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There are mechanisms and ways of thinking to how large fortunes are put together. We are going to kick the tires on Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Mike Novogratz, and a few others. At certain levels of scale, a number of strategies just stop working. For example, financial literacy and responsible budgeting is going to get you out of debt and into a reasonable personal situation. This will work for millions and billions of people. But if you want to generate empire-building cashflow, there is not enough coffee in the world you can choose to not buy (e.g., $4.00 times 365 is $1,460). Next up is the advice of the venture capitalist. Remember, a venture investor is taking portfolio bets on highly concentrated positions, of which 90% will fail and 10% will return billions of dollars. In such a world, the investor wants each bet to have the highest expected return. A 5% chance of $1 billion is worth $50 million. A 25% chance of $100 million is worth $25 million. The lower probability event w...

  Syed Talat Hussain -  Monday, December 07, 2015   The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV. Confident yet insecure. Well-established yet floundering. Unchallenged yet hobbled. In control yet struggling. The marvellous contradictions of the Sharifs are both amusing and worrying. Amusing because they yield comical sights like federal ministers’ childish in-fights over petty personal matters; worrying because the existential challenges confronting Pakistan require the federal and Punjab governments to inject immediate sense and long-term purpose into its functioning rather than act like a lost souls in lost woods protected merely by good luck and happy accidents. The Sharifs’ contradictions are not products of structural issues: a weak majority, a coup-plotting army, a motivated and ambitious judiciary, a feisty opposition with capacity to turn the tables. There is no economic meltdown looming large on the hori...