● Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World’s Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son
Lionel Barber
Essay by author via Harvard Business Review
Few characters are more enigmatic or misunderstood than Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese media technology conglomerate. In Japan and in western media, he is cast as a dreamer, financial engineer, and speculator — an object of suspicion who has risked financial ruin more than once in a five-decade career.
His life story is a Forrest Gump-like journey through all the key moments in recent business history: from the launch of the personal computer to the birth of the internet, the dotcom boom and bust, the rise of China, the global financial crisis, and the advent of artificial intelligence. As the British writer Simon Nixon observed in a review of Gambling Man, my biography of Son, “He seems to have known everyone and owned everything, or at least tried to buy it.”
● Buffett and Munger Unscripted: Three Decades of Investment and Business Insights from the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting
Alex W. Morris (editor)
Review via The NY Post
Warren Buffett always wanted to make money. As a child growing up in Omaha, Neb., he traded Coca-Cola and chewing gum with other kids, sold stamps and golf balls to adults, and worked in his dad’s grocery store.
But in April 1942, at age 11, he bought his first stocks, purchasing three shares in the utility company Cities Service, and his career in investing had a liftoff, as equities analyst Alex W. Morris explains in “Buffett and Munger Unscripted: Three Decades of Investment and Business Insights from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meetings” (Harriman House).
“Much of what I’ve learned about investing and business came from Buffett and Munger,” he writes. “For that, I will be forever grateful.”
● Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire
Carl Rhodes
Review via Capital Research Center
Carl Rhodes’ forthcoming Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire is among the better of several recent aggressive, populist, progressive critiques of, well, billionairehood, in and of itself. More particularly, it argues well against those who anti-democratically exercise the power that can come with, if not outright be purchased by, being a billionaire.
“Much has been said about the inequities in wealth and power that the growing horde of billionaires represent,” acknowledges Rhodes, dean of the UTS Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, in Stinking Rich. “This book joins and complements those discussions by seeking to understand how these inequalities are maintained through a cultural moralization of the ultra-rich.”
● The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China
Michael Sheridan
Review via The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute)
Sheridan debunks several myths. Much is made of China’s growing friendship with Russia, but Sheridan points out that Xi’s three years of accompanying defence minister Geng to negotiations taught him to be coldly realistic about Moscow’s intentions. When Bloomberg published an expose of the hidden wealth of Xi Jinping’s relatives, propaganda sources suggested that an irate Xi had ordered his siblings to divest their assets. According to Sheridan, they simply hid their wealth more efficiently.
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