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Billionaires
- ok_craig 14y agoWhenever I see these lists I always find it interesting to think about the fact that the only reason a Walton isn't in #1 is because Sam is long gone, and his value was split between his children, all 4 of whom have $30+ billion. Kinda crazy.
- emp_ 14y agoWikipedia puts him at $230 billion in 1992, crazy indeed. EDIT: Wikipedia meme, move along.
- kylec 14y agoDon't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. A week ago that was edited from $23 billion to $230,000 billion (i.e. $230 trillion), which is obviously preposterously wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sam_Walton&diff=533271968&oldid=533271814 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sam_Walton&dif...
- emp_ 14y agoA rather redundant comment, we wouldn't need to mention it as a source if at least the citation link worked, would we? There is though still $120+ billion on his children in that list.
- bostonpete 14y agoYeah, but the Walmart stock price didn't start to really take off until the late 90's.
- rayiner 14y agoOh Wikipedia. Sam Walton was listed as being worth $7.3 billion in 1990: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/09/10/73983/ http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/...
- mildavw 14y agoPointing out the fact that the most successful store in history by a huge margin is one that neither you nor anyone you know shops at is a great way to illustrate the importance of market validation for startups.
- pmorici 14y agoSorry, are you saying no one on HN shops at Walmart or that there is a more successful store?
- mildavw 14y agoIt's a broad stroke for sure, but, yes, no one on HN shops at Walmart.
- protomyth 14y agoI hope you're joking. Shopped there tonight. It was there or a poorly stocked K-Mart. I find the local grocery store less ethical than the Walmart.
- mildavw 14y agoI'm not joking, but my point is lost in some confusion, so I'll add this caveat: If your audience does shop at Walmart, or knows people who do, then pointing out Walmart's jaw dropping numbers will not be a good device for illuminating the importance of market validation. In fact it could encourage them carry on with the potentially mistaken assumption that the entire planet's needs/problems are the same as their own.
- ghaff 14y agoSilly comment. I don't especially like shopping at Walmart but there is one 5 minutes from me--in a fairly rural locale where there aren't a lot of especially close stores--so, yes, I shop there for a lot of items.
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- bjhoops1 14y agoI noticed this too - his four heirs listed are worth > $120 billion between them. Absolutely nuts.
- lbrandy 14y agoOnce you start to play that game, doesn't the conversation begin and end with John D. Rockefeller?
- ok_craig 14y agoAccording to Wikipedia, Rockefeller is widely considered to be the richest person ever, but I guess this is interesting to me because the Walton heirs themselves are still making billionaire lists. But that's a good point. I wonder what the total Rockefeller net worth is among all heirs today.
- larrys 14y ago"Rockefeller is widely considered to be the richest person ever" But back in a time when life was not as good, for even rich people, as it is today. Not to mention medical care or even pain medication or air conditioning or any creature comforts (I'm remembering when cars didn't have even electric windows when I was really young). Would you rather have 10 times the money you have and be back in the 1930's? Similar also to computers. As anyone who has worked with a teletype, floppy drives, punch tape, or green ascii terminal can attest to vs. being able to ssh into your server from an ipad mini.
- dllthomas 14y ago> Would you rather have 10 times the money you have and be back in the 1930's? If I could keep my current knowledge, yes I think so. "Hey, guys, here's some capital; look into these 'semiconductor' things..." I recognize that this is deliberately missing your point, however.
- dennisgorelik 14y agoYou are extremely too optimistic about your personal ability to move technical progress forward. The amount of technological knowledge our civilization carries is enormous, and even if you are extremely knowledgeable, you are unlikely to know even 1% of it. So yes, you would be able to move civilization forward in the magnitude of a few months. But that's about it.
- arbuge 14y agoThat's the nature of all great fortunes. Generations pass, and over time they're dispersed and taxed away.
- nwzpaperman 14y agothe cargill-macmillan family is probably the wealthiest in America, but they have a privately-held company and maintain their privacy well. ignore the net income numbers. ;) the waltons are definitely number two, if not number one.
- protomyth 14y agoThere are a lot more Cargill-MacMillians then Walton heirs and the Waltons are more recent so that makes a difference. These lists never really do well measuring private companies.
- maniacwhat 14y agoI may be reading it wrong, but it looks to me that there are no female self-made billionaires, which is interesting.
- colmvp 14y agoThat's my observation too. Also, none are African/African-American. Edit: Stand corrected. Aliko Dangote.
- stevenspasbo 14y ago#47, Aliko Dangote
- jules 14y agoNot just Aliko Dangote, but also #16 Alwaleed Al Saud.
- rottencupcakes 14y agoThey seem to be using the word "billionaire" loosely, it seems like a list of the 100 richest people. Oprah Winfrey is a self made billionaire (net worth ~$2.7 billion)
- tptacek 14y agoIt's the top 100. Like Steve Jobs, Oprah doesn't make the list.
- learc83 14y agoWhy does the link go to directly to self made, energy billionaires?
- tokenadult 14y agoWhy does the link go to directly to self made, energy billionaires? I noticed that too. The link was submitted with a search string appended, methinks, rather than in canonical form. Submitting canonical links is friendly to HN users: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933
- tlrobinson 14y agoThe submitter was probably playing around with it before submitting the link and didn't notice the URL was being updated.
- GuiA 14y agoWouldn't Laurene Powell technically have a very nice spot on this list?
- tptacek 14y agoNo, she apparently misses it by just a hair. Didn't Jobs also miss this list while he was alive?
- guimarin 14y agoWow. The infographic is cool but some of the copy is incredibly snarky. On Mark Zuckerburg under 'intelligence' "Sister Randi likes to pretend she was a television production assistant." That said I think it's more interesting to see who the next 900 richest people are than the top 100. maybe just me though.
- abat 14y agoIs this list accurate? I don't see Bloomberg (the person). According to Wikipedia, he's worth 25B, so I would expect to see him.
- 30thElement 14y agoIf you click the little "i" in the top right you can get the full methodology. In there it explains why Bloomberg the person is missing >Bloomberg News editorial policy is to not cover Bloomberg L.P. As a result Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, isn’t considered for this ranking.
- andy_boot 14y agogiven that its from bloomberg.com maybe this is intentional :-)
- sergiotapia 14y agoSurprised to see Sergei Brin so low on the list, considering his website is the number 1 IN THE ENTIRE PLANET. Then I remembered, the old saying: "You gotta diversify yo bonds, nigga." [1] - The top spots have mining operations, tech, banking, etc. [1] - http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/tw2ltp/chappelle-s-show-wu-tang-financial http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/tw2ltp/chappelle-s-...
- Retric 14y agoHe is still young give that 20 billion another 30 years and see where there at.
- bostonpete 14y agoIf he wasn't splitting that #1 website with Larry, he'd be in the top 10.
- dennisgorelik 14y agoIf he wasn't splitting that #1 website with Larry, he wouldn't be anywhere near the list of billionaires.
- bjhoops1 14y agoAt risk of sounding like a communist... When you consider just how much money $10+ billion is, from an ethical standpoint, does any individual deserve to have that much money/power? I can't help but think that it is really a grotesque thing for a single person to have more money than the GDP of a country like Cuba. There's just no way one person has contributed to society enough to justify that kind of wealth.
- AVTizzle 14y ago"Deserve" ? Except for thief, lottery, inheritance, marriage, or trickery, money is made when you've created value for others. Repeat and scale multiple times over, and you've not only made money, you've contributed and made others lives better, happier, more entertaining, or less stressful, etc. Using their businesses as leverage, most of these billionaires have made their fortunes creating billions of dollars worth of value for the masses. They deserve every penny of it.
- bjhoops1 14y ago"They deserve every penny of it?" I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. And if there are such individuals, they are the Teslas, Newtons, Einsteins or other true geniuses whose ideas have shaped the world and opened up new possibilities - not the oil magnates, plutocrats or Wall Street bankers that make up most of this list. The only way one could argue that all of the uber-rich deserve all of their money is if you subscribe to an incredibly simplistic, idealistic, optimistic Milton Friedman-esque economic and political philosophy which assumes that the earning of income directly corresponds to value added to the economy and society.
- AndrewKemendo 14y ago>I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. Why not? Just because it was likely timing, doesn't make the impact less great. Your point seems to be that such a person isn't inherently that much better than someone else. Ok, but no one is inherently that great. 90% of "making it" in any of the senses is timing and placement, so it's really all relative. By being able to post on HN you are about the same magnitude "better off" in real wealth terms compared to a man in the Shomali plains than a billionaire is to you. Does that make your accomplishments better compared to that Afghani man's?
- jules 14y agoInteresting that 71 of the 100 are self made. Of the 29 that inherited their wealth, 12 are female, however of the 71 that are self made, none are female. Very surprising that the disparity is that huge. Also surprising that only one of the 100 is black. We have a long way to go!
- philwelch 14y agoYou'd expect close to half of people who inherit wealth to be women, because about half of births are women. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of entrepreneurs and business moguls.
- jonpeda 14y agoI'd be interested to see how the numbers play out if you include spouses in the lists.
- tptacek 14y agoNot a single self-made woman makes the top 100.
- aresant 14y agoYet.
- leak 14y agoJ.K. Rowling would have been on the list but she gave away a lot of her money taking away her billionaire status. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/15/forbes-billionaire-list-rowling_n_1347176.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/15/forbes-billionaire-...
- mynameishere 14y agoNo, it's the top 100, not just anyone with a billion dollars. So, eg, Steven Spielberg (~4 billion) isn't on the list either.
- philwelch 14y agoNor were British billionaires Mike Ashley or Richard Branson.
- awakeasleep 14y agoThe fifteenth vs the nineteenth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unite...
- dr_doom 14y agoAnd only one black man.
- pmorici 14y agoWhere is Oprah?
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- downandout 14y agoIt's interesting that the only 3 self-made billionaires under 40 are in tech - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg. The fact that 12 of the top 100 are Russian is rather striking to me as well.
- lbrandy 14y agoAlso striking is how the Russians made their money: energy, steel, metals, and... uh... "being friends with the people in power when the Soviet Union fell". It's all very late 1800s.
- neel8986 14y agoI am also really surprised by number of russians. If you consider it with other BRIC countries (Brazil 3,India 2, China 1) then you have to believe something really strange is going on in russia
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- incision 14y agoIt's not so strange, pretty straightforward actually. When the Soviet Union fell apart a whole load of state assets were privatized right into the hands of well-connected people for below market value [1]. Pretty easy to make money when you're handed a monopoly, at a deep discount. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia
- philwelch 14y agoThe original intention was to effectively give every Russian citizen stock in all the newly privatized businesses. They did this, but the oligarchs were able to front-run the actual privatizations and bought all the stock for pennies on the dollar (ruble?) compared to what they ended up being worth. Taking all the economic activity that was going on under communism and immediately privatizing it is probably bound to create a few fortunes no matter how you do it, but the way it ended up happening in Russia was needlessly corrupt.
- powertower 14y agoTagged by how they made their money - first mover advantage, hard work and insight, theft, unfair practices, cheating, destroying the environment, war profiteering, rackets, bribery, political corruption, pure luck, ovarian lottery, etc, would be a much more interesting read.
- AndrewKemendo 14y agoIf you take out the ones who were billionaires by inheritance, and then look at those under 50, all but 5 are well connected beneficiaries of the fall of the Soviet Union. The other 5 made their money in IT (Dell, Bezos, Zuck, Brin, Page).
- bilbo0s 14y agoWhen governments go away, there is always money to be made. I strongly suspect that maneuvering of this nature is the most likely reason for Cuba's undersea cable only being turned on for one way traffic. In lofty debates on political world views, we can often overlook the greedy. I'd imagine the same sorts of things were going on when the Soviet Union dissolved.
- nwzpaperman 14y agoexcellent observation! when a sovereign nation collapses, its legal fabric is what is really destroyed. until a new system is embraced, it's the wild wild west and, strangely/frequently, military-connected persons and families rise to the top after things settle.
- seanlinehan 14y agoMany of these categories are, of course, culturally relative and would be viewed through the analyst's particular lens. Nonetheless, it would make for an interesting perspective.
- msandford 14y agoHow is it that Bloomberg himself isn't on the list? According to Wikipedia he's worth $25B which is well within the top 100.
- elboru 14y agoIt's interesting how the richest man in the world comes from a third world country (Carlos Slim from Mexico).
- civilian 14y agoI was going to question whether Mexico is a third world country but I did some googling and yeah, I guess that's an okay assessment. But I think the term "developing country" would be more appropriate. I think Mexico can be more easily grouped with the BRIC countries, rather than, say, Kenya and Cambodia. I guess the only point I really want to make is that naming and labeling is a difficult problem, even outside of computer science.
- elboru 14y agoWell, yeah you're right Mexico is supposed to be the 8th economy by 2050, acording to HSBC, Mexico will be above France, Canada, Italy, Turkey and S.Korea http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/12/worlds-top-economies-in-2050-will-be/ http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/12/worlds-top-economie...
- pm90 14y agoIs it really? Asif Zardari, the president of Pakistan, is estimated to have $1.8 billions. There was a recent uproar in India about some people storing billions in foreign banks etc. Point is: if you redirect money from where it was intended to be, you can make a lot of money. Especially in 3rd world countries where systems to keep this behavior in check are too weak or non-existent. (I don't know how Mr.Slim made his money though; I'm commenting more on the surprise for billionaire's from 3rd world countries)
- nwzpaperman 14y agoslim has a monopoly on the mexico mobile communications industry.
- DavidAdams 14y agoOne of the reasons that many developing countries such as Mexico have a hard time developing a robust economy and a strong middle class is precisely because their wealth is concentrated in an oligopoly made up of a handful of powerful families who wield vast political and economic power. You'll see this all across Latin America, and in most other parts of the world. Also, as you can see from the Russian billionaires on the list, many influential people have made vast fortunes when state-owned monopolies were "privatized" and became privately-owned monopolies.
- ggordan 14y agoIs there a reason why the Rothschild family doesn't appear on the list? I'd imagine that they are still billionaires.
- mmagin 14y agoWell, it's a list of individuals, after all this time, I imagine that wealth has been split between quite a few of them. Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#Conspiracy_theories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#Conspiracy_th...
- CleanedStar 14y ago#6 and #7 on the list are the Koch brothers. Under the categories "inherited" or "self-made" Bloomberg lists them as "self-made". Only 29 of the 100 are listed as having inherited their wealth. Ibn Saud's grandson, Alwaleed Al Saud is #16 and is also listed by Bloomberg as self-made. I guess even if you're the grandson of the guy your country is named after, you can still be listed as self-made by Bloomberg. Happy to see these self-made guys pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and became billionaires.
- adventured 14y agoIt's a fair point. So is the fact that it's extraordinarily easy to destroy vast amounts of wealth very quickly. Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, is a classic inheritance saying for a reason. Hand someone a large sum of money as inheritance and I would argue they're just as likely to destroy it as preserve it (much less grow it substantially). It's far easier to destroy $50 million than to multiply it by 1,000 times (which is what the Koch brothers did).
- arbuge 14y agoIndeed. The Koch brothers inherited a substantial business from their father... IIRC >$10m in inflation adjusted revenue today.
- arbuge 14y agoOne inaccuracy: Ortega (founder & ceo of Zara) doesn't pop up when you choose apparel.
- p3r1 14y agoSomeone have checked the "map" part? It shows a world map with a slider of the last year net worth changes. Something happens at April 18 and August 2.
- rglover 14y agoFuck billionaires.
- redwood 14y agoInteresting, only 1 British. Zero in Singapore... seems likely incorrect.
- gavanwoolery 14y agoBig mistake: They drew eyebrows on Larry Ellison. (Reference image: http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/05/larry_ellison1.png http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/05/larry_ellison1.png)