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."
Something is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Something is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
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In 'legacy' software, sure.
But isn't that one of the selling points of Win8 apps that they'll run independent of resolution on phones, Win RT tablets and desktops?
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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
Re:Something is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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".
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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.
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Internet was in many households long before Microsoft implemented it on the "commodized PC platform".
The numbers aren't there to support such a claim. In fact, they prove just the opposite. The US Census figures are particularly striking and persuasive.
Households With a Computer and Internet Access 1984 to 2003 [census.gov]
Internet Adoption 1995-2011 [pewinternet.org]
In 1990 the Internet had existed for only 7 years; just 3 million people had access to it worldwide. 73% of these people were living in the United States, 15% were in Western Europe.
Internet Users 1990 [worldmapper.org]
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Of course, without Microsoft, the rise and commoditization of x86 would have never happened
Lets not make such strong statements in retrospective. The succession of events leading to the widespread use of PCs might seem logical an inevitable when looking back a couple decades, but it might have happened in a completely different way. We will certainly never know.
What we know is that Bill Gates amassed this fortune by making pushing an inferior product on masses that defines the user experience of most PC users.
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.
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Without Microsoft, we would have comoditized PCs running DOS86 or CP/M. Then Linux would have taken over.
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The system should never allow a single individual to create a product that touches hundreds of millions of people daily. We should never allow economy of scale or efficiency in that scale. They're both shitbags as people go, but they've done incredible things to move the world forward. Imagine if we were all still trying to use C/PM or if hundreds of millions of poor people in central america didn't have access to an affordable cellphone.
You're a selfish douche.
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Linux still runs more servers, am I right? Whats more influential? Windows is simply more visible and the defacto OEM standard, through syndication, not competition.
Bill Gates has a monopoly on low level DoD informations systems, and business culture. That is all.
I would be interested to know what some of his closely held holdings are. But I'm sure the money trail around those disastrous African drug trials is nice and loose.
Re:Something is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Well the difference is when the few decide what is to much vs the many. Thats democracy, or rule by majority. For the distribution of wealth and power, majority rule is fine by me.
For other things concerning race or beliefs rule by majority is terrible.
Our system does not currently make much of a distinction. And is run mostly by the wealthy.
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No, you're making the same mistake as the OP, treating all places as if they were the same. 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.
There are two sentiments at work here, a kind of moralising piety that tut tuts at Bill sitting on his pile of cash as people in poor countries starve, and an attitude that really wants to see the lot of poor peo
Re:Something is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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even the worst off of us already have it better than the average man ever had it ever in the history of the world.
This is the only thing I take issue with. I am sure I could probably find an example of people in dire need in this country in recent times. I'm thinking the end result of Katrina. Or generally frozen and starved homeless people. Or people subject to gang violence. The fact is even in this "utopia" people still starve to death. Some earn that starvation, others don't really. I suppose in a 3rd w
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Well heck. If you take the average, it's probably a neolithic subsistence culture. And they had more freedom then some of our richest do. Shorter life spans. But hey quality of life is highly subjective.
Re:Something is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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" 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."
Not really. If you have no demand for all those extra hospitals, then you have essentially wasted capital. And if people went to med school to work in those
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Re:Something is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Punishing "not spending" sounds about right in this economy where our problem is pretty much that people stopped spending.
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That's specious re
Re:Something is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I live in Europe.
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So do I, and I was appalled when I went to the US for a few months. This was the big role model for economy, of growth and progress? The electric infrastructure (in California, not backwater hicksville) reminded me of our countryside in the late 1960s, and I found hemp isolation on the wires in the buildings. I was kinda wary to use the tap water for anything but washing hands, I didn't consider it impossible that they used lead pipes, too.
Fuck, I've seen better infrastructure in the former East Bloc, and t
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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.
And that's what the tax code is supposed to settle.
In a capitalistic society there is a need for some individuals to have excess capitol/money to invest in new ideas/companies. Gates just seems to be the richest.
And you know what? It has to be someone. Why not him. At least he seems to make an effort to give away some of the money towards his charity.
Do I like what he did with the Microsoft OS monopoly? Of course not. But what he's done with the money isn't as disgusting as just putting it into big oi
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If extremely rich people are buying politicians or something then I would suggest the problem again lies with your political system and a lack of serious consequences for corruption. Although I do agree that inheritances should be heavily taxed, in fact I think they already are in many places.
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And yet most developed countries are functioning fairly well. Certainly compared to poorer countries.
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In theory yes, in practice once you got enough money you dodge the tax system through offshore accounts.
Re:Something is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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?
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If your stockpile of dollars increase by 5% a year, which is very conservative when you have billions of dollars, even when inflation is considered. Let's say a generation lasts 20 years. After 20 years, your extremely rich has 265% of the money he inherited, minus what they spent, which is negligible for the extremely rich. You tax it 40%. The next generation will be left with 160% of the money left by the grand father. This is very conservativ
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If your definition of "any substantial inheritance" is $1,000,000+, sure, Mr. Ten Thousand Dollars Doesn't Mean Anything To Me.
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Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.
But the tax structure is only a secondary factor in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The primary factor is that wealth accumulates in the hands of those who control the means of production, and we've let the balance between capital and labor get too far out of whack. It's only going to get worse as technology advances. As
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:Something is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
[citation needed]
Meanwhile, I found data that completely reverses your assertion [data360.org].
Average Wage in US:
Dec. 1970 = $3.70
Dec. 2010 = $19.24
Are you sure your source wasn't already inflation adjusted?
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The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70
The average worker's wage was under 10,000 in 1970.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median%20Household%20Income.pdf [stanford.edu]
http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php [davemanuel.com]
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Not directed at you, but leaving out inflation kind of defeats his whole point. The way he wrote it made it sound like people made the same as before but have less buying power.
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Where did you get those bullshit numbers? In 1970 the average worker earned $19.20 (I guess that is per hour). Well, according to the SSA [ssa.gov] the US average income in 1970 was $6,186.24 (in 2011 it was $42,979.61). So, if the average worker was making $19.20 in 1970, they were only working 322 hours per year, which is of course nonsense. In reality, the actual average earner was making about $3/hour in 1970.
As for your idiotic example of Circuit City, do you have the slightest bit of evidence that retainin
Re:Something is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html [ssa.gov]
1970.....6,186.24
correct, mod up
Re:Something is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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
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"I don't understand how businesses work!"
Please note that the CEO of Circuit City (or any corporation, typically) has vested interest. This is so that they don't get rewarded for destroying the company. You point out a person who ran a business, made mistakes running this business, and destroyed it. Please note that Circuit City went out of business, and no longer has a CEO position (he's fired!). Please note that the CEO in question is James Marcum, who now makes $50K/year, according to Forbes (http://www.
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Just to let you know you're not the only one, I absolutely agree with you and anyone I've ever spoken to about this also agrees (parents, partner, friends, colleagues). The accumulation of wealth ought to be limited, nobody with a discrete income of over a million dollars a year can honestly say he needs more money. The ironic thing is that classic economic theory supports this view as well by presuming the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility - which in case of money has been confirmed well empiricall
Re:Something is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's when that better then everyone else is by an arbitrarily decided amount. Mostly due to politics, economic trends, luck, and fiat currency over other factors. Such as actual contribution to the "tribal" group. National group. Persons colloquial fellows who helped that one individual get there.
If it were not for us all contributing to the society we have now. There would be no pile to be on top of.
Bill Gates by that logic owes his countrymen a great deal.
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Specifically his achievements were in owning and selling the right things at the right times. Not even actively inventing them. You can maybe attribute some minor refinements to preexisting ideas to him.
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You say that like they just happened to have 86-DOS lying around when IBM happened to ask them for a disk OS. The fact that they kind of bluffed their way into market dominance, without even having to develop a new piece of software, displays a certain amount of cunning. They knew what they were doing.
Business intelligence and not computer intelligence, mind you.
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Why is there something wrong with the system when one person does better than everyone else?
That is not the bar and even suggesting that it might be is disingenuous prevarication. The bar is that there is something wrong with the system when one person has more than they could ever spend while others are starving in the dirt.
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Something is wrong indeed.... with your reasoning. There is no "system." Indded - the lack thereof defines capitalism.
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Confusion of laws with political construct. Stealing is illegal in socialist and communist nations the last time I checked.
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If you agree with Marx it is.
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For these uber rich people, it is not like the fantasy Scrooge McDuck idea, Of a guy with a vault just filled with money. It is spread across many different things and is working for him, moving from hand to hand and barely ever actually reaching Bill Gates. Unless Bill decides to sell it all at once.
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Bah I don't like the idea of "land ownership per see" because that is very draconian way of looking at things.... You might as well go back to feudalism. Clearly land ownership is not the most ideal solution. It's just what were using right now. It changes as sovereignty changes.
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Also what happens when there are no more empires to build? Or empire building is not sustainable for the greater good?
If the very rich and powerful were investing madly in Aerospace to the point the common man was getting a chance at the stars and we were seeing the whole Dune golden path thing play out that would be fine.
But I think we might have stalled out somewhere after Apollo. Which was mostly funded by everyone and not just a few people. However I might be able to believe some very rich intellectuals
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He's given back more than a third of his money to charity... Something is wrong because someone succeeded?
Success is not measured in terms of money.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Rothchilds never make the list (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If you're going to do that, why not allow religions into the list, or corporations?
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I suspect there's already a list for companies, it's almost certainly dominated by banks and other financial institutions (HSBC has over $100 Trillion in assets, for example). The Vatican Bank is probably near the top of the list, if you figure out how much money it actually controls (it's a private institution, so its records aren't public).
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Precisely. I'm not sure that having $100 Bn tied up in one person is really all that different than having it tied up in some other monolithic entity which can be expected to direct all its resources in the same direction.
yeah! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm glad to see Gates back on top. As a philanthropist he rocks.
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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 n
Re:yeah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?
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Got any citations for that claim that aren't from conspiracy sites?
0) Who the fuck are you to ask me? You don't even have a mother.
1) Conspiracies are the norm. Any time two people get together secretly to bone a third, it is a conspiracy. The only overarching conspiracy of which I'm aware is that to deprecate the word "conspiracy". Those involved thank you for doing your part as a useful idiot.
2) If you actually wanted a citation, you would already have found one with google. But you don't actually want a citation, you just want to make me look bad so that people won't be
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I have to agree. I can't for the life of me understand why people are so against what Bill Gates did, has done and will do. I would have done exactly the same at the time.
Bill?
C'mon, Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
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This is rather interesting I'd say: considering that BG has vowed to give away 95% of his wealth to charities, and already does give away a shitload of money every year, I find it interesting that his net worth should increase rather than decrease.
Me, when I give money to a charity, I find myself poorer afterward. Not him. That seems like a nerdy enough phenomenon to be worth mentioning.
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"News for nerds, stuff that matters". Is this news ? Does this stuff matter ? Just askin'....
Where are these words from? Last time I checked, Slashdot described itself as Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service.
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They dropped that epithet ages ago.
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Given that the news stories are picked by either the Slashdot editors directly or the Slashdot readership by the Firehose, it's safe to assume that some proportion of nerds consider this news and/or something that matters.
What matters (Score:2)
He gave away $28 billion (Score:2)
and he STILL has enough to be the richest?
Maybe he should give away some more.
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..
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I wonder why they don't set up some kind of non-profit investment group where all proceeds yearly would then fund a charity.
Because the Gates Foundation is a legal dodge. Remember, Microsoft was convicted of abuse of monopoly position under Bill Gates, which means he's personally responsible — in fact, it was actually explicitly shown in court that Bill Gates was personally involved in most of the illegal actions of Microsoft, as the primary decision-maker. There's a hot, smoking paper trail. But by creating this foundation, Gates has not just dodged paying taxes on the money invested, but also dodged any future repercussi
Your Microsoft Tax dollars at work... (Score:3)
Well, he gets a lot of stick here for the "evil empire" he created, but let's not forget he started out as a programmer.
He gamed the system for all it was worth, in a very smart manner, and pretty much stuck to the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
Along the way, DOS & Windows, with Intel, became the foundation of the "open" PC marketplace that radically transformed the computing marketplace.
So, kudos to him, especially if he dumps a few more $Bn into his foundation.
(I mean, $76Bn, do you really need that much money?)
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(I mean, $76Bn, do you really need that much money?)
I would buy a bunch of 747s and run them between major international airports around the world - with no one on them. It would be an kinetic art project about unsustainability.
Note: Mr. Gates is worth about 2.1 times more than the endowment of the school he dropped out of (Harvard).
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"Anonymous" money? (Score:2)
Hello, Editors (Score:2)
What comes to Bill Gates, most of his fortune is held in Cascade Investment LLC
That should read, "When it comes to Bill Gates..."
77 billion is a lot of money, but... (Score:3)
There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth, and it might even serve as a motivation for lots of people. But the society has to be on guard. But SCOTUS has ruled money is speech and rich people can out shout poor people, that would be damaging to free exchange of ideas. Even if the top rich men did not care, they have many hangers on, suck ups and brown nosers. They might get the confidence of these rich people, do enormous collateral damage to the society in their quest to peel of a measly million or two from these billionaires.
Many of our academic institutions are actually running on very little money comparatively, newspapers and other such institutions are struggling. So some rich dude dropping a million dollars a year could corrupt and poison such foundations of democracy easily, sometimes without even meaning to.
Re:77 billion is a lot of money, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The problem is.... (Score:2)
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I call you the mother of all Tea Party trolls, but most trolls post as ACs.
The problem with your posit is that there is a (nominally) fixed amount of wealth to be distributed - we are in a closed system. We can change the values of certain things and scale the numbers, but the net effect is that for more people to be rich, the richest must either get less-rich, or the poor become more-poor.
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the ultra rich have governments in their pocket and make war, famine and disease for profit. get a clue.
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Combined, he and his wife have given away nearly $30bn to charity, how in the hell is that not working? They've also stated that they intend to donate at least 95% of their wealth by the time they die.
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You're hopelessly naive about how much a cure for HIV is going to cost to develop. The resources involved in performing medical research make Gates' entire business empire seem like a child setting up a lemonade stand.
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What exactly is it that you don't trust him about? That he'll actually donate that amount, or that he won't blow it all on some ridiculous supervillain scheme to steal the moon?
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You still don't explain what kind of trust you're talking about though. I trust my chair to support my weight, but I don't trust it to pay my rent. It's not even a sensible question in that context.
So, what sort of trust are we talking about here?