Companies on such parallel trajectories as Apple and Microsoft are rare, but the same dynamic plays out throughout the economy. Chick-fil-A is a perfectly fine chain when it’s not stumbling into political hot water, but nobody would mistake it for the dominant fast-food brand in the United States. Yet its founder, S. Truett Cathy, has a $4.2 billion fortune that far outpaces anyone else in the food game. Howard Schultz—the other solo restaurant founder on the Forbes 400 list—brought us the ubiquitous and socially transformative Starbucks and is getting by on a measly $1.5 billion. H&M has similar profits and more revenue than Inditex (the parent company of Zara and related brands), but Amancio Ortega is about twice as rich as Stefan Persson. Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire whose fortune rivals Gates’, didn’t invent or create anything particularly noteworthy. Oracle and Amazon are worth similar amounts, but Oracle’s founder is worth about $20 billion more than Amazon’s. The results, again, are driven by the nitty-gritty of financial dealmaking, not the success of the businesses as enterprises.
The disjoint between the two is a reminder that, despite 30 years of supply-side myths, it’s difficult to understand action at the top as driven by financial incentives. Jobs didn’t come back to Apple for the money—he was already rich and agreed to try to save the company without insisting on a huge share of the upside. And Ballmer, who’s even richer, doesn’t keep plugging away at Microsoft in search of an extra billion or two. Money counts for something, of course. But the real rivalries are about more than a desire to be the boy with the most cake—it’s a competition for fame, prestige, and the ability to shape the future of technology. --http://www.slate.com/
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