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Microsoft's Bill Gates Is Richest Tech Billionaire With $78 Billion Fortune (gulfnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GulfNews: The "100 Richest Tech Billionaires In The World 2016" list has been topped by Microsoft founder Bill Gates with an estimated fortune of $78 billion. The titans on Forbes' second annual list of the world's richest in technology are worth a combined $892 billion, six percent more than a year ago. Just over half of the 100 richest in tech are from the U.S., including eight of the top 10 richest on the list. Forbes said the second richest person in tech Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is also the biggest gainer on the list this year and has an estimated $66.2 billion fortune, an increase of $18.4 billion since this list was released last year. That puts him ahead of Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, who comes in on the fourth spot. Ellison was also beaten by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who climbed from fourth to third place thanks to a 30 percent jump in the value of Facebook's stock; he is now also California's richest person, another title that previously belonged to Ellison.
Yes because spending all of your money at once is the smart thing to do. Nevermind what may arise in the future.
He's focused on shit that can actually have an impact like sanitation, drinking water and disease which has great impact such polio and malaria. Unlike these other charity foundations which rely on donations and do jack shit.
Yes, he could give each and every person $10.50 and have nothing - and we'd still have needy and homeless people all over the world. When there are 7.2 billion people on Earth, $78 billion doesn't go a long way towards easing poverty for any significant fraction of the populace. The best thing you could do is probably what Gates is doing - fighting malaria, working on sanitation and water, education, etc. Improve the infrastructure so those billions can pull out from poverty, rather than a handful of coins...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Bill Gates is probably the most effective philanthropist ever, which is why Buffett gave his foundation so much money.
He couldn't do that if he wanted to - you can't run your own foreign policy under US law, and even if he could people like you would criticize him for it. Daesh exists for a reason, and even if you were able to eliminate the group you'd have the same ideologies percolating under the surface. Daesh wouldn't exist but for the fact we went around "eliminating" people and groups thinking they couldn't be replaced by anything worse.
I doubt you'd ever get people to agree on just what an "excellent education" is. Certainly I wouldn't pay a bent nickel to subsidize the US university system at this point.
Probably also a bad idea. There are a whole lot of people who would sink into a cycle of dependency and sloth if they were allowed to do so, and they'd be miserable for it. You want to lift people out of poverty? The only way that actually works is to provide them with the tools to lift themselves out.
Why? Is there some reason people should lose their right to free speech when acting as a group? Or do you just want to remove that right for people who criticize Hillary Clinton?
I'm trying to understand why you would think of a person you don't know in those terms. Gates has already done more for destitute people in Africa than you our your descendants will ever do. What would make you think he's a "worthless piece of shit"?
Yes, he could give each and every person $10.50 and have nothing - and we'd still have needy and homeless people all over the world
900 million people live under the global poverty line of $1.90 a day.
That is 1.71 billion dollars a day to lift the entire planet out of poverty.
The fact alone that one person could do that for a month and still have more money left over than he can spend in a lifetime just boggles the mind.
If you further assume that most of these people don't have nothing, they just have less than $1.90 it becomes more crazy. My old statistics professor said that if you have no information, assume the average. So let's assume it takes 95 cents on average to bring someone just above the poverty line. That means Bill Gates alone could lift the entire planet out of poverty for three months before his fortune runs out.
While that shows how little these crazy fortunes are in global contexts, it also shows how crazy rich these people are compared to everyone else. It means the richest top ten could end poverty for a year and still be rich. Can you even imagine what it could mean to the poor of the world to not be poor for a year? How many of them would use the opportunity to secure a better future? At the end of that year, many of the poor would not go back to being poor. Millions would be permanently enabled to have a better life.
I applaud Melanie Gates to convince Bill to use a good part of his fortune like this, even if there's a lot of shady deals involved that the future will judge (largely, the crowding out of other organisations that try to help).
But the real problem is not that this money could be used to feed the poor. The real problem is that this money, if it had not been taken by the super-rich, would circulate much faster within the economy and would create more wealth. After the "trickle down" bullshit, a number of real economists have done the checking and they all come to the conclusion that money given to the rich hurts the economy while money given to the average people stimulates it.
Or in other words: In Bill Gates hands, these are 78 billion. In the hands of ordinary people, this would be 90, 100 or more billions. That is the real damage the super-rich do to all of us.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org