I strongly feel this power, influence, giant houses, jets, personal cruise ships etc are old generation stuff - something that grey haired Gekko will personify. The "new rich" is dramatically different and for the better. Today's centi-millionairs wants to stay anonymous, don't want to have butlers, have houses that they can manage without permanent staff and often prefers travelling first class or renting Yatch instead of buying them even if they can afford it. The new rich sets target to make X amount of money and then "retire". Their "retirement" consist of working hard doing their favorite activities and travelling the globe to sample the "regular folks" flavors. Most of them don't have desire to keep growing billion dollar business which will sip away their time and energy. They have strong political belief but have no desire for acquiring political power directly or indirectly. They are not in to heavily influencing how rest of the population shall live. They consider time to do their favorite activities far more important than keeping money scoreboard. They want to buy fashionable cloths and accessories but not those that will immediately attract attention and single them out in the crowd. They want to be physically fit and avoid having family as long as possible. They like to invest in ideas and technology more than traditional financial instruments.

I think new rich crowd will almost completely replace old generation wealthy in next 50 years or so. People who are born in this decade will have very hard time understanding philosophies and life style choices of Gorden Gekko.

Which is exactly the type of stuff Zuck is talking about here, although in less power-hungry ways. So you're kind of proving @austenallred's point.

$45B is not enough to change governments. That's about 4 days worth of US federal spending.

>You spend $45B on changing the way governments and populations live work and how power is balanced.

$45B is even overkill for that. Each presidential candidate spent (or had spent on their behalf) roughly $1B in 2012. Zuckerberg therefore could have doubled a candidates spending for each presidential election for the rest of his life and still have half his fortune. $45B is that huge.

EDIT: The multiple downvotes seem to indicate I said something that is disagreeable. I'm not implying that buying elections would be a better use of Zuckerberg's money, just that he has so much money that elections are just more "stuff" he could buy without even thinking hard about it.

Exactly, when you have that much wealth, you buy things that don't have price tags on.

Nah. It's about ego(tism). Power & influence use different currency. You have to either - 1) not know or 2) not care - how badly you'll mess this up.

And you will.