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Comment by newbie578 | Hacker News Reader

Reading this article, I feel like I read a satire?

I mean come on, comparing your executives to priests and yourself to Jesus has to be on the high end of arrogancy?

Especially when your company is not THAT kind of a big deal. If we convert the yen to usd, his "conglomerate" which is almost 30 years old had revenues of $2 billion dollars?

Don't get me wrong, it is a lot of money, but if you are going to compare yourself to Jesus then better start pumping those numbers..

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What are Jesus' numbers? I found Vatican's financial report, it seems to be a significantly smaller economy than that conglomerate:

http://www.ior.va/content/dam/ior/documenti/rapporto-annuale...

Jesus has significant but un-exercised IP rights on a lot of technologies underpinning the modern economy (e.g., all the waters under heaven, dry land, every living creature that moveth, etc.)

And his father's Universal Replicator: creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). It has to be a heavily guarded secret, otherwise it would ruin physics as we know it.

Don't forget the ur-patent: There is nothing new under the sun.

This^ Most under-rated comment ever.

Plus, maybe if you counted all the skisms (Mormonism, Protestant, etc.) i'm sure it'd outrank GMO.

According to [1], the Church is estimated to own over 170 million acres worldwide. Assuming that property is distributed evenly by land area, let's estimate that the Catholic church owns ~3.5 million acres in the United States and ~1.75 million in Europe (minus Russia). The value ranges from something like $100 million for an acre in NYC to $1,000/acre in Wyoming so even if you price each acre as Wyoming uninhabited wilderness they'd have $3.5 billion in assets. Considering how big churches, hospitals, and schools are and where they're built, I'd assume their assets average closer to $10k or $100k per acre, putting their wealth in the United States alone at $35 to 350 billion. In Europe, the numbers are probably even more skewed towards the higher end.

As long as the global average per acre is $500 or more, they've got at least a trillion in wealth. Unlike the corporation, the Church is more decentralized and structured such that most of the revenue moving through that property (donations, tithes, salaries, maintenance, etc.) doesn't show up on the books.

[1] https://archive.curbed.com/2017/10/18/16483194/catholic-chur...

That’s not a liquid asset. If you sell your Church property in a neighborhood then you no longer exist there, and have automatically failed your duty as a Church.

Unlike a regular business or charity, a church is expected to exist in perpetuity so long as there are people in the area.

The Catholic church doesn’t globally pool their wealth.

“ In 2010, the Vatican had an income of $326 million and ran a $13 million budget surplus, but in 2011 the Vatican ran a $19 million deficit. And while some of that money obviously went to maintaining church buildings and art, much of it also went to charitable causes.

Recent re-evaluations of Vatican assets show that the Vatican has approximately $1 billion in total assets. For comparison, Harvard University’s endowment is over $30 billion. So, relatively speaking, the Catholic Church is not really wealthy, and no one blames museums for maintaining their art work and structures. “

The calculation above is like adding up all the wealth of people with the last name Smith.

The Vatican isn't Jesus, either. Your comment completely misses the mark.

No, but according to doctrine, the Church is his bride, so it ought to be under a joint account at least.

I wouldn't mind hearing from a Japanese person if comparing yourself to jesus has the same creepy vibe as it does in the west. It may not.

I think comparing yourself to Jesus probably has a different connotation in a Japanese context.

In Japanese context: Normally no one comparing to Jesus.

Eh, I dunno. Jesus isn't exactly unknown to the Japanese, even if Christianity itself isn't a very common religion there. It's sort of like Buddha in the West.

The comparison was meant to emphasize that the organization views his creed as gospel, and all his executives practice what he preaches. He wasn't saying he had the scope or influence of Jesus.

The better comparison was the zaibatsu (which was actually legitimized by the emperor [a Shinto God] at the time)

which probably will have backlash by the Japanese society. Also if he compares it to other <insert other religion prophet/god here>, also get backlash. It is better for him to compare himself to Jesus.

Valley is full of bro’s talking about how they are the Jobs and the nerd they found is the Wozniak. Why not go up to an even more successful founder?

to be fair, it took a couple of millennia to get to the current numbers ...

Good CLTV though, and cheap on marketing. They're doing ok. If they were a company I'd buy stock in them ;)

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