Is this just a result of a strong market since most of their “wealth” is in stocks, driving up the perceived gap and resulting in such shocking sounding stats?
I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue?
Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how?
I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.
Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? I imagine they'd mostly just have a compound in an already rich area, and not interact with the general area much. And then be travelling to other houses of theirs or for business frequently?
Sick of fake news like this. If this is cash held, then it's a news story. But if these are company valuations then holding this in the hands of few is not making the economy worse.
> While the data does not name individuals, it is not hard to find the list of billionaires who call the region home: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and businesswoman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs in Palo Alto, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Los Altos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and financier George Roberts in Atherton, and Ubiquiti Networks founder Robert Pera in San Jose, are the richest nine in the two counties, according to the group’s analysis of a Forbes list.
Rich people have to live somewhere. Are they supposed to be isolated in some rich-only area with no poors allowed so that there's no inequality? I suppose they probably are on an even more local level. Problems with poverty in Silicon Valley are the result of government actions not the presence of rich people.
Adding up all of the wealth in a small region and then calculating wealth inequality against a small number of households makes for some triggering headlines, but it’s not a very useful metric for anything in the real world.
A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.
A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
The point is that SV is packed to the brim with very wealthy people, so this is a demonstration of the scale of the wealth inequality, which is something people tend to have difficulty wrapping their heads around.
The only problem with this is that there are so few billionaires. Wealth is good. We should celebrate it, and focus on making more of it, not on resenting the people who have already done so.
A billion in cash does not represent wealth in and of itself. If you lived in Germany in 1923, you could easily be a trillionaire, but that wouldn't do you any good.
What matters is how much cash you have relative to others, because that determines the actual purchasing power. So in a sense you're right in that the real problem isn't having billionaires, but that not everyone is one. But if everyone were one, there would be no reason to devalue the currency and drop the useless zeroes.
And, of course, the people who own those billions didn't make most of it. Some other people, who get paid salary or wages, did, with their labor. The guys who have the billions are those who collect economic rent from those who do the work.
This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.
What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing.
You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] threadwhat?
how is moving minimum wage a dollar going to help someone tackle the $136,500 necessary to rent responsibly?
just seems like an odd thing to add. they’re still going to be commuting an hour like everyone else
I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue?
Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how?
I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.
Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-va...
A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.
A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.
What matters is how much cash you have relative to others, because that determines the actual purchasing power. So in a sense you're right in that the real problem isn't having billionaires, but that not everyone is one. But if everyone were one, there would be no reason to devalue the currency and drop the useless zeroes.
And, of course, the people who own those billions didn't make most of it. Some other people, who get paid salary or wages, did, with their labor. The guys who have the billions are those who collect economic rent from those who do the work.
https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php
You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.