Bill and Melinda Gates: America’s Top Farmland Owner
landreport.com
landreport.com
On the one hand, that's a lot of land. On the other, it's not really anything.
It also confirms what I have always said..most of our food and farmland is controlled by sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, pension funds, unions and institutional investment. In the coming decade, all small farms and family farms will disappear. They will only exist as hobby farms or subsidy collecting token farms.
However, if it does pass..then it could just be the dollar value of farmland that is redistributed or with the caveat that they form a co-op to professionally farm the acreage to be productive.
All farmland needs protection. Transitioning of farmland into commercial land or residential land should be fully discouraged.
Also..small holdings(less than 1000 acres) should be automated. Farming is for the rich. You need to lose a lot of money first before you can start making returns.
Encouraging those with no farm experience with farmland is pushing them into debt and penury.
I am talking about food production and farming.
They are two entirely different issues
Having said that, it is because of economics. Small farm environmental sustainability is not feasible due to $$. The solution for this small acreage automation(what I am working on) systems and protocols.
Small acreage automation is important because globally, food comes from small acreages and it is becoming increasingly difficult for many small and poorer nations to feed their people. Not all countries have rich people owning very large acreages in cultivation.
American farms also produce little food and more fodder/fiber/fuel. We import most of our nutritious food like produce.
For food security, there needs to be more small acreage automation and more small farmers. We educate everyone these days and they need to be employed. They are not going to manually pick weeds if they run a sustainable farm. The only reason California has $45+ billion in ag revenue is because of the poorly paid undocumented immigrant labour force. And massive entitlements that big farmers(most of them as corporates own between 20k-100k acres of land) earn mostly through our complicated water agreements that the tax payers bear most of the cost indirectly.
Could you elaborate on this? What exactly is it that you want to automate?
I am unable to elaborate at this point, but I think this will give you an idea about the kind of costs and returns we face in our industry: https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/7a/c9/7...
Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated and helpful to me.
I grew up around family farms. Many members of my family still produce crops and own livestock. So, to someone with first hand knowledge your comment rings false. The large feedlots, processing plants, etc. are the most inhumane (and dehumanizing), places I know of in the industry.
I would appreciate if you would at least _attempt_ to provide proof/justification before making such a blanket, mean-spirited statement.
But it’s expensive. The failure of small farms is mostly seen in the balance sheet.
It isn't nearly so clear cut a situation.
I grew up on a small citrus farm, I saw NAFTA and the migrant worker bills ravage the small farmers first hand. The way it was done was unfair and amounted to a transfer of wealth to these entities but with that being said, I know why they did it. They need economies of scale, as well as the ability to offset risk, the easiest way to do that is to conglomerate the land together so that if there is a loss of production in one area output can be raised in another. This is hard to do with a co-op of independent farmers.
Starving people are dangerous to stability it really is as simple as that, and that is why you see these entities involved in farmlands.
Having said that, we can’t do away with small farms and family farms. The only way to save it is with automation and labour cost saving tech so it provides enough to be considered a career like any other.
I see it as forming co-ops and co-op hubs. Jellicles Farm is creating Hundred-Acre-Hubs and then co-ops of clusters hubs. I want to focus on small acreage automation. Small robots/cobots swarming in small acreages managed by individual farmers. Labour is 40-60% of cost. And it’s becoming increasingly unreliable and unavailable and expensive for small farmers. Automation is the only way. It will satisfy local food security and niche crops. Commodities will still be grown in large commercial corporate farms as they should be..
I was just noting that there was a human toll that happened for all this farm land to be rolled up by the conglomerates. Not implying that it was the wrong decision on the larger geo-political scale.
I would like to see the return of small farms if someone can make it viable, I would not trade the life I lived as a child for anything, but as I said above, I will never again scratch a living out of dirt, unless it is absolutely necessary for my and my families survival.
We are covered for grains, commodities and essentials. But we can maintain off grid homesteads and grow niche and high value crops on small acreages.
Look at all the vineyards we have now, marijuana grows, lavender fields and an embarrassment of riches when it comes to gourmet consumption.
Farming is magical. We convert sunlight and water through alchemy and plant genetics. There is absolutely nothing that compares.
Outside of the USA, small farm holdings feed the citizens. It is even more important for them to avail new tech and labour cost saving automation.
In India heavily subsidizes farming as well, for good reason since a significant portion of the population is employed in the agricultural sector.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Does it though? Based on a post above yours he owns less than 0.1% of US farmland. That means ownership is not concentrated. It seems to be much like the logistics / trucking industry. There is no concentration of power.
John Deere employee, but not speaking for my employer.
Also worth noting here that the 240k acres they own wouldn't get them into the top 10 private landowners in the US.
Edit: One of the solar maps: https://www.freeingenergy.com/how-much-solar-would-it-take-t...
Not the residential density map, but fun: https://www.6sqft.com/believe-it-or-not-the-worlds-entire-po...
The residential density maps: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/map-if-the-world-li...
Indeed. I seem to recall seeing that you could power the entire western hemisphere with just a Texas-sized solar farm.
If fusion (or anything else) adds four orders of magnitude (~200 PW) of new power at ground level, the new global average blackbody equilibrium temperature would increase from about +15 C to about +70 C.
Have you seen Texas? Boy howdy. That's 23,155 Noor Power Stations[0]. Scaling costs linearly, that's $58 trillion[1].
[0] 268597 (tx) / 11.6 (noor) square miles
[1] $2.5b * 23,155
58T is the opposite of pretty reasonable.
Even if you could assume it wouldn't need any maintenance, which you can't, it's too much money for anything.
60T is 10x more than global energy expenditure in 2010, and that's just for the Western Hemisphere, which I'm fairly certain expends significantly less energy then the Eastern.
Edit: just checked, and I was correct. In 2010, Western Hemi energy demand was ~130 PBtu, while Easter Hemi demand was ~330 PBtu[1], or 2.5x more.
So at this same price point, it would be 210T to power the whole world with solar, or 50% more than global GDP in 2019 (but only using 2010 energy consumption numbers, so it's actually much more). And of course you'd need to keep adding more solar as demand went up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi...
Even then, this is still a wildly conservative estimate in terms of price. For example, you're also not taking into account any of the things that can't currently be easily electrified, such as passenger jets.
Thinking about it more it would seem likely that as overall oil consumption falls, the relative cost of oil derivatives like jet fuel would go up because the advantages of scale decrease from what they are now. It's a pretty fascinating subject since solar prices seem to follow a Moore's law type price evolution at the moment while oil will get cheaper as well while demand decreases. Presumably there is a balance point somewhere?
While I haven't looked up the data yet, it seems plausible to assume that maintenance on photovoltaic electric generation is not only lower but significantly lower than thermal generation.
For example, having no moving parts in the generation process must be a large maintenance savings, though of course there must be unique costs associated with photovoltaics - cleaning, perhaps?
> Even then, this is still a wildly conservative estimate in terms of price.
I just did some quick calculations to check this statement and found it basically true - I estimate the cost of 100% PV solar generation at around $180tn 2019 USD for 30 years of capacity.
For reference, I used these figures:
173,340 TWh energy consumption in 2019 [1] * $35/MWh for utility-scale PV solar[2] * 1,000,000 MWh/TWh = $6.1t yearly energy cost for 100% PV energy production, or $182t over a 30-year lifetime.
This, of course, does not take into account the increase of energy consumption over that period which would raise costs, nor the economies of scale of this level of PV deployment which would surely lower costs, but as a BotE calculation it sounds about right and corresponds with your earlier estimate of $210tn for the same investment. Note also that the $35/MWh figure includes all operating expenses and amortized capital costs i.e. it takes all costs into account already.
However, as you imply with your first question regarding maintenance burden, the correct comparison is not "how much would it cost" but rather "how much would it cost relative to projected costs of energy" - and again per [2], utility PV solar is already cheaper than new utility thermal power generation. There is of course plenty of nuance when it comes to energy consumption - you point out, for example, that aviation will be a difficult sector to "electrify," a true enough statement in and of itself. However, it's pointed out in [3] that jet fuel represents 12% of transportation energy consumption and that transportation overall represents 25% of global energy consumption, implying that aviation only represents about 3% of global energy consumption.
Based on this, I speculate that aviation fuels can be produced in a 100% solar PV energy regime without increasing - and likely lowering - energy production costs above the current regime.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019 [3] https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/transport-uses-25...
If thats small, how can you describe the size of nuclear power plants required to do the same job?
And power plants would be way smaller and aren't impractical.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=texas%20area%20%2A%2010...
Worldwide power consumption is about 18 TW, electricity is about 3 TW.
And current PV looks like it’s good for 20+ years so you’re getting that power at about $3 trillion per year. The only reference I can find to current energy costs is this from Wikipedia:
"""In 2010, expenditures on energy totaled over US$6 trillion, or about 10% of the world gross domestic product (GDP)""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
On that basis, you’d be getting roughly twice as many exajoules for roughly half as many USD.
(Also: Quarter of the expenses if you keep power use the same: It’s half cost for double the energy)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
(Someone should update the “Grid parity for solar PV around the world”, that map was last edited in 2015)
The plant will be able to store solar energy in the form of heated molten salt, allowing for production of electricity into the night. Phase 1 comes with a full- load molten salt storage capacity of 3 hours. Noor II, commissioned in 2018, and Noor III, commissioned in January 2019, store energy for up to eight hours.
Very cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
If the entire planet resided in TX, each person would get 1100 sq feet to themselves. That's a very large 1BR, good sized 2BR apt.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B3Vtm-bk8NIntYc8mZRw...
Getting 10x our total energy would only require half the Sahara. We have plenty of deserted place for this if that's what we wanted to do. Transporting and storing that energy is more the issue, which is why hydro/wind/solar mixes aided by batteries/nuclear are probably what we'll be focusing on for the next few decades.
Last time I looked, the USA was in a similar position. Hasn't started building one in at least 40 years[1] and the one I saw on that list finishing in 1990 (Seabrook) I thought might be more recent, says it was permitted in 1976, took 14 years to get Unit 1 working and Unit 2 was cancelled due to delays, and cost overruns. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
The current 92 of them provided 20% of the USA's electricity generation. So you'd need another 368 to do the other 80%. How long will they take to build, 15 years each? 55 years to go all nuclear, assuming you build ten at a time. How do you get from "we haven't built a nuclear power plant in 40 years" to "we could build 10 at a time continuously for the next half-century" in a convincing way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
The same way we were like let's go to the moon, build the transcontinental railroad or some nuclear bombs. Everything is a hell of a lot easier and possible if you have alignment.
As with most technical projects, the technical problem is usually not the barrier to achievement.
One moon rocket, in an age of rocketry, competing with the Russians. 120 continuous nuclear power plants in an age of struggling to build a train line in California. One moon rocket to visit the moon which would look amazing, versus fighting climate change which the incumbent President thinks is a hoax. Not being able to get alignment is a valid reason to question "could".
I agree. That's precisely what I mentioned was the only barrier in achieving it. The answer to getting it done is getting alignment from various stakeholders.
Many of the people that think it's a hoax or the ones that don't believe it's doomsday support nuclear plants. That's always been the case in the US.
You can get alignment without even agreeing on why to go nuclear. This escapes the doomsdayers and the climate crusaders. And based on your comment... you.
I mean - you provided a perfect example. You mentioned our outgoing President thinking climate change is a hoax while we are talking about nuclear plants. And he supported nuclear plants.
People with different concerns and end goals can't talk and agree on things that would help both of their agendas.
You want nuclear plants? Pitch national security to one group. Pitch saving the world to the other. Pitch cleaner air to another.
You aren't going to get anything done if you try to convince them that they need to believe your reason.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson's dad told him - it's not enough to be right. You must be effective.
So while im all for solar and hope we build tons of it, I don't see it becoming the primary energy generation source of the world any time soon. The solar farms that we would need will be the biggest man made wonders in the world, which I don't see as all that feasible in our economic and political environment.
There is ~4ft of shoreline in the US per household, which gives me some notion of what the packing would look like.
That assumes everyone wants shore view. With young kids I prefer my house to be far away from places weak/non swimmers can drawn. I know many other reasons why someone would choose to not live somewhere far from the sea if they get a choice.
That rules out whole countries. And misses all the fun of having water nearby. The chances of that happening are so vanishingly small that it probably is a bad guide as to where you want your kids to grow up.
So the buildings would double as a tsunami wall? Interesting, though kind of self-defeating.
I suppose the problems arise when infrastructure has to be built for those linear communities (Dutch word of the day:'lintdorp', or ribbon-village). Because suddenly the average population density is awful and we have to drive a lot, build more schools and hospitals, etc. Not to mention the poor sods that have a 500 km commute to work the land so that the rest of us can eat >:-)
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/saudi-arabia-the-lin...
I'm not convinced it's not vapourstructure given how ridiculous it seems.
That's some tell-tale bullshit right here.
That said, the video is very interesting. As well as branding - The Line. Would work very well as a setting in a sci-fi movie or a videogame.
Always struck me as interesting in that you could easily section off a chunk of desert, properly sort and encapsulate the trash. At the same time fund research into ways to do recycling that is more cost efficient and more environmental friendly with regard to chemicals used, etc. Then once you have better tech for a certain class of garbage, go process it in bulk.
Of course humans being humans, we'd probably not bother to fund the research, not do upkeep on the encapsulation material and mess up the ground water, etc. Still interesting to think about just having one or two national trash dumps.
Storage of long lived nuclear waste is often considered a major problem. There are suggestions of firing them to the sun (worst idea ever), burring them in subduction zones (a bit more sensible) or in special sites with plenty of warning for future generations (artists get creative on this one).
The thing is, nuclear waste may actually be among the most valuable things on earth. These elements do not exist in nature, and producing them require nuclear reactors and enriched uranium, which is a finite resource.
Even today we have the technology to burn nuclear waste in fast breeder reactors, though for some reason we haven't made a lot of progress, maybe it is not commercially viable compared to more conventional reactors. This has the potential to supply us with energy for so long that we can effectively consider it renewable energy.
All that to say that in the future, nuclear "waste" may become extremely valuable. I find one particularly ironic quote from a suggested warning message for long term nuclear waste storage sites. "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here." I find it extremely dismissive of future humanity, as if we somehow reach the peak of technological progress and that future generations will be cavemen.
The risk that reprocessing can produce weapons-grade plutonium has been one reason. [1] Frustrating not only because it makes it unavailable as an energy source, but, as I understand it, the waste products from fast breeder reactors generally have much shorter half-lives than the current waste.
The decision not to do reprocessing was based on 1970s cost/benefit analysis. We're in a different world now.
Edit: in Utah
Dull thuds in the distance as dark masses streak across the sky every 10 minutes.
Futurama Season 1 Episode 8, "A Big Piece of Garbage": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage
Amusing. Why not a section of marsh? Or river delta?
#LizardLivesMatter
Much easier to actually use
https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/synchronizing-small-scal...
It's not challenge to switch from grid-connected to off-grid mode. The reason that solar PV systems today shut down during grid outages today is to protect line workers from current feeding back to to the grid from the PV - which is to say the automatic shutoff is there by design.
Home battery storage systems, however, have transfer switches that automatically "island" the PV system from the grid in the event of an outage so that it can continue to produce power.
> The challenge is such that most home PV can’t operate standalone.
Decentralized != Off-grid
Doesn't hold much of a candle to Weyerhaeuser which owns more than 12 million acres.
I know it is a subtle thing, but I am just curious. If you know which it is I would like to hear. Thanks.
Retrofitting roofs with panels seems wildly inefficient compared with using robots to plant thousands of panels few hundred miles away.
n.b. you do get slightly dicked by 'maintenance fees', but those probably gonna go down with time.
That puts the Gates at around 0.07% of the US farmland.
The #5 on their list of farmland owners (the infographic at the top of the page) has ~60% the farmland of the Gates family.
It's also worth noting that #2-5 rank 81, 81, 94, and 99 on the overall 2020 Land Report 100 -- and Gates doesn't rank at all. So a lot of people own a lot more land, but almost no one owns nearly as much farmland in the US.
Something similar happened to the King Ranch. More oil, less beef.
Drove through it a few months ago (and another time decades ago). It completely surrounds the township of William Creek, and the main road (well, track) in the area goes through the station for quite some time.
John Malone is #1 I guess, but I thought that Ted Turner approach was pretty badass. Ted Turner also has a herd of 50k bison.
"With approximately two million acres of personal and ranch land, Ted Turner is the second largest individual landholder in North America. Turner lands are innovatively managed to unite economic viability with ecological sustainability. Turner ranches operate as working businesses, relying on bison, hunting and fishing, and ecotourism as principal enterprises. In addition, Turner ranches support many progressive environmental projects including water resource and timber management, and the reintroduction of native species to the land." [2]
I like that.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-are-the-top-10-land-owne...
EDIT: I failed basic arithmetic, apparently. It's 0.03%
267K acres out of 897M acres.
source in blog post sorry
https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-regenerative-ag...
"Total land in farms, at 897,400,000 acres, decreased 2,100,000 acres from 2018."
I've seen the 330M acres figure elsewhere as the "prime" farmland area rather than total farmland and the blog post you cite has figures that include fallow, idle, and pasture farmland categories above the crop usage figure of 330M acres.
In any case, cropland is 2.5 orders of magnitude higher than GP's calculation rather than a full 3.
Unless you are actually using the land for farming, of course.
Yes, it’s a lot of land and it’s not remotely justifiable. Inequality isn’t something to just handwave away.
There are ~340 million acres of farmland alone in the US
To put that in perspective though.. per Wikipedia, all of Manhattan is 22.7 square miles!
*mindblown*
Another stat I read said the median US plot size is 10861 sq. feet., so Gates owns very nearly 1 million times the square footage of the average property.
So there's that.
https://www.floridatrend.com/article/17957/the-mormon-church...
This list of 73 properties are all significantly bigger than Bill's little patch of dirt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_stations_i...
eg. Anna Creek Station
23,677 km2 (9,142 sq mi; 5,851,000 acres)
You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, but that's not a great metric. When I think of wealth, I think of what you can reasonably acquire.
If you multiply Musk's shares in Tesla times the current share price, sure you get 180 billion. But if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them. Without Musk, I'd be surprised if Tesla is worth 20% of its current valuation. To a lesser extent, this is true of Bezos too, although Amazon without him is still a very valuable company.
On the other hand, Bill Gates owns 1.6% of Microsoft, which I believe is his biggest holding, followed by Berkshire Hathaway stock. I'd bet he can sell both of those holdings completely without a huge hit to either stock price (but definitely some hit). Same with his farmland and other alternative assets. On top of that, having already sold his Microsoft shares, he's not subject to as much capital gains tax as Bezos or Musk, each of whom pretty much owe 20% of their total net worth the second they want to sell.
So on paper, Musk and Bezos are wealthier, but if all of them decided to Scrooge McDuck it and put all their money into a gold filled vault tomorrow, Bill Gates' vault would be the fullest.
EDIT: typo above... Originally said that Musk owns 180 bn in Amazon stock :)
How much cash you could get in a vault isn't really a useful measure of wealth since cash isn't the only object of value that you can exchange for goods and services (which you even pointed out in your comment by mentioning gold)
Where do you get small fraction? That's not true at all. I can't even see either of your examples as having more, let alone a multiple.
Anyway, the wealthiest western capitalists aren't even accounted for. "author Malcolm Gladwell estimated the value of Rockefeller's fortune at its peak, in today's dollars, at $318.3 billion" [2] It's divided among the family at this point though of course.
But of the living individuals that we know (Bezos/Gates/Musk/Zuck), and have accurate info for, your statement is not true.
[1] https://money.com/vladimir-putin-net-worth/
[2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/how-rich-is-the-rockefel...
In 2015, the richest western capitalist was Gates with $80b[2], which means Putin was worth 2.5x more than Gates.
Another example of how these kleptocracies tend to funnel wealth up into the top is Kadafi, who was estimated to have died with $200b stashed around the world[3]. At that time, Bill Gates was worth $61b[4].
Without proof, I grant that you can believe whatever you want about Xi. But you can believe he's a unique benevolent snowflake in the history of totalitarians, or you can believe he's just like the rest. I'm going to assume he's like the rest and wait for proof that shows the opposite.
[1] https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/15/putins-net-wor...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2015/03/02/forbes-...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2011-oct-21-la-fg-kada...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2012/03/07/forbes-wo...
I think this is a good starting point to understanding the "real" value of Bezos' and Musk's fortunes, but I'm not sure it would play out like you say. As you pointed out, the valuations of both of their companies are held up by widely held beliefs about the men. A lot of Tesla's value comes from Elon Musk, super-genius-capitalist, being at the helm.
So, if the stock value comes from trusting the humans, it seems possible that Musk or Bezos could sell a large chunk of stock with the right explanation. Like, if Jeff Bezos said he was selling $30bn of stock to contribute to charity right now so he could get critics off his back and concentrate on Amazon...would the price go down? I don't see it.
I wonder if a lot of people would view that as the CEO version of a politician saying "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family", and immediately try to find the "true" reason he's selling the stock. Perhaps even causing more of a problem than if he had said "I'm selling this stock to buy a _really_ fancy yacht"
30 billion dollars of amazon stock would be about 10 million amazon stock. About 4 amazon stock is traded daily, so that would be 2.5 days of total average amazon stock entering the market over some period of time. This means higher competition between people selling the stock to find people willing to buy it, which would lower the price. The quicker the stock was sold off, the more dramatic this effect would be. 10 million stock also represents about 1/50th of all amazon stock in existence. Another 4/50th’s of that stock also belongs to Bezos. Increasing the amount of stock available to the general populous by a not insignificant amount would also lower the price of the stock, although probably not very dramatically.
In the end, those effects probably wouldn’t be too major. I’m actually surprised that so much of amazon’s stock gets traded every day, I wasn’t expecting 4 million stock to be traded daily. Still, it would have an effect that means Bezos couldn’t liquify his position in just a day or two even with a good explanation.
>Bezos couldn’t liquify his position in just a day or two even with a good explanation
That absolutely makes sense. I wasn't imagining a quick liquidation necessaraly - selling $30bn worth of stock over 5 or 10 years would be plenty of fuel in the fire of charitable giving.
For reference, MacKenzie Scott just gave away $4bn over one year that, I think, came from Amazon stock and it doesn't seem to have hurt the price?
These comparisons never take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into account. Bill Gates put about half his money into a financial structure with favorable tax treatment. But it's still his money that he controls. There's no reason to ignore it if you're trying to assess how wealthy he is.
I mean, you could say that groceries are part of your net worth, and immediately after purchase are roughly similar in value to the money you traded for them. Obviously people don't tend to bother counting their groceries as part of their net worth, mostly because they go bad or are consumed quickly and comprise a tiny percentage of most people's net worth.
But, in general, yes, your net worth is the value of everything you own (minus your debt). It's not at all crazy to say that, when you buy something very valuable or transfer money to a foundation which you control, your net worth is not changing much.
Yes, but that point comes when you eat the groceries, not when you buy them.
Think of it this way: Gates has a certain list of things he wants to spend money on. The government likes some of those things and forgoes taxes on them.
That doesn't change the fact that Gates is spending his money on exactly what he wants to. The restrictions are essentially irrelevant to him.
Bill Gates would never need to buy a yacht with his foundation money because he would buy a yacht before he made it foundation money.
It's like saying I can't buy a new TV with my retirement funds, but, I can certainly buy a new TV and contribute less to my retirement funds -- the end result is the exact same dollars went to the exact same end, I just organized them differently.
A version of this is that every kid who got scholarship money or loans knows how to bucket expenses to use your "limited use" dollars on qualifying expenses that would otherwise be paid by general funds, freeing up general funds for things. The net result is that the loans paid for nonqualified expenses, but they were organized appropriately.
I think you meant something else here?
Exactly. Stock wealth isn't real money because it isn't actionable. You can't sell all of it without crashing. All personal wealth should be measured by how much liquid cash you could get for it in a short term sale.
That's also the amount you could theoretically donate towards, for example, averting a short-term humanity disaster. If you needed $100 billion in hard cash to pay for a bunch of things to avert an asteroid or nasty virus, Elon Musk wouldn't be able to provide that sum even if he wanted to.
Bill, as I recall, had a much larger percentage of MSFT when he retired. Microsoft used to dilute their shares via employee stock grants, so I'm not sure how much of that is attrition and how much is divestiture on his part. One source on the internet says he was estimated to owns 4.3% as recently as two years ago. And I see another article from March of last year talking about him leaving the board of directors, and owning 1.36%.
I wonder if anyone has analyzed how much of the MSFT stock stagnation that occurred after his retirement could be attributed to his divestiture plan, rather than Ballmer's fault.
The swing in the stock price every day is fueled by supply and demand. The stock goes up 20c because the only person selling it wants a little more than the last sale price. It goes down 20c when someone wants to sell at the last price but the only people willing to pay that much already bought their shares. And that's not even including what happens to stop and limit orders that trigger automatically when the stock swings just a little bit farther than people anticipated. Just a small shift changes the slope of the price trend, which may cause people to shift demand away from that stock.
These days, when I'm mostly hands-off with my portfolio, more of my orders expire than actually trigger. Sometimes only just missing having done so.
It's part of the magic thinking about the stock market. We don't often discuss it in this sort of thread, but we definitely do when people are talking about HFT and AI for stock purchases and sales. Your orders don't happen in a vacuum, and they can affect future orders.
> Musk's shares in Amazon times the current share price
This is clearly a typo/copy-paste error since you got Musk/Tesla right in the next sentence.
Economics Explained - The Ranks of Global Billionaires: Not All Billionaires Are Made Equal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ
It even covers the oligarchy scenario :)
In the olden days they taxed millionaires crazy percentages of income tax. But that was before the digital era. Right now, money is digital and there isn't a gold standard. If you say: "Bezos, we tax you 80% of your income!" you'd see him simply not making any money at all and even collecting food stamps if he wanted to.
So the next step would be taxing someone's net worth, which would force Bezos to sell his stocks.
And guess who will be buying those stocks.
Other money printing governments in the form of their wealthy but sponsored businessmen, mostly from China. Then in a few years Amazon is Chinese-owned.
But yeah, Bill and Belinda Gates are at least doing it right. Their foundation is doing so much good for the world and their legacy will be immense for centuries to come.
Same for Musk, who single-handedly kickstarted (I'm not saying he did it all himself, I know he didn't) the world to accept electric cars and made rocket boosters that could land again.
Bezos, on the other hand? Honestly, more power to him doing what he does. He's playing the game by its own rules. And he's winning. But damn, he isn't doing much good with all those resources, does he? Even Amazon Prime isn't that good...
[1] https://qz.com/1594989/vladimir-putins-financial-disclosure-...
Since Gates funds a lot of the western media, (UK Guardian, BBC etc) you never hear any criticism of the WHO (which Gates also effectively owns) or GAVI, which is a Gates Vehicle. This is not a healthy situation at all.
1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awa...
Columbia Journalism Review https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu... A useful article
In the end it's very hard to tell if they are talking about pit bulls or puppies. Having nothing bad to say about a dog breed known for high profile attacks, dog fighting, and other negatively associated events would be extremely suspect. Having nothing bad to say about puppies in general is expected of such a benign subject. I doubt the Gates foundation is either a pit bull or a puppy, but I can't responsibly make an assumption even about what side of the spectrum they are from an article about how suspicious the absence of criticism is for an organization which is supposedly trying to do good as a charity.
And then his mom told him he needs to start giving it away. And he said, "how can I make money if I'm giving it away". And she told him "you can give away what you already made while you make more to give away".
And then he started the foundation.
I always thought of Bill as doing the same thing in Microsoft. Nice guy generally, but business is business, no hard feelings while he steamrolls your small company to death. Then, after having a fun work day doing what he should be doing, he reverts to his nice self.
He was probably shocked to learn the world knew only his evil side.
The decisions you make for the company affects the real world (even thought it is in the role of a artificial entity, like a company) and have real consequences on people and the state of the world.
The same in not true for the decisions you make in a board game or computer game.
Of course some might say board games affect the real world but the difference in scale is so large it is negligible.
This is wrong-headed but pervasive thinking. In reality, rich people are just people. Politicians are just people. Celebrities are just people. All people are corrupt to some degree, and some people are corrupt to a large degree.
It's easy for you to imagine a very wealthy person slipping into amoral hedonism, but I contend that their wealth has little to do with it. I once visited a rural Siberian village where a significant contingent of the older men wandered around town drunk. It was so commonplace that 10-year-olds in the community could tell you which of the men were angry drunks, and which ones could be led by the hand back to their homes. Those men lived on food rations from the government, and the first thing they would do when they got their ration of bread was to take it to the local convenience store and trade the bread for vodka. There are probably lots of reasons why someone would wallow in drunkenness for months at a time, but one reason is that they're just following whatever desires they have at any moment in time. Amoral hedonism isn't strictly a rich man's game.
One of my good friends is a highly-paid engineer at a tech company, and he told me, "Businesses want to keep people poor, so they have cheap labor." Which is about as sensible as saying consumers want businesses to be poor, so we get cheaper products. This is actually a pervasive myth believed by many intelligent people.
Of course businesses want to pay as little as they can for labor, the same way literally anyone paying for anything wants to pay as little as possible. But other concerns obviously come into play as well, e.g. the quality of the people you hire, the affluence of the customers you can sell to, your top-level revenue numbers, etc. This should have been obvious to my friend, who works at a tech company that's happy to pay him and others $200k+.
The reality is that businesses actually prefer wealthy societies with wealthy customers who can buy more things. It's a chronic problem that poor communities are under-served by businesses, because poverty makes it harder to profit.
And yet the myth that businesses want people to be poor persists.
As does the myth that you can only make large sums of money through cheating, scamming, lying, stealing, etc.
For a lot of people (myself included) it is not mainly about the ethics of individual billionaires, its about the ethics of the existence of billionaires to begin with.
But the interrogator doesn't grasp the subject entirely as well, I too would want clarification to the question if a content provider uses IE. You could ask a helpful question, e.g. Do you mean if they develop sites specifically for IE?
But That is not how you go about a deposition, you're not there to help people build a case against you.
We think gates is humble, kind, normal because that’s the image he wants to portray.
I agree his philanthropy goes a little further than typical billionaire reputation laundering, but he still has a limit. For example, he said he’d vote for trump if the dem candidate supported a wealth tax.
Maybe... however, the narrative that people never change and that any apparent changes are but a thin veneer on an unchanging person rubs me the wrong way.
I like to think I can change - that I can iron out my personality flaws and become a better person (more patient, kind, open-minded, charitable, etc.) over the decades. So why shouldn't I extend that benefit of the doubt to other people too? I assume a lot of people have an innate desire to change and improve as well since lots of people are religious, and the core message of a lot of religions is just that - that you can repent of your past mistakes, change, and become better.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-gates-im-happy-to-pay...
Estimating the true future earnings of businesses, and the amount available to current shareholders of course, isn't easy. But taking the stock market's approximation of that intrinsic value is quick and dirty way to get it. Of course, the caveat is that stocks aren't always efficiently priced.
Of note, the Gates don't even appear on this list. At first I thought it's because OP is only talking about farmland, but in the USA Today article the Simplot family apparently owns more than 400k acres for potato farming in Idaho, but doesn't even appear in the OP. I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy.
Also for the sake of comparison, 240k acres is a good amount, but (as another commenter mentioned), it's also not. There are some cattle ranches larger than that. And for an example of non farm/ranch use, Bezos apparently owns over 400,000 acres in West Texas to be used for the Blue Origin launch facilities.
EDIT: I'm less sure about this now, might just refer to government versus non government?
The answer is REAL simple. Taxes. Farmers get HUGE tax benefits that end up being particularly beneficial to the wealthy. Losses on farms translates into gigantic tax savings for billionaires.
How do I know this? My small family farm of 40 acres had major benefits to my fairly wealthy parents. There were many years they didn't pay taxes as a result of the farm.
"our researchers identified dozens of different entities that own the Gateses’ assets"
It doesn't seem to specify how much Bill and Melinda privately own, but it seems like the majority is owned by organizations.
To my mind, corporations are only good if they 1. provide value 2. capture some fraction of that value, because you have a win-win situation on your hands.
This applies well to production of products, which is obviously not zero-sum. Land is, however, so whenever a corporation is making a profit off of land ownership, it means an individual (or government) is not.
I basically agree about pure land ownership though. Obviously this is one of the main leftist critiques of capitalist societies. I'm not sure if state ownership is any better on net though (in general, I'm fine with national parks or whatever), mostly for logistical reasons. There's a lot of external factors to consider with land too. You don't want people to do whatever and poison said land via poor management or irresponsible resource extraction.
The alternative is probably a future where all land is owned by corporations and all people are just renting, which to me sounds like a recipe for disaster.
People will always exist. Corporations do not need to. I only believe corporations / companies should exist in situations where 1. they are providing value 2. capturing a portion of that value. Basically any corporation that is managing to do 2 without first doing 1 (or is managing to capture more value in step 2 than they are creating in step 1) is a business that should not exist.
As such, companies should not exist in spaces where they are not providing added value, and it is impossible for them to do so as a land-owner, because the owner is not providing any value, the land was always there. They didn't create it. Yes, Bob Gentry is not providing any value either, but again people will always exist, companies should not unless they serve a distinct purpose from what a person can.
But on top of that I do actually think the incentives are different. Companies and people are fundamentally different beasts. For starters, companies are effectively amoral.
source: I grew up in, and live in Nebraska. Family ranch was registered as an LLC, but we were just a small family operation, and by this point nonexistent (parents sold out and retired).
The initial purchase of the land by the corporation wasn't zero sum, however. The previous landowner and the corporation both gained subjective utility from the transaction (otherwise they wouldn't have engaged in it), so the transaction itself was positive sum.
...insulate management and shareholders from losses and litigation.
Don't get me wrong, we need to be able to pierce the corporate veil a lot easier in the US, but the setup isn't born from pure cynicism.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...
Corporate farming COULD be more efficient, but in common practice it is not.
I'm open to different definitions of efficiency, but this isn't really in question. HOW they are getting that efficiency (more fertilizer, etc.) we can agree/disagree. But they are more efficient in the most basic sense possible [more production, less land].
Note that there are other ways to organize people to farm efficiently, like worker cooperatives.
It includes individuals, privately-held & publically-traded corporations, and most trusts or other legal entities that aren't government controlled.
There might be different tax polices and exemptions carved out for the different entities, but the legal structure of ownership is the same.
This does not include anything federal, military, state, or local (including tribal) government, or is otherwise a special case, like some conservation non-profits, or things like public land trusts.
But if any part the government wants to expropriate or otherwise seize privately held land, it has to go through the same process no matter what type of legal entity.
https://sos.nd.gov/business/business-services/business-struc...
At least with big money owning the farms and absorbing the risk people can work in the ag industry for a salary without loosing their life savings.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-toughest-industri...
[2] https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-...
One of the issues in our area is how expensive it is to get enough labor for farms, so farmers are switching to easier crops to grow.
Farming is tough. Margins are low due to the nature of commodities. Very few 'go at it alone' farmers out there. Most went under, sold, died, or partnered up in the 1980s when the credit crisis hurt farms.
* Number 2 on the list, Offutt family, grow potatoes in Minnesota. https://www.rdoffuttfarms.com/
* Number 3 on the list, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, have many agricultural innovations to their name, the biggest being Cutie oranges.
Here is an in-depth article: A Kingdom from Dust | Jan 31, 2018
https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-du...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19072078
* Number 4 on the list, Fanjul family, are Cuban brothers who own sugar plantations and the Domino Sugar company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanjul_brothers
* Number 5 on the list, Boswell family, pioneered cotton farming in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Griffin_Boswell
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/112844547165831987...
Basically, there's a lot of tax breaks available if you designate your land a "farm", even if you don't grow anything. About 22% of farms in the US produce 0 output.
On the east coast you often see alpacas; their fur get harvested periodically.
Unfortunately these tricks are common in many states, especially in high tax states with wealthy residents trying to dodge taxes.
Well, $10m is definitely wealth to you or me, but not to Bill Gates.
https://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/what-will-gates-ch...
My understanding is that most of his wealth is held in MSFT stock which has increased in value by over 4x since 2016.
So if he had given away 75% of his wealth in 2016, he'd still have the same net worth today.
I think Gates is probably to the point where it's functionally impossible for him to give away all of his money. The value of his personal brand and network is such that startups will probably give away decent chunks of their business just to be a part of that network.
Also, completely liquidating and giving away his assets would result in a large payout once.. and then nothing ever again. You need money to make money, so holding onto some to appreciate in value (investments, interest, etc) results in more money being donated over a longer amount of time.
[1] https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.15/wildlife-how-beavers-make-t...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/06/24/620402681/the-bountiful-benef...
Land has to be rotated for fertility and even then it takes decades and decades to build an inch of top soil. At our current global population , we are treading on thin ice..or rather upon eroding top soil. Sad truth.
The meaning, which I mean to convey with it and what I do convey with it differ. At least wrt. politeness ;-)
Aside from the land in Benton County, and it's arability, they paid close attention to available water, access to interstate transportation including road (I-82, I-84), rail (BNSF) and air (Tri-Cities Airport), and reasonable proximity to major metropolitan areas (Seattle, Portland, Boise).
No doubt stable gas and electric are nearby along with high-speed fiber (next to the BNSF rail).
It's a mistake to think of Bill Gates as the next Mr. Douglas too [0]. His acquisitions are consistent with a mind towards building "smart cities" like the one proposed west of Phoenix.
I couldn't tell what kind of land Bill Gates owns. It does matter, but not all that much, because however you slice it, it's a pretty small amount of the total.
Side note: Mormon church is the biggest land owner in lots of areas including Florida and Utah. [1][2] Also own lots of land in other states where they are top 10 like Montana and Idaho. [3]
Ted Turner and the Wilks family are also massive land owners in Montana, Idaho and other areas. [4]
Here's the top land owners in all of US as of 2019: [4]
FAMILY ACRES
John Malone 2.20M
Emmerson family 1.96M
Ted Turner 1.92M
Stan Kroenke 1.38M
Reed family 1.33M
Irving family 1.25M
Brad Kelley 1.15M
Singleton family 1.10M
King Ranch heirs 0.93M
Peter Buck 0.93M
John Malone is the largest land owner in the US [5].
Largest land owners are mostly corporate, private individuals and in some states, religions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_Ranches
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-florida-mormons/mormon-c...
[3] https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/money/2016/06/21/who...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-largest-landowners-i...
[5] https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/john-malone-eve...
Vertical farms are all niches: lettuce is high value, and spoils fast. Thus they can get closer/faster to market by going vertical. They convert electric (coal and natural gas) to light, so they are not very environmentally sound.
Also, the reason they grow lettuce for these tests and not more calorie dense or nutrient packed plants is because lettuce requires little light and little nutrients, most of its weight and volume is just water and air. Growing wheat or potatoes or other primary food crops requires a lot more light and a lot more nutrients than these demonstration crops.
Not even for high price per area needed products like salad vertical farming is profitable yet. Most of the farmland is used for crops that use up a lot of space like wheat, corn or soybeans.
Over time, controlled conditions will be a necessity. Right now the cost is still cheaper for most on land, that will change, especially if we move to new planets but definitely if we don't due to population.
Necessity will fuel the innovation here and solar/light innovation will be a big future industry.
Writing off vertical/indoor farming is like writing off other fuel choices or EVs, until it happens everyone said it was impossible but necessity changes the impossible mainly due to changes in cost/investment and returns, as well as new technologies made possible over time.
Lots of examples of successes already besides in marijuana. Essentially just green houses that can be stacked like modular farming.
https://interestingengineering.com/13-vertical-farming-innov...
For other planets, we will have to have vertical or underground farming and controlled conditions.
As more and more land on Earth gets used and population increases, climate changes, soil is more and more less fertile, the only way to meet that demand is indoor, up or down.
Even industries like marijuana, where hydroponics and farming is more indoors, much of that is indoors and can be vertical.
There are lots of innovations yet to be made that will make it more of a possibility and ultimately a necessity [2].
When it comes down to it, growing in controlled conditions is easier and less risky, growing outdoors is harder. Though it doesn't work for all right now, the areas it works for those elements are key.
Even growing a single plant indoors versus outdoors, so much less to think about in controlled conditions. Farmers can be wiped out with a flood, or an insect, all of those things are less risky indoors where possible.
[1] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2018/08/14/vertical-farming-...
https://thinkingagriculture.io/what-agriculture-has-and-does...
It should also be noted that the world population will peak around ~10B people. We will have plenty of food to feed all of these people (minus corruption and politics).
Lots of innovations are underway for it. https://interestingengineering.com/13-vertical-farming-innov...
The comments here are alot like the EV comments back in 2000, can't be done, battery tech not there, no way to fuel on long trips etc etc.
Eventually the necessity will require it either due to population, climate change or other planets.
Sure, right this very moment it isn't as viable, but it is for many industries like herbs, marijuana and as you say niche products. That is how all innovations start.
Farming will still be massive on land when this happens as cattle, pigs, chickens etc need lots of land. Many of the biggest farms are cattle ranches so those won't be going anywhere much longer.
The 'buy land, they don't make more of it' is almost a meme at this point. We have plenty of land.
ETA: I had the spice and niche crops comment in my first comment, so yes we agree. Most of farming is to produce starch,oil, or protein at scale. Spices are a very very very (very) small slice
As I mentioned in my edited comment above, most large farms are cattle ranches or livestock that need massive amounts of land. Those also aren't as affected by weather. Unless people stop eating meat (they won't) then ranches will always exist and there will be at least a doubling of the need based on current populations to projected.
For plants, controlled conditions are always better. So when certain crops are viable to do indoors/vertical it will be economical to do so with less risk. That is already the case with marijuana, herbs etc that are smaller but also big business and will grow (no pun intended).
If people do start eating more plants instead of meat, and products move plant based more and more, indoor/vertical farming could become more necessary largely due to access/shipping/fulfillment and even labor availability. Right now current farming would not be able to support if everyone became vegan or vegetarian.
If population does top out and people are happy in cities, then your prediction is probably correct. If people don't want to live in cities as much due to other situations (climate change or pandemics or politics or other) some of that land may be more profitable in other uses. As industries move more remote and housing costs are too high in cities, people will spread out.
Efficiencies also come with indoor/vertical that you can't get on land: limited use of pesticides, recycled water or water constraints, recreating soil fertility, weather control, etc. Where soil is not fertile, vertical/indoor farming is a potential solution as it can go where land based farming can't always.
Final point, indoor/vertical/controlled farming would make humans able to survive on other planets or if anything were to ever happen with events that might make outdoor conditions risky or less viable. Everybody's bunker is going to need a good indoor farm.
ETA: About 90% of farms are non-irrigated
[1] https://farmfolio.net/articles/farmland-invetor-mike-burry/
unrivaled? Try the gulf of Naples in Italy, or Eastern Sicily, or Eastern Japan, or a dozen other locations I'm not even aware of.
Most of America is too "old" (in terms of Billions of years) to have "unrivaled" soils.
That or he owns the Atari burial site with the E.T. Games.
As they say "They're not making any more of it".
You want to share-crop for part of the price. It gives you incentive to ensure the farmer is farming the land as opposed to mining it for the nutrients before leaving you with dead land. Because you share some of the risk (and will have to cover it in bad years - there will be bad 5 year stretches so make sure you can budget for this!) you can get a greater return long term.
I heard London had a lot of empty places from the rich buying up all the houses just for money parking purposes and not living there.
Assuming there isn't some ideological reason the Gates are buying farmland, it's probably better viewed as a hedge/diversification -- it may not be a very good investment, yield-wise, but it is decoupled from a lot of other investments.
I know a few people that run small, ~5-acre farms that grow soybeans or corn. From what I gather, they work the equivalent of a few weekends over the summer and earn a few grand an acre after costs. The gotcha seems to be equipment; it's so expensive that one would need huge tracts of land to cover the costs. One guy I know paid someone a % of yield to handle the plowing/harvesting. While my cousin keeps an old, depression-era tractor going and uses that. I imagine some might just lease out the land and collect just enough to cover property taxes.
This seems like a pretty common setup in the midwest. If you travel down some rural back roads, you'll come up on small 2-5 acre plots surrounded by houses. More than likely, these are owned and managed by someone nearby as a side hustle.
Corn yields were ~180 bushels / acre for 2020, and corn prices were [will be, since it is still being sold] $4.85, which comes out to $873 / acre. You might clear a few grand for the entire small field, but even with a second planting of winter wheat I have a hard time imagining making four figures per acre after expenses.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/commodity-costs-and-r...
Better link: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/commodity-costs-and-r...
Here in Indiana an acre of farmland will average somewhere in the $7000 per acre range for 'average' soil.
See this report from Purdue https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/wp-content/uploads/2...
https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/...
Added: Check out the productivity by switching this to 'Yield per acre' https://observablehq.com/@kickout/usda-nass-map-extra-statis...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-coasts-idUS...
So, Bill's got some catching up to do.
That's very much a means-tested program to prevent farmers from being driven into bankruptcy by tariffs on things they've already produced. It's not a magic money fountain.
That type of info should be a whole lot easier to access and digest than it currently is.
Note that the same report says that excluding subsidies, farmer net income increased in 2020 over 2019, so I'm not convinced the Covid pandemic is a good reason.
My wife and I just spent 178k on just over a half acre + house in November. We don't get residential mail delivery, closest grocery is about 15 miles away, closest gas station abut 6 miles away. Our town is a little over 300 people, with no police, the fire department is volunteer, and if we had to call 911 for a medical emergency an ambulance is probably 15-20 minutes away. All of those sacrifices just to be able to afford a half acre.
The appraiser refused to agree to the listing price, so we had to scramble and get cash gifts from family after we'd already made an offer. Two offers before us fell through and we were in a 24-hour bid war with another potential buyer.
I make 36k a year and my wife is a public school teacher, we consider ourselves to be doing very good compared to many we know and this is the best we can do.
Here is a little less than 20 acres within a half hour of me, just land, no buildings. It is 6.91x my gross annual income. Just about no one makes land loans so I'd need to have 249,000 USD as cold hard cash just for the land, then need another 50-125k to build a house. Then I'd have to drill a well, then install septic, then get it changed from light-industrial to residential. All in I'd need 350-450k dollars to make it work. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/7700-N-Cou...
Similarly close is this one https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/959-E-Coun... for 400k USD with 10 acres and, admittedly, an absurdly large house.
No one is going to give a guy making 36k a 400k loan, and there's no realistic way I, at 35, can realistically save 350-450k cash to buy land and build a house before I'm too old to do a lot of the initial work the land would need for my purposes.
I'd love to know why I'm being downvoted too. Is it because I don't earn as much as you so my opinion isn't valid? Is it because I wish I lived in a world where I could afford 0.004132231% of the land that Bill Gates owns?
Hell, I read here yesterday that 44% of Americans apparently make less than $18k/year.
I'd kill for 10 acres. Even 1 acre near any kind of town is currently out of my reach as a lower-paid software engineer.
I'm sorry but I don't believe that, unless you have some specific personal circumstances such as very high debt or something.
If you're ready to go near any kind of town, it is absolutely possible to find 1 acre on a lower-paid SE salary.
I'll assume you meant that he needs a house in a town where he can find a job.
First, this was not mentioned as a prerequisite in his post, but fair.
Second, software engineer is the job that can be done from anywhere, if your priority is to find 1+ acre of land then maybe you can put up with working remotely.
And finally, there are still plenty of towns, with jobs where buying 1 acre of land is completely possible.
There are not many such places in the world though. If my city was any smaller it wouldn't have bus service at all. Good luck finding one.
It isn't the middle of nowhere if there is a bus stop. If there is a bus stop, it's a city. Most of the United States (by inhabited area, not population) doesn't even have public transportation.
A super-wealthy technologist is investing in _farm land_. Why do you think that is?
They have so much money they want to grow everything for their own consumption on the highest quality? If I were Gates rich I'd definitely do that. Don't even have to be that rich tbh
So I can give multiple answers, even contradicting ones too
Plus, he can dictate terms of use for the land, preventing leasees from spraying harmful pesticides and using practices that destroy the productivity of the land. It's possible he could ban beef production from his land, preventing some volume of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.