Tips for Would-Be Billionaires: Skip College, Play Poker, Sweat

(Bloomberg) -- Want to be rich? Of course you do.

Just remember this tip from billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga: ``No one ever drowned in their own sweat.''

The tale of how Huizenga, a college dropout, built companies such as Waste Management Inc. and Blockbuster Inc. is one of dozens of thumbnail sketches in ``All the Money in the World,'' a fat compendium published to mark the 25th anniversary of Forbes magazine's annual list of the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S.

To extract a narrative from a league table entails some contortion, and the strains are apparent though artfully masked here. Working in collaboration with Forbes and a team of writers and reporters, authors Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan have labored to create ``a collective profile'' of how the ultrarich amassed and sometimes squandered fortunes over a quarter century.

The result is a slick history by committee. The anecdotes, though polished, are often familiar: Recall Bill Gates and Paul Allen teaming up to write a version of BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800 -- or Warren Buffett still living in the home in Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500.

The lessons, though valid, are predictable: Building serious wealth tends to take hard work, luck, determination and often ruthlessness. ``All I want in life is an unfair advantage,'' as Hank Greenberg, former head of American International Group Inc., is quoted as saying.

Chicken Litter

The book does succeed as a primer, laid out in thematic chapters and peppered with inventive charts and tables. Think you need to be a hedge-fund manager or software magnate to be rich? A chapter on ``blue-collar billionaires'' reminds us that Johnnie Bryan Hunt Sr. made his pile on poultry litter and trucking. Others manufacture needs, as Ty Warner did with Beanie Babies and Clay Mathile did with Iams premium pet food.

Another chapter shows why the Forbes 400 is packed with poker fans: They embrace risk. Hedge-fund heavy Steven A. Cohen played all-night games as a high schooler and now trades 300 stocks a day at his SAC Capital Advisors LLC, the book says.

Higher education doesn't necessarily translate into higher earnings: Four of the five richest people in 2006 -- Gates, casino owner Sheldon Adelson, Oracle Corp.'s Larry Ellison and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Allen -- are college dropouts. The only university grad among the five is Buffett.

The thematic approach robs the book of narrative drive, making it more academic and less amusing than Robert Frank's ``Richistan.'' The reader must elbow past a crowd of business- school profs before getting a gawk at Ellison's yacht and Cohen's pickled Damien Hirst tiger shark.

Jail Time

What this book does offer is comprehensiveness, making it a handy reference work. Want to learn about S. Truett Cathy, the devout Baptist founder of fast-food chain Chick-fil-A Inc.? He's in the index. How about Richard Wendt, an Oregonian who made the list with Jeld-Wen Inc., a window and door maker? An appendix gives his peak net worth, $750 million.

As for the info graphics, they crunch the Forbes 400 numbers into a medley of themes, showing which colleges produce the richest grads, how long it takes to make $1 billion, and at least 13 listers who've been convicted of crimes or jailed, including the late Leona ``Only-the-Little-People-Pay-Taxes'' Helmsley.

My favorite table ranks the annualized returns of the 36 people from the original 1982 list who were still alive in 2006 and rich enough to qualify for all 25 years. Guess who came out No. 1, with an annualized return of 24.3 percent?

A clue: He lives in Omaha.

``All the Money in the World: How the Forbes 400 Make -- and Spend -- Their Fortunes'' is from Knopf (416 pages, $26.95).

(James Pressley writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

News Added: 14 September, 2007

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