Josh Duncan
EEE2083
13 September 2022
“Other People’s Money”
This movie is a classic business movie, it starts out a little slow then progressively picks up. How this movie deals with entrepreneurship are Lawrence Garfield has his own investment company and he invested in this new business called New England Wire and Cable and the stock was up a couple points when he invested. Garfield’s entrepreneurship mind soon then realizes that his investments are making more than the overall company. He then goes to the chairman of the wire and cable company and proposes the idea to buy it out and then resell it all and you would get a lot more money, but the chairman has hope and says that the business will take off. That’s when the entrepreneurial mind of Mr. Garfield kicks in and he decides that if he buys up all the stock and shares of the company, he can liquidate it and make millions off it. How he buys all the shares is with “OPM”, which stands for other people’s money. In Garfield’s entrepreneurial eyes he saw where he could make large amounts of money by doing this because he knew there wasn’t no value in wire and cable at the time and there was more value in the machinery inside the building. Even though he seemed like the bad guy in the whole situation because he was taking jobs away from people and ruining a new business for the town, in an entrepreneurial mind he was doing the right thing and making the most out of the situation which was money and that is what every person wants the most of and if you don’t then you are not the brightest. This is why it is interesting to me because everyone was mad and throwing riots when you know if you were in his shoes, you would be doing the same thing because it was the better thing to do because more money is involved. At the end of the movie and an eventful annual shareholder meeting, Garfield ends up getting everything and turning the factory into something that has ways more value than before, which shows how good of an entrepreneur Mr. Garfield was because he saw the value and opportunity cost of the whole thing.
This movie related to many of the concepts we have learned in class and read about from the reading we have had to do. The one that stuck out the most was the concept we talked about today creative destruction. Which was near a new thing replacing an old, an example would be the automobile replacing the horse. The same thing happened here nobody found any value in wire and cable because of fiber optics. Mr. Garfield, therefore, saw another replacement with the old building which was airbags. This is an example of creative destruction that happened right in the movie. Another thing in the movie we discussed in a previous chapter was opportunity cost, this happened a lot in the movie. One of the main examples is how they gave up the building for more money. Also going of opportunity cost, in the last chapter we also talked about optionality. There was quite a bit of this throughout the movie because Lawrence gave them many options for him to not take it over and other lawyers gave him many other options to buy his share back to the company. All of these are optionality because they are giving the option and he chooses the better option of course because he values one more than the other. Lawrence shows his values at the begging of the movie when he says he loves money and wants to get as much as he can until he dies. This shows that he values money over anything and that there isn’t anything that he values more or would exchange for unless he saw potential through his entrepreneurial mind. This movie ended up showing and proving how an entrepreneur works and thinks and is a great representation of one in my eyes because you have to be greedy and take risks if you want a chance at reward and that is what Lawrence Garfield does in this movie.