The richest man in the world - or not, as the case may be

In 2008 Forbes placed Warren Buffett as the richest man in the world.  Current opinion appears to place Bill Gates in that position, with Buffett coming in second.

Buffett, now in  his late seventies, has just given 37 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation.

As he is currently in the news because of the very good recent interview with Evan Davis, I thought I'd give him a brief mention.  Brief, because it's very rare for me to find a man of great wealth as excruciatingly boring as I find Buffett.  He's a rich version of a dull man from the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, who appears to have been driven from his early youth to acquire huge sums of money, without seeming to know what to do with it when he got it. And when he gives it away, as my second para shows, he doesn't give it to a personal cause of his own, but to other people who do know what to do with it.  For some reason, he seems to be regarded as a bit of a saint.

Buffett's profession is investments,  that's all he does; he does it brilliantly, but it's all he does. He doesn't make, produce or create anything, except money.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, changed the world. That's why his photo is up here and not Buffett's.

(This great shot of Gates, all youth and geekiness, is from the seattleworld blog site.)

There's a good piece by Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph about the Davis/Buffett interview. As Warner points out,  Buffett says he doesn't like the greed fuelled ways of Wall Street, but, as a little research shows,  he still invests in the Wall Street big beasts such as Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs.  Buffett says he thinks derivatives are  'financial weapons of mass destruction", yet it's clear that over the past year he has in bought extensively in these markets.

Buffett very nearly run into trouble with the regulators over sharp practices in his insurance subsiduary General Re, wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's holding company.  One unnamed associate said that "with a history as complex as Buffett's, there's bound to be an indictment in there somewhere".

In the Evans interview, Buffett reprised his often expressed view that the rich should pay higher taxes and not grumble about it.  He doesn't seem to acknowledge that the basic objection, of rich and poor alike, is not to the concept of taxes - most people agree on the need to fund things like the health services, education etc. - but to having large chunks of their hard earned money taken off them by incompetent politicians who've never worked in a real job in their lives, and have no idea of how to handle the money efficiently when they get it.

Buffett also believes in not leaving money to his three children. That about sums up Warren Buffett to me.  The man from Omaha is just not my kind of rich man.

Next post will be about two rather different rich men. They're not currently in the news, but I'm going to do a piece on them anyway - because I'm really rather taken with them.