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A Coveted Landing Strip for Google's Founders
An anonymous reader writes "The NYT reports, "In the annals of perks enjoyed by America's corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes' drive from their offices. For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft."
I worked at the base a few years ago and the runway wasn't being used most of the time, except by the 129th rescue wing of the Air National Guard and the occasional astronaut trainer jet. The base doesn't really have any residential neighbors but that noise would carry a long distance I assume.
If you work there and fly a private plane you can already fly to work (at least that's what I heard when I was there). But of course large commercial size jets is a different story entirely.
Its because making it big is 99% luck and less than 1% hard work. These guys made their money because they were in the right place at the right time which lead to meeting the right people (when the people with the money were willing to spend some). They also lucked out getting into a university that helped get them into the right place. Look at all the other dot com millionaires and look at how lucky they were to be in the right place at the right time. Even BillyG lucked out to have contacts into major companies like IBM thanks to his mother. With out her assistance, there would have been no way his company could have ever gotten the meetings that landed them their big contracts.
I know plenty of people who worked harder but got no where mostly due to things out of their control.
Yeah, I agree. Even a singleeconomy ticket on a transatlantic flight uses about a ton of CO2, which is far far more than you should be using all year for all your needs. Once the effects of high altitute emmission of the CO2 is taken into effect, the airline industry contributes 13% of our emmissions here in the U.K. and it is the fastest growing source of emmissions, effectively cancelling out all our other efforts. What is more, the airline industry is heavily subsidised, and jet fuel is not taxed. Emmissions from airlines are not even included in our EU limits here. We just had a Camp for Climate Action here at Heathrow protesting the expansion of the airport. Private jet flyers and short haul flights should just be stopped completely, there is absolutely no reason for them, and it will kill people, plain and simple.
Deconstruct the State
Google has 312 million shares outstanding. $1.3 million dollars per year, spread over 312 million shares, is only 4 tenths of a cent per share. As a shareholder, if you are worried about that, you have taken your eye off the ball.
Well, let's compare - a Boeing 767-200 burns (on average) about 5 tonnes of fuel per hour, or about 1500 gallons of Jet A-1. That would be enough to run my (not terribly fuel-efficient) car for around 50,000 miles.
There are lots of people who go into MIT but never hit it big. (I'm sure they were moderately successful.)
There are a lot of people who work hard - and the majority of 1st gen. billionaires are no exception. But reading Bill Gates history, I believe there was a definite element of luck there - right place at the right time - along with some cunning to get where they are at.
With the same skill set and drive, just with different luck, I could definitely see Gates as head of just another software company and be worth "only" $50-100 million.
I don't think he's the exception among the billionaires. I could see a lucky break at the difference between moderately sucessful multi-millionaire businessmen no one heard of and the ultra-rich - in fact it seem to be that the once in the lifetime jackpot is what propels them to ridiculous wealth.
The one exception to this I think would be Steve Jobs - that guy could probably make fortunes several times over starting from scratch.
Actually, historically speaking, English monarchs typically weren't all that rich, or at least didn't have much in the way of what we would call disposable income. Everything they needed to pay for came out of the royal treasury - that included paying for things like ships and armies, as well as their own personal expenses.
The state of Pennsylvania exists because Charles II needed to pay back a large debt owed to William Penn's father (Admiral Penn) - the only way he could pay for it was by forking over a huge amount of land. He'd never be able to raise the money to pay it back.
Elizabeth II, on the other hand, is loaded. Mostly because of the amount of land she privately holds (as opposed to holds by right of being the crown).
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Just to note: There is approx. one billionaire per 4.5 million people in the US.
Lots of people dream that dream, but know it's just that, a dream. The chances of attaining that are insane. And living your life out striving to attain that...well, lets just say you're in for a lot of disappointment.
Besides, for a lot of people anymore, that's not the dream they want to attain. There are other worthy dreams that don't center around becoming one of the richest people on the block.
No Comment.
Yes, people *should* pay the taxes they are required to (or *publicly* withhold their taxes as a protest, so as to show they're not merely trying to stiff other taxpayers), but as long as the tax structure encourages that, all the wishing in the world isn't going to change the creative use of accountants.
That's part of why I've come to the conclusion that a land tax would be the best tax of all. Basically, you can't avoid it because a) you can't hide land, and b) any "accountant trickery" would be publicly visible (hey -- why is Globocorp's HQ appraised at $0? Then I'll buy it!). It also means you don't have to monitor each and every (easily concealable) economic transaction for tax purposes.
Of course, people like making corporations work through hundreds of thousands of pages of tax law instead...
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I think Google's done a great job, but this is entirely the wrong impression. Search engines were not only obvious, they were old hat, the battles already fought and decided, when Google appeared on the scene. And Google has never, by any standard measure, been the best search engine, except for being fast. And it's not the best now, in fact it's worse than when it started.
Google's "breakthrough" was being fast through distributed search, which is something that all the search engines were working on for some time. Google won this by being latecomers to the search game, that is, not having any customers to lose by risking a different back-end architecture; and by being fortunate that the big Internet portals at the time made poor decisions (Yahoo thought directories were better and never committed to search, Excite was consumed by the monumentally misguided @Home). There's no sense in which their founders were smarter or worked harder than the founders of any other technology company at the time.
Now, lots of those founders are or were doing "just fine"--a lot better than me. Hard, smart work definitely counts for something. But the difference between "quite successful" and "super-rich" is luck, not hard work. The google founders weren't smarter or harder-working than a hundred other people. I know a very successful and famous Internet celebrity and multimillionaire, who, quite frankly, isn't smarter than anybody.
demi
'Well considering they probably have 10 accountants who work year after year on schemes on how to get Larry and Sergey's taxes minimized, it probably is taxpayer money. Then again I'm one of those crazy people who think you should just pay whatever your tax is without trying to do a dozen shady schemes in order to avoid it.'
You know I hear people complaining about this crap in Fortune 500 corporations and it sounds fine and dandy. It isn't until you look at the little guy that you realize why there are so many republicans fighting for these tax breaks.
I am a small business owner. I am incorporated because if anything were to ever go wrong it would basically end me financially ever after if I were not. Every dime I make gets taxed twice. The corporation is taxed, and then I am taxed. You bet I do everything legally possible to avoid taxation because I am paying double taxes! Forget private jets, those tax breaks impact my grocery budget.
This problem doesn't change in a bigger company, just the number of people involved in the scale. All of the profits are paid to employees or shareholders. The employees are taxed and the shareholders are taxed, in many cases the shareholders also invested after-tax money.
The solution is simple, abolish corporate taxes altogether since their profits are either reinvested or paid out to others who have to report them as income. Furthermore the payouts to shareholders should be taxed as income because for your average corporation the one or three shareholders are the owners.
I also think all car expenses, utilities, rent, phone, internet, and food should be deductions on personal income tax.