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Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.
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Robert Orben
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Building wealth in all aspects of our lives—including mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual—is paramount. That's what holistic growth is".
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Keisha Blair
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If you want to be on Forbes Rich List, use Cosmic Ordering.
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Stephen Richards (Cosmic Ordering Guide)
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Despite the absence of Queen Elizabeth II’s name in annual Forbes Rich Lists, everyone in the room was aware the Queen was one of the wealthiest people in the world, if not the wealthiest. However, hers and the House of Windsor’s assets and income were mostly non-declared.
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James Morcan (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
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CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom. And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy. He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he had told Amelio he would. He began to assert himself in some personnel areas, especially in protecting his people who had made the transition from NeXT. But in most other ways he was unusually passive. The decision not to ask him to join the board offended him, and he felt demeaned
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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I started tracking billionaire wealth in my home country, India. Back in 2010 anger against the new wealth elite was growing, and my first parsing of the Forbes lists helped explain why. Although India is relatively poor, billionaire wealth had soared to the equivalent of more than 17 per cent of gross domestic product, one of the highest shares in the world, with most of the gains accruing to a narrow set of families in industries prone to crony capitalism.
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Ruchir Sharma
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Forbes lists several top-performing small businesses that have had great endurance for the past ten years. Some of the industries represented include wallboard manufacturing, building material manufacturing, electronics stores, prefab housing, and automobile parts. No, these industries don’t sound very exciting. But typically it’s these mundane categories of businesses that produce wealth for their owners. Often dull-normal industries don’t attract a great deal of competition, and demand for their offerings is not usually subject to rapid downturns. We
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Thomas J. Stanley (The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy)
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He had told Larry Ellison that his return strategy was to sell NeXT to Apple, get appointed to the board, and be there ready when CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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she feels lucky to have a job, but she is pretty blunt about what it is like to work at Walmart: she hates it. She’s worked at the local Walmart for nine years now, spending long hours on her feet waiting on customers and wrestling heavy merchandise around the store. But that’s not the part that galls her. Last year, management told the employees that they would get a significant raise. While driving to work or sorting laundry, Gina thought about how she could spend that extra money. Do some repairs around the house. Or set aside a few dollars in case of an emergency. Or help her sons, because “that’s what moms do.” And just before drifting off to sleep, she’d think about how she hadn’t had any new clothes in years. Maybe, just maybe. For weeks, she smiled at the notion. She thought about how Walmart was finally going to show some sign of respect for the work she and her coworkers did. She rolled the phrase over in her mind: “significant raise.” She imagined what that might mean. Maybe $2.00 more an hour? Or $2.50? That could add up to $80 a week, even $100. The thought was delicious. Then the day arrived when she received the letter informing her of the raise: 21 cents an hour. A whopping 21 cents. For a grand total of $1.68 a day, $8.40 a week. Gina described holding the letter and looking at it and feeling like it was “a spit in the face.” As she talked about the minuscule raise, her voice filled with anger. Anger, tinged with fear. Walmart could dump all over her, but she knew she would take it. She still needed this job. They could treat her like dirt, and she would still have to show up. And that’s exactly what they did. In 2015, Walmart made $14.69 billion in profits, and Walmart’s investors pocketed $10.4 billion from dividends and share repurchases—and Gina got 21 cents an hour more. This isn’t a story of shared sacrifice. It’s not a story about a company that is struggling to keep its doors open in tough times. This isn’t a small business that can’t afford generous raises. Just the opposite: this is a fabulously wealthy company making big bucks off the Ginas of the world. There are seven members of the Walton family, Walmart’s major shareholders, on the Forbes list of the country’s four hundred richest people, and together these seven Waltons have as much wealth as about 130 million other Americans. Seven people—not enough to fill the lineup of a softball team—and they have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together. Walmart routinely squeezes its workers, not because it has to, but because it can. The idea that when the company does well, the employees do well, too, clearly doesn’t apply to giants like this one. Walmart is the largest employer in the country. More than a million and a half Americans are working to make this corporation among the most profitable in the world. Meanwhile, Gina points out that at her store, “almost all the young people are on food stamps.” And it’s not just her store. Across the country, Walmart pays such low wages that many of its employees rely on food stamps, rent assistance, Medicaid, and a mix of other government benefits, just to stay out of poverty. The
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Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
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Born in 1938, Ellen Sirleaf is the first elected female head of state in Africa, serving as the 24th President of Liberia from January 16, 2006, until January 22, 2018. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and received the Indira Gandhi Prize from Pranab Mukherjee, President of India. In 2014, she was listed as the 70th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine.
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Hank Bracker
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Putin and his defenders abroad bragged about Russia’s rising GDP, but it was like taking the average temperature of all the patients in a hospital. According to the 2015 numbers, even after a year of Western sanctions and plunging oil prices, there are still eighty-eight Russian billionaires on the Forbes list, which still doesn’t list Putin or several of his closest cronies. I find it impossible to believe that a man like Putin who holds the power of life and death over eighty-eight billionaires is not the richest of them all. The occasional leaks about mysterious Black Sea mansions and enormous bank transfers to nowhere add more circumstantial evidence to the case that by now Putin is likely the richest man in the world.
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Garry Kasparov (Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped)
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What’s more they are also some of the best-paid entertainers in history: Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, raked in U.S. $150 million in 2008 alone, placing him on top of Forbes’s “Hip-Hop Cash Kings” list.
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Peter Mcallister (Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be)
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Adjusted for inflation, the combined net worth on Forbes’ billionaire list has more than quintupled since 2000, but the income of the median household in America has fallen.1 The
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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BEHIND THE BILLIONS 172 words After our annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest was published, wealth reporter Chase Peterson-Withorn, who helped research and compile FORBES’ 2015 Billionaires list, hopped on Reddit for an “Ask Me Anything” chat. MATADERO Has anyone on the Billionaires list attended community college or
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Anonymous
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As wealthy North Americans-and I use the term wealthy relative to the vast majority of the world, not to the lifestyles of Forbes magazine's list of billionaires-it is often easier to be financially generous than personally sacrificial. The sacrifices needed for effectiveness might mean greater commitment to an incarnational lifestyle: moving into the barrio and developing long-term rapport so that we can work together toward economic growth for the community. It could mean making the long-term commitment to learning a language, researching another world religion or adjusting to a foreign culture. It often means laying aside our own priorities and asking where we fit in the vision of others. It might even mean laying aside our impulsive desire to send more short-term mission teams.
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Paul Borthwick (Western Christians in Global Mission: What's the Role of the North American Church?)
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In 2011, Forbes estimated that during the previous eight years, a Chinese billionaire had died of unnatural causes every 40 days, on average. Besides illness, the most common causes of death were murder, suicide, and execution. Chinese commentators have even begun wryly referring to Forbes ’ annual ranking of China’s richest people as “the death list.
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Anonymous
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A clique of nouveaux billionaires, many of whom were to become part of the group universally known as "the oligarchs" for their imperial levels of wealth and power, teamed up with Yeltsin's Chicago Boys and stripped the country of nearly everything of value, moving the enormous profits offshore at a rate of $2 billion a month. Before shock therapy, Russia had no millionaires; by 2003, the number of Russian billionaires had risen to seventeen, according to the Forbes list.
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Naiomi Klein
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A clique of nouveaux billionaires, many of whom were to become part of the group universally known as "the oligarchs" for their imperial levels of wealth and power, teamed up with Yeltsin's Chicago Boys and stripped the country of nearly everything of value, moving the enormous profits offshore at a rate of $2 billion a month. Before shock therapy, Russia had no millionaires; by 2003, the number of Russian billionaires had risen to seventeen, according to the Forbes list.
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Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
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Among the list of human emotions, anxiety can be regarded as a frequent and potent stress-trigger.
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Carlton U. Forbes (A Few Choice Words: A Collection of Inspirational and Motivational Discourses)
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Eight of the ten richest Americans today owe their wealth not to inheritance or to returns on inherited capital but rather to compensation earned through entrepreneurial or managerial labor, paid in the form of founder’s stock or partnership shares. A slightly broader view reveals that the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans has also seen its center of gravity shift away from people who owe their wealth to inherited capital and toward those whose wealth stems (originally) from their own labor. Whereas in the early 1980s, only four in ten of the Forbes 400 were predominantly “self-made,” today nearly seven in ten are. And whereas in 1984, purely inherited fortunes outnumbered purely self-made ones in the list by a factor of ten to one, by 2014, purely self-made fortunes had come to outnumber purely inherited ones.
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Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite)
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Under Narendra Modi, the rich have become richer, and inequalities have increased. A 2018 Oxfam report revealed that 10 percent of the richest Indians garnered 77.4 percent of the nation’s wealth (against 73 percent the year before)119 and that 58 percent of it was in the hands of India’s “1 percent” (while the world average is 50 percent). The earnings made by this handful of people in 2017 were equal to India’s budget for that year. Also in 2017, the fortune of India’s 100 richest tycoons leaped by 26 percent. The richest of them all, Mukesh Ambani, increased his wealth by 67 percent, according to Forbes India120—a publication, moreover, that belongs to this billionaire. Ambani’s fortune again rose by 24 percent in 2018.121 Going slightly beyond the 100 richest, the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List identified the 953 richest Indian families and gave figures showing that their fortune represented more than 26 percent of the country’s GDP122—which meant that if a tax rate of 4 percent was applied to the nation’s 953 richest families, it would give the government the equivalent of 1 percent of India’s GDP.123 According to Crédit Suisse, the number of dollar millionaires in India jumped from 34,000 in 2000 to 759,000 in 2019,124 which means that the country has one of “the world’s fastest-growing population of millionaires.”125 The average wealth level of these millionaires increased by 74 percent over this period.
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Christophe Jaffrelot (Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy)
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Dear Daughter,
Learn how to take calculated risks, if you want to be counted among the rich.
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Gift Gugu Mona (Dear Daughter: Short and Sweet Messages for a Queen)
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What if they get all the numbers in your contact list and have even more elaborate phishing schemes to unleash on them? Or what if they use your phone to send those texts?
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M.R. Forbes (Starship For Sale (Starship for Sale, #1))
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Kathe was a member of the Sackler family, a prominent New York philanthropic dynasty. A few years earlier, Forbes magazine had listed the Sacklers as one of the twenty wealthiest families in the United States, with an estimated fortune of some $14 billion, “edging out storied families like the Busches, Mellons and Rockefellers.” The Sackler name adorned art museums, universities, and medical facilities around the world.
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Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
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So how many of the Forbes 400 fortunes from 1982 remained on the list 20 years later? Only 64 of the original members—a measly 16%—were still on the list in 2002. By keeping all their eggs in the one basket that had gotten them onto the list in the first place—once-booming industries like oil and gas, or computer hardware, or basic manufacturing—all the other original members fell away. When hard times hit, none of these people—despite all the huge advantages that great wealth can bring—were properly prepared. They could only stand by and wince at the sickening crunch as the constantly changing economy crushed their only basket and all their eggs.10
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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In October 1988, Forbes published a list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans.1 Sam Walton was the richest with a fortune of $6.7 billion, and Buffett was ranked tenth with $2.2 billion. The list was full of familiar names, including Gates, Helmsley, Hillman, Kluge, Mars, Newhouse, Packard, Perot, Pritzker, and Redstone.
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Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
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Israel’s international standing was boosted by the fact that I was repeatedly ranked by Forbes magazine among the most powerful people in the world, one of only four political leaders to consistently appear in each listing for over a decade.
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Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
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Look at the Forbes list of the richest people. The individuals listed are very different, but they all share one trait: vision. The ability to imagine a future that doesn’t exist—to imagine what the world would be like if something changed, if a product or service existed. And these people’s fortunes were made because their visions were accurate—they correctly predicted that something that didn’t already exist both could be created and would be valuable to a specific group of people.
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A.G. Riddle (Genome (The Extinction Files, #2))
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Labor income now figures prominently even at the very sharpest peak of the distribution. Eight of the ten richest Americans today owe their wealth not to inheritance or to returns on inherited capital but rather to compensation earned through entrepreneurial or managerial labor, paid in the form of founder’s stock or partnership shares. A slightly broader view reveals that the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans has also seen its center of gravity shift away from people who owe their wealth to inherited capital and toward those whose wealth stems (originally) from their own labor. Whereas in the early 1980s, only four in ten of the Forbes 400 were predominantly “self-made,” today nearly seven in ten are. And whereas in 1984, purely inherited fortunes outnumbered purely self-made ones in the list by a factor of ten to one, by 2014, purely self-made fortunes had come to outnumber purely inherited ones. Indeed, the share of the four hundred top incomes attributable specifically to salaries grew by half between 1961 and 2007, and the share going to people with no college education fell by over two-thirds between 1982 and 2011. The shift toward labor income at the very top has been sufficiently pronounced to change the balance of industries in which the super-rich acquire their fortunes. In the inaugural 1982 version of the Forbes list, 15.5 percent of the people on the list owed their wealth to capital-intensive manufacturing, and only 9 percent came from labor-intensive finance. By 2012, only 3.8 percent of the list came from manufacturing and a full 24 percent from finance.
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Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite)
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Back in 1982, the average net worth of a Forbes 400 member was $230 million. To make it onto the 2002 Forbes 400, the average 1982 member needed to earn only a 4.5% average annual return on his wealth—during a period when even bank accounts yielded far more than that and the stock market gained an annual average of 13.2%. So how many of the Forbes 400 fortunes from 1982 remained on the list 20 years later? Only 64 of the original members—a measly 16%—were still on the list in 2002. By keeping all their eggs in the one basket that had gotten them onto the list in the first place—once-booming industries like oil and gas, or computer hardware, or basic manufacturing—all the other original members fell away. When hard times hit, none of these people—despite all the huge advantages that great wealth can bring—were properly prepared. They could only stand by and wince at the sickening crunch as the constantly changing economy crushed their only basket and all their eggs.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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A seven-year-old named Ryan, the star of Ryan ToysReview, takes in over $22 million a year, earning him the number one spot on Forbes’s list of highest paid YouTube entrepreneurs.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series))
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Adjusted for inflation, the combined net worth on Forbes’ billionaire list has more than quintupled since 2000, but the income of the median household in America has fallen.
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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- “The consequence?”
- “Globalization.”
- “Implication?”
- “Our fate is reflected in our most famous invention: the computer. Those local area networks that sprang up like cities in the eighties and nineties got connected at the turn of the century by the internet. Just like European colonization connected the globe. Globalization is to the human race what the internet is to computers—a method for sharing resources and ideas. Ideas can now move around the world in nanoseconds. We have a platform for enabling the strongest minds to transform their thoughts into reality—and deploy that reality for the good of the masses.
If you think about it, vision—fictive simulation—remains the most powerful human ability. Look at the Forbes list of the richest people. The individuals listed are very different, but they all share one trait: vision. The ability to imagine a future that doesn’t exist—to imagine what the world would be like if something changed, if a product or service existed. And these people’s fortunes were made because their visions were accurate—they correctly predicted that something that didn’t already exist both could be created and would be valuable to a specific group of people.
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A.G. Riddle (Genome (The Extinction Files, #2))
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I believe change is coming though! I was over the moon to see Forbes launch their 50 over 50 list. It’s a platform designed to highlight women breaking age and gender stereotypes; to act as advocates and role models for other retirees around the world. It’s fantastic and I want to see more!
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Sheila Holt (Trust is the New Currency: How to build trust, attract the right partners and create wealth through business and investments)
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If Forbes would put a list of the 400 oldest Americans and I was on that one—that’s the list I really want to be on.
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David Andrews (The Oracle Speaks: Warren Buffett In His Own Words (In Their Own Words))
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I don't vote. The 2 guys you get to pick to "run the country" are there as a charade to make you think you have choice. And to be fair, I'm sure these people make a lot of the day to day decisions that don't matter very much. But when you get down to it, if someone from the Rockefeller family, the Rothschild family, the duponts, or some of the other true owners of the country want something to happen, it's going to happen whether you like it or not. If they want you to have a car and house that run on oil or gas, then that's what you are going to get. Because those families own oil and gas companies. They own all the important land, they own the hospitals, the schools, tv stations that make the Grammys, x factor or American idol seem much more important than real events that you should actually care about that affect you. They own a huge chunk of the federal reserve, they lobby the congress, the senate, governors, judges, etc.to get exactly what they want when they want. You won't find these people on the Forbes list, because they don't fucking want you to know what they own and what they control. They want you to think the "walmart" Walton family are the richest family. Haha! Vote if you want to, but in reality it's like voting for Ronald McDonald vs. Grimace instead of the true executives of mcdonalds that actually run the company and make all the important decisions.
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Jess Margera