It would be more interesting to look at their wealth as a percentage of the world's wealth. We have greater output per capita (GDP) today than back then so while the nominal wealth amount may be considered low it's quite possible it was a higher percentage of the world's wealth back then than it is today.
I'm pretty sure this is not the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
There don't seem to be any relevant statistics on that Wikipedia page.
"Around the same time, I read an essay in Wired magazine by Paul Saffo, who is a director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, which argued that the information highway is going to cause a flowering of personal expression not seen in our society since the sixties, and that when this happens (maybe in five years) people whom we now think of as computer nerds will have the same hipness that in r…
Not hipsters so much as geeks. There's a big difference between a geek and a hipster.
There are so many gems in this text :) For example: > Designing software—or “writing code,” as people in the trade say
I liked Bill's advice on how to speed up meetings: “Every time you say ‘thirteen,’ I’ll know that what that means is that all you want to do is what the customer wants. And for every one of these other gibberish slogans, we can also get little numbers. There are a lot of small integers available. We’ll just tighten these meetings up. You know, Cannavino, if you want to talk about how you’re going to save the U.S. edu…
> The information highway will be the opposite of this—more like the library of congress but with an easy way to find things.
I thought this line was interesting, seeing as this was before the advent of Google. Bill knew that there needed to be an easy way to find things. MSN search started around the same time as Google, but I believe they used Inktomi rather than develop their own crawler.
Read the sentence right before that one where he says no one else reads his email. The implication is that he doesn't have an assistant screening his messages. His email is completely secure in the sense that it's a private one on one conversation, which is to say it's as private as a quiet conversation in a coffee shop or at a park for example. I don't think he is implying it's necessarily secure from hackers and ea…
Or he was just wrong. Maybe the simplest understanding of his statements is that he simply didn't know of what he spoke. Or maybe he was telling a fib. Either of those two options seem more likely than some convoluted debate as to the common understanding of the word "secure".
Well, you could assume he meant "secure" in the same sense as many of us in the industry would interpret it today and conclude that he is a dimwit. Or you could read the sentence right before which gives the context for the use of the word "secure". Reading into any more than that is pure speculation.