Bill Perkins Audiobooks

Die With Zero: the hedge fund manager who argues your money is for spending well

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Who is Bill Perkins?

Money, for most people who write about it, is a subject. For William Osborne Perkins III it is a day job. He runs Skylar Capital, a hedge fund built on trading energy markets, and has co-founded two technology ventures alongside it: SkyFi, which sells satellite imagery of the Earth, and SynMax, which turns geospatial data into intelligence for industry. Born in 1969, he is also a well known figure at the high stakes poker table.

None of which would place him on a books page were it not for one idea, published in 2020, that has quietly rearranged how a lot of people think about their savings. Perkins argues that money is a tool for buying experiences, that experiences pay a dividend in memory for the rest of your life, and that dying with a large unspent balance is not prudence but a mistake.

It is a provocation delivered with a trader’s bluntness, and it has made him one of the more argued about voices in personal finance.

Bill Perkins in audiobooks

Die With Zero comes to us read by its author, which matters more than usual here, because the argument is essentially a man leaning across a table and telling you to stop deferring your life. In print the tone can read as brash; spoken by Perkins, it lands as generous, occasionally funny and rather harder to dismiss.

At a shade over five hours it is one of the tidiest listens in personal finance: a single commute or two, a long walk, and you have the whole framework. It sits comfortably alongside business, money and personal development listening, and it works best if you come to it with a pen, because the exercises are meant to be done rather than admired. Press play below and see whether he changes your mind.