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.”
No one really seems to know what middle class is anymore. Both the family that is one missed paycheck from being homeless and the one lobbying their state for school vouchers so they can repurpose the cost of their kids’ private school tuition to their college fund think they’re middle class.
Is there a real definition of middle class? I’ve seen income percentile based ones, but that’s just bs, because depending on how poor or rich and equal or unequal a society is as well as cost of living, being in the 50th percentile might mean you’re dry pasta every day (because it’s cheaper than instant noodles, per kilogram), or it might mean you’re very comfortable.
What follows is entirely subjective, and is my perception of middle class is, in the US versus my own country, Estonia)
To me, middle class means you can live a comfortable lifestyle, and once you’ve been earning a decent income for a while, you can lose your job and keep living mostly the same lifestyle for several months without going bankrupt. But in reality, that may be only people in the top 20% (excluding the 0.1% ultra wealthy that are most definitely NOT middle class).
Middle class is the classic 80s and 90s American movie/TV show family. Either the sole provider, or both parents if both are employed, lose their jobs? Well, it’ll be a tight few months, but we’ll make it.
Home is not middle class though. This article puts it into perspective. I love this bit: “So what did Kevin’s parents do for a living? It’s likely the mom was a fashion designer considering the amount of mannequins in the home. As for the dad, he was likely a regular businessman.” What the hell is a “regular businessman” and how do I become one and make 300k+ 2022 dollars solo or 600k+ total household?
Now you could say “this is what the middle class was in the 80s and 90s, it’s not like that anymore”, to which I’d say, no, it’s not that the middle class has changed, it’s that the middle class is shrinking hard, and most Americans are actually working class now.
Anyway, this is my thoughts about a country I don’t live in and thus heavily skewed based on media. In my own country, the middle class has only started forming over the last decade or 2. We gained independence from the soviet union in 1992 and at first the class system was “hustlers and organized crime vs normal people (poor)”. Nearly all the wealthy businessmen of the 00s either had organized crime ties in the 90s, or deceived people out of their capital vouchers (yes, that was a thing during the privatization of the country). After all, what good is a voucher when you need food money NOW?
A couple of decades later, to me, growing up middle class here means you’re not worried about where the down payment for your first home is coming from after you’ve held a job for a few years. Growing up upper middle class is never having to rent in your life, your parents help make sure of that. Upper class is if your parents didn’t just buy you a home with a loan or fund your down payment, they bought it outright for cash. Now yes, it’s possible that your parents are loaded and don’t help you at all because “damn kids need to learn how to make it on their own”, but most parents do realize that getting started in life is ridiculously hard, so if it’s within their means, they tend want to help their kids get their foot in the home ownership door one way or another. Also noteworthy is that unlike the US, buying an apartment/condo here is a much better deal generally, so most people’s first home is an apartment/condo. I mean we get shafted less when renting too, but most people still want to own (even if with a loan), because otherwise you’re just paying someone else’s mortgage, or funding their holidays.
All in all, middle class is a vibe based definition more than a numbers based one if you ask me.
Millionaires are the middle class now.
yes, probably more accurately multi millionaires?
In 2018, Bill Gates’ net worth was approximately $90 billion. His estimated income was around $12 billion, according to estimates from Business Insider.
In 2018, the median net worth of an American household was $101,800. I chose median cause these billionaires drastically skew the mean. The median household income was $63,179.
If an average American household gave the same scale of gift in 2018, based on household income, the gift would be $83.29, and based on net worth, it’d be $17.89.
So it’s the equivalent of letting you kid buy a DVD from the discount bin.
At those sums, there’s really no equivalent. That discounted DVD has a real impact on your finances, even though it is a small impact. There’s no purchase that Bill Gates has to forego after spending 16 million on a horse farm, because the money flows in faster than he could ever spend it. He won’t be steaming a ham fewer for it, as we say in upstate New York.
It’s like letting your kid buy a DVD from the discount bin at the store you own?
A graduation gift worth more than most people will earn over an entire career.
At least he’s relatively philanthropic, Mush and Bezilbub don’t even try to make other peoples lives better.
This shows you how billionaires imagine middle class to be. They’re completely out of touch, as expected.
Never defend a billionaire, they would never defend you. Don’t defend them, idolize them, or trust them. Billionaires care about money and the power it provides, NOTHING ELSE. That’s the main prerequisite for becoming filthy rich, after all.
That’s right, they’re comparing to other billionaires and looking at themselves being so humble that they must be middle class. It’s unfathomable to them to know what it’s really like.
Being a billionaire in a world where most people don’t even early 50k annually is objectively immoral.
I worry more about the actual rent-seeking oligarchy in my part of the world running for political positions in next month’s elections, purely for feudalistic reasons.
She’s that bored.
Ikr? Rich and power but still a weird horse girl
I suppose, to her, having millions of dollars is soooo far away from her life that she has to look at it with binoculars and think that it should be middle-class.
All I got was a beer
She is a commoner. How else could she raise her kids?
Rich people always, without exception, fail to recognize their own disconnections from reality.
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.
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.
Everyone say it with me, “THERE. ARE. NO. GOOD. MILLIONAIRES. OR. BILLIONAIRES.”
…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.
What could a horse ranch cost? $10?
Much like the soon to be german chancellor, who told an interviewer, that he is upper middle class. All that while being a former Blackrock manager and owning (and using regularily) a personal private jet. Thats some kind of chancellor material…
You’ll love this:
Oh, I indeed love this XD Thanks for that
Tbf, it is “merely” a private prop plane, not a jet (which would be significantly more expensive still). But yeah, not exactly middle class material…
