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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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If he wants to impress me,
He doesn't.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
Maybe you should read up on what his foundation has already done. Most of his wealth is tied to stock. He can only cash out so much before it causes an upset on the exchange.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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!
Over the course of a lifetime, $1,000,000 is the equivalence of less than 20 years on the average American income (~$52K according to the 2014 census). If you had that much all at once with a steady stream of your normal income and wise investing, sure...you'll get ahead...but if that's all you had to live on for the rest of your life, you're not getting ahead of anyone. So...to live in America, yes, people do need a million dollars.
I wonder what percentage of the US population have the means to save 25K a year, regardless of their spending habits. I'm thinking median income after taxes and basic accommodation, used car, etc.
People are starving while Gate$ hoards 78 billion dollars in cash. That makes sense.
Somewhere, a computer has { BillGates: 78,000,000,000 }. So what?
Interest rates are effectively zero right now. Hoarding is obviously not a way to make money, nor does it impact anyone's ability to borrow money and be productive.
Hoarding corn, or gold, or Titan-X graphics cards, or elephants, or opera singers would be a dick move. Hoarding money is pretty value neutral.
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.
If Bill took half of his money, gave $10 million to me, and then gave the rest to people at risk at $1000 each, that would keep 38,990,000 people off the streets for two years or more. And he'd still have the other half to play with, plenty... to build a space elevator or something.
Come to think of it, if Bill took 3/4 of his money, gave $100 million to me, and then gave the rest to people at risk at $1000 each, that would keep 58,400,000 people off the streets for two years or more. And he'd still have $19,500,000,000 to invest in honorable charities around the world.
My friends, if Bill took 7/8 of his money, gave $250 million to me, and then gave the rest to people at risk at $1000 each, that would keep 68,000,000 people off the streets for two years or more. And he'd still have the $9,750,000,000 to spread peace and love around the globe.
The great thing about it, the more Bill gives to me, the more people get help. Win-win, from the guy who gave us C:\WIN.
Now, if Bill took 15/16 of his money...
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
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"?
I praise Bill Gates a lot and I'm Christian. Jesus wants us all looking out for each other and helping the poor. Gates and Buffet donate a lot and try and get other billionaires on board too. The world needs help that money can save lives
God spoke to me
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?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
He just gave away a $million to his "kids' computer education sucks, that's why we need more H1B visa's" fund.
That's, like almost 0.0013% of his bank balance.
It's like I gave away about $1.50 of my fortune and was lauded for it in the press as a philantropist.
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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
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.