Wealth & Money Quote by Mitchell Baker

Money doesn’t just buy things; it buys a certain kind of paranoia. Mitchell Baker’s line lands because it treats suspicion not as a moral failing but as an ambient effect of cash entering the room. “Floating around” is doing heavy work here: money isn’t framed as earned, saved, or even owned, but as loose, mobile, and therefore contestable. If it’s unclaimed or poorly defined, everyone starts scanning for who’s gaming whom.

Coming from a lawyer and longtime tech executive, the context is almost certainly institutional rather than personal. In organizations, the presence of money transforms relationships into potential conflicts of interest. Motives get reread in reverse: the same proposal that looked like idealism yesterday becomes a bid for budget, influence, or a future payday today. Baker’s intent feels diagnostic, not accusatory. She’s pointing to a predictable social pattern: once resources are scarce, opaque, or newly introduced, trust becomes expensive.

The subtext is also a quiet critique of how we talk about “mission.” In nonprofits, open-source communities, or public-minded projects, money arrives with a legitimacy problem. You can say you’re values-driven, but the moment funding appears, people start asking which values are being bought, and by whom. Suspicion becomes a form of due diligence, sometimes healthy, sometimes corrosive. The line works because it captures that double bind: money is necessary to scale anything, yet its mere proximity can poison the social fabric that made the project worth scaling in the first place.