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Back on the trail…first, Jimmy Buffett

  |   By Polling+ Staff

As it turns out, Jimmy Buffett was decidedly not Wasting Away in Margaritaville.  Fox Business reports a decidedly different portrait now revealed about the legendary singer who passed away a few days ago. It seems that Buffett, in the words of FB, “worked hard to build a business based on taking it easy.”

Reports FB:

“His 1977 song “Margaritaville” spawned an entire “island escapism” brand. As chairman of Margarita Holdings LLC — in which Buffett held a 28% stake — he had resorts, restaurants, casinos, cruises and merchandise, and his business acumen landed him on the Forbes billionaires list for the first time last April. 

Meanwhile, The Margaritaville café on the Las Vegas strip was said to be the top-grossing restaurant in the nation. He had an estimated wealth of $1 billion at the time of his death at 76 late Friday, according to Celebrity Net Worth.”

Fox Business was not the only place that took note of Buffett’s business acumen. Forbes magazine noted that it had a long relationship with the man it called the “unlikely billionaire.” After his passing, Forbes noted him this way, dipping into past conversations with him.

“I knew Margaritaville was a hit, but there are lots of hit records,” Buffett said. “They knew before I did that it was an annuity, it was not just a song. It took me awhile to figure that out. Jimmy Buffett Burgers were popping up everywhere,” Buffett said of his early efforts to build the Margaritaville brand. “The lawyers and the business men, they wanted me to fight every one of them and I just thought I got better things to do with my time.”

Taking the advice of his friend and longtime advisor, Warren Buffett, he left the mom-and-pop knock offs alone and focused on the ones who could really affect him financially. So when a California corporation claimed a copyright on the name and tried to build a global empire on it, he fought – and won – the right to control it.”

Got that? Jimmy Buffett was hanging out with and was buddies with financial guru Warren Buffett (no relation.) And profited from Warren Buffett’s advice Jimmy Buffett did, as Forbes notes here. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/remembering-jimmy-buffett-a-look-at-the-unlikely-billionaire-s-30-year-history-with-forbes/ar-AA1gbnKw

Contrast this with the sad revelations of the recent Elvis movie, which depicts the most famous rock-and-roller of his time being taken financial advantage of relentlessly by his own manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker.

Here’s the Fox Business story https://www.foxbusiness.com/entertainment/jimmy-buffetts-business-empire-went-beyond-searching-his-long-lost-shaker-salt that paints a decidedly different portrait of the seemingly casual Buffett who, in fact, built a billion dollar empire pegged to his musical celebration of “wasting away” while “searching for his lost shaker of salt.”

Who knew?