By Peter Lawrence Kane
It doesn’t take a coding genius to realize that the Bay Area is full of affluence, and the recently released 2013 Forbes 400 list shows just how heavily the tech realm has tilted the scales. Some 46 of the wealthiest Americans live in San Francisco or the Peninsula (or, in George Lucas’s case, Marin).
As a total non-shocker, all but very few are white males who made their fortunes in tech, with Larry Ellison (3), Larry Page (13), Sergey Brin (14), and Mark Zuckerberg (20) leading the pack. Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurine Powell Jobs, is the 35th wealthiest person in the United States, and by far the richest woman in the Bay Area until one comes to Doris Fisher, a cofounder of the Gap, at #151. (Another wealthy widow, Dagmar Dolby of Dolby Labs, ranks #235, while Meg Whitman, who appears to be the lone self-made Bay Area woman on the list, is number 296, although of course she would have an extra $140 mil lying around if she hadn’t run for governor).
With a few proper plutocrats such as Riley and Stephen Bechtel (143) or Gordon Getty (273) still breathing, the Nob Hill Gazette needn’t worry about declining readership just yet. But most of the mid-level billionaires are residents of the Peninsula who are barely known outside of venture capital or high-tech circles. (Non-shocker number two: many folks on the list, even the Northern Californians, are people whose job it is to move money around, creating little of enduring value.) Some, such as real estate magnate Richard Peery (260), are so anonymous that even Forbes couldn’t track down a photo. But at least a good portion of the Bay Area’s wealth resides in the hands of youngish people who sometimes do good for the world, unlike all those Oklahoma oilmen or hedge fund managers in Boca Raton. Palo Alto alone is home to over a dozen such folks, while Dustin Moskovitz (85), who at 29 years old owes his several billions and success at Asana to Facebook, is the wealthiest person to call San Francisco home.
Among the truly well-known tech names, only Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (98), gay libertarian PayPal founder and potential seasteader Peter Thiel (314), Yahoo’s Jerry Yang (327), and Jack Dorsey of Square (386) made the roster. For what it’s worth, Thiel, Dorsey and Robert Pera of San Jose comprise half of Forbes’ “Most Eligible Bachelors” of the 400. It should be noted that achieving the milestone of one billion dollars in wealth wouldn’t qualify you for that list, since even the 400th-richest American — Woodside, California’s own Nicholas Woodman, of wearable video camera maker GoPro — has $1.3 billion to his name.
The three top Googlers alone possess more wealth than the entire GDP of the Dominican Republic. Just think about those sums the next time you’re experiencing anxiety over the dearth of one-bedrooms in the Mission for under $3200 a month even before Twitter’s IPO jolts the market. (Or, you know, don’t.) But perhaps the key takeaway from the Forbes list – to put it into TED Talk terms — is the continuing ephemerality of all this tech-generated wealth. Your old roommate’s startup might give them a free kitten every day, and the coffee maker might be stocked with those crazy expensive beans dug out of civet cat poo, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to be around in a decade.
In fact, of all the major tech names on Forbes’ list, very few were on the list ten years ago, in the year 1 B.G. (as in, Before Gmail). The entire tech landscape exists in a highly sped-up cycle of growth and decay. Sure, Larry Ellison might be the third wealthiest American now, but he’s seemingly entering something of a Howard Hughes phase as opposed to disrupting or innovating much.
That’s not to say that all of these companies are built on sand the way the SoMa edifices that house them are built on fill. In the medium term, Google isn’t going anywhere (although the US surveillance state is giving foreign citizens pause before entrusting their lives to the cloud) and neither is Facebook (although teenagers seem to ignore it). But the at-times terrifying anxiety we proletarians feel as the cost of living in San Francisco whizzes up might be shared by the titans at the top, insecure atop their billions as they navigate the graveyard of their predecessors.
