Sublime

(As his predecessor John Pierpont Morgan had said about a banker’s reputation at the Pujo hearings in front of the House Banking and Currency Committee in 1912, “[It] is his most valuable possession; it is the result of years of faith and honorable dealing and, while it may be quickly lost, once lost cannot be restored for a long time, if ever.”)

fiat

As we’ll see in chapter 6, 40% of companies successful enough to become publicly traded lost effectively all of their value over time. The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans has, on average, roughly 20% turnover per decade for causes that don’t have to do with death or transferring money to another family member.17

His power was real, grounded in his unique role in channeling the ballooning trove of American savings. One way or another, through control of boards, investment partnerships, or just implicit understandings that a bank’s or an insurance company’s investment committee would follow Morgan’s lead, he and his partners disposed of perhaps 40 percent of

Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. New York: Random House, 1998.

Afterward, Alberg and Bezos told the Riggios they would think about a partnership. Later Alberg and Bezos spoke on the phone and agreed that such a collaboration was unlikely to work. “Jeff was always a big believer that disruptive small companies could triumph,” Alberg says. “It wasn’t the end of the world. We knew we had a challenge.”

His firm, TVI, had funded Microsoft, Compaq, and other notable technology companies, but it was not these that McMurtry wished to talk about. Rather, he wanted to talk about the companies that did not succeed. He recalled that in the mid-1970s, having been in the business a number of years, he had become depressed because “out of ten start-ups, we

While Jack Morgan was ensuring that he would have a direct bedroom-to-deck path on his new yacht, Ivar had tiptoed into the deal of the century.