Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Sullivan

There is a sly little pivot in Jim Sullivan's line: it starts like a backstage humblebrag and ends like a moral verdict. “Just recently I worked with Van Morrison” signals proximity to legend, the kind of name-drop that usually buys credibility. Then Sullivan yanks the rug out with “and I came to realize,” framing the encounter as a life lesson rather than a career flex. The payoff is blunt and unromantic: money, the industry’s favorite scoreboard, is useless at manufacturing character.

The subtext lands in two places at once. It’s an implied critique of Morrison’s reputed prickliness, but it’s also a wider jab at the music economy that confuses success with worthiness. Sullivan doesn’t say fame corrupts; he says it reveals. “Can’t make a decent human being out of you” suggests decency is a preexisting condition, not a perk you unlock with platinum records. The phrasing “out of you” is almost parental, like someone discovering too late that no amount of resources fixes a rotten foundation.

Context matters here: musicians spend their lives in rooms where talent and money are loud, and basic kindness can be strangely scarce. Collaboration is supposed to be intimacy-by-contract, the studio as temporary family. When that closeness produces disillusionment, the disappointment is sharper than ordinary celebrity gossip. Sullivan’s intent isn’t to moralize at strangers; it’s to puncture a myth the industry sells to itself: that success is self-justifying. It’s a small, cutting reminder that riches can amplify a personality, but they don’t edit it.