21h ago

Bill Gates Bought His Daughter A $16 Million Horse Farm As A Graduation Gift — But Ex-Wife Melinda Says The Kids Were Raised Very 'Middle Class'

finance.yahoo.com

If your dad is Bill Gates, you're probably not getting a Starbucks gift card for graduating college.

In 2018, Jennifer Gates walked off the Stanford stage and onto a 124-acre, $15.82 million horse farm in North Salem, New York. According to Architectural Digest, the lavish estate was a graduation gift from her billionaire parents—and came complete with rolling pastures, three parcels of land, and proximity to New York City for her future studies.

But in case that sounds too much like the plot of "Succession: Equestrian Edition," Melinda Gates would like to remind everyone: their kids were absolutely raised "middle class."

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Rich people always, without exception, fail to recognize their own disconnections from reality.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialectic?wprov=sfti1

These motherfuckers clearly need to be paying more taxes.
- Something Bill Gates actually agrees with. He's one of the super rich who has been outspoken about the rich needing to pay more taxes.
  
  Something Bill Gates actually agrees with
  It's always interesting to me how people bring this up regarding Gates and Buffett, as if that makes their largesse and greed at the expense of others perfectly acceptable. It's easy to say you support something when you know you're never going to be held accountable for following through.
- ...and not living behind gated walls. My partner works construction in some truly outrageous "communities " and the people in our city don't even know the lavishness of the lives of those who live there.

What could a horse ranch cost? $10?

They mean billionaire middleclass.
- I think they actually do. $16 million is like weekend money for them, I’m guessing
  
  They don’t even spend that money, as is all billionaire spending. They borrow against their assets and profit enough to pay back the loan so they literally don’t spend money by using that credit line to buy more assets. Gates, bezos, musk, etc. depending on their market situation they could literally take a piss and be 16 million dollars richer or poorer and it wouldn’t matter.

Much like the soon to be german chancellor, who told an interviewer, that he is upper middle class. All that while being a former Blackrock manager and owning (and using regularily) a personal private jet. Thats some kind of chancellor material...

Well, okay, if that's upper class then what size ranches do middle class people buy for their kids' graduation?
- You crazy LEGO is crazy expensive!
- Mattel brand. Less cost on maintenance also.

Lol "middle class"... Does anyone know a middle class family? I just see people with money, and people who don't have enough. That's the real world... Maybe long ago there was a middle class?
- I've met people who had enough but not too much. Never hurting for money, one vacation a year out of state but not out of the country, bought cars new but drove them for decades. Working class, but comfortable.
  
  Yeah, some still exists, most have gone the way of the dodo
- https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/
  Diminished sure, but still the largest group.

Rich people are so goddamn out of touch with reality.

and gates has to reinvent his image with his "charity work" he still a ruthless businessman, and countries complained about his vaccine requirements as well.

“Middle class” isn’t a thing. There’s the working class and the ruling class.

I want to be this middle class...

Its middle class, how much do they need to spend on graduation? 1mil? Yeah, we'll go 16mil and be the most middle class.

- I thought this was a Philomena Cunk meme at first

How do you raise a child “middle class in this house:
Bill Gates designed and owns a 66,000-square-foot (6,100 m2) mansion that is on Lake Washington in Medina, Washington.In 2009, property taxes were reported to be US$1.063 million on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million.
The house features an estate-wide server system, a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) gym, and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) dining room. There are six kitchens and 24 bathrooms, ten of which contain bathtubs.
- Why TF would you put in a pool that is 7 m shorter than Olympic sized? There's a reason they are 25 m. It makes it much easier to determine your daily workout.
  
  Olympic-sized is 50 meters, but your point stands.

So, Bill (after the divorce) buys the ranch as a gift, but the headline circles it back to a unsourced Melinda quote ON YAHOO FINANCE! This is another obfuscating hatchet job to whitewash billionaire behaviour by media owned by said billionaires. Please don't engage. This is non-news. Down vote this to the sewer where it belongs.

Never forget that Bill's mom was on the board of directors at IBM and pushed for the company to use her boy's software startup in the very beginning. Microsoft was built entirely on this nepotism and monopoly. There is nothing remotely middle class about that story.
- She wasn’t on the board of directors of IBM, she was on another board which the CEO of IBM was also on.
  It’s a distinction without a difference, but still.

Middle finger class.

Rich people have literally zero idea what middle class is. I'm middle class and I haven't been able to afford to go to the dentist is about 20 years. Sometimes the lower class lives better than the mid and lower middle class. We make just barely too much money to receive help. We made a decision to not stay in poverty and take raises that make us lose benefits, and life has only been harder since then.
- I'm middle class and I haven't been able to afford to go to the dentist is about 20 years.
  That doesn't sound right.
  
  Self employed, nonprofit. Pay lots of taxes, but zero benefits or retirement. My kids are aging out of the child tax credit but they're still at home. We don't qualify for Medicaid. We used to but not now, my wife runs a big High School cafeteria only for the health insurance. She gets the privilege of collecting "lunch debt". Still driving my 17yo daughter to school because there's no busing, and drivers ed isn't offered and private driving instruction is closer to $2k than it is to $1k. Hoping to be able to go to the dentist soon but life continuously gets in the way. New roof. New HVAC and ductwork. Foundation repair and waterproofing. Currently taking down a massive half-dead tree that leans over my son's bedroom. The cost of life is massively outpacing wages.
  
  That’s because the term “middle class” without context doesn’t mean much.
  My wife and I life in the Twin Cities metro in Minnesota and we meet the definition of middle class for this part of the country which ranges for our state from ~$55k to ~$150k if going based on income.
  We have almost no retirement savings but we have tens of thousands in the bank, we have a mortgaged home, two cars 6 years or newer with one completely paid off, in the last 3 years we’ve had to replace our AC, furnace, water heater, water softener, stove, refrigerator, dishwasher and garage door. We have also chosen to replace our kitchen counter, front door and front walk/patio as well as add a fence and dog door. All of this we paid for up front in cash.
  We carry no debt outside of my student loans which I pay on every month as well as one car loan and our mortgage. We both go to the dentist and get all needed medical care.
  Caveats to this are we don’t have kids and I can’t imagine how difficult it would be if we did. We also live pretty simple lives. We’ve always lived in a fashion so that we could afford our basic expenses on one income because my wife and I both lived very poor, check-to-check lives when we were younger.
  I don’t think middle class truly exists anymore. You either can afford to live now or you can’t, it’s just by how much and where.
  
  It's not. If you can't afford a dentist you're not middle class. IDK where dude lives, but I make $100k in a major metro area in the USA and consider myself middle class. My family still qualifies for partial forgiveness from medical bills.
- They seem to think you're only middle class if you've never been to Epstein Island.
  
  Leaves Bill out!

Melinda fucking Gates doesn't know what "middle class" means, big shocker there…
- middle class to her is being a poor millionaire's budget.

To be fair, by the time you graduate from college, you've already been raised.

How much can a banana cost, Michael? $10?

The problem is that the working poor and the billionaires all think they are middle class. Because poor is for non-whites.

I only got a £2 million pony farm for my 18th, and I was raised working class so this makes sense...

To be fair, out of all the billionaires they at least have made attempts to not make their kids shiteheads which is in stark contrast to most billionaires. At one point in time at least, they were only leaving $10m to each child, with plans to donate everything else.
Is that enough to live better than 99.99% of us? Absolutely. But it's also not: I can do whatever I want and buy whatever I want and never have to think about money again.
- leaving $10m to each child, with plans to donate everything else
  The plans were to donate everything else to a tax-advantaged "charity" in which the Gates family retains complete financial control.
  This is not philanthropy. It is tax avoidance, greenwashing, and a public relations campaign.
  
  when gates was on reddit, he choose AMA sub, so he wouldnt get criticized, they wouldnt allow you to question him on his charities being used tax evasion or money laundering.
  
  Yeah, it might be public relations, but the malaria nets and polio vaccines and HIV treatments and guinea work eradication did actually save millions of lives.
  It's one thing to argue that doing good doesn't make up for doing bad, but it's another thing to refuse to acknowledge the good at all.
- this is not how generational wealth work.
  lets say you are 17. having a party in the house with 100k cash in your bank account. you hear dad talk about a big merger "this company will be this company and the stock will go up" you put 50k on that and now you have 300k or something.
  I sat with a few upper class once, if I have cache on hand I will be millionaire by now, it doesn't take much to get rich when you hang out with rich people....
- But it's also not: I can do whatever I want and buy whatever I want and never have to think about money again.

She means she told them to hold their wallet around the blacks in the city, and that only feminine gays are acceptable.
- only feminine gays are acceptable.
  I'm out of the loop for this. Is this something middle class families believe?
  
  probably confusing it with UPPER middle class people, which are nowhere near middle class.

He's such a philantropist

But Daaaaaaaad, all the other kids are getting a horse farm!

Akshually. Depending on which definition you use they are middle class. The original meaning of middle class is the wealthy who don’t hold a title. They sit below the aristocracy aka upperclass, and above the peasantry aka the working class. The middle class is also called the bourgeoisie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie
- i like the original meaning because it made it a lot easier to point at the bourgeois and their politics (which is currently ruining my country and the proletariat is more than willing to lean even harder into their destructive mandates).
  in my country/culture, middle class is (or at least was) anyone who have earned a professional title of high esteem. i.e. a doctor. and socially they were highly respected, regardless of actual wealth status. wealthy people used to be targets of ridicule (because they tried to flaunt their wealth in public. i still remember, 20 years ago, how one of our wealthiest individuals were literally crying on TV how no one respected her for wealth and she much preferred american culture. incidentally and totally unrelated; she launched a bunch of reality tv shows about worshipping wealth after that).
  unfortunately american social media and said reality TV shows have radically changed how youth and the younger generation identify "status". i always hear about how they will be rich one day and buy a super mansion. but if you ask what the purpose of that is; they couldn't explain it - it's just what they're told to desire.
  so from my perspective, the next 2-3 generations are on a path to ruin in the name of capital ownership for the few.

Jennifer Gates, born on April 26, 1996, would have been 22 years old in 2018. All the raising has been done at that point.

$16 Million Horse Farm and middle class income. Can he drop the farm to some random person from middle class so we can compare the outcomes ?

They ate cereal for dinner one night per week. Super middle class. /s

Clearly not relatable at all but why do we talk about that all of a sudden? Is it a diversion over something else?
- The corporation knows we hate billionaires. They rang the dinner bell and gave us our slop. Now we need to lap it up and generate ad revenue for the business. We need to tell the world: ragebait articles contribute to society, they generate value, it brings in the visitors.

Everyone in the US is middle class. You can be upper middle class or lower middle class, but you can never not be middle class.

She is a commoner. How else could she raise her kids?

~~Why TF would you put in a pool that is 7 m shorter than Olympic sized? There's a reason they are 25 m. It makes it much easier to determine your daily workout.~~

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