【英语生活】亿万富翁婚姻稳固的奥秘 The mystery of billionaires’ improbably long marriages

To be a billionaire, the first thing you need is a personality disorder.

That is what I had always assumed, based on my own experience of having interviewed a few of them. Now I have corroboration from someone who knows what she is talking about. Justine Musk, who spent eight years married to the man behind PayPal, SpaceX and now Tesla Motors, has taken it upon herself to share with the world her view that those who achieve great things are mostly “freaks and misfits”.

Her remarks were in response to an earnest question recently posted on Quora: How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson? The short answer, she wrote, is you can’t.

The longer answer amounts to one of the best explanations of success I have ever read. According to her it comes in two types: normal success — involving hard work, talent etc — and extreme success — as enjoyed by her ex. The normal variety she recommends; the extreme version is only available to those who are born that way. “They are dyslexic, they are autistic, they have ADD, they are square pegs in round holes, they piss people off, get into arguments, rock the boat.”

So they find something bigger than themselves to obsess over and work insanely hard, she explains. It is their way of coping.

At a stroke Ms Musk has destroyed the whole self help industry. Seen like this, there is absolutely no point in studying extreme success. If you aren’t born like that, you will never achieve it. And you would not want to anyway.

However, these billionaires remain of zoological interest, particularly in terms of how they manage their personal lives. Ms Musk’s view on this is pretty grim. Extreme success, she reckons, comes complete with “family drama, issues with the Significant Other you rarely see, dark nights of the soul?.?.?.?little sleep, less sleep than that”.

In other words, billionaires are rotten people to marry. Which is also precisely what I had always thought.

Mr Musk himself sounds like a particularly bad marital bet: shortly after divorcing Ms Musk he married an actress, only to divorce and remarry her in quick succession. Now he is in the process of divorcing her again.

Yet just as I was congratulating myself on not having married a billionaire, I started thinking about the other names in the Quora question — Bill, Richard and Steve. The remarkable thing about them is not that they have gone through wives as quickly as the twinkling of a bed post, but that they have mostly found one and stuck with her.

Bill Gates, who married Melinda 21 years ago, appears to have one of those marriages so solid that if I discovered the two were splitting up, I would feel let down, as if the world had become a less dependable place. Sir Richard Branson, after a starter marriage in his early 20s, is still married to his second wife after 25 years. And Steve Jobs remained married to the same woman for 20 years, until he died.

If you go down the Forbes billionaires list a weird pattern starts to emerge. More than 40 per cent of all marriages end in divorce, but among the extremely successful, who one might have expected to be extremely unsuccessful in wedlock, the reverse seems to be the case.

Carlos Slim, number two on the Forbes list after Mr Gates, was married to the same woman for 32 years, until she died in 1999. Warren Buffett (#3) remained married to his first wife for 52 years (although for much of that time he was living with a cocktail waitress whom he married on his wife’s death).

Further down the list there are only a few who have exhibited certain traits of ADD in their approach to matrimony: Larry Ellison has had four wives and Ronald Perelman five. They are the exceptions — more of the billionaires seem to be on first wives than those who are not. This is not much of an achievement for Mark Zuckerberg who only tied the knot in 2012, but Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell have been married for more than 20 years apiece, Eric Schmidt for more than 30, Ray Dalio at Bridgewater has notched up about 40 while Phil Knight of Nike is heading towards his golden wedding.

How can such stability happen? These billionaires have all lived in the grip of a rip-roaring obsession with work that should have ruined all relationships, and all have enough money to attract gorgeous new wives — and to pay off old ones.

I have no idea what the reason is, but I wonder if it might be that when the truly weird find someone who suits them, they don’t give them up in a hurry. Or perhaps it is that if you are transfixed by your work, an affair offers insufficient thrill. Or it could simply be that if you hardly ever see your spouse, he or she is significantly less likely to get on your nerves.

要成为亿万富翁，你需要的第一样东西就是人格障碍。

我一直是这样想的，依据就是我自己以前采访几个亿万富翁的经历。现在，我的猜想得到了一位懂行人士的证实。曾与埃隆?马斯克(Elon Musk)夫妻8年的贾丝廷?马斯克(Justine Musk)，主动与世界分享了她的看法。在她看来，那些取得了非凡成就的人，大多都“古怪、不合群”。埃隆?马斯克创办了PayPal、SpaceX和特斯拉汽车(Tesla Motors)。

贾丝廷?马斯克的话，是为了回答Quara上最近贴出的一个严肃问题：我如何能像比尔?盖茨(Bill Gates)、史蒂夫?乔布斯(Steve Jobs)、埃隆?马斯克或理查德?布兰森爵士(Sir Richard Branson)那样伟大？她的回答用一句话来概括就是，你不能。

她的详细回答则是我读过的关于成功的最佳解释之一。在她看来，成功分为两种：普通的成功（靠勤奋工作、天赋等等）和非凡的成功（如她的前夫实现的那种成功）。她推崇普通的成功；非凡的成功则只属于那些天生如此的人。“他们有读写障碍，他们有孤独症，他们有注意力缺失症(ADD)，他们是圆孔里的方头钉，他们把别人惹毛，跟人吵架，把平静的地方搅得鸡犬不宁。”

于是，他们找到某种超越自身的东西去痴迷，并疯狂地工作，她解释道。这是他们与这个世界的相处之道。

贾丝廷?马斯克一下子就摧毁了整个励志行业。照她的观点来看，研究非凡的成功毫无意义。如果你不是天生如此，你永远都不会实现非凡的成功。并且，你反正也不会想要这样的成功。

然而，作为一个特殊的人群，这些亿万富翁仍然是有意思的研究对象，特别是就他们如何安排个人生活而言。贾丝廷?马斯克在这方面的看法非常冷酷。她认为，非凡的成功少不了“家庭变故，与伴侣感情不好、很少见面，灵魂的黑夜……少眠，失眠”。

换句话说，亿万富翁是靠不住的结婚对象。这也是我一直以来的想法。

埃隆?马斯克本人听上去就是个格外不可靠的结婚对象：与贾丝廷?马斯克离婚后不久，他娶了一个女演员，然后两人离婚，又迅速复合。现在，他已第二次与这个女演员离婚。

然而，就在我庆幸自己没有跟亿万富翁结婚时，我开始思考Quara上那个问题中提到的其他几个名字——比尔、理查德和史蒂夫。他们身上令人惊异之处，并非是他们走马灯似地换夫人，而是他们基本上都找到了适合自己的那个人，然后对她不离不弃。

比尔?盖茨21年前与梅琳达(Melinda)结婚，两人的婚姻看上去那么稳固，假如有一天两人分手，我肯定会备感失望，就好像世界变得不那么可靠了一样。理查德?布兰森爵士20岁出头的时候结过一次婚，他的第二次婚姻如今已走过25个年头。史蒂夫?乔布斯与同一个女人结婚20年，直到他去世。

如果你逐个研究福布斯(Forbes)财富榜上那些亿万富翁，你会发现一条奇怪的规律。他们的婚姻超过40%以离婚收场，但在那些特别成功、可能会被认为婚姻非常失败的人中，情况似乎是相反的。

福布斯财富榜第二名、排在盖茨之后的卡洛斯?斯利姆(Carlos Slim)，与同一个女人结婚32年，直到她1999年去世。沃伦?巴菲特（Warren Buffett，财富榜排名第三）与头一任妻子结婚52年（尽管他很多时间与一名鸡尾酒女招待生活在一起，头任妻子去世后，他就和女招待结了婚）。

排名略为靠后的人中，只有少数几个在婚姻中显示出某种ADD症状：拉里?埃里森(Larry Ellison)有过4任妻子，罗纳德?佩雷尔曼(Ronald Perelman)现在的妻子是他的第5任。他们俩是例外——亿万富翁中仍在与首任妻子相守的人数似乎超过了不是这样的人数。对马克?扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)来说，这算不上很大的成就，因为他2012年才结婚，不过，杰夫?贝索斯(Jeff Bezos)和迈克尔?戴尔(Michael Dell)都已结婚20多年，埃里克?施密特(Eric Schmidt)已结婚30多年，布里奇沃特(Bridgewater)的雷?戴利奥(Ray Dalio)已结婚40年，耐克(Nike)的菲尔?奈特(Phil Knight)还有几年就将迎来金婚。

这些亿万富翁的婚姻怎么会这么稳定？他们都是超级工作狂，这原本应该会毁掉任何的伴侣关系，他们也都有足够的钱，能够吸引漂亮的新妻子，以及向发妻支付分手费。

我不知道这是什么原因，但我猜想，或许这是因为当一个真正的怪人找到了适合自己的人，他们就不会匆忙放弃。抑或这是因为，如果你一门心思扑在工作上，外遇就显得不够刺激了。又或者，这只不过是因为，假如你和自己的配偶很少见面，他或她把你惹毛的几率就大大降低了。

译者/吴蔚