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“If you believe you can walk on water, people around you will believe you can walk on water,”
Unlike in the past, when belonging to certain families or religious groups was a vital marker of status, the price of entry into the twenty-first century’s global financial aristocracy was simply control of vast amounts of money.
Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, dined with Abraaj investors, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke to them. Tina Turner sang for Arif and his investors at a party in Dubai. As the American pop legend belted out “Simply the Best,” guests sipped vintage champagne served from an ice bar that was melting slowly into the Arabian sand on the beach, fire dancers performed and cigar rollers flown in from Cuba handed out their aromatic wares.
“I have a theory in life,” Arif had told Mustafa when they first met at a World Economic Forum event. “All good people should work together.”
“If everyone says, ‘Heck no!’ there should be huge opportunities.”
a third of the world’s inhabitants lived in the region where Abraaj invested; half of the people there were younger than twenty-five; a billion children would need training and work in the coming decades; 100 million new jobs were needed in the Middle East and North Africa just to stop the already high unemployment rate from rising further.
“This young population is going to want more of everything,” Arif said. “It’s going to want more consumer products, more of the good things in life.”
‘A poor lady from Jericho was producing something that was on a fine dining table in Dubai,’ Arif would say. Arif took a lot of the product and gave it to rich Palestinians in Dubai to show what he was doing.
The meeting to end poverty started with cocktails before dinner.
Impact investing was largely a movement made up of rich people talking to other rich people about what they could do for poor people.
They knew that the smartest investor in New York could well be the dumbest investor in Ouagadougou.
Like many cult leaders, Arif regularly referred to his followers as family. He told employees he was their older brother and insisted he had their best interests at heart.
Currency crashes were a cruel reality that could wipe out good companies as well as bad.
bet that consumer demand in emerging markets was immune to political crises, economic storms and collapsing currencies wasn’t working out
Skoll believed that a good story well told could change society, and he
“The Procter and Gambles, the Unilevers, the Nestlés, the Coca-Colas, and the Kimberly-Clarks of the world have picked this fact up.
The tantrum was familiar to employees. Arif often caused a scene demanding changes at the last minute. The process allowed Arif to believe that he was crucial to identifying and solving problems, an employee said.
This system enabled Arif to live like a billionaire even though he wasn’t one.
The master chess player had become a pawn in a game he no longer controlled.
