Missing Billionaires
by Victor Haghani, James White · first published 2025
75% recommend25% neutral
Over the past century, if the wealthiest families had spent a reasonable fraction of their wealth, paid taxes, invested in the stock market, and passed their wealth down to the next generation, there would be tens of thousands of billionaire heirs to generations-old fortunes today. The puzzle of The Missing Billionaires is why you cannot find one such billionaire on any current rich list. There are a number of explanations, but this book is focused on one mistake which is of profound importance to all investors: poor risk decisions, both in investing and spending. Many of these families didn’t
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The Missing Billionaires: A Guide To Better Financial Decisions, by Victor Haghani & James White. This book covers wide ranging topics within investing, hedging, personal finance, lifecycle investing and asset pricing. One of…
on “Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2023?” ↗…Because most people are terrible at judging and managing investments (when they care at all). When with even with no-brainer investments it would keep modestly growing from generation to generation. See The missing billionaires - A guide to better financial decisions, Victor Haghani and James White, 2023.
on “What it's like to staff the home of a billionaire” ↗…events and up to 50 times leverage - and that is very difficult to do equally for newcomers and established investors who have not deliberately worked on the issue of bet size and allocation. (See The missing billionaires - A guide to better financial decisions, Victor Haghani and James White, 2023 - excellent book on that topic) What in the world?? That's a lot of trouble to go to for one cheap marketing headline. With…
on “Crystal Ball Trading Game” ↗But this hasn't happened. See the book Missing Billionaires by White and Hagani. Subsequent generations are much better at squandering wealth than hoarding it. So that issue sort of takes care of itself.
on “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” ↗…contemporaries offers a cautionary tale. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s census recorded about 4,000 millionaires, note Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, in their book, “The Missing Billionaires”. Suppose a quarter of them had at least $5m (the richest had hundreds) and had invested it in America’s stockmarket. Had they then procreated at the average rate, paid their taxes and spent 2% of their…
on “Oracle is building yesterday's data centers with tomorrow's debt” ↗This is the entire premise in The missing billionaires - A guide to better financial decisions, Victor Haghani and James White, 2023. But this is an investing book, not sociology. They consider billionaires in the introduction and they point to the Forbes…
on “Why Do 70% of Families Lose Their Wealth in the 2nd Generation? (2018)” ↗