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Notes -
I'd be surprised if more than a dozen escorts in the Bay Area actually make more than $1M/year from escorting. It might even be substantially less. Their customers comprise a market that, though not exactly thin, is at least ragged enough and demanding enough that escorts can't simply line up a constant stream of guys to occupy all their working hours. And, if you treat $1M/year as an earnings cap for the very top performers in your career (that will last, very optimistically, a decade), in the Bay Area that isn't really shocking or impressive.
It's not even the best strategy if you're a woman looking to trade her looks and charm for money. Just marry a well-off guy, of which there are plenty. Or be like Lucy Guo: join a company early as the token pretty-ish woman, get fired, and walk away with billions.
Also, it seems like there's much better options for the guys? There was an article a while back about a somewhat autistic SF Tech guy that described his situation in which he basically had a subscription service with an Eastern European group that would send him an English speaking, very attractive, attentive Eastern European girlfriend of his type (given the pricing, probably Ukrainian) on a rotating basis every few months (I'm guessing on a tourist visa and they head back when the visa was running out) at an annual cost comparable to that 30k one weekend above. If you're into Asian woman you could prob. get even cheaper with Philippines/South East Asia or the like. This seems a lot more appealing to me if you're already going the escort route.
What's missing is the intellectual companionship, which is the selling point of the Aella sort to their particular clientele. The Eastern European woman might be attentive and attractive, and she might speak English, but she also is from a very different background and worldview, and possibly has a very different personality and level of intelligence.
Which is definitely strange to me -- surely there are enough decently-smart, decently-attractive, actually kind of geeky ladies for men with the kinds of money we're talking about to find one who might fall in love with him non-transactionally, but maybe the Bay really is a harsh place for straight love.
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