Word: superrich
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early 1980s, Asher Edelman seemed to have a magic touch. Bright, brash and hyperconfident, he reaped more than $40 million in instant profits for himself and his investors by raiding and liquidating two dreary companies: Management Assistance, a computer maker, and Canal-Randolph, a real estate firm. Suddenly superrich, the Bard College graduate, reared on Long Island, N.Y., bought fashionable residences from Sun Valley to Switzerland, a 100-ft. yacht, a personal jet and a modern-art collection today rumored to be worth $100 million...
Leaping limos! Superrich Texan Lamar Hunt rides the subway when he visits New York City? Apparently so, because a free-lance photographer last week spied Hunt, 55, and his wife Norma as they emerged from the U.S. District Court building in lower Manhattan and headed down to the tunnels...
...ought to be exempt from the forces that stimulate greed in the rest of us. They're already worth an estimated $1.4 billion. They're 67 and 79 years old, with no children. They give to charity generously, but not obsessively. Although the Helmsleys try harder than most other superrich, there's no way they're going to spend what they've already got. So why cheat the Government to get more...
Indeed, the question of what may have motivated one superrich couple to break the law is less interesting than the question of what motivates all of them to keep on accumulating, legally or otherwise. A central assumption of supply-side economics -- the dominant economic theology of the past decade, which produced large tax-rate cuts for the wealthy -- is that people are % motivated by rather fine calculations about the reward for further effort. Supply-siders are the chiropractors of capitalism, believing that small manipulations of the incentive structure can produce enormous changes in economic behavior. That may be true...
What can be said of a man so wrapped up in himself? Judging from what he did with his billions, Getty had little idea of the social responsibilty that vast wealth confers. In the American lore of the superrich, his place is just below William Randolph Hearst, the builder of San Simeon and another driven megalomaniac...