#171: Chuck Feeney (The Billionaire who gave all of his money away)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Chuck Feeney felt a profound sense of relief. He had flown into the Bahamas that morning, an extremely rich man.
Now he was flying out with little more to his name than when he had started out on his various business ventures three decades earlier.
He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. It was all done with the utmost secrecy. Few outside the small group that gathered that day in the Bahamas would know what had taken place for a long time to come.
Four years later, Forbes Magazine listed Feeney as the 23rd richest American alive, declaring him to be a billionaire with $1.3 billion.
But Forbes had got it wrong and would continue to repeat this mistake for many years afterward.
Chuck Feeney had gotten rid of it all.
He was the billionaire who wasn't.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Billionaire Who Wasn't, How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune and it was written by Conor O'Clery. This is another book that I did not, I wasn't aware of. It was actually recommended to me by a listener. Before I read the book, I actually watched a documentary. It's available on YouTube about Chuck Feeney. And there's a few notes that I wrote down that I just want to tell you before we jump into the book because I think watching the documentary helped me understand him. Watching the documentary before reading the book actually helped me understand who he was. He may be the most unique person I've ever studied on Founders. He's a very complex and confusing person. Here's a few quotes from the documentary from people that knew him or know him. He's still alive to this day. So it says, I can't say I ever encountered such an extraordinary individual.
One person described him in one word, complex.
Another description, he wanted to play fair, but he wanted to play rough, or excuse me, tough.
Another one word description, odd.
This one was really great. A conversation with Chuck Feeney is unlike any conversation you'll have with anyone on earth.
Another one word description, paradoxical, inspiring. Chuck Feeney is a totally one-off. He will know more about you in 20 minutes than you will ever know about him. He's a type A personality. He walked quickly, talked quickly, and worked incessantly.
Okay, so let's jump into the book. The vast majority of my highlights, I would say 95% of the highlights I made in this book have to do with how he built his business. I found that the most interesting, this business is going to produce billions and billions and billions of dollars. It's a private company. Before he sells it to LVMH, it's going to produce billions and billions in cash for the partners. But there's a few stories or anecdotes from his early life that gives us an insight into how he thought that I thought was interesting. So he comes from a very, like a working class, New Jersey background. He's very uncomfortable.
The reason people describe him as a paradox is because he was very gifted at making money, but he was very uncomfortable with keeping money. And so at this point, the story I'm about to tell you right now is he's just graduating high school. He decides to shoot to aim really high, even though no one in his family has gone to college before. He's like, I want to go to Cornell. I want to go to the Ivy League. He didn't think what was interesting, the reason I'm bringing this to your attention, is because he didn't think he'd get into Cornell, but he tried anyways.
So it says, the letter of acceptance was a major event for the Feeneys. No one in the family had ever been to a university, but Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life, thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. So that's very important. After he graduates college, he's with a group of friends. They're traveling in the United States. He has no idea what he's going to do in his life.
And this is just a short sentence, but really the way to think about this is that he was always looking for an edge while others slept. And so this is a friend of his. They were all living in this little apartment at the time together. And this is what his friend remembers. He says, the three of us would sleep in, but Chuck would go off to summer school in the morning to take lessons in Russian.