By Dan Amor
I think it was John Paul Getty, the American-born British
billionaire, philanthropist and heir to oil industry fortune, who quipped, when
asked how rich he was: “No one is really rich if he can count his money.” In
Getty's days, anyone with one million British pounds (or even one million
dollars) was rated as “rich” and anyone with more than five million pounds was “very
rich”.
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| *Adenuga and Dangote |
Above that and you were in the “super rich”
category, and when you got above the fifty million pounds level, you rated as a
“can't count”. Nelson Bunker Hunt, who with his brother inherited a fortune even
greater than Getty's, was a “can't count” man before he tried to corner the
silver market. Asked by a Senate Committee how much he was worth, he snapped, “Hell,
if I knew that, I wouldn't be worth very much”.
