flâneur

Founders: #171: Chuck Feeney (The Billionaire who gave all of his money away)

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What I learned from reading The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery. ---- He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. [0:01] Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. [3:27] I all of a sudden realized, shit, you can sell this to anybody, anywhere. [12:45] Feeney believed that there could be more lucrative opportunities in the less crowded Pacific. [21:53] Chuck lived out of his briefcase. Everything was connected with business. We did a lot of screwy things. I became part of what he called his ‘teen age frontier’ approach to business, because he surrounded himself with smart college youngsters, mostly single and aggressive ‘conquerors of the world.’ I was the oldest, always the damper, saying to him, "Are you out of your mind?" [25:44] We hadn’t spent any time on corporate structuring or anything like that, we were just simply busy selling cars, duty — free liquor, making the cash, putting the cash in the bank, ca

[00:00:00] Chuck Feeney felt a profound sense of relief. He had flown into the Bahamas that morning an extremely rich man. Now he was flying out with little more to his name than when he had started out on his various business ventures three decades earlier. He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. It was all done with the utmost secrecy. Few outside the small group that gathered that day in the Bahamas [00:00:28] would know what had taken place for a long time to come. Four years later, Forbes…

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