Bill Gates is rich. I own Microsoft products. In fact, I’m sure I have more than I realize.
Oil company execs are rich. I drive a lot.
Does this mean that in order to be fabulously wealthy (we’re talking top-of-the-charts rich) you need to have your product staring the average Joe in the face? In other words, can you be amazingly rich while having products that are really behind the scenes to the end-user?
Don’t just think in today’s standards either. Throughout history, is there a good example of a person getting rich while only being the middleman of production?
Not sure what you mean exactly, but I think about middlemen like car dealers or furniture salespeople who make a killing, and have absolutely nothing to do with the production of the goods they sell.
Find a rich person that doesn’t provide an end product to the consumer. By consumer, I mean the people that don’t purchase the product with the intent of modifying it for resale. Maybe the top space shuttle scientists? I don’t have one of those in my backyard. I’d say the guy that sells the sugar for my Pepsi, but I have sugar in my kitchen, so it doesn’t count. See what I’m getting at?
There are a number of ways to wealth that don’t involve making a product.
You can go for the raw materials to make products. Gold, copper, corn.
You can develop precious raw materials. Spices, gems, cashmere.
You can sell other people’s products, either in retail, wholesale, or business to business.
You can protect other people’s products or wealth. Insurance, security.
You can work to increase other people’s wealth. Banking, stocks, bonds, investments, consulting.
You can corner the land needed by others. Real estate.
You can also get around popular, ubiquitous products by selling highly specialized luxury goods to a few. Or by designing luxury items, houses, fashion, yachts.
All of these routes have been used to make fortunes at all times in all places in history in one form or another.
Read the Forbes 400 list. Look at the hedge fund managers and investors that are incredibly wealthy. Some of them don’t produce anything. There are huge fortunes in bond trading and as Tom Wolfe described it, it’s a matter of cutting the cake and scooping up the crumbs. Finance is where the real money is.
Don’t forget the transportation guys. Fedex doesn’t actually make anything but they make a ton of money getting things from those who do to those who need their products.
Same for the rail guys in the 19th century. Morgan, Cooke, et al didn’t manufacture stuff (some did, I admit) but made fortunes getting product from the point of supply to the point of demand.
During the 1849 California Gold Rush, the prospectors lived a hand-to-mouth existence. The people who made the big fortunes were grocers, hardware merchants, and various other supply-and-service industries. Levi Strauss made a much bigger fortune than most of the gold miners.
Somebody mentioned Warren Buffet, who may have sort of operated a couple of businesses along the way, but is basically an example of a guy who invested his way into being the 3rd richest person in the world (he’s fallen behind Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecom king).
It’s REALLY hard to argue with the example of Carl Icahn, number 24 on the (US) list:
Levi Strauss didn’t even move to California until 1853, five years after the gold rush started and several years after the fury died down. He was not a jeans manufacturer but a wholesaler. There’s no record of him even selling somebody else’s jeans until 1859. He did not start manufacturing them himself until 1873. Any fortune he made was well after that.
The first part of your statement is completely true. It’s just that Levi Strauss wasn’t part of it in any way.
I would have to agree with this. Parade magazine has there “what people make” issue today. Lots of people making big bucks helping other people spend their money.
