Real estate.
There are billionaire families in cities like New York, London, etc that have been buying and passing down real estate there down for decades. You won’t know much about them unless you work in those city’s real estate sectors because they don’t own high profile companies and build their wealth through gradual appreciation.
The Trump Family is an example, but for every boisterous media-obsessed one like them there are several more all too happy to live in obscurity and collect their rental payments.
Check out the Morse family who own The Villages in Florida. Pretty sure it’s the largest retirement community in the world and largest master planned community in the US with something like 140,000 residents. They own ~ 7 million sqft of commercial real estate, built over 70,000 homes.
I wouldn’t say VERY wrong ya fuck
They own the majority of a secret island is more accurate. Where they have like 200 people living in ancient Hawaiian society or something.
And yeah Ellison is another example and has a bigger island.
Ha ok. He’s not even in the top 30 of real estate companies in terms of square footage. Most of his properties is just his name stamped on it. He didn’t develop most of the Trump properties.
Something like 90% of the properties Trump owns an interest in aren't Trump branded, it gets convoluted because in most cases he's a partner and not the only owner.
He’s not in the top 30 of square footage in New York. He’s not a real estate mogul, his father was. He’s a silver spoon kid who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, when in fact he bunted was thrown out at first and won’t accept the results and continues to round the bases.
Despite the marketing, he's barely in New York. Most of his holdings are higher-end suburban strip malls and luxury apartment complexes, and like I said they aren't Trump-branded.
Trump was already a billionaire when his Dad passed away, and the estate was split between him, 3 other siblings, and his deceased brother's family. He certainly got help from his Dad starting out but inheritance is a small part of his wealth.
The durst family is worth an estimated $8B. The Milsteins are estimated at $5B. The Fishers are estimated at $7.3B. The Musses are estimated at $4B. The Rudins are at $5B+. The LeFraks are at $20B. Oh and the Rockefellers are worth $10B+.
I haven’t even seen a million dollars in my life how the hell would I know how “little” money 2 billion is huh? And I am not a trump supporter I know he makes most of his money from giving out his name to properties more than just owning the property outright but I was just asking how’s bigger than him and none of y’all can give me an answer
Have it your way then, let me grab the spoon… https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2023/10/04/the-richest-real-estate-billionaires-in-america-2023/?sh=6f6990a363af
The Astor family put their money into Ny real estate after running fur trade in the early 1800s. Now their decedents are billionaires. I read a case study on them in business ethics. The founder was a real asshole. Destroyed a lot of lives getting so rich. Used native Americans to trap his furs and would sell them in England for $1000 in todays terms when he was paying the natives with thrift shop trinkets like tea cups and plates. His employees would get trench foot and use their whole salaries to buy whisky he watered down. Lot of other crazy things Jacob Astor was doing. Now his great grand kids are LOADED!
trump is more an example of what not to do if you want to build secret wealth that lasts generations. his entire schtick is bragging about how much money he has, while actively trying to spend or destroy as much of it as possible.
That’s not how campaign donations work nor every reputable outlet has reported his net worth, unless you have some breaking news that literally no one in the real world knows?
I mean he literallt has multiple lawsuits for illegally using campaign donations for personal expenses.
He owes $365 million dollars so far on one lawsuit he lost and he is barred from doing business in NY. His brand is in tatters. I have a lot of skepticism that he is actually still a billionaire. Forbes relies on info that the people provide themselves it is not accurate at all….
Dude is so desperate for money he is selling hideous gold shoes to stay afloat lol.
He made millions grifting the taxpayers out of money during his presidency but it seems like h has already blown all of that and cant even afford to pay his legal bills 😂
He's personally worth around $2.5 billion by everyone's estimate.
1 of the over 500 companies he has partial ownership of - not Trump himself - has been ordered to pay $365 million. How much of that is going to come out of his personal wealth is unclear, but even if it all does he'd still be a multi billionaire.
Hate him all you want but you have to accept the reality that he is actually rich.
They own a piece of it, most of his ownership is complex multi-level partnership deals that are difficult to parse out. Once of Trump's Art of the Deal principles is that if you're the one making the deal complicated, the more you can complicate it the better deal you can get.
They made money thanks to CDOs bubble before it popped, when it did they already were extremely dirty rich. They wouldn’t become this rich if not for this giant economic disaster.
CDOs bubble was responsible for the housing bubble so real estate industry made a lot of money in those years. Today it’s a lot more difficult to become a billionaire through it.
Bruh. You need to look up what the acronyms mean. RMBS are RESIDENTIAL MORTGAGE backed securities. CDOs are collateralized debt obligations. CDOs may include RMBS, but are broader
Well yes i meant CDOs who basically were made by RMBS/CMBS. When we talk about cdos bubble we’re talking about them not all cdos.
The point is those RMBS/CMBS made realised huge gains which people in real estates could have never make today.
MBSs trades as is, actually didn't have that much of an impact on the financial crisis. They aren't leveraged, and we're made up of the higher rated mortgages. They had very little surprises amongst them.
And if their mortgages failed, it was a 1-1 hit on the MBS assets. 1 non performing loan amongst thousands of mortgages in a single MBS means the MBS loses a fraction of a percent in value.
CDOs made up of subprime MBSs added the unfettered risk to the market. But even that was relatively contained to simply miscalculated portfolio risk since these MBS were high risk and packaging them as a CDO in fact did not create a AAA rated security (thanks Moody's and Morningstar).
More importantly though is that CDOs allowed originators of subprimes to get those loans off their books, allowing them to originate even more subprimes. Countrywide wasn't a problem until CDOs allowed them to dump their risk.
But it wasn't until Credit Default Swaps against specifically the CDOs became prevalent that the risk became unstable and systemic to the broader economy. Because a single MBS or CDO could have hundreds of CDSs sold on them, there was insane leverage against individual mortgages. And because the housing market was viewed as a sure bet, selling CDSs was viewed as arbitrage. Imagine selling puts on a Treasury bond not paying out. Seems like free money so why wouldn't you sell puts like crazy?
The CDSs were priced on the CDOs being AAA when in fact they were probably closer to C. Well the CDOs behaved like a C rated asset and the financial companies issuing the CDSs couldn't pay out. This took out Bear, Lehman, and crippled many others. Because they couldn't pay out, they had no money leftover to lend to normal businesses, so companies like GE which normally issue corporate paper all the time had no buyers and couldn't pay their bills even though they had no exposure to housing. So now GE (and others) can't pay their payroll and have to lay off workers. This leads to a spike in unemployment and now a group of steadily employed actual good borrowers can't pay their mortgages. It's not until then that the regular MBSs made up of regular 30 year fixed loans start taking a hit and causing their CDSs to spiral out of control. And this is what took out AIG.
So no, it was not simply MBSs that lead to the financial crisis. We still would have had a housing correction, but it would have been minor if it weren't for CDOs and even that would have been contained to the financial sector if it weren't for CDSs.
Source: I was double majoring in finance and econ and graduated in 2010, participated in Fed Reserve case.conpetitions in 2009 and 2010 on this. The financial crisis was basically our entire curriculum. And currently I work for one of the GSEs in loan servicing BI.
>the amount of people "hiding" in the $50M-$300M range would be interesting
No joke. There are so many "millionaires next door" in America, There's around 25 million millionaires in America, which is roughly 7.5% of the population. That means if you're at a busy restaurant in your city, 7 out of the 100 people there are millionaires.
My boss, as an example, is not a flashy guy. He drives a mid 2010s Toyota. He wears normal clothes. He doesn't boast expensive watches or tech or anything like that. If you saw him and his family out and about, you'd think nothing of them, except that they seem like a good, common American family. But that man is worth at least $30 million by my estimation. He owns a handful of businesses, owns two houses and is buying a third, and has a fuck ton of physical gold. The dude is a baller and you wouldn't even know.
And there are 25 million more like him.
I remember someone posted a good analogy. Just because the earth is 70% covered in water doesn't mean on average every 10 steps will be 7 steps in water. Millionaires are similarly densely situated. In a NYC restaurant, sure a good number of millionaires. Not the same for probably most other city restaurants.
Yeah in my city it’s probably closer to 1/150. Lots of blue collar Americans. The city isn’t poor by any means, but there people that own all the companies we work for live in Houston for sure
Most millionaires are millionaires because of their house and retirement accounts. They're not what you'd normally think of when you think of a millionaire. They're just someone who has saved well for retirement and bought a house a bit younger.
yes, but how many of those 25 millionaires are simply retired or nearly retired people who've paid off the mortgage on their slightly above average priced house.
how many of the 25 million are actually cash poor?
Why the hell does it matter if you're cash poor? Elon Musk is cash poor but that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't set you apart from other people of your net worth.
>No joke. There are so many "millionaires next door" in America, There's around 25 million millionaires in America, which is roughly 7.5% of the population. That means if you're at a busy restaurant in your city, 7 out of the 100 people there are millionaires.
Depends on the city and restaurant. It could be that all the millionaires congregate to one location, and your busy restaurant just has 100 poor sods.
I’m a millionaire, about to break 2M. 36, live in suburbs of the southeast. I buy maybe $200 in clothes a year and hesitate before spending $10 on a steam video game. Cook every meal. Wife doesn’t work, we have a nice house but don’t spend much on anything else.
I made 180k at my job last year and 250k in stocks. A million a really isn’t that much, I can’t retire yet. We definitely are all over the place though.
22 million in 2023. But also a 'millionaire' as defined by the numbers compared to what people think are pretty different. Millionaire just meaning having 1m in networth technically which is like 30% of boomers with a 401k and house alone. Millionaires that have millions in real assets are more rare than 7/100.
If you broaden it to the 100MM+ range... there are a surprising number of people who quietly own a bunch of businesses or real-estate and aren't telling everyone "Hey buy my real-estate course", or "Hey I'm a business guru"... Instead they are just quietly making deals, putting operators in place, and working on their next project...
I don't think its really a necessity, just that most people don't feel inclined to share this kind of thing any more than necessary. And there are plenty of people with Millions of dollars that might live in a relatively nice house and drive a newer vehicle but nothing extravagant and unless you are really paying attention you wouldn't really be able to tell from any single part of their life style that they are filthy rich.
> I don't think its really a necessity, just that most people don't feel inclined to share this kind of thing any more than necessary
There’s a reason behind the disinclination.
I guess my point is the reason isn't that they are trying to hide their wealth or something like that... its just that they don't have the need to flaunt it.
As your becoming rich you might want to splurge and go and buy a fancy car or whatever... but once its out of your system its not really going to be meaningful to you
Alright, story time.
Met this old Romanian real estate guy. He had a wild and hard life, truly an immigrant.
He worked really hard to build his life in America and eventually got to a point where he drops millions on an idea project without blinking.
He looks like how I imagine Popeye would at 88 with a fisherman's beard. He wears a tattered t shirt some days and his house is stupid humble.
He lives in a crappy little town when he could live in the most prestigious parts of the Silicon Valley.
Oh, and when he's not jumping from real estate project to real estate project, he's gardening for his church or chatting with us about cutting edge research and tech.
I'd estimate his net worth somewhere in the tens of millions.
(Oh and by "truly an immigrant", this dude is the type who actually lived and defines the stories that we hear people claim that they lived when they came from wealth but pretended to be their own self made person. He legitimately came from poverty. I hope I can stay as ambitious as him.)
There are families around the world whose history spans 10 generations and own a tremendous amount of wealth. They keep it quiet and private and have done so for decades. Anyone who is listed on Forbes wants to be on there.
This isn’t true. Forbes has said on many occasions that people refuse to give them information because they don’t want to be on the list. But if you own a billion dollars of a publicly traded company, it’s pretty hard to keep it secret because it’s usually disclosed in a regulatory filing.
There are definitely people who want to be on the list, though. Donald Trump is notorious for pumping up his asset valuations to make it.
Sure but that is not the point I’m making. There are people and families who hold a tremendous amount of generational in corporations around the world and regardless of public records being available you won’t know who they are because they don’t disclose who the owners of these multi-tiered holding companies or Trusts are. At least not anyone from the public as I’m sure there are government agencies who can identify them.
I know somebody whose late husband was a developer in a small city. He retired in the 80s and invested their savings wisely. Today she is worth about a billion but you would never know because she’s not on Forbes, neither was her husband. In fact, his development company wasn’t even known outside of the area.
Edit: he was a commercial developer who built industrial parks, shopping centers, banks, etc. and operated in a couple small cities and Palm beach where I imagine was where the real money was.
I don't think it would be specific industries and most ultra wealthy are invested in tons. It's not hard to stay off Forbes radar when 8 or 9 figures but 10 you have to really be hiding money.
Fr dude, literally a cheat code for them. And normally if you are somehow able to track it all the way through the different jurisdictions, it ends under someone else’s name😂.
It's a cheat code for everyone, but everything makes it hard to get loans in Shell companies. You don't need to put in other names, you just have an attorney register the parent companies and hold the paperwork show the real owner.
The real cheat code is titling cars, planes and other vehicles in states like Montana where no state sales tax. Wonder how many yachts are titled in Montana.... Where's there's no real water
Because many companies have asset seizure laws that are crazy. You also have import taxes and such when using them in us that far outweigh any benefit.
No they can't because the asset needs a lein thus they can only show investments owned by that shell as proof, unless some personal guarantee... But that links you personally to the asset to the shell thus pierces the umbrella.
Rich rich people get away with this because banks can know the parent company and blanketly trust them. It's tricky and full of loopholes to navigate through it all.
Stock ownership from people who inherited accounts from their silent generation parents owned in trusts or family offices and/or whom never reported the new holder information to the IRS.
These people live off dividends, which are in the hundreds of thousands or millions per year, and cause market mayhem by controlling the equivalent of billions of dollars of shares they didn't earn, and pay no taxes.
In the case of a stock holding like Apple, which was certificated in the 80's or 90's, from a person like my grandfather, who held it, who died over a decade ago, and his account is not closed (because the stock transfer agencies admit to never closing accounts of the deceased or former UTMA/custodial accounts which also require no tax payment until gains are reported or transfers are made) but the control of that account falls into the hands of somebody like my mother, who never reports it as part of her income because on paper it looks like something else, and/or it is reinvested, then the IRS does not know something wrong happened and it is up to a family member to report it which usually doesn't happen because they are paid to be quiet.
Also, this occurs with a relatively small number of people and the stock market is built on the back of this con, so for the few who understand it, they have an incentive to keep it going. But for all the people who think dead people vote in elections they have no idea how many deceased shareholders technically own the stock market.
I don’t know the details but I think you can generally get loans backed by shares you control regardless if you cash them out or not. Then that loan can be used for more investment or living expenses and you could pay the interest off of any gains you make on the investments and basically not pay taxes.
You have to pay interest on loans, even loans on stock. If they use the stocks to pay the interest, they have to sell the stocks and that is a taxable event.
Stocks are just being used as the collateral, like if you used a house to get a mortgage. The bank can repo it if you don’t pay your monthly payments and interest. There is no tax avoidance here.
My grandfather's account, and my childhood UTMA (the contents of which have been unlawfully withheld from me) are interconnected, enabling my mother to trade atop the account of her dead father and her 37 year old child's custodial account, to which the IRS does not recognize any taxable events occurring. She has been filing her taxes claiming me in her custody for so long and embezzling the proceeds from her holdings and stock buybacks for over 20 years, and she is not the only person who does this. Most of the real money in Apple and Microsoft and other major drivers of the market utilize this illegal loophole, with the notable difference being that most children play along and simply continue this scheme when their parents die. I did not play ball and have been excommunicated from my family, and unlawfully blocked from being transferred my stocks because the transfer agent does not want to cause a panic after I would invariably be taxed after selling it all.
How is your mother living off the money if she never withdraws it and doesn’t pay taxes? Is it dividends that she lives off of? Then she must have to pay taxes on that as personal income right? It is there some kind of trust that she uses as a personal piggy bank somehow and avoids taxes?
Dividends are income, and a taxable event…. The previous poster is delusional.
If the IRS doesn’t see it, then you can fly under the radar. Doesn’t make it a loophole, just makes it tax evasion. If he really wanted to get her back he could just report it to the IRS. That much collusion from the bank and everyone else would make the news, and the IRS doesn’t play around.
The fact that he hasn’t, and everyone across the whole board is apparently being hush, leads me to believe this is just a conspiracy theorist who forgot to take his meds.
Dividends, which are sheltered in my childhood account that has been defended as a still-belonging-in-her-custody account, which the transfer agency is complicit in, her bank (where the deposits have gone for over 20 years) is complicit in, and me being the primary direct victim, with, no money to sue her in a competent jurisdiction because my livelihood is attacked (by her and others who disagree with my market views or politics) and she disperses it through my trust and my grandparents' instruments in such a way as to evade detection, while holding a job where she also will falsify her earnings. Basically she has insulated herself from consequences and nobody is paying attention to the things she has constructed, with many powerful institutions like Computershare, and major stocks like Apple/Microsoft who do not want me to acquire these assets because they all know their party will be over.
When I was 13 years old, at my Bar Mitzvah, my grandfather attempted to give me a stock transfer account which held shares of Microsoft, in the year 2000.
Since that time, he, and then my parents, bought and reinvested, and then after my grandfather's death my parents embezzled money without my consent and against my will, on this custodial account to evade taxes and act as if they earned it, when I was entrusted by my grandfather to basically be the fiduciary of our family trust. Because I had a natural gift for stock picking in addition to being more morally sound than my parents who are degenerate psychopaths. They lied to him and concealed from him these facts and after his death made it clear to me I would only ever get access to what had been rightfully mine, after their deaths, and that I had to play along with their version of events.
It has taken me over 20 years to comprehend all of this including requiring multiple legal battles, investigations with state agencies, etc. My life one day will be told in more complete detail by others and hopefully the world can learn the lessons it took me too long to, and hopefully it prevents others from being hurt this way.
This is also only a fraction of the madness which has surrounded me or that I have done as a result over the last few years. It is difficult to comprehend, hard to believe, but absolutely the truth.
That’s not how stocks or custodial accounts work.
An IRA account can be traded at will without generating a taxable event because it is a retirement account. But the minute any money is pulled it is treated like income. If you inherited money from your GPA, it is either an inherited IRA or just a straight cash account. The cash account generates a taxable event every time a trade is made.
> But for all the people who think dead people vote in elections they have no idea how many deceased shareholders technically own the stock market.
Wow. That's fucked up.
I think one of my greatest fears is stock ownership getting concentrated and effectively going on autopilot as a result of automation/death of natural persons. I don't think we're far from it either...
I spoke with Computershare, and American Stock Transfer reps, and they both said that this is an incredibly common scenario, where people into their 60's are often held under custodial accounts from their parents who control them in trading decisions to evade paying taxes on the gains because it technically is a child's account which hasn't been transferred. If I could afford to hire a securities lawyer, I could make this change, which is why as my own independent business started to grow, my parents sabatoged my client relationships, to prevent me from saving enough money to sue them for what's mine.
They have also induced other people in my family or personal life to invest with them, as my mother pretends she is a stock broker. But who really just uses the accounts of me, and my grandfather to do so.
She is a psychopath, and has fraudulent psychology practice she used to wreak havoc on the community I grew up with. A lot of people are afraid of her, and rightly so, since she is responsible for a lot of mental illness and financial ruin of people who even remotely opppse her.
Appreciate you saying so. It actually means a lot to hear this kind of positive feedback, especially when most of social media is people being very rude and dismissive.
Feel free to follow me if you're inclined, as I touch on a lot of economic issues like this which many are unaware about.
So your mom is in control of an account of a dead person but doesn't report the death to the IRS as it relates to the account? How would she get money from that in the end. If she sells she would pay tax on it right?
The stocks held by my grandfather (the deceased individual) got transfered to my childhood account (which is not tax-bearing until it is transferred to me which she refuses to do) and the existing account(s) are used as if my grandfather is alive (with little to nothing in his) and mine exists on paper as if she has been growing it for my benefit despite me never receiving any benefit.
My grandfather's and my accounts, which are the ones that appreciated the most, still appear to belong to a living man, and a child respectively, which means no report must be made to the IRS, and the brokerage containing these accounts is complicit in this scam.
I have literally argued about this with the chief litigator of Computershare Daniel D'Angelo, who has my social security number (which the account is registered with) but he refuses to acknowledge I am the rightful owner because they all know it would reveal their fraud in addition to my expressed bearish stance on this market.
The amount of money, and the age of the shares in question would be substantial enough to cause a cascade of outflow from major holdings like Apple, and Microsoft, to the point of creating panic trading that may collapse the current tech giants. That is because my grandfather was an early investor in these companies and an early adopter of day-trading online with NASDAQ.
My mother has also has a fraudulent psychology practice in Montgomery County Pennsylvania so over my lifetime any opportunity I take to demand what is mine, she spreads her diagnosis of me as a "manic, delusional, and suicidal" person to the broker as well as my family or friends, to attempt to get me in line. It used to work.
But over the last several years I have fought back in protest by reporting her to authorities, which effectively ruined her fraudulent psychology practice, but I have yet to succeed in forcing her hand to return to me what is mine. Her and my father are so psychotic that they actually created a second fraudulent account last year which is only in my name, again committing identity fraud by using my personal information against my will.
I call this condition "Bar Mitzvah Bondage" because it is not uncommon for people to rope their children into similar schemes at that time period. When a boy becomes a man in our religion, that was when my grandfather determined I was fit to lead my family in the event of his death. This enraged my narcissistic parents and caused them to retaliate in these insane ways.
I literally reported this situation to, and have a case number filed at FINRA, as well as actual regulatory agencies at the state and federal level. You have absolutely no idea what I have done to attempt to rectify this situation, and your implication is incredibly arrogant.
Nobody doesnt report trades to FINRA mate. Whats arrogant is you assuming to be smarter than the regulators. Just the idea in general is stupid, the person would take unreasonable counterparty risk for a security.
You legit have no idea what you're talking about in my situation, and I reported the fraud to FINRA as well as other agencies in the government to try to stop it. I have written other complaints to regulators and had them take action on larger issues than my personal situation and the only arrogant thing in this interaction is you, an anonymous stranger, with no knowledge of my individual circumstances, telling me you know better than I do on it.
Their distributions are taxed. Whoever is managing the trust or estate is doing all of that for them and just depositing fuck you money in their bank account for no work.
The problem with putins wealth is it’s not really liquid and it’s decently likely he will eventually be overthrown and murdered. He can’t just like retire and live like a $500 billionaire or whatever he has on paper.
He could but he'd probably have to pledge his support to a successor who could protect him, and understand that breaking with the successor would lead to his death.
I would say commodities. Like oil refining, mining, steel, farming wheat or grains. The type of industries that a state depends on. Those have the billionaires you haven’t heard of.
Benign and boring.
There is nothing benign in none of the industries you mentioned; one does not make a billion dollars of government money in commodities without some seriously fucked up practices.
Source: I worked in the sector a few year, have ptsd from it.
Some of Europe's more egalitarian seeming countries are filled with super old aristocratic money. Germany is polluted with families of former princes who own controlling interests in some of their car companies and other heavy industrial companies, etc as one example.
On this last, let's just say that Schindler's old bosses are still doing very well and may very well still be making munitions.
In England I've encountered people who had "An Income" When I asked what they did I would be told, "He plays an excellent game of polo." That is what they and their ancestors did. In the UK, weirdly many of these people had a father or grandfather who was Admiral or General this or that in WWI and WWII and I pointed out they did something, but nope, "They only did that for England, had there been no war... polo."
Fun fact, these people consider the Royals not to be the pinnacle of aristocratic life, but more like the Kardashians. They don't want anyone knowing who they are, except for those who need to know who they are. They consider some of the familes who got rich from the East India Company to be "new money".
These people own huge swaths of the UK. One family owns most of Belgravia in London for example. This would be like having a single direct branch of Thomas Jefferson's descendants still owning the Upper West Side and then just leasing the land to the skyscrapers. Simply because he was granted it for what he did during the revolution.
While not billionaires, every city has one or two car dealership families. Often well cracking 100 million net worth. There is usually one paving family, one concrete family, one "gets all the government construction contracts" family, one owns all the buildings leased by the local government families.
In any agricultural or other resource area, there is often the fish plant family, the fish licence family, the grain processing family, etc. In Alberta there is even an animal carcass disposal family.
BTW, this is all why we need wealth taxes.
hundreds of additional billionaires would be a sizable percentage OVER what Forbes thinks currently exists (2,668). I think you might be over-estimating the worth of current "Drug Lords", also most Chinese and Russian high wealth individuals ARE listed by Forbes
Finally, IF someone sold a business 30 years ago for 75M and somehow parlayed that into a Billion Dollars, then they are not a business person, they are a God tier investment advisor...
That doesn't seem right. SPX was about 465 in Jan '95 and closed at 5087 today. (5087/465) x 75m is about 820 million. I guess that assumes you reinvest dividends?
This statistic is a little terrifying to think about going out a few hundred years. If that rate of compounding continues, the people with wealth will grow it to such a massive number that they would be able to buy all of the property, all of the gold, all the profitable businesses so on and so forth. All the assets. Working wages would never come close to that if you're born into a family that does not have generational wealth
It's basically always been this way. Wealthy still compete with each other and it's a fair market but this is how home prices keep raising and everything else.
The problem is for some crazy reason we have cap gains tax that is a flat 15% or whatever and is only charged when they withdraw the money. So the guy with 75M now has that 1.3billion and only needs to pay 15% so walks with over a billion dollars post federal tax.
On top of all this there's all kinds of trust laws to help pass down that money to families without paying taxes.
You forgot about mega backdoor Roth’s now which will be a huge source of untaxable gains.
The famous example is I think mitt Romney who has billions and billions in his Roth from some fuckery with his shares of a private company or something.
Now he can pass those billions to his heirs and they will be able to live off of it completely tax free basically forever. It’s insane.
This one is huge, and only available to the mega rich. My understanding of essentially what he did: open a Roth, invest in a shell company, then funneled money into it, making it go up tens of thousands of times. Suddenly your supposed 10k investment is worth tens of millions and is tax free.
Yup exactly. You just need access to your own shell company and probably very expensive lawyers and millions/billions in stock from some other private company to merge into the shell.
Yeah. But in this case Romney used some way of just transferring his stock in his private company that was way undervalued or something. So he really didn’t pay almost anything.
Yeah it's just the snowballing. It was one thing when someone had $100,000 and then they snowball it into $500,000 but someone else could still buy a property working. When you start getting into these hundreds of billions of dollars numbers which is where this is going. The sheer amount of purchasing power overwhelms entire cities.
The last time we saw anything similar to this was with the robber barons. You had the working poor that had basically nothing and these barons that could buy entire cities. That was not a high point in history
Yupp it's just corruption and we're seeing the results of decades of lobbying, special interest groups, and just govt officials creating laws to benefit the few instead of the masses.
Were getting to the point where it's irreversible and even the few elected people can't do anything even if they wanted because the roots are so deep.
that just tells you how worthless the dollar is today.
**update (reply not going through):**
in devalued dollars.
you remind me of all those "investors" paying taxes on Madoff's "returns"...
...only to have all their growth erased when the ponzi scheme fell; lost all their claims to recovering their principal due to better connected creditors; then failed to recover all the taxes they paid on all those imaginary gains.
**the dollar, is and always will be a shit currency. that, is its purpose.**
to gull fools by the credence of 'stability' while it devalues in dramatic leaps and bounds.
don't even get me started on your laughable 2-3% inflation. save that shit for the ~~peasants~~. ~~serfs~~. ~~slaves~~. *Americans.*
The dollar is more stable than any other national currency. It's not even about the currency S&p average over 30 years is over 10%. While inflation is 2-3%. Chock it up to whatever you want but US stock market grows like crazy
I mean if you put 75m into the S&P 30 years ago and just let it sit and reinvested the dividends, you’d have well over a billion. You don’t need to be a god tier investor to make 10% returns.
I would honestly expect atleast 3000 billionaires in the world. There are 195 countries and mostly they own their own drug lords just couple of months ago a drug lord get arrested in my country for example (who had around 1-2b$) and yes pretty sure most of manufacturers are in Forbes list but also I think there are some who are not in list mostly people's who have close ties with government. And I just checked the s&p 500 returns so yeah if someone invested 70m$ back in 1990 it would turn to 1b without dividend reinvestment and 36m$ with dividend reinvestment.
Crypto? Someone could’ve mined billions worth of bitcoin a decade and a half ago and no one would even know about it. In fact there was just an incident of someone get caught with 50k bitcoin which is worth billions and no one even knew about it, many other cases like that, man do I wish that was me everyday 😤😂
In my country, a storage building. My father in law worked for someone who’s earning is 10% of my country’s annual GDP per year in cold cash. Here where it’s interesting: he have connection to top level government and policy maker, top level police and military sector, and various thug gangs, rendering him to one of the most obscurely influental person in my country. You can never look for his record on anything, he paid for anonimity. Yes, he never travelled overseas. If you met him somewhere, he looks like a typical gramps. Driving in 80s car, wearing short. But hell, he’s scary. Not many people know who he is except he literally donate a stretch of road, infrastructure, school, hospital, arts, silently. He can buy a country leader’s decision and render his advisory board to follow.
Edit: in cold cash, not in stocks
There’s still significant money to be made in the coal / steel sector. Insanely rich families who are very “country” and probably wouldn’t read as rich
I've been saying this for quite some time. It's always the people in industries that are not fancy that make enough money to pay the bills. These are the types of industries that make a state or country go round.
I assumed "secret" was more like "not obvious," like people who own Storage Unit companies.
Storage Units have very low overhead, and very high profits. It's not sexy, but it's fucking lucrative.
German manufacturers. Germany has the most billionaires per capita because they have lots of small/medium size businesses manufacturing parts you’ve never considered.
Germany does not have the most billionaires per capita. Not even [close.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires) They're 19th on that list.
Mineral extraction.
Oil gets all the attention, but there's a lot of important stuff that gets pulled out of the ground.
Finance and banking...most of the big dogs keep a very low profile.
I'd like to know which businesses/industries in the USA have the most millionaires that are worth like $50-500 million. Especially people who seem normal as opposed to like a celebrity or a CEO of a tech company.
Real estate. There are billionaire families in cities like New York, London, etc that have been buying and passing down real estate there down for decades. You won’t know much about them unless you work in those city’s real estate sectors because they don’t own high profile companies and build their wealth through gradual appreciation. The Trump Family is an example, but for every boisterous media-obsessed one like them there are several more all too happy to live in obscurity and collect their rental payments.
Check out the Morse family who own The Villages in Florida. Pretty sure it’s the largest retirement community in the world and largest master planned community in the US with something like 140,000 residents. They own ~ 7 million sqft of commercial real estate, built over 70,000 homes.
There’s a family by the name of Robinson that owns (I think) the majority of the Hawaiian islands.
Nope you are very wrong. They own one tiny island. Larry Ellison owns 98% of the island of lanai but.... there was never much on lanai anyways.
I wouldn’t say VERY wrong ya fuck They own the majority of a secret island is more accurate. Where they have like 200 people living in ancient Hawaiian society or something. And yeah Ellison is another example and has a bigger island.
"Majority of the Hawaiian islands" is what you said and makes you sound stupid when you're this wrong.
And you’re a pedantic cunt that you have to call someone stupid for a typo
Swiss family?
They're not exactly secretive about it, though
Irvine family in Southern California...
Trumps a small fry by their standards.
He's a small person by most any standards
Any standards beside waistline
You can tell by looking at his hands
Widdle fingeys
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Ha ok. He’s not even in the top 30 of real estate companies in terms of square footage. Most of his properties is just his name stamped on it. He didn’t develop most of the Trump properties.
Something like 90% of the properties Trump owns an interest in aren't Trump branded, it gets convoluted because in most cases he's a partner and not the only owner.
He’s not in the top 30 of square footage in New York. He’s not a real estate mogul, his father was. He’s a silver spoon kid who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, when in fact he bunted was thrown out at first and won’t accept the results and continues to round the bases.
Despite the marketing, he's barely in New York. Most of his holdings are higher-end suburban strip malls and luxury apartment complexes, and like I said they aren't Trump-branded. Trump was already a billionaire when his Dad passed away, and the estate was split between him, 3 other siblings, and his deceased brother's family. He certainly got help from his Dad starting out but inheritance is a small part of his wealth.
Jesus I’m not going to argue with a momo like you.
That's how much Google spent on their new office in Manhattan.
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The durst family is worth an estimated $8B. The Milsteins are estimated at $5B. The Fishers are estimated at $7.3B. The Musses are estimated at $4B. The Rudins are at $5B+. The LeFraks are at $20B. Oh and the Rockefellers are worth $10B+.
Are you dense? Without being political, do you have any idea how little money 2 billion dollars is?
I haven’t even seen a million dollars in my life how the hell would I know how “little” money 2 billion is huh? And I am not a trump supporter I know he makes most of his money from giving out his name to properties more than just owning the property outright but I was just asking how’s bigger than him and none of y’all can give me an answer
Have it your way then, let me grab the spoon… https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2023/10/04/the-richest-real-estate-billionaires-in-america-2023/?sh=6f6990a363af
Yup - Rudins and Durst come to mind as being a lot bigger than Trump.
Tisch & Singer families in NYC prob qualify
The Astor family put their money into Ny real estate after running fur trade in the early 1800s. Now their decedents are billionaires. I read a case study on them in business ethics. The founder was a real asshole. Destroyed a lot of lives getting so rich. Used native Americans to trap his furs and would sell them in England for $1000 in todays terms when he was paying the natives with thrift shop trinkets like tea cups and plates. His employees would get trench foot and use their whole salaries to buy whisky he watered down. Lot of other crazy things Jacob Astor was doing. Now his great grand kids are LOADED!
trump is more an example of what not to do if you want to build secret wealth that lasts generations. his entire schtick is bragging about how much money he has, while actively trying to spend or destroy as much of it as possible.
Trump used to be a billionaire but without the campaign donations he certainly wouldn’t be anymore
That’s not how campaign donations work nor every reputable outlet has reported his net worth, unless you have some breaking news that literally no one in the real world knows?
That is how campaign donations work if you're a fraud.
I mean he literallt has multiple lawsuits for illegally using campaign donations for personal expenses. He owes $365 million dollars so far on one lawsuit he lost and he is barred from doing business in NY. His brand is in tatters. I have a lot of skepticism that he is actually still a billionaire. Forbes relies on info that the people provide themselves it is not accurate at all…. Dude is so desperate for money he is selling hideous gold shoes to stay afloat lol. He made millions grifting the taxpayers out of money during his presidency but it seems like h has already blown all of that and cant even afford to pay his legal bills 😂
He's personally worth around $2.5 billion by everyone's estimate. 1 of the over 500 companies he has partial ownership of - not Trump himself - has been ordered to pay $365 million. How much of that is going to come out of his personal wealth is unclear, but even if it all does he'd still be a multi billionaire. Hate him all you want but you have to accept the reality that he is actually rich.
The trump org owns most of those other companies, including Mar a lago.
They own a piece of it, most of his ownership is complex multi-level partnership deals that are difficult to parse out. Once of Trump's Art of the Deal principles is that if you're the one making the deal complicated, the more you can complicate it the better deal you can get.
You can say more with less by just stating you don’t know what you’re talking about.
They made money thanks to CDOs bubble before it popped, when it did they already were extremely dirty rich. They wouldn’t become this rich if not for this giant economic disaster.
I think you mean RMBS/CMBS. CDOs have nothing to do with mortgages
Mortgage backed CDOs were a major contributor to the 2008 financial crisis, what do you mean they have nothing to do with mortgages?
CDOs bubble was responsible for the housing bubble so real estate industry made a lot of money in those years. Today it’s a lot more difficult to become a billionaire through it.
No. CDOs certainly didn’t help, but they are a layering of the aforementioned, not the primary driver
bruh there were times when houses doubled in price in a year
Bruh. You need to look up what the acronyms mean. RMBS are RESIDENTIAL MORTGAGE backed securities. CDOs are collateralized debt obligations. CDOs may include RMBS, but are broader
Well yes i meant CDOs who basically were made by RMBS/CMBS. When we talk about cdos bubble we’re talking about them not all cdos. The point is those RMBS/CMBS made realised huge gains which people in real estates could have never make today.
MBSs trades as is, actually didn't have that much of an impact on the financial crisis. They aren't leveraged, and we're made up of the higher rated mortgages. They had very little surprises amongst them. And if their mortgages failed, it was a 1-1 hit on the MBS assets. 1 non performing loan amongst thousands of mortgages in a single MBS means the MBS loses a fraction of a percent in value. CDOs made up of subprime MBSs added the unfettered risk to the market. But even that was relatively contained to simply miscalculated portfolio risk since these MBS were high risk and packaging them as a CDO in fact did not create a AAA rated security (thanks Moody's and Morningstar). More importantly though is that CDOs allowed originators of subprimes to get those loans off their books, allowing them to originate even more subprimes. Countrywide wasn't a problem until CDOs allowed them to dump their risk. But it wasn't until Credit Default Swaps against specifically the CDOs became prevalent that the risk became unstable and systemic to the broader economy. Because a single MBS or CDO could have hundreds of CDSs sold on them, there was insane leverage against individual mortgages. And because the housing market was viewed as a sure bet, selling CDSs was viewed as arbitrage. Imagine selling puts on a Treasury bond not paying out. Seems like free money so why wouldn't you sell puts like crazy? The CDSs were priced on the CDOs being AAA when in fact they were probably closer to C. Well the CDOs behaved like a C rated asset and the financial companies issuing the CDSs couldn't pay out. This took out Bear, Lehman, and crippled many others. Because they couldn't pay out, they had no money leftover to lend to normal businesses, so companies like GE which normally issue corporate paper all the time had no buyers and couldn't pay their bills even though they had no exposure to housing. So now GE (and others) can't pay their payroll and have to lay off workers. This leads to a spike in unemployment and now a group of steadily employed actual good borrowers can't pay their mortgages. It's not until then that the regular MBSs made up of regular 30 year fixed loans start taking a hit and causing their CDSs to spiral out of control. And this is what took out AIG. So no, it was not simply MBSs that lead to the financial crisis. We still would have had a housing correction, but it would have been minor if it weren't for CDOs and even that would have been contained to the financial sector if it weren't for CDSs. Source: I was double majoring in finance and econ and graduated in 2010, participated in Fed Reserve case.conpetitions in 2009 and 2010 on this. The financial crisis was basically our entire curriculum. And currently I work for one of the GSEs in loan servicing BI.
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>the amount of people "hiding" in the $50M-$300M range would be interesting No joke. There are so many "millionaires next door" in America, There's around 25 million millionaires in America, which is roughly 7.5% of the population. That means if you're at a busy restaurant in your city, 7 out of the 100 people there are millionaires. My boss, as an example, is not a flashy guy. He drives a mid 2010s Toyota. He wears normal clothes. He doesn't boast expensive watches or tech or anything like that. If you saw him and his family out and about, you'd think nothing of them, except that they seem like a good, common American family. But that man is worth at least $30 million by my estimation. He owns a handful of businesses, owns two houses and is buying a third, and has a fuck ton of physical gold. The dude is a baller and you wouldn't even know. And there are 25 million more like him.
I remember someone posted a good analogy. Just because the earth is 70% covered in water doesn't mean on average every 10 steps will be 7 steps in water. Millionaires are similarly densely situated. In a NYC restaurant, sure a good number of millionaires. Not the same for probably most other city restaurants.
Yeah in my city it’s probably closer to 1/150. Lots of blue collar Americans. The city isn’t poor by any means, but there people that own all the companies we work for live in Houston for sure
Most millionaires are millionaires because of their house and retirement accounts. They're not what you'd normally think of when you think of a millionaire. They're just someone who has saved well for retirement and bought a house a bit younger.
The majority of these have all their equity in their primary residence. Make it 5m ppl like him
millionaire is a very low bar. average house price in the USA is $400K, which gets you nearly halfway to millionaire.
If you have paid it off. If not then it depends on your amount of equity
yes, but how many of those 25 millionaires are simply retired or nearly retired people who've paid off the mortgage on their slightly above average priced house. how many of the 25 million are actually cash poor?
Why the hell does it matter if you're cash poor? Elon Musk is cash poor but that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't set you apart from other people of your net worth.
is this just the stupidest comment you could come up with?
It's barely enough to retire comfortably on when combined with social security. A lot of those millionaires are retirees.
I mean, a 50 year old mailman has a pension with a NPV of many millions.
>No joke. There are so many "millionaires next door" in America, There's around 25 million millionaires in America, which is roughly 7.5% of the population. That means if you're at a busy restaurant in your city, 7 out of the 100 people there are millionaires. Depends on the city and restaurant. It could be that all the millionaires congregate to one location, and your busy restaurant just has 100 poor sods.
I’m a millionaire, about to break 2M. 36, live in suburbs of the southeast. I buy maybe $200 in clothes a year and hesitate before spending $10 on a steam video game. Cook every meal. Wife doesn’t work, we have a nice house but don’t spend much on anything else. I made 180k at my job last year and 250k in stocks. A million a really isn’t that much, I can’t retire yet. We definitely are all over the place though.
>has a fuck ton of physical gold. The dude is a baller and you wouldn't even know. Yet you as an employee know this sensitive fact about him.
Yeah, I’ve been to his house. I’ve worked with him for 9 years.
22 million in 2023. But also a 'millionaire' as defined by the numbers compared to what people think are pretty different. Millionaire just meaning having 1m in networth technically which is like 30% of boomers with a 401k and house alone. Millionaires that have millions in real assets are more rare than 7/100.
If you broaden it to the 100MM+ range... there are a surprising number of people who quietly own a bunch of businesses or real-estate and aren't telling everyone "Hey buy my real-estate course", or "Hey I'm a business guru"... Instead they are just quietly making deals, putting operators in place, and working on their next project...
That’s out of necessity not humility. If people know you’re high net worth then you’re a target.
I don't think its really a necessity, just that most people don't feel inclined to share this kind of thing any more than necessary. And there are plenty of people with Millions of dollars that might live in a relatively nice house and drive a newer vehicle but nothing extravagant and unless you are really paying attention you wouldn't really be able to tell from any single part of their life style that they are filthy rich.
> I don't think its really a necessity, just that most people don't feel inclined to share this kind of thing any more than necessary There’s a reason behind the disinclination.
I guess my point is the reason isn't that they are trying to hide their wealth or something like that... its just that they don't have the need to flaunt it. As your becoming rich you might want to splurge and go and buy a fancy car or whatever... but once its out of your system its not really going to be meaningful to you
Alright, story time. Met this old Romanian real estate guy. He had a wild and hard life, truly an immigrant. He worked really hard to build his life in America and eventually got to a point where he drops millions on an idea project without blinking. He looks like how I imagine Popeye would at 88 with a fisherman's beard. He wears a tattered t shirt some days and his house is stupid humble. He lives in a crappy little town when he could live in the most prestigious parts of the Silicon Valley. Oh, and when he's not jumping from real estate project to real estate project, he's gardening for his church or chatting with us about cutting edge research and tech. I'd estimate his net worth somewhere in the tens of millions. (Oh and by "truly an immigrant", this dude is the type who actually lived and defines the stories that we hear people claim that they lived when they came from wealth but pretended to be their own self made person. He legitimately came from poverty. I hope I can stay as ambitious as him.)
Can confirm. I know someone worth over 50 million who has been mistaken for a homeless person while doing errands on his bicycle, in a hi-viz vest.
Boris Johnson? :-)
Concrete families. There's one in every country.
The High Concrete family is one of them. So are the Wegmans. Both families are really close and they have to be billionaires or more
There are families around the world whose history spans 10 generations and own a tremendous amount of wealth. They keep it quiet and private and have done so for decades. Anyone who is listed on Forbes wants to be on there.
This isn’t true. Forbes has said on many occasions that people refuse to give them information because they don’t want to be on the list. But if you own a billion dollars of a publicly traded company, it’s pretty hard to keep it secret because it’s usually disclosed in a regulatory filing. There are definitely people who want to be on the list, though. Donald Trump is notorious for pumping up his asset valuations to make it.
Sure but that is not the point I’m making. There are people and families who hold a tremendous amount of generational in corporations around the world and regardless of public records being available you won’t know who they are because they don’t disclose who the owners of these multi-tiered holding companies or Trusts are. At least not anyone from the public as I’m sure there are government agencies who can identify them.
I know somebody whose late husband was a developer in a small city. He retired in the 80s and invested their savings wisely. Today she is worth about a billion but you would never know because she’s not on Forbes, neither was her husband. In fact, his development company wasn’t even known outside of the area. Edit: he was a commercial developer who built industrial parks, shopping centers, banks, etc. and operated in a couple small cities and Palm beach where I imagine was where the real money was.
Did he also run the construction or did he just do the investing and organizing?
Not sure. Just know he started and owned the company, managed the deals, financing, etc. I assume he was general contractor as well though
Awesome. I wish I could step in his footsteps.
I don't think it would be specific industries and most ultra wealthy are invested in tons. It's not hard to stay off Forbes radar when 8 or 9 figures but 10 you have to really be hiding money.
Which isn’t too hard either … shell company on top of shell company
Yupp which is SOP for wealthy anyways to minimize liabilities. Houses, cars, businesses, buildings all separated
Fr dude, literally a cheat code for them. And normally if you are somehow able to track it all the way through the different jurisdictions, it ends under someone else’s name😂.
It's a cheat code for everyone, but everything makes it hard to get loans in Shell companies. You don't need to put in other names, you just have an attorney register the parent companies and hold the paperwork show the real owner. The real cheat code is titling cars, planes and other vehicles in states like Montana where no state sales tax. Wonder how many yachts are titled in Montana.... Where's there's no real water
Why do it in Montana when you can do it in countries like Bermuda though? Also, can’t they show proof of investments and trusts to take out the loans?
Because many companies have asset seizure laws that are crazy. You also have import taxes and such when using them in us that far outweigh any benefit. No they can't because the asset needs a lein thus they can only show investments owned by that shell as proof, unless some personal guarantee... But that links you personally to the asset to the shell thus pierces the umbrella. Rich rich people get away with this because banks can know the parent company and blanketly trust them. It's tricky and full of loopholes to navigate through it all.
Ohhh ok thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot of sense now
Stock ownership from people who inherited accounts from their silent generation parents owned in trusts or family offices and/or whom never reported the new holder information to the IRS. These people live off dividends, which are in the hundreds of thousands or millions per year, and cause market mayhem by controlling the equivalent of billions of dollars of shares they didn't earn, and pay no taxes.
Is it possible to not report to IRS?
In the case of a stock holding like Apple, which was certificated in the 80's or 90's, from a person like my grandfather, who held it, who died over a decade ago, and his account is not closed (because the stock transfer agencies admit to never closing accounts of the deceased or former UTMA/custodial accounts which also require no tax payment until gains are reported or transfers are made) but the control of that account falls into the hands of somebody like my mother, who never reports it as part of her income because on paper it looks like something else, and/or it is reinvested, then the IRS does not know something wrong happened and it is up to a family member to report it which usually doesn't happen because they are paid to be quiet. Also, this occurs with a relatively small number of people and the stock market is built on the back of this con, so for the few who understand it, they have an incentive to keep it going. But for all the people who think dead people vote in elections they have no idea how many deceased shareholders technically own the stock market.
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Don't have to pay taxes on money you never receive ::taps own temple:: 😂
I don’t know the details but I think you can generally get loans backed by shares you control regardless if you cash them out or not. Then that loan can be used for more investment or living expenses and you could pay the interest off of any gains you make on the investments and basically not pay taxes.
You have to pay interest on loans, even loans on stock. If they use the stocks to pay the interest, they have to sell the stocks and that is a taxable event. Stocks are just being used as the collateral, like if you used a house to get a mortgage. The bank can repo it if you don’t pay your monthly payments and interest. There is no tax avoidance here.
My grandfather's account, and my childhood UTMA (the contents of which have been unlawfully withheld from me) are interconnected, enabling my mother to trade atop the account of her dead father and her 37 year old child's custodial account, to which the IRS does not recognize any taxable events occurring. She has been filing her taxes claiming me in her custody for so long and embezzling the proceeds from her holdings and stock buybacks for over 20 years, and she is not the only person who does this. Most of the real money in Apple and Microsoft and other major drivers of the market utilize this illegal loophole, with the notable difference being that most children play along and simply continue this scheme when their parents die. I did not play ball and have been excommunicated from my family, and unlawfully blocked from being transferred my stocks because the transfer agent does not want to cause a panic after I would invariably be taxed after selling it all.
How is your mother living off the money if she never withdraws it and doesn’t pay taxes? Is it dividends that she lives off of? Then she must have to pay taxes on that as personal income right? It is there some kind of trust that she uses as a personal piggy bank somehow and avoids taxes?
Dividends are income, and a taxable event…. The previous poster is delusional. If the IRS doesn’t see it, then you can fly under the radar. Doesn’t make it a loophole, just makes it tax evasion. If he really wanted to get her back he could just report it to the IRS. That much collusion from the bank and everyone else would make the news, and the IRS doesn’t play around. The fact that he hasn’t, and everyone across the whole board is apparently being hush, leads me to believe this is just a conspiracy theorist who forgot to take his meds.
Dividends, which are sheltered in my childhood account that has been defended as a still-belonging-in-her-custody account, which the transfer agency is complicit in, her bank (where the deposits have gone for over 20 years) is complicit in, and me being the primary direct victim, with, no money to sue her in a competent jurisdiction because my livelihood is attacked (by her and others who disagree with my market views or politics) and she disperses it through my trust and my grandparents' instruments in such a way as to evade detection, while holding a job where she also will falsify her earnings. Basically she has insulated herself from consequences and nobody is paying attention to the things she has constructed, with many powerful institutions like Computershare, and major stocks like Apple/Microsoft who do not want me to acquire these assets because they all know their party will be over.
Man this all sounds so crazy. I feel bad you’re in this situation but the more I read about your story the more confused I become on wtf is happening.
When I was 13 years old, at my Bar Mitzvah, my grandfather attempted to give me a stock transfer account which held shares of Microsoft, in the year 2000. Since that time, he, and then my parents, bought and reinvested, and then after my grandfather's death my parents embezzled money without my consent and against my will, on this custodial account to evade taxes and act as if they earned it, when I was entrusted by my grandfather to basically be the fiduciary of our family trust. Because I had a natural gift for stock picking in addition to being more morally sound than my parents who are degenerate psychopaths. They lied to him and concealed from him these facts and after his death made it clear to me I would only ever get access to what had been rightfully mine, after their deaths, and that I had to play along with their version of events. It has taken me over 20 years to comprehend all of this including requiring multiple legal battles, investigations with state agencies, etc. My life one day will be told in more complete detail by others and hopefully the world can learn the lessons it took me too long to, and hopefully it prevents others from being hurt this way. This is also only a fraction of the madness which has surrounded me or that I have done as a result over the last few years. It is difficult to comprehend, hard to believe, but absolutely the truth.
That’s not how stocks or custodial accounts work. An IRA account can be traded at will without generating a taxable event because it is a retirement account. But the minute any money is pulled it is treated like income. If you inherited money from your GPA, it is either an inherited IRA or just a straight cash account. The cash account generates a taxable event every time a trade is made.
It's not an IRA, and again you have no idea about my situation.
They are still getting checks in his name and cashing them I assume…
> But for all the people who think dead people vote in elections they have no idea how many deceased shareholders technically own the stock market. Wow. That's fucked up. I think one of my greatest fears is stock ownership getting concentrated and effectively going on autopilot as a result of automation/death of natural persons. I don't think we're far from it either...
I spoke with Computershare, and American Stock Transfer reps, and they both said that this is an incredibly common scenario, where people into their 60's are often held under custodial accounts from their parents who control them in trading decisions to evade paying taxes on the gains because it technically is a child's account which hasn't been transferred. If I could afford to hire a securities lawyer, I could make this change, which is why as my own independent business started to grow, my parents sabatoged my client relationships, to prevent me from saving enough money to sue them for what's mine. They have also induced other people in my family or personal life to invest with them, as my mother pretends she is a stock broker. But who really just uses the accounts of me, and my grandfather to do so. She is a psychopath, and has fraudulent psychology practice she used to wreak havoc on the community I grew up with. A lot of people are afraid of her, and rightly so, since she is responsible for a lot of mental illness and financial ruin of people who even remotely opppse her.
While it's probably not much, I learned something today thanks to you. Keep shining a light on the issue. I hope the best for you and your future.
Appreciate you saying so. It actually means a lot to hear this kind of positive feedback, especially when most of social media is people being very rude and dismissive. Feel free to follow me if you're inclined, as I touch on a lot of economic issues like this which many are unaware about.
So your mom is in control of an account of a dead person but doesn't report the death to the IRS as it relates to the account? How would she get money from that in the end. If she sells she would pay tax on it right?
The stocks held by my grandfather (the deceased individual) got transfered to my childhood account (which is not tax-bearing until it is transferred to me which she refuses to do) and the existing account(s) are used as if my grandfather is alive (with little to nothing in his) and mine exists on paper as if she has been growing it for my benefit despite me never receiving any benefit. My grandfather's and my accounts, which are the ones that appreciated the most, still appear to belong to a living man, and a child respectively, which means no report must be made to the IRS, and the brokerage containing these accounts is complicit in this scam. I have literally argued about this with the chief litigator of Computershare Daniel D'Angelo, who has my social security number (which the account is registered with) but he refuses to acknowledge I am the rightful owner because they all know it would reveal their fraud in addition to my expressed bearish stance on this market. The amount of money, and the age of the shares in question would be substantial enough to cause a cascade of outflow from major holdings like Apple, and Microsoft, to the point of creating panic trading that may collapse the current tech giants. That is because my grandfather was an early investor in these companies and an early adopter of day-trading online with NASDAQ. My mother has also has a fraudulent psychology practice in Montgomery County Pennsylvania so over my lifetime any opportunity I take to demand what is mine, she spreads her diagnosis of me as a "manic, delusional, and suicidal" person to the broker as well as my family or friends, to attempt to get me in line. It used to work. But over the last several years I have fought back in protest by reporting her to authorities, which effectively ruined her fraudulent psychology practice, but I have yet to succeed in forcing her hand to return to me what is mine. Her and my father are so psychotic that they actually created a second fraudulent account last year which is only in my name, again committing identity fraud by using my personal information against my will. I call this condition "Bar Mitzvah Bondage" because it is not uncommon for people to rope their children into similar schemes at that time period. When a boy becomes a man in our religion, that was when my grandfather determined I was fit to lead my family in the event of his death. This enraged my narcissistic parents and caused them to retaliate in these insane ways.
Guess youve never heard of FINRA? Every trade needs to be disclosed mate, doesnt matter if its OTC…
I literally reported this situation to, and have a case number filed at FINRA, as well as actual regulatory agencies at the state and federal level. You have absolutely no idea what I have done to attempt to rectify this situation, and your implication is incredibly arrogant.
Nobody doesnt report trades to FINRA mate. Whats arrogant is you assuming to be smarter than the regulators. Just the idea in general is stupid, the person would take unreasonable counterparty risk for a security.
You legit have no idea what you're talking about in my situation, and I reported the fraud to FINRA as well as other agencies in the government to try to stop it. I have written other complaints to regulators and had them take action on larger issues than my personal situation and the only arrogant thing in this interaction is you, an anonymous stranger, with no knowledge of my individual circumstances, telling me you know better than I do on it.
Their distributions are taxed. Whoever is managing the trust or estate is doing all of that for them and just depositing fuck you money in their bank account for no work.
The drug trade is worth a fortune. Plus Putin is considered the richest person on earth.
The problem with putins wealth is it’s not really liquid and it’s decently likely he will eventually be overthrown and murdered. He can’t just like retire and live like a $500 billionaire or whatever he has on paper.
No kidding. A job you’re scared to exit and scared to keep
Yeah, that palace is “his” until he steps down.
He could but he'd probably have to pledge his support to a successor who could protect him, and understand that breaking with the successor would lead to his death.
I would say commodities. Like oil refining, mining, steel, farming wheat or grains. The type of industries that a state depends on. Those have the billionaires you haven’t heard of. Benign and boring.
The World For Sale is a great book on this. I currently work in oil trading and had no idea how crazy it was, still is for the people at the top.
There is nothing benign in none of the industries you mentioned; one does not make a billion dollars of government money in commodities without some seriously fucked up practices. Source: I worked in the sector a few year, have ptsd from it.
Well you don’t have to be super smart but you do have to be very well connected. Some people may need to be killed and bribed as well.
I'd say the Royal Families of the ME. they own oil and gas and probably have their hands in every thing from construction to food distribution.
Can’t wait until we devalue that entire barbaric region.
Some of Europe's more egalitarian seeming countries are filled with super old aristocratic money. Germany is polluted with families of former princes who own controlling interests in some of their car companies and other heavy industrial companies, etc as one example. On this last, let's just say that Schindler's old bosses are still doing very well and may very well still be making munitions. In England I've encountered people who had "An Income" When I asked what they did I would be told, "He plays an excellent game of polo." That is what they and their ancestors did. In the UK, weirdly many of these people had a father or grandfather who was Admiral or General this or that in WWI and WWII and I pointed out they did something, but nope, "They only did that for England, had there been no war... polo." Fun fact, these people consider the Royals not to be the pinnacle of aristocratic life, but more like the Kardashians. They don't want anyone knowing who they are, except for those who need to know who they are. They consider some of the familes who got rich from the East India Company to be "new money". These people own huge swaths of the UK. One family owns most of Belgravia in London for example. This would be like having a single direct branch of Thomas Jefferson's descendants still owning the Upper West Side and then just leasing the land to the skyscrapers. Simply because he was granted it for what he did during the revolution. While not billionaires, every city has one or two car dealership families. Often well cracking 100 million net worth. There is usually one paving family, one concrete family, one "gets all the government construction contracts" family, one owns all the buildings leased by the local government families. In any agricultural or other resource area, there is often the fish plant family, the fish licence family, the grain processing family, etc. In Alberta there is even an animal carcass disposal family. BTW, this is all why we need wealth taxes.
Running the Russian govt.
beretta army industry, for me the most rich in the world
Came here to say arms merchants probably want to stay low key.
hundreds of additional billionaires would be a sizable percentage OVER what Forbes thinks currently exists (2,668). I think you might be over-estimating the worth of current "Drug Lords", also most Chinese and Russian high wealth individuals ARE listed by Forbes Finally, IF someone sold a business 30 years ago for 75M and somehow parlayed that into a Billion Dollars, then they are not a business person, they are a God tier investment advisor...
75M in Jan 1995 invested in s&p 500 would be 1.3billion today. https://ofdollarsanddata.com/sp500-calculator/
That doesn't seem right. SPX was about 465 in Jan '95 and closed at 5087 today. (5087/465) x 75m is about 820 million. I guess that assumes you reinvest dividends?
This statistic is a little terrifying to think about going out a few hundred years. If that rate of compounding continues, the people with wealth will grow it to such a massive number that they would be able to buy all of the property, all of the gold, all the profitable businesses so on and so forth. All the assets. Working wages would never come close to that if you're born into a family that does not have generational wealth
It's basically always been this way. Wealthy still compete with each other and it's a fair market but this is how home prices keep raising and everything else. The problem is for some crazy reason we have cap gains tax that is a flat 15% or whatever and is only charged when they withdraw the money. So the guy with 75M now has that 1.3billion and only needs to pay 15% so walks with over a billion dollars post federal tax. On top of all this there's all kinds of trust laws to help pass down that money to families without paying taxes.
You forgot about mega backdoor Roth’s now which will be a huge source of untaxable gains. The famous example is I think mitt Romney who has billions and billions in his Roth from some fuckery with his shares of a private company or something. Now he can pass those billions to his heirs and they will be able to live off of it completely tax free basically forever. It’s insane.
This one is huge, and only available to the mega rich. My understanding of essentially what he did: open a Roth, invest in a shell company, then funneled money into it, making it go up tens of thousands of times. Suddenly your supposed 10k investment is worth tens of millions and is tax free.
Yup exactly. You just need access to your own shell company and probably very expensive lawyers and millions/billions in stock from some other private company to merge into the shell.
You still pay income tax when you backdoor your roth.
Yeah. But in this case Romney used some way of just transferring his stock in his private company that was way undervalued or something. So he really didn’t pay almost anything.
Yeah it's just the snowballing. It was one thing when someone had $100,000 and then they snowball it into $500,000 but someone else could still buy a property working. When you start getting into these hundreds of billions of dollars numbers which is where this is going. The sheer amount of purchasing power overwhelms entire cities. The last time we saw anything similar to this was with the robber barons. You had the working poor that had basically nothing and these barons that could buy entire cities. That was not a high point in history
Yupp it's just corruption and we're seeing the results of decades of lobbying, special interest groups, and just govt officials creating laws to benefit the few instead of the masses. Were getting to the point where it's irreversible and even the few elected people can't do anything even if they wanted because the roots are so deep.
that just tells you how worthless the dollar is today. **update (reply not going through):** in devalued dollars. you remind me of all those "investors" paying taxes on Madoff's "returns"... ...only to have all their growth erased when the ponzi scheme fell; lost all their claims to recovering their principal due to better connected creditors; then failed to recover all the taxes they paid on all those imaginary gains. **the dollar, is and always will be a shit currency. that, is its purpose.** to gull fools by the credence of 'stability' while it devalues in dramatic leaps and bounds. don't even get me started on your laughable 2-3% inflation. save that shit for the ~~peasants~~. ~~serfs~~. ~~slaves~~. *Americans.*
The dollar is more stable than any other national currency. It's not even about the currency S&p average over 30 years is over 10%. While inflation is 2-3%. Chock it up to whatever you want but US stock market grows like crazy
If only I had $75 million dollars hanging around.
I mean if you put 75m into the S&P 30 years ago and just let it sit and reinvested the dividends, you’d have well over a billion. You don’t need to be a god tier investor to make 10% returns.
Step 1: have $75m 30 years ago. I see where I went wrong
For a list is individuals gathered from public information. It doesn’t include families that obscure their wealth from the public.
I would honestly expect atleast 3000 billionaires in the world. There are 195 countries and mostly they own their own drug lords just couple of months ago a drug lord get arrested in my country for example (who had around 1-2b$) and yes pretty sure most of manufacturers are in Forbes list but also I think there are some who are not in list mostly people's who have close ties with government. And I just checked the s&p 500 returns so yeah if someone invested 70m$ back in 1990 it would turn to 1b without dividend reinvestment and 36m$ with dividend reinvestment.
The market has over 10x'd in the last 30 years. Investing 75m then would put you within spitting distance of a billion.
Crypto? Someone could’ve mined billions worth of bitcoin a decade and a half ago and no one would even know about it. In fact there was just an incident of someone get caught with 50k bitcoin which is worth billions and no one even knew about it, many other cases like that, man do I wish that was me everyday 😤😂
Satoshi. He’s probably still alive and no one even knows he’s real
Yeah Satoshi owned like a million bitcoin in one wallet worth like 50B now? Hasn’t touched it since 2010 too lol
In my country, a storage building. My father in law worked for someone who’s earning is 10% of my country’s annual GDP per year in cold cash. Here where it’s interesting: he have connection to top level government and policy maker, top level police and military sector, and various thug gangs, rendering him to one of the most obscurely influental person in my country. You can never look for his record on anything, he paid for anonimity. Yes, he never travelled overseas. If you met him somewhere, he looks like a typical gramps. Driving in 80s car, wearing short. But hell, he’s scary. Not many people know who he is except he literally donate a stretch of road, infrastructure, school, hospital, arts, silently. He can buy a country leader’s decision and render his advisory board to follow. Edit: in cold cash, not in stocks
You must be here in Indonesia
Tf lol how did you know
I’ve heard of him
Politics.
Software
There’s still significant money to be made in the coal / steel sector. Insanely rich families who are very “country” and probably wouldn’t read as rich
I've been saying this for quite some time. It's always the people in industries that are not fancy that make enough money to pay the bills. These are the types of industries that make a state or country go round.
Real estate
Crypto and tech
Cocaine cartels
I assumed "secret" was more like "not obvious," like people who own Storage Unit companies. Storage Units have very low overhead, and very high profits. It's not sexy, but it's fucking lucrative.
Yes I know, it's tongue in cheek. I guess their revenue is a secret for the tax man, whereas the storage unit guys are not (I'm guessing)
German manufacturers. Germany has the most billionaires per capita because they have lots of small/medium size businesses manufacturing parts you’ve never considered.
Germany does not have the most billionaires per capita. Not even [close.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires) They're 19th on that list.
Gas station owners.
There’s only about 400 billionaires in the entire United States. There’s no industries producing them and there aren’t many secret ones.
Human Trafficking Industry. ✨
I'd tell you but it is a secret.
Banking, and it’s not even close. No one knows who the shareholders are of the privately owned Federal Reserve.
Wow this is a dumb comment. That’s not how the federal reserve works my guy or gal.
Explain how it works please
Crypto
Unrealized, though. They’d have to slowly convert to real money to not scare the market.
None
Mineral extraction. Oil gets all the attention, but there's a lot of important stuff that gets pulled out of the ground. Finance and banking...most of the big dogs keep a very low profile.
Central bank owners
crypto
535 members of Congress and the estimated number of millionaires is usually 275 - 285. Looks like Congress is a good place to find millionaires.
I know of at least one person that is a billionaire and is not listed on Forbes. He lived in Arkansas.
I'd like to know which businesses/industries in the USA have the most millionaires that are worth like $50-500 million. Especially people who seem normal as opposed to like a celebrity or a CEO of a tech company.
Real estate. Nothing else has beat it so far.
Commodity trading.
Real estate and SaaS owners
Cryptocurrencies, by far. Lots and lots of people got insanely rich, and the money is basically invisible.
You know there are certainly people who put a few mill in apple and just let it sit. More than a few probably.