J. Paul Getty Quotes
My wealth is not a subject I relish discussing.
Getty, J. Paul. How to Be Rich. Playboy Press, 1965.
He was expressing his cynicism about deficit spending leading affluence. However, those who advocate government counter-cyclical spending have never advocated constant deficit spending, but have urged deficit spending for specific periods and when the economy has turned around, stopping the spending and reducing the deficit.
Most of the great industrialists and business people work to create something and change the world somehow. They get rich but that is not typically their major motivation. Most rich people however do not want to trade money for time as they know in a capitalist system rich people can make money without working.
Jean Paul Getty, known widely as J. Paul Getty, was an American-born British petrol-industrialist, and the patriarch of the Getty family. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957, Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approx. $7.4 billion in 2019). At his death, he was worth more than $6 billion (approximately $21 billion in 2019). A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived, based on his wealth as a percentage of the concurrent gross national product.
