The richest man in America is still Bill Gates, who has $72.6 billion in wealth. Most of the wealth gain came through the growth in the stock market. Even the guy who runs the Facebook page you sprint to every morning, Mark Zuckerberg, gained $10.5 billion dollars this year himself. He doesn’t use Facebook to find out what his friends are doing or to engage in long, meaningless conversations about stupid topics. Facebook is his personal ATM machine.
This is a lot of money. You don’t need a PhD in Finance to know this. But to put it all into deeper context, let’s do some quick comparisons.
LeBron James earned $60 million dollars last year, which means that Buffett earned James’ entire salary in less than two days. He earned this money without being able to dribble a basketball, or even being able to jump. In fact, LeBron James would have to play basketball for nearly 1,000 years in order to match the wealth that Warren Buffett has right now. Wait, scratch that. He would have to play for 200 years just to earn the money that Buffett has earned this year alone.