Part 1 of 3
The official narrative for becoming wealthy in the US and many other parts of the world is that you work hard, save up money, open up your own business, and the business takes off, and you sell it to a big business (presumably looking to buy out its competition and retain its monopoly or oligopoly status). In reality, most of wealth is made by the existing rich, and sometimes, if you’re smart and loyal, you can cozy up to a rich person and become rich using their capital and/or inside knowledge. The story of Jho Low follows the latter. While certainly his father became rich in Malaysia after selling his shares in a clothing company, by placing his son in an elite English boarding school, Harrow, he enabled his son to rub elbows with sons of billionaires around the world, specifically Brunei and the Middle East. Inside this exclusive circle, Low groomed connections that would later serve to expand his personal empire. While he could well have done all this legitimately, he encountered a corrupt system that ultimately corrupted him. You are your social influences.
Not to discount Low’s hard work, perseverance, ingenuity, networking skills, and “prodigious” memory, but there are countless poor people who also possess these skills and never get to use them with the world’s elite. In a truly free-market economy, the best and the brightest have access to capital and markets and generate wealth based on their hard work and ingenuity. Like many tech companies, they take advantage of old companies that are complacent and tech avoidant. However, the US is not a truly free market economy either. Rideshare had to spend billions of dollars funding local and national political campaigns to change laws to enable their existence. They replaced a dinosaur system whereby the government created manufactured shortages of taxi drivers to justify the higher taxi fees that created a huge transportation gap between taxis and buses.
In a rigged economy, the best and the brightest do not have access to capital and markets. In fact, they are often targeted and destroyed in order to protect existing monopolies and oligopolies. Instead, it is the crafty, narcissistic, selfish status climber that becomes successful as they rub elbows with those who hold the strings of power, the existing wealthy elite who own everything and the government bureaucrats who enable their monopolies and oligopolies by giving them breaks and playing hardball with their smaller, more agile and tech savvy competitors. In a rigged economy, it is absolutely essential to get to know those who hold power and wealth, to let them know that they approve of the whole rigged system and will become loyal accomplices to their shenanigans, crimes, secrets, and deceptions. The ruling elite are wary of anyone who purports to be a goody two-shoe, a do-gooder, a selfless leader, an independent mind, an iconoclast, a rebel, a troublemaker, a whistleblower, etc.
How do you tell one from a loyal, narcissistic sycophant? You party with them. You start out small. You offer them small bribes, small gifts, small quid pro quo’s, small rule or law bending. If someone is willing to do cocaine at a party and sleep with escorts, he’s not likely to become a public defender and hero. He’s likely to be corruptible and can be encouraged to break more serious laws like insider trading, stealing, money laundering, etc. Of course, the hardest part is trusting such a cretin. Inevitably, such a person of low character will turn against you, but in the meantime, they can be extremely loyal, and that is essentially all you have to work with.
Someone of high character will refuse to do your biding and even worse, may turn you in and/or testify against you in court. So long as you can incriminate the accomplice and keep the money flowing, there is no reason for the accomplice to turn against you. In the book, Mastermind, we even have the astounding case of Paul Le Roux who was the mastermind of his criminal empire being used as a state informant against his lieutenants instead of vice versa. When you decide to turn against your criminal boss, you have to deal with the fact that he works outside the law and has connections within the law that can make you either disappear or have all your wealth disappear. And in the case of Paul Le Roux, if your boss becomes an informant first, you’re screwed.
In addition to connections, you also have to have a lot of luck and be the right player at the right time and the right place. Low lucked out by arranging a lunch with Yousef Al Otaiba, foreign policy adviser to UAE sheikhs. Importantly, Otaiba introduced Low to Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak who ran a huge UAE investment fund, Mubadala Development. “Abu Dhabi had formed Mubadala a year earlier, in 2002, to diversify its oil-dependent economy. The idea was to raise capital from international markets, plowing money into industries like real estate and semiconductors.” “Bu Mubadala was novel: Rather than simply invest oil profits, securing them for future generations, the fund was borrowing from global markets and actively trying to move the economy in new directions.
What Low saw in Abu Dhabi planted a seed in his mind. Malaysia had a sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah National, but nothing like Mubadala. It would take six years for Low to establish himself as an Al Mubarak-like figure controlling his own fund in Malaysia.”
“Later that year [2007], he heard Khazanah… was looking for partners to develop a gigantic construction project in the southern state of Johor, near the border with Singapore, to be known as the Iskandar Development Region. The project was an ambitious effort to create a financial and lifestyle center to rival wealthier Singapore, Southeast Asia’s financial and commercial hub.”
Surprisingly, Low did not receive a broker’s fee for the gigantic investment, so Low decided he needed to create a company to partake in the investment game. “…Low heard about two Malaysian construction companies that were for sale. Perhaps he could buy them cheaply, and win contracts on the Iskandar development?”
What he did next was brilliant. “As a vehicle to make the purchase, Low set up a British Virgin Islands entity called the Abu Dhabi-Kuwait-Malaysia Investment Company and gave free shares to Ambassador Otaiba and minor aristocrats from Kuwait and Malaysia. He was creating the impression that prominent individuals were behind the company. With such illustrious backing now in place, Low had no trouble persuading Malaysian banks to lend tens of millions of dollars.”
As you read this book, you start to wonder why Low didn’t just keep legitimate and bend the law instead of break it. What Low likely soon realized after graduating from Wharton was that there are two worlds. In one world, the Wharton world, everything is done by the book, and you are taught the mechanics of finance, banking, accounting, business management, markets, etc. However, there’s also a huge education that you’re missing, especially in less developed countries where corruption is rampant. That is not to say that the First World is pure and pristine. Its scams are just more sophisticated.
The problem arises, when you start to bend and break rules and get rich and powerful doing so, your sense of morals start to become confused. If north keeps changing, it’s hard to determine where you stand or where you’re going. This happens to rebels as well. At some point in time, perhaps as a teenager, the rebel realizes that society is a sham, markets are rigged, and the world is run by corrupt, narcissistic psychopaths. What do you do? The rebel starts to question everything, just as the hippies did in the 60’s, and as such, they start experimenting with abandoning not just unjust and immoral things but just and moral things too.
In other words, when you realize a small group of criminals run the world and that the drug war is a hoax designed to imprison war protesters and people of color, what’s the harm in doing drugs? But then you start to wonder about other things too. Rebels start to journey down a slippery slope where they have the privilege of questioning any and all types of laws, rules, mores, traditions, and customs. At a certain point, they’re becoming drug addicts, alcoholics, unproductive partiers, and at some point, they start harassing and molesting women or engaging in other questionable immoral behavior. They believe they’re liberated from the corrupt constructs of modern laws, rules, mores, traditions, and customs, but in reality, they are just becoming as immoral and corrupt as those on top.
When you learn that many laws and rules are just created to protect the wealth and power of the ruling elite, you can choose to live your life better by obeying moral codes, being healthy, engaging in healthy relationships, and not getting carried away with drugs, alcohol, and debauchery. Just such a case has arisen with Russell Brand, the affable, iconoclast, rebel who questions modern society and corruption. Today, he’s besieged by accusations of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and crimes. Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General who took on the powerful elites of New York was taken down by his use of prostitutes. He could well have become the US President. What was he thinking as Attorney General?
If you are going to question rules and laws, you can’t make a blanket statement that they are all meaningless and void. The strategy of those in power is to mix up the moral rules into laws which give their corrupt laws an air of validity and importance. Even better, they invented the concept of evil whereby disobedience to any type of law is equated with the most heinous of crimes. In other words, if there is a rule or law banning cross-dressing, anyone who disobeys this rule or law is not only just disobedient, they are also evil. They are immoral for their disobedience, and then the peanut gallery fills in the rest with accusations of child molestation.
The powerful have a simple playbook for dealing with potential troublemakers and whistleblowers. The first step is to bribe them with gifts. Most people are poor, and most people respond positively to gifts. In fact, many so-called troublemakers are merely opportunists waiting for somebody to gift them into shutting up. It’s amazing what a little gift does. For those with money, these bribes are meaningless to them but the entire world to the troublemaker. If that doesn’t work, they try to find dirt on the troublemaker. If that doesn’t work, they create dirt on the troublemaker. They’ll go out and ply the troublemaker with booze, drugs, and prostitutes and then take photos or videos of him. They then blackmail the troublemaker. This often works too.
But there are some obstinate, morally pure people who don’t consider themselves risqué rebels who do booze, drugs, and sexual debauchery. How do you deal with them? This is when the gloves come off. It’s time to introduce violence or at least the concept of violence. They get photos of the troublemaker’s loved ones and subtly threaten them with harm. At this point, the troublemaker is more concerned with the safety of their loved one than themselves, and they will relent. If this doesn’t work, you can kidnap and beat them up, sodomize them, humiliate them, scar them for life, torture them, etc. In some countries that are corrupt, you can even have your very own police force or military do this. And finally, if that doesn’t work, you simply kill them.
There are also other ingenious and diabolical ways of messing with them including poisoning them and making them think they’re going insane. You find out what triggers them, what traumas they’ve suffered, and you use this to torment them. You can get someone to befriend them and gain their trust, only for that person to manipulate and inform upon them. An ugly man is a perfect target for the attention and sexual acts of a beautiful woman. That person can also be a conduit for illegal substances which can also be used to frame and imprison the person. Whatever it takes. The English were so effective at infiltrating the IRA that the IRA couldn’t trust anyone anymore, murdering just about anyone suspected of being an informant or English agent. Turns out the ones murdering people suspected of being an informant or English agent were informants and English agents. Nobody does their job better than someone who wants you to believe they’re really into their jobs.
Throughout the book, many people were weary of Low. In fact, there are a few stories of other shady characters whose questionable behavior was dismissed, because they brought in the cash. It reminds me of star athletes who get off the hook for bad behavior so long as they’re winning. This is the story of Johnny Manziel. How different his life might have been if he had a coach who didn’t put up with his BS and suspended him for missing practice or showing up hungover. Nobody dares question a star so long as they’re winning or bringing in the dough.
At the same time, the world of high finance is all about being shady and manipulating and tricking unsophisticated investors out of their wealth. Do you really want a goody-two-shoe, pristine, upstanding person to help your company pull one over on unsophisticated investors? Hell no. You want the narcissistic, sociopath who doesn’t care about destroying a pension fund manager’s entire career and life by selling him questionable and high-risk, complex derivatives. Of course, you run the risk of this soulless shit turning the tables on you and screwing over your company, but you’re more than willing to take that risk, because you’re shortsighted and only see dollar signs.
Who knows if you’ll even be working in five years? Many high finance workers burn out in several years, and most of them get the boot when a recession hits. In other words, the world of high finance attracts immoral losers. Of course, you’re going to look the other way when you see a colleague go out and snort coke, fuck a prostitute, have an affair on his wife with another colleague, steal a little bit of company money, lie, scam, and cheat his way to the top. It’s like being in an organized crime syndicate and going, hey, you see what Jim did yesterday, using racial slurs, getting blackout drunk, getting into a fight, destroying bar property, that Jim is just not cut out for organized crime! It’s absurd.
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