Alexander Gilkes: mixing aristocracy with celebrity
"If you wanted to find the invisible thread that links Americanand British money, between aristocracy and celebrity,between art and show business, between old wealth andnew, it would lead back to this man" art entrepreneurAlexander Gilkes, says Helen Rumbelow in The Times."His life is curated, straight from a Fitzgerald or a Franzennovel an artful commentary on 21st-century capitalism."His parties are attended by theglitterati, while Lana Del Reysang at his wedding in Venice.
Old Etonian Gilkes workedfor champagne house Krugbefore following his love ofart to Phillips in New York.But the old-world ways ofthe auction house got Gilkesthinking: "How can youmix the brick-and-mortarexpertise from thepast, but leveragethe accessibilityof eBay?"The answerwas online auctioneersPaddle8 aname he andtwo friendschose onthe spot,because aninvestorthey'd metwas readyto write thecheque thereand then. Thefirm, founded in2011, has rackedup $1bn in bids,including $53m for a Rothko painting.
The meatless burger
"It's not a problem that people love meat and dairy products," Patrick Brown tells the BBC's Katie Hope. "The problem is that we produce them using animals, which is completely inefficient." So the 62-year-old former paediatrician turned professor at Stanford University School of Medicine set up Impossible Foods seven years ago to develop a vegan burger that would appeal to meat eaters.
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The California-based startup's 70 scientists identified the compound responsible for giving minced beef its "richer taste" and "bloody, red colour" heme, a component of haemoglobin, the iron-containing pigment in blood. They added it to ingredients including wheat, coconut oil and potatoes to create the "Impossible Burger", a vegan patty now found on the menus of four upmarket restaurants in the US.
Impossible Foods has attracted funding from big-name venture capital firms including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Horizons Ventures, which invests on behalf of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, but for now, the focus is on development. Sales can wait. "The economics are so much in our favour," says Brown. "It takes a lot of resources to produce a pound of beef."
The man who traded his Jag for a bus
After deliveryman Kimi Takura was hospitalised with exhaustion, he decided he needed an easier life. So in 1992 he sold his Jaguar to buy a second-hand bus to drive tourists around Tokyo. Business boomed and within a year a Taiwanese travel agency wanted more tours. When Takura said he lacked the money, the owner of the agency gave him 20m in a brown paper bag and said "now you can buy the buses", Takura tells Chris Cooper and Katsuyo Kuwako on Bloomberg. "I was flabbergasted."
Today, Heisei Enterprise, Takura's firm, owns a fleet of 400 buses. With an eye to his retirement, the 51-year-old is now planning to list the company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange to ensure its future. "Usually bus companies don't do initial public offerings," he says. But "we're seen as an IT bus firm because we get so much of our money through the internet" something that helped undercut competition. His advice to entrepreneurs is to stick to what you enjoy. "I'm now a bus nerd. Nerds do what they like and it doesn't feel like work."
ROBIN HOOD GALA
(Image credit: 2013 Bloomberg)
How Trump divided the Kushners
If you want a metaphor for how Donald Trump has divided America, consider Jared and Joshua Kushner, the sons of the billionaire property developer Charles Kushner, says Helen Rumbelow in The Times. "One family symbolises the division of a nation, casting them in the kind of melodrama that few siblings' bonds could endure."
At Trump's inauguration last week, the older brother, Jared, 36, was "walking in the reverential procession" behind the president-elect, to whom he is both a son-in-law (he's married to Ivanka Trump) and a close adviser. Meanwhile, 31-year-old Joshua, who has donated $100,000 to the Democratic Party, was snapped on the other side of Washington DC at an anti-Trump rally. Together with his girlfriend of four years, the supermodel Karlie Kloss (pictured with Joshua), the younger sibling is seen as a member of the "glittering liberal elite", says Rumbelow.
The awkward conversations won't end there. Joshua's start-up company, Oscar Health (named in honour of his and Jared's great grandfather), sells insurance to individuals under former president Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. "That is a law that Jared... is uniquely positioned to influence now that he is a senior adviser to [Trump], which puts his younger brother and the start-up in an awkward position," says Katie Benner in The New York Times.
Oscar Health was founded in the offices of Thrive Capital, the venture fund that Joshua started while he was still at Harvard Business School in 2010, which has attracted almost $1.5bn from wealthy individuals, foundations and endowments. That included a small amount from Jared, who is now divesting his shares to avoid a conflict of interest. Joshua may face the same headaches. "For some money managers, even a loose connection to an incoming president could open doors that might otherwise be closed," notes Benner, but Joshua has vowed to stay out of politics.
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Chris Carter spent three glorious years reading English literature on the beautiful Welsh coast at Aberystwyth University. Graduating in 2005, he left for the University of York to specialise in Renaissance literature for his MA, before returning to his native Twickenham, in southwest London. He joined a Richmond-based recruitment company, where he worked with several clients, including the Queen’s bank, Coutts, as well as the super luxury, Dorchester-owned Coworth Park country house hotel, near Ascot in Berkshire.
Then, in 2011, Chris joined MoneyWeek. Initially working as part of the website production team, Chris soon rose to the lofty heights of wealth editor, overseeing MoneyWeek’s Spending It lifestyle section. Chris travels the globe in pursuit of his work, soaking up the local culture and sampling the very finest in cuisine, hotels and resorts for the magazine’s discerning readership. He also enjoys writing his fortnightly page on collectables, delving into the fascinating world of auctions and art, classic cars, coins, watches, wine and whisky investing.
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