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.”
But Daaaaaaaad, all the other kids are getting a horse farm!
All I got was a beer
Lol “middle class”… Does anyone know a middle class family? I just see people with money, and people who don’t have enough. That’s the real world… Maybe long ago there was a middle class?
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/
Diminished sure, but still the largest group.
I’ve met people who had enough but not too much. Never hurting for money, one vacation a year out of state but not out of the country, bought cars new but drove them for decades. Working class, but comfortable.
Yeah, some still exists, most have gone the way of the dodo
Never forget that Bill’s mom was on the board of directors at IBM and pushed for the company to use her boy’s software startup in the very beginning. Microsoft was built entirely on this nepotism and monopoly. There is nothing remotely middle class about that story.
cross class “networking” is common and more or less the only way people move up in the class system. Having rich colleagues/ aquatences is an important part of most extremely successful startups and is absolutely something that happens to “middle class” people, just not to those living paycheck to paycheck.
She wasn’t on the board of directors of IBM, she was on another board which the CEO of IBM was also on.
It’s a distinction without a difference, but still.
How do you raise a child “middle class in this house:
Bill Gates designed and owns a 66,000-square-foot (6,100 m2) mansion that is on Lake Washington in Medina, Washington.In 2009, property taxes were reported to be US$1.063 million on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million.
The house features an estate-wide server system, a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) gym, and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) dining room. There are six kitchens and 24 bathrooms, ten of which contain bathtubs.
Why TF would you put in a pool that is 7 m shorter than Olympic sized? There’s a reason they are 25 m. It makes it much easier to determine your daily workout.
Olympic-sized is 50 meters, but your point stands.
Bill Gates is rich enough to have other people work out for him.
20 yards is still a nice number, but it is weird to not just go a bit further and hit the 25m distance of a standard competitive pool
Hmmph. The most surprising part is that there are ten tubs for 24 bathrooms. You’d think those sort of people would just have combined the ten tubs into three giant tubs in 8 giant bathrooms so they could do their kinky stuff. Wasn’t bill a multiple time guest of epstein?
Rich people are so goddamn out of touch with reality.
How much can a banana cost, Michael? $10?
I wish that had not been foreshadowing…
Akshually. Depending on which definition you use they are middle class. The original meaning of middle class is the wealthy who don’t hold a title. They sit below the aristocracy aka upperclass, and above the peasantry aka the working class. The middle class is also called the bourgeoisie.
i like the original meaning because it made it a lot easier to point at the bourgeois and their politics (which is currently ruining my country and the proletariat is more than willing to lean even harder into their destructive mandates).
in my country/culture, middle class is (or at least was) anyone who have earned a professional title of high esteem. i.e. a doctor. and socially they were highly respected, regardless of actual wealth status. wealthy people used to be targets of ridicule (because they tried to flaunt their wealth in public. i still remember, 20 years ago, how one of our wealthiest individuals were literally crying on TV how no one respected her for wealth and she much preferred american culture. incidentally and totally unrelated; she launched a bunch of reality tv shows about worshipping wealth after that).
unfortunately american social media and said reality TV shows have radically changed how youth and the younger generation identify “status”. i always hear about how they will be rich one day and buy a super mansion. but if you ask what the purpose of that is; they couldn’t explain it - it’s just what they’re told to desire.
so from my perspective, the next 2-3 generations are on a path to ruin in the name of capital ownership for the few.
“Middle class” isn’t a thing. There’s the working class and the ruling class.
and in the narrow band where you neither need to work nor have the wealth to rule is the middle class.
I thought this was a Philomena Cunk meme at first
I only got a £2 million pony farm for my 18th, and I was raised working class so this makes sense…
Clearly not relatable at all but why do we talk about that all of a sudden? Is it a diversion over something else?
The corporation knows we hate billionaires. They rang the dinner bell and gave us our slop. Now we need to lap it up and generate ad revenue for the business. We need to tell the world: ragebait articles contribute to society, they generate value, it brings in the visitors.
He’s such a philantropist
Rich people have literally zero idea what middle class is. I’m middle class and I haven’t been able to afford to go to the dentist is about 20 years. Sometimes the lower class lives better than the mid and lower middle class. We make just barely too much money to receive help. We made a decision to not stay in poverty and take raises that make us lose benefits, and life has only been harder since then.
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.
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.
Our household income is just over 100k, I make $58k but it’s self employed so I pay at least 14% to social security where most only pay,~7%. And zero benefits, but my wife has decent medical, but not dental. We are solidify middle class for our area, lots of people make less but many of them get free medical care.
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.
Self employed, nonprofit. Pay lots of taxes, but zero benefits or retirement. My kids are aging out of the child tax credit but they’re still at home. We don’t qualify for Medicaid. We used to but not now, my wife runs a big High School cafeteria only for the health insurance. She gets the privilege of collecting “lunch debt”. Still driving my 17yo daughter to school because there’s no busing, and drivers ed isn’t offered and private driving instruction is closer to $2k than it is to $1k. Hoping to be able to be able to go to the dentist soon but life continuously gets in the way. New roof. New HVAC and ductwork. Foundation repair and waterproofing. Currently taking down a massive half-dead tree that leans over my son’s bedroom. The cost of life is massively outpacing wages.
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.
I’ve been poor too, I get it. And my job is to a large part helping under-esourced people get connected with food and other resources. So I still see it firsthand almost every day, and I know there are people who are way worse off than me.
My wife did work three jobs through COVID and I worked two, to try to save up a chunk of money so that we could afford to try to catch up on our dental care. We also saved all of the stimulus money. And we were there, but instead we got foundation repair - oh, and also replaced the water heater. You can be however fucking smug you want to be, but it sucks. I didn’t even mention the car repairs. There are no non-car options here and we can’t afford to move. My wife is now back to three jobs and Im back to two. We’re in our fifties with no retirement savings and just hoping to pay off the house before 70 so we have some hope of a short retirement. It still sucks.
Also, I never said I had it worse than people who are poor, you’re putting words in my mouth. They have it worse no question, but they do get free care I can’t afford.
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.
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.
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.
A graduation gift worth more than most people will earn over an entire career.
