Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player) has, nearly single-handedly, saved the lives of tens of millions of sharks by simply asking citizens of China to stop eating shark fin soup. Since he started doing this, the price of shark fins has tanked, and 90+ percent of people surveyed in China support a ban on selling shark fins.
All of that may be true, but it bears little resemblance to the case the US actually filed against Apple. If you haven’t read the charges, you really should. They are filled with reaches that have long been rejected in similar cases, and a desire for government to broadly micromanage. One type of charge, for example, could easily be brought against any company that makes a videogame for just a single platform.
I sold a bunch of 70’s and 80’s tabletop roleplaying stuff when I went to college. A few years ago, I reacquired many of those titles at collector’s prices. Not my most brilliant financial move.
Eh. In these kinds of articles, the story is less “rich seize more wealth from others” than it is “assets already held by rich increase in ‘value’”. Almost everything in this article is “stock price go up” and, therefore, the somewhat imaginary “wealth” number of anyone holding that stock goes up. Basically, the headline could be “changes in stock price make the notional wealth of billionaires fluctuate”. Sort of a non-story to me, because everyone listed in this article could have done absolutely nothing all year, and these numbers would have changed regardless. More interesting (if only slightly) would be an article about changes to their actual assets (i.e. did they increase or decrease shares in their company, etc.). I don’t really get the “let’s keep score” for billionaires thing the media does in any case, but this article is on the more useless end of that useless pursuit.
An actual AI working for Forbes would have managed to get in a dig at Apple in the headline.
Geezer Butler is the most important member of Black Sabbath.