Part of this trend - achieving notable financial success at younger ages - can be verified. It was obvious over the last ten years. Dinesh D’Souza in The Virtue of Prosperity, p.21 (Free Press 2000) states: “ Only in the last decade have we seen twenty-eight year olds sporting a net worth in excess of $1 billion. The emergence of so many young people with so much money has changed all the rules about affluence in America. ” According to the Forbes.com website, the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans for the year 2000 had a median and average age of about 50 years old, and the median age on the entire list dropped from 66 years of age to 60 years since 1996.

But whether this trend will continue over time, and whether it will change the life careers of the “ first generation ” wealthy, is something that is inherently impossible to verify at this early stage. What is clear is that modern financial markets and modern marketing techniques can compress the time it takes to go from the startup stage to a major business success, and then from turning that success into saleable wealth to starting again on a new business or other endeavor.

Even if it persists, this trend is, of course, a matter of degree, rather than a novel departure from the past. John D. Rockefeller, for example, became wealthy in the agricultural produce business while in his twenties, and then capitalized on the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania by building an empire that controlled the distribution of lamp oil in the U.S. But then he redirected his efforts entirely into gasoline refining when the discovery of Edison’s electric light bulb killed the lamp oil industry and Henry Ford and others began to build the automobile industry. This last transition was even more difficult than it seems because John D. passed up an early opportunity to invest in what turned out to the discovery of oil in Texas, which far eclipsed the discoveries in the East and spawned new major oil companies. At the age of 57 he redirected most of his daily attention from his oil business to philanthropy, which had always been part of his life due to his religious background. Andrew Carnegie followed a somewhat similar path, being financially successful early in life. He sold his steel company at age 66 and devoted his later years to giving away almost his entire fortune, practicing what he preached in his famous “ Gospel of Wealth. ” The newspapers at the time kept score of who gave more, and declared Carnegie the winner.