this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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A Boring Dystopia

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If your dad is Bill Gates, you're probably not getting a Starbucks gift card for graduating college.

In 2018, Jennifer Gates walked off the Stanford stage and onto a 124-acre, $15.82 million horse farm in North Salem, New York. According to Architectural Digest, the lavish estate was a graduation gift from her billionaire parents—and came complete with rolling pastures, three parcels of land, and proximity to New York City for her future studies.

But in case that sounds too much like the plot of "Succession: Equestrian Edition," Melinda Gates would like to remind everyone: their kids were absolutely raised "middle class."

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[–] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 209 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Rich people always, without exception, fail to recognize their own disconnections from reality.

[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 137 points 1 week ago (2 children)

These motherfuckers clearly need to be paying more taxes.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Something Bill Gates actually agrees with. He's one of the super rich who has been outspoken about the rich needing to pay more taxes.

[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Something Bill Gates actually agrees with

It's always interesting to me how people bring this up regarding Gates and Buffett, as if that makes their largesse and greed at the expense of others perfectly acceptable. It's easy to say you support something when you know you're never going to be held accountable for following through.

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[–] the_q@lemm.ee 71 points 1 week ago

What could a horse ranch cost? $10?

[–] lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de 69 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Much like the soon to be german chancellor, who told an interviewer, that he is upper middle class. All that while being a former Blackrock manager and owning (and using regularily) a personal private jet. Thats some kind of chancellor material...

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[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 51 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They mean billionaire middleclass.

[–] some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think they actually do. $16 million is like weekend money for them, I’m guessing

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They don’t even spend that money, as is all billionaire spending. They borrow against their assets and profit enough to pay back the loan so they literally don’t spend money by using that credit line to buy more assets. Gates, bezos, musk, etc. depending on their market situation they could literally take a piss and be 16 million dollars richer or poorer and it wouldn’t matter.

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

It's insanely broken and dangerous. If money was gravity they'd be black holes, disrupting everything in the galaxy. Someday we'll all be gone, and all that's left will be one self-important machine counting all the money in the world until its circuits burn out. The heat death of capitalism.

[–] b161@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

“Middle class” isn’t a thing. There’s the working class and the ruling class.

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[–] HeyJoe@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago

I want to be this middle class...

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Well, okay, if that's upper class then what size ranches do middle class people buy for their kids' graduation?

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 28 points 1 week ago

Rich people are so goddamn out of touch with reality.

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Lol "middle class"... Does anyone know a middle class family? I just see people with money, and people who don't have enough. That's the real world... Maybe long ago there was a middle class?

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[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 25 points 1 week ago

and gates has to reinvent his image with his "charity work" he still a ruthless businessman, and countries complained about his vaccine requirements as well.

[–] callouscomic@lemm.ee 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

In 2018, Bill Gates' net worth was approximately $90 billion. His estimated income was around $12 billion, according to estimates from Business Insider.

In 2018, the median net worth of an American household was $101,800. I chose median cause these billionaires drastically skew the mean. The median household income was $63,179.

If an average American household gave the same scale of gift in 2018, based on household income, the gift would be $83.29, and based on net worth, it'd be $17.89.

[–] dumbass@leminal.space 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

So it's the equivalent of letting you kid buy a DVD from the discount bin.

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[–] Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When you are a billionaire a $16m ranch is middle class.

[–] 13igTyme@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Remember the difference between 1 million and 1 billion, is 1 billion.

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[–] LavaPlanet@lemm.ee 23 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Maybe that's why these 1%ers wealth hoard so hard, maybe they genuinely think they ARE middle class.

[–] forkDestroyer@infosec.pub 16 points 1 week ago (7 children)

They're either extremely uneducated in current standards of living, or being purposefully deceitful. I'd like to think it's the former. They should have a class for rich people so they can understand what life is like without family money or high salaries.

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[–] Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 week ago

These rich people are so disconnected from the actual reality that the rest of us live in that it's not funny. And to make matters worse, a lot of these rich people see themselves as visionaries and leaders. Imagine that, blind visionaries. And to make matters even worse than that, a lot of people worship these 'visionaries' that can't even picture what life is like without billions of dollars, as if they have all the answers.

[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago

Its middle class, how much do they need to spend on graduation? 1mil? Yeah, we'll go 16mil and be the most middle class.

[–] blueeggsandyam@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (5 children)

How do you raise a child “middle class in this house:

Bill Gates designed and owns a 66,000-square-foot (6,100 m2) mansion that is on Lake Washington in Medina, Washington.In 2009, property taxes were reported to be US$1.063 million on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million.

The house features an estate-wide server system, a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) gym, and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) dining room. There are six kitchens and 24 bathrooms, ten of which contain bathtubs.

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[–] 3aqn5k6ryk@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] semisimian@startrek.website 17 points 1 week ago

So, Bill (after the divorce) buys the ranch as a gift, but the headline circles it back to a unsourced Melinda quote ON YAHOO FINANCE! This is another obfuscating hatchet job to whitewash billionaire behaviour by media owned by said billionaires. Please don't engage. This is non-news. Down vote this to the sewer where it belongs.

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Never forget that Bill's mom was on the board of directors at IBM and pushed for the company to use her boy's software startup in the very beginning. Microsoft was built entirely on this nepotism and monopoly. There is nothing remotely middle class about that story.

cross class "networking" is common and more or less the only way people move up in the class system. Having rich colleagues/ aquatences is an important part of most extremely successful startups and is absolutely something that happens to "middle class" people, just not to those living paycheck to paycheck.

She wasn’t on the board of directors of IBM, she was on another board which the CEO of IBM was also on.

It’s a distinction without a difference, but still.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

No one really seems to know what middle class is anymore. Both the family that is one missed paycheck from being homeless and the one lobbying their state for school vouchers so they can repurpose the cost of their kids' private school tuition to their college fund think they're middle class.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How much can a banana cost, Michael? $10?

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[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gates may be one of the better billionaires, but it's still like comparing prostate cancer to brain cancer.

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[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Melinda fucking Gates doesn't know what "middle class" means, big shocker there…

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[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 week ago

The problem is that the working poor and the billionaires all think they are middle class. Because poor is for non-whites.

[–] a9cx34udP4ZZ0@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (4 children)

To be fair, out of all the billionaires they at least have made attempts to not make their kids shiteheads which is in stark contrast to most billionaires. At one point in time at least, they were only leaving $10m to each child, with plans to donate everything else.

Is that enough to live better than 99.99% of us? Absolutely. But it's also not: I can do whatever I want and buy whatever I want and never have to think about money again.

[–] Krono@lemmy.today 51 points 1 week ago (2 children)

leaving $10m to each child, with plans to donate everything else

The plans were to donate everything else to a tax-advantaged "charity" in which the Gates family retains complete financial control.

This is not philanthropy. It is tax avoidance, greenwashing, and a public relations campaign.

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, it might be public relations, but the malaria nets and polio vaccines and HIV treatments and guinea work eradication did actually save millions of lives.

It's one thing to argue that doing good doesn't make up for doing bad, but it's another thing to refuse to acknowledge the good at all.

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[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

when gates was on reddit, he choose AMA sub, so he wouldnt get criticized, they wouldnt allow you to question him on his charities being used tax evasion or money laundering.

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