📚How Fortunes Are Made: Revisiting From Predators to Icons

In the 1970s, a young Bernard Arnault traveled to New York and had a fateful conversation. Arnault asked a cab driver about France. Did the driver know much about the country and its politics? No. But he knew Christian Dior. Arnault would never forget about the reach and power of iconic brands. Or so the story goes. One has to be careful with the origin stories of great fortunes. They can be carefully crafted, enriched with apocryphal anecdotes, polished and cleaned of unsavory deals or behavior. That’s the argument presented in an obscure book called From Predators to Icons (my original post) recommended to me years ago by Alix. The authors, two French academics, looked for shared characteristics and patterns in a sample of self-made billionaires. What they found was not a rags-to-riches tale. Instead, they argued, great fortunes arise from a set of favorable initial conditions (perhaps today they would use the term ‘privilege’) in combination with Strategic Intuition, the ability to

In the 1970s, a young Bernard Arnault traveled to New York and had a fateful conversation. Arnault asked a cab driver about France. Did the driver know much about the country and its politics? No. But he knew Christian Dior. Arnault would never forget about the reach and power of iconic brands. Or so the story goes. One has to be careful with the origin stories of great fortunes. They can be carefully crafted, enriched with apocryphal anecdotes, polished and cleaned of unsavory deals or behavior. That’s the argument presented in an obscure book called From Predators to Icons (my original post)