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.”
Rich people always, without exception, fail to recognize their own disconnections from reality.
These motherfuckers clearly need to be paying more taxes.
Something Bill Gates actually agrees with. He’s one of the super rich who has been outspoken about the rich needing to pay more taxes.
Something Bill Gates actually agrees with
It’s always interesting to me how people bring this up regarding Gates and Buffett, as if that makes their largesse and greed at the expense of others perfectly acceptable. It’s easy to say you support something when you know you’re never going to be held accountable for following through.
Few things in life are pure binary, and that’s especially true of humans themselves. My take on Gates is that he was a smart but cutthroat businessman who did a number of things that were at least somewhat unethical, and became one of the richest people in the world. Then he got older and started thinking about his life and his legacy. He has been giving away huge sums of money to really worthwhile causes, like trying to eradicate malaria. He seems pretty sincere in his lobbying for increased taxes for the rich.
Does his philanthropy now erase his unscrupulous behavior when he was young? Not to me, but I do believe he’s genuine in wanting to make the world s better place and putting his riches to good use.
What could a horse ranch cost? $10?
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…
You’ll love this:
They mean billionaire middleclass.
I think they actually do. $16 million is like weekend money for them, I’m guessing
They don’t even spend that money, as is all billionaire spending. They borrow against their assets and profit enough to pay back the loan so they literally don’t spend money by using that credit line to buy more assets. Gates, bezos, musk, etc. depending on their market situation they could literally take a piss and be 16 million dollars richer or poorer and it wouldn’t matter.
It’s insanely broken and dangerous. If money was gravity they’d be black holes, disrupting everything in the galaxy. Someday we’ll all be gone, and all that’s left will be one self-important machine counting all the money in the world until its circuits burn out. The heat death of capitalism.