16 ms·

Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens

88 points by c420 1y ago

j_crick 1y ago
Piketty was right? Who would’ve thought…
- an0malous 1y ago
  Wealth inequality is the primary issue in society. No one would care about immigrants, LGBTQ rights, trans athletes, or any of the other culture war issues if food, housing, transportation, and healthcare were affordable. The elites have done a fantastic job distracting everyone from the core problem afflicting society. As Piketty has shown, their increasing concentration of wealth is mathematically guaranteed and they continue to accumulate wealth while the labor class fights amongst themselves over relatively trivial matters.
  - decremental 1y ago
    [dead]
  - gruez 1y ago
    >No one would care about immigrants, LGBTQ rights, trans athletes, or any of the other culture war issues if food, housing, transportation, and healthcare were affordable. Seriously? I get why people would care less about immigration if they didn't think immigrants were stealing their jobs, but the culture war over LGBTQ rights and trans athletes hardly can be tied to some economic basis. If you spent any time interacting with conservatives you'd realize nobody is worried about LGBTQ people and trans athletes are stealing their jobs or whatever. They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues.
    - kaibee 1y ago
      > They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues. The mistake is assuming that these issues rise into public debate entirely through grassroots, when really its more of a consequence of the incentive structures around politics in the US. The Democratic party doesn't want to upset their donors, but they need some issue to campaign on, rally support etc. And equal rights and such is all well and good, has been successful in the past, and played well with the base. The Republican party, also doesn't want to upset their donors, and opposing the Democrats on equal rights is easy to sell to their base. As long as the game is about moving the ball of cultural/rights issues around, the wealthy win.
    - tumnus 1y ago
      I suspect the person you are responding to is suggesting that these culture war issues are merely meant to distract from the real problem, which is wealth inequality. Many of the people worried about 'moral fabric' are fine with divorce and sexual assault (and will vote for politicians with these compromised moral values) but are also concerned about trans athletes who by most metrics comprise less that .01% of all athletes.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >but are also concerned about trans athletes who by most metrics comprise less that .01% of all athletes. What about all the recent drama over the Epstein list, which comprise less than 0.01% of Americans?
        hn_acc1 1y ago
        There's a difference between "I don't like this thing that you're legally allowed to do and I think it should be illegal" and "these people possibly participated in illegal activities with trafficked minors".
        bigbadfeline 1y ago
  - sterlind 1y ago
    I still don't get billionaire populism. like just fundamentally, I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people. there are weak spots, though. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for murdering a CEO, with a lot of support across the political spectrum. likewise, the Epstein files getting suppressed seemed to agitate just about everyone. those fault lines weren't on the woke/anti-woke axis, they were on an elite/common axis. they were also harder to safely polarize the public on.
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      > I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people. They say the quiet part out loud and make enemies out of the people their followers already don't like. One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades, with literal Iron Man cameos, and the other promises to hurt people with blue hair a lot.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades What "media machine"? He only bought twitter in 2022, and even if he had a PR person or two, it can hardly be considered a "media machine" any more than some SMB with one or two social media interns has a "media machine".
        heavyset_go 1y ago
        Did you live under a rock until 2022? I don't care who was formally on his payroll or not, the media tripped over itself to ingratiate Musk and portray him as Literally Iron Man™ to the world since the millennium.
        hn_acc1 1y ago
        There are still many tech people who think he's a techno-genius and fully approve of everything he does, including grokAI's hitler episodes, etc..
yieldcrv 1y ago
> Yet, no cities in Silicon Valley have raised the minimum wage in the past three years. what? how is moving minimum wage a dollar going to help someone tackle the $136,500 necessary to rent responsibly? just seems like an odd thing to add. they’re still going to be commuting an hour like everyone else
- smallerize 1y ago
  Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year? https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-san-jose-california-minimum-wage-bump-barely-makes-a-dent/ https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-san-jose-califor...
  - altairprime 1y ago
    > Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year Thank you for pointing out this correction and article! TIL. > from $17.55 an hour to $17.95 come Jan. 1 > In the San Jose metropolitan area, as of earlier this year, [Living Wage Calculator estimates] about $32.87 for a single adult with no children > Last year, the calculator estimated single adults needed to make $26.20 Elsewhere: > The [CPI] inflation rate for the United States was 2.7% for the 12 months ending June So, assuming the article’s figures are valid, it looks like San Jose’s minimum wage increased this year by around -1.5% (inflation-adjusted) or by around -20% (Living Wage adjusted), depending on which basis you use. If only San Jose had misread the inflation chart and mistakenly issued a one-month inflation increase rather than a one-year. Sigh.
atonse 1y ago
Is this just a result of a strong market since most of their “wealth” is in stocks, driving up the perceived gap and resulting in such shocking sounding stats? I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue? Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how? I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  Here is the source and I’m still not sure https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/docs/SVPI%202025%20Annual%20Report%20-%20Press%20Release.pdf https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/docs/SVPI%202025%20Annual%20Report%...
  - gruez 1y ago
    Yikes. I get they're trying to push an anti-inequality agenda, but some of the statistics are only tenuously related to inequality. For instance: >0 Number of student wellness centers in the San José Unified School District that opened in 2024, despite the growing mental health crisis in youth >0 Number of Narcan kits stocked at San José Unified School District schools, making SJUSD the only major Bay Area school district that does not stock Narcan or train staff to administer Narcan in case of a fentanyl overdose. What's the implication supposed to be? That if it weren't for AI tech bros, there would be student wellness centers and narcan kits?
    - readthenotes1 1y ago
      It's obviously focused more on the agenda. They start out by saying they are inspired by the Katrina pain index--and I do have some food and shelter attributes. However, it seems like a lot of what they worry about is the victimhood from being envious.
    - hug 1y ago
      The implication is that if there were less wealth inequality, those with less current wealth would have more things, yes. Things that are currently underfunded could, with the availability of more funds, be less underfunded. Obviously it's not just the nine billionaires that are "the problem", but inequality in general.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? I imagine they'd mostly just have a compound in an already rich area, and not interact with the general area much. And then be travelling to other houses of theirs or for business frequently?
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? Not by their consumer spending or how they live but given that SV billionaires have increasingly become politically activist with their vast sums of money, almost certainly.
  - cavisne 1y ago
    They have actually become less politically activist with their money. Of the 9 families in previous election cycles Zuck - wanted to run for President as a Democrat Laurene Powell - huge left wing donor Google Founders - huge left wing donors Eric Schmidt - led digital for Clinton, huge Obama backer Ellison is the only right wing one of the group, the rest have just stepped back from politics, spending less (except Laurene) Not to mention those just below the cutoff like Dustin Moskovitz.
throwmeaway222 1y ago
Sick of fake news like this. If this is cash held, then it's a news story. But if these are company valuations then holding this in the hands of few is not making the economy worse.
- fsckboy 1y ago
  wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - kaibee 1y ago
    > wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies. Yes, I'm sure that once all of the wealth is held by a tiny fraction of the elites, they will successfully centrally plan the whole economy for maximum efficiency.
electriclove 1y ago
Which households are these 9?
- WNWceAJ9R9Ezc4 1y ago
  See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525
haebom 1y ago
[flagged]
WNWceAJ9R9Ezc4 1y ago
> While the data does not name individuals, it is not hard to find the list of billionaires who call the region home: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and businesswoman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs in Palo Alto, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Los Altos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and financier George Roberts in Atherton, and Ubiquiti Networks founder Robert Pera in San Jose, are the richest nine in the two counties, according to the group’s analysis of a Forbes list. Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-valley-households/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-va...
- tmsh 1y ago
  https://archive.is/KpqWc https://archive.is/KpqWc
- tmsh 1y ago
  I know it's not the point of this important article. But I had no idea about Robert Pera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera - kind of inspiring. Only millennial on the list that is not Zuck. And not gon' lie my instagram was similar to https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ for a while - seems like a semi-regular selfie with dog in car type of person. Did better financially though than most lol.
foxglacier 1y ago
Rich people have to live somewhere. Are they supposed to be isolated in some rich-only area with no poors allowed so that there's no inequality? I suppose they probably are on an even more local level. Problems with poverty in Silicon Valley are the result of government actions not the presence of rich people.
Aurornis 1y ago
Adding up all of the wealth in a small region and then calculating wealth inequality against a small number of households makes for some triggering headlines, but it’s not a very useful metric for anything in the real world. A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop. A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
- apwell23 1y ago
  > A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. ofcourse its zero sum. There are only so many natural resources to exploit. Zuckerberg owns like half of lake tahoe and Hawaii.
  - anothereng 1y ago
    if it were zero sum then how come middle class people nowadays live better lives than kings 500 years ago?
    - bgwalter 1y ago
      I'd rather have Versailles than my current apartment. I think all standard pro-billionaire talking points have been exhausted in these comments.
      - anothereng 1y ago
        so you want to be rich and are mad that you're not?
        Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Oh, he was wrong, now all pro-billionaire talking points have been exhausted.
seneca 1y ago
The only problem with this is that there are so few billionaires. Wealth is good. We should celebrate it, and focus on making more of it, not on resenting the people who have already done so.
- PlunderBunny 1y ago
  I don't think people resent the people for their wealth so much as the political influence those people wield in order to preserve their wealth and power.
- m0llusk 1y ago
  That is invalid framing of the issues. We know from Picketty's study of Capitalism that capital accumulates because returns on capital are higher than not and from Turchin's work on Cliodynamics that inequality drives social breakdown and chaos. One does not celebrate the creation of wealth by enabling society to crack and crumble.
- happytoexplain 1y ago
  >we should focus on making more wealth Of course! Why didn't we think of that? Congrats on getting the first sarcastic comment out of me I believe in all my time on HN. What you've said is absolutely breathtaking.
- int_19h 1y ago
  A billion in cash does not represent wealth in and of itself. If you lived in Germany in 1923, you could easily be a trillionaire, but that wouldn't do you any good. What matters is how much cash you have relative to others, because that determines the actual purchasing power. So in a sense you're right in that the real problem isn't having billionaires, but that not everyone is one. But if everyone were one, there would be no reason to devalue the currency and drop the useless zeroes. And, of course, the people who own those billions didn't make most of it. Some other people, who get paid salary or wages, did, with their labor. The guys who have the billions are those who collect economic rent from those who do the work.
hedora 1y ago
More approachable writeup / primary source: https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php
sas224dbm 1y ago
This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.
yonran 1y ago
What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing. You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.
klipklop 1y ago
None of those top families even really live in the bay area. They attend meetings here sure, but their real homes are on islands/compounds.
hazmazlaz 1y ago
Why not be bold and name those nine households? I think the public deserves to know who in their community is hoarding all of the wealth.

88 points by c420 1y ago

j_crick 1y ago

Piketty was right? Who would’ve thought…

an0malous 1y ago
Wealth inequality is the primary issue in society. No one would care about immigrants, LGBTQ rights, trans athletes, or any of the other culture war issues if food, housing, transportation, and healthcare were affordable. The elites have done a fantastic job distracting everyone from the core problem afflicting society. As Piketty has shown, their increasing concentration of wealth is mathematically guaranteed and they continue to accumulate wealth while the labor class fights amongst themselves over relatively trivial matters.
- decremental 1y ago
  [dead]
- gruez 1y ago
  >No one would care about immigrants, LGBTQ rights, trans athletes, or any of the other culture war issues if food, housing, transportation, and healthcare were affordable. Seriously? I get why people would care less about immigration if they didn't think immigrants were stealing their jobs, but the culture war over LGBTQ rights and trans athletes hardly can be tied to some economic basis. If you spent any time interacting with conservatives you'd realize nobody is worried about LGBTQ people and trans athletes are stealing their jobs or whatever. They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues.
  - kaibee 1y ago
    > They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues. The mistake is assuming that these issues rise into public debate entirely through grassroots, when really its more of a consequence of the incentive structures around politics in the US. The Democratic party doesn't want to upset their donors, but they need some issue to campaign on, rally support etc. And equal rights and such is all well and good, has been successful in the past, and played well with the base. The Republican party, also doesn't want to upset their donors, and opposing the Democrats on equal rights is easy to sell to their base. As long as the game is about moving the ball of cultural/rights issues around, the wealthy win.
  - tumnus 1y ago
    I suspect the person you are responding to is suggesting that these culture war issues are merely meant to distract from the real problem, which is wealth inequality. Many of the people worried about 'moral fabric' are fine with divorce and sexual assault (and will vote for politicians with these compromised moral values) but are also concerned about trans athletes who by most metrics comprise less that .01% of all athletes.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >but are also concerned about trans athletes who by most metrics comprise less that .01% of all athletes. What about all the recent drama over the Epstein list, which comprise less than 0.01% of Americans?
      - hn_acc1 1y ago
        There's a difference between "I don't like this thing that you're legally allowed to do and I think it should be illegal" and "these people possibly participated in illegal activities with trafficked minors".
      - bigbadfeline 1y ago
- sterlind 1y ago
  I still don't get billionaire populism. like just fundamentally, I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people. there are weak spots, though. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for murdering a CEO, with a lot of support across the political spectrum. likewise, the Epstein files getting suppressed seemed to agitate just about everyone. those fault lines weren't on the woke/anti-woke axis, they were on an elite/common axis. they were also harder to safely polarize the public on.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    > I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people. They say the quiet part out loud and make enemies out of the people their followers already don't like. One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades, with literal Iron Man cameos, and the other promises to hurt people with blue hair a lot.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >One of them had a media machine that painted them as Literally Tony Stark™ for two decades What "media machine"? He only bought twitter in 2022, and even if he had a PR person or two, it can hardly be considered a "media machine" any more than some SMB with one or two social media interns has a "media machine".
      - heavyset_go 1y ago
        Did you live under a rock until 2022? I don't care who was formally on his payroll or not, the media tripped over itself to ingratiate Musk and portray him as Literally Iron Man™ to the world since the millennium.
        hn_acc1 1y ago
        There are still many tech people who think he's a techno-genius and fully approve of everything he does, including grokAI's hitler episodes, etc..

yieldcrv 1y ago

> Yet, no cities in Silicon Valley have raised the minimum wage in the past three years. what? how is moving minimum wage a dollar going to help someone tackle the $136,500 necessary to rent responsibly? just seems like an odd thing to add. they’re still going to be commuting an hour like everyone else

smallerize 1y ago
Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year? https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-san-jose-california-minimum-wage-bump-barely-makes-a-dent/ https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-san-jose-califor...
- altairprime 1y ago
  > Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year Thank you for pointing out this correction and article! TIL. > from $17.55 an hour to $17.95 come Jan. 1 > In the San Jose metropolitan area, as of earlier this year, [Living Wage Calculator estimates] about $32.87 for a single adult with no children > Last year, the calculator estimated single adults needed to make $26.20 Elsewhere: > The [CPI] inflation rate for the United States was 2.7% for the 12 months ending June So, assuming the article’s figures are valid, it looks like San Jose’s minimum wage increased this year by around -1.5% (inflation-adjusted) or by around -20% (Living Wage adjusted), depending on which basis you use. If only San Jose had misread the inflation chart and mistakenly issued a one-month inflation increase rather than a one-year. Sigh.

atonse 1y ago

Is this just a result of a strong market since most of their “wealth” is in stocks, driving up the perceived gap and resulting in such shocking sounding stats? I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue? Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how? I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.

yieldcrv 1y ago
Here is the source and I’m still not sure https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/docs/SVPI%202025%20Annual%20Report%20-%20Press%20Release.pdf https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/docs/SVPI%202025%20Annual%20Report%...
- gruez 1y ago
  Yikes. I get they're trying to push an anti-inequality agenda, but some of the statistics are only tenuously related to inequality. For instance: >0 Number of student wellness centers in the San José Unified School District that opened in 2024, despite the growing mental health crisis in youth >0 Number of Narcan kits stocked at San José Unified School District schools, making SJUSD the only major Bay Area school district that does not stock Narcan or train staff to administer Narcan in case of a fentanyl overdose. What's the implication supposed to be? That if it weren't for AI tech bros, there would be student wellness centers and narcan kits?
  - readthenotes1 1y ago
    It's obviously focused more on the agenda. They start out by saying they are inspired by the Katrina pain index--and I do have some food and shelter attributes. However, it seems like a lot of what they worry about is the victimhood from being envious.
  - hug 1y ago
    The implication is that if there were less wealth inequality, those with less current wealth would have more things, yes. Things that are currently underfunded could, with the availability of more funds, be less underfunded. Obviously it's not just the nine billionaires that are "the problem", but inequality in general.

IncreasePosts 1y ago

Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? I imagine they'd mostly just have a compound in an already rich area, and not interact with the general area much. And then be travelling to other houses of theirs or for business frequently?

Barrin92 1y ago
>Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? Not by their consumer spending or how they live but given that SV billionaires have increasingly become politically activist with their vast sums of money, almost certainly.
- cavisne 1y ago
  They have actually become less politically activist with their money. Of the 9 families in previous election cycles Zuck - wanted to run for President as a Democrat Laurene Powell - huge left wing donor Google Founders - huge left wing donors Eric Schmidt - led digital for Clinton, huge Obama backer Ellison is the only right wing one of the group, the rest have just stepped back from politics, spending less (except Laurene) Not to mention those just below the cutoff like Dustin Moskovitz.

throwmeaway222 1y ago

Sick of fake news like this. If this is cash held, then it's a news story. But if these are company valuations then holding this in the hands of few is not making the economy worse.

fsckboy 1y ago
wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- kaibee 1y ago
  > wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies. Yes, I'm sure that once all of the wealth is held by a tiny fraction of the elites, they will successfully centrally plan the whole economy for maximum efficiency.

electriclove 1y ago

Which households are these 9?

WNWceAJ9R9Ezc4 1y ago
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525

haebom 1y ago

[flagged]

WNWceAJ9R9Ezc4 1y ago

> While the data does not name individuals, it is not hard to find the list of billionaires who call the region home: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and businesswoman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs in Palo Alto, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Los Altos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and financier George Roberts in Atherton, and Ubiquiti Networks founder Robert Pera in San Jose, are the richest nine in the two counties, according to the group’s analysis of a Forbes list. Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-valley-households/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-va...

tmsh 1y ago
https://archive.is/KpqWc https://archive.is/KpqWc
tmsh 1y ago
I know it's not the point of this important article. But I had no idea about Robert Pera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera - kind of inspiring. Only millennial on the list that is not Zuck. And not gon' lie my instagram was similar to https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ for a while - seems like a semi-regular selfie with dog in car type of person. Did better financially though than most lol.

foxglacier 1y ago

Rich people have to live somewhere. Are they supposed to be isolated in some rich-only area with no poors allowed so that there's no inequality? I suppose they probably are on an even more local level. Problems with poverty in Silicon Valley are the result of government actions not the presence of rich people.

Aurornis 1y ago

Adding up all of the wealth in a small region and then calculating wealth inequality against a small number of households makes for some triggering headlines, but it’s not a very useful metric for anything in the real world. A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop. A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.

apwell23 1y ago
> A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. ofcourse its zero sum. There are only so many natural resources to exploit. Zuckerberg owns like half of lake tahoe and Hawaii.
- anothereng 1y ago
  if it were zero sum then how come middle class people nowadays live better lives than kings 500 years ago?
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    I'd rather have Versailles than my current apartment. I think all standard pro-billionaire talking points have been exhausted in these comments.
    - anothereng 1y ago
      so you want to be rich and are mad that you're not?
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Oh, he was wrong, now all pro-billionaire talking points have been exhausted.

seneca 1y ago

The only problem with this is that there are so few billionaires. Wealth is good. We should celebrate it, and focus on making more of it, not on resenting the people who have already done so.

PlunderBunny 1y ago
I don't think people resent the people for their wealth so much as the political influence those people wield in order to preserve their wealth and power.
m0llusk 1y ago
That is invalid framing of the issues. We know from Picketty's study of Capitalism that capital accumulates because returns on capital are higher than not and from Turchin's work on Cliodynamics that inequality drives social breakdown and chaos. One does not celebrate the creation of wealth by enabling society to crack and crumble.
happytoexplain 1y ago
>we should focus on making more wealth Of course! Why didn't we think of that? Congrats on getting the first sarcastic comment out of me I believe in all my time on HN. What you've said is absolutely breathtaking.
int_19h 1y ago
A billion in cash does not represent wealth in and of itself. If you lived in Germany in 1923, you could easily be a trillionaire, but that wouldn't do you any good. What matters is how much cash you have relative to others, because that determines the actual purchasing power. So in a sense you're right in that the real problem isn't having billionaires, but that not everyone is one. But if everyone were one, there would be no reason to devalue the currency and drop the useless zeroes. And, of course, the people who own those billions didn't make most of it. Some other people, who get paid salary or wages, did, with their labor. The guys who have the billions are those who collect economic rent from those who do the work.

hedora 1y ago

More approachable writeup / primary source: https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php

sas224dbm 1y ago

This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.

yonran 1y ago

What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing. You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.

klipklop 1y ago

None of those top families even really live in the bay area. They attend meetings here sure, but their real homes are on islands/compounds.

hazmazlaz 1y ago

Why not be bold and name those nine households? I think the public deserves to know who in their community is hoarding all of the wealth.