{"id":42,"date":"2007-11-18T22:15:53","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T03:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/2007\/11\/18\/forbes-400\/"},"modified":"2007-11-18T22:15:53","modified_gmt":"2007-11-19T03:15:53","slug":"forbes-400","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/2007\/11\/18\/forbes-400\/","title":{"rendered":"Forbes 400"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been reading through the latest Forbes 400 list. The 400 richest people in America. Impressive wealth. I can’t imagine being that rich – it takes $1.3 billion of net worth to make the list this year. Some of the people on the list inherited their money but a lot of them made it themselves. Some of them actually started out pretty poor. The ones who are self-made seem to combine being very smart with hard work and a little bit of luck. These are people who see potential and are willing to take chances to make something of an opportunity.<\/p>\n

What I find interesting and actually a bit surprising is how many of them made their money in software. I expect people to make money in hardware (Dell and Jobs are on the list) because that is tangible. Likewise retail (the Walton family for example), real estate, energy (oil, gas, coal), manufacturing and other conventional businesses all seem reasonable. But I’m not sure I ever expected people to become billionaires from software. Somehow it makes me think I must have missed an opportunity or three myself.<\/p>\n

I wonder what these people are like in real life though. I’ve meet a couple of them but mostly those have been business situations. That means a somewhat more formal setting, conversation that is work related and applicable to what is going on at the moment. You can get more of an idea about people in a small meeting than watching them make a formal presentation but still it’s all artificial. I’ve had what I would consider to be a real conversation – the sort of informal one you’d have with ordinary people – with one of them – John Abele. Some of you will know that name because he has been involved with FIRST for a while and has been Chairman of FIRST<\/i> for the last four years or so. I have to say I liked him. He seemed as much a regular guy as anyone. Really smart to be sure but someone I could comfortably talk to.<\/p>\n

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, the rich "are different from you and me."  A character created by Ernest Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money." I wonder though how many of them are really different and how many just have more money? Two of the Forbes 400 I meet seemed pretty different. I’m not sure if they are different because they have money or if they have money because they are different. But clearly I don’t have enough of a sample to make a determination. I wish I could meet more of them to find out what they are really like.<\/p>\n

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I have been reading through the latest Forbes 400 list. The 400 richest people in America. Impressive wealth. I can’t imagine being that rich – it takes $1.3 billion of net worth to make the list this year. Some of the people on the list inherited their money but a lot of them made it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/mistert\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}