World's First Trillionaire Within 25 Years?

[Ben]

Then we can really kiss democracy goodbye -- for good. I mean, when you concentrate wealth, well, you concentrate power.
If Bill Gates emerges as the first trillionaire, well, he will have inordinate power. Might as well call him: King Gates.

World's First Trillionaire Within 25 Years?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHDkN97oCvQ

[martin48]

Do you realise that's equivalent to $140 for every person on the planet. Something wrong.

[Stavros]

Then we can really kiss democracy goodbye -- for good. I mean, when you concentrate wealth, well, you concentrate power.
If Bill Gates emerges as the first trillionaire, well, he will have inordinate power. Might as well call him: King Gates.


Do you have any evidence that Bill Gates (with or without his wife Melinda) has used his wealth to influence the legislative process in Congress and undermine the practice of democracy in the US? Is he in the same bracket as the Koch Brothers, or is he somehow different? Would you also shut down the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because it's projects are not 'democratically' determined?

[broncofan]

Bill Gates has done tremendous philanthropic work and I haven't seen evidence (though I don't know everything about him) that he has been intimately involved in our political process. A lot of people have attacked Warren Buffett as well, who has pledged his money to the Gates foundation, which is easy since Buffett has owned a piece of hundreds of companies he did not himself run. He can therefore be subject to politically motivated attacks based on the actions taken by any of those companies.

Finally, Bill Gates' current net worth is now 76 billion dollars. If he does not make any fairly risky investments, and his money accumulates at say an inflationary rate of say 3%, the nominal value of his money would about double in 25 years. That would be 152 billion...not shabby but not a trillion. He may do better than that but he would have to make some very intelligent decisions to turn his 76 billion into a trillion dollars.

Edit: what I mean is it's very hard to invest enormous sums of money like that because of liquidity problems in whatever you buy. You end up moving the market every time you change your mind and re-invest in new assets or asset classes.

[Ben]

Bill Gates has done tremendous philanthropic work and I haven't seen evidence (though I don't know everything about him) that he has been intimately involved in our political process. A lot of people have attacked Warren Buffett as well, who has pledged his money to the Gates foundation, which is easy since Buffett has owned a piece of hundreds of companies he did not himself run. He can therefore be subject to politically motivated attacks based on the actions taken by any of those companies.

Finally, Bill Gates' current net worth is now 76 billion dollars. If he does not make any fairly risky investments, and his money accumulates at say an inflationary rate of say 3%, the nominal value of his money would about double in 25 years. That would be 152 billion...not shabby but not a trillion. He may do better than that but he would have to make some very intelligent decisions to turn his 76 billion into a trillion dollars.

Edit: what I mean is it's very hard to invest enormous sums of money like that because of liquidity problems in whatever you buy. You end up moving the market every time you change your mind and re-invest in new assets or asset classes.

I've no idea what Bill Gates is like as a person. He could very well be a nice person.
But the problem remains: whenever you concentrate wealth, well, you concentrate power.
So, again, the notion of democracy will become a fallacy. I mean, it already is. This'll just cement it.
The question we should ask ourselves: is government policy made to serve the majority of the population (thus democratic) or is government policy designed to serve the super-rich and the corporate sector? Hence a plutocracy.
Was NAFTA about putting in place a treaty to serve the majority? What about policies like deregulation and privatization?
What about the lack of single-payer health care? Why don't we have it? I mean, most Americans want it.
If you dislike democracy, well, that's fine. Not necessarily you. Just people in general -- :)
I mean, a lot of people do believe that concentrating power is a good thing, that the lack of democracy is also a good thing. As the concentration of power makes for a more stable society. Ya know, hand power to the people, well, they'll screw everything up because they're irrational....

[Stavros]

But the problem remains: whenever you concentrate wealth, well, you concentrate power.


Barack Obama's financial base in his first election was made up of millions of small donors, some of them giving less than $30. I think sometimes you confuse the ownership of wealth with the distribution of power when maybe you should consider the distribution of wealth and the ownership of power. It is not my fault if you have a two party system, yet the differences between Republican and Democrat parties is wider now than it has been for some time, possibly ever since the Civil War. You will always have corporate interests in a capitalist economy like the USA, they employ vast numbers of people and are often in strategically important businesses, such as energy and food -and for the most part, as far as I know, you have or can demand transparent accounting in political donations in the US, it is not as if someone from the Mafia is passing dollars in brown envelopes to Obama's team. Not a perfect democracy no, but would you prefer the contemporary Russian version?