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John Semley on Kevin O’Leary’s selling young ‘uns on getting rich

Like any good villain, Kevin O’Leary is charismatic. Not in some charming, magnanimous way. Not like a Bond villain.

Rather, there’s something commendable about O’Leary’s brazen bullheadedness: the unwincingness of the anti-government, pro-business, stalwartly capitalist world view he espouses as a yapping head on CBC’s Dragon’s Den and The Lang & O’Leary Exchange. Where the rest of us might grapple with our ideas on a second-by-second basis, O’Leary is unswervingly and frustratingly confident in his belief that freedom – that is, human freedom – is equivalent to financial freedom.

O’Leary’s exhibit, Kevin O’Leary: 40 Years Of Photography, currently in a gallery space at First Canadian Place tucked behind a Starbucks and a Harry Rosen, reflects his travels for business and television, the spoils of all his (financial) freedom. There are pictures of beaches and ice floes and Jim Morrison’s graffitied-up grave in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, prints of which will set you back $5,000 to $6,000 apiece.

The kicker: all profits from sales of prints go to a charity established by O’Leary to fund teenage entrepreneurs. He says he netted $70,000 in sales even before the show opened to the public.

O’Leary’s charitable effort seems admirable. Who’s going to chide someone for raising money to stimulate the ambitions of self-starting young kids? (Provided those young kids aren’t impassioned 14-year-olds protesting GMOs, in which case O’Leary’s more likely to slam them as “shills.”)

“I think there are many kids in grade 11 and 12 who have made the decision that they want to be an entrepreneur,” O’Leary said at the media preview. He seems to conceive of these young upstarts as part of a discernible class of person belonging to his own Randian echelon.

“When I speak at high schools,” O’Leary says, “it’s clear to me which kids are extremely focused: on business, on entrepreneurialism, on starting a business, on the pursuit of freedom – which is what they want. They want to be wealthy. I’m getting pretty good at recognizing them. We’ll gift the right ones.”

O’Leary’s alleged ability to eyeball the future vanguard of Canadian entrepreneurialism seems hilarious. During the media tour of the gallery, he mentions that before becoming a businessperson, venture capitalist and CBC star, he worked as a film editor. Then, as he noted, his life took a different path. O’Leary isn’t giving young people the opportunity to find their own path. He’s busy moulding high schoolers in his own image he even calls the charity the Future Dragon Fund.

But O’Leary’s $5,000 donations aren’t just gifts. They’re investments – if not in the individual teenage entrepreneurs, then in his creed affirming that the urge to accumulate wealth is the natural order of things and a praiseworthy direction for one’s life.

It’s like remedying a disease with more of that same disease.

The thing about O’Leary is how boldly transparent he makes all this. His photo show and its tie-in charity are as laughable as the idea of paying $5,000 for a print of a photo of a defaced Jim Morrison bust, hanging it in your home and calling it art. All under the guise of, in O’Leary’s words, “supporting an initiative.” All under that most insidious guise of its being All About The Kids.

johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000

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