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I went to the bookstore to find a book I saw a review of online. It's not out yet. Instead, I ended up with "Richistan", about the dazzling boom in the numbers of the wealthy in the US over the past 25 years. It used to be that the nation's billionaires numbered about a dozen (13 in 1982) and were mostly names carried over from the Gilded Age, with a few shipping tycoons thrown in. Now there are at least 1,000 billionaires.
Forbes magazine's official list has gotten so full that for the first time, a mere $1 billion isn't enough. You need at least $1.3 billion. The numbers of under-$1bil people have swelled too. A mere $800 million won't get your calls returned by Forbes today. Once, Warren Buffett made the list with $600 million. Today, he's the world's richest man, at $62 billion. Carlos Slim, who doesn't make the US list since he's Lebanese-Mexican, is second on the global list at $60 bil. Bill Gates is actually third, at $58. That's just $4 bil separating the planet's top three.
Folks, we are in the midst of the greatest wealth creation since the early 20th century, when Henry Ford and his cadre built huge mansions in Detroit, then the wealth capital of the US. Today's billionaires live in New York City, where Wall Street has enriched thousands, and in the vast Southern California sprawl, where real estate has been the ticket to fortune. A few live in Silicon Valley. The averages say that Washington DC is the wealthiest metro area in the US, but averages deceive. The super rich live in LA or NY.
Warren Buffett, ensconced in his Victorian house in Omaha, is the oddball here. Massive estates, private jets, yachts, etc. While some whine, others are getting very very rich. Journalists, faced with a declining profession, are ranting about the sky falling while the ceiling is being jacked up ever higher. You may want to search out the blogs posted by billionaires. Mark Cuban is an active blogger.
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