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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.
This list is interesting, but hardly anything new. I'd like to see a list of tech millionaires and billionaires that lost the most amount of money. That is, take their peak net worth and subtract their current net worth, and rank the decline. I'm sure Elizabeth Holmes would make that list.
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Remember that the huge gains of these individuals have been made during the administration of a president who had as wealth redistribution, a la Robin Hood, as a stated goal of his presidency. Now, go look at who each of these billionaires, with a b, is supporting for president, and ask yourself if that candidate is really going to "stick it to the rich, and help the middle class" or if the rich will keep getting richer.
Don't get me wrong. I am all for people being compensated for their efforts and have nothing against people taking risk and profiting from the risk taking. But, if you happen to think that these folks got where they are by acting against their own interests, you are definitely kidding yourself.
A 5% return on 1,000,000 is 50K a year. That doesn't go very far when you have to cover your medical expenses, housing, food, and hopefully seeing your grandkids.
1,000,000 dollars isn't really all that much. Take an average 40 year working life, invest/save 25K a year - 40 years later... magic 1,000,000. Rather than complain about someone who provided value to millions of customers - why don't you go after the football/basketball/baseball players that get paid millions a year to play a game.
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Even if they ended up with nothing, that's still a lot of money being injected into the economy. Assuming he even invests it, it's not circulating around like it's suppose to for a healthy economy to work, and it's not trickling down. The trickle down system isn't designed to have that much money taken out of the economy if you add up all the mega wealthy people like that economists are not giving accurate projections. That's a significant amount of money too, he's practically an economic terrorists collecting that much. He could walk into nearly any town in the world and totally wreck havoc on any local economy he wants to. Honestly with that amount of wealth he's a national security risk.
The fact that this article comes right above the "A Bit of Cash Can Keep Someone Off the Streets For 2 Years or More " one says a lot.
So from the gain of one year alone, one of these guys by himself could save 18.4 million people from being homeless for two years, meaning he could do that every other year and his net worth would still rise.
But the USA has less than 600,000 homeless. I understand the other article is about people who are on the edge of becoming homeless, so it's hard to apply it in general, but let's just do it anyway because everyone who is homeless at one point became homeless. Let's also imagine that on average, such a person would need 2-3 such cash infusions to permanently turn their life around and not end on the street at all. Meaning it takes around 900 million a year to end homelessness forever. Or in other words, with the money that one of these super-rich people make in two weeks, homelessness within the USA would be over.
Which begs only one question: Why is homelessness still a thing?
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The problem with that argument is that the rich get to shape the policy of countries in a completely undemocratic manner, as we are seeing in this country. The rich own this place, along with our elected representatives. They write the legislation that the rest of us live under. I'm not really interested in kissing the ass of a billionaire in order to get clean water. Providing infrastructure, sanitation and clean water should be the job of government, not of a capitalist. $78 billion dollars is an insane amount of power that no single person should be allowed to have.