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Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

bloomberg.com

11–20 of 123 posts

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#11
This is of course an exaggeration by Bloomberg.

Six of the ten richest people on earth are US tech billionaires.

Out of the 63 technology billionaires in the top 500 global richest that Bloomberg tracks in their billionaires list, 32 are in the US. China has 13.

Here's the breakdown of technology billionaires in the Bloomberg top 500 rich list by country (the list cuts off at $3.7b):

US 32, China 13, Germany 5, Canada 3, India 2, Japan 2, Australia 2, Brazil 1, South Korea 1, France 1, Taiwan 1

(Eduardo Saverin gets listed for Brazil, I'd probably list him for Singapore however)

Over time you realistically can't have a China with an economy the size of the US (the two economies will be larger than $30 trillion each before China reaches parity, assuming they ever do), without them having an enormous amount of tech wealth. The two will likely represent ~45% of the entire global economy in terms of output over the next few decades. In terms of millionaires, it'll be closer to 75% of all millionaires on earth between the two giants (the US by itself as of just a few years ago had about 45% of all millionaires; I assume China has taken a few more points in that time). The last problem the US has right now, is a concern about an upending of its tech wealth creation. Most of China's tech wealth is entirely isolated domestically, the US was never going to be allowed to own that market, and can't own that market going forward. China's tech companies can't own the US market and never will. It's the rest of the globe that is up for grabs, and the US will always win that battle because the rich liberal world trusts China drastically less than the US. So long as China retains its current system (as opposed to resuming the Deng liberalization path), that will remain true. Would I rather use business software from Salesforce (US) or Atlassian (AU) or SAP (Germany), or China? Or nearly any cloud software for that matter. Among the more liberal nations, that remains a very easy decision. China can't compete outside of its borders in most circumstances when data, speech/expression/social/media, privacy, etc. are involved.

Out of the top 100 software companies by sales in the world, the US currently has 73 of them.

Here's a short list of US tech companies which have either been founded or seen most of their growth over the last 10-15 years:

Facebook $477b, Salesforce $120b, Uber ~$80b-$120b, Airbnb ~$40b, Workday $41b, ServiceNow $41b, Square $30b, Stripe $23b, Twitter $23b, Palo Alto Networks $21b, Splunk $19b, Lyft $15b, Fortinet $14b, Pinterest $12b, Snap $12b, GoDaddy $12b, Twilio $11b, Dropbox $10b, Ultimate Software $10b, Okta $9b, Nutanix $9b, Zendesk $8b, DocuSign $8b, Grubhub $8b, Instacart $8b, Qualtrics $8b, Coinbase $8b, Slack $7b, Zillow $7b, Github $7b (acq), Proofpoint $6b, Zscaler $6b, Etsy $6b, Hubspot $6b, Tanium $6b, MuleSoft $6b (acq), Pivotal $5b, LogMeIn $5b, MongoDB $5b, Robinhood $5b, Carvana $5b, RealPage $5b, DoorDash $4b, Pure Storage $4b, Snowflake $4b, Alteryx $4b, Houzz $4b, Medidata $4b, Anaplan $4b, Credit Karma $4b, Qualys $4b, CarGurus, Box, Cloudera, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Stitch Fix, ZocDoc, Eventbrite, SendGrid, Reddit, Zuora, SecureWorks, etc.

You could add dozens of companies to that list. You could also split off AWS, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram as well, as large tech businesses whose growth has soared over the last decade. Netflix was a still small $3b company just ten years ago. Google has also seen the vast majority of its growth since ~2004-2005.

I don't see where there has been a slowdown or upending for the US in the last 10-15 years (which represents most of the China boom phase in terms of their value creation). China's expansion has been heavily isolated to its own territory when it comes to tech companies (Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Ctrip, ByteDance, JD.com, Didi Chuxing, et al.), leaving the US free to continue doing what it has been in tech for decades without having to actually compete globally with China in most tech segments. Their tech expansion hasn't come at the expense of the US in other words.

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#12

An AirBnb IPO may tip it back towards the US. Or Pinterest, Palantir, Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates, Asana, Casper. Not really sure it should all be cast as a competition, but the wealth creation engine of the US is alive and well.

Matress Casper is a Tech company now?

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#13
post #7
post #6

Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? What's the significance of this? Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win? I'm happy for people that found success for what they've accomplished regardless of where they live. Good for them.

> Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? Yes lets root for the side that doesn't use prisoners parts for medical experiments and steals intellectual property to develop their cheap knockoffs.

Oh, OK, so we're going for... who, exactly?

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#14
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? Yes lets root for the side that doesn't use prisoners parts for medical experiments and steals intellectual property to develop their cheap knockoffs.

Oh, OK, so we're going for... who, exactly?

Technical nihilism is all the rage but... can you really not tell the difference between be the U.S. and China on human rights?

Of course, you could reply to this comment with some gross injustice, and I could counter. But I'm generally curious. And if you do believe that that U.S. and China are the same, I guess my next question, because arguments seem to lead this way - how do you feel about what-aboutism?

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#15
post #7
post #6

Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? What's the significance of this? Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win? I'm happy for people that found success for what they've accomplished regardless of where they live. Good for them.

> Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? Yes lets root for the side that doesn't use prisoners parts for medical experiments and steals intellectual property to develop their cheap knockoffs.

Do they execute the mentally handicapped like Texas? (I think China is much worse on human rights fwiw, we just have a long way to go)

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#16
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, OK, so we're going for... who, exactly?

Technical nihilism is all the rage but... can you really not tell the difference between be the U.S. and China on human rights? Of course, you could reply to this comment with some gross injustice, and I could counter. But I'm generally curious. And if you do believe that that U.S. and China are the same, I guess my next question, because arguments seem to lead this way - how do you feel about what-aboutism?

They're not the same. For example, it's the U.S. that has the world's largest prison population and the world's most expensive healthcare, etc. China has different issues.

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#17
post #6

Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? What's the significance of this? Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win? I'm happy for people that found success for what they've accomplished regardless of where they live. Good for them.

>Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win?

What happens if Xi Jinping decides that he wants something that you do not want? He will not let you vote if one day his foreign policy goals involve nice Americans.

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#18
post #6

Is this a contest where we should be rooting for a side or something? What's the significance of this? Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win? I'm happy for people that found success for what they've accomplished regardless of where they live. Good for them.

> Is this some kind of national pride thing where I should be rooting for my home country to win? What happens if Xi Jinping decides that he wants something that you do not want? He will not let you vote if one day his foreign policy goals involve nice Americans.

Just like the Chinese got no chance to vote on America's unilateral sanctions against Iran, but are still subjected to them.

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#19

I think it's not good to frame wealth creation in terms of billionaires.

Came here to say that. Compared to making everybody richer, making one guy a billionaire is easy. It costs $1 billion. Even giving each Chinese person $1 would cost more than that.

Edit: Which is not to be all "America Yay!" and "China Boo!" like some high school rivalry. America's legendary wealth inequality objectively demonstrates that it, too, leans closer to "making one guy a billionaire" than it does to "giving everybody a dollar."

Re: Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires

#20
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical nihilism is all the rage but... can you really not tell the difference between be the U.S. and China on human rights? Of course, you could reply to this comment with some gross injustice, and I could counter. But I'm generally curious. And if you do believe that that U.S. and China are the same, I guess my next question, because arguments seem to lead this way - how do you feel about what-aboutism?

They're not the same. For example, it's the U.S. that has the world's largest prison population and the world's most expensive healthcare, etc. China has different issues.

You're right that they have different issues, different problems, different strengths.

But what irks me is the "what-aboutism." If Texas executes handicap people, that's awful. But it makes China harvesting organs OK? The U.S. has a horrible track record in Latin America and (frankly) around the world, so China gets some "slack" in how many human rights activists or lawyers it jails each year?

I understand I'm responding to a larger idea and not your comment specifically but... your exact line of argument is used to justify basically everything China (and Russia, and a lot of people incidentally) does that is condemned by the international community

"So-and-so does it? Wake up you fucking sheep" is basically the locked-and-loaded phrase you can use to sound important and win any argument anytime, anywhere, and I think the tendency to fall back on that idea on HN hurts the community.

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