YOU can’t be right all the time. In a 1995 profile of Peter Munk, the founder of Barrick Gold, a mining giant, The Economist concluded that the biggest problem facing the company was who would replace him as boss. Mr Munk will at last step down as the company’s chairman at the annual meeting on April 30th, aged 86. In the same profile we fretted that by spending $500m on a property company, Mr Munk risked ending up in the same boat as two fellow Canadian tycoons, Paul Reichmann and Robert Campeau, who had gone spectacularly bankrupt. In 2006 Mr Munk had the last laugh, selling the company for $9 billion.

There were lots of reasons why our 1995 profile was so pessimistic. Mr Munk was already 67. The mining industry is an unforgiving one. Diversifying into property is a well-known road to ruin. And Mr Munk had a catalogue of failures to his name. But we forgot one vital thing: his ability to turn failure into success and threat into opportunity.

Failure is a hot topic in American business at the moment. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs argue that the valley’s success is its tolerance for failure. Historians apply the same argument to the great arc of American history: the United States has pulled ahead of its rivals in part because its entrepreneurs have always had a talent for picking themselves up, and its bankruptcy laws are among the most lenient in the world.

In Mr Munk’s early years, “threat” meant more than the possibility that his latest app might not get the nod from some venture capitalist; and “opportunity” meant more than the chance of being bought out by Facebook. In 1944 he fled his native Hungary on the “Kastner train”, which carried almost 1,700 Jews who were able to pay for their passage to Switzerland and thus escape the gas chambers. Four years later he arrived in Canada with his family fortune gone, and worked his way through university, cleaning cars and selling Christmas trees, ending up with a degree in electronic engineering.

His first business, the Clairtone Sound Corporation, went from boom to bust in 11 years. One moment the former penniless immigrant was driving a Pierce-Arrow convertible down Madison Avenue and paying Frank Sinatra to endorse his hi-fi systems. The next moment he was unceremoniously dumped from the company, which then folded, the victim of overambitious expansion and Japanese competition. Nina Munk, one of his five children, says that his first experience of failure marked him for life. It probably lay behind his penchant for hedging output when he started in mining, an innovation at the time among gold miners. “Every human being makes mistakes,” he says. “You have to hedge so that if a decision goes wrong it does not eliminate your ability to stay at the table and play on.” But it did not dull his appetite for venturing into challenging businesses.

After the collapse of Clairtone Mr Munk “played on” by investing in hotels in the South Pacific. The threat of failure continued to stalk him. A resort he tried to build in Egypt with Adnan Khashoggi, an arms dealer, went nowhere. A business park he developed south of Berlin after the Soviet empire imploded began well but was undercut by competing parks on the Berlin ring road. Nevertheless, he succeeded in restoring his fortune.

Mr Munk’s greatest gamble was his move into mining when he founded Barrick in 1983. He knew little about the business at the time—just as he had known little about hotels before that. But his ignorance freed him from the assumptions that dominated the industry. It was mostly run by geologists and engineers whose aim was to dig enormous holes with other people’s money, paying little regard to shareholder returns. Gold miners were supposed to be “believers” in gold rather than efficient managers out to maximise profits. “Bullshit,” thought Mr Munk; he soon changed all that. A string of ever-more audacious acquisitions turned Barrick into what was for a while the world’s largest gold miner and is still among the biggest.

Mr Munk also turned out to be a first-rate manager of his growing business empire. He may have been willing to overrule old hands when it came to whether mining should be run by managers or miners—and do it with absolute self-confidence that brooked no question. But he was also willing to delegate operational decisions to experts. Indeed, he explicitly refused to micromanage, to give himself time to think big thoughts.

Sailing into stormy weather

In recent years Barrick’s competitive advantage has been eroded in part because every other mining company has now recognised the force of his insight. He is leaving the company he created at a difficult time: last year Barrick lost $10.4 billion as the gold price tumbled; and a huge project in the Andes, that the firm has been working on for years, was halted. But none of these problems has dulled his appetite for risk. He may yet have some big, farewell deal for Barrick up his sleeve. Even if not, he can now give his full attention to a side-project he has been working on for years, to turn an old naval dockyard in Montenegro into a marina where the super-rich can park their yachts alongside his.

Whether fortune will smile on his latest venture is unclear: will Russian oligarchs, its most obvious customers, be impoverished by Western sanctions over Russia’s meddling in Ukraine, or will they flock to his marina to hunker down until the storm blows over? But Mr Munk is less troubled by the prospect of failure this time around. He plans to give almost all of his fortune to charity, and has already made a start by giving $160m to hospitals and universities in Canada and Israel. He wishes to spare his children the curse of too much inherited wealth. Take it from a man who knows a thing or two about success or failure: there are few things more dangerous than making life too easy.

Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter