What do you get a billionaire — a man who can buy anything he wants?
In the case of real estate mogul and former Tribune owner Sam Zell, the answer might be a dictionary with all the words in it.
“What is an entrepreneur?” Zell asked at a business lunch organized by the Executives Club of Chicago at the downtown Mid-America Club on Wednesday. “It’s someone who doesn’t have the word ‘failure’ in their lexicon: Maybe it didn’t work out at the Tribune, but it wasn’t a failure.”
Given that Zell’s ownership of the Tribune Company ended in its bankruptcy, Messrs. Merriam and Webster may disagree, but Zell, who’s still worth $5.1 billion, according to Forbes, said he’d buy it again in a flash.
“If I were to make that decision today, I still would buy it, because from a risk reward point of view, the reward justified the risk involved,” he said.
Zell, who is promoting his new book, “Am I Being Too Subtle?” also quipped that entrepreneurs “have to be highly self-confident, not that it has to be justifiable, necessarily.”
And when a Chicago Inc. reporter introduced himself as being from the Tribune, Zell joked “What’s that?!”
But while he portrayed himself as being as keen a risk taker as ever, the 75-year-old confessed to Inc. that he had traded in his beloved fire-breathing Ducati motorcycles for a BMW, generally regarded as an old man’s brand.
His latest steed, a BMW 800R, has a top speed of just 135mph.
kjanssen@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @kimjnews
