The issue came up when I was chatting with a few richer friends of mine about how Ratan Tata is considered great for the things that allowed him to be a wealthy man – largely business decisions like acquisitions, convincing boards, pulling plugs, taking chances – and not for being rich per se.
He came 122nd on the Fortune India-Waterfield Advisors Ranking of India’s Richest 2024. Of course, no one, barring a shady granduncle of mine, gets rich by doing nothing. Work – honest or otherwise – is put in to make the kind of dough that makes people realise that not only can someone have his cake and eat it too, but also own the cake factory and wonder why everyone else has a predilection for bread.
As a Marxist, I must channel my inner Groucho – who had a net worth of $2.8 mn at the time of his death in 1977, some $12 mn in today’s money after adjusting for inflation – and concur with his observation that money frees you from doing things you dislike, and ‘[s]ince I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy’.
Something I presume propaganda by Walt Disney – net worth of about $150 mn at the time of his death in 1966, about $1 bn in today’s money – succeeded to dispel among the salaried classes when his 1937 film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, connected with its hit song that went: ‘Just whistle while you work/ And cheerfully, together we can tidy up the place.’
The net worth of Snow White or any of the seven dwarfs was never available (presumably for tax reasons). But I get a feeling that when you sing this kind of song celebrating ‘Protestant/Narayana Murthy work ethic’ while doing house chores, as Ms White did, there isn’t much wealth to be made, princess or no princess. And therein lies the recipe, my richer friends and I concluded, to become seriously wealthy: gather the right people to get your job done for you. Again, something that Tata – barring on one famous occasion, presumably – had a real knack for. Like words and phrases such as ‘public school,’ ‘sanctions,’ and ‘not to be rude’ that mean the exact opposite of what they’re meant to, an ‘industrialist’ isn’t personally industrious. He is successful only when he can ensure that others are hard-working and producing the right results. In fact, the barometer of a wealthy person shouldn’t be his or her net worth at all. It should be how successful he or she is in producing the most (money) by (personally) putting in the least work.
Which brought our Ratan Tata-spurred discussion to another Walt Disney movie – the truly fantastic Fantasia, the 1940 Mickey Mouse-starring classic about a sorcerer’s apprentice, based on a 1797 poem by Goethe. In both Disney movie and Goethe poem, the old sorcerer departs leaving his apprentice to finish chores.
Unlike the rather silly Snow White – and the bunch of communist wildlife who help her tidy up the dwarfs’ house – the apprentice decides to delegate work. He uses magic to enchant and animate a broom and get it to fetch buckets of water he was tasked to do for his master. It’s another matter that he doesn’t know the magical prompt for turning the broom ‘off’ – leading to disastrous consequences.
But in the broomGPT scene lies the clue of how to get wealthy the way really wealthy people get wealthy: assign work to others. And here, I don’t even have to hire dependable people. Magic in the form of AI will do my work for me. Rather late in life, I shall be an industrialist.