The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way Read Online Free PDF

puts it: “You measure a man’s worth by the property he owns today, not be what he intends to do with it tomorrow.
Britannica
is a tidy lump of wealth no matter how you look at it.”
    If you want to learn how to get rich, Benton may not be the best man to emulate. Statistically, not much of a case can be made for his nonchalant, easygoing approach. When you’ve met all the glittering people in this gallery, you’ll have to conclude that the majority are compulsives and mavericks. Some have been called mad. Some may even be clinically mad. They took hair-raising risks, did things that everybody was sure couldn’t be done. When they were starting their careers, before they achieved the ultimate justification of $100 million or more, conventional businessmen labeled them unsound, unstable, unlikely to succeed. It is probable that most of them if they were to apply today for responsible salaried jobs under assumed names would be rejected as unfit. (One of them, in fact – Jeno Paulucci, whom you’ll meet in chapter 20 – once generated a little fun by applying incognito for a job in his own company. A psychological test showed him to be a miserable misfit. As he later reported in high glee, he was denied employment.)
    Thus, if you hope to become a hundred-millionaire some day, it appears that you shouldn’t invest too much hope in the calm, smooth, patient, conventional route of Bill Benton. Yet the fact that Benton did it this way indicates that, at least in some cases, it can be done.
    Bill Benton was born in Minnesota on April 1, 1900 a child of the century. His father was a quiet, undistinguished college professor who, even if he had lived, would probably never have exerted much influence on the boy. The father died when young Bill was in his early teens. (You’ll note as we go through the gallery that many of the very, very rich lost a parent at an early age. This fact gives rise to some odd psychiatric speculations, which we’ll consider in a later chapter.) Bill and his younger brother, Dan, were brought up from then on by their school teacher mother, in conditions of genteel poverty.
    The mother was quite equal to the task. She was a formidable woman of large intellect, strong will and unshakable opinions, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other intimidating outfits. Bill Benton spent much of his time as boy and man trying to justify his thoughts and actions to her, never quite succeeding. He wrote letters to her almost daily from the time he left home to seek his fortune – and these illuminating pleas and protests, which she saved, crowd the 600 pages of Sydney Hyman’s massive biography,
The Lives of William Benton
. Many of the letters, even for Benton as an adult, have the tone of a small boy trying to explain to a disapproving parent why he needs 50 cents to go to the movies.
    Biographer Hyman seems baffled, as was Bill Benton himself, by the stark difference between the two brothers. Bill was a straight-A man in school. He wasn’t tall or handsome or athletic, but he made up for those social drawbacks with a driving energy that pushed him to leadership in every school he attended. He was the class-president type, the kind of superbusy kid who organized fund drives and ran school dances. His mother demanded that he excel; it seemed to be as simple as that. Yet his brother, Dan, went in the opposite direction. The mother’s expectations were so high that Dan apparently despaired of living up to them. He plodded through school without distinction, a classic underachiever. Sadly he never had a chance to show what he could do as an adult, for he died of a viral infection in his teens. He might have turned out to be a late bloomer, as were some of the other men you’ll meet here. But judging by the start he made, he seemed doomed as a loser.
    Why does one man head for fame and fortune while his brother, reared in the same environment,