Light A Candle For The Billionaires & Hedge Funders Who Got Poorer in 2015

Light A Candle For The Billionaires & Hedge Funders Who Got Poorer In 2015

You think once you have money you’re set, right? You invest it, it earns interest; you use it to buy assets, they appreciate. Leave it alone and it breeds! Put it to work and it produces!

Ha.

Some of the world’s richest people are starting out 2016 a lot less rich than they were. Bloomberg reports that “the world’s 400 wealthiest individuals shed $19 billion in 2015,” which makes me feel a little better about that time I maybe made a $1,000 mistake. This marks “the first annual decline for the daily wealth index since its 2012 debut.”

Some people still made out like bandits, of course. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post and didn’t slow him down. He’s “the year’s top-gainer,” apparently:

The New Mexico-born billionaire more than doubled his fortune to $59 billion as investors cheered profits at the world’s largest online retailer. Bezos added $31 billion in 2015, undoing the $7.4 billion decline he had in 2014 and propelling him up 16 positions to No. 4 on the index.

Investors cheered the world’s largest online retailer despite Jodi Kantor’s grim and well-publicized revelations about its “bruising workplace,” like that it can be casually cruel to its employees. And to be fair we kind of already knew that. Turns out we really don’t care how a company behaves towards its workers, so long as it makes money. We kind of already knew that too.

I decided I cared! I gave up my Prime subscription and started shopping elsewhere. And it was much harder than it should have been. I don’t only mean that things were more expensive, though that’s true. I mean that Macy’s online didn’t have what we needed in stock, and Sierra Trading Post said it would deliver something and then never did, and Target’s entire web-based platform is an outdated mess that signed me up mistakenly and redundantly for two different auto-deliveries.

It seems like other retailers aren’t even trying to compete. Perhaps that’s because, as Alex Shepard put it in The New Republic, “Amazon has only one narrative: complete commercial domination.” And it’s been so damn successful that everyone else is exchanging glances and going like this:

Another billionaire who emerged from 2015 in the pink, according to Bloomberg, is Zhou Qunfei, China’s richest woman. “Zhou’s fortune increased more than $5 billion to $7.9 billion this year, a rise of 254 percent, the largest on the index.” And that’s in a country that had quite a volatile year: “out of the 50 billionaires created in the first half of the year, only 19 remained billionaires in August.”

Hers is a pretty great of rags-to-riches story: she started out rural and poor, became a factory worker in Shenzhen, and used the skills she learned to begin her own company, which now supplies the glass covers for your phones and tablets.

Overall, though, it was not a good year for billionaires. Other wealthy folks who emerged from 2015 looking like they’d scrambled their way out of the fighting pits of Meereen include William Ackman and David Einhorn. The New York Times tells us that “Hedge fund managers like Mr. Einhorn, Mr. Ackman and Larry Robbins have stunned investors with the depth of their losses.”

Maybe investors are beginning to realize what a racket these hedge funds are, anyway.

Steep losses this year come at a difficult time for the nearly $3 trillion industry; some pension funds have openly questioned what value hedge funds add to a portfolio in light of their hefty fee structure. Hedge funds typically charge 2 percent of assets under management and 20 percent of performance, which means that managers can still haul home multimillion-dollar paydays even when they lose money for their investors.

Anyway, chin up, billionaires! It’s a new year. A little pizza, a little ramen, and I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet — and with your boots on our necks — in no time.

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