How Get-Rich-Quick Thinking Replaced Entrepreneurship
Ever since humans learned to live in societies, there have been crafty souls servicing the needs of the market — the market being those people who need things done or things delivered. These crafty souls did not ask for permission. They did not wait for a committee, a regulator, or a grant application to tell them what to do or how to do it. They observed a need, weighed their chances, and attempted to satisfy it for their own benefit. Thus, the entrepreneur was born.
An honest creature, on whom every functioning society quietly depends. Some would even call the entrepreneur the backbone of civilization — though civilization itself rarely returns the compliment.
Almost simultaneously, another species emerged. The chancer.
Today we like to pretend that “get rich quick” is a modern disease, born of social media and zero-interest rates. It is not. Modern communication merely exposes it more efficiently. The chancer has existed as long as humans have formed groups larger than a dinner table. Perhaps even smaller. He is the one who wants wealth without apprenticeship, reward without endurance, success without responsibility. A dreamer who infects others with his dream — sometimes for funding, sometimes for labor, often for both.
We all carry the faint, shameful wish to get rich quickly. That is why lotteries exist. But only the chancer makes it a full-time vocation, forever scanning the horizon for a golden ticket he did not earn.
When gold was discovered in California in 1849, thousands of men rushed west in pursuit of instant fortune. It remains one of the most iconic expressions of that enduring fantasy: no long slog, no patient brick-by-brick construction of competence, no apprenticeship to reality. Dig in the right place, wash dirt in the right stream, and riches would simply materialize. One decisive act. One stroke of luck. Life solved.
That fantasy never died. It merely changes costumes.
While the miners flooded California with shovels and hope, one man discovered a far more reliable goldmine — without ever touching a shovel. Levi Strauss arrived not to dig, but to look. He noticed something unromantic and unavoidable: miners’ trousers were falling apart under the strain of brutal physical labor, performed in environments that offered little comfort and even less mercy. Clothing failed. Bodies suffered. A simple, obvious problem stood there, practically shouting at anyone willing to pay attention.
Strauss responded without spectacle. He designed durable pants from denim, reinforced with rivets — clothing capable of surviving the daily abuse of mining camps. The jean was born. No vision deck. No disruption manifesto. No TED talk. Just a practical solution to a real, urgent problem, implemented with the materials and skills at hand.
Strauss did not arrive in California clutching an “idea.” He arrived, lived there, inhaled the dust, and observed. The market already existed. He did not attempt to conjure it through persuasion or marketing sorcery. He served it. Almost certainly, he had no fantasies of multibillion-dollar outcomes when he began. Yet that is where his company eventually ended up — not through hype, but through persistence, usefulness, and ruthless alignment with reality.
Today, we are living through another gold rush. This one promises not yellow metal in dirt, but digits on screens — valuations conjured out of narratives, leverage, and collective self-delusion. For much of my half-century on this planet, this rush has dominated economic thinking. We call it startup culture. Have an outlandish idea. Go all in. Wean capital from anyone sufficiently optimistic or careless to provide it. Inflate perception. Fake it until you make it. Pray for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The pantheon of modern heroes is well established. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. Their names are ritually invoked as proof that all one needs is a great idea and the nerve to scale it aggressively. Every would-be entrepreneur secretly imagines himself next in line. Wall Street, naturally, has been delighted to encourage this mythology. Money makes money. Bubbles generate valuations. Valuations keep the carousel spinning.
Except that much of it is vapor business.
Originally, business emerged from necessity. A smith who took on apprentices became a business because he alone carried the risk. He paid wages regardless of outcome and reaped rewards only if value was actually created. His employees traded upside for predictability. Businesses produced goods and services people genuinely needed: bread and butter, needle and yarn, shelter and repair. They were physical. Grounded. Unmistakably real.
Today, when someone says “businessman,” they almost certainly mean something else. A venture capitalist who has incinerated millions while producing little besides collateral damage is treated with reverence. Meanwhile, the owner of a small sausage eatery — debt-free, serving customers for decades, with a balance sheet solid as Austrian granite — is met with suspicion, even faint embarrassment. Participation in the vapor economy confers status. Serving a small, tangible corner of the real economy invites awkward questions about ambition and stability.
This inversion tells us everything about the economy we have built.
To make matters worse, a single word now functions as a universal moral shield: innovation. Innovation has become a value in itself, capable of justifying additional zeros on valuations without requiring proof of usefulness. Anything labeled “innovative” is assumed to be worth money — often obscene amounts of it. Unsurprisingly, everyone now wants to be an innovator.
We are surrounded by alleged revolutions: new ways to commute, to consume media, to fold socks, to wipe ourselves after taking a dump. Everything must be reinvented, constantly. Last year is obsolete. Last month is embarrassing. The pace is manic — and almost entirely disconnected from what markets actually want.
Hipsters may chase novelty, but markets do not. Hipsters are fickle; the moment you have them, they are already looking elsewhere. Levi Strauss understood something modern innovators routinely ignore: practicality outlives excitement. He did not innovate for innovation’s sake. He responded to friction he could not avoid seeing.
Innovation divorced from demand is a dangerous sport. For every Amazon or Apple, there are graveyards filled with corpses: Betamax. Microsoft Zune. Google Glass. Segway. LaserDisc. Fire Phone. The list stretches back long before electronics. Most innovations fail not because they are poorly designed, but because they solve problems nobody is sufficiently desperate to have solved.
Modern innovators increasingly resemble casino gamblers, pushing everything onto a single horse and mistaking recklessness for courage. Entrepreneurs are different animals entirely. Entrepreneurs do what needs doing. They open sausage stands where hungry people pass. They run small shops that anchor communities. They tailor conservative clothing for old people who want to look respectable at weddings and funerals. They fix pipes so houses don’t flood. They keep daily life functional.
This space — the physical, necessary economy — has been hollowed out by scale, regulation, and corporate dominance. Competition often exists only on paper. Yet this is where real value is still created.
Words written years ago remain painfully relevant. We need entrepreneurs, and we need to appreciate them. Western societies have become entrepreneur-hostile and startup-crazed. My father was an entrepreneur. He was not innovative. He did not disrupt anything. He worked, served, and carried responsibility. He put bread on the table. That is entrepreneurship.
I am deeply concerned about America’s future for many reasons, but one stands out. Its leadership has fundamentally misunderstood what produces economic recovery. They speak as if innovation alone will save the country. Jobs, we are told, will come from innovation — so we must bet the future on it.
This is wrong. Innovation has no value until it creates a customer. The Internet itself was a brilliant, government-sponsored innovation that would have remained a curiosity without entrepreneurs turning it into an economic engine. One of the greatest economic expansions in history came not from invention alone, but from commercialization — from people willing to build businesses, absorb losses, and persist.
Innovation and entrepreneurship are not chicken and egg. That analogy is false. They are cart and horse — and entrepreneurship is the horse. The cart of innovation goes nowhere unless someone harnesses it to a viable business model and drags it, often painfully, through reality.
America excels at intellectual development. It identifies talent early, accelerates education, and feeds its elite university system. This has produced extraordinary innovation. But entrepreneurship is not cultivated with the same intent. Until it is — through early exposure, practical training, and real risk — economic stagnation will persist.
Against this backdrop, figures like Elon Musk provoke extreme reactions. He is adored and despised in equal measure. Intelligence matters, of course, but Musk’s defining trait is not academic brilliance. It is instinctive systems awareness. He understands — often without articulating it — that large human systems ossify under fear: fear of blame, failure, and loss of status.
Most people obey those rules. Musk burns them. He violates norms, ignores bureaucratic paralysis, and weaponizes discomfort. This is not moral purity. It is applied ruthlessness. In a world strangled by compliance officers and safety memos, such behavior feels almost refreshing.
Many powerful people are sociopaths in tailored suits. Musk is at least entertaining. He understands how susceptible people are to idiotic behavior and exploits it efficiently. I have never met the man. My impressions come from public behavior and secondhand accounts. Still, I am quietly glad he exists. In a century ruled by cowards, it is bracing to see someone willing to play the villain.
Yet Musk is the exception that proves the rule.
When I was still trapped in the corporate terrarium, the head of Business Development vanished one day — not fired, just gone. A few days later, I was offered his position. I knew I was stepping from operations — where things either worked or they didn’t — into a paper kingdom where PowerPoint substituted for progress.
They misjudged me. I dismantled the department and rebuilt it into a problem-solving unit. We delivered projects, not memos. This was not innovation. It was entrepreneurship smuggled into hostile territory.
Modern organizations drown in ornamental departments. Politics emerges with as few as twenty people. At fifty, it becomes systemic. Camouflage replaces competence. Honesty becomes dangerous. In very large institutions — especially public ones — only bandits and idiots remain in management. Their purpose is no longer mission or service, but protecting access to money.
This is where innovation goes to die — and where entrepreneurship is strangled.
Innovation is a tool, not an end in itself. As Elon Musk has often repeated, the best part is no part. His innovation is subtraction. Use what works. Favor common sense. Choose cheap, strong, heavy steel over fragile, expensive carbon fiber. Make the rocket more powerful instead of more delicate. Innovation applied, not worshipped. He does not dream up something “innovative” and then attempt to seduce the market. He solves problems. That is how it should be done. That is when innovation actually matters.
Anything else is religion. A get-rich-quick scheme for chancers.
And none of it functions without entrepreneurship. Corporations are about as entrepreneurial as a moon rock. Entrepreneurship can only emerge bottom-up, from those with genuine skin in the game. Hired guns are structurally incapable of producing it. Without true entrepreneurs, there will be corporate chicanery, but little innovation — certainly nothing durable.
The entrepreneur comes first. This species we have nearly beaten to death. It is time to abandon startup nonsense and finally give real entrepreneurs — the unglamorous, stubborn, useful ones — the attention and applause they have long deserved.
