A Japanese Mega-Collector Is Giving Away $9 Million to His Twitter Followers to See If Money Makes People Happy

The billionaire art collector and fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa is
giving away ¥1 billion ($9 million) to a group of his Twitter
followers in a “social experiment.”

The 44-year-old Japanese businessman, whose net worth is currently
estimated at $2 billion, wants to find out if money really can buy
happiness.

Maezawa is handing out ¥1 million ($9,000) each to 1,000
randomly selected followers (he has close to 7 million) who
retweeted a post of his from January 1, and he intends to track the
impact of the money through regularly conducted surveys.

He hopes that academics and economists will study the results of
his findings.

“It’s a serious social experiment,” he said on YouTube, as translated by Reuters. Money will be
distributed to the recipients on a monthly basis over the course of
the next year, according to the London Times. There
are no restrictions as to how the money can be used.

The founder of e-commerce giant Start Today and online fashion
mall Zozotown, Maezawa has become a high-profile art
collector, making headlines in
2016 by spending $81 million on
five works at a single auction, and $98 million over two days.

He followed that up in 2017 with the $110.5 million purchase
at Sotheby’s New York of an untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat painting,
setting a new record for a work by the artist at auction. (The
painting later headlined an exhibition
of the artist’s work at the Brooklyn Museum.)

Maezawa also plans to take between six and eight artists to
space through Elon Musk’s SpaceX program. The idea is to turn the
voyage into an interdisciplinary art project titled Dear Moon. The trip, tentatively
scheduled for 2023, is estimated to have a $200 million price
tag.

The new Twitter stunt marks the second time that Maezawa has
experimented with giving away money to online strangers. When he
pulled the same stunt last January, with $9,000 payouts to just 100
Twitter followers, Maezawa broke the record for retweets, with 4.68
million of them.

The idea of handing out money to the general public is inspired
by calls for a universal basic income, an idea backed
by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, among
others.

Maezawa was also inspired by the Japanese custom of
otoshidama, in which families give money to their
children at the start of a new year.

The post A Japanese Mega-Collector Is Giving Away $9 Million
to His Twitter Followers to See If Money Makes People Happy
appeared first on artnet News.