The oldest form of leverage is labor — people working for you. Because we're evolutionarily wired to understand it, society overvalues it. That's why parents are impressed when you get promoted with people under you, and why naive people ask 'how many people work there?' to gauge a company's importance.

Managing other people is incredibly messy. It requires tremendous leadership skills, and you're one short hop from a mutiny or getting torn apart by the mob. Entire civilizations have been destroyed fighting over it — Marxism is essentially the battle between das kapital and das labor.

Capital scales far better than labor. If you're a brilliant investor who can make 30% when others make 20%, you'll get all the money. Once you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more of it much more easily than you can manage more and more people.

Outside of technology, the CEO job at most large old companies is really a financial job — they're asset managers with a pleasant face on it. The richest people are bankers, money-printers, and people who move large amounts of capital around.

Capital is harder to use than labor because it's a modern invention we're not evolved for. Management skills from 100 years ago still apply today, but stock market skills from 100 years ago largely don't.

The hard part with capital is obtaining it — which is why specific knowledge and accountability come first. If you have specific knowledge in a domain and a good name, people will give you capital, which you can then use to get more capital.