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Comment by estomagordo | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who primarily reacts to Gaddafi's inclusion? I knew the crazy geezer was rich, but richer than Bezos and Gates rich?

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Here's a critical breakdown of where that number came from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwindurgy/2011/10/25/did-moamm...

TLDR: The $200 Billion number comes from the value of property and assets owned by the Libyan government and sovereign wealth fund. And while Gaddafi had zero qualms about using tax money to directly fund his lavish lifestyle, treating government property as his own and using the sovereign wealth fund as his personal trust fund, he never made any moves towards actually seizing the assets or principal of the wealth fund for himself, so technically it shouldn't count towards his wealth.

> using tax money to directly fund his lavish lifestyle

I am trying to find references for this lavish lifestyle claim. His Wikipedia entry says

"His home and office at Azizia was a bunker designed by West German engineers, while the rest of his family lived in a large two-story building. Within the compound were also two tennis courts, a soccer field, several gardens, camels, and a Bedouin tent in which he entertained guests. In the 1980s, his lifestyle was considered modest in comparison to those of many other Arab leaders."

I guess it's hard to say whether this amounts to a "lavish lifestyle" for a dictator.

I am trying to find references for this lavish lifestyle claim

First relevant looking link I found on Google:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-gaddafi-homes/aband...

Yes, there are several of those. I'm not very sure of their reliability though, as it is customary to paint in the worst possible light the people you've been waging war against.

That seems like a weird definition of wealth. Is Bill Gates relatively poor by the same argument because his enormous investment in assets he ultimately controls dwarfs his personal consumption? If you have $100 million sitting in a bank account you never touch you still own at least $100 million.

It's like Bitcoin:

If you had 3 million BTC, you couldn't sell them all without the value of BTC plummeting.

There's ~16 million BTC in circulation. If you had 3 million you'd be trying to sell ~20% of the total supply. Whereas Gaddafi allegedly had $200 billion in assets, which against the approximate world wealth of $300 trillion is around 0.05%.

This figure is disputed, and it's not clear what happened to it after his death. Despite a large campaign to seize it.

On the other hand, Libya earns about $20bn a year in oil exports. Subtract cost of production and then consider how much of that could have been taken by Gaddafi personally.

The $200 billion gaddafi wealth was part of the psy-op to take down gaddafi a few years ago. I remember seeing it all over social media and the news before gaddafi was taken out.

Interestingly enough, guess who else has $200 billion?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/20...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/31/financier-bill-browder-says-...

I'm sure they did a study to determine what wealth value was believable and anger inducing? Was $100 billion too low for people to care and $300 billion too high for anyone to take seriously? It'll be interesting to find ou thow they settled on $200 billion.

If I was maduro, I'd look for places to hide if the psy-ops start to mention his $200 billion or starts to focus on his wealth.

I've read this or a similar article before; the main thing is when a person's personal fortune is mixed with that of a country. If you'd consider idk, the value of the US and Trump to be one and the same, he'd have hundreds of trillions of USD (based on the US's $20 trillion / year GDP).

That's silly in the US case because the president doesn't even have the power to decide how to spend the money in the treasury much less the accumulated wealth of the companies and people... In the case of a dictatorship mixing the wealth of both makes sense at least a bit because they can directly control a lot of it (and are often embezzling the shit out of everything too so they actually 'own' a lot of wealth).

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