Do Secret Trillionaires Exist?

I know the idea seems far-fetched but in we know that secret billionaires hiding in plain sight exist. In fact, in one year Bloomberg reporters discovered 90 billionaires who hadn't previously been counted on the major lists of wealthy individuals (archive.is/h2pfH). So, that naturally provokes the question, if hidden billionaires exist and trillions upon trillions are hidden away in off-shore tax havens, is it possible that hidden trillionaires exist?

I think the answer is yes, even though a trillion dollars is an enormous sum and close to the near entirety of Russia's GDP, when we consider the fact that the value of assets far-out number a country's gdp I think its not impossible.

For instance, by some estimates the US economy is measured at 18 trillion dollars GDP but the total assets of the US comes to ten times that (archive.is/K8YK0 link is a bit old but you get the point) if not more by now.

How much the world itself is worth seems to vary, I've heard it figures thrown out between 220 trillion conservatively and one quadrillion. The derivatives market itself is 1.2 quadrillion from what I hear. I'm not the world's smartest person when comes to understanding high finance but to me it seems that with that much money/things to own in the world the chance of someone breaking the 1 trillion mark is likely. Someone's public fortune doesn't necessarily translate into all the different assets they control or have a controlling stake in.

Is there any material backing for the speculation that trillionaires might exist? Yes, two cases that I know of, the House of Saud is considered to be worth more then one trillion and the Emperor of Japan is estimated to have stolen 100 billion (1 trillion in today's money) in bullion and cultural artifacts during WWII. It's thought that the US recovered the majority of it and recycled it through the financial system with the aim of fighting the Cold War.

Some other criticisms that have been made of the Forbes and other business press lists that determines who the public thinks of as the world's wealthiest people is that they don't include the prominent business families (Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Krupp etc.), heads of state or any aristocracy. On paper Queen Elizabeth is "poor" even if she's still considered the world's biggest landowner as far as I know. According to American yellow journalism Putin is richer then Bill Gates, so how could he be richer then Bill according to mainstream media logic yet we should at the same time suppose that there's no one else attaining some stratospheric unheard of fortunes that we don't know about?

Wasn't Rockefeller considered to be worth 300 billion in current dollars at one time? Even if you just assume that wealth is spread evenly over a numerous Rockefeller clan even low-yield investments on that much money would've netted a considerable fortune over more then a century.

I admit this is all mostly speculation but I want to hear opinions on the possibility of the existence of hidden trillionaires? Do you think they exist? Who do you think are plausible candidates? Where do you even invest/put that much money?

I know some of you do believe in this. The question is, can you prove it? For instance, I'm inclined to believe it but I haven't seen strong proof so far. I believe we should at least weight the pros and cons, because according to the bourgeois press the age of open trillionaires will be here in a few decades if capitalism continues.

Other urls found in this thread:

thewarmongerreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/bombshell-list-of-secret-trillionaires.html?m=1
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock
businessinsider.com/worlds-biggest-landowners-2011-3?op=1)
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Yeah. I spam the 8 people own as much as the bottom 50% of the world but honestly most of their wealth is hidden. Even the dumbest prole would realize he's being fucked if they flaunted that shit openly.

If you count dollar amounts in pure dollars probably not, but if you count them in worth of assets owned, then yes probably.

Mitt Romney is probably more rich than Bill Gates and Larry Summers is probably richer than them both.

I think part of the illusion of capital though is not tying large fortunes to people who make nothing and yet are still rich. Which is why we only see "entrepreneurs" at the forefront rather than money changers and war profiteers.


Most historians who comment on this think it was used to help found the CIA. The appropriated funds were given to rich bankers and oil tycoons who then gave it to Allen Dulles and others to help start their covert operations in other countries, without government taxed dollars being seen and written in the books.

...

What makes you say this? I'm genuinely curious, do you have a source that indicates this?

No because I cant look into their bank account and say for sure, but we do know in a general sense how much money goes through their particular industries and how much of the economy they control. Your Larry Summers, Tim Geithner's and Robert Rubin's are at the apex of the government/finance convergence and they control so much of the economy and it's largest institutions that I have to believe their wealth is astronomically larger than it really appears on paper.

Think about it this way, the Koch's are richer than we can ever imagine and yet they probably couldn't get a government post that isn't an ambassador ship or some throw away bullshit. Yet people in the fiance industry go through the highest levels of government banks and corporations sometimes at the same time.I'm assuming their not doing all this for our benefit or as a hobby, they're banking billions and not just what we see on the surface.

Some good points here. I read somewhere that until recently the Kochs weren't even on the Forbes list. Now their ranked after ruffling some feathers with the tea party shit-show their ranked as some of the wealthiest people in america.

Charles Koch by himself is worth 44 billion.

Obligatory.

I'm not sure anyone could prove that 'secret' trillionaires exist since they are set up to be a secret. discovering them may be out of the scope of anyone on this board but I believe that there are probably people who control and accumulate capital in that amount. The conditions on Earth have never been better for people to become that rich. If Rockefeller had net assets which today would be equivalent to 300-400bil 100 years ago then there is no doubt in my mind that someone could have surpassed him in the modern era. It seems highly suspicious to me that income inequality has reached unprecedented levels yet supposedly the current richest person is worth a quarter Rockefeller was. Forbes and other publications that track the richest people are definitely full of shit.

I suppose the counter-argument would go that the capitalists face higher taxes then they did previously because of the development of the welfare state, therefore its harder to get Rockefeller type wealth + anti-trust laws.

I would say that might be true when it comes to profit and income but if the data Michael Hudson has come up with is corrected the land tax and various forms of capital gains tax has went down. No attempt is made to distinguish between the nominal and real tax rate by economists either. They also assume that tax cheating and other illicit profitable activity is not endemic when that's plainly untrue.

As for trust laws, you know what they say about band-aids and cancer patients, for some time Microsoft had an effective monopoly over the whole computer market, they still have significant monopoly power and the US business world as a whole is far more monopolized then even the 19th century when the monopolies were concentrated in just a few key sectors like oil, steel, railroads, etc.

thewarmongerreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/bombshell-list-of-secret-trillionaires.html?m=1

That is an argument that can be made, but I offer a counter to the counter. The largest corporations or "private" entities in history were large trans continental trade organizations like the east India company. They were so large they had their own military owned states and had worked independently of their host governments. The catch of course is that the reason they were able to grow so large is they were made through direct government intervention and were even argued as a public good to the Dutch and British people. You can say the real problem is if all you want is a large company with a large fortune is that the government isn't intervening enough.

There are other people than the Rothschild's who were mega rich in a way that would make Bill Gates and Warren Buffet seem like charity cases. Like the Wittgenstein family whose steel company basically owned half of Europe at one point and the family had a principality in Germany.

I think part of the illusion is wealth isn't shown or flaunted in the same ways and since the poor get toys too it doesn't seem as disparate a situation as it really is.

Officially the richest is worth 75bn usd (Gates)
Unofficially it's 250bn (Putin)
The way the derivatives market works it generates huge numbers but that's basically imaginary money

Why do you think it's Putin? If you look at it from the grand scheme of things he's in upstart in a country that doesn't have the super-power status it used to. I'd think there are clever and wealthier people then him.

I'm not that user, but a lot of people believe he was the buyer of Britain's gold reserves when G-Brown sold them and he presides over a cratered out first world empire that he basically can sell the assets and reserve resources of.

Imagine if some dumb asshole got control of America and started selling of its land and resources…. Oh yeah sorry about that.

I've most of this guy's writing (I think) on the subject of hidden trillionaires. He doesn't specify where the ICIJ came to the conclusion that these people were trillionaires if they ever did. There are some interesting cases like that descendent of Thyssen where it could be a possibility imo

The most interesting case he brings up is that of that Indonesian man who allegedly traded 15 trillion to the FED and then contacted a British lord about it to see if he could bring it back. Was Riyadi a scammer or was he legit trillionaire? Who knows but contrary to the FBI he is a real person if Indonesian documents on his gold ownership are to be believed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock

It's too common. That's why we have today's problems. Capital is disappearing somewhere.

The way they hide it is by attaching it to limited liability companies through proxy.

I work for a private accountancy company and deal with very wealthy clients, mostly German, French and Arab.
They're only rumours that I hear about Putin's wealth but that's the ball park of what he's whispered to be worth.
Basically all the oligarchs in Russia pay a cut to him to be there. It literally is like a mafia.


I think the Rothschild's are overrated by conspiracy nuts because of their history and mystique.
Most are worth 1-2 bn, but there is fuck loads of them. As a family they would be worth more than Putin, but not individually. But I doubt they would be worth 500bn in total. That is a lot of money in terms of private wealth.
Maybe they are worth trillions but there is no proof and it's all conspiracy theory level bs where the absence of evidence is the evidence.
You can prove anything like that.

What do you think about the theory that old, old money families have trillions stowed away?

The Fugger family for instance still exists and their founder attained the greatest wealth attained by a private individual in the 15th-16th centuries.

People also talk about the royal families having immense wealth such as Queen Elizabeth, the House of Orange in the Netherlands etc. Forbes doesn't really count them and in the English case there's great secrecy about what she's still invested in.

This article is a bit dated but if it's still accurate then the vast majority of the worlds largest landowners are still monarchs in the modern world with the Queen owning the greatest portion (businessinsider.com/worlds-biggest-landowners-2011-3?op=1)

There's talk of the Venetian black nobility still being extraordinarily wealthy. An old family doesn't necessarily mean wealth but if you had a lot of money a thousand years ago and invested in wisely or were even semi-competent it's not out of the question you could have enormous wealth.

One criticism that's been made of the "richest" lists is there are no aristocracy on them. Even the Romanovs are considered a wealthy family today and they don't rule over jack you gotta wonder how that happened.

Daniel Estulin claims to have discovered this document from the Krupp corporation from 1988 showing that they controlled 112 trillion dollars worth of assets (?).

Do you guys think this is genuine, or is it disinfo? Is there anything else like it?

Not sure if there's anything else like this but it seems pretty unbelievable to me. 112 trillion dollars is a completely ludicrous amount of money. That's more money than there is currently circulating in the entire world. That's one tenth of the derivatives market. That's more money than the nominal GDP of every country combined. If a private entity controlled that much wealth they could be the de facto ruler of the entire human race which is getting close to the theorised ultra-porky. When a porky exists with an accumulated capital of that magnitude money will become fetishized to such a degree that it will develop animus and will set up a market economy where human beings are used to measure the magnitude of commodities.

Ya, its pretty wild in practice that would be more assets then supposedly exist in the United States. As for the money issue, the same money in circulation is used over and over, and who much knows how much of it is just created from thin air sort of like when banks loan money into existence.

I think it could be possible to have that much wealth if you didn't try to spend it all at once.Does that mean I believe this means the Krupps really have 112 trillion dollars? I'm highly skeptical to say the least but I am convinced there are probably individuals who have a trillion dollars or more in assets.

112 billion

Count the zeroes, friend.

I'll be fair, let's assume that is just a misprint and the figure comes to only 112 billion dollars. Accounting for inflation that comes to 227 billion 2016 dollars. That's far more money then the official richest man in the world (Gates) has and just shy of the upper-most range for the alleged richest man in the world Vladimir Putin.

This is just one account of the Krupp's and its worth more then the Krupp fortune according to official accounts (1.9 billion pounds in 1997) and the 2016 value of post-merger Thyssen-Krupp at 39 billion Euros.

If the document is genuine and we assume its just a typo its still a major find. If they had that much money then how much do they have today? How many other companies and wealthy individuals engage in similar practices that lead to sever undervaluations of their wealth?

*severe