WHEN’S ENOUGH, ENOUGH?
When’s enough, enough? Ask Adolf Merckle of Germany. Well sorry, you can’t ask him anymore because earlier this week he threw himself under a train. After inheriting a small pharmaceutical distributing company and marrying into a family which owned a cement company forty odd years ago, he built an empire which today employs 100,000 plus people spread around the world. Last year he became the 9th richest man in the world with a personal wealth of just under $10 billion. Was he ever happy? The general consensus of opinion was to the contrary. He was not an easy man to get on with, in fact he was plain nasty, and until the day he croaked he checked both sides of each coin before handing it over the counter.
Now I know some people, like that quirky idiot who runs Air New Zealand, Fife “the knife” think it’s cool to risk their lives each day by biking to and from work, but Adolf accomplished this throughout his lifetime simply because he was literally too mean to buy a car! Ironically enough, it was the automobile that brought about his demise. A few weeks back, Volkswagen became the largest company in the world by market capitalization because part-owner Porsche played the “put and call” derivatives game in order to fully acquire Volkswagen. Merckle borrowed heavily to bet against Porsche and in the end had to deliver shares to them at the cost of $billions. The result was (his personal wealth was already heavily leveraged) this time the banks were no longer interested in lending another Euro without major collateral, which literally meant surrendering control of his empire.
This miser, who accumulated his wealth for no other reason than greed, couldn’t stand the thought that his $billions had overnight shrunk to $millions and more importantly someone else namely the Porsche and Pieche families had benefited from an action he undertook thinking it would grow his piggy bank by another $billion or so, not cost him virtually everything he had socked away over the past forty years. As Bruce McNall, that famous spendthrift fraudster who at his peak of fame owned the L.A. Kings hockey team, on replying to a question of why he was so generous (no-one then knew it was actually the banks’ money and not his), retorted, “You never see a Brinks van following a hearse to the graveyard, do you?” Mr Merckle, you are now dead and buried and mate your tombstone should read, “I went to my grave not knowing when enough was enough”. The only thing I can add is the way you died will ensure misery stays in your family for many years to come.
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