I don’t know either personally. I knew someone who lived in the same dorm as Zuckerberg at Harvard though. He said the impression around there was that he was very mediocre. Keep in mind, this is mediocre at Harvard which means very smart and that was ten years ago.

Presumably you are asking this question because you want to understand what it takes to be hyper-successful. Academic intelligence is only useful up to a point. Having grown up surrounded by hyper-intelligent people, I’ve noticed that past that the most successful people are those who also learn about life the quickest. You have to beat the learning curve. You also need to put yourself out there if you want people to recognize it. That and you need to be lucky. There’s always a bell curve. The internet has been an enormous enabler, especially after the Web 2.0 era. I expect we’re going to be seeing a lot more Gates and Zuckerbergs in the decades to come and not always focused on software.

Does anybody know who this man is? Well, he was the richest man in the 1980s and even as recently as 1990.

His name is Tsutsumi Yoshiaki. Now he is down to his last $1billion according to many reports.

Once he dies, inheritance tax will ensure his kids get much less than $1billion in all likelihood.

The point is, these things don’t last. Performance comes and goes. He was in a very profitable business (real estate).

That didn’t last with the various crashes. Likewise, Bezos’ model may not work forever.

Just look at historical records. Many people were richer than Bezos historically, in inflation adjusted terms.

People like Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller. Fortunes are lost over time.

So yes, I am sure there will be somebody richer than Bezos, sooner or later.

For the rest of us, merely being wealthy enough where we don’t need to have so many money worries and can live with more freedom, is enough!

 

TOKYO (AP) _ The world’s richest man patches his shoes with tape, hates to waste the last three shots on a roll of film and loathes giving money away.

Yoshiaki Tsutsumi knows that money, used wisely, begets more money. In two decades he turned a piecemeal collection of land bought from impoverished princes into Japan’s biggest real estate empire.

His Seibu Railways Group counts 27 golf courses, 25 ski slopes, 56 hotels with upwards of 13,000 rooms, several train lines and one major league baseball stadium. A rough estimate puts their total land area at about 60 square miles – one-fourth the size of metropolitan Tokyo.

But Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who occasionally has the prime minister over for a chat and a round of golf, was almost unknown outside Japan until Forbes magazine last month pegged his wealth at $21 billion.

Tsutsumi said he was too busy to be interviewed. He dislikes talking about himself or his family – even a long-time friend doesn’t know whether his three children are sons or daughters – and has ordered company spokesmen to refuse requests for personal information.

Friends and reporters who know him say he shuns parties, collects no artwork and has little taste for culture. His house, two stories on prime Tokyo real estate, is an unadorned brick rectangle with a flat roof that almost touches his neighbor’s.

The world’s ranking billionaire is obsessed with frugality.

″We have 30,000 employees,″ Tsutsumi boasted to a reporter once, ″and not one uses extra water or paper towels after he uses the restroom.″

Tsutsumi collects property the way some people play Monopoly. He says his formula for ″keeping my workers living comfortably″ is to expand assets by at least 10 percent a year.

He flits between sites in a helicopter, constantly inspecting and barking orders for improvement. He is quick to demote and tolerates no waste. Towels in his hotels are used for an extra year; afterward, they end up in his offices as rags.

″The workers are terrified,″ says Taro Nawa, a journalist and long-time friend. ″If his orders aren’t carried out as soon as possible, there will be thunder.″

At 53, Tsutsumi is a trim, active man who enjoys skiing down his own slopes. He has sponsored ice hockey exchanges with eastern European countries and owns his own major league baseball team.

Nawa says Tsutsumi doesn’t understand baseball, but he knows business. He bought the mediocre Lions in 1979, poured in money for players and publicity, built a new stadium, chose the concession food and sites for restrooms, added a train station and left the rest to his manager.

The Seibu Lions have won three Japan Series championships since.

Tsutsumi is the third son of the late Yasujiro Tsutsumi, whose friends called him ″Pistol″ and whose enormous energy fueled the expansion of Seibu. Pistol scraped together his empire in the midst of Japan’s postwar poverty, on land sold by princes too poor to pay their taxes.

He also produced seven children, one of whom, according to his friend Kunio Kamibayashi, was legitimate.

When Pistol died in 1964, Seiji, his second son, got his stores and turned them into the Seibu Saison retailing group. Yoshiaki, his third, got the land.

Yoshiaki never forgot the favor. On his orders, Seibu managers still make the pilgrimage to Kamakura, one and a half hours outside Tokyo, to pay respects at Pistol’s grave. Some reports say Yoshiaki has them take turns standing guard duty.

Pistol Tsutsumi, a one-time speaker of Japan’s Lower House, left his children powerful political connections. Even now the country’s top statesmen gather on Yoshiaki’s golf courses. When his mother, Pistol’s mistress, died in 1985, funeral guests reportedly included Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and three former prime ministers.

Tsutsumi is said to donate generously to politicians in both ruling and opposition parties.

Sometimes, the billionaire splurges. He entertains friends with the best food and liquor his Prince hotels can offer, Nawa says, even though his own palate cannot discern the taste of good wine.

He finds expression in photographing nature – mountains, flowers, baby birds. He compiles the best pictures in a calendar he distributes to 4,000 acquaintances.

″My problem is the film,″ Tsutsumi once said. ″If I have three or four shots left, I agonize over whether to get the roll developed as it is or use it up.

″In the end I usually get it developed, but only after a huge struggle.″