Especially not like me. I don’t even understand how they happen. With me, the closer I came to a billion, the less I would be able to focus on work, or amassing more. I look at Zuck, in his suit taking shit off of congress people and I wonder, what’s this fucker do for fun? I think Branson is closer to the ideal.
If they weren’t hardwired to be driven in some fairly unique (and often sociopathic) way, then they wouldn’t be billionaires.
Not exactly on topic but I wanted to post it somewhere.
You have to understand that these are the billionaires you know about. I’d imagine there are quite a few out there quietly enjoying themselves, but that doesn’t make the news.
Bill Gates seems to genuinely enjoy reading and learning while also doing lots of important charitable work that makes a real impact in the world. Warren Buffet reportedly enjoys living a relatively simple life without a lot of the ostentatious trappings of people in his tax bracket.
And campaigning for being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Great that his foundation is doing such important work but I think the existence of it is more attributable to his former wife, and his motivation seems to be as much self-glorification as altruism. Which is fine, I guess…I just think it says more about human nature than most people would like to acknowledge. (The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, has long been undermined by awarding it to people who have not embraced peace or benevolence in any way, so giving it to a software magnate who spent much of his career running roughshod over others to promote mediocre products is not at all surprising.)
I think it is in error to attribute all billionaires has being of a common mindset even toward their wealth much less motivations for building it. Some certainly enjoy acquiring and flaunting wealth for its own sake; for many, the enormous wealth is secondary or even ancillary to their primary goals of building a successful business empire or dying on another planet. Few seem to have little interest in and of itself for what such massive concentrations could do for improving humanity overall, but then, that is really too big of an abstraction for overevolved primates who still think in terms of tribal alliances.
Stranger
Same greed, less publicity.
I’m a one-percenter; I drink low fat milk all the time.
Whatever you think about whether someone should even have that much wealth, it is certainly to small feat to create and grow a company to billions of dollars within your lifetime. Plenty of smart, ambitious, greedy, sociopathic people working on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and other places who do alright but never attain anywhere near that level of wealth.
Many if not most of these billionaires grew up with money. Trump, Tucker Carlson, Paris Hilton, ad nauseum were born with proverbial silver spoon in their mouth. Money never was a determining factor in what they did. Sure, they wanted to “earn” the keep, and add a zero or three. But they never decided what car(s) to buy based on cost.
Without facebook Zuck would have still graduated from Harvard debt free and prolly into a 6 figure job with one of his Dad’s cronies without even trying. Same is true for Chesea Clinton, who went to “work” for an investment bank. And dollars to donuts Chesea never put in the ibank hours that I or most folks ever did.
Anyone growing up that doesn’t understand what a lack of money means, is not like the rest of us.
Do you mean actual billionaires? Or are you colloquially using the term “billionaire” to mean “rich people”?
Mark Zuckerberg’s parents were a dentist and a psychiatrist. You don’t make ten, eleven figures working for “cronies” of people who make six figures.
And Chelsea Clinton isn’t a billionaire. Her net worth is reported somewhere in the $15 to $30 million range. Still a lot of money by most people’s standards.
Plenty of people working at investment banks. Most aren’t billionaires.
Trump is a better example as he basically just inherited a successful real estate business.
Now maybe one advantage people who are born “not poor” have is that they are more tolerant of risk. They can take time to learn how to make money doing things that interest them instead of wallowing away in any job they can get to keep a roof over their head. They don’t develop poor and working class mindsets about money such as “never go into debt” or thinking a little bit of money is all the money in the world or even just being a “good employee” doing exactly what you are told for decades.
I think the main thing with billionaires and most other mega-rich people is that they don’t work for other people. At least not for very long. Sure, there is some small set of people who get rich by working their way up the ladder to CEO over decades. But most found their own businesses. They leverage debt to grow their business. They also have to come up with a billion dollar idea and convince people with billions of dollars to finance it (without stealing it for themselves).
This explains a lot. Such as how they can go literally bankrupt, and then bounce back to the millions.
Frank Partnoy worked as a derivatives structurer for a few years, made a few “bars” (millions), got disgusted with the work, and wrote a few books about it: F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street and Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets among others.
He remarks that, once these multi-millionaires and billionaires have a certain level of wealth, earning more becomes rather meaningless. Rather, he suggests that they use their incomes simply as a means of “keeping score” against one another.
Yeah; it’s ambition, not merely the desire to enjoy affluence. There are plenty of affluence-desirers who make a pile of money and then retire early to enjoy life without working. But those people tend to hit their desired target way, way before approaching the billion-dollar range.
There are also a fair number of billionaires who love their work, just like a lot of non-wealthy people love their work, only the work of the billionaires happens to be about directly increasing financial worth, so they get richer much faster.
When a pediatric surgeon, for example, loves her work and works really hard at it, what she gets is a rapidly increasing number of successfully treated pediatric patients, and as a secondary outcome, more slowly increasing net worth. When a wealthy entrepreneur loves her work and works really hard at it, what she gets is stratospherically increasing net worth as the primary outcome.
I seriously doubt Zuckerberg does anything like a hard day’s work anymore. He is never staying at the office until 2a working on that report someone wants first thing in the morning. He is not getting up at 5a so he can make the train and be at work by 8a every day.
He goes to meetings scheduled to his convenience and gets to tell people what to do. That’s it. For someone like him I expect he finds that enjoyable.
I seriously doubt what you’re seriously doubting. Musk is known for sleeping over at headquarters, and when I was working 12 hour days with a CEO, that dude was there when I left and back before I showed up. They don’t see that sort of thing as some big sacrifice or inconvenience - it’s the norm, and they expect it from everyone around them. The ones that are tired of the grind cash out and move on; they aren’t going to hang around doing half-days.
I think there is a difference between the CEO who is growing a company and one at the helm of one that has already arrived and is in cruise mode.
Their hands must be pretty calloused working those labor jobs that much.
There is also a difference between doing productive work and just doing things to be busy or micromanage others who know better how to do their jobs than the CEO. I don’t want to engage in apocryphal storytelling but I’ve heard from numerous people who have worked at SpaceX or Tesla about fits of rage, demands to do a task “faster” even though it could not be physically or computationally sped up, and just generally unproductive “supervision” by Musk. There is one story that is already well publicized about when SpaceX was trying to develop a friction-stir welding (FSW) process for propellant tanks (which requires a lot of trial and error for any specific application) and Musk put his desk and even a cot out on the production floor. This seemed to impress people about how hard he worked on making sure that his company was achieving maximum efficiency, but in fact lacking expertise regarding FSW he had nothing to contribute and did nothing to accelerate the process development. It really seemed to just be a story told to engender the myth of how Elon’s singular intellect and ambition was the driving force behind SpaceX without which it would collapse, which is more shades of Ayn Rand.
One would assume that a CEO and “Chief Designer” would have a multitude of different problems and issues to address and delegate down to a select team of experts instead of being hyperfocused on some specific production issue about which he had no useful experience but from the fawning press it became an example of how hard Elon “works”, even though people in C-suite positions should really be focused on strategic business issues. Most of the work a CEO should be doing is taking in a lot of information and contemplating the myriad of implications, and being the public face of the company to reassure investors of its stability.
Stranger