Wealth Secrets of the One Percent
A Modern Manual to Getting Marvelously, Obscenely Rich
-
-
4.5 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
Discover how the superwealthy made it to the top (and you can too!)
From the richest Romans to the robber barons to today's bankers and tech billionaires, Sam Wilkin offers Freakonomics-esque insights into what it really takes to make a fortune. These stories of larger-than-life characters, strategies, and sacrifices reveal how the wealthiest did it, usually by a passion for finding loopholes, working around bureaucratic systems, and creating obstacles to competitors.
Wealth Secrets of the One Percent gets at the heart of our feelings about the 1% of top income earners and the roughly 0.0001% who achieve billionaire status: we love to hate them, but we'd love to be them. Wilkin's insight into the sources of wealth is thought-provoking and rigorous, and he reveals that behind almost every great fortune is a "wealth secret" -- a moneymaking technique designed to defeat the forces of market competition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This exhaustively researched, misleadingly titled tome by economics consultant Wilkin claims that nearly every enormous fortune is founded on a "wealth secret," a slightly dodgy, if not actively illegal, strategy. The author aims to provide guidance to those who are interested not just in a "minor" increase in their fortunes, but in achieving private-island, personal-jet, "diamond-encrusted light fixtures" levels of wealth. Acquiring billions takes both smarts and luck, and all of the world's living billionaires there are over 1,600 had both. The author tells the stories of individuals, companies, and groups throughout history that attained astronomical wealth, including J.P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Circuit City, and neoliberal-era Indian industrialists. What he offers are not so much secrets as lessons derived from well-documented success stories: "don't be the best, be the only"; "bigger is still better"; own your own business; network like a fiend. While the history is intriguing, the tone and approach presto-change-o magical thinking are not. Readers looking for a shortcut to wealth are likely to be disappointed.
