The system panel hit him like a gold-plated sledgehammer on New Year's Day 2011.
[New System Funds approved: $500,000,000 transferred to SkyHigh Mobile]
[Personal Cash: $26,084,428.47]
[Next settlement: 365 days (annual cycle unlocked)]
[Note: Congratulations on becoming a household name. Consumer electronics division activated. Go make something people will hate. Or love. We're not picky.]
Peyton stared at the half-billion until the zeroes started tap-dancing.
*Five hundred million dollars.
For a phone.
That's not a product launch. That's economic terrorism with a glass back.*
He didn't even call a meeting this time. He just walked into the loft, wrote on the whiteboard in giant red letters:
WE ARE MAKING A SMARTPHONE
IT WILL BE TERRIBLE
YOU ARE ALL FIRED IF IT ISN'T
Then he went back to his supply-closet office and locked the door for three days.
When he emerged, he looked like he'd been wrestling demons and lost.
The plan was simple, beautiful, and guaranteed to bankrupt him:
Phone name: **SkyHigh One**
Tagline: "A phone for people who hate phones."
Killer anti-features:
- $1,999 base price (higher than anything on the market)
- Glass back that cracks if you breathe on it wrong
- Battery life: 4 hours max, non-replaceable
- Charger port: proprietary magnetic connector that breaks after 11 plugs
- No headphone jack (in 2011, when everyone still used wired headphones)
- Camera: single 2-megapixel sensor "for mindfulness"
- OS: custom skin that adds 3-second lag to every swipe "to encourage patience"
- Pre-installed apps: Tax Season Simulator, Eternal Wait queue manager, and a live feed of the Tomorrow's Star wall scene
- Marketing budget: $200 million spent telling people how much the phone sucks
He hired the most expensive, delusional engineers money could buy:
- Lead designer: ex-Apple guy who got fired for suggesting the iPhone should be made of concrete. Salary: $40 million.
- Battery team: instructed to make it as small and explosive as legally possible.
- Marketing: told to run ads that literally said "Don't buy this phone."
The team—now 120 people after another hiring spree of beautiful lunatics—went feral with joy.
Dylan: "I'm making the glass back so fragile it cracks in the box. We'll call it 'patina of ownership.'"
Cody: "I'm adding a feature where the phone randomly reboots during calls and plays Joey the clown whispering 'Why are we here?'"
Ashley: "Haptic feedback? Only when you get a parking ticket notification."
Tyler & Elena: "Ringtone: the sound of dial-up modem mixed with crying babies."
Peyton personally approved every terrible decision.
He spent:
- $120M on custom magnetic chargers that cost $199 each to replace
- $80M on a "luxury unboxing experience" (the box was a concrete block you had to chisel open)
- $90M on celebrity endorsements from people famous for hating technology
- $60M on focus groups where they paid participants $500 to say the phone was garbage (then used the quotes in ads)
Launch event: September 2011, live-streamed from an empty warehouse.
Peyton walked onstage in a black hoodie, held up the phone, and said:
"This is the SkyHigh One.
It's overpriced.
It breaks easily.
The battery dies when you need it most.
Don't buy it."
Then he dropped it on the concrete floor. It shattered into a thousand pieces.
Chat exploded. Pre-orders crashed the website in six minutes.
First month sales: 4.7 million units.
Revenue: $9.4 billion.
Average customer review: "I hate it so much I bought three."
Old Joe's video dropped the same week:
**"I Used the Worst Phone Ever Made for 30 Days – My Sanity Is Gone"**
He documented the phone dying during a family emergency, the charger breaking on day 3, and the random clown whispers at 3 a.m. Chat called it performance art.
By Christmas, SkyHigh One was the #1 selling phone in America.
Settlement day:
[SkyHigh One – Profit: $7,884,447,003]
[Personal conversion (100:1): $78,844,470]
[Money forever lost: $7,805,602,533]
Peyton sat on the warehouse floor surrounded by shattered glass backs, holding a working SkyHigh One that refused to die.
He was now personally worth over a hundred million dollars.
The company was valued at forty billion.
And the phone that was supposed to brick itself had just become the most profitable consumer product of the decade.
He requested new funds.
One billion this time.
The universe didn't even pretend to be surprised anymore.
To be continued…