Turning greed on its head

Half a billion is small change to him. When people are buying fast cars as a hobby, he is buying football clubs. That is what money can do when you have enough of it. Peter Lim did not get his Liverpool Football Club. It could be a blessing in disguise. He has just acquired Thomson Medical Centre for half a billion bucks. This in all sense is a much more meaningful buy. And he could make it more meaningful to himself and to the people in the streets. Peter Lim is getting close to a state like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, though still far away, but he could still uttered, huh, another $500m profit, what shall I do with it? He is comfortable enough that another half a billion is not going to make him a different person or to excite him. So what is he going to do with his new acquisition? To make more profits, to live the Singapore ethos that profit is everything, or to live the Gecko mantra that greed is good? Could he turn the Medical Centre into an institution to benefit the people at large? Medical cost is spiralling up like housing prices. Of course it need not be if there is less greed. Here we have a man who does not need any more small change of half a billion. He could be another philanthropist in the making. What Singapore need is a no frill hospital to serve the people without breaking their bank account for every admission. We need a hospital to make a point that medical and hospitalisation fees need not keep going to the sky. Would Peter Lim answer to this higher calling, that making money and more money is not the only reason to live? That money shall be made to good use, that one’s good fortune can be share with the common folks and the less fortunate. No one is going to begrudge him should he take the conventional path, to turn it into another successful business enterprise, and making more money for himself. And one day he will join Gates and Buffett, to give the money away because he just have too much of it.