(5 of 10)
Kapor still attends business meetings in blue oxford-cloth shirts, rumpled khakis and running shoes. He operates out of a cramped 12-ft. by 15-ft. office in the company's headquarters, a four-story former glue factory. Says he: "I believe the trick is to be ambitious but not driven."
Walter Gilbert, 51, co-founder of Biogen, a genetic-engineering firm. Gilbert, who studied chemistry and physics at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Cambridge, has spent most of his life working with genes. While a professor of molecular biology at Harvard, he won the Nobel Prize in 1980 for his work in exploring the DNA molecule. By then, Gilbert and eight other scientists had decided, at the urging of financiers, to capitalize on their knowledge. With $750,000 in venture capital, they incorporated Biogen in Curasao in The Netherlands Antilles. The company's goal is to discover, produce and sell practical applications of gene-splicing technology.
Biogen has never made an annual profit, and lost $5.7 million during the first nine months of last year. But it is considered one of the hottest companies in a field that is likely to be a great growth area in the next decade. The firm produces interferon, a substance that is being tested against a variety of illnesses, ranging from cancer and herpes to the common cold. Gilbert and his wife hold shares that were worth $12 million at the public offering in March, and he draws a salary of $274,200 as chairman of Biogen.
Very little has changed for Gilbert. The scientist and his wife still reside near Harvard. Says he: "We live in a very simple fashion. I come from a typically academic background, where you have an adequate income and are not really in it for the money."
The enormous fortunes of big stock market winners would appear to dwarf the wealth made by businessmen in earlier eras. In 1848 John Jacob Astor, the fur trader and real estate owner, was the richest man in the U.S. with $20 million. At his death in 1877, Railroad Pioneer Cornelius Vanderbilt left $100 million. John D. Rockefeller was said to be worth nearly $1 billion when he died in 1937. After adjustments for inflation, however, the older fortunes remain impressive. Moreover, fortunes made before 1913 were not subject to the federal income tax. Astor's $20 million would probably be worth $233 million today. Vanderbilt's $100 million is the equivalent of $947 million, and Rockefeller's $1 billion would be the same as nearly $7 billion.
There have never been so many millionaires walking about as there are today. While only 13,000 people could claim a net worth of $1 million in 1948, as many as 500,000, a number nearly equal to the population of Milwaukee, qualified in 1981. Even an annual income of $1 million is no longer enough to set one apart from the masses. In 1920 just 23 people reported making $1 million or more. In 1981, the latest year for which figures are available, 5,286 people, including an assortment of baseball players and rock stars, filed tax returns showing incomes of more than $1 million.
Since World War II, there has been no surer way of making big money legally than founding a company and taking it public.