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Mark Zuckerberg Tops Warren Buffett to Become the World’s Third-Richest Person
- thinkcomp 8y agoMark Zuckerberg : Facebook :: Elizabeth Holmes : Theranos Holmes's biggest mistake was making hardware, so the fraud was more obvious. Until the media actually digs deep into the fake/fraudulent account problem on Facebook, the stock will continue to go up.
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- lumberjack 8y agoFacebook has a built a legal surveillance machine that can read the thoughts of most people on the planet. That is very valuable. I don't doubt Facebook is incredibly valuable both for reading our thoughts and for its ability to shape them. The only current danger to Facebook's model is the EU severely curtailing their operations within the EU, but even if they have just the US market that is still hugely valuable. Of course it is a danger to society and hugely unethical but financially they are sound.
- nvusuvu 8y agoIt's only valuable as long as people continue to use it.
- thelastidiot 8y agoPeople can't stop using FB. It's a gigantic flywheel feeding itself back. Your friends are there, you want to leave, there is no where else to go. You come back. They win!
- nopacience 8y agothird richest person... "officially" there are so many much more richer persons/families not taken into consideration by forbes. russians, chinese, indians, non americans. People that have money spread across borders.. there is no such thing as the officially "Worlds third richest person"... some are "unkown (by forbes)" trillionaires that are not accounted because there are no official records
- 21 8y agoWhen the biggest "official" richest person only has ~150 bil, your claim that there are trillionairs out there is pretty ridiculous.
- lucasmullens 8y agoI would be surprised to hear there exists a trillionaire that Forbes didn't even consider. That would mean having 8x more money than the "officially" richest person.
- arcanus 8y ago> People that have money spread across borders.. trillionaires The only person I could even speculate with that sort of wealth could be Vladimir Putin, if you argued he is a dictator and so controls the entire Russian economy / wealth base.
- withdavidli 8y agoBy that argument, there’s another person that’s basically president for life that controls a country with about 10x of Russia’s.
- darawk 8y agoWhile it's true that Xi Jinping (to whom you are presumably referring) is probably dictator of China for life now, he can't quite use the country as his personal piggy bank in the way Putin can.
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- anaphor 8y agoAs an individual looking to make long term investments, I'd still much rather own stock in Berkshire Hathaway because its holdings are much more diverse than just Facebook stock. FB is not as safe a long term bet for the average person.
- 21 8y agoNot sure what your point is. The average person should just own a stock index fund. In fact, this is the exact advice that Buffett gives.
- anaphor 8y agoMy point is that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg whose wealth is concentrated in equity for a single company are different from people like Buffett, who actually spent most of their life working on managing different investments in order to create stable growth of their portfolio. So we're comparing someone who is 87 years old and has steadily increased their wealth over time, to someone who basically got rich very quickly, and whose wealth is open to extreme fluctuations. I'd much rather be the first person.
- petercooper 8y agoInteresting. I'd much rather be a 34 year old with extremely risky/fluctuating wealth than an 87 year old with even a trillion in the bank.
- 21 8y agoFTFY: I'd much rather be 34 than 87
- 21 8y agoNothing stops Zuck from selling some/all of his shares and buying BRK.A, SPY or treasuries. Sure, if he wants to do it quickly he will need to do it at a discount, but I'm pretty sure it's under 10% if he is willing to spread it over a year or so. You can argue that he is so rich exactly because he didn't diversify. Obligatory Warren Buffett quote: "Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely"
- gowld 8y ago> further solidifying technology as the most robust creator of wealth. How does such bald propaganda get through a site that calls itself news?
- 21 8y agoEasy. Just look at the most valuable companies in the world today, and how long did it took to get there. Please give another example of people becoming billionaires in under 10 years who are not in tech.
- ztratar 8y agoPlease explain how this is propaganda? Tech has been surging at 8-10% YoY, while the rest of the economy sits closer to 2%.
- melling 8y agoBerkshire is sitting on over $100 billion in cash. Buffett will hopefully double his money in the next 5-7 years. He’s giving away 99% of all his money. Bill Gates will be using it to make the world a better place.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoFWIW, Zuckerberg has promised to give away 99% of his Facebook shares too.
- mikece 8y agoHow much would The Zuck's pile be if he actually tried to cash it out? I think if Zuckerberg and Buffett cashed out of their holdings over six months the drop in FB stock would result in the very diversified Buffet having one or two orders of magnitude more money at the end of it. On-paper wealth isn't real. If you can't roll around on it or stand it front of it with an assault rifle to defend it, then it's not real.
- siculars 8y agoZuck rolls around in it every time he drinks a free latte or gets hauled in front of Congress. Dithering about how "real" it actually is is left to the plebs like you and me. It's as real as anything else in this world.
- myroon5 8y agoMark Zuckerberg is already constantly one of the largest insider traders. He currently sells almost $50M of FB stock most days the stock market is open. https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=FB https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=FB (Insider Trading at the bottom) Better link: https://finviz.com/insidertrading.ashx?oc=1548760&tc=7 https://finviz.com/insidertrading.ashx?oc=1548760&tc=7
- swyx 8y ago"Insider trading" is very different from "planned sales as part of normal executive compensation", despite what your chosen financial software may say.
- myroon5 8y agoNot all insider trading is the illegal kind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading
- omosubi 8y agoWhy is this news?
- moate 8y agoWhy is anything news? Because people are interested in it. Nothing has meaning, everything is made up, we all die in the end, none of this matters. Let's just go all the way down the the philosophy hole and say we should all just kill ourselves now since that's faster and more efficient than actually living. tl;dr- Because news is news.
- thelastidiot 8y agoLaughed so hard reading your reply, I spilled my $8 latte all over!
- the_cat_kittles 8y agogive that shit away asap
- thelastidiot 8y agoI hate this guy. Even the way him and his wife are making donations is aweful. Naming an hospital with their names while they are still alive? Pathetic and not cool at all.
- siculars 8y agoWhen you can afford to buy naming rights to a hospital I'll register your opinion. Until then, although everyone is free to express an opinion, I'll file yours under ungrateful jealousy.
- thelastidiot 8y agoWhat's your point? Are you saying that you can only formulate an opinion about people who are equality or less successful than you in life?
- moate 8y agoI think he's saying that your feelings on how people should do charity work is just like, your opinion man. You seem salty that some dude has lots of money because you're whole thesis was "this guy is a jerk because he paid for a hospital and then had his name put on it".
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- asdsa5325 8y agoYeah, it's disgusting for them to get recognition for a very kind large donation /s
- ModernMech 8y agoI'm sorry, but why aren't there more people outraged and disgusted that so few people hold so much wealth? It seems like people not only think it's not a problem, but we gleefully track stats like this. I've seen people argue about who "deserves" to hold the richest person title. People pick sides like it's sports. Seriously, what am I missing here?
- tuesdayrain 8y agoIt's a proxy for their extreme level of success. I can't be mad at that
- thelastidiot 8y agoI believe because they project the image of the American dream to everyone else including the Walmart employees using food stamps.
- vixen99 8y agoPeople typically seek to maximize the return on their activities whatever their views on inequality. Thus Joseph Stiglitz, author of "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future" has no problem charging $50,000 - $100,000 for a speech thus making his income proportional to his talents. That's what most of us do. Famous politicians who've preached from the same hymn book, go even higher. The interesting questions are at what level do you set the 'inequality coefficient' and how would you meet it using rules that don't stifle innovation and prevent people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and countless others from doing interesting things?
- ModernMech 8y agoI have no problem with people making a lot of money. I have a problem with people making obscene amounts of money. Elon and Bill can do interesting things without personally being worth more than the GDP of some countries.