Most of you probably do not realize that Israel’s wealthiest citizen is actually the American-born heiress to the Carnival Cruise fortune — the ultra-kooky Shari Arison.
Worth roughly $4.5 billion, she was sent to the Holy Land by her ex-Israeli pop — Carnival founder Ted Arison — to develop family businesses in his homeland.
That was nearly a decade ago. Since then, she’s taken over Israel’s largest bank, fired hundreds of workers, married and divorced a notorious — and notoriously-endowed — convicted sexual harasser, and shown Israeli simple folk a bit of the bling-bling good life.
Most interestingly, Arison has also established herself as the Middle East’s wealthiest and highest-profile nut-case!
For years she’s claimed hearing voices, receiving visions, getting messages from the beyond. Now — like a good little rich girl — she’s written a book about it all: Birth, which had its own birth this week.
In it, Arison dishes up her own brand of populism meets karma-ism — with a smattering of financial insight and lots of self-indulgence
When asked why — if she’s clairvoyant — she did not foresee the recession, Arison dead-panned “God gave me this gift to do good, not so I can turn a profit. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know when. I asked what to do and the answer I kept getting was ‘seek your truth.”
Amen!
Still, Arison’s gifts are not entirely useless — they’re simply unappreciated.
In Birth, Arison says she foresaw 2004′s Indian Ocean tsunami, 2005′s Hurricane Katrina and years of rocket fire on southern Israel.
With 2009 already almost half over — we can only ask “What might you have for us this year, Shari?”