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One millionaire is now leaving the United Kingdom every forty-five minutes, and this week I spoke to one of them.
His name is Gary Ashworth; he started his first company at twenty-one back in nineteen eighty-two, floated it on the London Stock Exchange, and sold it for ten times what it floated at. He built another one to a hundred and fifty million in revenue and exited in twenty twenty-four. He is sixty-six years old; he has a one-year-old daughter, and I had just described him on air as a man who lives between England, France and Dubai. That is where he stopped me, because he said it was not by choice, that he had been driven out and driven away from the country that he loves. Then he told me that one millionaire is now leaving Britain every forty-five minutes and that since the two of us had started speaking, another one had already gone. Meanwhile, Britain changed its Prime Minister on Monday for the seventh time in ten years, and the man I was interviewing that afternoon finally said the quiet part out loud.
I am German; I have spent more than twenty-five years outside my own country, so I asked him the only question that actually matters to anyone watching this, which is whether you stay and fight or whether you go.
Watch the conversation below here on YouTube. ⬇︎
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What we covered
Gary has been building in Britain since before I could walk. That matters, because a man who has paid into a system for forty-four years does not walk away from it lightly, and he does not walk away from it for a tax rate. He walked away because he ran the numbers on his daughter.
Here is what we got into:
Britain is close to ungovernable. He pulled the stats live. The average chief executive holds his job for six and a half years. On average, a football manager lasts for about a year and a half. The average British Prime Minister also lasts about a year and a half. You cannot run a country in eighteen-month increments.
Successive governments have been anti-business and high-tax. His point on employee protection was more carefully made than most people's. Protecting employees is a good thing He simply thinks the pendulum has swung so far the other way that hiring someone is a decision you have to think about.
The exodus is real and it is accelerating. One millionaire leaves every forty-five minutes. The top ten percent of earners carry roughly sixty-five percent of the tax burden. Those people fund the hospitals and schools and have the mobility to leave.
Two-tier policing and free speech. This is the part most guests would have swerved. He did not. He said what a lot of people in Britain now say privately, and he said it on the record.
Being successful does not make you the enemy. He spent time with a billionaire recently who has used his money to force ethical practices into gold mining, work governments did not do. His argument was that wealth does not eliminate social conscience, and that the assumption it does is driving builders away.
Migration goes both ways. Everyone argues about who is coming in. Almost nobody counts who is going out. And the people going out are the ones with the skills and capital to go anywhere.
His test is simple. Are people coming to contribute or coming to take? If you contribute, come. He ended on three words that I kept: hail the contributors.
Just because you're a successful entrepreneur doesn't mean that you're the enemy. It doesn't mean that you don't have a social conscience.
Why I asked him
I'm German. I've spent more than twenty-five years outside Germany, twenty of them in Latin America. Germany is running the same script. It is slightly behind, slightly quieter, and has the same ending.
So I put the question to him the way a 25-year-old founder would put it. Should you stay or should you go?
His answer was more honest than I expected. Some people stay and change it from the inside, and that is good. And some people get beaten and attacked to the point where they take the thing they built and go do it somewhere else. Countries need to embrace their wealth creators, because those are the people funding the infrastructure everyone else uses.
Then he said the thing I keep coming back to.
Being successful does not make you the enemy. It does not mean you lack a social conscience.
The Takeaway
If you only take four things from this:
One. A country that punishes its builders does not keep its builders. Not out of spite. Out of arithmetic.
Two. The tax base is narrower than people think. When the top ten percent carry sixty-five percent, you do not need many of them to leave before the numbers stop working.
Three. The decision to go is almost never financial at the moment it gets made. Gary did not leave because of a budget. He left after asking where his one-year-old could be educated and where there would be less violence.
Four. Some people stay and change the system from within. Gary said that is good, and he meant it. This is not a video telling you to leave; just make sure you know why you're doing what you're doing
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