Keeping Up With the Joneses
“I’m not sure I want this written all over the place.”
Scott Jones delivers this verdict not long after he settles into a booth at Chatham Tap, the sports bar on the campus of Butler University. Bags droop beneath his suddenly wide eyes, and his face is rounder than it once was in the professional headshots and file photos that regularly popped up in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company. It is an uncharacteristic thing for one of the city’s most swaggering entrepreneurs to say. The world’s business writers have chronicled his monied conquests in a career spanning more than three decades: At 25, he was a founding partner in Boston Technology, the company that made voicemail stick. He later founded Gracenote, the music search company he sold to Sony for $260 million and some of the technology that powers iTunes. He was an early investor in Art Technology Group, the ecommerce giant that Oracle would later purchase for $1 billion. And in 2005, he was the mind behind ChaCha, the human-powered, text-based search engine backed by JeffBezos and whose data was acquired by either Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. (Jones won’t say which one.)
Jones’s voice lowers, as if he has a terrible secret to share—the kind better left out of braggadocious and tightly lawyered press releases. “I’m in the middle of the fucking worst divorce you can imagine,” the 60-year-old tells me. “It’s not done, and we’re at rock bottom.”
Jones says he has $1,332 left in his checking account. He says he owes his parents, Barbara and George Jones, more than $1 million in loans and credit card companies some $140,000.
“People don’t know?” I ask him.
“They don’t know,” he says.
In the last five years, Jones has spent the last millions of his once-vast personal fortune of more than $400 million and has a negative net worth.
It is a stunning reversal for a man who owned an English manor house MTV dubbed the “Home of the Decade”—he beat out 323 houses, including ones owned by 50 Cent and Russell Simmons, along with the Hugh Hefner Playboy Mansion and Mariah Carey’s Art Deco apartment. Kim Kardashian presented the award. “Their teched-out masterpiece is the all-time, ultimate place to hang out,” Kardashian
