh, who’d asked her to give up her career in finance to make way for his. She felt sure her vocation was to be an assistant to a hedge fund manager, helping the wheels of capitalism to turn with ultimate efficiency.

Landing the job was a feat, involving 14 interviews, one by an ‘executive coach’ who assessed her mental fitness: would she be ‘all in, putting work above everything else?’

Now, here she was, the lucky Chosen One, slim and perfect in suit and high heels, on the 46th floor with views over Central Park, in a quiet office world, working for a softly spoken financial genius who was clearly raking in billions.

‘I was sure I was going to be with Carbon for the rest of my life,’ she writes, towards the beginning of this riveting memoir. (By the

‘Gifts bestowed on her by Boone and his wife included a $6,000 coat and a Balenciaga bag’

way, ‘Boone Prescott’, and the firm’s name, ‘Carbon’, are pseudonyms in this true story.)

Slightly ominously, the five-page guidelines for new employees listed 96 ‘responsibilities’ and 13 ‘general expectations’, including ‘willing to help firm as needed’. That expression ‘as needed’ appeared 11 times.

The lavishness of the office lifestyle was hard to resist. At lunchtime, Carrie could order luxury deliveries to her desk on expenses. The towels in the office gym were ‘like blankets’. Gifts bestowed on her by Boone and his wife Elisabeth included a $6,000 coat and a Balenciaga bag.

The contrast between this and what her parents had gone through during the Cultural Revolution in China was stark. Carrie’s mother’s ankles were still swollen after being made to work in paddy fields for a pittance. She and Carrie’s father had managed to emigrate to the USA in the 1990s, when Carrie was four.

But Carrie soon discovered that ‘as needed’ meant ‘on call 24/7’, and that her high-earning job in the warmth and comfort of the 46th floor was every bit as soul-sapping as what her mother had been put through. It gradually became clear that Boone expected her to be a flawless machine of efficiency.

‘Can you respond to all my emails when you see them?’ he asked her one morning, with the softly spoken, iron-willed firmness that was his trademark, after she hadn’t replied when he’d sent her a photo of his children at the firm’s Family Day out of hours.

She found that the only way to do the job to his required standard was to work at weekends and to give up all socialising.

In his softly spoken way, Boone was terrifying. His demands were ‘continuous, non-repeating, and increasing in intensity’, so Carrie couldn’t pre-empt his requests. For example, he would suddenly give her 30 minutes to read dozens of research reports, and pull and synthesise all the data that might affect a billion-dollar decision. And then he would say: ‘Carrie. So. Your energy. I need you to walk with more confidence, and just come in, and then get out, but also be more easy-going, relaxed and chill.’

One day, he asked her to ‘log what you are doing by the minute, and then add up all the minutes you might save from when you were being inefficient or sub-optimal’. In his appraisal, he said he wanted her ‘to become more of a leader through hard work,’ to ‘increase proactiveness’ and to ‘take feedback well: it’s just intended to make us better’.

But then he gave her a bonus and a raise, plus the perk of being ‘invested in the fund’, plus a voucher for a massage and body scrub at the Mandarin Oriental, so she felt she had to be grateful.

‘He was nice – so nice – as he worked me to the bone,’ she writes.

When she dared to mention during her ‘sits’ with Boone that she was being overworked, he just gave her a few days off at a lavish spa or yoga retreat, or a $3,000 voucher at the Ritz Carlton by Lake Tahoe.

Exhausted, she started making small mistakes, such as forgetting to book in her other boss, Gabe, online for his flight, so he had to wait a full hour at an airport. ‘This cannot happen again,’ he said to her.

Sweating on the running machine one day, as part of her drive to be physically and mentally perfect, Carrie was so busy replying to one of Boone’s emails that she tripped, burning and gashing her leg.

She started making more mistakes, and then stuffing herself with cupcake sundaes, leading to bulimic episodes. She put on 36lbs.

Looking back on it all, Carrie delves into her impossibly hard childhood. Her account is illuminating on the effects of China’s one-child policy. (Her mother had forced abortions after she was born.) All the pressure was put on Carrie to succeed and be perfect. Carrie did land the perfect job: but the end result was a nervous breakdown. Boone sent her to see a $3,000-an-hour therapist, who told her, ‘Nothing’s wrong with you. Your job is killing you’.

It was time to leave.

‘This is terrible timing for me,’ said Boone, when she handed in her notice. She stresses that the fault wasn’t Boone’s. ‘He was the best of his kind.’ It was the system: capitalism at its most lean and ruthless.

Eight years later, she is happily married, living in Brooklyn, and turns out to be a superb memoir writer.