I Accidentally Became a Billionaire

I never really understood finance.

I got into banking because a guy in my dorm told me the pay was good and I thought Midtown looked nice. During recruiting they kept asking why investment banking. I said I liked businesses and they seemed to like that answer.

A few years later I met a kid working on a website where college students could look at pictures of each other. He talked for about an hour. I didn’t really understand the business model, but everyone I knew at school was using it, so I gave him some money. That was Facebook. People later said I had recognized the power of social networks before the market did, I mostly thought the website was addictive.

After that people started sending me things. I bought Amazon because I ordered books there. I bought NVIDIA because my roommate wouldn’t shut up about his graphics card. I held both because I forgot the passwords to two of my brokerage accounts.

When everyone started talking about artificial intelligence, I asked a guy much smarter than me what all the computers actually needed to work. He said chips, data centers, power, cooling and transmission. So I bought those too. A few years later CNBC called it “the AI infrastructure trade.” I had thought it was just the stuff you needed to plug the computers in.

By then I had a fund. I bought companies I understood and tried not to sell good ones. Eventually I started buying entire asset managers. One year someone asked whether I’d be interested in Blackstone. I asked what they wanted for it. Apparently that was the wrong question because everyone in the room got very quiet. We bought it anyway.

After that I owned pieces of airports, pipelines, data centers, utilities, insurance companies, apartment buildings and things I didn’t know we owned until someone mentioned them at dinner. People began asking me about the economy. I told them I thought houses should probably be built where people wanted to live, electricity should probably be cheap, and spending more money than you have forever sounded difficult. A governor asked me to join an advisory council. Then another governor asked. Then the President called. I mostly listened. At some point people started saying I should run for office. I told them I had no experience in politics. They said that was the point.

So I ran and I won.

Then I ran for President, won that too.

The first morning in the Oval Office, the National Security Advisor handed me a briefing book about several countries I had never visited, the Treasury Secretary wanted to discuss the debt market, and someone asked what I wanted my administration to accomplish. I thought about it for a while.

“Probably leave things a little better than we found them.”

Everyone started writing.

By the time I left office, people had written books about my investment philosophy, my political philosophy, my leadership philosophy and something called my theory of institutional power. I had never read any of them.

Years later, a college kid found me sitting on a bench and asked if he could get some advice. He told me he had offers from Goldman and Evercore and had built a spreadsheet comparing exits, compensation, brand value, promotion velocity and long-term optionality. He asked what I would choose.

“I don’t know.”

He looked disappointed.

Then he asked how I had gone from an investment banking analyst to one of the richest investors in history and President of the United States.

I thought about Facebook. NVIDIA. The data centers. Blackstone. The White House.

“I guess I kept doing things that made sense to me.”

He waited for something deeper, and so did I.