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Bill Gates No Longer World's Richest Man
alphadogg writes "Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim Helu has beaten out Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the wealthiest person on earth and nab the top spot on the 2010 Forbes list of the World's Billionaires." I'd still let the guy buy me dinner if he's ever in my town. He's probably still good for it even though he's fallen on hard times.
When I'm laid off and searching garbage cans for food, it will bring me great comfort to know that at least someone is doing well.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Having billions of dollars in chequing strikes me as incredibly insane.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
I'm sure he has 500 million in loose change lost in his couches.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
...when people's losses equal more money than I will EVER have in my entire life...I become a sad panda :(
Living With a Nerd
Carlos 'not so' Slim.
And now, the $0.5 million question: How much money does Gates give to charity?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Who?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Hearing this news saddened me at first, then it angered me into action. I've setup an online donation fund here. With a small $50 weekly donation from 30 or 40 million of you, Bill can continue to live the kind of life he's used to. Won't somebody think of Bill Gate's children!
Turns out he spend his entire fortune on sweater vests and diesel powered nuns.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
California's bankrupt and the richest man in the world is Mexican?
Lovin' them apples.
This happens occasionally. Sometimes it's Carlos (not "Carlo"); I think once it was Ingvar Kamprad (who founded IKEA), etc. Bill will be back on top eventually.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
... where all our money went?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Don't worry, Carlos Slim is a generous man, he'll give Bill Gates some side work till he gets back on his feet.
On a more serious note, we now have more millionaires and billionaires than at any other time in the history of the world! The wealth is trickling down baby!
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
NO ONE CARES
TelMex controls 92% of the landline phones in the country and his affiliate cell phone business, Telcel, accounts for 73% of the mobile business. The wealth and power derived from these companies has allowed Slim to expand his business empire across a wide swathe of industries."
Monopolies are obviously highly profitable for a few. Besides the economic cost to the those funding el imperio de Carlo Slim Helu, have the Mexicans actually weighed up the social costs of supporting it?. ...Or is it that the Mexicans do not have a government that represents their best interests...?
None of these men passed Sultan of Brunei. The Forbes list only counts people in the private sector, so the Sultan is not counted.
Sam Walton's heirs, if they were counted as one person, make Gates, Buffet and Slim combined look like paupers.
It's probably worth clarifying... his name is Carlos Slim Helú or just Carlos Slim.
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/philanthropy_individual/
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"last year's wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year. "
I'm no communist, but something sticks in my craw when I realise how many of the very richest (both corporations, banks and individuals) have done so well out of the recent financial woes that have destroyed the lives of so many people.
I can't help thinking that we are lining up for a political "readjustment" in many countries if the current situation continues. The gap between the very richest and everyone else is growing wider, and the theory of "trickle-down" just isn't holding up, those at the bottom are still being shafted.
Paul Leader
And the poor got poorer. Nothing new to see here, move along.
It's criminal, though isn't it? Millions of people are out of work, thousands are losing their homes, a majority of Americans have so little in savings that a single illness can put them over the edge into poverty, and yet, all these guys, despite a huge recession, saw their fortunes go UP.
Go figure.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
along the way with a combination of smart, aggressive, unseemly, unethical, and blatantly illegal tactics is probably much more impressive.
Is the fact that Gates isn't worth as much may be a function of him giving away his wealth as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation? If so, I see him slipping as a sign that he is really putting his money where his mouth is, and actually doing something to improve the world with the results of his hard work like he said he would.
Sheldon
In America, greed is a game. Sure, Gates, Buffet and rich asshole #1 have money.
Question: Did they earn it?
Answer: No. They played a game well and have received a cash prize.
No man does 53 billion dollar of work. He games the system so the incremental profits of the workers at the bottom of the pyramid trickle up into his pockets.
If you disagree, you are wrong. The truth in the paragraph above is undeniable by clear-minded, rational people. However, fear of socialism fueled the Cold War, was the justification of the US war in Viet Nam, the US funding and training of death squad in Nicaragua, and is the rational for the current Cuba embargo. Oh, and fear of socialism is the primary undercurrent to keep healthcare in America as a luxury only the wealthy can afford.
America is a fucked up mess. Capitalism is a fallacy.
this is old school politically connected rich. You want to see who has the best pensions, health care, and similar, look to those in government or connected to it.
The surest way to stay poor or just plain upset with life is to compare what you have to others, the first symptom is directing blame to those who are better off.
I am quite sure a garbage can surfer is not a /. surfer, if they are it probably explains the previous. Let alone, Obama and Co. decided trickle down was too inefficient of means to get money to Wall Street so they just send the checks directly.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
In case anyone doesn't remember. (link) Now if I actually want to see a product in a package, I have to go to WorstBuy or Wal-Mart.
Gates spent 30-40 billions on charity, if he didn't, still would've been #1.
You can't handle the truth.
Here's the article on CNN about it:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/03/10/forbes.list/index.html
The last paragraph in that article makes me wish I was down on my luck and only getting thousands of dollars a month.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Each little saving he made by laying off workforce, or using cheaper components, or undermining the competition, or misleading you with regards to the quality of functionality of his products or services... and so on, added a little more to his wealth.
Is the man a towering genius. Probably not. Is he single mindedly bent on amassing power and wealth. Yes. Did he get lucky. Yes, that too.
There should be a law against it.
If you have got some drivel to spout about how someone getting rich somehow enriches us all then I suggest you save us the torture by sticking your head in a bucket first.
Cry me a fucking river.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
...when even Bill Gates can lose his job to cheap Mexican labor.
Still a little way go before Bill's chances improve to pass through the eye of a needle:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark%2010:24-10:25&version=KJV
But it looks like he and his wife are at least giving it a try:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/
Camel: "There's More Than One Way To Do It."
Needle: "No there isn't!"
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
Reagan is the primary person to blame for the current economy. Basically he sold the world a pyramid scheme. Trickle down economy is EXACTLY what a pyramid scheme is. The idea that anyone who joins the scheme just pours some money into the top of the pyramid and then reaps his rewards as it trickles down to him. And it works, for the first few layers until to many people are needed to join to keep the system flowing and it all collapses.
And just like pyramid schemes continue to be popular, reaganomics continue to be popular, by the same kind of people. The scammers and the ignorant.
A pyramid scheme MUST fail, because the longer it continues, the larger it becomes. It can only work in fictional universes were infinite growth is possible (and for a long time, that is exactly what Reagan fans claimed). For a manufacturing nation as you claim it would in, this would mean that their must be an infinite number of resource to use in manufacturing and an infinite market to take the products. Or to put it in simpler terms, it would mean for Microsoft, that it could half the release cylce of their flagship product Windows each time, and still find a growing market for it. So by now you would be getting a new windows every day, pay 300 bucks for it, and have 6 billion people buying it.
Silly? That is what reaganomics boil down to. Infinite sustained growth.
Like all pyramids scams, we want to believe that it could work, but it doesn't. And it shows the fatal flaw in democracy. People that fall for scams, get to vote.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
America does tax the the rich to support its poor, therefor it is a socialist state. Trust me, you don't want to see real capitalism. Places like Hong-Kong used to be it and it ain't pretty. Think American ghetto's are though, imagine people with actual paying jobs living in "housing" that is a shell, with inside a mesh of cages that house entire families. Yes, not dissimilar to how chickens are housed in battery farms.
In a true capitalistic country, there is no restriction on what can be for sale. You would have legal organ harvesting, since money buys anything.
America right now might be bad, but it could be a lot worse.
And you can't really blame the Bill Gates of the world for it either. He got 1 vote. It is the millions of people who are just a paycheck away from complete financial ruin who vote against a system that could give them a proper safety net because they think that next paycheck will have a billion dollar amount on it, and then they would have to pay 50% taxes on it and that 500 million would mean utter ruination of their dream to one day make it rich.
It ain't the rich who worry about taxes, if Bill Gates suddenly had to pay 80% in taxes, what would he loose? Nothing. It is the idiots who live on minimum wage who somehow capping capital gains tax is a good thing for them.
It is the American dream vs gritty reality and reality doesn't stand a chance.
Sweden is the almost complete opposite, there the working and middle class (the majority voter) believe that the best system for themselves is a system where you can take a year off from work, or not work at all and be supported by the state. An alien thought to most Americans, but ultimately the Swedish system can only exist because the majority votes for it.
And the majority of American seem to want the current system.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Actually, the value of the stock of Buffet and Gates has gone up. They just have contributed more to each of the foundations they run.
As a correction to this story, in 2008, Bill Gates was not the Richest man in the world, Warren Buffet was, in fact, Bill Gates wasn't even the second richest, according to this article
http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/richest-people-billionaires-billionaires08-cx_lk_0305billie_land.html
[stating the obvious because it is fun] /. this is blindingly obvious but to many mainstream people this will be a revelation. So my next thought is: If the mobile devices are the next probable source for an internet-bubble like bonanza ... how do I get in on the action? I wonder if there's a mainstream open source mobile operating system that I can write code for ... hmm ...
I've been suspecting that mobile devices are already the "PC" or "Internet" of this decade. This seems to support the idea. I'm sure to most of the smart folks on
[/stating the obvious because it is fun]
[signature]
Since when do they treat a known drug cartel guys front business as legitimate income? I mean I know he started out somewhat legit, but his big break was the cocaine trade, which he used to make his visible fortune.
... had he not taken part in the buyout of CompUSA years ago. Hence Bill Gates should be personally thanking all the unemployed upper management idiots at CompUSA for keeping him on top of the list for just a little bit longer...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
When you have so much money that everyone (including your wife and children) hate you, thats when you know you are TOO RICH.
I don't mean to appear racist but how much of his 53 billion is drug money?
Am I wrong to be skeptical of that kind of growth?
I'm not saying Carlos is involved in that, but I'm sure there are a lot of rich Mexicans, some who are as rich as Carlos Slim.
His whole adult life, after failing out of college, has been in pursuit of the modern sin accumulating excessive wealth at the expense of the common good of society. The current Pope made that clear in last year's Caritas in veritate . Even the media pandering with the pseudo-philantropy does nothing to mitigate the harm. That may fool the media hacks owned by him and his political friends but at the end of the day the pseudo-philantropy is simply using the fascade of charity to further personal investments and provide political leverage to increase power and block opponents.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You are assigned your class, you cannot freely choose it. We need to change the rules to compensate.
The worst thing is that the most powerfull character class is the only one allowed to change the rules. And it does so continually to further increast its advantage.
In tax breaks and handouts. Or did you forget the bank bailouts (among others) and the biggest tax cuts in american history which went to the corporations and largest wealth owners?
I think it is terribly bad for a pair of evil company monopolists to be the worlds richest people. I'll give you my paypal details and let you all help me claim that position in the name of justice!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Making money isn't "criminal" and I, for one, hope it never will be.
--
I've just had an epiphany.
Close. Think theological or ethical rather than legal. See Caritas in Veritate on 5.) causing poverty and 6.) becoming obscenely wealthy. There are also a lot of chemicals in creating hardware components that can mutate DNA and / or act as gender hormone mimics...
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Same price as late 1990s, although substantial dividends in the past decade.
Gates diversified much of holdings out of it. Google boys are doing the same out of theirs.
I'd like to point out that Forbes previously announced that Carlos Slim was the world's richest man in 2007.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
You don't know much about statistics, do you?
First, the "GDP per capita" can be grossly distorted by the top 0.1% to make it look like the average continues to increase while the median does not.
Second, we're talking about wealth, not income. If you think "income inequality" is bad, try looking at "wealth inequality" - it's far worse.
Third, the wikipedia article you cite turns against you quite well, despite being about median household income.
Percentage change in median household income by percentiles
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/02/Changeinmedianbefore-taxincomeUS1989-2004.gif
Percentange change in mean household income by percentiles
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/28/Changeinmeanbefore-taxincomeUS1989-2004.gif
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the last bar in those charts indicates a negative percentange change in income for the bottom 50% of households from 2001-2004. I wonder what the updated charts would look like.
Okay, so that was only those three years. What about a longer trend? How about a historic graph of income broken down by percentiles, adjusted for "inflation" (probably CPI *gags*)?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a7/United_States_Income_Distribution_1967-2003.svg
That doesn't look too bad...until you see the logarithmic axis on the y scale. The ones at the bottom make roughly the same amount of money for the past 30 years (Trickle Down FTL), but the ones at the top are getting exponentially increasing wealth. And they stop at the 95th percentile...they probably had to exclude the 99th and 99.9th percentiles because they would have made the 95th percentile look flat.
Sure, over 30 years, the bottom 10% of households went from $8000 to $10000. But hey, $2000 more dollars, that's a positive increase alright! Can you even imagine being one of those households that makes it by on less than $10k?
:(){
per capita. And if it were, beating an underdeveloped, fast growing, China is nothing to be proud of in that case.
Claiming Reaganomics was a "pyramid scheme" sounds good at first glance, but I don't buy into the theory.
In a classic pyramid scheme, you're looking at ONE entity at the top, making promises of success and fortune to all the people to sign up to work for them at the lower levels. And typically, that "work" includes some arrangement causing the number of people signed up to expand exponentially, as they're encouraged to sign up at least X number of other recruits, collecting some sort of fee or earning some sort of bonus for each one they sign on. Before too long, the visual concept of a pyramid isn't even too accurate anymore, as a more accurate depiction would be a squashed pyramid that's radically wider as it approaches its base.
In a "trickle down theory" as Reagan was advocating, it's more like you're trying to create a huge field of little pyramids. You want to *encourage* people to start their own businesses. And yes, it's true that there will always be a relative few at the top who earn more than the greater number of people comprising the lower layers of these "pyramids", but the people in the "lower layers" aren't prevented from getting out from under one and trying to start their OWN pyramid, where they get to be on top, OR sliding into a layer of an existing pyramid elsewhere, where they're happier with their situation.
To take the analogy a bit further, when you've got this field of pyramids, none of them are fully self-sustaining. They need to exchange resources with each other. So the more of them are out there, successfully "trickling money down", the better the economy is on the whole - because money is going to circulate amongst all of them.
Where did you get the idea that Reagan made claims about "infinite sustained growth", or was this just a conclusion you came to about the process? There are ALWAYS going to be a limited number of resources to go around, and a population limit of so many people on the planet. Nothing is "infinite" in the equation.
IMHO, you can boil everything on the planet down to two different basic philosophies of how wealth should be distributed. One camp advocates attempting to "equalize" everyone, so regardless of our personal efforts, we're all essentially guaranteed an equal share of wealth and resources. The other advocates competition, believing it's not only "ok" but "good and proper" for some people (or even nations) to succeed in claiming larger shares of wealth and resources than others. Oddly enough though, I think you USUALLY find that the leaders of any nation subscribing to the former ideology manage to justify larger shares of said wealth and resources for themselves than for the rest of their citizenry.
Wow we're even outsourcing our rich people now.
No wonder our economy sucks.
I'd still let the guy buy me dinner if he's ever in my town.
Don't think I would. It'd probably be full of worms and viruses and whatnot.
I'd rather have my dinner supplied by folks who are open about what went into it. Not that that's always a real choice, y'know, but still ...
(I have found that many of my favorite meals have been made by people who want to discuss at great detail everything they did to make it. But I suppose not everyone is such a cooking geek.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The richest guy in the world being from one of the most corrupt countries? Big surprise. When you own much of the industry in an entire country, you know some nasty deals have gone on somewhere.
I'm pro-capitalist, but if a single business/person owns controls that much, it ceases to be capitalism. There is no competition, no new investment, no invention. Nothing but collecting payment since there is no other option. The sad thing is the Mexican government probably couldn't break up Carlos' monopolies at this point even if they wanted to.
Congrats Carlos. You won. Everyone else in Mexico loses.
FUNK!
Once again, we get to admire some of the most ruthless people alive. People who so vastly overcharge for goods and services and brutally underpay their staff, people who speculate mercilessly and rapaciously with no regard to the broader costs to society, people who push for legislation that favors their accumulation of wealth at any cost, in short some of the world's greatest social parasites.
Go ahead. Admire them. You love them. You wish you were like them. You believe the bullshit that working hard, taking risks, and being "entrepreneurial" deserves such fantastically disproportionate accumulation of wealth. Let's face it. You're a sucker. You look around you and you don't see what is actually there. You just see the puerile myths and legends that have been drummed into your wooden head since birth.
Now go lick Carlos Slim's boots, or better yet, those of the Waltons. Between them they have more than Carlos Slim and Bill Gates put together. Why not? Hell, it's partly your money they accumulated. Sucker.
He got his money clean, or at least, that is mostly true. Most everyone he had anything to do with was better off for having dealt with him.
Read his wiki article.
--PM
How much of the US economy is supported by illegal mexican immigrants who do the jobs the US economy needs done, but natives can't and won't do? Pot calling kettle, you look a bit black.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can attest that he (ok, his maid) gave out fantastic candy at Halloween and I was better off for having dealt with him.