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There are more secret billionaires, who don't appear on the billionaires list. I know of two such billionaires. One is super, super secretive, who passes off as

There are more secret billionaires, who don't appear on the billionaires list. I know of two such billionaires. One is super, super secretive, who passes off as a multi millionaire. There are special trusts that billionaires make use of. Treat a trust like a corporation, with its own independent existence. Such trusts can be set up for multiple generations: these trusts (corporations) are run by professionals, while the offspring gets monthly paychecks (that's why they are called trust fund babies).

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Assuming we're not talking "I have a retirement plan and a house so my net-worth is over a million" type of millionaire, isn't passing oneself off as a multi-millionaire instead of a billionaire a distinction without a difference? I guess I don't run in those circles, but it's still fabulous wealth either way.
- tylersmith 3y ago
  It's the difference between someone having $2k and $1 million dollars.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    I think with the "distinction without a difference" bit they meant that if you look like you have $2k instead of looking like you have $1m, what is the difference in your life than just having $2k? The answer to that is: you have $1m of peace of mind to live your comfortable lifestyle of someone with $2k. Now living the lifestyle of someone woth $2k might not be particularly desirable to most, but living the life of a multi-millionaire with that relatively same level of peace of mind sounds like a crazy nice way to live.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      Yes, exactly. If you live like you're making minimum wage as a millionaire that's obvious, but if you're living like a multi-millionaire instead of a billionaire how could you even tell?
      - DennisP 3y ago
        Depends on how many multis you're talking about. A billionaire who wants them can have a large yacht, private jet, multiple large homes, staff for everything. Someone with $10 million will be living an upper-middle-class lifestyle, but without needing to work. Maybe a second house or a boat or plane they pilot themselves, but no full-time staff. $100 million could start having the billionaire stuff but at a smaller scale. Vast difference in political influence, too.
      - tylersmith 3y ago
        You could tell by the 1000x difference in spending.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    But the differences there are material - rent, food, utilities, these all function on a scale of thousands. Millions to billions? You don't need to care about any of those. You've very much left the mundane monetary worries behind.
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
  Being worth 50 million puts you in the ultra high net worth category (>30M$) and you live an incredible lifestyle obviously. But your entire net worth is 5% yearly interest on a billion dollars. It's hard to imagine for regular people just how far a billion dollars is, you're essentially royalty at that point as far access to anything in life is concerned.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Yes, by the numbers million vs billion is massive, yes, but for quality of life and for worrying about monetary things? You no longer need to be concerned about food or any type of shelter. It's a matter of the size of yacht you can buy.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      As someone in my 20s, I couldn't even retire with $1m. On the other hand, I could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $1b. (Obviously putting $1b entirely into a savings account is a terrible idea, just making a point)
      - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        And that's why I drew a distinction between the "owning a home and having a retirement plan" millionaire and the truly wealthy multimillionaire sort.
      - smallerfish 3y ago
        > I could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $1b. I mean, you could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $5m (you can easily get 2.5% at the moment.)
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      Or more realistically, the matter of the politicians and media narratives you can buy. For $50 million a year you can run a good few think tanks and make a good few campaign donations.
- teachrdan 3y ago
  You might not have to worry about your or your kids getting kidnapped if you're "only" a millionaire. There are probably other security considerations, too.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    If you are "only" a millionaire in a HCOL area, you might still have to worry about crimes against your children. However, they will be random crimes that occur within the city you live rather than targeted crimes. I have a friend living overseas. His children go to school with a Russian oligarchs kids. Visiting the oligarch's home for a birthday party was wild.
  - mupuff1234 3y ago
    It's probably a easier to target a low multi-millionaire than to mess with a billionaire.
- naremu 3y ago
  Statistically, many "average" upper middle class people are very able to become low tier multimillionaires through a well educated upbringing and a good job, and good financial decisions over a long period of time. But many of those people take their entire lives to go from "pretty well off" to "technically a multi millionaire, after many years of hard work, and planning" and got there from very reasonable expectations. Now a billionaire is literally about a thousand* times richer than any of those people. We're talking "I literally make a difference in elections without anyone knowing my name" rich. Maybe this is a good example of how rich billionaires don't need to be. The mere fact some people can't even imagine the difference between a factor of a literal thousand* (how ironic of me).
  - bombcar 3y ago
    In the US a billion is 1,000 million, not one million million.
    - carabiner 3y ago
      Is it different in other countries?
      - elteto 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...
        saalweachter 3y ago
        "A billion dollars isn't cool. You know what is? A billion dollars."
      - hvs 3y ago
        Historically, in the UK, Australia, and other countries, "one billion" meant "one million million" (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000). Officially, at least in the UK, it now means the same as the US (i.e. 1,000,000,000)
- raincom 3y ago
  Yes, there is a psychological difference. Super wealthy have hard time trusting people including their family, friends, etc. Some of them even suffer from paranoia. Just a couple of bad experiences are enough for them to become like that. For ordinary mortals like us, we just write off our bad experiences with other people as natural, not some extraordinary. Being lied to, being backstabbed, lying, backstabbing, colluding, etc are all part of human existence: either one directly experience it or heard through others' experience. That is a cost to pay to live among people. In other words, the experience of one whose wealth is $2B is not same as the experience of one whose wealthy is $50M plus $1.955B. What one experiences in the world depends on how much weight one puts on everything one is involved in. Poor people give different weightage than rich people. Same event doesn't give the same experience to everyone.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    But you said: "One is super, super secretive, who passes off as a multi millionaire." To say they "pass themselves off as" means there is a visible difference in either what they own or how they act. What does that look like? Are you saying they pretend to trust? How is that apparent? I can't figure out what the obvious visible difference would be. If a millionaire passes themselves off as someone with much less wealth they'll drive an old Corolla instead of a Mercedes. What's that equivalent here?
    - raincom 3y ago
      In some actions, yes, he wants to appear as successful multi millionaires. In some other actions, he sounds like a billionaire. That's why he is seen as a weird multi-millionaire. He is not cheap either, but doesn't trust anyone: he feeds you information, to see whether you share that with other people; he says, he trusts you, later he can send a private detective to see what you are up to. I think, the root cause is this: just as FAANG engineers's social circle is fellow people working from FAANG, it is the same for wealthy, super, uber wealthy. You don't see a FAANG guy living in a mobile home surrounded by people who work in the blue collar folks. Some folks don't want to involve in many social activities of the class they belong to, but want to be part of the lower classes. That's what I mean by 'pass themselves off as'.
- pmorici 3y ago
  If you think about it in terms of what kind of income you would make off interest of ~3% of the principal it’s easier to understand the difference between someone with 5 million vs say 50 and 500 million. It’s the difference between $150k, $1.5 million, and $15 million dollars in yearly income. At 5 million you can decide to not work but you are only really able to afford an upper middle class lifestyle. Depending on where you lived that might be a working class income these days. So there is a massive difference across the spectrum of multi-millionaires.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    You think $5 million a year only gets up upper middle class lifestyle? I don't think we share definitions...
    - pmorici 3y ago
      That’s 5 million in assets from which you can derive a yearly income of $150k per year adjusted for inflation as time goes on. Yes I consider 150k per year upper middle class.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        Ah, I see. I misread your previous comment.
orangepurple 3y ago
The wealthiest and most secretive are probably the members of the Rothschild family. Today, the family's total net worth is estimated at an eye-watering $400 billion, with some estimates ranging to an astonishing $1 trillion. Ref: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/the-richest-living-members-of-the-rothschild-family-ranked-by-net-worth/ar-AA1fsycc https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/the-richest-... Archive: https://archive.is/pMypx https://archive.is/pMypx -- Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and author, estimated this year that Putin has somewhere between $100 billion and $130 billion in assets—a calculation based on the wealth of Putin’s oligarch confidants, which could be between $500 million and $2 billion each. Ref: https://time.com/6151695/vladimir-putin-wealth-assets-freeze-ukraine/ https://time.com/6151695/vladimir-putin-wealth-assets-freeze...
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  That reads like something out of a tabloid in the checkout aisle of a grocery store. It links to a website called “celebritynetworth”, which just based on the URL, has no credibility.
  - metabagel 3y ago
    It seems like you stopped after the first paragraph.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Why should I? It even claims the richest family member is worth $10B, which is nowhere near the top of the list these days. It says $1T in the headline, how big is this family? More likely is that this is a garbage clickbait article with no credible source.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > which just based on the URL, has no credibility. It seems like you're proudly flaunting your own ignorance? The site has been around for more than a decade. What about a web site such as "Hacker News"? Sounds like I might get a virus if I visit that page!
hilux 3y ago
For more on this, which I really don't recommend, google "South Dakota Dynasty Trust."
- triceratops 3y ago
  Why don't you recommend it?
  - hilux 3y ago
    Because it's depressing.
    - tylersmith 3y ago
      But what about it a Trust is depressing exactly? It's just a legal agreement for how wealth can be spent.
      - yboris 3y ago
        0 taxation on assets or income and it's available to people living outside of the state. So rich people can avoid paying taxes.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        It’s for avoiding federal taxes. The federal government can fix the situation anytime it wants, and it won’t matter where in the US people live.
        SoftTalker 3y ago
        Specifically for avoiding tranfer/inheritance taxes. Any money actually paid out of the trust to a beneficiary is subject to that individuals federal income taxes.
        verall 3y ago
        > [A functioning federal government could] fix the situation anytime it wants
hyperfuturism 3y ago
Yes, there are many such cases. Many billionaires out there that people do not know are billionaires. Not all wealth accumulated has been broadcasted out in the public for everyone to know, only the broadcasted has been broadcasted.
wdb 3y ago
I liked the trust funds where you only get the monthly paycheck when you have a job. No matter just a 35 hours work week otherwise no pay. E.g. only get like $8-10k/mo when you work.
- saulpw 3y ago
  I like this model too, except it should function (maybe pro-rated?) at lower number of hours/week--not everyone should work "full-time"--and also include volunteering. Maybe also other unpaid labor like child-rearing and open source software development.
- giardini 3y ago
  This still won't keep people from "calling J.G. Wentworth", blowing all their net worth on methamphetamines and then crashing into the hospital ER of the USA support systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg
thelastgallon 3y ago
The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer...
itsoktocry 3y ago
>who passes off as a multi millionaire. What does this look like?
- jononomo 3y ago
  Has a nice house, a second beach house, and drives a Lexus. Doesn't own any super-cars and flys business class rather than in a private jet. People think he's worth $3 million, not $1.3 billion. (I just made all that up.)
boeingUH60 3y ago
They don't appear on the lists because their companies are usually private and hard to value because Forbes and Bloomberg et al don't even know who owns what. Take, for example, Jeff Yass, who didn't appear on Forbes until 2021. Well, according to the ProPublica tax leaks, he was not just a billionaire but someone who made over $1 billion in annual income(!) from 2012 upwards [1] 1 - https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax-avoidance https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tik...
cyrillite 3y ago
Can you go into a little bit more depth about what life is like for these people? What do they do? How do they keep it so secret? Etc. I’m fascinated you can have so much wealth and benefit from it in proportion to its scale without giving the game away

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago

Assuming we're not talking "I have a retirement plan and a house so my net-worth is over a million" type of millionaire, isn't passing oneself off as a multi-millionaire instead of a billionaire a distinction without a difference? I guess I don't run in those circles, but it's still fabulous wealth either way.

tylersmith 3y ago
It's the difference between someone having $2k and $1 million dollars.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  I think with the "distinction without a difference" bit they meant that if you look like you have $2k instead of looking like you have $1m, what is the difference in your life than just having $2k? The answer to that is: you have $1m of peace of mind to live your comfortable lifestyle of someone with $2k. Now living the lifestyle of someone woth $2k might not be particularly desirable to most, but living the life of a multi-millionaire with that relatively same level of peace of mind sounds like a crazy nice way to live.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Yes, exactly. If you live like you're making minimum wage as a millionaire that's obvious, but if you're living like a multi-millionaire instead of a billionaire how could you even tell?
    - DennisP 3y ago
      Depends on how many multis you're talking about. A billionaire who wants them can have a large yacht, private jet, multiple large homes, staff for everything. Someone with $10 million will be living an upper-middle-class lifestyle, but without needing to work. Maybe a second house or a boat or plane they pilot themselves, but no full-time staff. $100 million could start having the billionaire stuff but at a smaller scale. Vast difference in political influence, too.
    - tylersmith 3y ago
      You could tell by the 1000x difference in spending.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  But the differences there are material - rent, food, utilities, these all function on a scale of thousands. Millions to billions? You don't need to care about any of those. You've very much left the mundane monetary worries behind.
WXLCKNO 3y ago
Being worth 50 million puts you in the ultra high net worth category (>30M$) and you live an incredible lifestyle obviously. But your entire net worth is 5% yearly interest on a billion dollars. It's hard to imagine for regular people just how far a billion dollars is, you're essentially royalty at that point as far access to anything in life is concerned.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Yes, by the numbers million vs billion is massive, yes, but for quality of life and for worrying about monetary things? You no longer need to be concerned about food or any type of shelter. It's a matter of the size of yacht you can buy.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    As someone in my 20s, I couldn't even retire with $1m. On the other hand, I could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $1b. (Obviously putting $1b entirely into a savings account is a terrible idea, just making a point)
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      And that's why I drew a distinction between the "owning a home and having a retirement plan" millionaire and the truly wealthy multimillionaire sort.
    - smallerfish 3y ago
      > I could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $1b. I mean, you could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $5m (you can easily get 2.5% at the moment.)
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Or more realistically, the matter of the politicians and media narratives you can buy. For $50 million a year you can run a good few think tanks and make a good few campaign donations.
teachrdan 3y ago
You might not have to worry about your or your kids getting kidnapped if you're "only" a millionaire. There are probably other security considerations, too.
- brewdad 3y ago
  If you are "only" a millionaire in a HCOL area, you might still have to worry about crimes against your children. However, they will be random crimes that occur within the city you live rather than targeted crimes. I have a friend living overseas. His children go to school with a Russian oligarchs kids. Visiting the oligarch's home for a birthday party was wild.
- mupuff1234 3y ago
  It's probably a easier to target a low multi-millionaire than to mess with a billionaire.
naremu 3y ago
Statistically, many "average" upper middle class people are very able to become low tier multimillionaires through a well educated upbringing and a good job, and good financial decisions over a long period of time. But many of those people take their entire lives to go from "pretty well off" to "technically a multi millionaire, after many years of hard work, and planning" and got there from very reasonable expectations. Now a billionaire is literally about a thousand* times richer than any of those people. We're talking "I literally make a difference in elections without anyone knowing my name" rich. Maybe this is a good example of how rich billionaires don't need to be. The mere fact some people can't even imagine the difference between a factor of a literal thousand* (how ironic of me).
- bombcar 3y ago
  In the US a billion is 1,000 million, not one million million.
  - carabiner 3y ago
    Is it different in other countries?
    - elteto 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...
      - saalweachter 3y ago
        "A billion dollars isn't cool. You know what is? A billion dollars."
    - hvs 3y ago
      Historically, in the UK, Australia, and other countries, "one billion" meant "one million million" (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000). Officially, at least in the UK, it now means the same as the US (i.e. 1,000,000,000)
raincom 3y ago
Yes, there is a psychological difference. Super wealthy have hard time trusting people including their family, friends, etc. Some of them even suffer from paranoia. Just a couple of bad experiences are enough for them to become like that. For ordinary mortals like us, we just write off our bad experiences with other people as natural, not some extraordinary. Being lied to, being backstabbed, lying, backstabbing, colluding, etc are all part of human existence: either one directly experience it or heard through others' experience. That is a cost to pay to live among people. In other words, the experience of one whose wealth is $2B is not same as the experience of one whose wealthy is $50M plus $1.955B. What one experiences in the world depends on how much weight one puts on everything one is involved in. Poor people give different weightage than rich people. Same event doesn't give the same experience to everyone.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  But you said: "One is super, super secretive, who passes off as a multi millionaire." To say they "pass themselves off as" means there is a visible difference in either what they own or how they act. What does that look like? Are you saying they pretend to trust? How is that apparent? I can't figure out what the obvious visible difference would be. If a millionaire passes themselves off as someone with much less wealth they'll drive an old Corolla instead of a Mercedes. What's that equivalent here?
  - raincom 3y ago
    In some actions, yes, he wants to appear as successful multi millionaires. In some other actions, he sounds like a billionaire. That's why he is seen as a weird multi-millionaire. He is not cheap either, but doesn't trust anyone: he feeds you information, to see whether you share that with other people; he says, he trusts you, later he can send a private detective to see what you are up to. I think, the root cause is this: just as FAANG engineers's social circle is fellow people working from FAANG, it is the same for wealthy, super, uber wealthy. You don't see a FAANG guy living in a mobile home surrounded by people who work in the blue collar folks. Some folks don't want to involve in many social activities of the class they belong to, but want to be part of the lower classes. That's what I mean by 'pass themselves off as'.
pmorici 3y ago
If you think about it in terms of what kind of income you would make off interest of ~3% of the principal it’s easier to understand the difference between someone with 5 million vs say 50 and 500 million. It’s the difference between $150k, $1.5 million, and $15 million dollars in yearly income. At 5 million you can decide to not work but you are only really able to afford an upper middle class lifestyle. Depending on where you lived that might be a working class income these days. So there is a massive difference across the spectrum of multi-millionaires.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  You think $5 million a year only gets up upper middle class lifestyle? I don't think we share definitions...
  - pmorici 3y ago
    That’s 5 million in assets from which you can derive a yearly income of $150k per year adjusted for inflation as time goes on. Yes I consider 150k per year upper middle class.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Ah, I see. I misread your previous comment.

orangepurple 3y ago

The wealthiest and most secretive are probably the members of the Rothschild family. Today, the family's total net worth is estimated at an eye-watering $400 billion, with some estimates ranging to an astonishing $1 trillion. Ref: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/the-richest-living-members-of-the-rothschild-family-ranked-by-net-worth/ar-AA1fsycc https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/the-richest-... Archive: https://archive.is/pMypx https://archive.is/pMypx -- Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and author, estimated this year that Putin has somewhere between $100 billion and $130 billion in assets—a calculation based on the wealth of Putin’s oligarch confidants, which could be between $500 million and $2 billion each. Ref: https://time.com/6151695/vladimir-putin-wealth-assets-freeze-ukraine/ https://time.com/6151695/vladimir-putin-wealth-assets-freeze...

lotsofpulp 3y ago
That reads like something out of a tabloid in the checkout aisle of a grocery store. It links to a website called “celebritynetworth”, which just based on the URL, has no credibility.
- metabagel 3y ago
  It seems like you stopped after the first paragraph.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Why should I? It even claims the richest family member is worth $10B, which is nowhere near the top of the list these days. It says $1T in the headline, how big is this family? More likely is that this is a garbage clickbait article with no credible source.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > which just based on the URL, has no credibility. It seems like you're proudly flaunting your own ignorance? The site has been around for more than a decade. What about a web site such as "Hacker News"? Sounds like I might get a virus if I visit that page!

hilux 3y ago

For more on this, which I really don't recommend, google "South Dakota Dynasty Trust."

triceratops 3y ago
Why don't you recommend it?
- hilux 3y ago
  Because it's depressing.
  - tylersmith 3y ago
    But what about it a Trust is depressing exactly? It's just a legal agreement for how wealth can be spent.
    - yboris 3y ago
      0 taxation on assets or income and it's available to people living outside of the state. So rich people can avoid paying taxes.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        It’s for avoiding federal taxes. The federal government can fix the situation anytime it wants, and it won’t matter where in the US people live.
        SoftTalker 3y ago
        Specifically for avoiding tranfer/inheritance taxes. Any money actually paid out of the trust to a beneficiary is subject to that individuals federal income taxes.
        verall 3y ago
        > [A functioning federal government could] fix the situation anytime it wants

hyperfuturism 3y ago

Yes, there are many such cases. Many billionaires out there that people do not know are billionaires. Not all wealth accumulated has been broadcasted out in the public for everyone to know, only the broadcasted has been broadcasted.

wdb 3y ago

I liked the trust funds where you only get the monthly paycheck when you have a job. No matter just a 35 hours work week otherwise no pay. E.g. only get like $8-10k/mo when you work.

saulpw 3y ago
I like this model too, except it should function (maybe pro-rated?) at lower number of hours/week--not everyone should work "full-time"--and also include volunteering. Maybe also other unpaid labor like child-rearing and open source software development.
giardini 3y ago
This still won't keep people from "calling J.G. Wentworth", blowing all their net worth on methamphetamines and then crashing into the hospital ER of the USA support systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg

thelastgallon 3y ago

The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer...

itsoktocry 3y ago

>who passes off as a multi millionaire. What does this look like?

jononomo 3y ago
Has a nice house, a second beach house, and drives a Lexus. Doesn't own any super-cars and flys business class rather than in a private jet. People think he's worth $3 million, not $1.3 billion. (I just made all that up.)

boeingUH60 3y ago

They don't appear on the lists because their companies are usually private and hard to value because Forbes and Bloomberg et al don't even know who owns what. Take, for example, Jeff Yass, who didn't appear on Forbes until 2021. Well, according to the ProPublica tax leaks, he was not just a billionaire but someone who made over $1 billion in annual income(!) from 2012 upwards [1] 1 - https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax-avoidance https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tik...

cyrillite 3y ago

Can you go into a little bit more depth about what life is like for these people? What do they do? How do they keep it so secret? Etc. I’m fascinated you can have so much wealth and benefit from it in proportion to its scale without giving the game away