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Dotcom was sedated and, along with Kirsten, taken to hospital. She spent a month in a head-brace, forehead swollen and blue-black from bruising. He woke with his arm, braced from surgery, broken bones pinned to a titanium plate, and a room full of friends with photographs of the wreckage and a detailed recounting of the crash.

“And that's what I decided there in the hospital bed. I said, 'Dude, I'm going to live life to the fullest.'”

Life began at that moment. “I shouldn't even be here. That's why every day that I have means something to me.”

Kim Dotcom decided he would not be constrained by demands or expectations. Germany, he said, has an unspoken code of conduct which governs how life is lived: not offending others with indulgent or outrageous behaviour is a priority. “You cut down on your enjoyment and what satisfies you because it might offend somebody. In that moment I switched completely. I said, 'I don't give a shit what people think. I'm going to do what I like because life is short and you don't know how much time you have. I just want to live a great life.'”

The accident also changed his attitude to money. “Money for me was really just a tool to collect experiences, rather than having it sit in the bank and accumulate and get more interest. For me, money was there to be spent, to have a great life because it could end at any time.
“That's really where this whole lifestyle began.”

DOTCOM AND ORTMANN met in real life in about 1991 at a Munich 2600 meeting. The number is legendary in hacker history, being that of the 2600 megahertz tone once needed to access operator level in the American telephony network. The meeting was organised by Sven Echternach, who would become another long-time friend and one of the co-accused in the Megaupload case, although not caught up in events in New Zealand. Another figure from Munich was Finn Batato, the charming and handsome future sales director of Megaupload.

PUTTING TOGETHER THE A-TEAM II — FINN BATATO
New to Munich, Dotcom was 18 and already surrounding himself with the sort of trappings that would follow through life. There was the big, powerful Mercedes — more on that soon — and one of the newly introduced mobile phones, the latest ultimate accessory. He headed out into the evening, going to one of the city's popular clubs. “I think it was called Skylounge,” says Dotcom. “I had this giant phone. It was one of the first phones that came out. It was really heavy, a big clunky

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