If you combined the fortunes of the five richest people on Earth — Elon Musk (Tesla/Twitter/SpaceX), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Larry Page (Google) — you’d have a staggering total gross personal wealth of over $1.5 trillion. If any one of these guys gave away $10 million, it would barely register. At a mere 0.002% of Elon Musk’s fortune, it’s hardly worth expending the energy to fire off a neurone thinking about it; barely an afterthought. To put it into perspective it would be the equivalent of someone with $1,000 giving away two cents.
With $10 million, you could buy five riverfront acreage homes in Karalee. If you were so inclined $10 million would get you 135 Toyota Hilux GR Sports or 142 Isuzu D-MAX X-Terrains or… 192 or the much more cost effective GWM Cannon XSRs.
Here on the Hill, we could have refurbished the top floor of Westcourt, purchased all the modular classrooms in T Block. We could have added in a roof over the entire Tennis Court area and have money to spare.
Donating $10 million would be generous, appreciated and impactful. But it would be charity. Charity is easy. Service on the other hand, is hard.
Charity is about giving things — money, food, clothes. It’s useful, valued, and it can make a difference. But service is something deeper. Service is about giving a part of yourself: your time, your effort, your comfort. It’s about stepping outside of your own world to help someone else in theirs.
Today we celebrate the spirit of service through the efforts of our Skool-2-Skoolies riders. These young men have trained all year to ride 115 km from Mary Street to Cavill Avenue, not for glory, but for others. They’ve approached strangers — committee chairs, managers, business owners — to explain their mission and ask for support. They’ve given their time, their energy and a piece of themselves.
In 2025, the young men of the Skool-2-Skoolies team have raised an extraordinary $80,000 — a testament to their dedication, teamwork and unwavering commitment to making a difference.
- Today as they ride for others and as a community, we present two deserving charities with the fruits of their service:
- St Vincent de Paul (SVDP), who serve the poor, the homeless and the marginalised.
Ipswich Hospice, who walk compassionately with people in their final days of life.
Throughout the year we’ve seen this spirit of service in action — at Head to Heart Camp, during the Winter Sleep Out, through the Rosies Outreach, through sandwich making at Rotary, Kruger Baptist Church Meal Outreach and Villa Maria Care Visits, College Recycling Committee … and today, as we farewelled our Skool-2-Skoolies riders.
We look forward to welcoming them back after a successful crossing. Their example reminds us all that charity is good and service is hard but service is transformative. For us, as the Eddies Team, our aim is to live simply and make a difference, but this difference, our difference, is a difference created through service and that is far more enduring.