Hidden Oil Wells Over Steady Returns

““Ross liked businesses with hidden oil wells, where you could get nothing or a five-fold gain. He preferred that to a business where you were likely to have steady 15 percent returns,”

“Before Warner, virtually everything Ross had done had been a preface; transient; utilitarian. Alliances he had formed had been little but handholds to enable him to climb higher. Now, for the first time, he had appropriated a business that he would not just as happily discard. He would continue to climb—he could not not—but he would never leave its province. He did not need to. It offered him everything he might want: seemingly infinite vistas of business possibility; astronomical compensation; entree to a glamorous, star-studded world. And it was, moreover, a business where his instincts with people—cultivating them, catering to them, winning their favor—would be extraordinarily, even uniquely, useful.”