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A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found successful entrepreneurs realize just 3 per cent of the value of what they produce, while consumers reap the rest, either directly through employment or by social benefit. "If there is a CEO who creates value for shareholders and wealth for the economy, the value they create is so much greater than their compensation," said Sydney Finkelstein, author of "Superbosses" and a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Given the blame directed at America's millionaire class for inequality, the U.S. economic meltdown and our slow recovery, Fox...

An elite annual invite-only conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, organized by the investment bank Allen & Company is taking place this week, with the guest list including billionaires and powerbrokers from the Big Tech Masters of the Universe and the media such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Disney CEO Bob Iger, CNN host Anderson Cooper, Patriots Owner Robert Kraft, and possibly Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The estimated wealth of attendees tops $588 billion this year. The Daily Mail reports that key tech and media industry players are arriving in Sun Valley in Idaho this week for the start of the...

ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.

There are 2,755 billionaires globally – and combined, they are worth over $13 trillion. Of these ultra wealthy individuals, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes that just over 100 are millennials, born between the years 1981 and 1996. This young generation represents around 3.8% of all billionaires on a global basis with a combined net worth of $573.1 billion. This visualization, using data from Forbes, ranks the richest 25 millennial billionaires and details their source of wealth, total net worth, nationality, and age.Note: Forbes categorized billionaires by current age (2021). For those slightly over or under the age range of Millennials,...

LeBron James would be proud. The New York Times reports that Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola are among the many global companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bipartisan bill that cracks down on human rights abuses and forced labor in China. “The bill also targets so-called poverty alleviation and pairing programs that ship Muslims from impoverished areas to work in factories elsewhere, which human rights groups say are often coercive.” For human rights supporters, the bill is great news. For companies that care about their bottom line first, it’s terrible. The legislation, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act,...

A little-known Democratic super PAC backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest donors is quietly unleashing a torrent of television spending in the final weeks of the presidential campaign in a last-minute attempt to oust President Donald Trump, Recode has learned. The barrage of late money — which includes at least $22 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — figures among one of the most expensive and aggressive plays yet by tech billionaires, who have spent years studying how to maximize the return they get from each additional dollar they spend on politics. Moskovitz is placing his single biggest public...

The Lincoln Project, a GOP anti-Trump group, on Wednesday launched a $4 million ad buy targeting Senate contests in Maine, Alaska and Montana. The buy, which was first reported by Axios, will air for seven to 10 days in key markets in the three states. The ads in Alaska and Maine express support for challengers to Republican incumbent Sens. Steve Daines (Mont.) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska). The spots are dubbed "Real" in Alaska and "Strong" in Montana. The group endorsed Democrat Al Gross in its ad in Alaska ahead of the state's Democratic and independent primary on Aug. 18. Meanwhile,...

Bill Gates has said Donald Trump's decision to stop US funding of the World Health Organisation "during a world health crisis" is as "dangerous as it sounds". The Microsoft founder tweeted:"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

"Legendary investor and Berkshire Hathaway founder and CEO Warren Buffett said it’s high time companies stop acting as moral arbiters, social activists and SJWs — social justice warriors — and instead focus their efforts on their primary responsibility: making money for their shareholders. This comes alongside the announcement that Berkshire Hathaway is pouring about $30 billion into wind turbines and infrastructure in Iowa. The plan, according to Buffett, is to turn the state into “the wind capital of the world, the Saudi Arabia of wind.” Among the corporate consensus these days is a call to be “doing well by doing...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth an estimated $69 billion, stated in a recent internal Q&A that he sympathizes with Bernie Sanders’ view on billionaires, and agrees that “no one deserves to have that much money.” CNBC reports that during a livestreamed employee Q&A call this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed a number of topics including politics. Zuckerberg was asked to respond to Senator Bernie Sanders’s comment that billionaires should not exist, and gave a surprising answer given that Zuckerberg himself is worth $69 billion. “I understand where he’s coming from,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t know that I...

On Tuesday Facebook released the results of a study on bias within and by the platform against conservative perspectives and activity on the platform. It was led by former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and his team at corporate law firm Covington & Burling LLP.The report confirmed what many had already been experiencing firsthand in the years since social media has become central to global communications, business, governance, and interactivity – that many voices on the right felt subject to arbitrary purposefully targeted restrictions on their ability to operate freely within the terms of services of the platform.Senator Kyl and...

He’s still in rarefied air, but Bill Gates is no longer the world’s second-richest person. For the first time in the seven-year history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Microsoft co-founder dropped to the No. 3 slot — giving way to France’s Bernard Arnault on Tuesday, Bloomberg News reports. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos still occupies the top spot in the exclusive club. Arnault, the CEO of luxury goods maker LVMH, has a net worth of about $107.6 billion, having added $39 billion to his fortune in the past year — the largest individual gain by far among the 500 people...

FULL TITLE: Beto Apologizes To Campaign Staff: ‘I Was A Giant Asshole To Be Around Sometimes’ 2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke apologized to his campaign staff for being a “giant asshole” at times during his failed Senate bid, video released Tuesday shows. In “Running with Beto,” a documentary premiering Tuesday on HBO, O’Rourke gathered with a group of campaign staffers to thank them before giving his concession speech after losing to Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm election. “I just feel very, very lucky, and I love you guys more than you’ll ever know,” O’Rourke said in...

WASHINGTON - Top officials from 75 companies descended on the U.S. Capitol Wednesday to try to convince lawmakers to support the creation of a carbon price mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among them were more than 20 companies from the Fortune 500, including brand names like Levi's, Johnson & Johnson and Pepsi, along with European oil majors BP and Shell, who took meetings with Republicans and Democrats in Congress in a bid to increase momentum for legislation addressing climate change. **SNIP** At a press conference Wednesday, none of the executives gathered gave any chance to a carbon price passing...

Eleven Americans explain how Big Tech’s cheap foreign labor cost them their livelihoods.

Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy. Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms. Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.” Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook...

The Raptor engine is designed to power the spaceship currently known as Starship as part of the rocket assembly currently known as Super Heavy (previously dubbed the BFR). The first Raptor test fire took place in September 2016, when the company was targeting an uncrewed Mars launch in 2018. Three Raptor engines like this one are built in to the Starship Hopper, which has been under construction in Texas and which SpaceX will use to begin testing the rocket technology in real life. SpaceX plans to assemble 31 Raptor engines into the Super Heavy rockets, with another seven Raptors on...

Full tile: Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic. That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with...

To build a big line of exclusive products on its site, Amazon.com Inc. is pushing other brand manufacturers to do most of the work. The online retail giant is asking consumer-goods companies to create brands exclusively for Amazon after finding that developing them on its own is too costly and time-consuming, according to people familiar with the strategy. Equal sweeteners and nutrition brand GNC are among the first to launch products through an accelerator program Amazon launched last year to outsource the work. Mattress maker Tuft & Needle also recently created a new brand called Nod exclusively for Amazon. Amazon’s...

P&G Brand Director Pankaj Bhalla tells Ad Age its goal was to provoke conversation, so Gillette no doubt expected polarization. And this is, after all, an era when brands increasingly take a stand on social issues, as Nike did with a ballsy campaign that sided with Colin Kaepernick on the issue of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. But there's one glaring difference between Nike and Gillette: Nike's primary customers are young urban millennials who support brands that stand up for causes and tend to sympathize with Kaepernick's protest. Many of the customers for Gillette, a 117-year-old brand, are...