Stunned with the wealth of the 8 richest billionaires in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has become the region with the largest gap between rich and poor in the United States.

According to the newly released Silicon Valley Index for 2021, there are currently 8 billionaires holding as much wealth as 50% of the total wealth of Silicon Valley households, or nearly half a million people.

That number is up 5% from 2021, making Silicon Valley the region with the highest wealth gap in the United States, said Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, the company behind the index. Silicon Valley has up to 85 billionaires, is home to the third largest density of billionaires in the world, after New York and Hong Kong.

Of these eight billionaires, seven are from the technology sector.

They are Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google co-founders), Eric Schmidt (Google CEO), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO), Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO), Jan Koum and Laurence Powell Jobs (2 co-founders of WhatsApp) ).

The only person who isn’t in the tech industry is Charles Schwab, the founder of the financial group that bears his name.

According to data from Forbes, as of December 2022, the total assets of these 8 people (including cash, real estate and investments of 10 billion USD or more) reached 260 billion USD.

In addition to the eight people mentioned above, there are 22 other residents of Silicon Valley (most of whom are also in the technology industry) with assets between 1 and 10 billion USD, totaling 63 billion USD. Examples include venture capitalist John Doerr, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and real estate mogul John Sobrato.

Some other numbers that tell about the gap between rich and poor in Silicon Valley:

* Of the 163,000 millionaire families in Silicon Valley (those with more than $1 million in investable assets), about 8,300 have more than $10 million. * But about 220,000 other households don’t have $5,000 in their bank accounts. * Nearly a third (28%) of households “do not earn enough to meet the most basic needs without subsidies. * 42% of children in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are living in such homes. * About 2% of households (22,000 households) do not have a bank account

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