What Rich Guys Can Actually Teach You

“Richer, Wiser, Happier,” by William Green

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous (and probably apocryphal) comment to Ernest Hemingway about the rich being different drew a truly Hemingwayesque response: “Yes, they have more money.”

Most of us don’t share Hemingway’s healthy attitude. Rich people’s castles, cars, yachts, divorces and rotten kids are endlessly interesting. If you haven’t been tempted to look up the home of some wealthy acquaintance on Zillow then you’re a better person than me.

Back in the 1920s, when the conversation between the two literary giants supposedly happened, the zero-point-one-percent were mostly born into it and might have been the children or grandchildren of ruthless and cunning robber barons, or maybe members of The Social Register able to trace their roots back to New York Knickerbockers or The Mayflower. Fitzgerald had an unkind view of what it did to their character in a short story that’s probably the origin of the supposed quote:

They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

A century later we’re more fascinated by a different kind of rich person–self made ones. Pumped up tech stock prices, lavish options grants, and lopsided rewards for managing other people’s money on Wall Street have turbocharged wealth creation. The top 12 members of the Forbes 400 all had a middle or upper-middle class childhood, though one is a bit coy about dad’s emerald mine.

The reason attention has shifted from glamorous heirs to people who amassed fortunes themselves is that people want some of that magic to rub off on them so that they, too, can get rich in a hurry. This has sparked perverse interest in the minutiae of their daily routines. Just google “What does Elon Musk eat for breakfast.” 🙄

Those who built their fortunes more gradually or who feel their wealth should be given back to society are somehow less-copied. For what it’s worth, here’s Warren Buffett’s self-described routine: His wife puts three varying amounts of change in the 94 year old billionaire’s car for his morning McDonald’s run:

“When I’m not feeling quite so prosperous, I might go with the $2.61, which is two sausage patties, and then I put them together and pour myself a Coke. $3.17 is a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit, but the market’s down this morning, so I’ll pass up the $3.17 and go with the $2.95.”

I really find this endearing. Imagine my delight, then, when I came across a book that hits the trifecta: It focuses on some really admirable rich people, tells us how they did it, and how they live their lives. Financial journalist William Green’s Richer, Wiser, Happier is a delight to read for anyone, and especially people interested in investing like me. The men he profiles all made their money through compound interest. Over a long career Green has personally interviewed dozens of prominent investors so the book is filled with his own impressions of their qualities, warts and all.

I’m glad I picked it up and also that I didn’t notice that the only blurb on the front cover is from Tony Robbins, whom I’ve always considered to be a bit of a charlatan. (One of his books is actually about investing. I won’t be reviewing it, but here’s a writeup from Nick Maggiulli, whose book Just Keep Buying also is full of great lessons).

I first heard of Green through YouTube’s algorithm which suggested his podcast, “We Study Billionaires,” to me. It might be too much for those not into the nitty-gritty of investing. The book, on the other hand, will be of interest to the layperson as well as fellow obsessives who’ve already read elsewhere about many of the people Green profiled.

The section on Indian value investor Mohnish Pabrai, “The Man Who Cloned Warren Buffett,” is especially fascinating, and worth it for the bon mots alone. Upon studying other money managers who ignored Buffett’s “simple” and “powerful” investing style, he said it was like meeting “an entire set of physicists who don’t believe in gravity…Whether you believe in gravity or not, it’s fucking gonna pull you down!”

Pabrai’s strategy, in a nutshell, which sounds an awful lot like Buffett’s early playbook: “Be patient and selective, saying no to almost everything. Exploit the market’s bipolar mood swings. Buy stocks at a big discount to their underlying value. Stay within your circle of competence. Avoid anything too hard. Make a small number of mispriced bets with minimal downside and significant upside.”

I’d read about Pabrai before, but I wasn’t familiar with his charitable work. His Dakshana program takes more than 1,000 severely-underprivileged Indian students and prepares them for university entrance exams with a very high success rate.

Nick Sleep, who might be less-known to U.S. readers, is another investor well worth your while to read about both as an investor and a human being The letters from his NOMAD partnership with Qais Zakaria from 2001 through 2014 are free to read online if you feel like taking a deeper dive.

The book isn’t a pure hagiography. His impression of John Templeton is nuanced, and Green admits he didn’t really like him. I remember visiting Templeton’s office in The Bahamas during my analyst days with a salesperson who was in awe of the fund manager. He was in his mid-eighties at the time and semi-retired. She was impressed with his piety as much as his track-record, but I got an icky impression of some of the people he hired and also the gated community where he lived next to an international fugitive and assorted tax-exiles. That was why we had to visit them there, 180 miles from Miami—to not fall afoul of the IRS.

Other well-known investors profiled include Tom Gayner, Jeff Vinik, Charlie Munger, Bill Ruane, Ed Thorp, Irving Kahn, Bill Miller, Jean-Marie Eveillard, Guy Spier and Christopher Davis. A couple who weren’t well-known to me, but who were interesting to read about, include Arnold Van Den Berg and Paul Lountzis.

The internet, and especially LinkedIn, are full of sappy takes on what it really means to be rich. For a delicious parody of the genre, check out: “Actually Jeff Bezos, I'm the world's wealthiest man if you count how rich I am in love and also my drug empire.”

But if you happen to actually view dollars and cents as the only true measure of wealth, I just calculated what the Forbes 400 list would look like if Warren Buffett hadn’t given away so much of his fortune to charity already. His original stake in Berkshire A shares would make him the richest man in the world, edging out Elon Musk as of this writing.