The British energy tycoon Jim Ratcliffe didn’t have a privileged start to life. His father – the household’s main wage-earner – was a joiner when Ratcliffe was young, and he lived in a council house in Failsworth, Oldham, until he was ten. In 2024, he summed up his ordinary beginnings by telling the Gentleman’s Journal: “I didn’t come from any money.” Things, however, would only get better.