Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/21/silicon-valley-income-wealth-gap

by c420 • 1 year ago

88 133 1 year ago

theguardian.com

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

Yet, no cities in Silicon Valley have raised the minimum wage in the past three years.

what?

how is moving minimum wage a dollar going to help someone tackle the $136,500 necessary to rent responsibly?

just seems like an odd thing to add. they’re still going to be commuting an hour like everyone else

smallerize• 1 year ago

Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year? https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-san-jose-califor...

altairprime• 1 year ago

Didn't they just increase minimum wage this year

Thank you for pointing out this correction and article! TIL.

from $17.55 an hour to $17.95 come Jan. 1
In the San Jose metropolitan area, as of earlier this year, [Living Wage Calculator estimates] about $32.87 for a single adult with no children
Last year, the calculator estimated single adults needed to make $26.20

Elsewhere:

The [CPI] inflation rate for the United States was 2.7% for the 12 months ending June

So, assuming the article’s figures are valid, it looks like San Jose’s minimum wage increased this year by around -1.5% (inflation-adjusted) or by around -20% (Living Wage adjusted), depending on which basis you use. If only San Jose had misread the inflation chart and mistakenly issued a one-month inflation increase rather than a one-year. Sigh.

atonse• 1 year ago

Is this just a result of a strong market since most of their “wealth” is in stocks, driving up the perceived gap and resulting in such shocking sounding stats?

I am not defending inequality but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers? Is it a taxation issue?

Does the number of billionaires impact the overall cost of living of a whole metro area? If so, how?

I don’t quite understand the comparison. Genuinely asking.

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

Here is the source and I’m still not sure

https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/docs/SVPI%202025%20Annual%20Report%...

gruez6• 1 year ago

Yikes. I get they're trying to push an anti-inequality agenda, but some of the statistics are only tenuously related to inequality. For instance:

0 Number of student wellness centers in the San José Unified School District that opened in 2024, despite the growing mental health crisis in youth
0 Number of Narcan kits stocked at San José Unified School District schools, making SJUSD the only major Bay Area school district that does not stock Narcan or train staff to administer Narcan in case of a fentanyl overdose.

What's the implication supposed to be? That if it weren't for AI tech bros, there would be student wellness centers and narcan kits?

chipotle_coyote• 1 year ago

A lot of the compensation is in stocks, sure, but a lot of compensation is also, well, in compensation. HN users have been posting -- for years -- about salaries and cash (or cash equivalent) bonuses for starting level software engineering positions at some companies exceeding $250K annually. The salary inflation in Silicon Valley's tech fields has far outpaced both general inflation and wage increases of non-tech workers in the area, so even if you're seeing San Jose Panda Express locations paying $20/hr, it's just not closing or even maintaining the gap. (And we're setting aside how many of those sorts of positions aren't actually full-time.)

For full disclosure, when I was working in Silicon Valley as a tech writer a few years ago, I was making over $200K in salary and bonuses, no stock options. Now I'm working remotely in Florida, contracting with a "managed services" company who's placed me with a much bigger tech company (one you've definitely heard of) which uses this structure to keep salaries down, and I'm making $35/hr -- and the company only pays for benefits in the most technical sense, e.g., I can buy health insurance with pre-tax money but they don't contribute any of it, there's a 401(k) but it effectively has no corporate matching, I get 10 days of PTO a year, etc.).

greyface-• 1 year ago

The value of appreciated stocks (or other assets) still represents purchasing power, either through piecemeal sales as needed to match spending, or via asset-backed loans ("buy, borrow, die") to avoid sales entirely. This increased purchasing power drives up demand for (and therefore prices of) goods and services generally in the region.

pj_mukh3• 1 year ago

I have the same issue as OP.

Piecemeal sales aren't affected by the total amount though? If I'm a billionaire vs a 100 Billionaire, I'm still taking out the same amounts to live and buy yachts.

Also, as far as I can tell, it's not these 9 Billionaires hoovering up housing in the valley either. They all utmost have 2-3 properties, most of the rest of the market remains unaffected by this inequality.

In this local context, Citizens United is irrelevant too, most of the state MP's and local council members are not funded by the Billionaires and do not need to kowtow to their policy preferences.

So how exactly is inequality driving the cost of living?

EDIT: I do wish someone would actually answer this question. Everytime I bring this up I get yelling (or downvotes) in response. I agree Citizens United has really changed how Billionaires are able to affect federal elections, but in these local cases like "Silicon Valley", how does inequality affect the cost of living? This is a sincere question.

teamonkey2• 1 year ago

Here is one explanation.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4

gruez6• 1 year ago

is there a tl;dw? Based on a quick skim of the transcript it seems to be "pandemic stimulus/quantatative easing went to rich people and they bought houses with it", which seems to demonstrate a massive misunderstanding of how quantitative easing works, and ignores how housing prices crept up pre-pandemic, before any money printing happened.

beedeebeedee• 1 year ago

They have a disproportionate amount of influence on public policy. That leads to diverse systemic problems in society, so yes, this impacts low income workers and the overall cost of living in a city, state and country.

standardUser• 1 year ago

but how is stock-based wealth taking away from lower income workers?

Workers could have some/more of that stock. Nearly all workers own precisely zero share of the companies they work for, despite what this tech-oriented crowd might imagine. So when a company does well and the ownership's wealth surges, the worker bees only benefit down the line if they're able to successfully lobby for a raise. Though that doesn't always work, since the factors that drive up stock values often involve things like laying off expensive workers, cutting benefits and freezing pay. Huzzah.

So it's not exactly "taking away" anything, it's more that the entire system is stacked to ensure the workers don't have anything to take away to begin with.

jrflowers• 1 year ago

Is this just a result of a strong market since most of their “wealth” is in stocks

No. This isn’t the result of The Market happening more to nine households than everybody else. That isn’t a thing that happens

Tadpole91812• 1 year ago

The ultra rich have, effectively, left the economy. They forgo taxable income and get what amounts to interest free loans, backed on their non-income benefits, from other rich folk, then spend that to accumulate "real" assets like property.

The result is that their imaginary, untaxed, "unrealized" money is effectively realized at an opportunity cost of normal people still participating in the schmuck economy.

It's more complicated than that, of course, and it's not exactly "free money" - the house of cards could crumble - but that's the skinny of how it works.

This is why there's so much talk of taxing unrealized gains (as one example). They're trying to remove the game and force the wealthy back into the normal economy.

_DeadFred_2• 1 year ago

Stocks have changed from the prior concept of stocks. Stock buybacks used to be illegal stock manipulation. Lifestyles didn't used to be financed via loans using stock as collateral. Companies used to be managed for the long term and dividends not this quarter's impact on stock value.

The rich initiated the changes but keep going 'what who me? They're just stocks' like it's 1940 when the public calls them out for it.

j_crick• 1 year ago

Piketty was right? Who would’ve thought…

an0malous2• 1 year ago

Wealth inequality is the primary issue in society. No one would care about immigrants, LGBTQ rights, trans athletes, or any of the other culture war issues if food, housing, transportation, and healthcare were affordable. The elites have done a fantastic job distracting everyone from the core problem afflicting society. As Piketty has shown, their increasing concentration of wealth is mathematically guaranteed and they continue to accumulate wealth while the labor class fights amongst themselves over relatively trivial matters.

gruez6• 1 year ago

No one would care about immigrants, LGBTQ rights, trans athletes, or any of the other culture war issues if food, housing, transportation, and healthcare were affordable.

Seriously? I get why people would care less about immigration if they didn't think immigrants were stealing their jobs, but the culture war over LGBTQ rights and trans athletes hardly can be tied to some economic basis. If you spent any time interacting with conservatives you'd realize nobody is worried about LGBTQ people and trans athletes are stealing their jobs or whatever. They are worried about how LGBTQ/trans athletes are destroying the moral fabric of their society. Those concerns aren't going to evaporate just because everyone is fed and housed. If anything if they're more economically secure they'd be able to spend even more time on culture war issues.

sterlind• 1 year ago

I still don't get billionaire populism. like just fundamentally, I do not understand how Musk and Trump built this image that they're men of the people.

there are weak spots, though. Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for murdering a CEO, with a lot of support across the political spectrum. likewise, the Epstein files getting suppressed seemed to agitate just about everyone. those fault lines weren't on the woke/anti-woke axis, they were on an elite/common axis. they were also harder to safely polarize the public on.

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

Do billionaires affect the area they live in much? I imagine they'd mostly just have a compound in an already rich area, and not interact with the general area much. And then be travelling to other houses of theirs or for business frequently?

Barrin92• 1 year ago

Do billionaires affect the area they live in much?

Not by their consumer spending or how they live but given that SV billionaires have increasingly become politically activist with their vast sums of money, almost certainly.

cavisne• 1 year ago

They have actually become less politically activist with their money. Of the 9 families in previous election cycles

Zuck - wanted to run for President as a Democrat

Laurene Powell - huge left wing donor

Google Founders - huge left wing donors

Eric Schmidt - led digital for Clinton, huge Obama backer

Ellison is the only right wing one of the group, the rest have just stepped back from politics, spending less (except Laurene)

Not to mention those just below the cutoff like Dustin Moskovitz.

throwmeaway222• 1 year ago

Sick of fake news like this. If this is cash held, then it's a news story. But if these are company valuations then holding this in the hands of few is not making the economy worse.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies.

kaibee2• 1 year ago

wealth inequality does not make the economy worse anyway. economies are always better where more wealth is created, and wealth is never created "evenly" across the population; however, the rising tide does lift all boats, that's the empirical history of successful economies.

Yes, I'm sure that once all of the wealth is held by a tiny fraction of the elites, they will successfully centrally plan the whole economy for maximum efficiency.

electriclove• 1 year ago

Which households are these 9?

WNWceAJ9R9Ezc42• 1 year ago

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525

WNWceAJ9R9Ezc42• 1 year ago

While the data does not name individuals, it is not hard to find the list of billionaires who call the region home: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and businesswoman and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs in Palo Alto, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Los Altos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and financier George Roberts in Atherton, and Ubiquiti Networks founder Robert Pera in San Jose, are the richest nine in the two counties, according to the group’s analysis of a Forbes list.

Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/03/06/wealthiest-silicon-va...

tmsh2• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/KpqWc

tmsh2• 1 year ago

I know it's not the point of this important article. But I had no idea about Robert Pera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera - kind of inspiring. Only millennial on the list that is not Zuck. And not gon' lie my instagram was similar to https://www.instagram.com/__rjp__/ for a while - seems like a semi-regular selfie with dog in car type of person. Did better financially though than most lol.

foxglacier• 1 year ago

Rich people have to live somewhere. Are they supposed to be isolated in some rich-only area with no poors allowed so that there's no inequality? I suppose they probably are on an even more local level. Problems with poverty in Silicon Valley are the result of government actions not the presence of rich people.

Aurornis• 1 year ago

Adding up all of the wealth in a small region and then calculating wealth inequality against a small number of households makes for some triggering headlines, but it’s not a very useful metric for anything in the real world.

A though exercise: If these 9 households moved to another city, the wealth inequality would improve. But what has actually been accomplished? Tax revenues would actually drop.

A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum. If a small number of households have a lot of wealth, some people assume it must have been amassed by taking it from the other households. The more people believe in zero-sum thinking, the more egregious this feels.

apwell234• 1 year ago

A lot of these perspectives cater to an idea that wealth is zero sum.

ofcourse its zero sum. There are only so many natural resources to exploit. Zuckerberg owns like half of lake tahoe and Hawaii.

anothereng3• 1 year ago

if it were zero sum then how come middle class people nowadays live better lives than kings 500 years ago?

soulofmischief3• 1 year ago

It's not zero sum if we regulate these resources. The sun provides low entropy which we can convert to an increasing stockpile of wealth. The problem is how we've decided to distribute it, and whether we can successfully transition to mining our local solar system.

taftster• 1 year ago

The total sum of all natural resources has yet to be discovered. We were supposed to hit peak oil in what, the 1990's? Trees are on a dramatic decline, but they still exist. No one can correctly or meaningfully count the amount of natural resources left in total existence. And when there's scarcity, another solution tends to emerge as substitute.

As such, as parent stated, it's not a zero sum game. Zero sum assumes you can define the end state.

That being said, whether or not it's zero-sum is meaningless, and I don't take issue with arguing against the parent. Ultimately, the wealth-gap is widening to detrimental effect. The middle class is being divided into haves and have nots.

Whether you believe this is a problem, that's probably another type of discussion.

conception• 1 year ago

It’s not zero sum but that doesn’t mean the very wealthy aren’t taking substantial more of the pie’s growth as its grows, if not nearly all of it.

monero-xmr8• 1 year ago

All that matters is what you can purchase and what lifestyle you can afford. Despite living in supposed Dickensian-levels of inequality there is no better time in world history to be alive, by a long shot, and our poorest have it better than ever before

silisili• 1 year ago

One rather sobering thing is to search both mean and median net worth for your age. For mine, mean is over 4x the median.

You'd expect some divergence, but not nearly that much.

jayd16• 1 year ago

You're looking at this backwards. It's already an affluent area and even still wealth is so consolidated.

What is the point of the thought experiment? No one is asking them to _move_.

happytoexplain6• 1 year ago

The more people believe in zero-sum thinking

It is zero-sum. That's the correct way of thinking.

It may not be absolutely zero-sum, but it is effectively zero-sum. As in: The effects, problems, and solutions - in practice - are the same as is if it were zero-sum.

avmich• 1 year ago

Can it be a negative-sum - the bigger inequality, the smaller the total?

drivingmenuts• 1 year ago

While they are perhaps paying large amounts of local taxes, are these taxes in the same proportion as those of lesser wealth and are these taxes in proportion to their influence? For most wealthy people, taxes are an afterthought given the tax breaks they have access to.

antonvs• 12 months ago

The point is that SV is packed to the brim with very wealthy people, so this is a demonstration of the scale of the wealth inequality, which is something people tend to have difficulty wrapping their heads around.

seneca• 1 year ago

The only problem with this is that there are so few billionaires. Wealth is good. We should celebrate it, and focus on making more of it, not on resenting the people who have already done so.

PlunderBunny• 1 year ago

I don't think people resent the people for their wealth so much as the political influence those people wield in order to preserve their wealth and power.

m0llusk• 1 year ago

That is invalid framing of the issues. We know from Picketty's study of Capitalism that capital accumulates because returns on capital are higher than not and from Turchin's work on Cliodynamics that inequality drives social breakdown and chaos. One does not celebrate the creation of wealth by enabling society to crack and crumble.

happytoexplain6• 1 year ago

we should focus on making more wealth

Of course! Why didn't we think of that?

Congrats on getting the first sarcastic comment out of me I believe in all my time on HN. What you've said is absolutely breathtaking.

int_19h5• 1 year ago

A billion in cash does not represent wealth in and of itself. If you lived in Germany in 1923, you could easily be a trillionaire, but that wouldn't do you any good.

What matters is how much cash you have relative to others, because that determines the actual purchasing power. So in a sense you're right in that the real problem isn't having billionaires, but that not everyone is one. But if everyone were one, there would be no reason to devalue the currency and drop the useless zeroes.

And, of course, the people who own those billions didn't make most of it. Some other people, who get paid salary or wages, did, with their labor. The guys who have the billions are those who collect economic rent from those who do the work.

hedora• 1 year ago

More approachable writeup / primary source:

https://www.sjsu.edu/hri/policy-projects/svpi/index.php

sas224dbm• 1 year ago

This is not unique to SV. This is happening world over. The wealthier are buying more assets, the middle and lower classes are left paying rent to the wealthy landowners. "Gary's Economics" has tons of material on wealth inequality and its impacts.

yonran• 1 year ago

What a disappointment that this “Silicon Valley Pain Index”—where the pain consists of things like high rents and homelessness—is headlined with an irrelevant scapegoat of 9 billionaires. The 9 billionaires named in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641525) do not own the vast majority of residential zoned land and are not active in land use politics as far as I know. It’s the few hundred thousand millionaires who use regulatory capture (zoning) to prevent abundant multifamily housing.

You can hate billionaires for other reasons, but urban land use is mostly a problem of your own neighbors who vote, not some tiny minority of super-rich.

klipklop• 1 year ago

None of those top families even really live in the bay area. They attend meetings here sure, but their real homes are on islands/compounds.

hazmazlaz• 1 year ago

Why not be bold and name those nine households? I think the public deserves to know who in their community is hoarding all of the wealth.

Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens

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