Bill Gates Regains the Position of World's Richest Person 311
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."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:He gave away $28 billion (Score:4, 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..
Re:Something is wrong (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.
Re:yeah! (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.
Re:yeah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?
Re:Something is wrong (Score:4, 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.