Rich People

Sofia Coppola is rich, beyond rich, and always has been. The same is true for Bill Gates. People act like he is some great entrepreneur, an example of the American Dream, he isn't. He was born to rich, successful parents who were themselves born to rich successful parents. He is smart, he is quick, he is ruthless, he has always had enough money to gamble on the big bets and he hit the jackpot.

But back to Sofia Coppola. Here, in an article in the New York Times, she talks with the interviewer about Paris, how her parents have a place up a rode they pass by. Even though they are Italian, she says, they would often go to Paris, though Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit and raised in New York so I don't see how her family being Italian brings any significance to them visiting Paris often, it's not as though they lived in Italy and traveling to Paris would be any more significant than any other place. But, that aside, she loves Paris, she has deep emotional connections, I can understand this, I think we all have deep connections with various places for various reasons, as the preceding post shows I have a strong emotional connection to the place her Dad currently lives.

But the point of me talking about this is Lost in Translation, the only film she's made that I've seen. Renowned for it's capturing of the feeling of Tokyo through the eyes of an American foreigner. I marveled at the movie, it's subdued tone, it's lack of explanation of every story point, it's creation of a feeling of place I had never met. I wonder how hard it was for her to create that movie, after reading that article, the movie seems a natural output based on her life and it's subtlety the product of someone who has no need to bow to corporate movie executives and multiple managerial script re-writes.

Oh, did you know that Nicolas Cage is Sofia's brother? I didn't, I also didn't know that he went to high school with Al Brooks, Angelina Jolie, Lenny Kravitz and Rob Riener.

I'm sure this all sounds very bitter and maybe it is. But I think it has more to do with the realization that it is very hard to be anything approaching as rich as Bill Gates without having more or less been born into it. More and more it seems to me strikingly obvious that hard work alone will almost never make you large amounts of money. I don't have any value judgments to pass on that, at least at the moment. No, I'm simply beginning to really realize the way that things work I suppose.

However I would like to pass judgment on one particular aspect of the rich in American that is fairly easy to throw stones at, particularly because Warren Buffet the second richest person in the world has said it before me. That is that corporate managers and CEOs are making far too much, for instance he takes in as his salary $100,000 which to any normal person would seem immense but compared to the average of $9 million that other executives that occupy the S&p 500 take in it is absurdly small.

I'm rambling but I want to through out a couple more statistics that are depressing to me :-D
The top 1% own nearly twice as much corporate wealth as they did 15 years ago.
"In 38 states where the incomes of the bottom fifth of families grew more slowly than those at the top, incomes at the top rose by an average of $45,800 (62%), while the incomes of the poorest grew by $3,000 (21%)." This info is from here.