In January 1963, Warren Buffett included the following impish observation in his letter to his investment partners. “I have it from unreliable sources that the cost of the voyage Isabella underwrote for Columbus was approximately $30,000.”
Unreliable indeed; there was no dollar in 1492. But we get the gist. Buffett goes on to observe that while the voyage could be considered “at least a moderately successful utilisation of venture capital”, if Queen Isabella had instead invested the $30,000 in something yielding 4 per cent compound interest, the invested sum would have risen to $2tn by 1962. For her inheritors’ sake, perhaps Isabella should have said no to Columbus and simply found the 15th-century equivalent of a passive index fund instead.
Buffett’s thought experiment returned to me as I browsed through the latest list of billionaires from Forbes. None of the leading players had achieved their position by the simple accumulation of family wealth over generations. The top five — Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Buffett, Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos — are all entrepreneurs of one form or another. According to economists Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver, the proportion of billionaires who inherited their fortunes has fallen from 55 per cent two decades ago to 30 per cent today.