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Quote:GATES AND BUFFETT: 1000 TIMES WORSE THAN KEN LAY

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ken Lay--all thieves. Compared to the world's two richest men, however, Lay was small potatoes. So why are we praising them, and kicking Lay while he's down--six feet down?

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Quote:Buffett and Gates may not have broken any laws--although, in Gates' case, the Clinton-era Justice Department thought he'd cheated millions of American consumers by violating anti-trust laws--but it's hard to see how their billions are more ethically legit than Lay's misbegotten millions. Sorry, but "working hard" doesn't cut it. I don't care if you stay late at the office every night, work weekends and holidays, or you never go on vacation. It doesn't matter how smart, imaginative or lucky you are. It just isn't possible to earn $44 billion in a single lifetime.

Not honestly, anyway.

Gates and Buffett have created a lot of pain and misery on their way to "earning" their combined $94 billion. (Bear in mind, that's what they're worth. That doesn't include what they've spent.) Gates scammed his dough the old-fashioned way: overcharging his customers and underpaying his employees. Somewhere along the way to accumulating $50 billion, doesn't it occur to a guy that he could charge a little less than $200 for buggy, instantly obsolete, software? Or that it's time for a company-wide raise? He could even hire (gasp) unionized American workers instead of building plants in the Third World and relying on the slave labor of prison inmates!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20060710/cm...thankenlay

Gates sells proprietary products at what the market will bear. That's basically what capitalism is in a nutshell. Has he twisted arms to get his products in every possible nook and crannie. Yes, he has been a bully along those lines, bordering on the illegal. Maybe even crossing that line. The difference is that he has created products that have changed the way we live and work, and he has created countless millionaires along the way. Nobody has ever lost money riding on his coattails.

Buffett is a very smart investor. People thought that he was a dinosaur when he refused to get caught up in the dot com boom era. His analysis didn't see the value in many companies that others were pumping up and investing their life savings in. Investors who have followed his advice through the years have also made tons of money. How does that make him a crook?

Both Gates and Buffett give billions in charity and are scheming up creative ways to give billions more. Buffett is planning on donating 30 billion to the Gates Foundation even though he has a foundation of his own.

Anyway, I'm not petitioning either of them for sainthood but that article that you quote doesn't have much reasoning in it to speak of. Sounds like someone had a deadline to make and just came up with something to fill space. Everyone's entitled to an opinion but I'd like to see more specifics as to how he came to his conclusions.

~Bob