Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.

Robert Orben (1927–2023) was an American comedy writer and speechwriter known for one-liners and topical humor about business, ambition, and public life. This quip belongs to his persona as a professional gag writer: it riffs on the cultural prominence of Forbes magazine’s wealth rankings (especially the annual “Forbes 400”) and the American fixation on measurable financial success. The joke’s setup—checking a list “every morning”—mimics a daily ritual, then flips into a punchline that treats work not as vocation but as the default response to not yet being fabulously rich. It circulated widely as a standalone Orben aphorism in quotation collections.

The line satirizes the idea that wealth is the ultimate scoreboard for achievement. By pretending that the only reason to work is failing to appear on a rich list, Orben exposes a reductive, status-driven view of labor and success. The humor depends on exaggeration: no one realistically checks Forbes daily, and the notion of “going to work” as a consolation prize mocks both the fantasy of effortless riches and the social prestige attached to being publicly ranked. Read more broadly, it’s a critique of external validation—measuring one’s worth by lists and rankings—while also acknowledging the motivational power such comparisons can exert.