The US academic on why the Mr Burns caricature of rich people is wrong, the double-edged sword of godlike technologies, and why young people shouldn’t follow their passion

Scott Galloway is an American professor of marketing at New York University Stern school of Business. He has founded and sold several tech firms, and served on the board of directors of companies such as the New York Times and Urban Outfitters. With tech journalist Kara Swisher he co-hosts the hugely popular tech and business podcast Pivot. He is a fierce critic of tech companies and their business models and he has written five books, the latest of which is The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Economic Security.

You spend a lot of time with wealthy and successful people. Do they have anycommon habits?

Well, the most common attribute I’ve registered is they were born at the right place at the right time. What I’ve found is that the majority of people’s success is not their fault. And I think something that plagues people, especially tech bros, is they conflate luck with talent. But across those who excel, the thing I have found is that if you want to be successful, you need to collect allies along the way. There’s this cartoon of Monty Burns in The Simpsons, the guy who owns the power plant, who has no friends, who lights cigars with a hundred dollar bill. But what I have found is that really wealthy people are constantly put in rooms of opportunities, because from a young age they’ve acquired allies.