Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates is the wealthiest person in the world (or arguably Arnault).

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 :)

View on HN

There's another issue, which constantly bothered me back when "Jeff Bezos is richer than Bill Gates" was a big news item.

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.

It's kind of his money that he controls. He can do a lot with it, but he can't buy a yacht with it... You don't get the favorable tax treatment without a ton of restrictions on how you can spend the money.

Yep but he chooses for it to be restrict this way

To be a bit facetious, that's like saying that I still possess all of the money I spent on groceries because I chose to spend it that way... at some point it's not my money anymore. I agree that Bill Gates still exerts some control over the money, but if he can't actually do anything he wants with it, then it's not wealth the same way cash, or even stock is.

At a certain point it starts to become silly to talk about wealth as the ability to buy things, rather than the ability to organize a large portion of the world's economic systems. That's specifically what his foundation can do as long as it's within a fairly broad set of parameters.

The point was that this is how he chooses to spend his money. For whatever reason I guess it makes him feel good. Which his cool but he has vastly more autonomy over his money than regular mortals - as do many other HNW individuals, they’re not all as kind hearted as Bill though.

> To be a bit facetious, that's like saying that I still possess all of the money I spent on groceries because I chose to spend it that way... at some point it's not my money anymore.

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.

> that's like saying that I still possess all of the money I spent on groceries because I chose to spend it that way... at some point it's not my money anymore.

Yes, but that point comes when you eat the groceries, not when you buy them.

He might be able to buy or build a yacht with it actually.

How? By outfitting it with facilities so that he can claim it has medical applications?

My understanding is that there are actually very few restrictions on what kind of expenses charitable foundations can use their funds toward. The public’s attention was drawn to this because of media reporting on some of the more ludicrous outlays of the Trump Foundation.

Yea that’s pretty much the only way. Mercy Ships is a major charity that does similar. And to the commenter who mentioned the trump foundation, it was charged with fraud, fined $2M, and dissolved. So probably not a great example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_Ships

He can't buy a yacht with his Foundation money, but he already has a yacht.

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.

>It's kind of his money that he controls. He can do a lot with it, but he can't buy a yacht with it... You don't get the favorable tax treatment without a ton of restrictions on how you can spend the money.

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.

No need to buy anything with it when he still has enough outside of that money. It still gets used to further his initiatives, although no longer personal like one would do with money in their direct control.

What I find amazing is how the richest person in the world also happens to be a really good person. Bill Gates generally just seems humble, kind, and... normal. Imagine if Bill Gates were instead a corrupt megalomaniac - it wouldn't be too hard to slip into amoral hedonism when you have that much money.

I think if you scroll back to discussion on slashdot in the 90s, you'd see public opinion in the tech community was very different back then. That said, I agree with your take on Gates.

Gates has a much bigger pr organization behind him than Mellon or Carnegie ever did in a previous era of monopolists and oligarchs.

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.

Gates funds the BBC? What?

I wasn't aware of this, but apparently, yes, he does.[1][2] I think it's important to note that this doesn't have to be because he expects something in return, he could just think funding good news organizations is a good thing to do. It's also important to keep in mind that even if he doesn't expect favorable reporting doesn't mean he doesn't get it anyways as a byproduct.

1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awa...

2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding

Journalism’s Gates keepers

Columbia Journalism Review https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu... A useful article

The problem I have with articles like that is they are long on innuendo and implication and short on data. We get a lot of "not much bad is said about them" without much comparison to sources that aren't funded by them that might be more neutral.

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.

It's quite a redemption story. 20 years ago Bill Gates was reviled as one of the most evil people in technology. He was a bully and a thief, and crushed potential competitors for fun.

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 thought it was Warren Buffet that convinced him to go the philanthropy route.

He said it was mom that told him "has to give it away" but Buffet guided him on how to do it.

To be clear, he spent about as much as humanly possible on himself first. He just didn't want to reserve the rest for his descendants.

Always asked myself how this came about. Is there somewhere I can read about it?

His testimony to the anti-trust investigation is on YouTube

I play board games with some friends. While we're generally nice guys and girls, in some of the games we go full twirling moustache evil, every trick allowed as long as its in the rules. That's an in-game persona for an hour, after which we revert back to our nice selves. Which is fine, BTW, we're consenting adults and we know its a game.

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.

You might be right, but I do feel that it is a difference between a board game and real world.

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.

that's clearly true, of course. I don't want to defend Bill or Microsoft (not that he needs me to). I simply see it as a way to explain his behaviour.

I think you find this amazing, in large part, because in 2021 the American culture (and to an extent, the global culture) has equated wealth with corruption. If somebody has wealth, then they must have done something distasteful to get it. The wealthier they are, the more people they must have exploited to gain their wealth. So the logic goes.

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.

The spread of this narrative is fascinating, given how easy it is to find counterexamples. I attribute it to a lack of education around business.

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.

At the same time, nobody has accumulated a billion dollars in personal wealth with a totally clean conscience. Millionaires, sure, thats an order of magnitude less wealth though. Billionaires are such a distortion of economic allotment that just to be one necessitates having such a profound influence on so much of their economic sphere that to have gotten into that position required someone else being taken advantage of at some point, and in practice its a lot of someones and a lot of harm caused. Its no different than diverting a river into a reservoir - you can make a small lake with minimal ecological damage, but when you divert into a sea or an ocean the entire environment shifts around it for some good and some ill with there always being some consequences for it happening.

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.

I'll agree, but I really do think being a successful politician is probably heavily correlated to being prone to corruption/other immoral acts. The type of people who are attracted to and capable of succeeding at political are necessarily immoral. Those with morals generally lose elections and aren't able to raise money.

I guess you weren't around in the 90s.

I don't expect you to change your mind because confirmation bias is a powerful force. I did see this video recently and found it interesting. Have you seen it? "Bill Gates - Microsoft Antitrust Deposition - Highlights" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE

Wow, he does seem like a massive jerk in that video. That said, I try not to judge people on how they acted in the past, but how they currently act. Compare that more recent interview and videos (like Mark Rober's) and he seems to have mellowed out a lot. Maybe it's all for the cameras and he's privately still a massive jerk, I don't know, but my impression of him lately based on stuff I've seen online has generally left a good impression.

He is not speaking personally in that video but after hours of coaching by lawyers. He sounds rude the same way a suspect refuses to speak without a lawyer is rude.

To me it is clear that Gates was prepared by a host of lawyers, which makes sense.

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.

It's the result of having a good public relations firm.

It’s important to understand that gates and his people have put in a _lot_ of work to reform his image in the last 20 years.

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.

> We think gates is humble, kind, normal because that’s the image he wants to portray.

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.

Citation needed. He's said approximately the opposite publicly.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-gates-im-happy-to-pay...

It's crazy what paying for better branding can do. This is the same guy that tried to take all of Paul Allen's stock while he had Cancer. He's the same, he's just worked on his image.

For purchases like the one in the article, you can absolutely purchase with stock in lieu of cash. This happens all the time, and doesn't have nearly the impact on the share price that selling for cash on the exchange does.

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)

You still have to sell some to cover the real estate transfer taxes since the government doesn't accept stock. With a 1% transfer tax you're still looking at $1.7M. Not too bad though.

Cash, or gold, artwork, whatever... Sure you can purchase with stock. But you can't easily purchase with $180 billion in stock without affecting the stock price.

If Musk started to sell off a significant chunk of stock he'd have to disclose this, and the stock price would take a hit whether it was on an exchange or for farmland.

Even if you sell it as a divestiture plan, that constant pressure has consequences on the stock price. I think in some cases you can list stock holdings as collateral on a loan, in which case you can derive a similar cash benefit from the stocks as you would get from selling it, meanwhile not incurring the social and political consequences of selling your holding.

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.

It was reported in the 80's that Gates had regular scheduled (to avoid insider trading allegations and spooking investors) sales of MSFT stock.

Was just thinking about this the other day. Not only does the incoming CEO have big leadership shoes to fill, the incoming CEO has to deal with the previous founder CEO unloading shares every quarter which essentially appears to the general market as a vote of no confidence. In Ballmer's case he also had to contend with the dotcom bubble bursting.

I think unless the founder is liquidating en-masse it's usually a non-event. Even in the click-batey articles I read about those they always include something about how it's normal and been planned for the last year when a CEO sells their stock

It's not a non-event, it's just invisible. A divestiture plan is erosion instead of a mud slide.

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.

Yes - that's probably the challenging part for the incoming CEO - its an invisible headwind for them. If you think about over a two decades - Gates/Paul Allen going from 50% ownership in 2000 when they both retired to 20% ownership in 2010 to 0% around when Nadella took over - it must have some impact.

> 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.

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.

I'd argue if you own a significant fraction of a large company, you have a significant effect on it's decisions. Controlling a giant company and all it's connections, levers, abilities, etc is way more valuable than just a hundred billion in hard cash

Musk or Bezos can use their wealth as collateral against other a huge line of credit. At their level of resources, you are more likely to take on a lot of debt to delay realizing gains, they do not need to sell their shares to have other things

If you have $100 of stock you can’t borrow $100 in cash against that.

You can borrow more than 1:1. You can usually leverage up to 3x. This is literally all of modern finance

Jeff's going to be so annoyed when he discovers Musk owns 180bn of AMZN stock.

Good point :) My mistake!

Clearly he's been learning from Warren Buffet about how to buy stock through proxies.

Here's a fun video which discusses the phenomenon you're describing. Its a bit click-baity but does provide an overall summary pretty nicely.

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 :)

Another way to look at wealth is as total spending power between now and eternity. Taken that way, it doesn't matter as much if your wealth is tied up in unsaleable stock-- stock afterall represents your claim on the discounted future earnings of a company, so those earnings will be available given enough time.

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.

They all have infinite money for all intent and purposes.

What always annoys me with most people out there is that they want to take money from the super wealthy. As if Musk and Bezos and Gates are sitting on stockpiles of Dollars. Their income isn't billions of Dollars a year, that's simply–mostly–the increase in value of their assets.

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...

If we tax the rich more we'll be owned by China? That feels a bit like an insincere argument. Anyone wanting to buy large sums of Amazon stock could do so right now. Hoarding large sums of money isn't really beneficial to society and the huge sums are far past the point of justifying innovation and job creation incentives.

I completely agree with your overall point, although there are definitely a lot of intracicies here. Overall liquidity is definitely important though.

> 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.

Is Bill Gates, or Musk, or Bezos (pre-divorce) the wealthiest person in the world? What I noticed is that these wealthiest lists routinely exclude royalty from these lists.

> Musk's shares in Amazon

I think you meant something else here?

Hmmmmm, I'm pretty sure by that measure Vladimir Putin is the wealthiest person in the world. On top of his own wealth, most of which is unreported, he can use state power to acquire whatever property in Russia he wants.

Only un-leveraged wealth should be measured. Meaning Musk and Bezos probably don't even make the top 10.

Putin is the richest person in the world. While we cannot verify it [1], it is estimated to be around $200 billion.

[1] https://qz.com/1594989/vladimir-putins-financial-disclosure-...

> if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them

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.

> 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

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"

Maybe? I haven't seen any reactions like that to MacKenzie Scott's contributions.

There’s two parts of how the sale would effect the price. One effect is trust in the business due to it’s shareholders, which could definitely be dealt with yes. The other effect though would be a massive amount of shares entering the market place, which would have purely mechanical outcomes.

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.

Thank you for the notes about stock availability and the impacts of that! I hadn't thought about how the volume of available shared affects the price. Though it feels like market makers would feel this the most? I guess I'm not sure how much of a stocks' price is driven by limited availability.

>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?

I thought when such large quantities of shares were being traded, its typically done in a dark pool so as to purposefully not impact the stock price. Dark pools are a means for individuals or organizations who want to trade massive amounts to do so without impacting the public market.

Not that it matters who the wealthiest person on earth is, but western capitalists have a small fraction of the wealth that people like Putin and Xi have.

I'm curious about this. Is there any easy way to determine how much wealth Putin or Xi actually has? Or is any discussion about their wealth just anecdotal?

Pure speculation, but it’s easy to see how people like them can conceal their wealth. One data point is that Gadaffi had by some estimates, $200b in wealth stashed around the globe when they unwound his estate. Bill Browder asserted that, when Vald was consolidating his power, he took half ownership in all of the oligarchs’ business in exchange for not jailing them.

Putin's is unknown. An advisor said 70B in 2012 [1] Where do you see Xi having comparable substantial wealth? I see 500M to 1.5B.

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...

Why on earth would Xi allow his wealth to be known? The media in China isn’t even allowed to cover basic actions of the CCP. But China is a country run by bribes and guanxi. And all bribes flow up. It is possible he has decided to not accept the payments, but very unlikely.

That's precisely my point. We only have some very limited data available. And none of that says anywhere near 200B or multiples of that as you present as a fact.

2015 estimate for Putin was $200b[1] by Bill Browder, who for a period of time, had been mistakenly believed to manage Vlad's wealth, and was active in the privatization investment opportunities in Russia.

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...

Putin had $200 billion in 2017 if you believe this senate testimony. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/31/financier-bill-browder-says-...

That's an estimate by someone with insight, but not like they were the bookkeeper for Putin. And if true, that's still inline with the top western capitalists (which we have real data for). Not multiples of their wealth. That's ridiculous to assume and present as fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com