Meet powerhouse Xin Zhang, the woman who catapulted herself from a factory assembly-line worker at age 15 in 1980 to one of the 10 richest self-made women in the world by 2010. A sobering reminder that young mainland Chinese could work in Hong Kong, study abroad, and, in Xin’s case, return and rebuild skylines during the greatest urbanization in China’s 5000-year history. She tells us, “It was such an incredible moment to mobilize the whole country; everyone felt so excited, and there was such optimism in the air.”

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Read on, and please consider subscribing to publications that educate and inform…which may, in turn, mobilize us to fix problems in our own communities. A lot of my Substack readers email me about paywalls, but the Wall Street Journal offers a $2-a-week subscription! (And the New York Times now has a $1 a week Spring offer subscription!)

In this weekend’s Review Section of the Wall Street Journal, I try to tackle the reasons smart people were so dumb. Sex aside, why did Senators, scientists, Wall Street’s top lawyer, doctors, and entrepreneurs park their morals before they entered his lair?

I believe I know why: it’s how power ticks in New York. Here, I’m not judging nor exonerating, my goal is to explain.

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He’s to the point, original, and doesn’t shy from difficult questions – in fact, he attacks them with grace, wit, and honesty. Sit with a cup of tea or a glass of wine and enjoy an interview where you may learn about art as an asset class, how to handle a testy billionaire or a self-questioning creative type, and the very role art plays in our democracy.

Read on and enjoy at the Wall Street Journal.

Holly

And, by the way, please subscribe to this great newspaper and any newspaper or magazine you enjoy. We all thrive from an active press that relies on devoted readers!

MoMA’s Former Director on How to Handle Artists and Billionaires

FOR THE PAST three decades, Glenn Lowry made a habit of traipsing through each gallery of the 708,000-square-foot Museum of Modern Art in New York City on weekday mornings. Trim and fit, wearing his signature Nehru-collared jacket, he might have been found kneeling to erase a smudge on the wall, peering up to check on a painting’s lighting or simply standing alone in a corner, witnessing how people flowed through a gallery. Lowry admits, “I drove the facilities guys crazy.”

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IN THE EARLY DAYS of MTV, the receptionist sold cocaine and the office had one clothing rule: no frontal nudity. Such was the circus atmosphere of the place, according to Tom Freston, whose memoir, “Unplugged,” reveals how a team of die-hard believers turned music into television.

By 1969, he’d earned an M.B.A., but soon after nixed his banker-bro side part, quitting his job at Benton & Bowles advertising firm. Why? He says talking about mouthwash or toilet paper for hours with clients “didn’t turn me on.”

Instead, Freston hopscotched the globe for a decade, living in Southeast Asia as he launched a multimillion-dollar clothing business. Returning to the U.S. in 1979, he became part of the initial squad that launched MTV in August 1981 with a paltry 160 music videos.

Freston’s unusual and messianic marketing department got megastars like David Bowie and Mick Jagger to scream, “I Want My MTV!”—a campaign designed to strong-arm cable systems into carrying the fledgling station. Between seductive advertisements and must-see videos, Freston and his cohorts had made enough noise by 1985 that Viacom decided to purchase MTV Networks for $550 million (a deal that included Nickelodeon and VH1). Two years later, Sumner Redstone made a hostile bid for Viacom, buying the company for $3.4 billion.

Freston drove consistent double-digit growth for 17 years; by 2001 the company had reached $3 billion in revenue—the shiniest gem in the Viacom universe. Hiring misfits and creative oddballs, Freston and his team launched Comedy Central and stars including Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.

MTV is back in the headlines, with David Ellison’s Paramount looking to revive its legacy with younger listeners—a tough road, given that the median MTV audience is now 56 years old, according to Nielsen, and that the brand’s cachet faded in the post-Freston era with the rise of digital media. Here, the CEO who built the company into a juggernaut talks about how the unconventional network fought its way into the mainstream.

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When Ruth Porat was 6 years old, her physicist father would come home from his job at the Stanford Accelerator Laboratory and the two would tinker for hours in the garage, soldering radios and adding machines. Perhaps he had a hunch that putting his daughter at ease around gadgets would one day set her up for a good job.

How about a massive job? Today, as the chief investment officer and president of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Porat oversees global corporate investments as well as Alphabet’s “other bets,” including Waymo self-driving cars and the drone-delivery startup Wing. During her decadelong tenure, the company’s market capitalization has soared from $384 billion to nearly $3 trillion.

Porat is known for the clarity of her vision and intent, despite her leadership role at a company that includes a dizzying array of products, such as Google Search and Cloud, YouTube, Android and Chrome. To maximize her team’s output, she pushes her teams to stop focusing on the branches—“Look at the whole tree.”

Before arriving in Silicon Valley, Porat hacked her way through the jungles of Wall Street. Starting in the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley months before the crash of 1987, she went on to co-head tech investment banking during the early, heady days of the internet. These smart risks opened new doors and eventually led to her running the financial institutions group (a position, she says, that she had initially assumed would be “so boring”).

How does Porat explain her rise? “My record of making things work and delivering so people wanted to take a risk on me.” It’s just one of the reasons leaders in the private and public sector have placed her in central roles—and often in the hottest of hot seats.

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I once dated a Frenchman for his cashmere blazer—the buttery feel on my cheek, the faint caramel scent in the chilly October sun. We lasted one Parisian autumn. I was more in love with the style than the man.

This fall, on urban sidewalks and rural paths, you’ll find plenty of variations on that country-gentleman look: tweed blazers, chocolate-suede laced ankle boots and a playful purple sock peeking out from under a forest-green corduroy cuff. Not to mention all those of-the-moment barn jackets. Brands in this space include Loro Piana, Fendi (which last year released a Princess Anne-inspired menswear collection) and, if you fancy a cashmere sweater pricier than a Porsche 911, the Italian brand Brunello Cucinelli.

The style is rooted in the culture of the British grouse shoot, where European men and women stomp through muddy hillsides, typically in shooting parties of nine or ten. Whether shooting or watching, they don tweed suit jackets and trousers, wool buttoned vests and earth-colored sweaters—a look as far from the tactical cargo gear and backward baseball caps of American hunters as a banana split is from a flaky Napoleon pastry. (The best shooting grounds in both the U.S. and U.K. are models of conservation for nongame wildlife and proper land use. All downed birds are sold for their free-range meat.)

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In high school, Peter Brant cut class to gamble on horse racing at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York, by asking an adult to take him inside. At the University of Colorado, he partied at fraternities with such gusto his father took away his car keys until his grades improved. Average kid stuff—if you consider it normal for a 19-year-old to use his stock market earnings to buy art from a then virtually unknown Andy Warhol.

Brant, 78, says spotting the artist’s genius early wasn’t luck. “I just knew it,” he says. “I was always a believer.” He went on acquiring contemporary art, selling some works purchased later for as much as $100 million. His advice on detecting a masterpiece? Go look at it in a museum 50 times; you’ll learn something every time.

Brant’s transformation of the family paper business, by purchasing several paper mills and expanding operations, turned him into a billionaire industrialist and the philanthropist behind the Brant Foundation, Inc., dedicated to the exhibition and study of contemporary art. He purchased Warhol’s Interview magazine from the estate in 1987 and owned it until 2018, when his daughter Kelly relaunched it. Now CEO of newsprint-manufacturer White Birch Paper (The Wall Street Journal is a customer), he restructured the company in 2020 under Chapter 11 because of declining demand.

Brant’s life has been riddled with epic lows. Now married to his second wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, he’s lost two of his nine children (Harry, who died from an accidental overdose at 24, and Ryan, who died of cardiac arrest at 47). He also got into legal trouble in 1984 for failure to keep proper records, a misdemeanor that he calls “a horrible experience” but which he credits with making him a better person.

But Brant has also experienced expansive highs, as a polo player who reached the highest rating for an amateur and as the breeder of champion thoroughbreds. Swale, a dark bay colt he co-owned, won the Kentucky Derby in 1984, while several others bred by Brant won the Breeders’ Cup. His youthful obsession with horses, which he now calls a “disease of passion,” paid off.

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Though tricky to confirm, Donna Karan is almost certain she’s improved the sex lives of her customers. Her essential pieces prize comfort and confidence over constrictive patterns, putting men and women at ease with their body and look. And because she tries on all her creations herself (and, as she freely admits, doesn’t wear a bra), most of her colleagues have seen her topless at some point. At times forgetting she was half-naked when someone popped into her office, she’d simply ask, “Yes? What do you need?”

Karan’s authority blossomed early when she became the head designer of Anne Klein at age 25. It didn’t hurt that she’d grown up on Seventh Avenue (both parents worked in fashion; as a girl she watched the Thanksgiving parade from her father’s second-floor office at Macy’s). In 1985, then 36, she launched her own company, Donna Karan New York, with seven pieces that moved gracefully from day to night, from work to socializing. For women, this meant bodysuits, wrap-and-tie skirts, tailored jackets, suede wrap jackets and camel coats. For men (after the launch of DK Men in 1992), black crepe suits, sportswear, knit T-shirts, tailored trenches and cashmere sweaters that Karan knew “women would steal.”

In 2001, Karan sold the company to LVMH and stayed on as chief designer until 2015. Now she’s focusing her energy on Urban Zen, a lifestyle brand she founded in 2007 that combines fashion, accessories, home décor and wellness. (Its integrative-health initiative is a legacy of the cancer treatments Karan’s husband, Stephan Weiss, received before his death in 2001; toward the end of his life, Karan performed Reiki on him every day.)

The designer isn’t shy about her spirituality. While reviewing documents for the sale of DKNY, she told the assembled group that Mercury was in retrograde—a terrible time to enter into any contract—and that they should put it off. Having none of it, her lawyer urged her to sign, saying, “This is the best f—ing deal I’ve seen in my whole career.”

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Ahh, the sounds of summer: a cannonball ka-plunk in the pool, a whoosh down a slip and slide on the lawn. But when your kids and their guests move inside this season, it’s not a pretty sight. There’s more chaos in our homes now than at any other time of the year. They’ll scatter explosions of Doritos bigger than any splash in the water.

Young visitors aren’t always helpful. Ever hear a hollow “Lemme know what I can doooooooo?” from a teen or 20-something? The last part trails off as they run to the pool, leaving behind wet towels limper than their offer to pitch in.

If you have kids who can plot a calculus curve but forget how to clear a table, I have a solution: a Google Chore Doc. It’s a list of all the tasks in my life that I either can’t or don’t want to do.

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ICONOCLASTS DON’T waste their time or ours. We know entertainment mogul Barry Diller bested most of his rivals, although a few—notably Sumner Redstone—outmaneuvered him. So when Diller takes his gloves off in his new memoir, he confronts what we couldn’t see. His backstage positioning to chomp entire companies whole; the contrast between working for someone else versus for himself; and, on a personal level, his demons. Case in point, Diller on his attraction to men: “I had wanted so desperately to alter my sexuality as a child and teenager and I had tried so hard and failed. I was left with an unquenchable need to be vigilant about every other aspect of my life.” On his much gossiped-about relationship with his now-wife, Diane von Furstenberg: “We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept up for years.”

Diller broke out of the William Morris mailroom at age 24 and turned the Movie of the Week at ABC into must-see TV, producing hits including Go Ask Alice and Brian’s Song. Ever heard of Saturday Night Fever or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Both came out during his decadelong stewardship of Paramount from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. After more than seven years running a second major studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and releasing blockbusters such as Home Alone, he left Hollywood and went on to acquire the Home Shopping Network (HSN). Before most of his peers understood the term interactivity, Diller had seized on the commercial potential of merging telephones and televisions. He also made a series of strategic acquisitions that transformed his media holdings into a diversified digital empire under IAC (formerly InterActiveCorp).

Unlike many entertainment or business icons who write memoirs to bolster legacies and egos, Diller faces facts: No one can run or reposition several studios and networks without a few spectacular swan dives. He remembers a time in the mid-1990s when he was “a mogul manqué,” “nationally known damaged goods,” after losing his bid to buy Paramount. He recounts “glorious dead ends” and how Google “manhandled” him out of opportunities. But he never let these setbacks hamper his momentum. Instead, he owned the simple truth: They won. We lost. Next.

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When you look back at your career at this juncture, do you see strokes of luck here and there, or simple grinding hard work? There’s no correct or humble answer. Maybe you believe one chance meeting at a bar led to where you stand now. Steve Jobs credits a font class in college with pretty much everything that followed at Apple.

Others believe there’s no such thing as luck on the job: you put yourself in situations to Earn Your Luck. Or your drive and experience allow you to better recognize luck when it comes your way and you seize it.

Either way, Ursula Burns, legendary CEO of Xerox, doesn’t believe luck exists on the job: you don’t walk into a room, and they hire you. Even an actor on an audition walks in prepared to impress.

Read the first installment of Earn Your Luck at the Wall Street Journal:

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Beyond the discreet gates of frou-frou hotels and patrician country clubs, a tsunami swells from Mar-a-Lago's gilded lobbies. The flotsam includes MAGA partyers in rinse/repeat celebration mode and a stream of Black SUVs for Donald Trump and his entourage. These centipede-like motorcades shut down traffic instantly, regularly and without warning.

New security measures, introduced after the assassination attempts over the summer, have made travel by air, land and sea in Palm Beach a testing affair whenever Trump's in town. The president-elect now crosses blockaded bridges like Brezhnev's Soviet convoys speeding through Moscow's emptied thoroughfares.

For blue-blood locals who have crafted an otherwise frictionless existence here, these daily disruptions are maddening. Hell hath no fury like a blue-haired lady in a magnolia Lilly Pulitzer dress insisting on order.

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'Tis the tipping season. Time to show appreciation for those making our lives better or easier: the hairdresser, the babysitter, the mail carrier.

But in Manhattan's high-end buildings, there's another category of helper to reward: the doormen. The Big Apple version of the British beefeater, proud and loyal standard-bearers guarding some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

In high-rise condos with 800 apartments and dozens of employees, workers generally receive $5 to $100 each. In the snootiest buildings, tips swing from the miserly to the munificent: $50 to $1,500.

Non-New Yorkers might assume our trusty doormen only open doors, hail taxis and accept packages. That's like saying a nanny just wipes up spilled milk.

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No matter where you socialize, there are two types of dinner party guests: those who want to know the guest list ahead of time and others who prefer the serendipity of a naive encounter.

Though attitudes on this issue differ, everyone agrees on one party foul: You cannot ask who else is coming before committing to a dinner. And if your host is the helpful type who discloses some or all of the attendees as the event approaches, no canceling because you find one of them annoying.

As a guest, do you want to know who is coming?

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Sturdy red curtains cordon off the lives of plutocrats at play. To better hide their gilded world from the 99.9%, the super-rich avoid high-end labels, favoring "quiet luxury" and "stealth wealth." When this affluent army enters our world, they camouflage themselves with earthy-colored cashmere and luxurious suede.

Yank back those curtains, however, and a quandary emerges for the highest of high-net-worth individuals. How to signal to each other where they rank on the totem pole?

Today, especially with talk of new wealth taxes heating up on the campaign trail, gauche display is out. A subtler set of cues and signifiers is required.

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When rich people hang out, the conversations are always laced with one-upmanship. Tennis elbow? My orthopedist can fix all. Long Island to Cape Cod? Fly private from East Hampton—it's the only way.

It's summertime, and wealthy New Yorkers who moved to Florida are back North. From East Hampton to Kennebunkport, everyone's in the same sandbox now. It's time to compare who has the shiniest bucket: those who decamped or those who stayed.

Palm Beach: the best decision ever? Yep, or so they claim. They golf before work and take a dip on Billionaires' Row beachfront after work. It's only two hours by speedboat to go bonefishing in the Bahamas.

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