Along about the time of that Taylor Swift prom date in Good lord, this is a book

… was filed a lawsuit by a former manager, and among the documents was this lengthy email from Scott Swift, Taylor’s father.

https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=8114495&z=26399dc2

(beginning on page 21 there, and lasting for 7 pages!! )

I had never seen this email before today, the day after I wrote a bit here about Taylor Swift.

Of course there are paragraphs of the man having written too much, in confidence, but the general body of the letter reads as would one from Bill Gates, back in 1975 or so, making reference to tiny little investments akin to getting Microsoft shares for perhaps 50 cents.

To the surprise of few who bother to read the referenced email, Taylor Swift’s parents divorced in 2011.

Hard to know what Scott Swift thinks in (almost 2024) when seeing that email still making the rounds today, but if he can play-down all of the personal stuff he said about his wife, and play-down the poor writing in many spots, while looking objectively at most of what he said…

he as a financial planner himself would have to recognize that all of those investments grew at a rate of return that he never could have forecasted at the time, and a rate almost never matched by any other investments on the planet.

It is another chance to document the little things which all came together to make today’s Taylor Swift phenomenon. Those parents did make some sacrifices, and it appears that Taylor Swift herself did at some point make the choice to get (her expected half of the parents’ estate) in advance, so as to invest in herself when she needed start-up $$$ for one reason or several others.

Granted it wasn’t a case of some random (young adult) begging their parents to do the same thing as a means of their buying a random restaurant that was eventually likely to fail. The parents could see the lights getting brighter, and probably didn’t worry that to ‘advance’ Taylor such a huge share of (themselves) was going to be especially risky. It was a way to be relatively “fair” to Taylor’s brother, in the long run. That, too, was an appropriate move.

Of course there are ‘family secrets’ strewn about the email, and of course the Swifts are made to seem like “stage parents” in many ways… but their instincts proved to be correct to epic proportions and it is pretty clear that society as a whole has benefitted a great deal from their efforts… perhaps particularly YouTube in general, which, to some amusement, was less than three months old at the date of the referenced email from Scott Swift.

It is probably fortunate for more than just him that Scott Swift generally had the money to fund so much of Taylor’s even-earlier forays into the music world.

Plenty of amusement can be found in the various other interpretations of that email, so often from envious parties around the interwebs.

~ I didn’t even go searching for additional Taylor Swift details - this just landed front and center on my screen today, after I’d written yesterday’s entry.