What I learned from reading The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery.
Chuck Feeney felt a profound sense of relief.
He had flown into the Bahamas that morning an extremely rich man.
Now he was flying out with little more to his name than when he had started out on his various business ventures three decades earlier.
He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him.
It was all done with the utmost secrecy.
Few outside the small group that gathered that day in the Bahamas would know what had taken place for a long time to come.
Four years later, Forbes magazine listed Feeney as the 23rd richest american alive, declaring him to be a billionaire with $1.3 billion.
But Forbes had got it wrong and would continue to repeat this mistake for many years afterward.
Chuck Feeney had gotten rid of it all.
He was the billionaire who wasn't.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the billionaire who wasn't how Chuck Feeney secretly made and gave away a fortune.
And it was written by Connor O'Clery.
This is another book that I did not, I wasn't aware of.
It was actually recommended to me by a listener.
Before I read the book, I actually watched a documentary.
It's available on YouTube about Chuck Feeney.
And there's a few notes that I wrote down that I just want to tell you before we jump into the book because I think watching the documentary helped me understand him.
Watching the documentary before reading the book actually helped me understand who he was.
He may be the most unique person I've ever studied on founders.
He's a very complex and confusing person.