Over the last couple of days I've been listening to an interview with Sam Zell, a very successful investor who's developed a bad reputation over time in some circles for taking the axe to newspapers in Chicago and LA. As a child of Polish immigrants in Chicago, Zell said that he grew up associating money with freedom and that he had a great deal of respect for people with money.
That wasn't how it was with me. The person in my world who had the most money was my mom's dad, who was a decidedly mixed figure. He was drunk often due to his alcoholism and much of the time he was an out and out jerk. At his worst he would hit on Leslie. He criticized me for reading at the table at big dinners at restaurants while my cousin Martin was leading Leslie around the dining room stealing tips off of tables. Here in Chapel Hill the doctor with the big fancy house across the lake (I won't mention his name, many of you know who I'm talking about) was reputed to be a child molester. The families I knew in Durham seemed at the time to be pretty much philistines. They had barely any books on display in their big houses.
By now I've obviously developed a more nuanced view on the whole thing. I do appreciate that almost invariably those who make money work really hard and it's always interesting to talk to them about their businesses and what they've learned from building them. Efficient markets and competition pretty much insure that no business is simple or easy. But that wasn't where I started.
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