The love of money? Or just the love of risk? Even these pseudo quests for spirituality seemed ennobled by a higher calling: rising to the top of the food chain. And mining is high risk, environmentally contentious and prone to cyclical gyrations. Robert Friedland is a strange character to be sure; even when he was tuning in and dropping out, a la Timothy Leary, even the LSD was viewed as a commodity. Its a story of ambition, and personal ruthlessness, and more than a little guile. Its also slightly comic that there could be such an extrme fixation on money and risk and dealing constantly with the pathologically corrupt….
( see link at end)….Steve Jobs was a man who adopted many mentors in his life, but one of his mentors deserves more than a passing look: Robert Friedland, a charismatic, free love wacko who dealt LSD and had his own free love commune on the same apple orchard that inspired Steve for the name of his company. It was also where Steve allegedly got his “reality distortion field” from.
Steve Jobs met Friedland at Reed in 1972 after Friedland was kicked out of Bowdoin forhaving $125,000 worth of acid and then doing two years in a federal prison. Highly charismatic, he journeyed to Reed, ran for student body president, and handily won….
—Friedland’s charisma was his most useful asset as he plied his business sense to become Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Ivanhoe Mines. He developed mining interests all around the globe and become extremely wealthy — his personal fortune is estimated by Forbes to be $2 billion.
It comes at something of a cost, however. Friedland oversaw the Summitville mine, the site of the worst cyanide release in the U.S.
Looking back on his friendship with Friedland, Steve Jobs said in Isaacson’s book that “it was a strange thing to have one of the spiritual people in your young life turn out to be, symbolically and in reality, a gold miner.”
Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-24/tech/30315390_1_steve-jobs-summitville-mining-interests#ixzz26NuP8hrY
Image:http://cieljyoti.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/balthus-balthasar-klossowski-1908-2001/
Steve met him after arranging to sell him his IBM Selectic typewriter. When Jobs came into the room, Friedland was having sex with his girlfriend, and insisted Jobs stay and watch, which Jobs did.
Friedland then formed a commune out on All One Farm, an apple orchard that was granted to him by an eccentric millionaire uncle. People did acid and talked a lot about Eastern spiritualism there, and the Hare Krishnas would cook them meals….
—”In Spain, you can buy a beautiful estate with hundreds of acres of land, with a beautiful farmhouse on it overlooking the Spanish countryside, for the price of a crappy little apartment in Hong Kong. Disneyland is trading at a massive discount,” he said. “Outside Beijing there’s a fake Versailles. Now they can buy the real one.”
Increased wealth and aspirations in the emerging world would ensure growing demand for the high-end products Europe could produce.
“Not only do our wives like Italian shoes, but the girlfriends like them too,” he joked.—Read More:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/robert-friedman-says-ignore-european-woes-and-invest-in-emerging-nations/story-e6frg9if-1226213573855 image:http://www.dorothybarenscott.com/2012/06/location-paris-meet-field-school_9919.html
Steve eventually decided communal living was not for him after sleeping in the kitchen and watching people steal each other’s food in the night. Upon leaving the commune, though, Steve Jobs had the inspiration to name his company Apple.
Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/125656/this-lsd-love-guru-turned-gold-mining-billionaire-gave-steve-jobs-his-reality-distortion-field/#tsRdjxC85Ovi1Z6r.99
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…VANCOUVER—Robert Friedland, the billionaire who spent the past decade building a $6 billion (U.S.) copper mine in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, is asking investors to fund projects in an even riskier locale—the Democratic Republic of Congo….
—”The developing world is the only rational place to put your money at the moment,” he said. Moments of market panic were the best time to buy: you knew when to invest “when you feel the urine running down your leg”.
Perceptions of risk in Africa were overdone,
said, with the continent an example of “rubber knife theory”: it looks scary but won’t hurt you at all.—Read More:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/robert-friedman-says-ignore-european-woes-and-invest-in-emerging-nations/story-e6frg9if-1226213573855 image:http://www.forbes.com/profile/robert-friedland/gallery/5
Ivanplats Ltd., a Friedland-controlled mining company, plans to raise about $300 million (Canadian) in an initial public offering in Toronto, according to a person with knowledge of the IPO who declined to be identified because the amount hasn’t been published. Vancouver-based Ivanplats seeks funding for its Kamoa copper project in Congo and to repay debt owed to Israeli investor Dan Gertler, who sold the company a zinc mine in the African country last year, according to a prospectus filed with regulators Sept. 10.
Friedland, 62, five months ago lost control of the Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia after disputes with the government and joint venture partner Rio Tinto Group. He’s now proposing a mining development in Congo, whose government seized copper assets from Canada’s First Quantum Minerals Ltd. in 2010, and in South Africa, where the mining industry is convulsed by labor unrest. Read More:http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1256082–friedland-seeks-funding-for-congo-project
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