The new tech firm lobbying group FWD.us has played a major role in writing the Gang of Eight’s immigration legislation to make it easier for technology companies to import foreign computer programmers to drive down the ruinously high cost of American labor. I thought it would be fun to rank the names on FWD.us’s "Our Supporters" page by net worth.
I mean, if America’s tech billionaires and mere centimillionaires can’t lower programmers' salaries immediately, what possible financial incentive will they have to continue to be rich?
It just doesn’t pay to be a billionaire anymore.
Here are the Friends of Mark Zuckerberg. Please take a moment to thank them for coming to work despite having to pay their employees such exorbitant wages that they are forced to bribe Gang of Eight senators with free campaign commercials.
(I’m not promising that these are the best and most up to the minute net worth estimates, but they're what I came up with quickly.)
$66,000,000,000 Bill Gates, Chair of Microsoft & Gates Foundation
$15,200,000,000 Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft
$13,300,000,000 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
$8,200,000,000 Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google
$3,100,000,000 Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
$2,700,000,000 John Doerr, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins
$2,700,000,000 Elon Musk, CEO SpaceX and Tesla Motors
$2,000,000,000 Sean Parker, Founders Fund
$1,500,000,000 Ron Conway, Special Advisor to SV Angel
$1,200,000,000 Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners
$760,000,000 Mark Pincus, Founder, CEO Zynga
$600,000,000 Drew Houston, Founder and CEO of Dropbox
$559,000,000 Reed Hastings, Founder and CEO of Netflix
$400,000,000 Matt Cohler, General Partner at Benchmark
$400,000,000 Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder of Instagram
$345,000,000 Chad Hurley, Co-founder and CEO of AVOS
$300,000,000 Max Levchin, Co-founder of PayPal, Chmn of Yelp
$230,000,000 Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!
$200,000,000 Andrew Mason, Co-founder of Groupon
$100,000,000 Josh James, Founder and CEO of Domo
? Aditya Agarwal, Vice President of Engineering at Dropbox
? Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder of The Social+Capital Partnership
? Ruchi Sanghvi, Vice President of Operations at Dropbox
? Brian Chesky, CEO and Co-founder of Airbnb
? Chris Cox, Vice President of Product at Facebook
? Paul Graham, Co-founder of Y Combinator
? Joe Lonsdale, Partner at Formation 8
? Mary Meeker, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
? Dave Morin, Co-founder and CEO of Path
? Hadi Partovi, Co-Founder and President of Code.org
? Alison Pincus, One Kings Lane Co-Founder
? Keith Rabois, Partner at Khosla Ventures
? Hosain Rahman, CEO and Founder of Jawbone
? David Sacks, Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Yammer
? Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft
? Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at Cisco
