Forbes Top 100 List and the Jews
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:36 am
Karl Radl
In line with my interest in the jewish question: I thought it appropriate to conduct some work on the Forbes Rich Lists that are produced every year. In order to understand how jews stand in regard to their representation.
While I am aware of other analyses along these lines (1) as well as Forbes' own. (2) I tend to be skeptical of such lists/analysis in part, because (per my earlier comments on these kind of lists) (3) they tend to use shifting or inconsistent data points on which to assign jewishness to an individual.
After all what makes an individual jewish is rather hotly debated inside both Israel and the Diaspora jewish community with the differing religious communities inside Judaism bickering (for example is a convert a jew in Judaism [i.e. an Israelite] or not?), the Zionists joining the fray with another definition and the secular liberal jews sprinting to take part in the definitional scrap.
My own preferred data point on which to assign jewishness by is to strictly say that any individual with any known (not speculative) evidence of jewish ancestry is jewish. This removes conversion (such as it is) from the picture and also satisfies both the biological and cultural definitions of jewishness as usually argued (as well as partly satisfying the stricter religious definitions). Thus I would argue this provides us with the broadest possible intellectual dragnet to pick up any jews in data sets such as the Forbes Rich List.
In methodological terms I have used several standardised Google searches to see if I could turn up any trace of jewish ancestry. I assumed that one reputable standard type of source (e.g. Wikipedia or a Jewish Community Site/Media Publication) stating as fact the jewishness of an individual or family was sufficient to take that information as being factual without digging any further. This allowed the research to both be economical in terms of time as well as further increasing the size of the intellectual dragnet to catch as many plausible cases of jewishness as possible.
This allows me to then present the worst possible scenario in terms of jewishness, while working to the same rubric that is used by jews themselves to argue that lists of this type prove jewish 'superiority' or 'contribution to civilization'.
I have demonstrated elsewhere (4) that such logic is invalid as it relies in the first instance on a faulty premise (i.e. prizes are awarded to those who have contributed most and in this instance that the richest people have contributed the most to society) and on the second that it ignores the definitional games exponents of this thesis use to try to maximize their results, while ignoring any contribution from non-jewish elements to an individual's heritage on the assumption that the jewish heritage is the cause of brilliance/superiority (e.g. JInfo's crediting converts as being jews, while using a biological definition of jewishness) .
The preliminaries having thus been dealt with it only remains to begin with the Top 100 Richest people in the United States according to the annual Forbes listing (5) (and it is worth noting these individuals are only getting richer). (6)
First lets list out the 2014 Forbes Top 100 for the United States and see who is as well as who is not jewish. To wit:
Bill Gates (Non-Jew)
Warren Buffett (Non-Jew)
Larry Ellison (Jew)
Charles Koch (Non-Jew)
David Koch (Non-Jew)
Christy Walton (Non-Jew)
Jim Walton (Non-Jew)
Michael Bloomberg (Jew)
Alice Walton (Non-Jew)
S. Robson Walton (Non-Jew)
Mark Zuckerberg (Jew)
Sheldon Adelson (Jew)
Larry Page (Jew)
Sergey Brin (Jew)
Jeffrey Bezos (Jew)
Carl Icahn (Jew)
George Soros (Jew)
Steve Ballmer (Jew)
Forrest E. Mars, Jnr (Non-Jew)
Jacqueline Mars (Non-Jew)
John Mars (Non-Jew)
Leonard Blavatnik (Jew)
Phil Knight (Non-Jew)
Harold Hamm (Non-Jew)
Michael Dell (Jew)
Charles Ergen (Non-Jew)
Paul Allen (Non-Jew)
Laurene Powell Jobs (Non-Jew)
Anne Cox Chambers (Non-Jew)
Ray Dalio (Non-Jew)
Donald Bren (Jew)
Ronald Perelman (Jew)
Rupert Murdoch (Non-Jew)
Jack Taylor (Non-Jew)
John Paulson (Jew)
Abigail Johnson (Non-Jew)
James Simons (Jew)
Andrew Beal (Non-Jew)
Patrick Soon-Shiong (Non-Jew)
Philip Anschutz (Non-Jew)
Richard Kinder (Non-Jew)
George Kaiser (Jew)
Stephen Schwarzman (Jew)
Steve Cohen (Jew)
Elon Musk (Jew)
David Tepper (Jew)
Charles Butt (Non-Jew)
Samuel Newhouse (Jew)
Eric Schmidt (Non-Jew)
Thomas Peterffy (Non-Jew)
D1onald Newhouse (Jew)
Leonard Lauder (Jew)
Pierre Omidyar (Non-Jew)
Dustin Moskovitz (Jew)
James Kennedy (Non-Jew)
Ralph Lauren (Jew)
Hank and Doug Meijer (Non-Jew)
Blair Parry-Okeden (Non-Jew)
John Menard Jnr (Non-Jew)
James Goodnight (Non-Jew)
John Malone (Non-Jew)
John Frist Jnr (Non-Jew)
Jan Koum (Jew)
David Duffield (Non-Jew)
Edward Johnson III (Non-Jew)
Eli Braud (Jew)
Dannine Avara (Non-Jew)
Scott Duncan (Non-Jew)
Milane Frantz (Non-Jew)
Gordon Moore (Non-Jew)
Randa Williams (Non-Jew)
David Geffen (Jew)
Charles Johnson (Non-Jew)
Jeffrey Hildebrand (Non-Jew)
Sumner Redstone (Jew)
Charles Schwab (Non-Jew)
Micky Arison (Jew)
Rupert Johnson Jnr (Non-Jew)
Ira Rennert (Jew)
Leslie Wexner (Jew)
Ray Lee Hunt (Non-Jew)
Kelcy Warren (Non-Jew)
Carl Cook (Non-Jew)
Richard DeVos (Non-Jew)
Stephen Ross (Jew)
Robert Rowling (Non-Jew)
Dennis Washington (Non-Jew)
Richard LeFrak (Jew)
Enos Stanley Kroenke (Non-Jew)
Herbert Kohler Jnr (Non-Jew)
Ken Griffin (Non-Jew)
Trevor Rees-Jones (Non-Jew)
Leon Black (Jew)
Jin Sook & Do Won Chang (Non-Jew)
George Roberts (Jew)
David Green (Non-Jew)
Henry Kravis (Jew)
Ann Walton Kroenke (Non-Jew)
Bruce Kovner (Jew)
Leonard Stern (Jew)
Of these individuals some forty are jewish by my count, which obviously means that a whopping 40 percent of the Top 100 North Americans in 2014 were jewish. When one considers that jews are only 2.2 percent of the population of the United States (7) then we get the jewish over-representation in this area as being a rather scary 18.1 times greater than they are represented in the population demographics.
This in turn makes the conclusion that this cannot be an accident extremely strong, because while one might expect some over-representation in a small population (say twice or three-times their representation in the wider population) you would not expect to see eighteen times. Nor can this be attributed to a small sample size given that a sample of one hundred is ample and does not give us a misleading sense of representation (as 1 instance equals only a 1 percent contribution).
All in all it makes one wonder: how much of the infamous 1 percent is jewish?
Going by their representation among the Top 100 wealthiest people in North America in 2014: I'd say around half.
A scary achievement for a 'tiny persecuted religious minority': huh?
References
(1) For example: http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-leaders-lis ... aires.html
(2) http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/ ... d-figures/; also http://www.jpost.com/Business/Business- ... ews-310104 and http://www.jta.org/2009/10/05/fundermen ... are-jewish
(3) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co ... s-are.html
(4) Ibid.
(5) http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/
(6) http://rt.com/business/218751-worlds-ri ... et-richer/
(7) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... ewpop.html