Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran thinks you shouldn’t ‘have to work your buns off to get rich’

The Shark Tank star doesn’t subscribe to the the mantra of other high-flying entrepreneurs, many of which believe that outworking the rest of the population is the only way to get ahead.

Instead Corcoran, who sold her New York real estate business in 2001 for $66 million, says you shouldn’t have to work hard to get rich.

“I don’t agree that you should work your buns off to get rich,” Corcoran told CNBC Make It, adding the thought “never entered my mind my whole life. And I’m rich.”

It’s not a mindset that’s in-keeping with the hustle mentality vast swathes of the American workforce subscribe to, but Corcoran might have a point.

A study from the World Economic Forum published last summer revealed that the top 10% income percentile in the U.S. works 4.4 hours more each week than those in the bottom 10%.

The study—derived from data obtained by the U.S. Census Bureau—found that people in the top 10% worked an average of 46.6 hours a week whereas the bottom worked an average of 42.4 hours.

But that’s not the case in every country. Of the 27 countries the WEF surveyed directly—including the U.K., Japan, Russia and Australia—respondents in the top 10% of earners said they actually worked an hour less every week than the bottom 10% every week.

Do the rich really work longer hours than the poor?

The graph below plots data from 27 countries.

On average, the Top 10% actually works ~1 hour less per week than the Bottom 10%, among full-time workers. Working hours are usually pretty similar though.#dataviz pic.twitter.com/Ue23VweJ9C

— Ruben Mathisen (@rubenbmathisen) August 7, 2022

In some countries this is more pronounced. For example, in South Korea and South Africa top earners work at least seven hours less than their less fortunate counterparts.

A study from the Harvard Business Review also suggests that an all-consuming work life may be an example set at the top of companies.

In 2018 Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria gathered 60,000 hours’ worth of data from working CEOs, finding that on average the leaders worked a 9.7-hour weekday and worked 79% of weekends—when they would put in around four hours of work.

On 70% of their vacation days the CEOs worked—around 2.4 hours a day—with only half of their work done at company headquarters while the rest was conducted commuting, traveling, at external meetings, at other company locations and at home.

It’s a mentality Twitter owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk subscribes to—he claims he works 120-hour weeks and compresses all the time needed for sleeping, eating, relaxing, and other tasks like hygiene into a combined seven hours a day.

Corcoran’s words of wisdom

A new study from the economics department at Washington University in St. Louis suggests that younger men in higher-paid roles might actually agree with Corcoran.

The research based on federal data from 2022 found that on average the top 10%-earning men worked 77 fewer hours that year when compared to the same earnings group in 2019. This was particularly acute in bachelor’s degree-educated men who were of “prime” working age, as opposed to those closer to retirement.

And this isn’t the first time 74-year-old Corcoran has issued advice that flies in the face of more conservative money and career advice.

In May this year the mogul confirmed she’s “not a believer in saving money,” adding: “I’ve never saved a dime my whole life.”

“I think the carefree attitude of believing that money makes money, if you’re willing to share it and spend it, really works, or at least it has certainly worked for me,” she continued.