Who is the richest of them all?

There has just been a rather meaningless debate about whether Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Bill Gates of Microsoft should be labelled ‘the richest man in the world’. Both are notionally worth more than $90 billion, although Bezos was briefly ahead by a nose after a surge in the value of his Amazon shares. It was meaningless because such unimaginable wealth ‘can’t change how many people love you or how healthy you are’ — as the world’s fourth richest man, Warren Buffett, once remarked — and can’t even buy you more fun than, say, the $5 billion fortune of our own Sir Richard Branson. The point is that the only thing worth doing with humongous wealth, once you’ve bought the lifestyle you want, is to come up with a serious long-term plan for giving it away.

Gates and his wife Melinda, backed by Buffett, have created a $40 billion foundation dedicated to ‘zero malaria, zero TB, zero HIV, zero malnutrition… zero difference between the health of a poor kid and every other kid’; left-wing critics strive to find fault, but it is clearly making a difference in Africa and elsewhere.