Legacy Series: Hunters & Lions

“Until the lion learns how to write,
every story will glorify the hunter.”
—Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)

Legacy Hunters: Buying the Narrative

Elite Charade of Changing the World?

It’s trendy for capitalists to make a pledge promising to give away most of their wealth in their lifetime. Refocusing attention on charity is often part of the playbook to repair a damaged reputation and buy a narrative for how they want to be remembered (e.g. Gates Foundation: ~$50 billion to “fight poverty, disease, and inequity around the world"; Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation: $3 billion to “cure all diseases"). Winners Take All, a book by Anand Giridharadas, is summed up simply by a Guardian journalist describing it as "superb hate-reading" for “the hubris and hypocrisy of the super-rich who believe they are helping the world.”

Innovation: Driven by Government or Lone Geniuses?

Anand Giridharadas and Mariana Mazzucato—dubbed the ”world's scariest economist" with her plan to "fix capitalism”—each makes a case for bigger governments that make bigger investments with bigger payoffs for the future. Mazzucato argues the driver of innovation is government investment, not lone geniuses.

Unclear Legacy of Billionaires as Philanthropists

It’s unclear what the potential legacy of capitalists in this century will be. The obituary of Anshu Jain, banker, 1963—2022 by FT journalist Olaf Storbeck last year is an example of the best-case scenario. Jain is remembered as “the best fixed income banker of his generation” while also noting blows to his reputation “amid a series of misconduct probes and billions in ensuing fines for Deutsche." Perhaps the most memorable parts are the juxtaposition of Jain being described as a killer who always had a knife between his teeth and the singular sentence noting he was a vegetarian who met his wife at age 17 and never spent extravagently.

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