Two hundred seventy-five million dollars. Six billion dollars. One hundred seventy-nine contracts. A million dollars in uncashed checks. Sixteen months of silence.
All lost in spreadsheets. We trust them with everything, and they remember nothing.
In September 2008, as Lehman Brothers collapsed into the largest bankruptcy in American history, Barclays Capital moved quickly to acquire pieces of the failing investment bank. Lawyers worked through the night preparing documents. An Excel spreadsheet listed the contracts Barclays intended to purchase.
Someone on the team hid certain rows. Perhaps they were duplicates. Perhaps they were under review. Perhaps someone simply meant to come back to them later. The spreadsheet, as spreadsheets do, obliged without comment. It rendered itself as though those rows didn’t exist.
When the document was converted to PDF for court filing, the hidden rows reappeared. Barclays had inadvertently committed to purchasing 179 contracts they never intended to acquire. The spreadsheet had looked correct. It had simply been incomplete, in a way that was invisible to everyone who reviewed it.
Sixteen Months of Silence
In 2023, the singer Jimmy Buffett died, leaving behind a $275 million estate and a trust designed to provide for his widow, Jane. The trust named two co-trustees: Jane herself, and a financial advisor named Richard Mozenter.
For sixteen months, according to court filings, Mozenter failed to provide Jane with basic information about her own finances. No accounting. No reports on trust assets. No explanation of income or expenses. When he finally produced financial projections, they showed annual trust income of less than $2 million on a $275 million portfolio, a return of less than 1%.
The projections also excluded income from Margaritaville, the hospitality brand that had already paid $14 million in distributions since Buffett’s death. Meanwhile, Mozenter’s firm had charged $1.7 million in trustee fees for 2024 alone, while advising Jane that she might need to sell real estate or cut back her spending.
Jane filed suit in California to remove him as co-trustee. Her complaint alleged that she had been “left in the dark with regard to the state of her own finances.”
The information existed somewhere. It simply hadn’t been shared in any documented, verifiable way.
What a Purse Remembers
When Aretha Franklin died in 2018, she left no formal estate plan. No trust. No clear accounting system. Instead, she left handwritten wills tucked into furniture cushions and locked cabinets, some dated years apart and contradicting each other.
She also left, in one of her purses, three uncashed checks totaling nearly $1 million.
Her sons spent years in litigation. One accused the estate administrator of failing to provide an inventory: the jewelry, the master recordings, the Grammy awards, the gold records. The estate’s accounting eventually showed $3.9 million in annual income and similar spending, including more than $900,000 in legal fees.
It wasn’t that records didn’t exist. Bank statements existed. Contracts existed. The checks in her purse existed. What didn’t exist was any organized system that could tell heirs what she owned, what she was owed, and where it all was. The spreadsheets and documents her representatives eventually produced were assembled after the fact, reconstructed from fragments.
A court can accept a reconstructed record. But a court can also choose not to. And when doubts arise, courts resolve them against the fiduciary who failed to keep proper records in the first place.
The Missing Countries
In 2010, two Harvard economists published a paper that reshaped global economic policy. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s “Growth in a Time of Debt” argued that countries whose debt exceeded 90% of GDP experienced sharp declines in economic growth. The paper was cited by Paul Ryan in Congressional debates, by European Central Bank officials advocating austerity, by finance ministers across the developed world.
Three years later, a 28-year-old graduate student named Thomas Herndon tried to replicate their findings for a class assignment. He couldn’t make the numbers work. After weeks of frustration, he finally obtained the original spreadsheet.
The formula calculating average growth rates had been applied to rows 30 through 44. But the data extended to row 49. Five countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark) had been accidentally excluded from the calculation. When Herndon corrected the error, the famous finding largely disappeared. The 0.1% decline in growth became a 2.2% increase.
The spreadsheet had contained all the data. The formula had simply failed to see it.
Six Billion Dollars
In 2012, JP Morgan Chase disclosed trading losses that would eventually exceed $6 billion. The “London Whale” incident, as it came to be known, involved complex financial derivatives and a trader whose positions had grown dangerously large. But buried in the postmortem was a detail that received less attention: the risk models that should have flagged the danger had been built in Excel.
Someone had copied a formula, a simple average, and pasted it as a sum. The model dramatically underestimated the risk. The spreadsheet performed its calculations exactly as instructed. It simply hadn’t been instructed correctly.
What Courts Actually Require
Estate attorneys know the pattern well. An executor prepares an informal accounting, typically in Excel, and sends it to the beneficiaries. If everyone signs off, the estate closes. If anyone objects, the spreadsheet goes to court.
And courts have standards that spreadsheets cannot meet.
A valid trust accounting under most state probate codes is not a spreadsheet or summary. It requires specific formatting, verified statements, and documentation that traces every asset, every transaction, every distribution. The executor must be able to support the accounting with canceled checks, purchase records, bank statements, and investment documentation.
When records are incomplete or missing, fiduciaries face a legal presumption that works against them. A trustee who fails to keep proper records is liable for any loss or expense resulting from that failure. Courts resolve doubts against the trustee. These failures may result in reduced or denied compensation, removal from the fiduciary role, or surcharge for the cost of corrective proceedings.
The American College of Trust and Estate Counsel has noted that when records cannot be located, fiduciaries sometimes have no choice but to bring a judicial application, disclose the problem to the court, and hope for a favorable resolution. That’s not a strategy. That’s a last resort.
The Philosopher’s Observation
Alan Watts once noted that we spend enormous energy trying to make permanent that which is inherently impermanent, while treating as temporary the things that ought to endure. Our relationship with spreadsheets follows this pattern.
We use them to capture what happened: the inventory of assets, the sequence of decisions, the preferences expressed, the conflicts resolved. We trust them to remember. But a spreadsheet is a living document. Every cell is editable. Every formula can be overwritten. Every row can be hidden or deleted without leaving a trace. The document you’re looking at today may bear little resemblance to what existed last Tuesday, and you’d have no way of knowing.
The irony is precise: we use mutable tools to create records we expect to be immutable. We ask the thing that changes to serve as proof of what was.
What Gets Lost
In estate administration, there are hidden rows everywhere. The informal conversation about grandmother’s china. The phone call where one sibling agreed to yield on the jewelry in exchange for priority on the artwork. The verbal clarification from the appraiser about condition issues. The moment when everyone nodded in agreement, before anyone thought to write it down.
The Uniform Trust Code, adopted in some form by most U.S. states, establishes what fiduciaries actually owe. Under Section 813, trustees must keep beneficiaries “reasonably informed about the administration of the trust” and provide accountings that include “a report of the trust property, liabilities, receipts, and disbursements.”
More simply: you must be able to prove what happened.
Courts don’t care what you remember. They care what you can demonstrate. A spreadsheet, endlessly editable and lacking attribution or timestamps, demonstrates very little. It shows you what exists now. It cannot show you how you got here.
When disputes arise (and in estate matters, they arise with remarkable frequency), the only thing that matters is what you can prove. Beneficiaries who feel wronged can seek what the law calls a “surcharge”: a remedy that makes trustees personally liable for losses resulting from breach of duty. This includes losses from documentation so inadequate that proper administration cannot be verified.
The tool chosen to save time becomes the reason years are spent in litigation.
What Remains
Jane Buffett’s lawsuit continues. Aretha Franklin’s sons eventually settled, six years after her death. Thomas Herndon earned his PhD and a footnote in the history of economic policy. Barclays absorbed the unwanted contracts and moved on.
These are stories of recovery, of errors eventually caught, of disputes eventually resolved. But they’re also stories of what was lost in the interim: years of litigation, millions in legal fees, relationships strained or broken, estates diminished by the cost of proving what should have been obvious from the start.
A proper record isn’t a burden. It’s a gift to your future self, and to whoever comes after you, wanting to understand how things unfolded.
The spreadsheet will always be there for the work of thinking, of calculating, of exploring possibilities. It’s good at those things. Just don’t ask it to do the work of remembering. That requires something else entirely: a record that knows who changed what, and when, and cannot be quietly revised to suggest that things were always as they appear today.
The hidden row, after all, was never really hidden. It was simply waiting for a moment when its presence would finally matter.