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Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person

Posted by samzenpus on from the more-money-more-problems dept.

jones_supa writes "Bill Gates is once again the world's richest person. He recaptured the title from Mexican investor Carlos Slim, as Microsoft hit a five-year high. It is the first time Gates has held the mantle since 2007. His fortune is valued at $72.7 billion, up 16 percent year-to-date. At the same time, Mr. Slim's América Móvil, the largest mobile-phone operator in the Americas, has dropped 14 percent this year after Mexico's Congress passed a bill that could quash the billionaire's market dominance. That's helped erase more than $3 billion from the tycoon's net worth. What comes to Bill Gates, most of his fortune is held in Cascade Investment LLC, a holding entity through which he owns stakes in more than a dozen publicly traded companies and several closely held operations. He has donated $28 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

51 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Something is wrong by Krneki · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When the system allows a single individual to amass such wealth into his own hands something is wrong with the system. I have nothing against the rich or Bill Gates and I do think that more capable people should have a reward, but this is going beyond good taste.

    --
    Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
    1. Re:Something is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is nothing new, and plays out again and again throughout human history. My greater disappointment is that we're *still* dealing with this after all these years. But unless BG starts taking over countries, or allowing his sex slaves to escape unharmed, live with it.

    2. Re:Something is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The system should never allow a single individual to create a product that touches hundreds of millions of people daily. We should never allow economy of scale or efficiency in that scale. They're both shitbags as people go, but they've done incredible things to move the world forward. Imagine if we were all still trying to use C/PM or if hundreds of millions of poor people in central america didn't have access to an affordable cellphone.

      You're a selfish douche.

    3. Re:Something is wrong by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who gets to decide how much is too much? The problem isn't that some people are too rich, the problem is that way too many people are incredibly poor, which is most people outside of developed countries. This isn't a problem that can be fixed by arbitrarily picking a number and confiscating any wealth above that, it's a problem that gets fixed by people in those countries getting rid of their corrupt politicians and levying taxes on their own wealthy. Not to say each country is a discrete unit of course, we can help them in many ways, but ultimately the decisions need to be made domestically.

    4. Re:Something is wrong by chromas · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not only are we unharmed, he even lets us post to /. from our Windows 9 phones while on the job.

    5. Re:Something is wrong by Twanfox · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who gets to decide how much is too much? ... people in those countries getting rid of their corrupt politicians and levying taxes on their own wealthy.

      Something tells me you answered your own question just there. And if it is 'the people in those countries' deciding when too much is too much, then the GP poster commenting he feels Gates has too much is certainly within his rights to say.

      Saying that the problem isn't that some people are too rich, it's that some are too poor is trying to make excuses why being overly successful (in some cases, abusively successful) is desirable and 'them good for nuthin' lazy poor folk' are in the wrong for not being successful enough. The whole game is set up so that a few accumulate a lot that could otherwise be feeding the many. The phrase 'you have to have money to make money' didn't come about because it's a cute saying. I can't imagine that anyone that's rich now continued to slog away on the assembly line until they were rich. At some point they stopped doing manual labor and let their funds work for them through investments. Even still, SOMEONE needs to slog away on that assembly line, don't they? Why can't they be paid commiserate with the total value their work brings in, just like those awesome investors that ponied up a little dough but didn't otherwise put forth ANY effort for their return? It'd certainly keep them unsuccessful poor from being so poor, wouldn't it?

      The simple fact is that people are greedy assholes no matter which end of the 'rich' spectrum you're on. It's just that those that have (money, skills, power), they get to flex their greed more strongly than the rest. If everyone played fair on their own, sought balance instead of their own aggrandizement, we wouldn't feel the need to put in such silly things like regulations and limits and 'how much is too rich' and such because you just wouldn't have that problem anymore.

    6. Re:Something is wrong by flayzernax · · Score: 2

      Well the difference is when the few decide what is to much vs the many. Thats democracy, or rule by majority. For the distribution of wealth and power, majority rule is fine by me.

      For other things concerning race or beliefs rule by majority is terrible.

      Our system does not currently make much of a distinction. And is run mostly by the wealthy.

    7. Re:Something is wrong by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, you're making the same mistake as the OP, treating all places as if they were the same. The bottom line is that even the poorest in developed countries have a standard of living far beyond most of the rest of the world mostly due to open and clear political systems and more importantly taxation.

      There are two sentiments at work here, a kind of moralising piety that tut tuts at Bill sitting on his pile of cash as people in poor countries starve, and an attitude that really wants to see the lot of poor people get better and understands how to do so. Yours and the OPs are the former.

    8. Re:Something is wrong by chrismcb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why is there something wrong with the system when one person does better than everyone else?

    9. Re:Something is wrong by ta_gueule · · Score: 3

      Extremely rich people are a threat to democracy. If you don't take action they become richer and richer, faster and faster and end up controlling your nation. The risk would be greatly mitigated with a cap on inheritance for instance.

    10. Re:Something is wrong by flayzernax · · Score: 2

      It's when that better then everyone else is by an arbitrarily decided amount. Mostly due to politics, economic trends, luck, and fiat currency over other factors. Such as actual contribution to the "tribal" group. National group. Persons colloquial fellows who helped that one individual get there.

      If it were not for us all contributing to the society we have now. There would be no pile to be on top of.

      Bill Gates by that logic owes his countrymen a great deal.

    11. Re:Something is wrong by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 2

      If extremely rich people are buying politicians or something then I would suggest the problem again lies with your political system and a lack of serious consequences for corruption. Although I do agree that inheritances should be heavily taxed, in fact I think they already are in many places.

    12. Re:Something is wrong by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Another mistake they are making is not distinguishing between wealth and income. Taxing wealth amounts to punishment for not spending, and it can only be done once.

      96.9% of the people in India (1.18 billion people) live on less than $5 per day (adjusted for purchasing power.) Confiscating 100% of Bill Gates wealth will only give each of them a one time payment of $61.61, less than a month of income.

      The upshot of realizing these things is that you see that wealth disparity is a pretend problem, and the closest thing it is to a real problem is the fact that so many people can be so easily fooled into droning on about it like it actually was a problem.

      At the end of the day no matter how the handful of people like Bill Gates became so rich, neither their wealth nor their income holds a candle to what governments throw around on a daily basis. The frustrating part is that those than drone on about wealth disparity were basically handed marching orders to drone on about it by members of the very governments that so easily throw around much larger sums of money. It only takes a week for the U.S. Federal government (responsible for only about half of all government spending in the United States) to spend more than Bill Gates entire net worth.

      The problem in India is mainly rooted in the lack of the sufficient capitol base necessary for the percentile growth of the economy to keep up with western nations. The problem in America is too many people don't realize that the government already spends more than enough, and because of that they even the worst off of us already have it better than the average man ever had it ever in the history of the world.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    13. Re:Something is wrong by Rockoon · · Score: 3, Informative

      The risk would be greatly mitigated with a cap on inheritance for instance.

      The U.S. Federal government grabs 40% of any substantial inheritance. What the fuck are you smoking?

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    14. Re:Something is wrong by Sockatume · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Confiscating 100% of Bill Gates wealth will only give each of them a one time payment of $61.61, less than a month of income.

      And if we lived in a system where tax money was literally handed to people, you'd have a point, but that's not what tax money is used for on all but the smallest scales. Economics has shown time and time again that the impacts on quality of life from spending money on social infrastructre are disproportionately large. Suppose you built tens of billions of dollars worth of hospitals, which is a lot of hospitals by any measure, as well as the infrastructure to set up medical schools. Suddenly you've not only created a promising new career avenue, you've also made the nation healthier and, as a consequence, more productive, and as a consequence, raised their incomes.

      Bootstrapping, essentially.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    15. Re:Something is wrong by ta_gueule · · Score: 2

      With all respect, this is not a cap. Let's do some maths here.
      If your stockpile of dollars increase by 5% a year, which is very conservative when you have billions of dollars, even when inflation is considered. Let's say a generation lasts 20 years. After 20 years, your extremely rich has 265% of the money he inherited, minus what they spent, which is negligible for the extremely rich. You tax it 40%. The next generation will be left with 160% of the money left by the grand father. This is very conservative. Anyway, the family (or should we call it a dynasty?) will still multiply its wealth forever, faster and faster.

    16. Re:Something is wrong by ta_gueule · · Score: 2

      You are assuming the politicians have the power, which is debatable. The too rich people actually end up with more power than the politician. He controls the industry more than the politician does. He can set the direction of the economy. He can hire or fire people. He can relocate factories, he can remove a city from the map and build it elsewhere with his money. This is not about buying politicians, it's about where the real power lies. If you let the extremely rich people get too rich, they become kings. Their power exceeds the one of the elected politicians. They are a threat to democracy.

    17. Re:Something is wrong by peragrin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Put this into perspective. In 1970 a man earning $35,000 a year could afford to own a home, a car, and afford to have his wife stay at home to raise the kids. If the wife worked too then they probably had a second summer cabin somewhere.

      in 2010 a man earning $35,000 is barely living above the poverty line.(depending on location) you can't support a wife to raise the kids, let alone anything else.

      The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
      In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70

      In 1970 the average CEO earned $500,000
      in 2010 the average CEO earned $5,000,000

      Now tell me what is wrong with that picture? Circuit city is my favorite example. in 2008 after a year of bad sales the CEO of circuit city came up with a plan to save $10 million over 3 years. He fired the top 3,000 highest paid non mangers and rehired new people in their place earning minimum wage. Wall street was happy, and he and the board paid themselves $5 million in bonuses immediately.

      With in a year Circuit city was gone completely. why? because he fired the top 3000 sales people. He could have saved $10 million dollars immediately that year by cutting his and the rest of the executive boards salaries. They weren't doing anything anyways.

      executive and upper level bonuses have gone out of control. Goldman Sachs had to borrow money from he US Government so it could pay bonuses. I always thought that if the company did poorly bonuses were to be cut first not last, but for the rich they payout bonuses and then close the company down.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    18. Re:Something is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Of course, without Microsoft, the rise and commoditization of x86 would have never happened (this started in the XENIX days, when they were the single largest Unix vendor), which set the stage for essentially creating the home computer market as we know it today. Of cours, it existed before MS got involved, but it wasn't Texas-Instruments, Atari, Apple or Commodore/Amiga/Commodore-Amiga who put a PC in practically every household.

      It stands to reason that had Ms not, via their partnerships with Intel and IBM, commoditized the personal computer in the way that they did, the internet probably wouldn't have left academia and become what it is today. The DTP revolution would have still happened (it was born on the Mac, after all) but also wouldn't have grown into what it is today without the accessibility of having Windows, and by extension cheap PCs everywhere. Same goes for gaming and multimedia (previously the barrier to entry for the latter, was being able to afford SGI gear, though Atari introduced it to consumers).

      And your gripe is screen resolution? Based on Android devices which xist in a market Microsoft was never at any point a major player in. Never mind that Apple was debatably first to market with that, and was first to market for "traditional" devices with their retina displays. I'd venture that it having took so long is due to the cost of producing the hardware has dropped to where it's affordable only now.

      I do, however agree with the conclusion. life before "tech everywhere all the time for everything" was probably better.

    19. Re:Something is wrong by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      The problem with your argument is thus: You can move a billion dollars around the planet in seconds. this means that you would have to fix EVERY country and ALL the politicians on the entire planet to do anything about the problem of too much wealth giving too much power, and that simply isn't realistic.

      Just look at T. Boone Pickens who has said on several occasions he intends to own every drop of water in the United States, even if YOUR state refuses to sell to him all he has to do is find one upstream who will, now picture that on a global scale because that is what we are talking about here.

      The simple fact is money is power and power corrupts, end of story. With the ability to move wealth at a push of a button the ability to just "fix politics" just doesn't exist because the wealthy can use the fact that they can move billions in a second to turn nation against nation.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    20. Re:Something is wrong by Sique · · Score: 5, Informative
      It has nothing to do with Microsoft and the commodization of the PC. There were home computers in many households before, and most of them were able to work with the Internet before Microsoft enabled Internet out of the box on their OS offerings.

      For a long time, Microsoft tried to use their own LANmanager (based on DEC's Pathworks) or its later incarnation as NetBEUI/NetBIOS as the local networking stack, and IP had to be added via Trumpet Winsock or similar third party applications. The Internet Providers thus were giving out installation media to install IP functionality together with the Internet access.

      Internet was in many households long before Microsoft implemented it on the "commodized PC platform".

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    21. Re:Something is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The bottom line is that even the poorest in developed countries have a standard of living far beyond most of the rest of the world mostly due to open and clear political systems and more importantly taxation.

      I see this trotted out in nearly 'rich vs poor' thread. Why? Are you proud of this standard? Here in the US we still have homelessness. A good friend of mine is a public defender in a mid-size city; she just lost a client to cancer because he couldn't get chemo due to lack of health insurance (an no, the ER doesn't do chemo) and he fucking DIED. We've got food deserts in major cities where you cannot buy fresh vegetables and fruit; only prepackaged preprocessed shit masquerading as food. You want third world? Take a look a the pollution in East St Louis.

      I've got some very good friends in Australia and Chile, and they mock us. Get back to me with our poorest having a decent standard of living when we have real safety nets for when the bankers fleece us and the economy tanks again.

    22. Re:Something is wrong by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Why is there something wrong with the system when one person does better than everyone else?

      That is not the bar and even suggesting that it might be is disingenuous prevarication. The bar is that there is something wrong with the system when one person has more than they could ever spend while others are starving in the dirt.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    23. Re:Something is wrong by Sockatume · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Regarding inflation, you're just emphasising his point. If a worker's wage has only gained in fifty cents since the '70s, then that worker is, in real terms, being paid much, much less. Which is why the average worker can no longer afford to have a house and a family. Meanwhile the average CEO wage has not just kept up with inflation, but doubled.

      James Marcum received $150K in compensation in 2011, not $50K. His current income is not indicated.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    24. Re:Something is wrong by bondsbw · · Score: 4, Informative

      [citation needed]

      Meanwhile, I found data that completely reverses your assertion.

      Average Wage in US:
      Dec. 1970 = $3.70
      Dec. 2010 = $19.24

      Are you sure your source wasn't already inflation adjusted?

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    25. Re:Something is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Spend it and get it back into circulation or have it taxed back to get it into circulation. The 1% don't need 99% of the wealth and the other 99% certainly need it.

      I get the feeling that people learned economics from duck tales and think that Bill Gates has a vault of gold somewhere.
      Most of his money is in assets. Hard to get those back in circulation.

    26. Re:Something is wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The bit about being late to the Internet party is accurate, but Microsoft was a major player in the commoditization of the PC market.

      A (good enough) operating system you could dump on any IBM compatible was key, and provided a kind of inexpensive, universal operating system that anyone could make use of.

    27. Re:Something is wrong by gtall · · Score: 2, Insightful

      " Suppose you built tens of billions of dollars worth of hospitals, which is a lot of hospitals by any measure, as well as the infrastructure to set up medical schools. Suddenly you've not only created a promising new career avenue, you've also made the nation healthier and, as a consequence, more productive, and as a consequence, raised their incomes."

      Not really. If you have no demand for all those extra hospitals, then you have essentially wasted capital. And if people went to med school to work in those hospitals, they are SOL because there will be no jobs waiting for them.

      China is suffering from this same sort of mentality. They built all kinds of infrastructure that only managed to give them a housing boom and now it is busting. A similar thing happened in the U.S. when demand was artificially created, couldn't be maintained, crashed, and almost took out the entire U.S. economy in the process.

      I'm not against public investment, it is necessary. However, it cannot be done without an eye on a return on that investment. Otherwise, it is just warping the economy and creates bigger problems than it was intended to solve.

    28. Re:Something is wrong by gtall · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Just to be fair, that wasn't only the bankers. That was the real estate agents, the builders, Wall Street, government agencies, credit rating agencies, house appraisers, and last but not least, the sainted American People who mortgaged second houses, flipped houses, signed on the dotted line for adjustable rate mortgages because they were too stupid to relax, read, and live within their means.

    29. Re:Something is wrong by ZiakII · · Score: 2

      He was saying with inflation. as $3.70 is equivalent to $22.17. Although he is cherry picking data and only applying inflation to the worker and not the CEO. As a CEO making $500,000 in 1970 would be about 3.2 million in 2012.

    30. Re:Something is wrong by bws111 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Of course in reality the average worker's wage did not only increase fifty cents, those were complete bullshit numbers he made up. In reality, in 1970 the average income was $6186 (about $3/hour) and in 2011 it was $42976 (about $21/hour).

    31. Re:Something is wrong by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      So do I, and I was appalled when I went to the US for a few months. This was the big role model for economy, of growth and progress? The electric infrastructure (in California, not backwater hicksville) reminded me of our countryside in the late 1960s, and I found hemp isolation on the wires in the buildings. I was kinda wary to use the tap water for anything but washing hands, I didn't consider it impossible that they used lead pipes, too.

      Fuck, I've seen better infrastructure in the former East Bloc, and those of you who've been to countryside Romania know what THAT means!

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    32. Re:Something is wrong by poity · · Score: 2

      http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html

      1970.....6,186.24

      correct, mod up

      --
      your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
    33. Re:Something is wrong by Nimey · · Score: 3, Informative

      FWIW adjusting for inflation (and why didn't you?) means your 1970 person would make $35336.47/yr or ~$17/hr today, giving an inflation-corrected increase of $4/hr.

      source: westegg.com

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
    34. Re:Something is wrong by Custard+Horse · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It is arguable whether Windows was inferior or not. It had 'something' that gave it mass appeal. Take Windows out of the picture and something would have taken its place but would it have been so successful and would it have appeared/developed in the same relatively short timescale? I doubt it.

      Lots of inferior (by comparison) products succeed but this is not a bad thing. Ultimately the dominance of a product makes competition really hone its own product in order to steal a market share. I'm not an Apple fan but you cannot help admire their products and the niche that has been carved. And the open source community has produced viable alternatives which, by some miracle, are free and fairly easy to use.

      Windows is easy to use and easy to get hold of. It is feature rich and despite the annoying difficulties with it, it works most of the time and does a pretty good job.

      As for 'pushing an inferior product on the masses' I cannot recall a user-friendly GUI based alternative to Windows, Outlook and Word when I started working in an office in 1993. Perhaps I was just blind, ignorant or representative of Joe Public which I suspect is the case.

      However, you cannot expect those users to 'just drop' Windows when a semi-viable alternative arrives particularly when the software industry has been slow to build releases for platforms other than Windows. People are reactionary - they don't like change.

    35. Re:Something is wrong by dgatwood · · Score: 2

      96.9% of the people in India (1.18 billion people) live on less than $5 per day (adjusted for purchasing power.) Confiscating 100% of Bill Gates wealth will only give each of them a one time payment of $61.61, less than a month of income.

      The upshot of realizing these things is that you see that wealth disparity is a pretend problem, and the closest thing it is to a real problem is the fact that so many people can be so easily fooled into droning on about it like it actually was a problem.

      That's specious reasoning for two reasons.

      First, the only useful measure of wealth is a local one, because most commerce occurs locally. The people in India don't pay American prices for food, shelter, clothing, etc., so Bill Gates being rich doesn't affect them significantly. The more interesting question is what his wealth would do if redistributed to the poorest people in his own country, where there are a quarter as many people, and where only about 15% of those are living in poverty relative to the rest of Bill Gates's home country.

      Second, your argument assumes only a single ultra-wealthy person. When you actually look at real numbers instead of your strawman assumptions, the reality is very different from what you're presenting. Here are the cold, hard facts:

      • If you took away all the wealth of just the Forbes 400 (the richest 400 people in the U.S.) and redistributed it, you could give $35,000 apiece to every single American living below the poverty line. That's enough to wipe out their debt entirely and put them on the road to financial recovery.
      • If you extend that to the top 1% of Americans, you would have enough to give every American currently living below the poverty line nearly a million dollars apiece—enough for them to retire right now and live off the interest for the rest of their lives while still making about as much per year as they currently do!

      Frankly, wealth is even more unequally distributed in the U.S. today than it was in the days leading up to the French Revolution. The only reasons things aren't as bad as they were then are because we have a middle class, we allow people other than the top couple of percent to own land, and we are geographically large enough to be resistant to local droughts that would cause famine in a country as small as France. Those differences make the wealth disparity no less real, though.

      I'm not suggesting that it's time to behead the top 1% and redistribute their wealth, but clearly we cannot afford to ignore the problem indefinitely.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    36. Re:Something is wrong by sjames · · Score: 2

      Without Microsoft, we would have comoditized PCs running DOS86 or CP/M. Then Linux would have taken over.

  2. The Rothchilds never make the list by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even still he'll never be as rich as the Rothchilds... who for some reason never grace the inside of Forbes top #100 rich people
      (maybe because they own the magazine and don't want to draw attention to themselves...., just a guess)

    --
    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
    1. Re:The Rothchilds never make the list by _Shad0w_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Probably not, they have dynastic wealth, rather than individual wealth. Individually they're still wealthy, but not on the scale as individuals like Bill Gates.

      --

      Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.

  3. yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm glad to see Gates back on top. As a philanthropist he rocks.

    1. Re:yeah! by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm glad to see Gates back on top. As a philanthropist he rocks.

      If by "rocks" you mean "is amazingly good at setting up nations for future fleecing", that's a proven fact. You don't get vaccinations from the gates foundation unless you adopt strong (Western-style) IP protection for Big Pharma — so strong that the IMF and World Bank will wind up owning your country if you should dare to produce medications to save the lives of your citizenry because the price Big Pharma is asking for AIDS medication (or whatever) is above your people's means to pay.

      Bill Gates has not wiped out any diseases and will not wipe out any diseases because of this restriction; their "gifts" come with a price tag that some are unwilling to pay. Would you give up your right to health care in the future for some health care now? Because that is what the Gates Foundation offers.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?

    3. Re:yeah! by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?

      0) Who the fuck are you to ask me? You don't even have a mother.

      1) Conspiracies are the norm. Any time two people get together secretly to bone a third, it is a conspiracy. The only overarching conspiracy of which I'm aware is that to deprecate the word "conspiracy". Those involved thank you for doing your part as a useful idiot.

      2) If you actually wanted a citation, you would already have found one with google. But you don't actually want a citation, you just want to make me look bad so that people won't believe what I'm saying. For example:

      However, Microsoft lobbied vociferously for the World Trade Organizationâ(TM)s TRIPS agreement (the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property), which obliges member countries to defend patents for a minimum of 20 years after the filing date. As recently as 2007, Microsoft was lobbying the G8 to tighten global intellectual property (IP) protection, a move that would, Oxfam said, âworsen the health crisis in developing countriesâ(TM).[1]

      Or perhaps you would prefer it to come straight from the horse's mouth, where their primary IP lawyer places "respect" of IP laws and markets above saving lives, by making it the primary consideration? He includes a lot of weaselly speak about protecting access, of course, but what he focuses on is the law — which the Gates foundation is promoting.

      There are no shortage of similar references, and if you are unaware of them it is because you are willfully ignorant.

      [1] The flip side to Bill Gatesâ(TM) charity billions. Bowman, Andrew. New Internationalist Magazine, April 2012. ( )

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work... by Bearhouse · · Score: 2

    Well, he gets a lot of stick here for the "evil empire" he created, but let's not forget he started out as a programmer.

    He gamed the system for all it was worth, in a very smart manner, and pretty much stuck to the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
    Along the way, DOS & Windows, with Intel, became the foundation of the "open" PC marketplace that radically transformed the computing marketplace.

    So, kudos to him, especially if he dumps a few more $Bn into his foundation.
    (I mean, $76Bn, do you really need that much money?)

    1. Re:Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work... by WGFCrafty · · Score: 2

      (I mean, $76Bn, do you really need that much money?)

      I would buy a bunch of 747s and run them between major international airports around the world - with no one on them. It would be an kinetic art project about unsustainability.

      Note: Mr. Gates is worth about 2.1 times more than the endowment of the school he dropped out of (Harvard).

  5. Re:Sounds like his "philantrophy" isn't working... by Sockatume · · Score: 2

    What exactly is it that you don't trust him about? That he'll actually donate that amount, or that he won't blow it all on some ridiculous supervillain scheme to steal the moon?

    --
    No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  6. Re:He gave away $28 billion by WGFCrafty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    and he STILL has enough to be the richest?

    Maybe he should give away some more.

    I think him and Warren Buffet are doing it more slowly. Non profits are required to spend a certain part of their endowment yearly - by holding on to it and investing it and donating a trickle (a billion dollar trickle... he made several billion in one year just from having money) which could last indefinitely. I think they pledged to give much more upon their death.

    I wonder why they don't set up some kind of non-profit investment group where all proceeds yearly would then fund a charity. One big donation could do $70 billion of good once, or $3-7 billion dollars of good yearly, forever..

  7. 77 billion is a lot of money, but... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2
    Adjusted for inflation, or seen as a percentage of GDP, or as a multiple of median income of the country etc, Bill Gates fortune is dwarfed by the rich men of early 1900s. I think Andrew Carnegie, when he sold USSteel for some 450 million dollars in 190X, he got 2% of the GDP of the country or something. John D Rockefeller became richer, but the country also grew faster than his personal fortune and he did not top that percentage, if my memory serves me right.

    There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth, and it might even serve as a motivation for lots of people. But the society has to be on guard. But SCOTUS has ruled money is speech and rich people can out shout poor people, that would be damaging to free exchange of ideas. Even if the top rich men did not care, they have many hangers on, suck ups and brown nosers. They might get the confidence of these rich people, do enormous collateral damage to the society in their quest to peel of a measly million or two from these billionaires.

    Many of our academic institutions are actually running on very little money comparatively, newspapers and other such institutions are struggling. So some rich dude dropping a million dollars a year could corrupt and poison such foundations of democracy easily, sometimes without even meaning to.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:77 billion is a lot of money, but... by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth

      Yes, yes there is. You cannot earn that much with your own labor. You can only aquire that much by confiscating the labor of others.

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      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  8. The problem is.... by Pyrotech7 · · Score: 2

    The problem is not that we have the extraordinarily wealthy among us, it is that there are not more of them. Increase incentives and benefits of accumulating wealth and you might find more more people become wealthy. Relief given to the poor often as not helps perpetuate the lifestyle. This is the opposite of communism, where everyone is poor equally. Let there be the rich, and let them keep their riches. More of us will want to become wealthy.

    1. Re:The problem is.... by Pyrotech7 · · Score: 2

      That is a common misunderstanding amongst liberal socialists. I never can understand a person that thinks there is only so much wealth to go around and some have an unfair share. Wealth is created, and in ever increasing amounts, at least in a growing economy. If I buy something wholesale, and sell it at retail and make some wealth in the process, how does that take away wealth from anyone else?