Say what now?
Let's just set aside the issue of wages across the world because that's a whole mess of messiness.
Instead, let's look at a different kind of math. The one that looks at the top 11 richest Americans (among the top 20 in the world).
Bill Gates is worth 67 billion dollars by himself. One billion could
make 1,000 millionaires. If you divested his wealth, you could make 67,000
individual people millionaires. If those people were able to get a 5% annual return, from
the interest alone, they would have an annual income of $50,000—slightly higher than
the average income today (and higher than the $34,000 number in the video). The difference is that they wouldn’t have to spend
all of their days working to get that income. They would be free to
pursue other interests, like volunteering or tutoring or just sipping mimosas
and shopping all day.
Let's add up the list:
2. Bill Gates: $67 billion
4. Warren Buffett: $53.5 billion
5. Larry Ellison: $43 billion
6./7. Charles & David Koch $34 billion (each)
11. Christy Walton $28.2 billion
13. Bloomberg $27 billion
14. Jim Walton: $26.7 billion
15. Sheldon Adelson: $26.5 billion
16. Alice Walton: $26.3 billion
17. Robson Walton: $26.1 billion
19. Jeff Bezos: $25.2 billion
20. Larry Page: $23 billion
Grand total: 406.5 billion.
That’s the equivalent of 406,500 millionaires--even more than the entire population of Anchorage, AK* (392,535). Between 11 people! Put another way:
who wouldn’t want to live in Alaska?
