...there's a lot less fluctuation in the top ranks of the wealthy than there is among the highest income households.
Bill Gates' income in any given year may be topped by that of a hedge fund manager, Williams noted. But his wealth remains vast enough to keep him among the world's richest for a very long time.
The first paragraph says:
> The popular view of America's upper class is that of an ossified aristocracy. But research from the National Bureau of Economic Research shakes up this view, at least among America's richest individuals.
Not much has shaken up this view. Half of the list inherited $400 million or more upon turning 18. Even the other half of the list are from among a small percentage of America's upper middle class.
#1 Bill Gates. Father a wealthy lawyer. His grandfather was a national bank president. He went to an elite private grammar school, which had teletypes and computer timesharing back in the 1960s. His mother was on the board of United Way with the CEO of IBM - a helpful thing for a son who became a billionaire by riding IBM's coattails. Despite all of this, he is still on the bootstrapped, self-made side of the F400 list. He is not one of the heirs.
Next is Warren Buffett. His father was a congressman. His grandfather owned a string of stores. And so on.
The rest of the top ten are the Waltons, who inherited Wal-Mart on birth, the Koch brothers, who inherited an oil company on birth, plus Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg. Ellison and Bloomberg are the only middle class people on the list.
I do think there are new trends happening at this level, but they don't point to what the blog post authors are pointing to.
The third is not a majority. The first link says 57% were not born wealthy.
>>> And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with
Anecdote is not data. I don't know where you live, but depending on it and your social circle, the minuscule number (compared to the whole nation) of people you can observe personally would be very different.
>>> Often it was a right-place, right-time thing.
It was. So what? Nobody claims billionaires are superhuman. The claim is only they deliver (or delivered) value. Did they come into position of being able to deliver the value by luck? Maybe. So what? If you per chance found a deposit of gold or discovered very valuable technology - they fact chance played role in it does not change the price of gold or the usability of technology.
>>> If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire.
Sure, so that guy everybody mentions would be called "John Walles" instead, it's no different.
>>Even the mega-wealthy families of the robber-baron era are not that well represented in these lists.
May be because bulk of that wealth is locked in Trusts. And passed on through Trusts.
The Bezos, Zuckerberg's and Gates will leave behind Trusts which their descendants will inherit. You won't find their names in the richest person list in the next few decades. Their descendants will almost be as rich as the richest guy of their times. They will just be rich through a proxy.
"No single Swede comes close to the epic wealth of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett." -- wasn't Ingvar Kamprad (of IKEA fame) more wealthy than Gates at one point? Due to some currency being strong, iirc.
> The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth
Not sure what you mean by that. Just going through the wikipedia articles they certainly seem to have inherited some part of their fortune. Using money to make more money isn't particularly complicated. You also inherit the social standing which makes successful investments much easier.
Let's give some credit to Bill, ok? How many Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Astors, Rothchilds, Waltons etc etc did what Bill Gates did? Combined, they have thousands of offsprings and had way more money that Gates' father had.
So yeah, Bill cam from a well to-do family but he also was extremely {insert here}...
Although I think people superestimate the wealth of some leaders (like Putin and Khadaffi when he was alive), there is some people much wealthier than Bill Gates.
I met once a guy that worked for some banks that handled middle-east money, and he said it was not uncommon to see some accounts moving around numbers with a crazy amount of zeroes, although he didn't knew what was personal money, what was family money, and what was company money, the amount of money flow still was much, much more than what western people move... but middle easterns don't care about disclosing it.
I'm rather disappointed PG would think that the Forbes wealth list could support any kind of conclusion whatsoever. One of the biggest reasons that the top of the list is filled with tech billionaires is that their wealth is relatively transparent, being mostly in the form of stock holdings in publicly traded companies and often directly disclosed. This makes it much easier for Forbes to estimate their net worth with some degree of confidence. Older wealth is often more opaque and diffuse, hidden behind various complex financial structures or stored in assets that are difficult to value or rarely change hands. Whether Forbes is aware of how much wealth there is and in what form, depends largely on the desire of the possessor to make it known. Some would want to disclose (or even inflate) their wealth for ego or branding reasons. Others would likely prefer to remain off the Forbes list altogether. So the Forbes list is a poor starting point even for a discussion soley about the wealthiest people. To draw any kind of inference from it to the broader economy is just downright ridiculous.
> It doesn't seem to be the case in the Forbes 400
Per the link, 7 of the 20 inherited their wealth. Of the others in the top 10, per Wikipedia:
* Gates' wealthy family background is described in another post in this discussion.
* Bezos' family (broadly defined) owned a 25,000 acre ranch in Texas and his father was an Exxon engineer
* Buffet's father was a member of the US Congress
* Zuckerburg is the child of a psychiatrist and dentist, and attended high school at Phillips Exeter academy (possibly the most elite high school in the U.S.).
* Ellison grew up middle class
* Bloomberg seems to have been working class
Note also that in the land of opportunity, where ~33% of the population is white-skinned and male, 90% (18 of 20) of the 20 wealthiest people are white guys and the other 2 are white women who inherited their money from white guys.
The rich aren't stashing most of their money under a mattress. Gates, Bezos, etc are worth billions, but that wealth is almost all based off of the stock prices in the companies they own percentagess of.
Pedantic, but. Families with $1m net worth are largely late-middle-aged (newly retired) salary workers with paid-off mortgages on their median-priced houses in suburban flyover country, plus ~40 years of 401k contributions and capital gains.
They drive Toyotas and fly economy for their 1-2 yearly vacations because that's what left when the 15% 401k contribution, mortgage on 3bd house, children's educations, and groceries are paid for.
Think teachers, bureaucrats, journalists (pre-internet), scientists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers, in roughly ascending order. What you'd call the upper middle class.
There are about 8 million millionaire households in the US as of 2016 [0].
Private jets are more a feature of the Fortune 500 CEO Davos-going class. $1 million in income maybe, very different from $1m net worth. It's not generally useful to conflate these wildly different wealth levels under the same terminology.
...there's a lot less fluctuation in the top ranks of the wealthy than there is among the highest income households.
Bill Gates' income in any given year may be topped by that of a hedge fund manager, Williams noted. But his wealth remains vast enough to keep him among the world's richest for a very long time.
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