Word: riches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the business began to emerge in the early '60s, Walton was a fairly rich merchant in his 40s, operating some 15 variety stores spread mostly around Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. They were traditional small-town stores with relatively high price markups...
...airplane pondered incoming U.S. aircraft and assumed they must be divine. Technology is confusing, and these were reasonable guesses under the circumstances. In 1995 Gates published a book (co-authored with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson) called The Road Ahead. Peering far into the future, he glimpsed a technology-rich dreamworld where you will be able to "watch Gone With the Wind," he wrote, "with your own face and voice replacing Vivien Leigh's or Clark Gable's." Apparently this is just what the public had been dying to do, for The Road Ahead became a runaway best seller, though...
...postwar America of the 1950s and '60s democratized middle-classness, Gates has democratized filthy-richness--or has at least started to. Get the right job offer from Microsoft, work hard, get rich; no miracle required. Key Microsoft employees pushed Gates in this direction, but he was willing to go, and the industry followed. The Gates Road to Wealth is still a one-laner, and traffic is limited. But the idea that a successful corporation should enrich not merely its executives and big stockholders but also a fair number of ordinary line employees is (although not unique to Microsoft) potentially revolutionary...
...bosses are women. But Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean, played evil stepmom to all the employees of her husband, New York City real estate mogul Harry Helmsley. She fired employees at a whim (one for taking an apple from the kitchen while working through lunch) and had that rich-person disease of being paranoid that everyone was stealing from her; meanwhile, she was convicted of tax evasion. Even one of her lawyers called her a "tough bitch...
...being chased by torch-bearing mobs brandishing antitrust suits. Nowhere in Gates' overwired palace is there a program to inform him how to act in the nation he lives in: the U.S. of A., in which throngs cheered the heavy-metal band Motorhead when it performed Eat the Rich and where Garth Brooks became a megastar for crooning about having friends in "low places," even if by doing so he has made himself into a country-music mogul with a bodacious estate of his own. Still, every country singer since Hank Williams has made his fans want to burn...