The same is true of YouTube. While its three founders don't entirely agree about its origin, the most plausible story is that it's called "YouTube" because they thought people would make videos of themselves and upload them -- a lame idea which pretty much nobody wanted to do. Instead they figured out how to grab other media and put them up. (Another founder says it was supposed to be a video dating service.) The billions followed shortly thereafter.
You can list on one hand the Internet billionaires who have truly combined both vision and execution: Google. Amazon. eBay ... we're not even out of fingers yet.
There's "You didn't build that," and now we can add "You didn't think of that." And even the brightest billionaire's success includes a lot of lucky accidents. (And we haven't even begun to talk about the heirs and heiresses yet.) So why do they have all that money?
We're not saying they can't be rich. But how much money do a few people need -- or deserve?
7. Lucky or not, they've got a lot of control over our government.
"Of the people, by the people, and for the people"? That's still true -- for a few very rich people. The Sunlight Foundation offers these staggering statistics:
A mere 31,385 people -- less than 0.01 percent of the nation's population -- contributed 28 percent of the country's total political contributions. Nobody was elected to the House or Senate without their money.
As the Sunlight Foundation also notes, this elite group contributed at least $1.62 billion to political campaigns in 2012. (They probably also contributed the lion's share of the $350 million in "dark money" which was spent that year.) Their median donation of $26,584 is larger than the average household income in this country.
84 percent of Congress took in more from the 0.01 percent than they did from all other donors combined.
They're also spending like crazy at the state level. State candidates collected nearly $2.8 billion in 2012. It's money well-spent, and not just for the influence it gives donors at the state level. This spending has also allowed them to gerrymander Congressional districts.
Gerrymandering has turned the House of Representatives into such an unrepresentative body that Republicans now control despite a 1.4 million loss to Democrats in the popular vote. It's like they say: You get what you pay for.
8. They control the media, too, which means they control what we see and hear as "news."
The sale of the Washington Post barely scratches the surface of our media problem. There's a reason why revolutionaries from 1919 onward have always gone for the radio stations (and later, the television stations) first. They understand that the media hold enormous power.
Thirty years ago, 50 companies controlled 90 percent of all the media in this country. Today it's six companies.
Those six companies include GE, owner of serial corporate criminal GE Capital, and Newscorp, owned by the scandal-plagued Rupert Murdoch. (The others are Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS)
Americans rightfully despise totalitarian nations' "state-controlled media." But what happens when the same few people hold undue influence over the state and the media?
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