The Art of Money Getting

Because people now are so wildly different from people 150 years ago? We are exactly the same, with slightly shinier toys.

I'm highly agreeable, and I've had to learn not to be. Knowing when to challenge people - "strategic non-agreeableness" - is extremely valuable. I've also made most of my career off being somewhat neurotic - I've described the core of my job as "finding things to panic about before they happen" (I went on Prozac a while back and caused an incident in the first couple weeks during uptake because my anxiety didn't trigger about something during a deploy). As far as extroversion - friends of mine who are genuine extroverts about went crazy during the pandemic, while I and a few other introvert friends got some of our best work ever done during that period. There's a spectrum - you can't be a misanthrope, but being able to take (and stand) quiet time to focus on a problem is absolutely an asset. With regards to conscientiousness, this often manifests in the workplace as an unwillingness to deviate from the plan when circumstances demand it and a preference for adding process as a kind of panacea for any kind of failure or delay, and at risk of offending the more conscientious among us, I have not found that a recipe for success.

Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices.

The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest):

1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.

2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.

3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).

4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.

Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.

Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad

> and that's pretty important to me

The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.

I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.