The oil man J. P. Getty was once asked how people could become as rich as he was.
It's very easy to believe that, had he cared to try, Stallman might have become as rich as Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, or any other Silicon Valley nabob.
And there are the locals who have become as rich as summer people by working for them as contractors and landscapers.
When it joined the EU in 2007, many citizens thought the country would quickly become as rich as France or Germany.
Just as the Spanish and Irish rapidly caught up with the economies of the other countries in the EU after they joined the club, so the Poles, Czechs and others will become as rich as their western cousins.
I knew what was happening with the environment, but before I became minister I thought the environment could wait and that we could solve our environmental problems when we have become as rich as the West.
Pretty much every page gleams with Cusk's darkly humorous powers of observation: "At 25 Howard was already rich and losing his hair, two things that seemed to go together, though he has never become as rich as Thomas expected him to be, nor as bald either".
And he suggests that the motivating force behind his reckless piloting of the bank's move into risky markets, like his decision to build a Gatsbyesque "casino of a house" in the small town of Finden, where his mother once cleaned houses, stems simply from his desire to become as rich as the people who once employed her.
In some of the glorious Baroque and Rococo monastic libraries that followed, architecture became as rich as the plot of any Romantic novel.
It's no coincidence, then, that a ferocious bull market has made it possible for hired hands to become as rich as investors on board from the start.
