If your dad is Bill Gates, you’re probably not getting a Starbucks gift card for graduating college.
In 2018, Jennifer Gates walked off the Stanford stage and onto a 124-acre, $15.82 million horse farm in North Salem, New York. According to Architectural Digest, the lavish estate was a graduation gift from her billionaire parents—and came complete with rolling pastures, three parcels of land, and proximity to New York City for her future studies.
But in case that sounds too much like the plot of “Succession: Equestrian Edition,” Melinda Gates would like to remind everyone: their kids were absolutely raised “middle class.”
Being a billionaire in a world where most people don’t even early 50k annually is objectively immoral.
No one really seems to know what middle class is anymore. Both the family that is one missed paycheck from being homeless and the one lobbying their state for school vouchers so they can repurpose the cost of their kids private school tuition to their college fund think they’re middle class.
posting from Yahoo Finance eh
if you are seeing Yahoo Finance in your feed i bet there isn’t a single word of truth in the whole scroll
Maybe that’s why these 1%ers wealth hoard so hard, maybe they genuinely think they ARE middle class.
They’re either extremely uneducated in current standards of living, or being purposefully deceitful. I’d like to think it’s the former. They should have a class for rich people so they can understand what life is like without family money or high salaries.
I remember seeing a clip a long time ago of someone asking Gates how much a box of rice-a-roni is and he was like… 5$?
No class can teach you what it feels like to be a few bucks away from homelessness.
When the class is over the billionaires go back to their worry free lives. The poor worry about ending up on the street.
See now if failure to pass the empathy class results in your forced destitution there might be some incentive to pay attention
Made me think of the Meme: “Who wants to be a millionaire? - but with Billionaires, so it’s more of a threat.”
If we made empathy classes a must with our current governing systems, I cannot imagine them not beeing corrupted and used against the poor within seconds of becoming obligatory.
being purposefully deceitful
Warren Buffet keeps around the house he bought in Omaha, Nebraska in 1958 and brags about how little it is worth. The man travels on private jets and sleeps in hotel high rises, surrounded by an army of aides and adjuncts and a smattering of medical staff. But he’s still got the title to that old homestead from sixty years ago, so he’s perpetually middle class according to business talking heads.
Well put yourself in their shoes. They ARE the middle class when they are surrounded by only the top 1%.
We are not existant/irrelevant others. That will stay the same as long as their heads remain attached.
My sister and husband were confused when I said its sad Microsoft owns Xbox, one of our favorite past times. And it because of shit like this. Tax the fuckers, tax them one cent I dare u.
In 2018, Bill Gates’ net worth was approximately $90 billion. His estimated income was around $12 billion, according to estimates from Business Insider.
In 2018, the median net worth of an American household was $101,800. I chose median cause these billionaires drastically skew the mean. The median household income was $63,179.
If an average American household gave the same scale of gift in 2018, based on household income, the gift would be $83.29, and based on net worth, it’d be $17.89.
So it’s the equivalent of letting you kid buy a DVD from the discount bin.
At those sums, there’s really no equivalent. That discounted DVD has a real impact on your finances, even though it is a small impact. There’s no purchase that Bill Gates has to forego after spending 16 million on a horse farm, because the money flows in faster than he could ever spend it. He won’t be steaming a ham fewer for it, as we say in upstate New York.
It’s like letting your kid buy a DVD from the discount bin at the store you own?
I know people want to hate on Bill for being rich, and I can understand that, but I still prefer him to a certain South African billionaire.
Maybe some people will say that’s like comparing a giant douche to a turd sandwich though.
Why are you choosing favorites?
You don’t have to choose a favourite when none should exist
It’s a nice race to the bottom 🤷♂️
At least Bill gives away a lot of his money, and his stance on politics seems relatively sensible and measured. Whereas the South African billionaire gets a kick out of being stupid and damaging to the US (and beyond the US if you look at his comments on foreign politics).
At least Bill gives away a lot of his money
Does he? If you still control how it is spent, are you really giving it away?
If you still control how it is spent, are you really giving it away?
Actually yeah. You can’t just give a billion to an organization. Most of the organizations that receive money have the capacity to handle millions at most. Anything above that would just sit on their bank accounts because they’d have to scale up massively.
The amount of money the Gates Foundation is handling requires so much managing that they have 2000 employees.
I suggest to read up on what they are actually doing:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_Foundation
- https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants
It’s quite altruistic in nature.
Giving it away allows other people to decide what to do with it.
Gates is in full control of what he “gives” away.
I literally explained why it is set up like that. Except for the part where they use money of the foundation to make more money for the foundation.
Gates is in full control of what he “gives” away.
And rightfully so. The foundation is always looking for organizations to give grants to. You can’t just give it all away randomly. To give away so much money you need to put it somewhere where it can be distributed fairly. Which is exactly what the foundation is doing.
The only real argument you can have against Gates is whether or not he should be giving even more. But that is not the best argument because he still is giving away much more than people more wealthy as him.
Not surprising given that Cascade Investments controls both the foundation and Bill’s personal portfolio.
He spends quite big sums on healthcare I think? I’m not saying he’s a perfect guy. Maybe the world would be better if taxes were such that nobody could be a billionaire. I just think I prefer Bill Gates to other billionaires, especially the prominent South African one.
He blocked Oxford university from open sourcing it’s covid vaccine so that his other vaccine investments paid off.
Gates may be one of the better billionaires, but it’s still like comparing prostate cancer to brain cancer.
What makes you think that ? The missing bad headlines in the newspapers ?
I worry more about the actual rent-seeking oligarchy in my part of the world running for political positions in next month’s elections, purely for feudalistic reasons.
When you are a billionaire a $16m ranch is middle class.
Remember the difference between 1 million and 1 billion, is 1 billion.
It’s not. It’s 999 million.
Eh, it’s a 0.1% difference
Correct.
It’s well within tolerance. Functionally 1 billion :p
I’ll gladly take the difference.
rounded up
These rich people are so disconnected from the actual reality that the rest of us live in that it’s not funny. And to make matters worse, a lot of these rich people see themselves as visionaries and leaders. Imagine that, blind visionaries. And to make matters even worse than that, a lot of people worship these ‘visionaries’ that can’t even picture what life is like without billions of dollars, as if they have all the answers.
I suppose, to her, having millions of dollars is soooo far away from her life that she has to look at it with binoculars and think that it should be middle-class.
Much like the soon to be german chancellor, who told an interviewer, that he is upper middle class. All that while being a former Blackrock manager and owning (and using regularily) a personal private jet. Thats some kind of chancellor material…
Tbf, it is “merely” a private prop plane, not a jet (which would be significantly more expensive still). But yeah, not exactly middle class material…
You’ll love this:
I want to be this middle class…
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I’m middle class and I haven’t been able to afford to go to the dentist is about 20 years.
That doesn’t sound right.
That’s because the term “middle class” without context doesn’t mean much.
My wife and I life in the Twin Cities metro in Minnesota and we meet the definition of middle class for this part of the country which ranges for our state from ~$55k to ~$150k if going based on income.
We have almost no retirement savings but we have tens of thousands in the bank, we have a mortgaged home, two cars 6 years or newer with one completely paid off, in the last 3 years we’ve had to replace our AC, furnace, water heater, water softener, stove, refrigerator, dishwasher and garage door. We have also chosen to replace our kitchen counter, front door and front walk/patio as well as add a fence and dog door. All of this we paid for up front in cash.
We carry no debt outside of my student loans which I pay on every month as well as one car loan and our mortgage. We both go to the dentist and get all needed medical care.
Caveats to this are we don’t have kids and I can’t imagine how difficult it would be if we did. We also live pretty simple lives. We’ve always lived in a fashion so that we could afford our basic expenses on one income because my wife and I both lived very poor, check-to-check lives when we were younger.
I don’t think middle class truly exists anymore. You either can afford to live now or you can’t, it’s just by how much and where.
It’s not. If you can’t afford a dentist you’re not middle class. IDK where dude lives, but I make $100k in a major metro area in the USA and consider myself middle class. My family still qualifies for partial forgiveness from medical bills.
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My area introduced tiers for medical forgiveness based on household income, even if I made twice as much there’d still be some degree of assistance. May be worth looking into for your family.
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Man that must be rough. Poor people only have to worry about where their next meal is coming from and whether they can afford rent. I can’t imagine having to deal with repairing my house.
FYI. Not trying to say you don’t have struggles or challenges. But to say that it’s harder to live like that than being even more poor is insane. Just like the rich people this thread is about.
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Yeah, again I’m not saying you don’t have struggles. I get it. But to phrase it in a way that suggests you have it worse than poorer people is insane. These people don’t have half the shit you do.
Also you said that sometimes poor people have it better than middle class. And that’s just not true.
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They seem to think you’re only middle class if you’ve never been to Epstein Island.
Leaves Bill out!
presuming you are American, look at dental clinics and if you are near a city, dental universities.
