HIGH STAKES WINNERS

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Colbeth's shares are worth $22 million. He says he still goes about his life the same way. He brings a lunch box to work, takes his turn making coffee, sits with his employees in the lunchroom. Yes, he has paid off some debts and put aside some money for his children's education, but his only real indulgence has been to buy a $3,000 surround-sound system for watching movies at home. He has watched Top Gun 12 times.

Conservatives and liberals all seem to regard the high-tech entrepreneur as the ideal economic agent. They do so with good reason, for if capitalism is "creative destruction," in Joseph Schumpeter's famous phrase, then people like Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, Jeff Braun, Bill Schrader and Doug Colbeth are responsible for the creating part. But is there much that conservative or liberal policies can really do to nurture such enterprise? Would Marc Andreessen work harder under a flat tax? The creating part of capitalism is the part that economic laws do not explain. Like a code writer and his code, inspiration and dedication stand outside the system to which they are so crucial.

--Reported by Marc Hequet/St. Paul, David S. Jackson/Mountain View, Stacy Perman/New York and Adam Zagorin/Washington