How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

Philip Greenspun’s essay starts out sassy: Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully and Lesson 2: Choose Your Parents Carefully. But he does get serious with his last four lessons. And he takes a stab at one of the enduring questions of capitalism, which is why do really rich people keep trying to get richer:

Socrates asserts that people who’ve inherited fortunes tend to be light with their money but that people who’ve made their fortunes “have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth.”

Don’t miss his amusing sidebar, The Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, which could use some updating but is still good for a laugh or cry, depending on your mood or his take on money and investing.