A few more weeks had gone by and new years was approaching, Brandon woke up and spent some time at home for the morning before heading to the office around 9. When he got there the materials for manufacturing the phones had arrived. He decided he would build one as a demonstration to the new employees so that it would hopefully save time. He planned to have it built and kept by Cameron since Cameron was first real employee of the company. He also built another 2 himself since he wanted to give one to his mother and one to John.
After having demonstrated how to produce the phone, the new employees seemed to understand it rather easily. He left it to them to start manufacturing them as quickly as they could with minimal mistakes. With that taken care of it was lunch time and he decided he would just order something to be delivered. He also realized he would likely need to think about hiring security personnel soon since the construction on the company building was getting close to completion. It was built rather quickly since he requested for it to be done as soon as possible.
He was expecting it to be completed mid January based on the current progress, so he needed to make sure that everything was ready to be moved over. This meant making sure that the power was working, there was running water, he had internet in the entire building, he had security set up for the building, and so on. This being the case he needed to get with Cameron and John to see about hiring people to work as security for the building. He wanted at least 4 people for each floor of the building, 2 who would monitor the cameras and 2 who would monitor any people who were entering or leaving the floor they were on. Each floor would have a small area designed for those who were entering, There was a single area that had 3 elevator's, it also had a stair case for those who wanted to take the stairs. There was also 2 other emergency exits that would be alarmed and unable to be opened from the inside of the stairwells except the first and second floor.
He decided he would need to hire almost 300 people to work security alone to ensure everyone had time off as well as him having enough people to cover all 35 floors. This was a large number of people considering the amount of money he currently had and the fact that he didn't have any profits coming into the company at the moment. If they couldn't start making a profit within the year they would end up bankrupt because of the number of employees they had. The annual expenses to just pay the employees for the year came out to nearly $100 million. With this in mind he had to make sure that production could reach a meaningful level by summer of 2009 or he would be out of business unless he found other sources of income which he did not want to do.
Once he made the arrangements for hiring the security employees he decided that it was once again time to call it a day and went home for the night. The following morning when he went back to the company he went to check on the production progress of the phones.
When he arrived to check on the progress of the production he was surprised to find that a few hundred phones were ready to be sold already. He calculated that based on the cost of the materials he could make a significant profit by selling it for $1,000. This price was actually quite decent considering the features and amount of storage space it had on it exceeding the other smartphones on the market by more than 10 times. The total cost of the production and materials only came out to around $200, meaning he could make a profit of 5 times the investment into it.
After he checked the progress of the phones he decided to check the progress of the computer production. When he arrived at their production area, only 3 had been completely produced. He was going to be keeping 2 for himself, and decided he would auction the 3rd in the Group chat as he did with the phone.
"Hello again @everyone, I have another new product that my company is going to be selling in the near future. I would like to offer it up for bids here first so that it may be tested by who ever bids the highest. Before I announce the starting bid for it though I would like to ask @BGates what he thinks of the phone he recieved after winning the phone from before?"
"@Brandon(admin), The phone is beyond anything I have ever seen. I have not yet been able to completely explore all of its functions, however it is definitely worth the price and has amazing capabilities when it comes to its speed and storage space. I have started to use it more than my computer simply because it is faster and more convenient since it can be used while on the go as well."
"@BGates, Glad to hear it! Now as @everyone has heard from Mr. Gates about his experience with the phone, the next device my company will be releasing is a computer. This computer has speeds that are faster than any other computer in existence today, and like the phone it provides military grade encryption beyond what the government currently has. The processing speed of the computer is 10.0GHz, more than triple anything on the market currently, it also provides improved GPU with a speed of 10.0GHz as well as more than 20GB of memory. This again is well beyond anything currently on the market. This computer runs on a completely new operating system that is not Microsoft's Windows or Apple's IOS/macOS. I will start the bid at $100,000 and it will have a minimum bid increase of the same."
Jeff Bezos: "$300,000"
Bill Gates: "$500,000"
Warren Buffet: "$1 million"
The bidding continued for almost half an hour before the final bid was announced again by Bill Gates for $280 million. Brandon was shocked to see such a high bid, he wasn't expecting it to be more than $50 million even though the phone had sold for almost $100 million.
Once the bidding was completed Brandon had the AI assistant to send it anonymously just as it did the phone. He then looked at the group chat and decided to take out $200 million from the group account and put half of it into the business account while keeping the other half for him to spend on other investments. He was thinking about establishing a company that deals with real-estate.
He was thinking about this just in case the technology company did not generate profits for the first year or two. He wanted to make sure the company could keep operating even if it had to utilize funds from other ventures.
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Status as of this chapter:
Personal Net worth: $100 million cash, $159 million group, $145 million stocks
Investments: Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, Microsoft
Business net worth: $225 million liquid funds, $204 million estimated non-liquid assets