Hollywood has at all times had its business-minded celebrities: Consider Fess Parker, who purchased up huge swaths of Southern California actual property, or Roy Rogers, who constructed a restaurant chain in his title. The brand new breed, writes Greenburg, is likelier to spend money on intangibles and speculative tech-based ventures. One to whom he pays explicit consideration is Ashton Kutcher, who constructed a substantial fortune taking part in movie characters corresponding to, fittingly sufficient, Steve Jobs and starring in one of the crucial common sequence on TV, incomes him the very best wage within the enterprise. With a companion, Kutcher based an funding fund price $30 million in 2010 that quickly grew to greater than $250 million. The creator credit him with doing his personal homework and following an funding philosophy: “search for corporations fixing an actual drawback…and take into account unglamorous sectors.” It’s a philosophy that different celebrities, from Shaquille O’Neal to Jennifer Lopez and a small military of hip-hop stars, have taken to following. Examples embrace funding in a Los Angeles–primarily based “firm that makes corporations,” software program that rounds up purchases and invests the change in index funds, and a “Fitbit for cows” that tracks a bovine critter’s reproductive well being and different points. Having movie star spokespeople and buyers helps, however the corporations Greenburg profiles are completely on observe in fixing actual issues, even when they’re typically actual issues that almost all of us don’t have—e.g., the way to snag a seat on a constitution jet in the identical manner an earthbound traveler summons a rideshare driver. Although at coronary heart his ebook is an prolonged journal article, there’s loads of curiosity right here, particularly when the creator seems at ingenious philanthropy corresponding to Matt Damon’s Water.org, which brings plumbing to poor communities but additionally works “to create enterprise funds that generate low single-digit returns by giving low-cost microloans.”
