They made something useful as a tool that in many respects has done just as much harm as good, or at least Gates has. I don't think I am using anything that I'm familiar with from Oracle. Maybe I am and don't know it?..
The racketeers love the internet, predeators love it, govt loves it, and so do the hedgefunds, lots of arguments can be made on both accounts, but it doesn't make Gates or Ellison worth this kind of money. No one on this planet is worth this kind of money, but if they can earn it through selling their products, or have sold their business to someone who is willing to pay billions for it, so be it, the more power to them, this though is not the case, they use their businesses as a platform to enrich themselves by every means possible, in particular use of the investing public..........
Never was the case for Disney.........Risner made a fortune using that enterprise as his own personal piggy bank.
If individuals who invest in their enterprises, and in reality not totally theirs, but each and every shareholder, see their stock hover around the same price for 6 or 7 years, like Msft, or, tanks due in part to their consistent selling and them taking their money to sock it away for their toys, or bigger castles, or just to race one another to see who can accumulate the biggest stash makes it into something other than an investment vehicle.............
if this money was being used to enhance their shareholder value and their products that would be another story but its not. Its more about them...........How many life times over can you spend this kind of money?, where is the incentive to make the company greater, or to grow the employee base, which they could with that kind of money.
The real driving forces in this country are the small businesses, not these conglomerates..............Just give a look at AIG, or FNM, or FM, GM etc can we use the same argument for them and their Ceo's to say they did so much good, everyone now has an SUV, or they got more people into homes, and insured those CDO's to make sure those hedgies, like GS, and banks didn't lose out if things went South.
Things did go South because all of them were the contributors to it............."what was the spin Paulson used?". The taxpayer is now on the hook!........Aig alone $175 billion in a year but yet those CEO's were all making killings in compensation..........In particular Raines former Ceo of Fannie raked in over a hundred million. Not that he earned it, and not that he was paid from the earnings of
Fannie, but it came rather thru the public who invested who thought it was such a wonderfully run enterprise.
Money can move around in mili-seconds around the world. The same argument can be made for cell phones and text messaging.
