Larry Ellison forks out over $200m to slurp up sexy Malibu strip Billionaire Oracle chief Larry Ellison has added to his impressively opulent property portfolio with an entire strip of houses on the so-called "Billionaire's Beach" in Malibu. Ellison has made sure that he won't have any problems with noisy - or nosy - neighbours by buying a string of properties on Carbon Beach, along with: a …
All those "homes" are a mere 3 meters above the sand, any good sized wave will rearrange the furniture within. From Pacific Coast Highway, most of them are rather pathetic looking for billionaire lodgings, and if we're in for some sea level rise, most will be within the mean high-tide line, and become public property.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Y'know - its his money to do with as he wishes. And fair play to accumulating all that moolah.
But, y'know, I can't help thinking that if you had all that money in the bank perhaps there are more interesting things (or "good for humanity" type things) you could be doing with it? <casting a glance to Bill Gates/Warren Buffet/Eleon Musk>.
Or is wor Larry doing this anyway and hiding his light under a bushel??
Buying property is just transferring wealth. He's putting it into someone else's hands in exchange for their property, so then it becomes up to them whether or not the money eventually goes towards a worthy cause or not.
Buying property is probably one of the best uses you can put wealth to, because the property will always be there. It will never wear out or go bad (well, unless California has a REALLY big earthquake) On the other end of the scale would be things like hookers, blow, bottle service at a nightclub, or an entourage of questionable characters - you know, the things a typical celebrity wastes their wealth on.
Larry may be wasteful when he's buying a bigger yacht because his ego demands the biggest one in the world, but leave him alone when he's buying property. That's about as close to doing charity before he's dead (or at least retired) as we'll ever see him get.
...Except that buying Carbon Beach property means it's wealth being transferred from a billionaire to another billionaire, so basically another tax deduction to an opera or art gallery or some university for some dumb "think tank" pontification.
Other than Gates (whatever you think of his business tactics) deciding to heroically eradicate various global diseases in Africa (like Pres. Jimmy Carter sans his own money) and Buffet doubling down another $45 billion, most billionaires in the world are insanely meek & small-minded in their actions. (Or maybe the news media just doesn't publish others' details.)
Note that it's been shown that philanthropy is sadly self-interested and appallingly stingy (as Teresa Odendahl revealed on C-SPAN way back...).
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/13246-1/Teresa+Odendahl.aspx
Noblesse oblige, indeed.
Who knows what Ellison will do his money after he dies? Most of his wealth is in Oracle stock, so it is obvious why he doesn't want to donate massive sums today - he wants to remain the largest stockholder by a wide margin to retain full control. Maybe he'll leave everything to his children, but maybe not. Why does philanthropy need to be done on your timeline, rather than his?
Is he able to actually use all of these properties?
As far as Bill Gates and altruism, he is donating money that he derived from US, through consumer fraud by selling defective operating systems. Gates belongs in prison for the next 35 years and all of his ill gotten assets should be ceased, sold and the money refunded to consumers who have been bilked by Gates and Microsucks. Thankfully Win 8 has been rejected by the majority of PC makers and consumers. Hopefully Gates and Microsucks will eventually be held accountable for their criminal behavior.
Your post sucks. Even if I don't use Windows, if I can avoid it, all this M$ and similar sucks. As far as the Gates altruism is concerned I believe it's quite a good business, and I believe his ego thinking he is an inventor was the beginning of Microsoft loosing it's mojo. Still I am happy he did not start some new church like The Church of Windows or something, good as far as taxation is concerned too. As far as Ellison is concerned I wonder in what banks and countries those billions are kept. I like sailing and I give him same credit for that. But finally I think those, and similar, guys should pay a lot more tax, a lot more.
Bill Gates charity fund is for tax reasons. Charity funds have much lower taxes. The fund earns more money than it gives away, the income is greater than the outcome. At the same time, Gates have said he will donate all his money before he dies, how does that add up when he is richer now than before? Because Gates have moved his money to the fund, it seems he is poorer, but he is richer.
Sure, the fund has given some serious money. Like $10 billion or so. But, that is during the course of.. 20(?) years. So, he gives away 0.5 billion a year. That is a steal: much lower taxes, and he only have to give away half a billion a year.
If it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't pay it.
The real suckers are the workforce whose dedication and commitment create most of that value. The handful at the top leverage that value to award themselves fat bonuses and paychecks far beyond their own real worth. Ellison might be more deserving than the average exec given that he actually founded the company, but there's no way his earnings are in proportion to his own efforts. If corporations were democratic it wouldn't be this way.
Yes, it's a bit of a dick move, and in the limit this would allow the rich to buy up all the good stuff so we peons cannot access it, but at least the man isn't trying to force other people who own property to abide by his view of things <cough/>trump and scotland<cough/>.
I say the best way to deal with this has been publicly available prior art for decades in the form of Monopoly:
"Let's see: you own N houses, that is N times the tax per house. Pay by 15 April, please."
If you read, the now quite old, "Difference Between Larry Ellison and God..." biography he's a very odd character, prone to unbelievable acts of charity sometimes and other times acts like the world's hardest bastard.
He went mental when co-founder Bob Miner got cancer, demanded to know why Miner only went to his local doctor, Larry immediately hired the best cancer specialists he could find in the world to try to help Miner, sadly too late to save Miner. Ellison even spent a week working as a junior lab tech at a cancer research lab to try to understand more about it, he then donated millions to a trust to help their cause. Other times when people have threatened to leave, Ellison has sacked them on the spot so they automatically lose all their rights to vest their stock options and publicly made their name mud so they have trouble making their next move.
His stepfather always told him he'd be a complete failure and never amount to anything, now one of the richest men in the world is not bad going for a loser! Good luck to him if it makes him happy, he's devoted his life to being number one, often at the expense of his personal life. However like they always say, you can't take it with you when you go.
There seems to be race to gather as much money as possible before people die.
I am a capitalist, but i do wonder what the point of having so many billions really is... to be the richest guy in the graveyard...
He has very big boats, an island, now a very exclusive strip. While it may not be his personal aim, but like the poster said above, if all these rich guys just buy everything, then there will be nothing left for the rest of us. Maybe they can eradicate the property market totally, if there is nothing that is not owned "as an investment" then there is nothing that can be bought.
It is all starting to look like a William Gibson novel, where the world is owned by the big corporations and they are so big, no one can touch them.
I've always wondered that myself. I think they just like the money for its ability to serve as a counter of how much they're winning. At a certain point it becomes meaningless to acquire more wealth simply because of its purchasing power: There's only so much you'd be permitted to buy and you've already got everything else you could want. If it was me I would disappear into the country, build traditional furniture & just be left alone (except for my herd of monkey butlers and topless model type women riding armored rhinos). But that's just me.
It is all starting to look like a William Gibson novel, where the world is owned by the big corporations and they are so big, no one can touch them.
Starting?
Where have you been for the last 60 years? (Think Eisenhower's famous speech about the military industrial complex)
If I were rich, I'd try to have the less amount of cash possible. Because having cash in the bank usually means paying taxes for it. Here's how I would do it.
The trick is to avoid earning money at all costs: have your salary as CEO being $1, or even nothing. File meals, traveling and living expenses as company expenses, so you don't need to earn any money to enjoy these.
How then one does to afford to have a luxury lifestyle, buy planes, yatches, properties, and everything else? Well, you don't have a salary, but you own (or have rights to own) lots of valuable company stock. So you go to a bank and ask for a loan. That loan, which would not be usually given to anyone without any income, is backed by the value of the stock.
When the loan payment is due, you simply default on the loan (as you have nothing to pay the loan with, remember, you have no income), effectively going bankrupt. The bank then proceeds to get hold off the stock used to back up the loan amount, plus interests (and perhaps an additional commission)
Since you're broke, you don't pay taxes when the bank gets hold of the stock. The end result is that you've enjoyed money as if you sold part of your stock, but without paying regular taxes for its sale. The only costs are the interests paid for the loan and the additional commission, which are way, way lower than the tax rate.
I'm sure that it is a bit more complex, but basically this scheme should work for anyone with enough stock.
And I'm not making this up, see http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/the-zuckerberg-tax.html?_r=0
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