Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person

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."

Comments

Something is wrong

[Krneki]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[chromas]

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

Re:Something is wrong

[Twanfox]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[chrismcb]

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

Re:Something is wrong

[ta_gueule]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Rockoon]

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?

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[peragrin]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sique]

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".

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Sockatume]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[bondsbw]

[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?

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[gtall]

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.

Re:Something is wrong

[bws111]

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).

Re:Something is wrong

[Nimey]

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

Re:Something is wrong

[Custard Horse]

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.

The Rothchilds never make the list

[Neo-Rio-101]

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)

Re:The Rothchilds never make the list

[_Shad0w_]

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.

Re:He gave away $28 billion

[WGFCrafty]

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..

Re:yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:77 billion is a lot of money, but...

[Hatta]

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.