Nathan Myhrvold, Using his Billions to Help Humanity

I just saw  Nathan Myhrvold interviewed by Charlie Rose. He is super-intelligent and super-rich. He's one of the few super-rich guys I can think of who's also super-intelligent. 

You don't have to be super-intelligent to be super-rich. Many, if not most super-rich people, like the six Walton heirs [net worth estimated by Forbes in 2013: $144.7 billion] or 91-year old Liliane Betancourt, the world's richest woman and the sixth richest person in the world [estimated 2013 net worth: $30 billion], just got their billions by inheriting it, without performing a single day's worth of honest labor in their entire frivolous and pathetic lives. 

And even super-rich billionaires like Carlos Slim Helu, CEO of Mexico's  América Móvil [the world's second richest man, 2013 estimated net worth $69 billion] or Warren Buffett [2013 estimated net worth $53.5 billion] are not remarkably intelligent, but have one idea and just relentlessly focus on that idea to the exclusion of all others. 

You don't need lots of books or even a high-school or college diploma to explain how Warren Buffet became a super-billionaire.  [By the way, it's interesting to note all the super-billionaires who were college drop outs: here's a list of 34 of them.]  

Warren Buffet's entire investment philosophy can be summed up in one sentence: "Be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy." Now anybody, even my archetypal third-grader, can understand that, but maybe only one person in 10 million or 100 million can actually apply it relentlessly and ruthlessly.  

In Carlos Slim's case, he just ruthlessly obtained a virtual monopoly--70%--of the mobile telephony market in Mexico and charged rates that were so exorbitant that the Mexican government eventually slapped him with an unprecedented $1 billion fine in 2011 for unfair trade practices, a fine he avoided by reluctantly agreeing to slash his rates by 20%!  Slim has applied the same formula in other countries, particularly in Latin America. You don't have to be very intelligent to do this, you just have to be extremely focused and extremely ruthless.

Anyway, on the other hand, Nathan Myhrvold [2013 net worth $650 million], being not only super-rich, but super-intelligent, actually spends the millions he made as Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft for 13 years for useful purposes that can benefit the entire human race, most particularly the two or 3 billion people who eke out a precarious living and survive on less than two dollars a day.

So I went to his website and read Descended From Apes, Acting Like Slime Molds, an article he posted on Bloomberg, in which he articulates some of his ideas. What a brilliant metaphor to compare human societies to slime molds--I told you the guy was intelligent!