In billionaires’ brains

How should the richest people on the planet be judged – by their wealth or by their actions?

Li Jinyuan, the billionaire owner of the Tiens Group, took more than 6,000 staff on holiday to France. Lionel Cironneau / AP

The very rich, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously noted in a 1924 novel, “are different from you and me”. His point was about an innate sense of superiority that had no correlation to their actual level of wealth they possessed at the time, but the point is equally valid when it comes to how today’s billionaires are treating their money.

As The National reported on Friday, the very rich might be different from the rest of us but they are also different from each other. Take the examples of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who are vowing to use most of their billions to make the world a better and fairer place. Compare that to Chinese direct-marketing skincare tycoon Li Jinyuan, who used some of his fortune to take 6,400 of his best salespeople on a tour of France.

All this suggests that what really defines the enormously rich is not how much money they have but, as Fitzgerald hinted at, how that affects their view of the world.