[jasonbarrah]

The whole point of his question was that you take those advantages away from those men and see what they would do. The key is their creativity and ability to find ways to make money.

Bill Gates was actually famously asked a version of this question. (What would you do if you were poor with no education and lived in a third world country.) He responded "Buy Chickens".

[tabtab]

The one thing in common about the mega-rich is that they are obsessed with money and/or success. Warren's family members often complained he didn't spend enough time with the family because he was in his den sifting accounting and finance material. Warren is in love with numbers.

The thing is the obsession trait doesn't necessarily scale. If you cloned a billion Gates', that would NOT give us a billion Microsofts. It's not a zero sum game, but pretty close to one. There's only so much room in any given niche.

Another thing, I've been using and following Microsoft for about 3 decades. They didn't do anything special or innovative in my opinion, at least not relative to their size. MS just did smart marketing, acquisitions, pricing, and packaging. MS mostly leveraged monopoly in one category to gain another category: not raw merit. If MS never existed, the world would be the same or even better off: more OS and office-software choice. I have a bit more respect for Steve Jobs: he spotted useful product configurations before any one else (with means). MS just copied/purchased trends after it was obvious they were catching on.

[lamarpye]

Really? The world would be the same if Microsoft never existed or better off?

No doubt IBM would have led innovation if not kneecapped by M$.

[tabtab]

I don't mean exactly the same, but in terms of general innovation. There were decent, good, and great alternatives to ALL of their key products: PC GUI's, spreadsheets, word-processors, desktop databases, etc. Heck, they purchased most of them from other co's. Granted, MS usually charged less, at least initially, but that's because they took an up-front loss in that product to gain market-share. But then stagnated once they killed competition. I know an obvious MS-Access bug not fixed for 15 years.

[Someone1234]

> The whole point of his question was that you take those advantages away from those men and see what they would do. The key is their creativity and ability to find ways to make money.

And the answer is that most wealthy people, when reset to zero, would never be able to regain their wealth. The only way they may have a shot is by exploiting things from their formally wealthy life (e.g. contacts, connections, niche industry knowledge, or an ivy league degree).