By Larry Kuperman on July 29, 2007
Jews are so ethnically diverse that we never really consider ourselves a race, more often a religion or a culture.
The Reptilian Origins of the Jews – Library of Rickandria
The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of “What is a Jew?” and also “Who is a Jew?”
Exposing the Jews – Library of Rickandria
Questions that have been asked many a time… mostly by other Jews.
Knowing the Jews from their own Writings & Quotes: Deep Dive Version – Library of Rickandria
Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes… well, ME.
Liberalism & Communism: Two Sides of the Same Jewish Coin – Library of Rickandria
A Secular Jew is one who studies all the aspects of Judaism, including religion, but accepts only the cultural ones.
I study the Bible, for example, but don’t believe that it was divinely inspired.
The Truth About the Bible – Library of Rickandria
More importantly, we don’t require that a person have to meet birthright requirements in order to be Jewish.
Orthodox Jews require both parents be Jewish, Conservative Jews require that the mother be Jewish, Reform that either parent be Jewish.
Conservative & Liberal: 2 Masks of Communism – Library of Rickandria
Our definition is cultural.
That is very much germane to the topic.
“If I go to the baker to get bread, does it really matter who they are if the bread is good?”
No, it doesn’t matter if the bread is good… but would all bakers of all cultures produce the same quality?
I think that the answer is “no.”
Baker A belongs to an obscure religious group called the Pray-A-Lots.
They believe that all outcomes are determined only by prayer and that every other 15 minutes you need to stop and pray.
As a result of constantly being distracted, Baker A always burns the bread.
When people complain about the blackened bread, he replies that,
“I shall pray on it.”
He doesn’t believe that leaving the bread in the oven too long is the cause because he doesn’t accept a deterministic view of the world.
Baker B is a secularist.
His world view holds that you determine the optimum baking conditions in order to create the perfect loaf.
You duplicate and repeat said conditions, ensuring the highest quality standards.
As a result of this philosophy, he becomes very successful.
He opens up a string of bakeries, sends his kids to college, where they create search engines… okay, I’ll stop.
The difference between Baker A and B is not genetic, not caused by being a member of a better race Baker B uses a better methodology, because he has a more realistic world view.
That world view is made possible by the culture that he was raised in, and religion is a part of that culture.
Religions that insist that everything that is to happen in the world has already been ordained and that you will only be able to do what you are “fated” to do produce passive people.
Destiny & Fate – Library of Rickandria
Examples of religions that encourage passivity include:
- Hinduism
- Islam
- Evangelical Christianity
Christian Program & Purpose – Library of Rickandria
All three religions mentioned also discourage the accumulation of wealth.
Accumulation of wealth is not the only area that where people from Jewish culture exceed the statistical norm.
Power of the Purse: The Origin of Money – Library of Rickandria
Between 1901 and 2006, there were 750 Nobel Prize winners.
Of these, at least 158 are Jews.
Jewish Nobel Prize Laureates (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
In studies correlating wealth and religion in America, Evangelicals score the lowest and Jews the highest.
Jews, as a culture, not a religion or race, tend to be more deterministic.
Sure, the image that the outside world has of a Jew is the ultra-Orthodox or Chasidic Jew.
But statistically, Reform Judaism is the largest sect and even more, one third of the Jewish population of the world is secularist.
Religious Jews are in the minority and have been for the last 200 years.
(We refer to period beginning in the late 18th Century as the Haskalah or Enlightenment.
All modern forms of Judaism originate in this time.)
Jews are successful because they actively seek success.
Even the Covenant with Abraham was one of land and prosperity, not of Heaven.
Success is something to be sought, not to be embarrassed about.
I have been accused of being “prideful.”
Well, yeah.
But in my culture, that is not a sin.
The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews.
Relentless Problems with the Jews Go Back for Thousands of Years – Library of Rickandria
This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world’s population.
So, you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers.
Not so, bubala.
(A term of endearment, darling. Can you feel me virtually pinching your cheek? In a nice way.)
The Meaning of “Bubala” in Yiddish Revealed! | Noodls
The impact of Jews far outweighs their numbers.
Let’s look at “Who’s A Yid?”
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when he stepped down in favor of Eric Schmidt and then again from April 2011 until July 2015 when he became CEO of its newly formed parent organization Alphabet Inc. which was created to deliver “major advancements” as Google’s parent company,[6] a post he held until December 4, 2019 when he along with his co-founder Brin stepped down from all executive positions and day-to-day roles within the company. He remains an Alphabet board member, employee, and controlling shareholder. As of January 2024, Page has an estimated net worth of $129 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the eighth-richest person in the world. He has also invested in flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener. Page is the co-creator and namesake of PageRank, a search ranking algorithm for Google for which he received the Marconi Prize in 2004 along with co-writer Brin.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American businessman best known for co-founding Google with Larry Page. Brin was the president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members. As of January 2024, Brin is the 9th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $114 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Brin emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics as well as computer science. After graduation, he enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he built a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and they discontinued their PhD studies to start up Google in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park.
Larry Page’s mom, Gloria Page, is Jewish.
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia, who fled to America for religious freedom.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard University.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (/ˈzʌkərbɜːrɡ/; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman and philanthropist. He co-founded the social media service Facebook, along with his Harvard roommates in 2004, and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), of which he is executive chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder. Zuckerberg briefly attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Originally launched in only select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users in 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the time. He has since used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Time named Zuckerberg one of the most influential people in the world in 2008, 2011, 2016 and 2019, and nominated him as a finalist several other times. He was named the Time Person of the Year in 2010, the same year when Facebook eclipsed more than half a billion users. In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked tenth on the Forbes list of the World’s Most Powerful People. In the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans in 2023, he was ranked eighth with a personal wealth of $106 billion. As of January 2024, Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at $130 billion by Forbes, making him the fifth richest person in the world. A film depicting Zuckerberg’s early career, legal troubles and initial success with Facebook, The Social Network, was released in 2010 and won multiple Academy Awards. Zuckerberg’s prominence and fast rise in the technology industry has prompted political and legal attention. The founding of Facebook involved Zuckerberg in multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues of user privacy. In 2013, he co-founded the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us. On April 10 and 11, 2018, Zuckerberg testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation regarding the usage of personal data by Facebook in relation to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Sugar Mountain: Mark Zuckerberg – The Ultimate Fake Person Award – Library of Rickandria
It was originally going to be limited to Harvard students but expanded quickly.
Zuckerberg saw the potential in the site and sought capital.
He turned to Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and, not-so-coincidentally, also Jewish.
Peter Andreas Thiel (/tiːl/; born 11 October 1967) is a German American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of June 2023, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $9.7 billion and was ranked 213th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He worked as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, as a speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. After PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2003, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, serving as its chairman since its inception. In 2005, he launched Founders Fund with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Earlier, Thiel became Facebook’s first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000 in August 2004. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion in 2012 but remains on the board of directors. After the Fifth National Government intervened on his behalf, Thiel was controversially granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011 after spending 12 days in the country non-consecutively. He co-founded Valar Ventures in 2010; co-founded Mithril Capital, serving as investment committee chair, in 2012; and served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017. Through the Thiel Foundation, Thiel governs the grant-making bodies Breakout Labs and Thiel Fellowship, and funds non-profit research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and sea steading. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed Thiel as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker and led to founder Nick Denton declaring bankruptcy. Thiel is a conservative libertarian who has made substantial donations to American right-wing figures and causes.
Facebook is often rumored to be up for sale.
How much is Facebook worth?
The Jewish Hand Behind the Internet: Facebook – Library of Rickandria
Let me refer that to Mr. Thiel:
“Facebook’s internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015.”
Founder Mark Zuckerberg is 23, or as we like to say, 10 years past his Bar Mitzvah.
Robert Kevin Rose is, comparatively, an old man at age 30.
Kevin Rose is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV’s The Screen Savers. From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at GV.
He is best known for founding Digg.com.
Robert lost his job during the burst of the Dot Com bubble, ended up working as a production assistant on the show The Screen Savers he began appearing on air and stepped in as host after Leo Laporte left TechTV.
On November 1, 2004, he started a site that combined:
- social bookmarking
- blogging
- RSS
into arguably the premier tech news site.
Today Digg is rated among the 100 most popular sites on the web.
Scott Blum has been referred to as the “Sam Walton of e-commerce.”
Leaving a successful career as a shoe salesman as a youth, he founded Microbanks, a company that sold add-on memory modules for Macintosh computers.
Before his 21st birthday, he sold Microbanks to Sentron Technology in San Diego for $2.5 million in cash.
He would then co-found Pinnacle Micro with his father.
Leaving there under a cloud of dubious accounting practices (he paid no penalty and admitted no guilt) he would go on to found Buy.com.
He left before went public, returned to take it back private and it is now his baby.
RealNetworks is not the most beloved company in the world, nor is Real Player a favorite product.
But there is no question that CEO and Founder Rob Glaser has been influential.
When he founded Real Networks in 1994, at age 31, he was already a millionaire from his days at Microsoft.
He has had a major impact on the Internet.
Certainly, also worth mentioning are:
- Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, whose mother is Jewish
- Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a Jewish mother and raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago
- Phillipe Kahn, founder of Borland
What would the Internet be like with:
- PayPal
- Digg.com
- Buy.com
It would be very, very different…
Oy gevalt, I left off Michael Dell!
Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American billionaire businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world’s largest technology infrastructure companies. He is the 12th-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $104 billion as of March 2024. As of October 2023, according to Forbes, approximately $50 billion of his net worth was derived from his 50% stake in Dell and 40% stake in VMware, with the rest being held by his family office DFO Management. In January 2013 it was announced that he had bid to take Dell Inc. private for $24.4 billion in the biggest management buyout since the Great Recession. Dell Inc. officially went private in October 2013. The company once again went public in December 2018.
They are all American Jews, except for except for Phillipe Kahn, who was born in France.
Wealth is an interesting metric.
According to the Forbes list for 2007, there is not one Jew in the top 10.
However, we begin with Mr. Ellison after that:
Larry Ellison, number 11, $21.5 billion.
Sergey and Larry share the honors at number 26 with $16.6 billion.
Michael Dell at number 30 with $15.8 billion.
Steve Ballmer at 31 with $15.0 billion.
Rose and Zuckerberg may have more potential wealth than realized at this time.
There are many, many others.
A study by Stanford University cited:
“Today, though barely 2% of the nation’s (referring to the US) population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews.”
Continuing on the report further cites:
“The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked.
Jews are elected to public office in disproportionate numbers.
In 1993, ten members of the United States Senate and thirty-two members of the House of Representatives were Jewish, three to four times their percentage of the general population.”
I cited that 4 out of the top 31 billionaires on the Forbes list were Jewish.
That is approximately 13%, or 52 times the percentage of the population.
Disproportionate.
The point being that we have been good for technology and technology has, in return, been very, very good to us.
This disproportionate degree of success should be interesting in its own right.
I don’t believe in “inherent” superiority.
The Work of Miles Mathis – Library of Rickandria
Ability may be inherent, but the willingness to use it is a matter of individual choice.
Success is based on both ability and drive.
I suggest that the values of Judaic culture, as opposed to the religion itself, increase the odds of entrepreneurial success.
Concrete examples:
1. Jews have always valued learning and literacy.
The Controlled Global Education – Library of Rickandria
It is part of the culture.
Cultural Judaism – Library of Rickandria
Jews were required to read and often to be multi-lingual.
Is the English Language Really Reversed Hebrew? – Library of Rickandria
That was a key factor in ancient days.
ANCIENT SPOOKS – Library of Rickandria
2. Jews have always had a sensible attitude towards money and venture capitalism.
Look at the Jews of the Middle Ages.
3. The Diaspora created a very diverse gene pool with people identifying themselves as Jews living in places as diverse as Ethiopia to Russia.
The Jewish Takeover of Russia – Library of Rickandria
I doubt that an Ethiopian Jew has the same genetic mix as an Ashkenazim from Minsk, but they both share the common experience of someone coming along every couple of generations and killing half the Jewish population.
That tends to weed out the slow runners.
While everyone alive today is descended from the “winners” it is more true truer for some than others.
A new national study shows that religious affiliation plays a powerful role in how much wealth Americans accumulate, with Jews amassing the most wealth and conservative Protestants the least.
Religion Helps Shape Wealth of Americans, Study Finds (osu.edu)
Quoting Lisa Keister, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ohio State University:
“The results suggest people draw on the tools they learn from religion to develop strategies for saving, investing and spending, and those tools may be different in various faiths.”
Lisa A. Keister | Department of Sociology (duke.edu)
In each of the Arab Israeli conflicts of:
- 1948–49
- 1956
- 1967
- 1973–74
and 1982, the Israelis overcame numerically superior armies.
Middle East Exopolitical Saga – Library of Rickandria
In each of those wars, Arab forces attacked Israel.
The Modern State of Israel: A Hegelian Paradigm – Library of Rickandria
There was no American and British fleet off the coast during the Jewish resettlement which began in the 1870’s (first Zionist settlement Petah Tikvah 1878) well before WWII.
More WWII Fakes – Library of Rickandria
The Israeli land expansion took place after each of the wars I referenced, during a period that spanned almost 50 years, which were won without outside support.
If the theory is that Jews network more skillfully than other groups and that is the key to our success, good for us.
If we do it over and over again, than it is part of our culture and I rest my case.
Jews figured out that America was the place to be as early as the time of the Spanish Inquisition and moved here.
Jews Pushing Hard for a Communist America – Library of Rickandria
(First Jews in America came here by way of Spain to Brazil to America, landed in New York.)
Jewish Communizing of America – Library of Rickandria
I say again, the hallmark of a successful culture.
Came here, assimilated, brought the relatives over.
Jews are the most successful group in America.
The Biggest Anti-American Communist Agents were the Jews – Library of Rickandria
Jews have been successful in every culture for 2000 years, except in situations where they have encountered anti-Semitism that has limited that success.
Most successful Jews today live in America and Israel… that’s because most Jews live in those two countries.
LINKS:
The Jewish 1%: Is It Time to Talk Openly About Wealth and Power? – Tablet Magazine
The Chosen Few: A New Explanation of Jewish Success | PBS NewsHour
Jews, money and antisemitism: How the hate myth was born | Middle East Eye
The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending – The Atlantic
The Jews Have All The Money And The Whites Have All The Power And Im Arways In Taxi Cab With Dliver Who No Shower Crossword Clue (sporcle.com)
The myth that Jews are all-powerful is the biggest threat to Jewish lives – The Washington Post
Myth busting: Are Jews actually rich? – New Statesman
Economics and well-being among U.S. Jews | Pew Research Center
Is There a Future for American Jews? – SAPIR Journal
Jews, Money, Myth – The Jewish Museum London
Larry Kuperman July 29, 2007 – Search (bing.com)
Jews On the Internet » Forum Post by Larry Kuperman (wincustomize.com) – Author battles trolls
CONTINUE:
SoSHHial Media: The Jewish Hand Behind the Internet – Library of Rickandria