If you know someone that has a couple million dollars, you would categorize that said person as ‘’rich”. If you see said person driving around in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, you assume that person is rich (it’s only a $400,000 car). If that same person went to eat at the nicest steakhouse five times a week, was able to put his four kids through college without taking out a loan and has a couple properties spread across the United States, this person has the characteristics of being “rich”, right?. During the tech boom of the 1990’s, that word “rich” was taken to a new level. Although, $50-100 million is a lot of money by all accounts and would set up your family for generations upon generations, a new level of wealth was obtained. We will look at three examples in particular.
Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos (I’ve left out Larry Page and Sergey Brin because Google is post tech boom having gone public in 2004, but they are worth $19.8 billion a piece) redefined the word rich and took rich beyond wealthy and took wealthy to some level that is unimaginable. This was the first time in history that a founder of a company gave themselves a large amount of their company and their company took off such that these particular entrepreneurs are in the stratosphere compared to even the ultra wealthy.
We all know Bill Gates. We all know Microsoft. He owns a commanding 500,981,726 shares of his baby. That equates to $15.02 billion in just stock alone. He is worth about $50 billion to date and has been worth as much as $80 billion at his peak. Remember, $50 billion is 999 million times 50 (a lot of zeros). Just a side note, Microsoft is such a monster that Bill’s partner Paul Allen cashed out years ago with $20 billion and current CEO Steve Ballmer is worth over $14 billion with $10 billion in stock (333,252,990 shares).
Larry Ellison may be less known than Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but I don’t think he cares about notoriety. Lawrence Joseph Ellison is the founder and largest shareholder by a mile of Oracle; the second biggest software company in the world behind Microsoft. He owns roughly 21% of the company that has a market cap of $145 billion. You could do that math but I’ll do it for you. He owns 1,106,834,580 shares of Oracle (yea you read that right) times $29 a share equals around $30 billion in stock. Hey Larry, how about giving me a million or two?
Last but not least, is the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. If you don’t know what Amazon is you really have been living under a rock and I’m not using it as a figure of speech! Amazon has had a great last two years until recently when their stock price has gotten a little rocked because there spending a lot of money on expanding and hardware (Kindle products). Nevertheless, his 88,068,493 shares are still worth beyond a gold and diamond mine. Amazon.com has been trading around $180 a share and has been as high as $246. He has roughly $16 billion in stock.
This type of wealth is so serious you almost laugh when you talk about it. When you know how much things cost, expensive things such as a private jet (average $25 million for a very nice one, Lamborghini Reventon, which goes for around a million give or take) and think that these items have 0 effect of their money, it’s really mind boggling. They could buy the NFL without a blink of an eye. They could buy whole cities and towns and countries. They could sit in their living room and dream a dream and make it a reality immediately. There’s nothing they can’t do or can’t have or can’t invent. What an interesting position to be in.
Will this ever happen again? Will there ever be another boom where people, normal people, are able to make this kind of coin? Combined these three guys are worth roughly $100 billion.
The numbers are unfathomable, what would you do with that kind of money? Would you give it all away? Would you expand your own baseball team? (I would) Would you build a castle that has a bat cave? (I would) Would you have your own Delorean from Back to the Future Part II (I would)? Would you have a full size USS Enterprise (I would)? Would you build your own casino/hotel in Las Vegas (I would)?
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