Masters of the hedge fund universe are on a different planet when it comes to motivational mumbo-jumbo, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

THE E-MAIL was waiting for me on my return from holiday, just as I knew it would be. Shortly before I went away, I had written a column in which I had borrowed not merely someone else’s idea but his very words. At the time I thought I’d get away with it, but in the middle of the night had woken in a sweat. In the age of the internet, plagiarists nearly always get punished.

Such was my dread that during our brief holiday in deserted Greece, I kept my BlackBerry turned off and at the bottom of a suitcase. But once in Athens airport I took it out and there was the message.

"Martin Lukes/ Twilight", read the subject line.

Before I describe the contents of the e-mail, I ought to explain myself. A few days earlier I had been forwarded a memo written by the real-estate investor Tom Barrack to his underlings at Colony Capital. In it, he described a "personal breakthrough" he had made as a result of reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilightbooks. "I feel renewed and refreshed, having gotten out of my comfort zone and experiencing something so totally out of my normal realm," he wrote.

Such insights were perfect for my satirical character Martin Lukes, and I got to work paraphrasing Barrack’s words. Alas, the original was unimprovable, so I gave up and cut and pasted it into my column.

When I opened the e-mail, I found it was not quite what I had been expecting.

"I've just read the latest Martin Lukes column and it wasn't funny," it read. "I think you've just taken him too far from the real world. The stuff about Twilightwas just silly. Can you please make him closer to real life in future?"

I read the message and laughed. But once I had got over the relief, I started to feel despair. What role is there for satire when real business leaders are beyond far-fetched?

Back in the office, I looked again at the original memo (which can be read on dealbreaker.com) and am inclined to agree with the reader who e-mailed me: it isn’t funny, it’s terrifying.

“Gang,” Barrack starts.

It goes on to describe how after "an agonisingly tough couple of weeks" he took some "yacht time" and chanced upon his daughter's copy of Twilight. "I don't get it . . . but I feel it. Taking the agenda-less time to absorb a point of view that I had ignored while loved ones around me relished it was an oasis for my soul."

There are long musings on love, on anticipation and vampires, allowing him to draw the following conclusion for his team: “It is hard for us to dream . . . it is time for all of us . . . to spend more time outside the strict arithmetic cadence of our business . . . we must really find the ‘moment’.”

There is no time to answer the questions this raises – why are dreams good for hedgies? Find what “moment”? What is a “strict arithmetic cadence”? – as there is more.

“Move your cheese!!!! . . . The earth is turning on its axis. Planets and moons and suns are in orbit. Gravity is pulling and tugging, and molecules and quarks are warring inside of us. We need movement to live.”

There is a lesson to be drawn from all this but it has nothing to do with cheese, moons or quarks.

It does, however, relate to planets, and in particular to these people being on a different planet from the rest of us.

Tom Barrack isn’t the only one. A couple of months ago, Ray Dalio, founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund, presented his staff with equally nutty reading matter. But where Barrack’s was pure slush, Dalio’s was a dictatorial manifesto on how to live one’s life in a set of 297 principles that banned gossip and advised managers to think of their teams as baseball cards.

Both men are creating a new sort of business drivel: billionaire financier drivel. The management drivel that we are familiar with comes from corporate bosses who are wage slaves and whose words are, therefore, fettered. But these guys feel so rich and powerful that there are no restraining influences on them at all.

On dealbreaker.com readers have asked “WTF?”, but you can be certain that no colleague at Colony has dared stop Barrack

in the corridor to ask the same obvious question.

I realise that in writing this column, I’ve drawn even more attention to my act of plagiarism. But I’m no longer frightened. Instead, I am stimulated at the thought of going head-to-head with a billionaire high on vampires. My quarks are crashing and I need movement to live . . . – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)