In this interview, Jeremy Habour explains how he intends to use his deep expertise in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to generate wealth for entrepreneurs, believing that wealthy entrepreneurs become powerful change agents who can tackle major societal problems such as cancer and homelessness. He cites examples like Larry Ellison’s massive investment in cancer research and Sean Parker’s $250 million open‑source cancer‑data platform, arguing that when entrepreneurs are financially empowered they can direct resources efficiently toward issues that matter to them. Habour identifies inequality of opportunity—especially the uneven starting conditions for people from different backgrounds—as a primary societal flaw, and he proposes that leveling the playing field begins with giving more people the chance to become wealthy through business. To that end, he aims to educate entrepreneurs on buying and selling companies, creating capital events, and assembling groups of public companies that can distribute wealth broadly. His mission culminates in a forthcoming book, “Democratizing Wealth,” which will outline his ideas for fixing inequality and making wealth creation more accessible.
Chapters
Yeah, so look, I think about this, or I've been thinking about this for many, many years in terms of the impact I could have on the world because there are so many things you see when you look around you that are broken and need fixing and things that shouldn't really be tolerable in a modern society. And my skill set is pretty narrow. This M&A thing I'm extremely good at. You ask me a question about marketing and I'll just look at you like, I really have a sort of an area of competence that I spend a lot of time on, everything else I'm pretty ignorant of. I look at it as how can I apply the skills that I've got for the maximum impact? What I realized is that entrepreneurs are change agents. When you make entrepreneurs wealthy, they then tend to go on and solve the problems that have affected them in their life. Larry Ellison lost people close to him to cancer, and so he's invested huge amounts in cancer research. Now, because he's an entrepreneur and he's smart, that money is really targeted around things that will have a positive impact and actually solve the problem. Same thing with Sean Parker at Napster. He put $250 million into an open-source system that allows all the cancer research laboratories to share their data. And they reckon that that's shaved 50 years off of cancer research because he's smart, he knows how to target it, it's his area of expertise, and he can have a massive impact with that. So, you know, I believe that you make entrepreneurs rich, they then go and solve, you know, whether it's homelessness, cancer, you know, whatever it is, I think they will then go on and fix that problem. My big bugbear is inequality and mainly inequality of opportunity, the difference that exists for different people to get started in the first place. If you at least give everyone the same chance at the beginning, I think then we have a much fairer society. What people then do with that opportunity is entirely up to them, and they can live or die by those decisions. At the moment, there's too many excuses around where you've come from or what background you have or what opportunities you had when you were young. I was very fortunate with the opportunities I had and the parents I had. And so, yeah, I see that as being a huge advantage in my own life. And I'd like that playing field leveled in that respect. And so the way I see to do that with what I'm doing is basically helping entrepreneurs become wealthy through business, because I think, you know, automatically that doesn't happen. What tends to happen is people work for 20, 30 years. As I say, their income increases, but their lifestyle just increases to fit that income. So if I can educate people on how to buy companies to make their business bigger, how to sell companies to create capital events so they create wealth for themselves, and put together these groups of public companies which effectively empower tons of entrepreneurs with lots and lots of wealth, then we have this chance of reconnecting entrepreneurship with money, because it's got a bit detached in the last 20, 30 years where you don't necessarily have a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yeah, if we can show entrepreneurs how to become wealthy, I think make enough entrepreneurs wealthy, they then go on and solve some of the world's biggest problems. So that's my mission. And I have a book about it. It's called Democratizing Wealth as an author's channel. I've written the first— I've written the skeleton of it. Well, I've written most of it actually, but we need that brutal edit next. So I reckon that one's probably, yeah, 2021 at some point. Democratizing Wealth will come out. There are some ideas in there around how we fix inequality and how we make everything fairer.
