Anybody who has been on the job market recently knows the game. Clean up your Facebook profile and make sure it’s secure. Update your LinkedIn profile and upload a new resume. Brand yourself, manage a positive web presence, look professional.
As a rule, most corporate websites should adhere to many of the same standards. A website should be useful to customers and attractive to potential hires. It should be easily navigable, sleek and modern, and consistently branded. These are basic rules so obvious they are almost not worth mentioning.
But in this case, these rules need to be mentioned - because they’ve been broken by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. As it turns out, when you’re at the top of your game and everybody knows it, you don’t need branding or marketing. Because the primary function of marketing is to convince everybody that you’re at the top of your game.
What results from that level of self-confidence is rarely pretty. Take, for instance, the website for Archie Aldis Emmerson‘s (worth $3 billion) Sierra Pacific Industries, which appears to be an homage to the aesthetic of local government websites from the early 2000s. Then there is Igor Olenicoff‘s (worth $2.4 billion) Olen Properties site, with its rigid construction and a homepage button hidden on the right side of the page.
But these are minor infractions. Some of the world’s ultra-wealthy boast websites that are so out-dated and so bizarre that one can only stare in wonderment at their audacity. Here they are:
5. Warren Buffett: $46 Billion
Website: Berkshire Hathaway
Nothing says “second richest man in America” quite like the Berkshire Hathaway website, which is little more than two columns of hyperlinks and another link to buy insurance at Geico. Once you delve into the website, there is no way to return home - save for the back button on your browser. No worries, most of the companies that Berkshire is invested in - like Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, and Wal-Mart - have great websites.
4. Elon Musk: $2.4 Billion
Website: Musk Foundation
If you’re curious as to who the Musk Foundation gives money to, you’re in luck. That information is listed, clear as day, on the foundation’s website. Want to know anything else about the Musk Foundation? Well, too bad. You won’t find anything else on this website, last updated in 2006.
The Musk Foundation website is not objectively ugly - in fact, there might just be a bit of beauty in its absurd simplicity and its casual use of Times New Roman. Is Musk playing with our expectations? Providing ironic commentary on the state of philanthropy?
There is more information to be found in the foundation’s 990′s. Elon runs the foundation with his younger brother Kimbal, who serves as secretary and treasurer, according to the 2011 filing (Kimbal also sits on the board of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX). Total donations per year range from $175,000 to $600,000 since 2005. Some bigger gifts: installing solar photovoltaics for the South Bay Communities Alliance in Riverside California and donations to promote vegetable gardening in elementary schools.
3. David Cheriton: $1.3 billion
Website: Stanford Professor’s Page
David Cheriton wrote Sergey Brin and Larry Page one of their very first checks in 1998. The duo used that money to design one of the most gorgeously simple and iconic home pages in all of existence: Google.com. Cheriton was rewarded handsomely for his investment, but the notoriously frugal billionaire, who still cuts his own hair, probably didn’t spend any of that on a new web page. The page for his Distributed Systems Group is also noticeably un-designed. But the website for the Department of Computer Science at Stanford, through which Cheriton’s DSG operates, is much less offensive.
2. Nadhmi Auchi: $1.5 billion
Website: General Mediterranean Holding
The website for this real estate tycoon and investor is an absolute nightmare: the layered photo reels, the pearlescent colour scheme, the enter buttons for each new page, the endless web charts. None of that has prevented Auchi, a London resident, from developing a cross-continental empire with assets of approximately $4 billion.
1. Carl Berg: $1 billion
Website: Mission West Properties
Carl Berg hasn’t been rich enough to appear on the Forbes 400 for the past two years, but he is still a staple on our annual list of the world’s billionaires. And the website for his REIT, Mission West, is impressively ugly. It gets extra points for being the web presence for a publicly-traded company, meaning that it should ideally inspire confidence in investors. The crown jewel: “We will be competitive on any market deal!” is written in bold/italicized primary red Consolas in a white text box on a mismatched maroon background. That sort of exclamatory promise is typically associated with used car salesmen and pawn shops - but Berg has leveraged it to billionaire status.
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