> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill.

Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them if they keep too many taking crazy risks.

Who is a great genius, and is who is just winning at "The Martingale entrepreneurial strategy"?

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matheist 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You know, it only just now occurs to me to wonder if the blackjack story is the public sanitized version of "how I got $24k because I'm not allowed to tell you the real version"

	▲	askafriend 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Great thought, that seems very likely since so many "founder stories" are heavily spun tales.
	▲	Analemma_ 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Las Vegas still had deep mafia ties in the 1970s so that’s very possible.

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FireBeyond 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What this version of the FedEx story doesn't mention is that Fred was already stiffing his pilots on their salaries. Taking the last money in the company and deciding that the best use for it was the blackjack table in Vegas and not paying his employees ... worked well, but it was a gamble, let's be clear, not a calculated decision - like you say, not the decision of a "great genius". It goes a different way, and you have "FedEx founder decides to go gambling, leaving his employees without paychecks".

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jjmarr 2 days ago | parent [-]

If your marginal utility of money increases with more, it's a rational decision to go to a casino and gamble.

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

The casino is an extremely rational savings model if you expected to constantly be robbed and want to convert small (and thus not worth robbing) income streams into occasionally large sums of money to be spent rapidly. I.e. say you are a north korean worker in China/Russia and you occasionally get small change to spend on cigarettes, you could gamble it every 'paycheck' and eventually buy a phone to escape with the winnings.

Filipinos have a more predictable low-loss version of this call Paluwagan.

	▲	barchar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It can also be a way to evade capital controls. You know you'll lose, but otoh you also know you'll probably not lose _everything_ and you buy in with RMB and cash out in HKD.