Painfully Rich - John Pearson  ## Metadata - Author: **John Pearson** - Full Title: Painfully Rich - Category: #books ## Highlights - The truth was that Jean Paul Getty was a man of passion, which he had channelled single-mindedly into the creation of his massive fortune much as a great composer pours his soul into a symphony. His real love was not for women, who were incidental, but for money, which was not, and he had proved himself a faithful and romantic partner during his lifelong love affair with wealth, jealously acquiring it, and making it increase, in massive quantities, across a period of more than sixty years. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0vh3h14arse1pyjw25ry0gt)) - That mordant critic of the social scene, the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his classic *Theory of the Leisure Class*, invented a phrase to describe the way the great nineteenth-century American *nouveaux riches* like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers once employed their surplus wealth in competitive display. He called it ‘conspicuous consumption’: the building of the great Rhode Island mansions which they barely used, the throwing of the massive parties which none but the hideously rich could equal. Driven by such sumptuary competition, they sometimes reached the point which Veblen identified as ‘conspicuous waste’ – the spending of very large amounts of money simply to defeat their rivals in a war of pointless ostentation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0x3mre86n68dnpnpbafe8md)) - Tags: #wealth - Far from requiring any outside interests, he had a perfect built-in system of obsessive motivation. Far from ever getting bored with money, the more of it he had, the more profound would be his sense of satisfaction. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0x3ndam28fgq5v51meathbk)) - ‘Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold on until everyone else is buying.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0x3wtvmmg167esfnzyp6w4n)) - ‘A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you’re a business failure.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0xdtyn1m9v7qjydfngfc1hp)) - He believed that business wasted too much time on paperwork, committees and discussion anyhow. Forgetting nothing, and delegating what was inessential, he became a great exponent of the role of capitalist as self-sufficient one-man band, making the most minute decisions with a minimum of red tape and bureaucracy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0xdwkn9p09w0e0dhsfpv79p)) - Victor Hugo once called Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who also loved living in hotels and hated families, ‘the vagabond billionaire of Europe’. Paul Getty, who was much the same, was fast becoming his successor. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0xdx53j0agtba2eb59pe0bw)) - The more she got to know Paul, the more she saw him as a man with extraordinary powers of concentration and strength of will, and realized that his attitude to women (herself included) was part of something crucial to his nature. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0z5qcb70p7vccfaxb35vkfp)) - In October 1957 Paul Getty finally emerged from the capitalist closet in which he had been living in relative obscurity for so long. *Fortune* magazine, after several months’ research among America’s super-rich, including Rockefellers, Morgans, Hunts, and Fords, publicly proclaimed Jean Paul Getty, an ‘expatriate businessman living in Paris’, the ‘richest living American’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j10wamzd46b0etamr4v2c2pt))