One of the things that infuriates me most about current capitalism isn't the greed of the super-wealthy, it's their short-sightedness. If they weren't so impatient for maximum gains ASAP now now now now, they could end up with more while letting things operate at a reasonable pace in a reasonable way. Forcing a company to operate recklessly and slash their workforce or lower quality to get a single quarter return of 20% then go under is idiotic when they could let the company operate sensibly for the long term and return 5% this quarter, and next, and next, and next, and go on for years and years. They'd get more in the long run if they could just be patient! But these people are chopping down young fruit trees for the firewood instead of letting them grow into orchards that would bear much more valuable crops of fruit for hundreds of years. Impatience is a kind of stupidity, and in a smart would people would never be impatient with investment.
"In the long run we are all dead" - John Maynard Keynes
Everybody is short-sighted, but some are more short-sighted than others. A business owner who pushes for 'maximum gains ASAP now now now now' will probably kill the business and end up worse off - as you say. OTOH one who doesn't push for anything will probably also end up worse off. The trick is to find the right balance, and let capitalism do its magic. To become insanely rich you don't have to play the long game, but you do have keep building. Start early and grow your wealth until you hit the big time, then
keep going.
For example you could start at age 12 learning how to code on a cheap home computer like the
Spectravideo SV-328. Write a game in BASIC and send the listing to a magazine, who pays you $500 for it. This gives you a taste of what you could earn as a programmer.
So you hone your skills during your teen years, then at age 24 (in 1995 when the internet is just starting to enter the home) you get an idea for an online service similar to the Yellow Pages. You start a company with your brother and another guy who's willing to put up $8000. You combine a free Navteq database with a Palo Alto business database, and go looking for clients. Before long you have dozens of cities in the system, and more investors interested.
Then you hit the bigtime. You get $3 million in investments, and strike deals with The New York Times, Knight Ridder, and Hearst Corporation. By 1998 you have 160 newspapaers on board, and then in 1999 Compaq Computer takes an interest in your business. They pay $305 million for it, and your share comes to $22 million. Yay, you're now a multimillionaire before your'e 30! Time to stop working and put your fortune into a safe investent so you can live the rest of your life in quiet luxury, right?
No, that's thinking way too small. Now you have enough money to sink into larger ventures. You use $12 miilion to create an online banking system, again getting other investors onboard to grow the business. Soon it's become the preferred way of paying on eBay, who decide they need control of it so they purchase the company for $1.5
billion, of which you get $175 million. Billionaire status is now in sight!
Now you have more money than you know what to do with. But you have some ideas. You and a freind get the crazy idea of sending stuff to Mars, and try to buy a cheap rocket from Russia. This doesn't pan out though, so you start your own rocket company from scratch - hoping to provide commercial launch services. You also discover a small startup attempting to convert expensive sports cars to electric. "Cool", you say, "The world needs to get off fossil fuels and I want to help with that!". Before you know it you've poured everything you have into two very risky ventures. No turning back now, it's do or die...
But what do you get in the end? $22 million is plenty, why keep going when you don't need insane wealth? Because it's often not just - or even - about the money. If it was then you would just quietly amass more while enjoying a life of luxury. You won't achieve anything great, but also won't get in the news and have half the world screaming about how immoral you are for not squandering any money you come across. But that would be short-sighted.
True visionaries look beyond what they have and push for a better future, even though it may be risky. If they are smart they may achieve things nobody though possible - things that could make life better for everyone, but nobody else had the drive and initiative to make real. But they can't do that without money - insane amounts of it. Any large corporation must - by its very nature - be worth an insane amount. If you have a large piece of it then you will also will be insanely rich - at least on paper. That's how capitalism works. If you want control of the busuiness then you have to own it.
The most 'valuable' car company in the World right now currently has a market cap of US$1.24 trillion. Imagine if you had 22% of that (oops, only 13% now 'coz you needed money to buy Twitter, and the stock options you were supposed to get for growing the company more than 10x were blocked by an opportunist invester with only 9 shares. Just as well you have other businesses because despite being the 'richest man in the world' you have received
zero compensation from the company you poured half your fortune into). Imagine if you had poured your heart and soul into doing vitally important work, only to be excoriated and worse for being a
selfish bastard billionaire.
In truth, the vast majority of short-sighted selfish bastards are smaller investors looking to make 'maximum gains ASAP now now now now' on the stock market, who have no interest in what the companies they are 'investing' in do apart from how it affects the stock price. Pump it up, sell high and buy low, move on to another one when it implodes - who cares about the harm. But nobody's talking about them.
.