Silicon Valley — America’s greediest place

Forbes has done some simple calculations of billionaires-per-capita and, not suprisingly, Silicon Valley ranks #1 and San Francisco is second in the US. Seattle (with the Microsoft billions) came in third.

They took the ratio of Forbes 400 members per 100,000 residents, and the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara came in first. As with the nearby SF-Oakland metropolitan area, most of that money came from tech startups. California was also represented by Los Angeles (#8) due to entertainment moguls, while my hometown of San Diego didn’t make the cut.

A local union organizer once described tech stock wealth as

a bunch of young white guys being in the right place and winning the lottery.

This is an odd thing to say around here, since even our local (PC and PC-centric) newspaper is about economic efficiency and wealth creation, even if it is socially liberal enough to match any Eastern big city newspaper.

It’s almost enough to make one think that the cult of George Gilder never hit the dot-bomb crash. Of course, back then we didn’t have tech zillionaires hoping to make money selling environmentally friendly toys.

Note to readers: with OS X 10.5, I’ve finally re-installed and updated my blogging software and now have improved productivity (and spell checking) in updating my blog.