|
Snipped from a great article I read:
Here we are faced with a paradox: Trump does not speak, act, or behave like a normal billionaire, nor even like a renegade or eccentric billionaire. He behaves like someone who is desperately broke.
I know that sounds odd. Improbable. Counterintuitive. And I don?t ? I can?t ? I won?t - say for certain whether he is broke. But I think it is a very distinct possibility.
I base this judgment on many years of working closely with very rich people. I?ve had the pleasure ? though that is not quite the right word ? of spending a lot of time around people who are extremely wealthy, and none of them behaves remotely like Trump.
For one thing, true billionaires hate seeing their name in the papers or being discussed in public. They don?t want people stealing their ideas, they don?t want scrutiny from regulators, they don?t want others to control the narrative about their business dealings, and frankly there is no financial advantage to being well known among ordinary people who don?t have money to invest.
The truly wealthy seek to be known in the right circles and not to the general public. It?s a fair bet that if the richest twenty hedge fund managers walked down the street, no one in the general public would turn their head; conversely, it is a also a fair bet that the twenty guys at the airport talking loudly into their cell phones about how they are returning to the head office after closing a big deal in Baltimore are actually worth next to nothing. Powerful people have secrets, barriers, walls. If Trump really had special ideas or assets, he would crave secrecy, not publicity.
Second, the truly wealthy do not brand themselves. Whatever you may think of how Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Steven Cohen made their fortunes, they did not get into the bottled water industry to compete with ?Trump Ice,? nor do them sponsor beauty pageants or have television shows where they send out contestants to make ice cream cones and then berate them mercilessly for choosing $1.45 as a price point. There is a very revealing type of bullying taking place on Trump?s show The Apprentice.
__________________
|