Who wants to be a PRIVATE billionaire?

I have to challenge my friend Om on this one. He asks How to be a billionaire without any real cash? and makes the point that Forbes may have prematurely ranked the Google duo as billionaires because their company is not public--hence their fortunes aren't very liquid. So, Om asks, "Are the toothsome twosome worth a billion each then?" Yes, they are.

First, I bet many of the billionaires on the Forbes list have fortunes in non-publicly traded assets (think of the ones in real estate, for example). Of course, assets can certainly have value even if they are not publicly traded so Google ownership is certainly worth SOMETHING, even though it is illiquid at the moment. So the question is whether there should there be a discount applied for the fact that Google shares aren't publicly traded? Of course. But I don't think enough to bring the "toothsome twosome" down from, at least temporary, billionairehood. Whether Forbes valued Google properly is something I don't know, and frankly don't care, but it is not a "new kind of math" for one to be a billionaire (for real) without owning a share of public stock.

It's worth remembering too that there are many former billionaires who owned (or own) publicly traded securities. Being public is scant protection from the "what ifs" that Om posits. In fact, I don't think ANY of Om's list of what could go wrong apply only to private companies:
* another new cool search engine comes to the market and takes away traffic form Google
* someone discovers that Google is in patent infringement or something like that
* the stock market tanks

Would a public Google be protected from any of these things? In fact, one could argue that public companies face many more risks (can you say Sarbanes Oxley or class action suit?) that don't tend to threaten private companies.

Private company value is more secure, and public company value less secure, than Om would have us believe in this piece.