Andrew Wilkinson

From Barista to Billionaire

Carnegie's rise from a bobbin boy of thirteen to the richest man in the world.

Franklin's life as printer, scientist, diplomat and founder.

A biography of Bill Gates covering his reinvention after Microsoft.

Buffett's life from Omaha and Graham's class to building Berkshire Hathaway.

Two years shadowing Musk, across SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and the buying of Twitter.

Sam Bankman-Fried's rise through Jane Street, Alameda and FTX to its collapse.

Kissinger's life and years in power, where realism, secrecy and strategy met.

Candid thoughts on illness and mortality.

Dell's founder on the buyout, the Icahn fight and VMware

How a running-shoe importer became Nike, surviving one cash crisis after another.

A daughter's memoir of a California childhood between her mother and Steve Jobs.

Authorised; Ellison's rebuttals run in footnotes throughout.

Steve Jobs's life and Apple's products, from forty interviews with him and many more.

Bill Gross and how he built PIMCO into the largest bond manager, until 2014.

Peter Thiel biography with substantial Palantir founding material.

Samuel Zemurray rose from selling ripe bananas to taking over United Fruit.

A Hollywood producer's life behind The Godfather, Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby.

Buffett's life to 2008, written with full access to his files and his friends.

How Rockefeller built Standard Oil, faced its breakup and gave his fortune away.

Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage

Flow, the state of full absorption in a hard task, and how to find it more often.

Six principles of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, and how sellers use them.

Depression and anxiety traced to lost connections to work, people and values.

Tavris and Aronson focus on what happens after a bias fires: the self-justification, narrative revision, and escalating commitment that follow. Cognitive dissonance, they argue, is not a personality flaw but a universal mechanism, and understanding it explains police misconduct, political tribalism, and therapy failures in a single framework.

An engineer's approach to happiness: the illusions and brain flaws behind suffering.

Daniel Gilbert's accessible account of affective forecasting — our poor ability to predict what will make us happy. His research on immune neglect and focalism is less cited than Kahneman's work but equally well-evidenced.

Change made easier: direct the rational rider, motivate the emotional elephant.

The 'Upper Limit Problem': how people sabotage themselves when good things happen.

Alfred Adler's psychology taught through five nights of dialogue.

Ancient wisdom on happiness tested against modern psychology and brain research.

Eighteen patterns of human behaviour, from irrationality on, and how to handle them.

Michael Lewis's account of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration works as intellectual biography and as a second path through the research for readers who find academic writing slow. The friendship and its eventual fracture clarifies how two very different minds produced work that neither could have done alone.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Rene Girard's theory that people imitate each other's desires, applied to business.

Seven patterns, such as the adjacent possible, in the settings that produce ideas.

Fake documents giving made-up "true stories" of Dylan, the Stones and other bands.

Comic stories: pirates raise a stowaway, a wolf-raised woman, an aging superhero.

In 1979 a prosperous car dealer, co-owner of the lot, is haunted by regrets.

In 1989 an overweight car dealer with a failing heart copes with a son on cocaine.

A novel of a teenager hunting 1980s-themed puzzles in a virtual world for a fortune.

A novel of nine people whose lives are bound up with trees and their defence.

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

Harari's concern — that humans may cede decision-making to opaque systems through preference rather than coercion — reframes the alignment problem as a cultural and political challenge, not only a technical one. Less rigorous than Bostrom or Russell, but more widely read, making it a useful lens for understanding public discourse.

How information networks, from the Stone Age to AI, have made and unmade societies.

America in the summer of 1927: a booming stock market, a great flood and more.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

Churchill's first year as prime minister, from Dunkirk through the Blitz.

Every Berkshire annual letter since 1965, in order, as the company grew.

Synthesis of his mental-models framework, not a life.

Bill Ackman's six-year campaign against bond insurer MBIA, from 2002 to 2008.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

The explicit argument for cloning rather than originating ideas.

Spier on the psychology and habits behind durable value investing.

How Jim Simons's Renaissance used maths and data to earn the best returns on record.

Second-level thinking on risk and cycles, with notes by Klarman and Greenblatt.

Quotation collection with commentary; thin, but the quotes are sourced.

Twelve rules for living, each drawn from clinical practice, biology and myth.

Modern Stoicism; desire management and negative visualisation

Montaigne's life and essays, read as answers to the question of how to live.

Where the worry about others' judgement of us comes from, and how people overcome it.

MacAskill's longtermist argument, grounded in effective altruism, is the most rigorous philosophical case for prioritizing future people. His core claim — that if the future contains vast numbers of people, influencing its trajectory matters more than almost anything we might do for the present — is informed by Derek Parfit's work on personal identity and is the most demanding version of the long-term thinking argument.

Amazon from 2010 to 2020: Alexa, AWS, logistics and its rise to the top.

How Theranos reached a $9 billion value with blood tests that never worked.

Simplicity as Apple's operating principle, from the adman who worked with Jobs.

How Uber grew on subsidies and aggression until its founder was pushed out in 2017.

Amazon's first two decades, from an online bookshop to selling nearly everything.

Behind the scenes of the Murdoch family and its crumbling Fox News empire.

An investigation of Bridgewater that contradicts the firm's public image.

How Enron used mark-to-market accounting and hidden deals until its 2001 bankruptcy.

Step-by-step rules for hosting short, structured parties that build relationships.

How to make sense of the daily torrent of news, and what it does to our minds.

Short pieces of advice on living, goals, generosity, careers, family and money.

Burkeman's book on finitude is the necessary counterweight to grandiose civilizational thinking. Four thousand weeks is approximately an 80-year life, and Burkeman's argument — that productivity systems typically function as denial mechanisms against this fact — forces the question of how a mortal agent ought to orient toward long-term causes. The tension between personal finitude and multigenerational obligation is never fully resolved here, which is exactly right.

Get commitments out of your head into a trusted system, and decide next actions.

Tim Ferriss's book belongs on a personal-finance list not for its investment advice but for its income argument: the fastest way to reach financial independence may be redesigning how and where you work rather than cutting spending to the bone. The 'new rich' framework is deliberately provocative, and the specific tactics age poorly, but the income-side case remains underweighted in most FIRE writing.

Seven habits, from being proactive to win-win, that build personal effectiveness.

Six traits of memorable ideas, from simple and unexpected to emotional stories.

How to find and tell personal stories, and how telling them well helps careers.

The key elements of literary memoir: memory, identity and reflecting on the past.

Why AI must be redesigned from the ground up to keep superhuman machines in check.

How AI could change crime, war, justice, jobs and what it means to be human.

Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb apply economic logic to AI's real contribution: cheap prediction. The framework — AI as prediction machine that changes the relative value of judgment and data — is more useful for understanding where AI creates and destroys value than any amount of case studies.

The OpenAI-DeepMind race that set the shape of Nvidia's customer base.

Why AI and synthetic biology will spread fast and cheaply, and how to contain them.

How a college dropout with no family money made himself a fortune.

Small firms fail when technicians run them; build systems that run the business.

Subtitled 'Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers'

Venture capital from Arthur Rock to SoftBank, and why a few big bets pay for all.

How Ross Ulbricht built Silk Road, the online drug market, until the FBI caught him.

How chips became the key to economic and military power, made in a few chokepoints.

The evidence for a diet that can prevent and treat the leading causes of death.

A diet drawn from 25 years of research on ageing and nutrition, for a longer life.

How sleep, diet and social media feed ADHD-like traits, with Trump as a case study.

A tour of the human body: how it works, how it heals itself and how it fails.

Shackleton's men survive after the ice crushes their ship Endurance in Antarctica.

Eight CEOs who beat the market by allocating capital, not by running operations.

A six-week programme to automate banking, credit, saving and investing.

Interviews with 50 investors, from Dalio to Bogle, turned into money advice.

Twenty short essays on why behaviour matters more than knowledge with money.

Masayoshi Son's rise from Kyushu to SoftBank, Yahoo Japan and the Vision Fund.

How Chuck Feeney made a fortune from Duty Free Shoppers and gave it away in secret.

Sam Altman's life, including his November 2023 firing and return at OpenAI.

From the Harvard Negotiation Project, this examines the negotiations we avoid: performance reviews, relationship ruptures, disagreements about fault. The three-conversation model (what happened, feelings, identity) explains why these go wrong and provides a structure for having them anyway.

Four steps to speak without blame: observations, feelings, needs and requests.

Why America lost the ability to build housing, energy and infrastructure.

Why the US-guarded trading order is ending, and what that means for supply chains.

A tennis champion's life story, built around the fact that he hated tennis.

His America's Cup campaign; the only book covering the later Ellison.

Seven practices, steadiness to timelessness, joining brain science and meditation.

Why tech products stall between early adopters and the mainstream, and how to cross.

A marketing adviser's ideas for growing a business or a career.

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

How GE fell from the world's most valuable company to a conglomerate split in three.

Four traps that ruin decisions, such as narrow framing, and a process to beat each.

Builds out Munger's latticework idea from primary sources.

Prosperity grows as trade and specialisation let ideas meet and combine.

David Ogilvy's life and the making of his famous advertising campaigns.

How BlackBerry maker Research In Motion rose to dominance and fell after the iPhone.

Founder's account of building Firestone; business sense from the tyre trade

A scenario of a nuclear strike on the United States, built on expert interviews.