John Bogle on “Enough”
I read an interview Jason Zweig of Money Magazine did with Vanguard founder John Bogle. Here’s an excerpt that I couldn’t have said better myself.
Question Vanguard is a not-for-profit company. If you’d organized it differently, you’d be a billionaire today. Any regrets?
Answer I read this story recently: There’s a big cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard. Someone comes up to this writer, I think it’s Joseph Heller [author of “Catch-22″], and says, “Joe, see that guy over there? He’s a hedge fund manager, and he made more money yesterday than you made on all the books you have ever published.”
Heller looks over, pauses and says, “Yeah, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”
And I have enough too.
Question Isn’t it time to take a victory lap and retire?
Answer Every once in a while I think a day of doing zero might be a good idea. But there’s too much left to do.
April 19th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
A while ago I read an interview with Craig Newmark of Craig’s List.
Craig’s List is of course phenomenally successful. But Newmark has not capitalized on its success by putting the company up for sale, or covering his site with ads. Regarding the sale of myspace for $15 billion, he said:
“Who needs the money? We don’t really care. … If you’re living comfortably, what’s the point of having more?â€
and
“We both know some people who own more than a billion dollars and they’re not any the happier. They also need bodyguards.â€
I found that to be such a refreshing attitude. The guy surely does OK, and is maybe even a millionaire. But he doesn’t really see the need to turn that millions into tens or hundreds of millions.
I’m sure Bogle has done even better than Newmark, but clearly his attitude is similar. He’s concerned more about offering a great product than extracting money for himself.