Review: Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World’s Richest Man by Jonathan Conlin

The oil tycoon’s ruthless pursuit of wealth is a lesson in the pathology of greed, says Gerard DeGroot

Sometime in the summer of 1918 Calouste Gulbenkian was writing to his son, Nubar, from the Ritz in Paris. The Germans were shelling the city from 75 miles away. Boom! Gulbenkian told his son about a new oilfield in Borneo. Boom! Momentarily distracted when the room shook, he resumed his letter. “One shouldn’t allow oneself to be put off by those barbarians and idiots,” he wrote. Boom!

That moment at the Ritz perfectly encapsulates Gulbenkian. Nothing distracted him from making money. He was, writes Jonathan Conlin, an “inscrutable force of nature”, loyal only to himself. Although he had a British passport, he was, in truth, a citizen of nowhere.

Financial reasons alone caused him to be in France during the First World War. The French,…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-mr-five-per-cent-the-many-lives-of-calouste-gulbenkian-the-worlds-richest-man-by-jonathan-conlin-x9qc70b9j