Capital

Tancredi C di Montezemolo | November 2025

In all its controversial yet pleasing ways, capital is that which we should all aspire to have in spades, wherever and whenever. I know what you are thinking, or what you might be thinking depending on which side of the proverbial aisle of society your seat lies. If you’re on the left, you may already have diagnosed me as an insecure, overcompensating capitalist caricature with relatively small genitalia; if you’re on the right, you might be hoping I’ll confirm your priors about personal responsibility and wealth.

Please be advised: this is not a political essay. This is an essay about the difference between being well-kept and being free, and why that difference has less to do with money than we’ve been taught. Capital is not money; it’s freedom. Money is not capital; it is the price you pay for freedom.

We are told that straight As and regard for institutions will give us access to a happy life. And so we start, and even if grading is not all straight As and making the Dean’s List, we eventually land a job and start a career. “Career” is a funny word. Its root is the Latin word carrus, a chariot or, more prosaically, a wheeled vehicle of some description. So next time you hear about someone having a “career”, think about a poor horseman leading two equines pulling a wheeled box, often battered by rain and winds, rather than a “corporate titan” – another funny expression, as Titans were relegated gods overthrown from power, not exactly a thriving bunch. Do you see my point?

A career gives you no more security than any other thing you may pursue with your life. For a start, if you choose not to have a career you will likely avoid becoming a miner, an investment banker or an offshore oil extraction worker, which dramatically increases your chances of survivorship. And this is a good thing, no doubt. But even if you land a white-collar gig where your working hours are billed in the thousands by your employer, you are just a well-paid bondsperson. Your life exists only on a fine line between the opinions of your boss on the one side, usually very volatile, and the next secure paycheck that, in your subconscious mind, justifies it all – until it doesn’t and you get fired. And that is a bad thing, no doubt.

The tragedy is that we confuse rented stability with owned freedom. A salary is rent you receive for your time from someone who owns the “carrus” you are pulling. They set the direction, they decide the speed, they choose when the journey is over and you are no longer needed. People celebrate promotions as if they were acts of emancipation, when in fact they are often just nicer harnesses with slightly softer leather. The box on LinkedIn changes title; the box around your life rarely does.

Capital, on the other hand, is what allows you to step off the chariot altogether. Not just financial capital – though that helps – but:

Time capital: hours of the day that are genuinely yours, not pre-sold in monthly instalments.

Relational capital: people who would pick up the phone for you even if you had nothing to offer them today.

Reputational capital: the quiet knowledge in others’ minds that you are competent, reliable, interesting enough to be worth betting on.

Skill capital: things you can actually do that move the needle in the real world, without a job title attached.

Inner capital: your ability to stay centred when circumstances go feral; the discipline, courage and imagination no one can confiscate.

Money is simply the lubricant, the unit we use to coordinate these forms of capital. It is the ticket you buy so that your time, your relationships, your skills and your inner life are not perpetually auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder. But the ticket is not the journey. Wealthy people with no capital of character are just high-net-worth prisoners with better lavatories.

We grew up in an era where the promise was linear: do well in school, go to a good university, get a prestigious job, and climb. The invisible footnote read: “and in the process, quietly accept that your time, geography, mood and integrity will be subordinated to the institution.” In exchange, you would receive status, predictability and the right to complain about being busy at dinner parties.

Picture, for a moment, the supposed winner of this bargain: a hyper-polished executive in a glass-walled office in Mayfair at 10 p.m. The cleaners have gone home; the only lights still on are his floor and the blue glow of half a dozen screens. His armour, even on a Friday, is impeccable – an Audemars Piguet on his wrist, Loro Piana suede loafers, tailored trousers and a Brunello cashmere roll-neck – and his calendar for the next three weeks has been written almost entirely by other people. On paper he is the dream outcome of the linear promise. In practice, his time is fully securitised against school fees, mortgage payments and other people’s expectations; the only thing he owns outright is his illusion.

And now, whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence is going to make this reality impossible to ignore. AI will not politely ask if you agree with this essay; it will simply make the old bargain worse. The kinds of jobs once sold as elite white-collar careers – pattern recognition, deck-making, email-drafting, information-shuffling – are exactly what machines are becoming frighteningly good at. If your “security” rests on tasks that can be statistically predicted, you are renting a shrinking moat. Institutions will happily deploy AI to protect their margins long before they use it to protect your freedom.

Yet look closely. The people we secretly admire, the ones whose lives feel alive rather than simply well-upholstered, rarely followed that script to its numb conclusion. They built capital, not careers. They learned things that compound. They cultivated tastes that refined their perception. They chose projects and relationships that stretched them rather than simply endorsed them.

The system tells you that capital is something you accumulate after a long and loyal career – that you must first sacrifice decades to the altar of “experience” before you are allowed a modicum of autonomy. I would put forward the opposite: you should think of your life as a continuous arbitrage between career and capital. Every year, perhaps every month, you should be asking:

Is this increasing or decreasing my dependence on one institution, one person, one paycheck? Am I building something that would still exist if, tomorrow, my business card evaporated?

Do my choices expand or shrink the space in which I am allowed to say no?

Because that is all freedom really is: the right and ability to say “no, thank you” without your entire life collapsing in on itself.

Most people are not actually afraid of being poor. They are afraid of status loss, of falling out of the social narrative that tells them, “You’re doing well.” They will endure numbing work, casual humiliation and spiritual malnutrition for years, so long as they can still say, “I’m a [title] at [institution].” The job title becomes a rented identity, a mask, an armour we cling to because we haven’t built enough capital to stand as our true selves.

Capital asks you to do something more difficult: to become someone that the world finds genuinely useful, interesting or inspiring. That might mean learning to write, to code, to negotiate, to design, to lead, to sell, to heal, to create beauty. It might mean cultivating taste, judgment, discernment – those intangible forms of capital that make people seek you out when decisions actually matter.

And yes, it might mean, horror of horrors, taking the risk of owning what you do. Of failing. Of struggling. Entrepreneurship, craftsmanship, investing, trading, artistry – these are just different roads to the same destination: disentangling your freedom from someone else’s budget.

This is why I say capital is self-reliance, and that is what we should aspire to have in spades. Not because I worship a gold-plated life and private jets (though I have no objection to legroom), but because capital is the only known antidote to the quiet despair of a life spent performing for invisible committees. You can be poor in financial terms and still rich in capital if you own your time, your craft, your relationships and your conscience. Conversely, you can be numerically rich and existentially bankrupt if every decision depends on “what will they think?” Capital is not just for billionaires. Capital is capital, whether it is $100 or $100,000,000. That capital often begins in embarrassingly small denominations: one unpaid hour you claw back from your inbox, one client of your own, one skill you own outside your job description.

The uncomfortable truth is that building capital requires a certain willingness to be misunderstood in the short term. Your parents may prefer the word “career” because it sounds safe at dinner. Your peers will understand promotions and bonuses; they won’t necessarily understand stepping sideways to learn a craft, or saying no to a pay rise because it tightens the leash. To build capital you must occasionally appear irrational and distant to those who have outsourced their sense of possibility to third parties.

So what do you do with all this? You start small and local. You look at your days and ask:

Where am I most rented, and where am I most owner?

Which relationships feel like transactions, and which feel like alliances?

What skills do I possess that would still matter if every fancy logo vanished tomorrow morning?

Then you bias your choices, gently but stubbornly, towards ownership: of your time, your output, your name. You may still have a job – this is not a sermon for everyone to resign en masse and launch questionable start-ups on tropical islands. But even within a job you can behave like a free person in training. You can learn things your job doesn’t strictly require. You can build relationships that outlive your email address. You can refuse to sacrifice your inner capital – your ethics, your curiosity, your aliveness – on the altar of short-term compliance.

In the end, money will come and go. Markets will rise and fall. Careers will be made obsolete by technology, restructuring, or the sudden whim of a bored board of directors. What remains is the capital you built inside and around yourself: the person you became, the freedom you carved out of a system that would rather keep you comfortably yoke

d.

Capital is not a number on a statement. It is the expanding radius of your “no”, the depth of your “yes”, and the degree to which your life is authored by your own hand rather than ghost-written by grey institutions.