146 | Living in Color—John
animals while merely hoping to make a kill, here and there—a lion is 100 percent driven to spend its days minimizing the risk of pursuing its big-game prey. Its sleeping habits, the way it walks, its family life, its choice of location, all are aimed at minimizing the risk of its pursuit of large prey. (Gladwell frequently cited researchers Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot, whose book, From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero, also said that the people who are most successful in business are risk-minimizers. In the book, they provided numerous examples showing that successful entrepreneurs are consumed with maximizing opportunity and minimizing risk.) Gladwell compared hedge fund manager, John Paulson, to his lions in the grassy plains example. In 2007 just before and even during the financial crisis, Paulson made massive bets on the housing collapse. He made billions of dollars from his bets and became a richer man during a time when few people were getting rich. Many people claimed Paulson was guessing about the market collapse and had gotten lucky. Gladwell said no way was Paulson guessing that the housing market would collapse. He saw an opportunity. He made his employees run the numbers over and over again until they figured out a housing collapse was certain. He knew that even in the unlikely event that housing prices dropped softly—instead of collapsing suddenly, which is how he thought they would fall—his investment positions were safe, and he would make money. He figured out that there truly was no way he could lose. Gladwell said that successful entrepreneurs are people who hate risk. Their minds are so intensely anti-risk that they constantly crunch data to reduce risk. He described the physical anguish of Ted Turner as Turner tried to improve a troubled media company he had acquired. Turner told Gladwell: