Wealth Secrets of the One Percent

Book excerpt: Discover how the superwealthy made it to the top (and you can too!) From the richest Romans to the robber barons to today's bankers and tech billionaires, Sam Wilkin offers Freakonomics-esque insights into what it really takes to make a fortune. These stories of larger-than-life characters, strategies, and sacrifices reveal how the wealthiest did it, usually by a passion for finding loopholes, working around bureaucratic systems, and creating obstacles to competitors. Wealth Secrets of the One Percent gets at the heart of our feelings about the 1% of top income earners and the roughly 0.0001% who achieve billionaire status: we love to hate them, but we'd love to be them. Wilkin's insight into the sources of wealth is thought-provoking and rigorous, and he reveals that behind almost every great fortune is a "wealth secret" -- a moneymaking technique designed to defeat the forces of market competition.