GATES AND BUFFETT: 1000 TIMES WORSE THAN KEN LAY

Bill Gates,

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Warren Buffett and Ken Lay--all thieves. Compared to the world's two richest men, however, Lay was small potatoes. So why are we praising them, and kicking Lay while he's down--six feet down?
Yeah, yeah, I watched the documentary ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"). Lay and his sidekick CEO Jeffrey Skilling, used bluster, lies, a bunch of fictional Excel spreadsheets and an updated Ponzi scheme to create what appeared to be the nation's seventh largest energy company. Even when the truth--that Enron had negative net assets--was about to come out, Lay continued to talk up his BS company and its fraudulently inflated stock. Shareholders, many of them employees whose retirement savings were invested entirely in Enron, believed his reports that the company's finances were solid. Meanwhile, while he lied through his teeth to thousands of men and women who would be ruined because they believed him, he secretly cashed out millions of dollars of his own.
Federal prosecutors say that Lay and Skilling illegally bilked Enron out of $183 million, including company bonuses paid during their conspiracy to pump up the company's stock and Lay's use of its line of credit to pay off millions in personal debt for such items as a $200,000 yacht for his wife Linda's 2001 birthday party. When Lay died last week of a heart attack, having been found guilty of a fraud that led to the 2001 collapse of Enron, he had been awaiting sentencing. The New York Post, noting that Texas law may protect Lay's estate from forking over the $43.5 million the
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Securities and Exchange Commission had sought as restitution, published one of its instant classic front pages: pictures of the deceased executive and a coffin, under the headline "Before They Put Cheato Lay's Coffin in the Grave, CHECK HE'S IN IT."
True, Lay was scum. But the "I Spit On Your Grave" act is a new phenomenon. Cruel and avaricious titans of industry typically receive the kid gloves treatment when they pass on to the Great Equities Desk. In 1989 Steven J. Ross, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, paid himself a record $78.2 million--more than 9,000 times the average salary of his employees, thousands of whom he had cheerfully laid off the year before. When some cynics mentioned that Ross' victims might be jumping for joy at the news of his 1992 death from prostate cancer, they were universally and loudly denounced as rude and unfeeling.
Lay stole $43.5 million. Ross overpaid himself at least $78.2 million (worth $121.9 million today). Now consider investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, worth $44 billion and $50 billion, respectively, according to Forbes. Each one has accumulated one thousand times more cash than Ken "#1 Bush Campaign Donor" Lay. But we're supposed to like, and even admire, these rogues.
Buffett and Gates may not have broken any laws--although, in Gates' case, the Clinton-era Justice Department thought he'd cheated millions of American consumers by violating anti-trust laws--but it's hard to see how their billions are more ethically legit than Lay's misbegotten millions. Sorry, but "working hard" doesn't cut it. I don't care if you stay late at the office every night, work weekends and holidays, or you never go on vacation. It doesn't matter how smart, imaginative or lucky you are. It just isn't possible to earn $44 billion in a single lifetime.
Not honestly, anyway.
Gates and Buffett have created a lot of pain and misery on their way to "earning" their combined $94 billion. (Bear in mind, that's what they're worth. That doesn't include what they've spent.) Gates scammed his dough the old-fashioned way: overcharging his customers and underpaying his employees. Somewhere along the way to accumulating $50 billion, doesn't it occur to a guy that he could charge a little less than $200 for buggy, instantly obsolete, software? Or that it's time for a company-wide raise? He could even hire (gasp) unionized American workers instead of building plants in the Third World and relying on the slave labor of prison inmates!