South African comedian Trevor Noah is photographed during an interview. Noah, 31, will become Jon Stewart's replacement as host (AP Photo/Bongiwe Mchunu-The Star)
South African comedian Trevor Noah is photographed during an interview. Noah, 31, will become Jon Stewart's replacement as host (AP Photo/Bongiwe Mchunu-The Star)

Trevor Noah’s tweets rise up from the grave



There are three kinds of famous people: the hugely famous, the somewhat famous, and the internet famous.

The first category is easy to understand. These are the internationally famous people who swan around the world’s most glamorous hotspots. These are the kinds of people who you do not see in airport security lines, or trying to get a taxi after work. These are people who do not need to make restaurant reservations.

The second category is pretty clear, too. These are the celebrities who aren’t quite as famous as the upper tier, and who do, occasionally, fly on commercial aircraft and go shopping for groceries.

The last category are those irritating people – and there seems to be an unending supply of them – who have thousands of Twitter followers for no discernible reason, or who blog or vlog on internet platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, Vimeo, Vine, and probably a dozen others I’ve never heard of. These are people who aren’t really famous – they can walk down any street anywhere unmolested – but who nevertheless have an audience.

“I’m probably the most famous person you’ve never heard of,” one of these internet-famous people told me once, without a trace of irony. “But my goal,” she said, “is to become someone famous who is also well-known.”

It’s only at first that her sentence makes no sense. If you really think about it, she’s describing what fame really means in this hyper-inflated era, when with a tiny bit of effort – and no talent required – everyone can have an audience of ten thousand strangers.

The trouble is, the kinds of things people do to get attention on online platforms – deliver rude monologues, make tasteless tweets, broadcast their every half-brained notion and off-the-cuff prejudice – are precisely the things that can come back to haunt them later, should they succeed in leaping from internet-famous to actual-famous.

One of the most coveted jobs in American television is to be the host of Comedy Central network’s humorous news programme, The Daily Show. Its longtime host, Jon Stewart, announced his retirement a few weeks ago, and since then the press have been obsessed with his replacement. When the new guy was unveiled earlier this week – it’s South African comedian Trevor Noah, who has appeared regularly on the show – the press did what it does now whenever someone relatively unknown pops up in the news: it searched Twitter and everywhere else for his online footprint.

Alas for Trevor Noah, he actually has an online footprint, and not a very auspicious one. Barely hours after the big announcement, his past tweets had been unearthed and passed around, Tweeted and re-tweeted across the web for everyone to see and judge.

It turns out that back before Trevor Noah’s first appearance on television, back when he could barely be considered even “internet famous”, he liked to tweet jokes about fat girls, Jewish people, white men, and women in general. And the moment he made the transition to actual fame all of that past nasty material came roaring back to life. Within a day, there were people calling for his immediate termination, groups threatening to boycott the programme, demands for an abject apology, shouts about “hate speech” and “exclusion” and every other currently fashionable phrase.

It’s sort of like what happens in those low-rent horror movies, when everyone is convinced that the murderer or monster is safely dead. The heroes will be celebrating in the foreground, smiling and laughing, while in the background the killer rises silently.

That’s what Trevor Noah’s tweets did earlier this week: they rose from his pre-famous past to attack his now-famous present, and it’s still up in the air if he’s going to survive it.

It’s a cautionary tale, I think, for all of us – because all of us, any of us, can suddenly lurch quickly from pleasant obscurity to internet fame to actual, real-life renown, and when we do, every utterance and online thought is going to be rebooted and retweeted. You’d think that the smart play would be to simply avoid any kind of online activity – don’t play with fire and you won’t get burnt – but for people who want to become famous in real life (which is pretty much everybody these days) being internet famous is a prerequisite.

See the dilemma? The best way to catapult yourself into the top tiers of fame is to scramble up the internet ladder: start with wild and crazy Tweets, some truly unforgettable Instagrams, maybe a raucous podcast or two. Pretty soon you’ll find yourself getting more and more attention. But eventually all of that material is going to be a serious liability.

So, just when you’re about to break into a new and higher level of fame, be smart: erase everything. Disconnect your Facebook. Trash your Twitter. Eliminate your Instagrams. Cover as many traces of your past internet-famous life as you can and saunter onto your private jet happy and secure, knowing that the really dangerous stuff is well and truly dead. Just like in those horror movies.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl

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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”