#171: Chuck Feeney (The Billionaire who gave all of his money away)

What I learned from reading The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery. ---- He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. [0:01]  Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. [3:27] I all of a sudden realized, shit, you can sell this to anybody, anywhere. [12:45]  Feeney believed that there could be more lucrative opportunities in the less  crowded Pacific. [21:53]  Chuck lived out of his briefcase. Everything was connected with business. We did a lot of screwy things. I became part of what he called his ‘teen  age frontier’ approach to business, because he surrounded himself with smart college youngsters, mostly single and aggressive ‘conquerors of the world.’ I was the oldest, always the damper, saying to him, "Are you out of your mind?" [25:44] We hadn’t spent any time on corporate structuring or anything like that, we were just simply busy selling cars, duty — free liquor, making the cash, putting the cash in the bank, cash in, and cash out. [28:06] They were on the verge of going bankrupt, perhaps already were. Feeney and Miller were almost back where they started. They could perhaps boost the cash flow from the duty   free shops in Hong Kong and Hawaii to clear off the debts. Feeney had moments of despair. “Of course. It goes with the territory. But there wasn’t much we could do. It was something we had started, and we thought we were going to make a million dollars out of it. We had no choice but to salvage the company or go over the cliff.” [31:21]  The duty   free shops began to make substantial profits, the owners agreed to take 90 percent of the dividends in cash, a practice that would continue for a quarter of a century. [44:54]  Paradoxically, while Feeney became more frugal, he was pushing h