The Saudi royal clan has some very sick people. Most of the conflict in the middle east is financed and/or instigated by them. The Germans had concluded their involvement in funding of some of the 9/11 terrorists. Not sure if it's absolutely true but I wouldn't put them beyond it.
So only thing I got out of it, is it would be very profitable strategy to buy Kingdom stock 3 months before FORBES list, and short immediately after. Now, since he was removed from Forbes list, that would probably not work.
A Vice piece on the contrast of slums and a billion-dollar home in Mumbai [1] and a pair of 2008 billionaire suicides [2][3].
It makes me wonder if each of these guys and the profiled Alwaleed are just so far abstracted from typical human wants that prestige and status become sole obsessions?
Reading about guys like this or that billionaire whiner Perkins make me feel very blessed. I'm not really motivated by money but I do recognize it is a tool that allows for other things I am interested in. But then you get smacked in the face with someone like the people you're talking about and realize that your modest life is not too bad since you're not so out of touch with the reality of the world...
The apparent vanity and ostentatiousness does leave a bad taste in my mouth, but the CFO mentioned in the article does have a point - Why apply different standards to this particular billionaire.
I am no expert- but according to the article, the prince's net worth was calculated not directly from the publicly traded value of Kingdom holding, but Forbes' own analysis of Kingdom's assets. If they applied that standard uniformly I think half the paper billionaires would be off the list. Silicon Valley companies are ridiculously overvalued if you consider P/E ratio. For example,Toyota which had profits of $18 billion is valued at $190.2 billion whereas Facebook which had profits of $1.914 billion is valued at $166 billion. To those arguing about Facebook's potential- I am not sure Facebook will be around 10 years from now, but I am pretty sure Toyota will be. Yet Mark Zuckerberg (who seems to have little assets other than his Facebook stock) is at #21, while Alwaleed (who according to Forbes has a lot of tangible assets) is at #31.
I'm guessing the moral parable about what happens when you forget that it's not the money that matters, but what you can do with the money that's important.
