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Feeling good about yourself today? We can fix that. On Wednesday’s Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Americans (to get on the list, you had to be a billionaire), eight were under 40. Four were under 30.
How does one become a fat cat before the hair starts to gray? Do something on the Internets. Of the 20 youngest members of the list, three are from Google and another three are founders of Facebook (along with relatively-speaking mature Web businesses like Yahoo and Paypal).
Of course that latter group includes founder Mark Zuckerberg who is worth $6.9 billion and at 26 certainly acts his age sometimes (if an upcoming movie is to be believed).
That said, the caricature of the nerd-as-tycoon doesn’t completely hold water. Some of the rich kids hit it big in finance – hedge funds were particularly lucrative. Owning a pipeline or two, or an NFL franchise also helped.
And, of course for some there was the time-honored American way of making money. They inherited it.
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Zuckerberg is a punk. He cut out his friend who developed many of the tools that made Facebook popular.
Guess his friend needs to "lawyer up" in a serious way.
And most of this internet stuff is simply funny money..... click for ads... but nobody buys... but someone wants to pay Zillions for the site... Facebook..... passing fad.... something else will replace it.... and then it's worth squat.... anyone remember netscape?.....
Guess his friend needs to "lawyer up" in a serious way.
Facebook may well indeed be a passing fad. I certainly hope so. Mark Zuckerberg's billions however are very real.
It will be interesting to see the affect billions have on their lives and them, to much to soon isn't good; most of the facebook stuff is just so much blah blah in pictures, kid stuff.
Another article where someone used the word "Internets". I didn't know a single entity could be made plural.
It would appear we learned nothing from the internet bubble. How is it that two areas of the internet, a social network and a search engine, both free services, are valued in the billions? At least Google is branching into software with their wildly successful Android operating system but what meat does Facebook have to offer?
You have Google who has total control of how you are ranked in searches and seems to have a habit of privacy invasion and then there is Facebook which keeps trying like crazy to make everyone's life public. Facebook is called a social network yet there is nothing social about it. We have created a generation of people that will only communicate via typed words. They have phones but don't talk. When they are with each other they are texting someone else.
These are companies that want to know everything about you and everyone you know and every place you have been for one single purpose, targeted advertising. I don't click ads on the internet because I don't have that much expendable income and just because you think you know me doesn't mean you know me.
What would be a great gesture to everyone would be to take some of the billions of dollars and get rid of the BS ads on these sites. Major websites have ads that are blatant ripoffs. They are successful because there truly is a sucker born every minute. I would venture to guess that the amount of people that use the internet that truly understand what goes on and what they are doing falls somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20% and this may be a high percentage.
There is an ignorance gold mine out there. Security software, web sites that promise to speed up your PC, advertisers and those that feed it to the masses, plus the hackers that have a field day. Anyone can purchase a computer but not everyone should.
I will predict that Facebook will eventually fall. I hope that everyone goes to see Social Network because as much as that weasel likes to state that he was young when those things happened and he's changed he is full of it. First off, he isn't that much older, second, attitudes like that don't change they just get masked over for a while.