The Billionaire Boys Club
Go away for a few weeks, leave a few blog posts behind, and come back to fodder that changes the world. I remember a few years back, sailing the Mediterranean, wondering where billionaires come from. What makes a billionaire? It wasn’t really a rhetorical question and not the same as asking where babies come from.
I wanted to ponder what makes a billionaire, as I was swimming with “my yacht is bigger than your yacht” types, with famous designers, Russian oligarchs, and the like. Let me just put on record — I wasn’t in said yachts, but observing them in my surroundings and asking the big question to the universe.
Here’s what I realized: most billionaires are born from infrastructure of the ground-breaking innovation that makes society run. Think railroads, automobiles, gold and silver mining, chemicals, oil, banking, cement or construction, or even telecommunications and semiconductors. Today, we think of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, and maybe even our friend Elon Musk with solar, Hyperloops, and cars that run on electricity. In that moment, I realized the modern day technocrats are the new Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Asters, Pullmans, Stanfords, and Hearsts of yesteryear. They, like those before them, are laying the foundation for our society and globe to run in entirely new ways, providing an infrastructure that we call platforms. These platforms are well positioned and unique in what they do. Even Larry Ellison at Oracle and Marc Benioff at Salesforce have built a new kind of infrastructure — not quite as foundational but pretty darn ubiquitous and disruptive. They have all laid “pipes” for our planet’s infrastructure.
Go away for a few weeks and the Billionaire Boys Club continues to change the world. Elon Musk laid out plans for Neuralink. Facebook announced plans for telepathy. Steve Ballmer is building the biggest, boldest database in the sky focused on government spending. I even heard rumors yesterday about Bezos buying Whole Foods so he wouldn’t have to build his way into fully automating grocery stores. Maybe he’ll buy FedEx instead of disrupting them in shipping and logistics. The Washington Post is so yesterday. All in three weeks. Geesh! The billionaires are changing the world and bringing infrastructure to a whole new level.
I wish Jim Rutt were still in our industry to see this. He was the forward-thinking CTO of Thomson before it was ThomsonReuters. I will never ever forget him being on a panel talking about the future of technology and saying the next wave of technology would be telepathy. People just about lost it. They were stunned that anyone would say that. They thought he was crazy, but they were too polite to say anything, and you could hear the polite guffaws. We here at Outsell knew he was right. Several of our analysts talked about Wi-Fi and machines capable of picking up wavelengths in a way that had little difference to how brains are able to do it. We wrote, moons ago, about Twitter and the internet being an evolution, a step closer to telepathy, mimicking what it does. Look how lightning fast peoples’ thoughts move these days. We felt the day would come. We just didn’t say it as big and boldly as Jim, but god bless him. While everyone was choking, we knew Jim would have the last laugh because the billionaires club is on the case, and it’s now only a matter of time. That puts a whole new spin on infrastructure for sure.
Anthea C. Stratigos is Co-founder & CEO of Outsell, Inc., the leading research and advisory firm focused exclusively on data, media, information, and technology. Get professional and personal lessons from a career spent mentoring successful leaders. Tell your story or ask a question — confidentially. Ask Anthea!