Mark Zuckerberg Tops Warren Buffett to Become the World’s Third-Richest Person
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
there are so many much more richer persons/families not taken into consideration by forbes. russians, chinese, indians, non americans. People that have money spread across borders..
there is no such thing as the officially "Worlds third richest person"... some are "unkown (by forbes)" trillionaires that are not accounted because there are no official records
The only person I could even speculate with that sort of wealth could be Vladimir Putin, if you argued he is a dictator and so controls the entire Russian economy / wealth base.
The consolidation of power is what we have to look out for. So the qualifier to your statement is “yet”. Would you have said the same thing of Putin after he returned to being president? How long did it take him to control as much as he has?
What it doesn't include are people where their wealth is hidden because it was either acquired and/or held illegally and those who have control over wealth but only by virtue of their position (so a king is "rich" because they can control what the sovereign fund invests in but they don't make the list because if they weren't king all of that wealth would be inaccessible to them.) If Czar Putin suffers the same fate as the Czar Nicolas where the people decide it is no longer in their best interest to have him plundering the country then Putin will likely die with greatly reduced wealth, much like Emelda Marcos.
Crime bosses have the same problem, their wealth is a function of their black market operations and when they are deposed or killed the organization reclaims the wealth for itself.
The people on the Forbes list have full control of their assets and nobody is going to rise up in revolution if they decide to spend it poorly. So they are indeed rich 'persons' as opposed to simply stewarding great wealth.
On-paper wealth isn't real. If you can't roll around on it or stand it front of it with an assault rifle to defend it, then it's not real.
https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=FB
(Insider Trading at the bottom)
Better link: https://finviz.com/insidertrading.ashx?oc=1548760&tc=7
The interesting questions are at what level do you set the 'inequality coefficient' and how would you meet it using rules that don't stifle innovation and prevent people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and countless others from doing interesting things?
The average person should just own a stock index fund. In fact, this is the exact advice that Buffett gives.
So we're comparing someone who is 87 years old and has steadily increased their wealth over time, to someone who basically got rich very quickly, and whose wealth is open to extreme fluctuations.
I'd much rather be the first person.
You can argue that he is so rich exactly because he didn't diversify.
Obligatory Warren Buffett quote: "Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely"
If this is a "virtue of work" thing where Buffett is somehow "better" because he "earned" his money I don't buy it. Being the son of a wealthy politician and using that influence and money to procure MORE wealth and influence isn't somehow more noble than creating one of the most powerful companies in the world.
But I mean, if you're more into the whole "old money" crowd, that's your choice I guess.
I get that humans are, by design, way too risk averse, but what do you define "could easily go under" as meaning? What odds would you actually give of these outcomes: Facebook keeps stays a top 10 business for the next 20 years, Facebook stays a top 10 business for the next 5 years, Facebook implodes and is worthless in the next 5 years.
I get your point, which I think is extremely narrow, is that "a diverse portfolio is better than a single stack investment plan", but to say you'd prefer to be one billionaire vs being another different billionaire because the first billionaire meets some weird criteria you've devised for determining how best to become a billionaire is not an objective point to be made.
TL-dr; you're not playing the same game either of these guys are, and your suggestion that trying to model your life after one vs the other is a weak point to make because of it.
He’s giving away 99% of all his money. Bill Gates will be using it to make the world a better place.
How does such bald propaganda get through a site that calls itself news?
Please give another example of people becoming billionaires in under 10 years who are not in tech.
Tech has been surging at 8-10% YoY, while the rest of the economy sits closer to 2%.
Let's just go all the way down the the philosophy hole and say we should all just kill ourselves now since that's faster and more efficient than actually living.
tl;dr- Because news is news.
You seem salty that some dude has lots of money because you're whole thesis was "this guy is a jerk because he paid for a hospital and then had his name put on it".
Holmes's biggest mistake was making hardware, so the fraud was more obvious. Until the media actually digs deep into the fake/fraudulent account problem on Facebook, the stock will continue to go up.
Of course it is a danger to society and hugely unethical but financially they are sound.