Max Gunther - The very, very rich and how they got that way: the spectacular success stories of 15 men who made it to the very, very top

In 1972, when this book was first published, $1 had the same buying power as $5.22 in 2010. (According to calculations by the US Department of Labor, www.bls.gov/data.)

This table shows those featured in the book with their fortunes as they would now be in modern US dollar terms.

COME WITH ME NOW, ye seekers, and stand before this great golden door. In a while we will turn the jeweled key and go in. Step softly. Speak in whispers. You in the back, there, get rid of that damned beer can. We are about to enter the presence of Wealth.

Did I pronounce it with an awestruck capital W? I intended to. This is not ordinary wealth we are about to study, not the mere upper crust, not even the tribe of mere millionaires. No, we are about to see Wealth in its most exaggerated some would say gorgeous, some would say disgusting manifestations. The very poorest individuals well meet will have net assets of $100 million or not far below, and some will have more than a billion.

What is the purpose of our visit to this golden gallery? Why, you ask, should we study these, the immoderately rich?

It is a sharp question, and we must acknowledge from the start that some will say there is no sensible answer. Our quest, we will be told, is foolish. A historical record stretching back some 2500 years reveals that wealth and seekers after wealth and seekers after the seekers (in which final category we now find ourselves) have all been steadfastly jeered at in every clime and culture. Wealth, the 2500-year-old platitude goes, is only an ephemeral thing and may not even be real at all. A man is better advised to spend his life in quest of something else: truth, perhaps, or beauty, but not money. Money isnt worth the seeking.

Nobody knows who first noted that you cant take it with you probably a Cro-Magnon man bellyaching about his neighbors flashy new leopard skin. The Greek philosopher Theognis was one of the first to put the sour old clich in writing. No one goes to heaven with all his immense wealth, Theognis grumped in the Fifth or Sixth Century B.C. Very probably not a single year has since gone by in which some man of intellectual stature has not reiterated the thought in hopes of cooling off whatever rat race was then afoot. Cicero said it in materialist Rome. Shakespeare said it to the earthy Elizabethans, while, across the English Channel, Rembrandt, himself a moderately rich man, was saying it to the boom-maddened Dutch. Shelley said it in reference to a departed king named Ozymandias. Thoreau said it at Walden. It would probably be a safe bet that at least 100,000 novels published in the 20th century have said it one way or another. The Bible says it not once but many times.