Chapter 27: Power Grows With Use

Lyndon Johnson won his 1948 Senate seat by eighty-seven votes, and by every honest account, most of them weren't real. Both campaigns rigged returns that year: Johnson's men in the south, his rival's in the east. The difference was patience. Johnson had already learned this lesson the hard way: in a 1941 Senate race, he'd gotten greedy and released his rigged precincts too early, tipping his hand and handing his opponent time to counter. By 1948, his campaign corrected for it, holding the fraudulent counties back and releasing them only after the other side had shown its cards, leaving no time for retaliation. The lesson isn't that fraud is admirable. It's that naivete is fatal. Someone in the race is willing to cheat, and if you assume otherwise, you've already lost before the polls close.

Everything that follows proceeds from that assumption, and almost none of it is about persuasion. Campaigns are won on structure: which contest you enter, whose votes are already available to you, and when anyone is actually listening.

Choose the path of least resistance. Winning is less about fighting harder than about picking the fight with fewer opponents in it. When Michael Bloomberg ran for mayor of New York in 2001, he was a lifelong Democrat. He ran as a Republican anyway, because the Republican primary had a fraction of the competition. The party label meant nothing next to an open lane.

Expand the coalition; never purify it. Roger Stone, who spent a career engineering victories, put it bluntly: politics rewards those who broaden their coalition, not those who guard their ideology. A base that agrees with you unanimously is a base that has stopped growing. Napoleon understood the instinct better than most political operators: he claimed to have paid little attention to individual opinions and a great deal to public opinion. Policy, in this view, is not a matter of conviction but of polling. Stone codified the mechanics into a rule: move right for the primary, move to the center for the general. Secure the base first, then spend the rest of the campaign courting everyone the base doesn't reach. Candidates who never leave their base win their base and nothing more, which is why, in Stone's analysis, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern both collapsed: elections aren't decided at the extremes—they're decided by whoever captures the exhausted middle.

Take votes from the other side. The sharpest campaigns defend their own coalition and raid the opponent's. Nancy Pelosi won her first House race in part because Republican voters crossed over to support her, calculating she was the lesser evil on the ballot. Decades later, Donald Trump's 2024 pitch to end taxes on tips aimed at a similar target: a policy built for Nevada's hospitality workers, a bloc no single party owns, and one his campaign moved to claim outright.

Pander to grievance. Nearly everyone feels shortchanged by something, which means nearly everyone is reachable through that feeling. As Thomas Sowell observed, almost no one lacks a dimension on which they can be told they've been wronged. The candidates who win are rarely the ones offering the most rigorous policy; they're the ones who let each voter feel like the story is about them, casting themselves as champions of "the people" against a distant, corrupt elite, regardless of whether they intend to serve those people at all.

Time your message to when anyone is actually listening. Most voters ignore politics until the final weeks of a race. Richard Nixon observed that the only moments that truly register are the campaign announcement, the nomination speech, and the closing argument; everything in between is noise. This is why early polling is nearly worthless. Rudy Giuliani led the Republican field for most of 2007, and within a year had vanished from the race entirely. A lead built before anyone is paying attention is not a lead. It's a mirage.

Negatively Brand Your Opponents

Every campaign needs a story, and every story needs a villain. As political strategist Mark McKinnon put it, no one goes to the movies or picks up a book without one, and a campaign is no different: there has to be a good guy and a bad guy. The candidate who defines the villain first usually wins.

Lyndon Johnson understood this better than most. Running against Barry Goldwater in 1964, he didn't just attack Goldwater's positions—he branded him a threat to civilization itself. The result was the "Daisy" ad, a little girl counting petals as the screen cuts to a nuclear countdown, implying that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for annihilation. Goldwater lost in a landslide.

The formula recurs across decades. In 1950, Florida senator George Smathers branded his primary opponent Claude Pepper as "Red Pepper," hammering him as a friend of Stalin until the label stuck. Richard Nixon's campaign borrowed the tactic against Helen Gahagan Douglas, printing its attacks on pink paper and branding her the "Pink Lady." In 1968, operative James Martin turned moderate Florida governor Leroy Collins into "Liberal Leroy," a nickname that helped make Ed Gurney the state's first Republican senator since Reconstruction. Donald Trump revived the tradition in 2016: "Low Energy Jeb," "Lyin' Ted," "Crooked Hillary." The nicknames outlasted the campaigns themselves, which is the point. A label that sticks does more work than any policy argument ever will.

A label works because language assigns morality as much as it describes. War is either courageous or reckless depending on the word chosen; a wealthy person is either cautious or greedy. In the 1970s, Republican strategists recognized this and began replacing "tax cuts" with "tax relief," reframing taxation itself as an affliction and anyone opposing relief from it as the villain. Linguist George Lakoff studied the shift and later urged Democrats to adopt the discipline with their own language. The technique scales down to individual behavior: I invest, you make a bet, someone else gambles; I reconsidered, you changed your mind, someone else went back on their word. And it scales up to nations: Russia invades, the United States liberates, China occupies—three descriptions of one act, engineered to produce a clean story of good against evil that audiences can absorb without thinking.

It works outside politics too. Harvey Weinstein spread word that Ashley Judd was a "nightmare" to work with, and directors quietly stopped casting her. No lawsuit, no headline, just a story told to the right people.

Let No Attack Go Unanswered

Silence is not dignity—it's surrender. Bill Clinton built his political survival on the principle that every attack must be met, immediately and without exception. His 1992 campaign institutionalized it in a rapid-response war room staffed to answer any charge inside a single news cycle, on the theory that an accusation left standing overnight becomes a fact by morning.

But answering an attack is not the same as defending against it. Murray Chotiner's rule was to attack and never defend, and Roger Stone refined the distinction: a charge should be answered only as part of a counterattack, never as an apology or explanation. And when you do answer, don't repeat the accusation in full. Restating the charge only educates the voters who hadn't heard it yet. The goal isn't to clear your name in detail—it's to redirect the fight onto ground you control.

Don't Be Seen as the Villain

Public opinion doesn't just decide elections—it decides who gets protected by the law and who doesn't. During the McCarthy era, the Hallinan family of Marin County became targets for the father's left-wing politics: their home vandalized, their children harassed. When a group of marines beat sixteen-year-old Patrick Hallinan badly enough to break the bone through the skin of his arm, the district attorney told his mother, apologetically, that no jury in the county would convict anyone for assaulting a Hallinan. The family had already lost in the court of public opinion.

Martin Shkreli learned the same lesson decades later. He wasn't charged for the pharmaceutical pricing scheme that made him infamous. He was eventually convicted over conduct from his hedge fund years, unrelated to the scandal that made his name toxic, because once public opinion turns against someone, prosecutors and juries go looking for a reason to make it official. Being disliked is dangerous. Being despised ends you.

Hypocrisy is what turns dislike into contempt, because people will forgive almost anything except being lied to about it. Eliot Spitzer's downfall as governor of New York wasn't that he paid for escorts. It was that he had prosecuted escort services as attorney general. He ran on the need for campaign finance reform while funding his own run with millions in undisclosed, improper loans from his father. The affair was survivable. The hypocrisy was not.

Machiavelli warned rulers to avoid two things above all: being hated and being despised. He traced the fates of Rome's later emperors as evidence. Commodus managed to be both, and didn't last long at all. Septimius Severus was neither, and held power without difficulty—feared, certainly, but fear and hatred are not the same thing, and that distinction was his advantage. The practical lesson is closer to what Napoleon would later advise: rule with an iron hand, but keep it inside a velvet glove.

Spend Where the Votes Are Cheapest

Money buys less the higher you aim. George Soros observed that a dollar goes further in a mayoral race than in a governor's race, further in a governor's race than in a Senate race, and further there than in a presidential campaign; the smaller the electorate, the more a single ad or mailer can move it. Bloomberg proved the small end of that scale. Running for New York mayor, he outspent his opponent Mark Green by five to one, papering the city so thoroughly that his name seemed to be on every building and stadium in town. He won three times.

The large end of the scale humbled him. In his 2020 presidential run, Bloomberg spent more than half a billion dollars and still couldn't buy traction, especially after two weak debate performances; he dropped out by March and endorsed Joe Biden. Sam Bankman-Fried arrived at a subtler version of that math. His team calculated that primaries, not general elections, were where money actually moved voters, since primary outcomes often came down to name recognition alone, and a million dollars dropped into a close primary gave a roughly one-in-five chance of swinging it. The trouble was they couldn't tell in advance which one race in five would work, so they spread bets across many candidates the way a venture fund spreads bets across startups. Most lost. Carrick Flynn, their most heavily funded candidate, finished a distant second despite Bankman-Fried spending nearly a thousand dollars for every vote Flynn received. Bankman-Fried took the result philosophically: some candidates, he concluded, no amount of money can get elected.

The Power Broker Who Never Held Office

Everything so far assumes the object is to win an election. The larger prize is to acquire the power an election confers without ever standing for one.

Robert Moses never won an election, yet for over three decades he controlled more money and reshaped more of New York City than any mayor or governor who came after him. He built the highways, bridges, and parks that define the city today, and he did it by exploiting a truth about power that few have understood as well as he did: the people who write the rules control the outcome, and almost no one bothers to read the rules.

Moses discovered his lever early: legislation. He drafted bills so dense and technical that the officials voting on them, and the public they served, had no real idea what they contained. Between 1934 and 1968 he built his empire on public authorities, the obscure financial vehicles created to fund a bridge or tunnel through tolls, then dissolved once the debt was paid. Before Moses, no one saw these authorities as anything but boring accounting mechanisms for small projects. He saw that if he diverted a portion of the revenue toward new projects, the original debt would never fully clear, which meant the authority would never dissolve and would generate a permanent income stream under his control. When he drafted the state law regulating these authorities, he buried language that made it nearly impossible to remove him as chairman, and no one caught it, because no one imagined the provision mattered. A government employee who never won a single election ended up commanding public authorities that generated billions a year in today's terms, using that machine to sculpt the city as if it were his personal canvas.

Befriend Politicians

On April 12, 1929, John Raskob was planning a dinner party. Raskob, one of the richest men in America and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was gathering the party's elite at his suite beside the Ritz-Carlton to announce a private war. His friend Al Smith had just lost the presidency to Herbert Hoover, and Raskob had no intention of resigning, retreating, or making peace. He intended to bankroll an obsession: he would spend the next four years, and as much of his fortune as it took, making sure Hoover never won a second term.

Raskob considered Hoover a moralizing bureaucrat, and the insult was personal as much as political. So he did what the wealthy have always done when the ballot box fails them: he found an instrument. Jouett Shouse, the DNC's executive director, recommended a journalist named Charley Michelson, a man whose prose was sharp enough to be called a weapon in its own right. Michelson had spent years underpaid at the New York World; Raskob offered him ten times his salary to run a new "publicity" operation, and Michelson, who despised Hoover on his own account, needed no convincing and less direction. He understood the assignment instinctively: seed unflattering stories, cultivate friendly newsrooms, keep the pressure constant.

Notice the structure. Raskob did not personally hire Michelson. He let Shouse do it, then stepped back after one brief courtesy meeting. If the operation blew up, he could say, truthfully, that he had only written checks.

Raskob spent a fortune making an enemy. Thomas Lamont, senior partner at J.P. Morgan, spent far less making a friend, and got more for it. Just after Hoover's inauguration in March 1929, Lamont wrote to him from Paris offering his congratulations and, more importantly, his availability: he would come to Washington "at your convenience." A brief meeting followed. Then a follow-up note, designed for one purpose only, to keep the line open. Lamont was not interested in flattery for its own sake; he wanted Hoover's ear on the nation's economic decisions. The strategy worked. By that October, Hoover was consulting Lamont most mornings before breakfast, and Lamont was mailing him eighteen-page memos on the state of the economy. Access, cultivated patiently, had become influence.

A century later the arrangement was unchanged. Charlie Kushner, Jared's father, spent years donating to Democratic politicians and hosting them in his home, not out of ideology but investment. Those friendships are credited with helping elect a governor and then placing Kushner's own allies throughout that governor's administration, long-term access-building of exactly the kind Lamont had practiced decades earlier. The payoff came later, in New York City's real estate industry, worth well over a trillion dollars and policed by regulators who could be persuaded to look the other way. With enforcement weak and friends in office, Kushner Companies was able to falsify building permits and face little consequence.

Bernard Arnault has argued that this arrangement, business courting politics rather than the reverse, actually inverts the traditional hierarchy of power. Politicians serve limited terms and then vanish from relevance. An executive with the right political relationships can hold influence indefinitely, because their position never expires on a ballot.

Sam Bankman-Fried applied the model directly. He hired Mark Wetjen, a former CFTC commissioner, to serve as his bridge into Washington, then became the sixth-largest political donor in the country in the two years before the election, roughly $40 million from him personally and another $30 million from FTX executives around him. The goal was legislation, the DCCPA, that critics say would have handed FTX something close to a legal monopoly. Peter Thiel ran a similar play: an early donation of over a million dollars and a public endorsement of Donald Trump in 2016 bought him the ability to hand-pick the head of the FDA.

The Mayor's Army

In an October 2017 conversation with Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson, Michael Bloomberg was asked where an ambitious person should enter politics. Not the presidency. Not Congress. Not even the governor's mansion. Bloomberg's answer was the mayor's office, and specifically the mayor's office in New York City. Cities are where the problems live, he said, and a mayor can look a constituent in the eye and hand them a real, tangible benefit. Then he gave the real reason. As mayor, you control the police department. "It's like having your own army." By Bloomberg's own accounting the NYPD rivals the seventh-largest army on earth, its budget exceeds the GDP of many countries, and more foreign missions sit in New York than in Washington, because the United Nations lives there too. Proximity to enforcement is worth more than a title.

Balaji Srinivasan made the point with a different unit of measure. San Francisco's city budget runs $12 to 13 billion a year, and twelve people—eleven supervisors and one mayor—decide where it goes. Divide the money by the decision-makers and each official is effectively steering a billion dollars annually. Srinivasan calls this the "political billionaire": unlike the tech billionaire, whose net worth is locked in illiquid equity, the political billionaire commands a billion dollars in real cash flow, every year, indefinitely. A founder's fortune is a number on paper; a city official's budget is money that moves, today, at their direction.

Change the Enforcement, Not the Law

George Soros understood something that most reformers miss: rewriting the law is slow and expensive, but changing how the law is enforced is fast and cheap. Win the local elections that control the enforcers—district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs, judges, city councils, attorneys general—and you have effectively rewritten the law without touching a single statute. Soros treated enforcement itself as a lever, and he pulled it at the local level, where few were paying attention and even fewer were competing for the seat.

The instinct ran through his philanthropy too. His Open Society Foundation kept offices across Europe, and its meetings with local politicians routinely included a look at the country's financial books—precisely the information a foreign exchange trader would most want to see. Philanthropy and intelligence gathering were not, in his case, easy to separate.

The logic scales upward. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page's study of U.S. policy outcomes found that strong support for a measure among the middle class has almost no bearing on whether it becomes law. Strong support among the top 10 percent of earners, by contrast, roughly doubles the odds of adoption, and when that same group strongly opposes a measure, its odds of passing fall by 25 to 30 points. Middle-class opposition barely moves the needle. Policy in America is set, in practice, by the upper and upper-middle class: influence follows capital and proximity to power, not headcount.

Know Everyone's Price

When Philip II of Macedon arrived outside a city that boasted its walls were impregnable, he asked a single question: whether those walls could be scaled by gold. He had learned that anything force of arms could not take, money could. Bribery became his signature weapon, and it worked faster than any siege. The historian Diodorus Siculus credited the expansion of his kingdom "far more to money than to arms." City after city fell not to soldiers but to a bought traitor who opened the gates from within. Philip recognized no morality for governments, treating lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter, and in doing so he undercut every attempt at Greek unity before a single battle was fought.

Rod Blagojevich, given the power to fill a vacated Senate seat, treated it as an auction. Nothing, the lawyer Roy Cohn once observed, is fair in politics; everything can be rigged through bribery and connections, and no institution, not even a supreme court, is beyond price. Nassim Taleb captured why the practice never dies out: in poorer countries, officials take an explicit bribe; in wealthier ones, they take an implicit promise, the assurance of a seven-figure sinecure at a bank or a firm once they leave office, easily arranged and barely regulated. The mechanism is cronyism: a politician steers a contract to a company, and once out of office, joins its board at ten times their old salary, collecting slowly what would have been illegal to collect all at once.

Have a Day 1 Plan

Acquiring power is the easier half. What follows is the discipline of using it before it decays.

The most powerful day of a presidency is the first one. Lyndon Johnson understood this before he'd even landed back in Washington.

Hours after John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Johnson appointed Jack Valenti as a White House aide. Valenti, who would go on to run the Motion Picture Association of America for thirty-eight years, later described what happened next: on the flight home aboard Air Force One, Johnson sat with three advisors in his private cabin for six or seven hours and sketched out the entire Great Society. Medicare, Head Start, the Civil Rights Act, the war on poverty, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, a new Cabinet department for Health, Education, and Welfare: all of it took shape before the plane touched ground. Valenti recalled Johnson's words: "Now that I've got the power, I aim to use it." He rattled off the agenda item by item, the civil rights bill "locked up too long," an education bill so every child could "get all the education they can take," Truman's old medical insurance plan finally made real.

Johnson grasped three things that most new leaders miss.

First, a new position comes with a window, a honeymoon period, before opponents organize and resistance hardens. Whatever gets done in that window tends to stick, and the accomplishments themselves become the scaffolding that secures the position further.

Second, grudges outlive gratitude. Enemies remember far longer than friends do, which means every day in power adds to the pile of accumulated opposition. The longer someone waits, the harder it becomes to act. Time is not neutral—it works against the incumbent.

Third, and this is the deeper lesson: power is not a fixed reserve that depletes with use. It behaves the opposite way. The more a person exercises their power, shaping their environment, moving the right people into place, pushing their agenda forward, the more power they accumulate. Using power is itself a demonstration of having it, and demonstrated power draws allies the way success always does. This is why Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his seven rules for power, counsels people to use the power they have, and even to act as though they have more than others assume. Larry Ellison reduced the whole dynamic to a sentence: the more you win, the more you win.

Serve Necessity, Not Morality

Machiavelli turned this into doctrine. A prince surrounded by those who are not good, he wrote, cannot survive by being good himself; he must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge or withhold it as necessity demands. Napoleon put it in harder terms: political administration is never a matter of simple good and evil. "Necessity is the highest law; public welfare is the highest justice. Unto each day the evil thereof; to each circumstance its own law." A sovereign acts as a collective person, not a private one, and politics commands them to do what would be inexcusable in an individual. This is not the absence of morality but a different morality: for a leader, whatever secures and serves the people they govern.

It is also, Napoleon understood, what the people want. "Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses." Freedom is a burden that only the purposeful want.

Make Yourself Necessary

Lyndon Johnson ran a fixed sequence when he needed something from someone: charm first, then persuasion, then a bribe, and only if none of that worked, a threat. J. Edgar Hoover skipped straight to the last resort as a permanent strategy, keeping secret files on politicians, celebrities, and fellow law enforcement officials, and using them to blackmail and control anyone who might otherwise have checked his power. Nancy Pelosi ran a gentler but no less effective version. She raised the money, built the grassroots operations, and recruited the candidates, then made sure everyone understood the arrangement was conditional: "If you don't do this, there's no money for you from me or from the state party or the DCCC." The generosity and the threat were the same instrument.

This is Robert Greene's Law 11 in practice: keep people dependent on you. The more you are needed, the more freedom you retain, and the moment you teach someone enough to do without you, your leverage disappears. The refinement of this law is delegation. Let someone else carry out the punishment and deliver the bad news, so that you remain, in the eyes of everyone watching, the source only of favor and reward.

Be Unpredictable

The final safeguard is refusing to be read. Taleb described the trap of a fixed threshold: if people learn exactly how much abuse you will absorb before you react, they will take you right up to that line and stop, comfortable in the knowledge of where it sits. Randomize the trigger point instead, reacting mildly some days and fiercely over nothing on others, and no one can calculate how far they're allowed to push. Governments rely on the principle in conflict, working to convince adversaries that they might overreact to the smallest provocation, because unpredictability deters in a way that consistency never can. Reasonableness and unpredictability, used together, cost little and protect a great deal.

Own the Media

Elizabeth Holmes understood the game before she understood the science. She got onto magazine covers by exaggerating what her technology could do, then used those covers to recruit Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis onto the Theranos board. She then used their names to pull in investors who assumed the board had done the diligence they themselves hadn't. Every success became a stepping stone to the next. It was a machine that ran entirely on perception, and it worked for years before anyone checked.

The first move is to own the media outright if you can. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Ownership isn't subtle, but it's effective, and once you own the platform, you never have to ask anyone for access again.

Ownership isn't the only lever over a newsroom. Li Ka-shing bought advertising space across Hong Kong's media companies, then withdrew his spending whenever a story turned unflattering, teaching every outlet what a critical story cost: criticize Li Ka-shing, lose the account.

If you can't own it, buy proximity to it. Sam Altman's advice to founders is to skip the PR firm and build relationships with three or four journalists directly, people who understand the company well enough that they'll cover every story handed to them. Cheaper than a PR retainer, and far more durable.

If you can't buy access, buy the record itself. Rockefeller and Bill Gates both hired personal historians, not for flattery, but to make sure they'd be remembered on their own terms. Alexander the Great brought writers on campaign for the same reason: he was not only conquering territory but managing how the conquest would read centuries later. History is written, not found, and someone is always doing the writing. Better it's someone you chose.

Peter Thiel ran a version of this at Palantir. A report crediting Palantir's software with helping find bin Laden spread across outlets that never verified it, and likely added billions to the company's valuation, even though Palantir's real strength was closer to data visualization than intelligence sorcery. Thiel let the ambiguity work for him rather than against him: a name that sounded ominous made the technology feel more powerful, not less. As he put it, he'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent. Menace, it turns out, is a better marketing asset than reassurance.

Win by Deception, Not Force

"Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception," Machiavelli wrote, and Sun Tzu built an entire philosophy of war on that premise: appear weak when strong, appear distant when close, let the enemy believe whatever keeps them least prepared for what you actually intend.

Deception does not require malice to be effective. Before PayPal's IPO, eBay held real leverage over it: eBay could have launched a competing payments product and starved PayPal of the traffic it depended on. Reid Hoffman's countermove wasn't to fight that threat. It was to open acquisition talks with eBay. A company doesn't sabotage something it's about to buy, so as long as the deal looked live, eBay had no reason to interfere, and PayPal used the cover to go public independently. PayPal never intended to sell. The negotiation itself was the entire strategy.

Destroy Your Enemies

When Isaac Newton was voted president of the Royal Society upon the death of his rival Robert Hooke in 1703, legend has it that his first act was to strip Hooke from the Society's record. The discipline worth studying is not the erasure itself but the coldness behind it. Newton didn't rage at a dead man. He removed him.

Start with the emotional discipline. Marcus Aurelius compared life to a boxing match: when your opponent lands a punch, you don't complain about the unfairness of it. That's the game. Someone acts nasty toward you, and your job is to master your emotions, not to react, and to treat the moment as a move on a chessboard, nothing more. Robert Greene puts it in the language of command: when you succeed, be wary; when you're angry, take no action; when you're afraid, know that fear will exaggerate the danger in front of you. War, and by extension any serious contest, rewards realism above all else, and the more you can limit your emotional response, the closer you come to seeing clearly.

Clear sight is what makes the next truth bearable: everyone has enemies, and pretending otherwise is naive. Politics, business, and most competitive arenas reduce to us versus them. Greene writes that without enemies you lose your sense of maneuver, your sense of your own limits. Roger Stone put it in colder terms: it comes down to winning, using every legal means to secure victory for your allies and inflict a crushing, humiliating defeat on your opponents. That is not cynicism but clarity about the terms of the game.

Larry Ellison hired private investigators to dig up material on Bill Gates, his closest rival in tech, because he wanted to be number one. Michael Jordan carried a private list of every executive who'd passed on drafting him, and made a career of punishing those teams on the court. Elon Musk distrusted Twitter's leadership so thoroughly that the night before his acquisition closed, he moved to force the deal through and fire the top executives for cause before their stock could vest, reasoning aloud that the difference between closing that night and the next morning was worth two hundred million dollars. None of these people set out looking for a fight. But when one arrived, they didn't flinch from it.

You should expect to find yourself with enemies, and when that day comes, remember the line self-defense instructors like to use: violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it's the only answer. Gandhi, a man built entirely of restraint, put it in his own terms: where the only choice is between cowardice and violence, choose violence. As Rockefeller said of his own method: he did not meet competition—he destroyed it.

Attack the Weak Point

The Allied bombing campaign against Germany didn't try to destroy all of German industry at once. It targeted ball bearings, the one small component nearly every machine in the war economy depended on, and by knocking out that single chokepoint, crippled everything built on top of it.

Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign is a case study in what happens when you get this backward. He ran as a reformer, building his credibility on real success overhauling Texas public education in the 1980s, and by mid-1992 he had genuine momentum. Then he dropped out of the race in July. He later claimed the Bush campaign was preparing to embarrass his daughter, Carolyn, before her wedding by spreading a rumor about her sexuality. Whether or not the threat was real, Perot treated his own child as the vulnerability an opponent could exploit, and withdrew rather than let it play out in public. People, like industries, are only as strong as their weakest link. The discipline is in knowing what yours is before someone else finds it.

Play the Long Game

Standard Oil's approach in the 1880s is the clearest case study. As kerosene demand exploded, Rockefeller's company blanketed the country with storage tanks and tank wagons, then sent salesmen door to door underselling every local retailer. When retailers protested, Standard Oil offered a deal: sell our product exclusively, or we'll open our own store next to yours and undercut you until you fail. Some retailers turned to a rival supplier called Republic Oil to escape the squeeze, never realizing Standard Oil secretly owned Republic Oil too. There was no exit that hadn't already been anticipated.

And when you do acquire a competitor, close every door behind them. Buffett once bought Nebraska Furniture Mart from its ninety-year-old founder without a non-compete clause. A few years later she got angry at how the store was being run, quit, and opened a new store across the street that stole enormous business from the one Buffett owned. He eventually had to buy her out a second time, for five million dollars, and this time he remembered the non-compete.

Peter Thiel worked on a longer clock. When Gawker outed him, he didn't sue, because what they'd done to him wasn't illegal. Instead he quietly funded lawsuits against Gawker filed by other plaintiffs the site had wronged, waiting until he found the right case: Hulk Hogan's. Gawker tried repeatedly to settle, never understanding why Hogan wouldn't take the deal. Thiel's only condition to Hogan was that the case had to go all the way to a verdict, and that single condition broke a legal system built on the assumption that both sides want to settle. Hogan won a hundred and forty million dollar judgment, and Gawker went bankrupt. During depositions, Hogan's attorney asked the company's leadership a simple opening question: had they ever been deposed before? They hadn't. Gawker had seemed invincible for fifteen years for one reason only: no one had ever tested them.