CAPITALIST FOOLS By Nicholas Von Hoffman (Chatto and Windus, $195) WHAT would you think of a man who owed his life to baked beans? Not much? Well consider Anthony J.F. O'Reilly. It has been estimated that as chairman of H.J. Heinz and Co, he, in one year, earned stock options worth US$120 million - the equivalent of HK$936 million.
Knock off non-working days, and you have a story of a man who comes home to his wife every day bringing home half a million US dollars. Can you imagine his normal greeting? ''Hi, Honey. I had a good day. I bought home the annual GDP of a small African nation for you.'' But, believe it or not, today's mega-rich are less rich than yesterday's mega-rich, argues Nicholas Von Hoffman, in this new book on the growth of business.
In 1918, John D. Rockefeller was worth an estimated US$1.25 billion. Depending on how you calculate inflation, that would be worth between US$15 billion and US$30 billion - more money than super-rich individuals have today.
Capitalist Fools is a big, sprawling, messy book about the development of American business this century. It started off as a biography of Malcolm Forbes, a man who made money into a sexy subject for a glossy magazine in the same way that Hugh Hefner made sex and the high-life into the same thing.
The writer, Nicholas Von Hoffman, is a financial columnist who is, by turns, anecdotal, discursive, informative and infuriating. Sometimes he is facetious and insults the reader. For instance, he points out that some of the financiers he writes about dida great deal of good, ''unless one believes power plants and factories and office blocks . . . will pop up by themselves if one sits under a New Age crystal long enough.'' The reader is left wondering what he has done to deserve this nasty dig.
What is more fun is to watch Mr Von Hoffman insult the rich and famous, which he does very well, frequently hanging them using their own rope.