Bill Perkins

Bill grew up in Jersey City and walked on as a defensive back for the Iowa Hawkeyes while studying electrical engineering. He landed his first Wall Street job in 1991 as a clerk on the New York Mercantile Exchange — making $16,000 a year. By the late 1990s he was running an options desk in Houston during the deregulation of Texas electricity markets. In 2002 he joined his friend John Arnold's energy hedge fund Centaurus, where he traded the opposite side of the bets that took down Amaranth Advisors in 2006. When Centaurus closed in 2012, he founded Skylar Capital Management.

Somewhere along the way — between the hedge fund, the high-stakes poker tables, the art collecting, and the years watching wealthy peers not spend their money — the book started writing itself. Die With Zero came out in 2020 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has since been translated into 25 languages. The argument is the same one Bill had been running on himself for two decades: money is a tool to drive fulfillment, and the optimization most people get wrong isn't how much they earn — it's when they spend it.