If that seems often true, it’s probably only because so many of the super-wealthy deserve a reckoning. But certainly not all, by any means. I never had any issues with Steve Jobs, for instance, even though I disagreed with many of his product policies. What I think is much more common and more disappointing is the way that newly successful entrepreneurs, especially those who achieve great success at a young age, become darlings of the fatuously adoring and wholly uncritical financial media. The worshipful cover of Inc magazine posted above was from October, 2015. The previous year Forbes had named her the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire – she was 30 years old at the time and worth around $4.5 billion (Forbes now estimates her net worth at $0). That same year she was also on the cover of Fortune which ran a similarly gushy article.
It reminds me a bit of a satirical story written many years ago by the humourist Stephen Leacock called “The Wizard of Finance”, from a collection called Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich about the silliness of the wealthy classes in his era of the early 1900s. The protagonist in this particular story is a simple honest fellow who suddenly becomes very rich when large amounts of gold are supposedly discovered on his property. Quickly tiring of pretentious living in swank hotels into which circumstances had forced him, he tries to shed his wealth by buying terrible stocks, hoping to lose everything. But such is his fame and reputation among the wealthy classes that as soon as word gets out that “Tomlinson interests” are buying up a certain stock, everyone rushes to get in on the action, and he gets even wealthier, and naturally his reputation as a “wizard of finance” grows and grows, with everyone admiring his genius.
Eventually it turns out that the putative gold find was a scam perpetrated by someone else, and our hero’s paper wealth is wiped out. Whereupon the buzz among the wealthy classes is all about how they knew all along that the man couldn’t be trusted, and how they’d recognized his scheming shifty eyes right from the start.
If you think about it, our hero-worship of the super-rich is much the same today as it was over 100 years ago. Holmes got the adulation, and Elon Musk is still getting it, even though he obviously doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing at Twitter.