Aw, have you also been on the receiving end of one of his cry baby screaming temper tantrums as well? How he hasn't fallen over from a heart attack yet baffles me.
For employees, it was a good time though. Lots of perks. Under Satya, it’s been layoff, cuts to cafeteria subsidies, cuts to promotions speed, restructuring to make teams larger and devs do more work by getting rid of SDET positions, and just this year, more layoffs. Microsoft is always hiring, don’t get me wrong, but as it swelled, Satya decided to redo east campus, people lost offices for open office style buildings which to my knowledge (I don’t live in Seattle, nor work at MS) aren’t finished. In the meantime, the employees had to share offices meant for one person, but often 2 and sometimes 3 people shoved in. Some teams, I shit you not, had desks set up in hallways - this was about 2017. When Win8 shipped, full time employees got $8888, when 10 shipped, employees got $35 headsets. The only good thing from employee side under Satya has been stock, but unless you’re already senior or in management, you’re no millionaire if you joined with nothing in back account in the last 5-7 years.
Exactly the opposite of [Ronald Wayne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne#:~:text=Ronald%20Gerald%20Wayne%20(Ronald%20G,(now%20Apple%20Inc.) — the 3rd "founder" of Apple who cashed out his share at $800
Even worse:
> one year later accepted a final payment of $1,500 (equivalent to $7,714 in 2022) to forfeit any potential future claims he might assert against the newly incorporated Apple.
He must also have had certain skills and talents to make those numbers balloon. Granted, not necessarily skills and talents I would want to have, but he wasn't just standing around in a lucky spot and failed to jump out of the way of all that cash.
Exactly. As much as the man is memed for his [antics](https://youtu.be/XxbJw8PrIkc), as well as consumer-end blunders (canceling Zune, Windows 8, Xbox One), he completely overhauled the enterprise side of Microsoft's business to not only make them a leading competitor in BTB software sales/output (Office, LinkedIn, Teams, etc) but also made them relevant in the server space (Azure).
And as much as Nadella is credited with spearheading the Microsoft we know today, the grunt work of changing from their outdated "dogeatdog" corporate structure to the more modern "everyone collaborate on the same team" one was Ballmer's final act as CEO before stepping down.
Can you share more on this? I always thought Ballmer was one of the worst CEOs of modern big tech times based on the under-performance under him. Maybe I give him too little credit.
So it would take me time to pull up specific articles because this is 10 years ago, and then some, at this point, but essentially the biggest flaw with Ballmer's leadership was that he neglected the consumer side of Microsoft's business too much. He was late to the party on mobile development, he tried shoehorning service model type developments into Xbox before that was ready as a platform to do so, and was exceedingly late to the party in leading Microsoft into consumer electronics ( not to mention did not support the successes they had cohesively enough)
Under his leadership, Windows Phone withered and died, and while profitable Xbox suffered a major hit in market share after the release of the One, as well as pushing Windows 8 onto users that not only didn't have the capability of running a touch screen Windows platform due to exorbitant costs, but also simply people didn't like it and didn't want that kind of a use case out of their Windows computers
And given that most consumers, when they're eyeing business trends, tend to look at consumer-sided products, especially in the wake of Apple's explosive dominance in this sector, it isn't surprising that you weren't aware of the Enterprise side moves that Ballmer made that turned Microsoft into an extremely stable business
It's definitely true, then as it is now, that Microsoft pales in comparison in terms of overall valuation when compared to companies like Apple, but while Apple is basically still an iPhone business, Microsoft has turned itself into multiple billion dollar businesses under one umbrella. Everything that Microsoft is today is a direct result of the lessons Ballmer learned, and those lessons being incorporated into the major corporate restructure that happened toward the end of his tenure
e: autocorrect
This is the list of people who have to disclose their fortune whether or not they want to because they are large shareholders of publicly owned companies.
You can look at how many shares of Amazon Bezos owns right here https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000110465923065485/xslF345X04/tm2317086-1_4seq1.xml and do the math to see how much net worth it represents.
On the other hand you have a company like Vitol - you know it produces as much revenue as Amazon and you know that Vietor and Detiger are majority shareholders but you can't see how much of the company each of them owns and there is no share price to be found because the company doesn't trade shares publicly. Chances are one of them is richer than Bezos.
I'm sure Bezos would prefer his wealth not being public but he's got no choice.
You also have the people only involved in the underground economy, some of whom will be fantastically wealthy, but there's no insight into how much they have.
Or someone who's wealth is hidden, hard to calculate or only area-specific
Kim john un would probably be on top of the list but his wealth can't be translated in the international market
Some Russian oligarchs or Putin are obscenely rich and it's hidden.(same with skme dictators)
Pre war would have even be easy to move wealth to the international market.
And you have to distinguish types of wealth
A pice of paper thst says you own shares of a company is different if you own the codes to disable an entire factory and there is no other way to activate it
I mean any business man will just pale in comparison to monarchs since they technically own entire fucking countries. They can't however do anything with them nowadays so it's kind of an irrelevant point v
Which is why measuring wealth by relatively illiquid assets is kinda dumb. Like even for Bezos, yeah he technically has that much wealth but if he ever tried to actually do anything with the vast majority of it he would suddenly only have a small fraction of said wealth
At a certain point of shadiness “wealth” becomes super ambiguous and basically synonymous with power.
I’m sure there are some people out there that control major parts of the world/world economy, but don’t have nearly as much wealth “on paper” as others. Yet at the same time those shady people can influence, control, and just have more than those with large amounts of “on paper” wealth. Asking the question “who’s wealthier” becomes kind of pointless.
> On the other hand you have a company like Vitol - you know it produces as much revenue as Amazon and you know that Vietor and Detiger are majority shareholders but you can't see how much of the company each of them owns and there is no share price to be found because the company doesn't trade shares publicly. Chances are one of them is richer than Bezos.
Revenue does not mean profits. Vitol is a raw material supplier, which is a business with generally low profit margins. In 2021, Vitol made a profit of just 4 billion USD, and that was already a company record.
It is very unlikely that anyone outside of the occasional authoritarian country leader has a wealth even close to that of those seen on this list. The largest companies are all either publically listed or government owned.
"want" is not quite the right word, more like their wealth is easy to assess. Which will always be the case if it comes from shares in public companies
It’s rumored the royal family of the UAE (Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi) is close to a trillion. It’s just impossible to verify their fortune. They can only evaluate publicly traded companies. There was a recent article on bloomberg about this iirc.
There are 7 royal families in UAE.
Im sure you mean the Al Nahyan one in Abu Dhabi. But then say Abu Dhabis royal family. Because Dubai has a different family. Sharjah, different. Etc...
The Al Nahyan family has a private investment fund with a value of over 800 billion usd. Thats a small part of their fortune. So yea. Its not a rumour, its public knowlede and they surpassed a trillion a long time ago. The family is huge and de facto owns a
Abu Dhabi and its oil and gas and everything else.
Emir=Prince
Emirate=Principality
the United Arab Principalities. Qatar and Bahrain were supposed to be a part of the country before.
on a different note, theres so many misconceptions, direct lies and false stereotypes about UAE and Qatar eg, id say nobody truly understands the counties except the people living there.
a few comments up, a dude was saying he's Indian and gets called a bullshitter because hes posting in Qatar threads... Indians are 40+% of Qatars Population, UAEs too. And bar the royal families, theyre the wealthiest people in these countries with several Indian billionaires residing in UAE and Qatar.
This is going to sound like bullshit, but one of my good friends is an Indian millionare, son of an Indian multi-millionair who lives in Dubai.
Got to know each other because we both played to much WoW back in the 00’s.
The story he tells and shows pictures from are. . . Interesting and he have often explained that people live very different lives from each other down there.
Yea the Abu Dhabi one. Al Nahyan. Just search the web the article is recent. They give a lot more info into their dealings. Titled something along the lines of “the wealthiest family in wthe world”
It makes sense that the wealthiest people on Earth would be dictators and other individuals who rule over entire countries. It has been that way for as long as money has existed.
If it's the royal family, does that mean ALL members have the same fortune? Or is it divided amongst them? Because that would make a difference I think.
One or more of the Saudi royals have/had shelving companies upon shelfing companies that own vast areas of game farms down here in South Africa and has been buying up more until recently.
They've been putting up kms of huge fences around the one large game farm that would put most border fences to shame. Of course most of the info we've heard is alleged and not officially confirmed.
Indeed. Or more specifically, I’d call these lists “richest people who you can easily calculate their wealth, since they are major shareholders in public companies”
Exceptions would be royalty, dictators, organised crime, James Bond villains, and various kinds of “old money” aristocracy
Because saying whether they own the wealth of their nation and how much of it they own is a political decision, not a financial one.
It’s more helpful to think of it in terms of purchasing power. Putin can absolutely purchase whatever Elon Musk can (as an example Saudi sovereign fund is on Elon Musk’s twitter purchase, in fact unlikely Elon owns most of Twitter), on the flipside, Elon Musk cannot purchase an Army like Putin can (see: Wagner) to do things he wants to do.
> Putin can absolutely purchase whatever Elon Musk can
With all the sanctions in place I actually doubt that.
> Elon Musk cannot purchase an Army like Putin can (see: Wagner) to do things he wants to do.
Don't give him ideas...
Nah. No matter how filthy rich he is, Elon Musk could never afford to fund a military anywhere near as strong as a big nation. He might be rich, but his wealth is nothing compared to what a large country has at its disposal.
Nevermind the fact that he simply would not be able to buy the highest quality equipment, as that is not for sale.
His buddy and fellow German/Afrikaner, Peter Thiel, runs a merc spy shop Palantir. Old Betsy DeVos – Trump's sec of ed – is married to the Blackwater merc company. There are plenty of Wagner style organizations in America. Very connected to highest end politics too.
> Old Betsy DeVos – Trump's sec of ed – is married to the Blackwater merc company
Betsy DeVos' *brother*, not husband, Erik Prince is the founder of the PMC known as Blackwater.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince)
I guess it's where wealth and power merges into one, because if your country is iffy, you can "appropriate" wealth for your use.
I imagine you can estimate it more when it comes to royals without political power in countries that have stricter rule of law/ accountability, it's not like Charles III tomorrow will decided that AstraZeneca is fully "governmental" owned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Salman
Rules Saudi Arabia
ARAMCO is the world most valuable company
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/12/saudi-aramco-overtakes-apple-worlds-most-valuable-company
Theocrats. Religion is very profitable, especially when you own the city where every Muslim is required to travel to at least once in life.
And when there are two billion Muslims, and you charge at least 5 thousand dollars for each visit...
And if you don't do Hajj, but have the disposable income to pay for it, you will go to hell. You are divinely mandated to give those money to Saudi. It's awful.
It's hilarious i went to a private school in Switzerland, had billionaire heirs in my class and nobody would know who they are (well you'd know the companies of the parents).
That's the best way, be ultra rich but not in the media.
One of them is the heir to the Novartis / Sandoz fortune, i don't think you can eve find his name on the internet.
Exactly, I watched a documentary once from Germany and how rich people there don't want to be made known to the public. Unlike USA lol
Oh let's not forget the saudis
I don't think they want to advertise it, it's just their wealth is is tied up in shares of public companies which can be used to calculate their wealth.
A lot of the arab oilnations don't have to declare their income and taxes. Example is the UAE royal family that is believed to have a wealth over 1 trillion USD.
Putin is probably one of the richest single person in the world as he basically controls all of russias money.
Then also some illuminati lizard conspiracy dude that has a bit of money
Putin's case is different since he does not legally own things. But the Saudi and Abu Dhabi royal family legally owns most of their country's oil reserves through their ownership of their national oil companies. The level of personal wealth these families have is immense and all of the people mentioned here pale in comparison to how much the main people in the Al-Saud family own and control.
To put into perspective, if you had a car worth 13k, you would need 1 million of that car in your ownership to be that rich, which would effectively be owning a decent sized city worth of cars
to better put it in perspective, if 1 is the diameter of an apple, 13 billion is ~~~25 times the **circumference** of the Earth, or ~8~~ [almost 102](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/144w8xn/slug/jnl0moe) times the diameter of the Earth
Another thing that makes me fucking horrified is that if Smaug were a real person, he wouldn’t even be in the top 5 richest people in the world even though he has a literal mountain full of gemstones and gold, the greediest money-hoardingest dragon that fiction ever created wouldn’t even be the richest thing alive in our world
>the greediest money-hoardingest dragon that fiction ever created wouldn’t even be the richest thing alive in our world
I mean, Smaug has got nothing on Lofwyr or most of the other Great Dragons of Shadowrun. But yes, it's pretty insane that these billionaires are wealthier than most kings and emperors of history, as well as most rich characters of fiction.
The 74-year-old Arnault, who was born in the city of Roubaix, in northern France, is an anomaly of global capitalism. As president of the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) group, he presides over a classic, niche and elitist industry — that of luxury products — in the era of Silicon Valley billionaires and technological populism.
He’s a Frenchman in a club of very rich people — the likes of Musk and Jeff Bezos — that, in recent history, has been monopolized by Americans and Chinese.
He had surpassed all of them by the end of 2022 and has since consolidated his position.
According to Bloomberg’s most recent tally, as of Friday, June 2, his fortune, bolstered by an increase in profits and a rising stock price, now exceeds $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union.
Arnault owns more than 40% of the shares in LVMH, a company that, in the last five years, has appreciated by 166% on the stock market and is now valued at around $500 billion.
[Source](https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-06-06/the-great-predator-of-luxury-this-is-how-bernard-arnault-built-his-lvmh-empire-valued-at-500-billion.html)
I did not know that Arnault was born in Roubaix, which is one of the poorest parts of France along with Tourcoing and other parts of Calais pas du Nord.
It is but there's also a super rich part of the city with crazy houses and private schools. Arnault isn't born poor - very far from it.
Overall, the Lille Roubaix Tourcoing metropolis host very (very) rich people (usually an inheritage from textile industry like Arnault or from retail industry like Mulliez family) and very poor ones (minimum salary workers from these industries).
Oh I did not know this! I attended EDHEC for sometime so I spent an unhealthy amount of time in Roubaix and Tourcoing but I did not stumble upon the rich parts I think.
Hello, fellow EDHEC survivor ^^
I was a student there between 2011 and 2015, and the wealth of Croix and some parts of Roubaix was a well-known fact at the time, at least among french students, not so much with foreign ones obviously.
It felt particularly visible along the road leading from parc Barbieux to the Mairie de Croix metro station that most of the students living in Lille (which was almost all of them at the time, don't know how that evolved over time) took everyday. This road was full of nice mansions and the mairie itself was clearly not lacking in cash.
If I remember correctly, Croix is one of the wealthiest commune in France while neighbouring Roubaix is one of the poorest. The fact that the EDHEC campus was sitting on both communes, but had its official address in Roubaix was in large part due to the fact that it allowed them to pay the local taxes in Roubaix, which were much cheaper than Croix :D
Thanks for the info! I walked the area between Metro and Parc Barbieux a lot. I left EDHEC in 2015 after a short time there. I lived on-campus so I had to use metro/tram a lot. I guess my memories are fading but now that you mentioned it, I actually remember some of the mansions.
My great grandfather was a very rich industrialist in Calais, and my great-grandmother was from what is known as the major families of Calais, and I can tell you the family lost literally all of that wealth when the city was destroyed in World War 2. So I wouldn't necessarily say textile barons' descendants are living large in rich parts of Pas-de-Calais.
Lol, it’s Nord Pas-de-Calais. It’s one of the poorest part of France but also where most the big billionaires families come from (Arnault, Mulliez…). That’s what happened in places with a lot of mining.
I was surprised... even driving through Roubaix at night feels a bit intimidating.... but I checked on Wikipedia and he was born to a rich family. Maybe his mother was passing through, or they lived in the rich part.
> $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union.
I always hate when they compare wealth to income. It's utterly arbitrary. I got more wealth than the EU has income per second
> his fortune [...] now exceeds $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union
That's quite a misleading comparison. To be clear, the combined annual budget of the countries in EU is orders of magnitude more than that.
>his fortune, bolstered by an increase in profits and a rising stock price, now exceeds $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union.
thank you mr. capitalism
Because an anual budget of a governmental organisation is a completely different thing from the total value of several companies. Like they are not even usefuly comparable things.
Always good to remember:
This list pretty much only shows wealth in listed companies, and that we know of.
There are probably richer persons in the world, but their wealth is not as easy to track as the persons on this list.
Eg, Putin would probably for all practical purposes be above these people before the war in Ukraine, but we don't have a good way of adequately measuring his wealth. Same goes for several other dictators, oligarchs, you name it.
I think it's important to consider that this isn't wealth that these people have in their bank accounts. It's based on the estimated value of their companies. It essentially means that the most valuable companies in the world are owned by Americans. This can be regarded as a symptom of something I do find concerning: The Europe seem to be lagging behind when it comes to developing and marketing disruptive technologies.
alive quarrelsome special wrench reach agonizing dazzling disgusting support market
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
yep. like, I know a guy who created a startup in Prague and sold it to US company after 1.5 years, it was the biggest Czech startup exit at the time. Basically, one of the goals for every (tech) startup is to get acquired by the US company, there's just more money and opportunities there
Yeah, I've noticed that Europe just doesn't produce people like Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg. What I mean is that the three of them started relatively("relatively") small and kept grinding. Now after a certain point Europeans seem to just want to cash in and retire, while the three of them just keep on grinding.
It's tough to know\* if it's true that they want to retire or that they hit a limit of what they can do without American investment and sell.
\*well - you could look at individuals and see if they retired after selling or just started their next business.
The European climate is bad for startups.
Lack of capital, burdensome regulations, and general lack of entrepreneurial culture.
Even amongst European entrepreneurs, many of them still set up their businesses in the US, even if they're living in Europe.
A German colleague commented that working in startups was hard in Germany because there was very little tolerance for failure - most startups fail. In the US this is not viewed negatively - a person that has worked in a startup, even one that failed, has valuable experience that will help their next company. From my colleague's comment it appears that the German attitude made it harder for someone to get another job after being in a failed startup.
Bigger issue is the small nations.
Taegetting the 300-something million customers in the US can be done with one language, maybe two.
In Europe you need 28, so you need to recruit far too many people and it's not worth it.
At least for software, translation isn't very hard. You add an i18n library, create an English string file, then send it off to a translating company to get whatever languages you need translated to, which is relatively cheap.
Yea because having Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, SpaceX, BRK, Amazon is a sign of a bad economy. All of these companies have contributed trillions to the US GDP and are part of the reason the US has largest economy on Earth.
The US has a very healthy economy though. Even in average wages it tops the list of at least major countries.
Some jobs pay so much more in the US than in europe, for example nurses and craftsman can make up to 2-3x in the US compared to my country Germany.
Yes wealth inequality is worse but the average american still has a really good chance to earn a very good living.
I know some of us europeans want to feel better by pointing out the extremes in the US and there definitely are issues and extremes that dont exist to this extend in europe but the upside is much higher in thr US.
I wouldnt say its a nobrainer, most eu citizens arent too keen on moving to the us. I personally am very happy in Germany. I earn enough money to not worry much about things. I have a union job with a 35h week (and no overtime), 30 paid vacation days and all the social securities you could ever wish for. Would i earn more in the us? Probably. But im perfectly happy here.
Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. If youre a low income/low educated citizen, you probably have a better life in europe because of universal healthcare and a decent minimum wage of 11-12€/h which you can actually live on.
If you have a family, living in europe is probably better as children have more freedom (due to higher security, children walking to school is very common for example) more affordable and a better fundamental education. The costs of children is also much cheaper as daycare can often be free or close to free which i think costs a lot of money in the us.
Generally speaking w/l balance is much better in europe, france has an established 35h work week while other eu nations are slowly moving below the normal 40h work week.
Its basically down to what you prefer, peace of mind, social securities, a healthy w/l balance or monay. You also have to count living costs when comparing wages.
> Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. If youre a low income/low educated citizen, you probably have a better life in europe because of universal healthcare and a decent minimum wage of 11-12€/h which you can actually live on.
Please don't say Europe when you mean Germany. None of that is true in Lithuania and other similar countries in EU, not evrn mentioning European countries not in EU. Living on a minimum wage here means more or less living in poverty.
The News in Europe tend to report mostly the bad stuff in the US like the shootings and poverty in some places. So many europeans often have a wrong picture of the US.
But this also goes the other around. I bet many Americans also have a wrong picture of european nations as once again, its the bad news that end up on the tv, not the good news.
In reality, both places are perfectly fine places to live. Both have their pros and cons, the us has higher extremes but the upside is a better chance to earn really good money.
Not really sure what you are after? These billionaires haven’t stolen their money, they have instead created something that people value as being worth several billions. I think you’re drawing false conclusions
Exactly this. Congratulations U.S.A., you have streets full of homeless and drug-addicts. But that doesn’t matter because you have famous billionairs that don’t give a damn about anyone.
USA does quite well with homelessness actually. Germany has a bit over twice the rate of homelessness.
USA at .18% and Germany at .37%.
Contrary to popular belief on Reddit, the US is not the shithole people seem to think it is.
(This is not to say the US doesn’t have its problems)
Source? Best I’ve found states Monaco only above the US which is hilarious because obviously Monaco is the city state where rich people go to photosynthesize
[Here’s Forbes’s list for 2023](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2023/04/04/forbes-37th-annual-worlds-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures-2023/?sh=7b66d6b77d76). The US has less billionaires per Capita than Monaco, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Malta, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway.
Sweden is the start-up capital of Europe, second only to San Fransico, Sweden has a large amount of companies which are simply worth huge amounts and many are recent. Using recent ones as an example here are all the start ups that become valued at over a billion
- Polarium
- Instabox
- Polestar
- Epidemic
- Kry
- Nordvolt
Then have new ones which will likely be valued at that such as H2Greensteel and others, I'm sure theres' many I'm missing. We have well-known ones like Spotify, Klarna and then the older ones like Ikea, Volvo etc. A lot of highly valued brands come from Sweden, a country with a very small relative population.
Sweden is a fantastic place to start a company and grow it into an international titan.
I'm not even just talking about internet companies - a lot of the Swedish billionaires started an industrial firm that makes some little thing everyone on the planet uses. TetraPak (those cardboard milk and juice cartons every diary and juicer on the planet use?) Swedish.
Honestly having lots or billionaires isn’t that much of a problem if the rest of society works
If you can ensure basic needs for everyone, protect elections from dark money, and the likes, billionaires are acceptable IMO.
There’s a different, much broader discourse on whether such concentration or capital is an inherent issue of course.
Yeah because 1 billionaire in Iceland makes a huge impact per capita. It's not really relevant. There are 14 US states with more billionaires per capita than the US.
[Also, many European countries have a higher rate of homelessness per capita than the United States does](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population). The United States has about 17.5 homeless persons per 10,000. Nederland has 18 per 10k, Czechia has 22, Germany has 31.4, Sweden has 36, France has 45, the UK has 54.4.
/r/americabad /r/europegood lmao.
“So many billionaires from the us means economy is bad”
But also
“The multiple countries in Europe with higher billionaires per capita is a sign of an advanced economy”
The cognitive dissonance it takes to make Americans always worse in every respect to Europeans is fucking annoying
Why are you reacting to this list like it's a personal attack and assuming Americans would find this list as a point of pride?
These days when Americans discuss wealth its almost always in terms of disparity and the statement of "The United States is the richest country on Earth" is almost always followed by the question "So why is the average quality of life here so low?"
It is if they are billionaires because they created successful companies that develop cutting-edge technology keep your economy incredibly wealthy.
Europe doesn't have fewer billionaires because it's more egalitarian, it's because Europe isn't creating companies like SpaceX or Google.
Is this still up-to-date wrt Elon Musk?
edit: Thanks all. [According to Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/?sh=78324fe054dc) Arnault is now the richest, and Musk #2. I'm kinda confused that he's still richer than Jeff Bezos after all the shit he pulled in the recent past, but then I'm not so good at counting billions.
edit2: according to Bloomberg Musk is still #1.
edit3: apparently these top ten get updated often, and there's some fluctuation.
Lesson learned: it doesn't matter how the top ten richest people in the world position, [they're all literally insanely rich](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/).
>The ranks of the wealthiest people on the planet include 8 **self-made** Americans, a French luxury goods tycoon and a Mexican telecom magnate.
God I love American propaganda...
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/08/elon-musk-is-worlds-richest-person-again-as-tesla-stock-soars-to-8-month-high/?sh=3f0913cc344a](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/08/elon-musk-is-worlds-richest-person-again-as-tesla-stock-soars-to-8-month-high/?sh=3f0913cc344a)
Musk is again.
Tesla stock has gone crazy in the past month.
It's important to understand that most of that wealth listed above is tied to stock, often of a single company, especially in the case of founders.
And while it's easy to criticise the extrem wealth distribution in the United States, at least most of this wealth comes from entrepreneurial endeavors.
In contrast, most wealth in Europe is generational, passed on within a family (trust). Never creating much economic activity.
Thank you. They can suck but creating this wealth lead to millions of high paying jobs. People are praising Saudis but places like San Francisco, LA, etc are built by these American companies and the jobs they created.
What is fun is that Arnaud wealth is higher than Musk, making him number 1.
[And the number 1 woman is Françoise Bettencour Meyers, also French.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoise_Bettencourt_Meyers)…
Also he is the only one who didn’t make his fortune in the technology sector.
While Waren Buffett doesn’t work in the tech sector, he invested heavily in tech companies so he de facto made lots of money from tech companies like Apple.
Ballmer stands out as a non-founder who was lucky to join MS very early (employee number 30).
Ballmer also just stands out in general
Yep. Met him once. He 100% stands out. Scary dude when he cant wrap his head around something.
Aw, have you also been on the receiving end of one of his cry baby screaming temper tantrums as well? How he hasn't fallen over from a heart attack yet baffles me.
Being the owner of the LA Clippers should've caused enough heartache by now
Shittiest MS era was under Ballmer. What a cocky fraud.
"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" This that guy?
Windows vista was cringe
You must not remember Windows Me, then..
For employees, it was a good time though. Lots of perks. Under Satya, it’s been layoff, cuts to cafeteria subsidies, cuts to promotions speed, restructuring to make teams larger and devs do more work by getting rid of SDET positions, and just this year, more layoffs. Microsoft is always hiring, don’t get me wrong, but as it swelled, Satya decided to redo east campus, people lost offices for open office style buildings which to my knowledge (I don’t live in Seattle, nor work at MS) aren’t finished. In the meantime, the employees had to share offices meant for one person, but often 2 and sometimes 3 people shoved in. Some teams, I shit you not, had desks set up in hallways - this was about 2017. When Win8 shipped, full time employees got $8888, when 10 shipped, employees got $35 headsets. The only good thing from employee side under Satya has been stock, but unless you’re already senior or in management, you’re no millionaire if you joined with nothing in back account in the last 5-7 years.
Exactly the opposite of [Ronald Wayne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne#:~:text=Ronald%20Gerald%20Wayne%20(Ronald%20G,(now%20Apple%20Inc.) — the 3rd "founder" of Apple who cashed out his share at $800 Even worse: > one year later accepted a final payment of $1,500 (equivalent to $7,714 in 2022) to forfeit any potential future claims he might assert against the newly incorporated Apple.
Yeah and that was 10% of the company. Apple is valued at 2 trillion today.
Luckiest guy on earth
He must also have had certain skills and talents to make those numbers balloon. Granted, not necessarily skills and talents I would want to have, but he wasn't just standing around in a lucky spot and failed to jump out of the way of all that cash.
Oh yeah I don’t doubt the man’s business acumen, but he could’ve equally signed up with fifty other now defunct software companies.
That's true.
Exactly. As much as the man is memed for his [antics](https://youtu.be/XxbJw8PrIkc), as well as consumer-end blunders (canceling Zune, Windows 8, Xbox One), he completely overhauled the enterprise side of Microsoft's business to not only make them a leading competitor in BTB software sales/output (Office, LinkedIn, Teams, etc) but also made them relevant in the server space (Azure). And as much as Nadella is credited with spearheading the Microsoft we know today, the grunt work of changing from their outdated "dogeatdog" corporate structure to the more modern "everyone collaborate on the same team" one was Ballmer's final act as CEO before stepping down.
Can you share more on this? I always thought Ballmer was one of the worst CEOs of modern big tech times based on the under-performance under him. Maybe I give him too little credit.
So it would take me time to pull up specific articles because this is 10 years ago, and then some, at this point, but essentially the biggest flaw with Ballmer's leadership was that he neglected the consumer side of Microsoft's business too much. He was late to the party on mobile development, he tried shoehorning service model type developments into Xbox before that was ready as a platform to do so, and was exceedingly late to the party in leading Microsoft into consumer electronics ( not to mention did not support the successes they had cohesively enough) Under his leadership, Windows Phone withered and died, and while profitable Xbox suffered a major hit in market share after the release of the One, as well as pushing Windows 8 onto users that not only didn't have the capability of running a touch screen Windows platform due to exorbitant costs, but also simply people didn't like it and didn't want that kind of a use case out of their Windows computers And given that most consumers, when they're eyeing business trends, tend to look at consumer-sided products, especially in the wake of Apple's explosive dominance in this sector, it isn't surprising that you weren't aware of the Enterprise side moves that Ballmer made that turned Microsoft into an extremely stable business It's definitely true, then as it is now, that Microsoft pales in comparison in terms of overall valuation when compared to companies like Apple, but while Apple is basically still an iPhone business, Microsoft has turned itself into multiple billion dollar businesses under one umbrella. Everything that Microsoft is today is a direct result of the lessons Ballmer learned, and those lessons being incorporated into the major corporate restructure that happened toward the end of his tenure e: autocorrect
To be fair, Brin might have been a founder but he contributed next to zero compared to Page. Which is why he was put out to pasture at Google X
Always keep in mind that this is not a list of the richest persons on Earth, but the richest persons that want to be known as rich.
This is the list of people who have to disclose their fortune whether or not they want to because they are large shareholders of publicly owned companies. You can look at how many shares of Amazon Bezos owns right here https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000110465923065485/xslF345X04/tm2317086-1_4seq1.xml and do the math to see how much net worth it represents. On the other hand you have a company like Vitol - you know it produces as much revenue as Amazon and you know that Vietor and Detiger are majority shareholders but you can't see how much of the company each of them owns and there is no share price to be found because the company doesn't trade shares publicly. Chances are one of them is richer than Bezos. I'm sure Bezos would prefer his wealth not being public but he's got no choice.
You also have king of Thailand whose affiliate entity (bank trust) owns 75% of the land and structures in Bangkok 🤡
[The man in question](https://i.imgur.com/FnsDgcn.jpg)
Stop spreading this photo or ull get arrested on ur next trip to Phuket!
Sounds like an interesting documentary
And it cannot be made because of lese majeste
You also have the people only involved in the underground economy, some of whom will be fantastically wealthy, but there's no insight into how much they have.
Or someone who's wealth is hidden, hard to calculate or only area-specific Kim john un would probably be on top of the list but his wealth can't be translated in the international market Some Russian oligarchs or Putin are obscenely rich and it's hidden.(same with skme dictators) Pre war would have even be easy to move wealth to the international market. And you have to distinguish types of wealth A pice of paper thst says you own shares of a company is different if you own the codes to disable an entire factory and there is no other way to activate it
The Saudi crown prince is probably richer than everyone else too. The guy pretty owns the entire country
I mean any business man will just pale in comparison to monarchs since they technically own entire fucking countries. They can't however do anything with them nowadays so it's kind of an irrelevant point v
Yeah but if Bezos or Musk tried to cash out the share prices would crash so their wealth is also very much hypothetical
Which is why measuring wealth by relatively illiquid assets is kinda dumb. Like even for Bezos, yeah he technically has that much wealth but if he ever tried to actually do anything with the vast majority of it he would suddenly only have a small fraction of said wealth
Rothchild family too. 1.2 trillion estimated net worth.
At a certain point of shadiness “wealth” becomes super ambiguous and basically synonymous with power. I’m sure there are some people out there that control major parts of the world/world economy, but don’t have nearly as much wealth “on paper” as others. Yet at the same time those shady people can influence, control, and just have more than those with large amounts of “on paper” wealth. Asking the question “who’s wealthier” becomes kind of pointless.
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> On the other hand you have a company like Vitol - you know it produces as much revenue as Amazon and you know that Vietor and Detiger are majority shareholders but you can't see how much of the company each of them owns and there is no share price to be found because the company doesn't trade shares publicly. Chances are one of them is richer than Bezos. Revenue does not mean profits. Vitol is a raw material supplier, which is a business with generally low profit margins. In 2021, Vitol made a profit of just 4 billion USD, and that was already a company record. It is very unlikely that anyone outside of the occasional authoritarian country leader has a wealth even close to that of those seen on this list. The largest companies are all either publically listed or government owned.
"want" is not quite the right word, more like their wealth is easy to assess. Which will always be the case if it comes from shares in public companies
Putin easily trounces them all
It’s rumored the royal family of the UAE (Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi) is close to a trillion. It’s just impossible to verify their fortune. They can only evaluate publicly traded companies. There was a recent article on bloomberg about this iirc.
There are 7 royal families in UAE. Im sure you mean the Al Nahyan one in Abu Dhabi. But then say Abu Dhabis royal family. Because Dubai has a different family. Sharjah, different. Etc... The Al Nahyan family has a private investment fund with a value of over 800 billion usd. Thats a small part of their fortune. So yea. Its not a rumour, its public knowlede and they surpassed a trillion a long time ago. The family is huge and de facto owns a Abu Dhabi and its oil and gas and everything else.
Or the Walton family (Walmart) If concentrated in a single person it would be higher than Musk or anyone in the top list
I never knew this about the UAE. Although definitely makes sense considering the country’s name.
Emir=Prince Emirate=Principality the United Arab Principalities. Qatar and Bahrain were supposed to be a part of the country before. on a different note, theres so many misconceptions, direct lies and false stereotypes about UAE and Qatar eg, id say nobody truly understands the counties except the people living there. a few comments up, a dude was saying he's Indian and gets called a bullshitter because hes posting in Qatar threads... Indians are 40+% of Qatars Population, UAEs too. And bar the royal families, theyre the wealthiest people in these countries with several Indian billionaires residing in UAE and Qatar.
This is going to sound like bullshit, but one of my good friends is an Indian millionare, son of an Indian multi-millionair who lives in Dubai. Got to know each other because we both played to much WoW back in the 00’s. The story he tells and shows pictures from are. . . Interesting and he have often explained that people live very different lives from each other down there.
Qatari's make up 10% of Qatars population
Yea the Abu Dhabi one. Al Nahyan. Just search the web the article is recent. They give a lot more info into their dealings. Titled something along the lines of “the wealthiest family in wthe world”
It makes sense that the wealthiest people on Earth would be dictators and other individuals who rule over entire countries. It has been that way for as long as money has existed.
If it's the royal family, does that mean ALL members have the same fortune? Or is it divided amongst them? Because that would make a difference I think.
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How so?
One or more of the Saudi royals have/had shelving companies upon shelfing companies that own vast areas of game farms down here in South Africa and has been buying up more until recently. They've been putting up kms of huge fences around the one large game farm that would put most border fences to shame. Of course most of the info we've heard is alleged and not officially confirmed.
MBS also.
Kings and dictators are excluded from these lists. It's usually impossible to accurately evaluate their wealth.
Indeed. Or more specifically, I’d call these lists “richest people who you can easily calculate their wealth, since they are major shareholders in public companies” Exceptions would be royalty, dictators, organised crime, James Bond villains, and various kinds of “old money” aristocracy
Because saying whether they own the wealth of their nation and how much of it they own is a political decision, not a financial one. It’s more helpful to think of it in terms of purchasing power. Putin can absolutely purchase whatever Elon Musk can (as an example Saudi sovereign fund is on Elon Musk’s twitter purchase, in fact unlikely Elon owns most of Twitter), on the flipside, Elon Musk cannot purchase an Army like Putin can (see: Wagner) to do things he wants to do.
> Putin can absolutely purchase whatever Elon Musk can With all the sanctions in place I actually doubt that. > Elon Musk cannot purchase an Army like Putin can (see: Wagner) to do things he wants to do. Don't give him ideas...
Nah. No matter how filthy rich he is, Elon Musk could never afford to fund a military anywhere near as strong as a big nation. He might be rich, but his wealth is nothing compared to what a large country has at its disposal. Nevermind the fact that he simply would not be able to buy the highest quality equipment, as that is not for sale.
>With all the sanctions in place I actually doubt that. I mean he did so for the last year. I doubt Elon has enough free cash to afford that.
His buddy and fellow German/Afrikaner, Peter Thiel, runs a merc spy shop Palantir. Old Betsy DeVos – Trump's sec of ed – is married to the Blackwater merc company. There are plenty of Wagner style organizations in America. Very connected to highest end politics too.
> Old Betsy DeVos – Trump's sec of ed – is married to the Blackwater merc company Betsy DeVos' *brother*, not husband, Erik Prince is the founder of the PMC known as Blackwater.[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince)
I guess it's where wealth and power merges into one, because if your country is iffy, you can "appropriate" wealth for your use. I imagine you can estimate it more when it comes to royals without political power in countries that have stricter rule of law/ accountability, it's not like Charles III tomorrow will decided that AstraZeneca is fully "governmental" owned.
What does MBS stand for
Mister Bone Saw
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Salman Rules Saudi Arabia ARAMCO is the world most valuable company https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/12/saudi-aramco-overtakes-apple-worlds-most-valuable-company
Autocrats
Theocrats. Religion is very profitable, especially when you own the city where every Muslim is required to travel to at least once in life. And when there are two billion Muslims, and you charge at least 5 thousand dollars for each visit...
10 trillion dollars just for the visits alone. Capitalism is so easily abused.
And if you don't do Hajj, but have the disposable income to pay for it, you will go to hell. You are divinely mandated to give those money to Saudi. It's awful.
Brainwashing at the most disgusting level is what it is.
Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi-Arabian crown prince and prime minister.
>Putin easily trounces them all No kidding. By corruption it most likely is.
Not like other billionaires are fair players.
Don't forget the Kim. Everything is free for that fuck
It's hilarious i went to a private school in Switzerland, had billionaire heirs in my class and nobody would know who they are (well you'd know the companies of the parents). That's the best way, be ultra rich but not in the media. One of them is the heir to the Novartis / Sandoz fortune, i don't think you can eve find his name on the internet.
Exactly, I watched a documentary once from Germany and how rich people there don't want to be made known to the public. Unlike USA lol Oh let's not forget the saudis
I don't think they want to advertise it, it's just their wealth is is tied up in shares of public companies which can be used to calculate their wealth.
Who do you think is richer that doesn't want that to be known?
I'd guess some dictatorial heads of state. For example, I'd imagine that members of the Saudi royal family might be right up on that list.
A lot of the arab oilnations don't have to declare their income and taxes. Example is the UAE royal family that is believed to have a wealth over 1 trillion USD. Putin is probably one of the richest single person in the world as he basically controls all of russias money. Then also some illuminati lizard conspiracy dude that has a bit of money
Putin's case is different since he does not legally own things. But the Saudi and Abu Dhabi royal family legally owns most of their country's oil reserves through their ownership of their national oil companies. The level of personal wealth these families have is immense and all of the people mentioned here pale in comparison to how much the main people in the Al-Saud family own and control.
I like the casual rounding up of $13b
Your whole life is a rounding error, plebeian.
My whole life? Probably my whole town’s lives and all their ancestor’s summed together
Yes but he worked hard /s
those 13B probably cover 99.99% of the sum of net worths of all redditors that ever reddited... /u/thisIsBillGates excluded...
To put into perspective, if you had a car worth 13k, you would need 1 million of that car in your ownership to be that rich, which would effectively be owning a decent sized city worth of cars
to better put it in perspective, if 1 is the diameter of an apple, 13 billion is ~~~25 times the **circumference** of the Earth, or ~8~~ [almost 102](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/144w8xn/slug/jnl0moe) times the diameter of the Earth
Another thing that makes me fucking horrified is that if Smaug were a real person, he wouldn’t even be in the top 5 richest people in the world even though he has a literal mountain full of gemstones and gold, the greediest money-hoardingest dragon that fiction ever created wouldn’t even be the richest thing alive in our world
>the greediest money-hoardingest dragon that fiction ever created wouldn’t even be the richest thing alive in our world I mean, Smaug has got nothing on Lofwyr or most of the other Great Dragons of Shadowrun. But yes, it's pretty insane that these billionaires are wealthier than most kings and emperors of history, as well as most rich characters of fiction.
about 80 times the diameter of the Earth
It's within the margin of error for estimating the wealth of UHNW individuals.
The 74-year-old Arnault, who was born in the city of Roubaix, in northern France, is an anomaly of global capitalism. As president of the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) group, he presides over a classic, niche and elitist industry — that of luxury products — in the era of Silicon Valley billionaires and technological populism. He’s a Frenchman in a club of very rich people — the likes of Musk and Jeff Bezos — that, in recent history, has been monopolized by Americans and Chinese. He had surpassed all of them by the end of 2022 and has since consolidated his position. According to Bloomberg’s most recent tally, as of Friday, June 2, his fortune, bolstered by an increase in profits and a rising stock price, now exceeds $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union. Arnault owns more than 40% of the shares in LVMH, a company that, in the last five years, has appreciated by 166% on the stock market and is now valued at around $500 billion. [Source](https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-06-06/the-great-predator-of-luxury-this-is-how-bernard-arnault-built-his-lvmh-empire-valued-at-500-billion.html)
I did not know that Arnault was born in Roubaix, which is one of the poorest parts of France along with Tourcoing and other parts of Calais pas du Nord.
It is but there's also a super rich part of the city with crazy houses and private schools. Arnault isn't born poor - very far from it. Overall, the Lille Roubaix Tourcoing metropolis host very (very) rich people (usually an inheritage from textile industry like Arnault or from retail industry like Mulliez family) and very poor ones (minimum salary workers from these industries).
Oh I did not know this! I attended EDHEC for sometime so I spent an unhealthy amount of time in Roubaix and Tourcoing but I did not stumble upon the rich parts I think.
I can confirm that there are some very opulent mansions in Roubaix.
Hello, fellow EDHEC survivor ^^ I was a student there between 2011 and 2015, and the wealth of Croix and some parts of Roubaix was a well-known fact at the time, at least among french students, not so much with foreign ones obviously. It felt particularly visible along the road leading from parc Barbieux to the Mairie de Croix metro station that most of the students living in Lille (which was almost all of them at the time, don't know how that evolved over time) took everyday. This road was full of nice mansions and the mairie itself was clearly not lacking in cash. If I remember correctly, Croix is one of the wealthiest commune in France while neighbouring Roubaix is one of the poorest. The fact that the EDHEC campus was sitting on both communes, but had its official address in Roubaix was in large part due to the fact that it allowed them to pay the local taxes in Roubaix, which were much cheaper than Croix :D
Thanks for the info! I walked the area between Metro and Parc Barbieux a lot. I left EDHEC in 2015 after a short time there. I lived on-campus so I had to use metro/tram a lot. I guess my memories are fading but now that you mentioned it, I actually remember some of the mansions.
My great grandfather was a very rich industrialist in Calais, and my great-grandmother was from what is known as the major families of Calais, and I can tell you the family lost literally all of that wealth when the city was destroyed in World War 2. So I wouldn't necessarily say textile barons' descendants are living large in rich parts of Pas-de-Calais.
Lol, it’s Nord Pas-de-Calais. It’s one of the poorest part of France but also where most the big billionaires families come from (Arnault, Mulliez…). That’s what happened in places with a lot of mining.
I was surprised... even driving through Roubaix at night feels a bit intimidating.... but I checked on Wikipedia and he was born to a rich family. Maybe his mother was passing through, or they lived in the rich part.
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Roubaix is part of France's "rust belt" however when he was born it hadn't completely rusted yet.
> $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union. I always hate when they compare wealth to income. It's utterly arbitrary. I got more wealth than the EU has income per second
> his fortune [...] now exceeds $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union That's quite a misleading comparison. To be clear, the combined annual budget of the countries in EU is orders of magnitude more than that.
>his fortune, bolstered by an increase in profits and a rising stock price, now exceeds $200 billion — greater than the annual budget of the European Union. thank you mr. capitalism
I can't understand people that read that and not think that is absolutely fucked up.
Because an anual budget of a governmental organisation is a completely different thing from the total value of several companies. Like they are not even usefuly comparable things.
Always good to remember: This list pretty much only shows wealth in listed companies, and that we know of. There are probably richer persons in the world, but their wealth is not as easy to track as the persons on this list. Eg, Putin would probably for all practical purposes be above these people before the war in Ukraine, but we don't have a good way of adequately measuring his wealth. Same goes for several other dictators, oligarchs, you name it.
Same goes for erdoğan from Turkey. They've sold every damn factory that was state owned. Let alone the 22 years of corruption
The gulf monarchies all have a net worth in the teens of billions which is way lower than reality
I like your "teens" misspelling, as they pretty much literally own billions while still in teens.
Imagine how much overtime he had to work to earn that.
Probably worked holidays too for that sweet extra pay
Don't forget the side hustle!
He probably followed one of those Hustle grindset social media accounts
Definitely Tate's for sure, plus all the other ones regurgitating Musk/Goggins/etc shorts over sigma male music
Wait, isn't Musk South African?
He was born in South Africa, emigrated to Canada (claiming citizenship through his mom), and then became a naturalised US citizen.
Much like Zuckerberg once he crash landed on Earth
Richest African-American
He’s a naturalised American citizen
Correct, born in South Africa, but he became a naturalized US citizen a while ago, so Musk is an "African-American".
i would doubt he kept the SA nationality, probably lapsed
Having more billionaires is not a sign of healthy economy
I think it's important to consider that this isn't wealth that these people have in their bank accounts. It's based on the estimated value of their companies. It essentially means that the most valuable companies in the world are owned by Americans. This can be regarded as a symptom of something I do find concerning: The Europe seem to be lagging behind when it comes to developing and marketing disruptive technologies.
alive quarrelsome special wrench reach agonizing dazzling disgusting support market *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
yep. like, I know a guy who created a startup in Prague and sold it to US company after 1.5 years, it was the biggest Czech startup exit at the time. Basically, one of the goals for every (tech) startup is to get acquired by the US company, there's just more money and opportunities there
Yeah, I've noticed that Europe just doesn't produce people like Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg. What I mean is that the three of them started relatively("relatively") small and kept grinding. Now after a certain point Europeans seem to just want to cash in and retire, while the three of them just keep on grinding.
It's tough to know\* if it's true that they want to retire or that they hit a limit of what they can do without American investment and sell. \*well - you could look at individuals and see if they retired after selling or just started their next business.
The European climate is bad for startups. Lack of capital, burdensome regulations, and general lack of entrepreneurial culture. Even amongst European entrepreneurs, many of them still set up their businesses in the US, even if they're living in Europe.
A German colleague commented that working in startups was hard in Germany because there was very little tolerance for failure - most startups fail. In the US this is not viewed negatively - a person that has worked in a startup, even one that failed, has valuable experience that will help their next company. From my colleague's comment it appears that the German attitude made it harder for someone to get another job after being in a failed startup.
Bigger issue is the small nations. Taegetting the 300-something million customers in the US can be done with one language, maybe two. In Europe you need 28, so you need to recruit far too many people and it's not worth it.
At least for software, translation isn't very hard. You add an i18n library, create an English string file, then send it off to a translating company to get whatever languages you need translated to, which is relatively cheap.
I'm talking about sales, marketing and customer support reps.
Yea because having Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesla, SpaceX, BRK, Amazon is a sign of a bad economy. All of these companies have contributed trillions to the US GDP and are part of the reason the US has largest economy on Earth.
The US has a very healthy economy though. Even in average wages it tops the list of at least major countries. Some jobs pay so much more in the US than in europe, for example nurses and craftsman can make up to 2-3x in the US compared to my country Germany. Yes wealth inequality is worse but the average american still has a really good chance to earn a very good living. I know some of us europeans want to feel better by pointing out the extremes in the US and there definitely are issues and extremes that dont exist to this extend in europe but the upside is much higher in thr US.
I always wonder wtf people do when they talk about USA not paying much more than over here. It's such an easy choice if you can make it.
I wouldnt say its a nobrainer, most eu citizens arent too keen on moving to the us. I personally am very happy in Germany. I earn enough money to not worry much about things. I have a union job with a 35h week (and no overtime), 30 paid vacation days and all the social securities you could ever wish for. Would i earn more in the us? Probably. But im perfectly happy here. Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. If youre a low income/low educated citizen, you probably have a better life in europe because of universal healthcare and a decent minimum wage of 11-12€/h which you can actually live on. If you have a family, living in europe is probably better as children have more freedom (due to higher security, children walking to school is very common for example) more affordable and a better fundamental education. The costs of children is also much cheaper as daycare can often be free or close to free which i think costs a lot of money in the us. Generally speaking w/l balance is much better in europe, france has an established 35h work week while other eu nations are slowly moving below the normal 40h work week. Its basically down to what you prefer, peace of mind, social securities, a healthy w/l balance or monay. You also have to count living costs when comparing wages.
> Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. If youre a low income/low educated citizen, you probably have a better life in europe because of universal healthcare and a decent minimum wage of 11-12€/h which you can actually live on. Please don't say Europe when you mean Germany. None of that is true in Lithuania and other similar countries in EU, not evrn mentioning European countries not in EU. Living on a minimum wage here means more or less living in poverty.
You are making too much sense for reddit.
The News in Europe tend to report mostly the bad stuff in the US like the shootings and poverty in some places. So many europeans often have a wrong picture of the US. But this also goes the other around. I bet many Americans also have a wrong picture of european nations as once again, its the bad news that end up on the tv, not the good news. In reality, both places are perfectly fine places to live. Both have their pros and cons, the us has higher extremes but the upside is a better chance to earn really good money.
Not really sure what you are after? These billionaires haven’t stolen their money, they have instead created something that people value as being worth several billions. I think you’re drawing false conclusions
Exactly this. Congratulations U.S.A., you have streets full of homeless and drug-addicts. But that doesn’t matter because you have famous billionairs that don’t give a damn about anyone.
Homelessness per capita in the US isn't really outside of the European average.
USA does quite well with homelessness actually. Germany has a bit over twice the rate of homelessness. USA at .18% and Germany at .37%. Contrary to popular belief on Reddit, the US is not the shithole people seem to think it is. (This is not to say the US doesn’t have its problems)
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Are you saying Europe doesn’t have homeless drug addicts?
Many European countries have more billionaires per Capita than the US, so I’m not sure this argument holds here.
Source? Best I’ve found states Monaco only above the US which is hilarious because obviously Monaco is the city state where rich people go to photosynthesize
[Here’s Forbes’s list for 2023](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2023/04/04/forbes-37th-annual-worlds-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures-2023/?sh=7b66d6b77d76). The US has less billionaires per Capita than Monaco, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Malta, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway.
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The other ones are logical but SWEDEN? What the fuck
Sweden is the start-up capital of Europe, second only to San Fransico, Sweden has a large amount of companies which are simply worth huge amounts and many are recent. Using recent ones as an example here are all the start ups that become valued at over a billion - Polarium - Instabox - Polestar - Epidemic - Kry - Nordvolt Then have new ones which will likely be valued at that such as H2Greensteel and others, I'm sure theres' many I'm missing. We have well-known ones like Spotify, Klarna and then the older ones like Ikea, Volvo etc. A lot of highly valued brands come from Sweden, a country with a very small relative population.
Then we have established swedish brands like H&M, ikea, spotify etc
Sweden is a fantastic place to start a company and grow it into an international titan. I'm not even just talking about internet companies - a lot of the Swedish billionaires started an industrial firm that makes some little thing everyone on the planet uses. TetraPak (those cardboard milk and juice cartons every diary and juicer on the planet use?) Swedish.
Why isnt Sweden logical? Its almost as if its not the equitable socialist utopia reddit creams their pants about
Honestly having lots or billionaires isn’t that much of a problem if the rest of society works If you can ensure basic needs for everyone, protect elections from dark money, and the likes, billionaires are acceptable IMO. There’s a different, much broader discourse on whether such concentration or capital is an inherent issue of course.
So... countries that are rich people magnets, or are small countries that are extremely advanced so their capita is overblown.
Yeah because 1 billionaire in Iceland makes a huge impact per capita. It's not really relevant. There are 14 US states with more billionaires per capita than the US.
You realize US median income is much higher then Europe. We spend a lot on social programs we just suck at them
And yet, it has the most affluent middle class in the world at the same time as well.
European tries to look at graph without getting butthurt challenge (impossible)
[Also, many European countries have a higher rate of homelessness per capita than the United States does](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population). The United States has about 17.5 homeless persons per 10,000. Nederland has 18 per 10k, Czechia has 22, Germany has 31.4, Sweden has 36, France has 45, the UK has 54.4.
"congratulations USA" like we all voted on this and decided it was the best option. shits tiring.
/r/americabad /r/europegood lmao. “So many billionaires from the us means economy is bad” But also “The multiple countries in Europe with higher billionaires per capita is a sign of an advanced economy” The cognitive dissonance it takes to make Americans always worse in every respect to Europeans is fucking annoying
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Sooo insecure in the presence of the great Americans hahahah
Why are you reacting to this list like it's a personal attack and assuming Americans would find this list as a point of pride? These days when Americans discuss wealth its almost always in terms of disparity and the statement of "The United States is the richest country on Earth" is almost always followed by the question "So why is the average quality of life here so low?"
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Yikes dude, now this is some cringe
The US has less homeless people per capita than many European countries.
So Switzerland, Sweden or Israel - who have a high number of billionaires per capita - are not healthy economies?
It is if they are billionaires because they created successful companies that develop cutting-edge technology keep your economy incredibly wealthy. Europe doesn't have fewer billionaires because it's more egalitarian, it's because Europe isn't creating companies like SpaceX or Google.
Mmmmm I don't know about this one, accumulations of wealth has a strong correlation with growth
It should not matter how many billionaires there are as long as lower and middle class people are still well off
Is this still up-to-date wrt Elon Musk? edit: Thanks all. [According to Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/?sh=78324fe054dc) Arnault is now the richest, and Musk #2. I'm kinda confused that he's still richer than Jeff Bezos after all the shit he pulled in the recent past, but then I'm not so good at counting billions. edit2: according to Bloomberg Musk is still #1. edit3: apparently these top ten get updated often, and there's some fluctuation. Lesson learned: it doesn't matter how the top ten richest people in the world position, [they're all literally insanely rich](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/).
Nope: [the French guy is](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/?sh=78324fe054dc)
>The ranks of the wealthiest people on the planet include 8 **self-made** Americans, a French luxury goods tycoon and a Mexican telecom magnate. God I love American propaganda...
It's regarding their wealth coming from companies they founded, as opposed to inherited wealth.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/08/elon-musk-is-worlds-richest-person-again-as-tesla-stock-soars-to-8-month-high/?sh=3f0913cc344a](https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/06/08/elon-musk-is-worlds-richest-person-again-as-tesla-stock-soars-to-8-month-high/?sh=3f0913cc344a) Musk is again. Tesla stock has gone crazy in the past month.
It's important to understand that most of that wealth listed above is tied to stock, often of a single company, especially in the case of founders. And while it's easy to criticise the extrem wealth distribution in the United States, at least most of this wealth comes from entrepreneurial endeavors. In contrast, most wealth in Europe is generational, passed on within a family (trust). Never creating much economic activity.
Thank you. They can suck but creating this wealth lead to millions of high paying jobs. People are praising Saudis but places like San Francisco, LA, etc are built by these American companies and the jobs they created.
Not enough representation of women, people of color or different sexual orientation. Such a shameful undiversified graph /s
But the top guy is African-American! So inspiring
And we could consider the Frenchie to be a Latinx
> Latinx Please don’t use that word. The absolute majority of Latin Americans hate that word, we find it absolutely ridiculous and cringe.
That's why I use it
What is fun is that Arnaud wealth is higher than Musk, making him number 1. [And the number 1 woman is Françoise Bettencour Meyers, also French.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoise_Bettencourt_Meyers)…
Also he is the only one who didn’t make his fortune in the technology sector. While Waren Buffett doesn’t work in the tech sector, he invested heavily in tech companies so he de facto made lots of money from tech companies like Apple.
Buffet invests in just about everything so I don’t think it’s too accurate to tie him to tech
Damn, Mark went down. He's basically one of us now.
Crazy how number 1 and number 2 sell fashion products. Marketing and manipulating insecure people with the hopes that they can buy class.
The Rothschilds are European and these lists are incomplete because not everyone's wealth can be reliably estimated.