Sustained wealth happens when you have a community thinking together. The key person who is visibly wealthy only achieves that wealth because others also have skin in the game and propel them for their benefit.
I am not engaging in "trillionaire worship" like others, but what was instructive about the SpaceX IPO was that the cafeteria workers and janitors at the same company also became wealthy. That is a bigger deal than anything else.
I hear so much talk about founders and investors in African entrepreneurship, but what nobody tells you is that the people who also became wealthy are the people who supported the entrepreneur and the enterprise with work.
Decades ago, I discovered that Dangote's depot operators, when he was selling commodities, were also Naira billionaires in their own right. They didn't need to cheat him to get wealthy, as most misguided people believe employees should do; they had an arrangement that made all of them wealthy.
Dangote took the financial risk while the depot chiefs took the operational risks. I see this same dynamic in many supply chains in Africa. My wife's aunt's 70th birthday in Accra last year was attended by all the key FMCG players and traders who worked together in an ecosystem that they all profited from.
Aliko became rich because his family learned about this model long before anyone else did. He benefited immensely from it, and he is passing this same ecosystem-building approach on to the next generation of his family.
This aspect of African entrepreneurship is rarely discussed. People want to hear grass-to-grace stories or miracles. True wealth in reality is built by communities and ecosystems that work in sync. I will be talking about it a lot more.
I survived surgery yesterday, and I am grateful for another chance to keep doing this.