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Looking at their wealth breakdown now:

$12.7B from Georgia-Pacific (a "pulp and paper company")

$10.6B from "Other Businesses"

$9.6B from Koch Pipeline (petroleum)

$4.5B from Flint Hills Resources (refining/chemicals/biofuels)

$3.8B from Molex ("connectors and interconnect components")

$3.5B from Koch Fertilizer

$3.0B from Invista ("polymers and fibers")

all other sources below $2B

Looks pretty diversified to me. Just because they made their fortune in petroleum doesn't mean that's currently the largest source of their wealth.

Source: the Net Worth Analysis from the RICH function on a Bloomberg Terminal

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Great so every time I spring for the brand name molex connectors I'm helping those assholes out.

sounds like someone's jealous. why are they assholes when they're selling you a product that helps you?

For completely orthogonal reasons. It's not about what they sell, it's about what they do with the money. More US political candidate financing this year came from the Koch brothers than both major political parties combined. [1]

Congressional policy decisions always have to keep future fundraising prospects in mind. It is not a stretch to describe candidates who depend on Koch largesse to win as "bought and paid for." Keystone XL (a certain pipeline Koch Industries stands to benefit disproportionately from) is a controversial issue, and it ought to be considered with an eye towards policy impact rather than next year's electability.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/kochs-plan-to-...

They are in a ton of different industries:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/4/1/1288957/-Sign-the-ple...

To me, "source" implies where the wealth came from, and it's misleading to say that the Koch brothers grew rich from a diverse portfolio of anything. They were born into oil wealth.

Oh, true, if read that way then petroleum is probably the correct thing to put there. Curious.

The rest of their wealth also has sources.

Many of the people on this list should have their source listed as "birth".

Funny how many "self made" millionaires and billionaires, when you dig down to root cause, owe it to birth and family connections.

Perhaps obviously, when your interpretation makes the article not make sense, it's useful to try interpretations that work.

I guess another way to put it is that a very human mistake to make is to infer something and assume it was implied, then use that assumption to form a dismissal.

I get that your particular interpretation is likely meant as some subtle manner of dismissal of the Koch brothers (something along the lines of how they didn't earn their wealth would be my guess) and I'd like to encourage you to state such feelings directly. It's far more interesting than low-grade emotional rhetoric that just turns into boring no-light-low-heat discussion.

This is a spreadsheet, not an article, so I'm confused about your first point.

When looking at a list of billionaires, it's natural to wonder "where did this fortune come from?", and in the case of the Koch brothers, the answer is "oil". I don't think it requires a deep dive into my psyche to defend this interpretation of the "source" field, though I'm always happy to swim around down there.

Suppose I make my first $10M getting lucky in technology, then make my next $1B getting lucky in real estate by leveraging my lottery winnings.

What's the source of my wealth in this case?

(this seems to be a clarifying exaggeration of what is being asked here)

In my view: Technology. Without that first $10M, you'd never have had the opportunity to make $1B in real estate. When I think "source" I'm digging down to root cause.

What is Michael Jordan's source of wealth?

By your logic the actual source in "inheritance." More than half of their wealth came from non-oil sources so I don't see how "oil" makes sense as a source.

I think the intended usage for this spreadsheet is more along the lines of "derived," as in where does X derive their current wealth from, or "What current holdings qualify the person for this list." Otherwise this table would involve an order of magnitude more research and editorializing. For example, Elon Musk has "Tesla" listed as his source even though as we know his initial wealth came from Paypal. At least, that is the usage that seems to best fit with what's in the spreadsheet.

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