The man who had two fathers.
Robert T. Kiyosaki grew up in Hawaii with a father who taught him to study hard and find a good job, and a friend's father who told him to buy the company instead. The book is the argument between the two.
From the islands to a kitchen table
The book's own biography describes him as a fourth-generation Japanese-American, born and raised in Hawaii, one of four children. He went to school in New York, served in the Marine Corps as a helicopter pilot, and worked for the Xerox Corporation, where he learnt something about selling he had not learnt in a classroom.
He built companies, including one that made nylon and Velcro wallets, and by his own account retired at forty-seven. He wrote the first Rich Dad book about the two men who taught him about money: his father, a teacher with a doctorate who was always short of cash, and the father of his childhood friend Mike, who left school at thirteen and owned the shops, the land and the hours nobody was paying for.
The introduction to the book is not about investing at all. It is about two ways of talking, and about a nine-year-old deciding which one sounded more like the truth.
The company behind the diagram
He co-founded the Rich Dad Company with his wife Kim Kiyosaki, who wrote Rich Woman, a book and community for women who were handed someone else to make their money decisions. Together they built the CASHFLOW board games, a coaching programme and a shelf of books that each take one piece of the original diagram and stretch it out.
The company's position is simple and repetitive on purpose: financial literacy should be taught in school and is not, so somebody has to teach it outside school.
1997: the first book
Rich Dad Poor Dad appears, a memoir of two fathers and one diagram, and spreads by word of mouth rather than by advertising.
The game follows
CASHFLOW turns the income statement into a board, so the lesson can be felt rather than only read.
2011: the Plata Publishing edition
The English edition used around the world, and the one later translated for Arabic readers.
2017: the Arabic edition
Published by Jarir Bookstore, bringing the two fathers to a new readership.
What this book is not
It is not a licensed financial advisory. It is one man's account of what he was taught, written in a style built for repetition: one diagram, one rule, ten steps. It names no specific shares, no specific fund, and no specific market timing.
It is also not a scheme for getting rich quickly, whatever its cover has been taken to promise. The book's own instruction is slow and unglamorous: buy assets, keep learning, pay yourself first, and repeat for a long time.
Some readers have questioned whether Rich Dad was a single real man. The book presents him as Mike's father; Kiyosaki has always described him as real. For a reader, the useful question is narrower: does the diagram change how you file the money in your own life? If it does, the argument has done its work.
Nothing on this site is financial advice either. It is a companion to a book, and the numbers on the diagrams are illustrations, not recommendations.