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So in recap, IDK where sammy got his money from
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Sure you do. Sounds like maybe you know when he first got it, but like everyone else you don't have a clue where it comes from. I seriously doubt it is anything illegal. The arabs are the richest people in the world but they don't go around boasting about it because they don't want to engender any more hatred from the west.
If Exxon made 17 billion in one quarter or whatever it was what do you think the countries and the families that actually control production and own the land are making?
Anyone that thinks the top 25 or so richest people in the world aren't Arab families is naive. I don't care what Forbes says, no way Buffet, Microsoft and some Euro-dude selling furniture are richer than the Arab families that control the oil. I'll take millions of barrels of oil every day over an operating system, an insurance peddler and a furniture maker. It makes perfect sense that from this fountain of money a small protion would trickle into the poker economy as does an unwillingness to disclose the source.
Didn't anyone read Mario Puzo's Fool's Die? "In this country you have to get rich in the Dark". There are no SEC filings or sets of books to audit when it comes to oil producing nations.
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The richest man in the world is now a Mexican. After that, you've got Buffett, Gates, the Indian Lakshmi Mittal who is worth about $40 billion because he owns a large part of the steel industry. No-one in the Middle East can compete with this because the wealth is spread across large families:
"Estimates place the total size of the royal family at 5000-plus princes, each one of whom is given $500,000 as a sort of start-up fee at birth. The family propagates at the alarming rate of between 35 and 40 princes each month. (For his personal pleasure, the founding king Ibn Saud kept four wives, four concubines, and four slaves, whose numbers he replenished frequently. He married into 30 tribes, a series of arrangements that supposedly helped knit the country together.)
The incredible wealth of this family is entirely based on American investment in and development of the country's oil fields, namely by Aramco, a joint venture of Standard Oil and Texaco. And the family has made money hand over fist, with annual oil revenues jumping from $4 billion in 1972 to $111 billion in 1981. Since the family runs the country, most of that money goes to them. Very little gets passed along through its medieval religious government to ordinary people."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0141,ridgeway3,29134,6.html
So there's a lot of money, but it's not as concentrated as one guy owning most of a company. I'd take Gates' bank balance over any Saudi prince any day.
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lol u must be kidding, and u clearly don't now how these things go in those countries.
In those countries u have no IRS reporting every single dime u earn, like in the USA or Europe. Their net worth, and even their yearly income are based on rough estimation from outside there community. Hell they are the IRS and they basically own the country.
Why should they give us a accurate estimation of their wealth, they are not obligated to do so.
I would take half of what the emir REALLY has over Gates' bank balance ANY DAY ANY TIME
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What, besides idiocy, makes you so certain in his wealth?