Sixteen American tech/internet billionaires account for well over half-a-trillion dollars in personal wealth.
Perhaps worst of all, this list is horribly incomplete and only looks at those who made extreme amounts of money in tech. It does not include finance, business, real estate, etc. It also does not include millionaires. It only considers billionaires. How we are ever to unwind the strings of division that hobble us in these most unsettling times is hard to imagine, but the facts are not a bad place to start.
Other interesting factoids about this list:
- There are only two women on the list, or 13 percent of the total, and everyone else is a white male.
- Facebook has made all of its 30-something founders into billionaires, with Mark Zuckerberg being both the richest of the group and the most prominent.
- Microsoft has created over $100 billion in personal wealth for its two founders, and an additional $34 billion for its former CEO. By way of comparison, New York State passed a $153.1 billion budget last year.
- Google has created over $90 billion in personal wealth for its two founders.
- Facebook had not been created yet when George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. (It would be another four years for that to happen.) Google was just two years old at the time and Amazon had just turned six.
- There is a grouping of founders born between 1953-56, there is a second grouping from 1964-73, and there is a third grouping from 1982-84. Larry Ellison is the only billionaire on this list born before 1950.