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.”
She means she told them to hold their wallet around the blacks in the city, and that only feminine gays are acceptable.
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probably confusing it with UPPER middle class people, which are nowhere near middle class.
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When you are a billionaire a $16m ranch is middle class.
Remember the difference between 1 million and 1 billion, is 1 billion.
It’s not. It’s 999 million.
rounded up
Eh, it’s a 0.1% difference
Correct.
It’s well within tolerance. Functionally 1 billion :p
I’ll gladly take the difference.
I worry more about the actual rent-seeking oligarchy in my part of the world running for political positions in next month’s elections.
Gates may be one of the better billionaires, but it’s still like comparing prostate cancer to brain cancer.
What makes you think that ? The missing bad headlines in the newspapers ?
Its middle class, how much do they need to spend on graduation? 1mil? Yeah, we’ll go 16mil and be the most middle class.
Ok.
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.
Everyone say it with me, “THERE. ARE. NO. GOOD. MILLIONAIRES. OR. BILLIONAIRES.”
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.
Pff, he is still a piece of shit even with his “philantropies”. For example, he has given some money to fight some diseases (though even then there is an argument to be made that his focus on fashionable diseases has taken resources away from more pressing diseases affecting the global south, but that’s another discussion). But then as soon as it was convenient for him he rallied against lifting the patents of Covid-19 vaccines during a pandemic (https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/). So what fucking good are his philantropies if he still acts like a piece of shit at the most crucial moments. Everything he does is just to increase his power and influence, and to whitewash his image. He is still the same piece of shit he has always been. You have to be purposefully naive to think anyone who remains a billionaire is trying to do any good.
…and not living behind gated walls. My partner works construction in some truly outrageous "communities " and the people in our city don’t even know the lavishness of the lives of those who live there.
Well, okay, if that’s upper class then what size ranches do middle class people buy for their kids’ graduation?
You crazy LEGO is crazy expensive!
Mattel brand. Less cost on maintenance also.
What could a horse ranch cost? $10?
Rich people always, without exception, fail to recognize their own disconnections from reality.
So, Bill (after the divorce) buys the ranch as a gift, but the headline circles it back to a unsourced Melinda quote ON YAHOO FINANCE! This is another obfuscating hatchet job to whitewash billionaire behaviour by media owned by said billionaires. Please don’t engage. This is non-news. Down vote this to the sewer where it belongs.
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.
and gates has to reinvent his image with his “charity work” he still a ruthless businessman, and countries complained about his vaccine requirements as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
