Jeff Bezos Could Become World's First Trillionaire (usatoday.com) 280
hcs_$reboot writes: The world's first trillionaire will likely be Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Projections show Bezos reaching trillionaire status by 2026. [Comparisun, a company which allows small- to medium-size firms to compare different business products] said their projection is based on taking the average percentage of yearly growth over the past five years and applying it to future years. "The projection has sparked anger on Twitter, noting how many people are financially struggling during the coronavirus pandemic as Bezos rakes in billions of dollars," reports USA Today.
Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:5, Insightful)
how many people are financially struggling during the coronavirus pandemic as Bezos rakes in billions of dollars
Bezos isn't "raking in" any new wealth, is the thing. Most of his wealth comes from the percentage of Amazon he retained when he took public the company he owned and built. He sells $1B worth of stock every year to fund Blue Origin, so he has materially fewer shares each year. He hasn't received meaningful compensation from Amazon for several years now.
This 2026 projection is a bit nuts, as Amazon would need to be worth many $trillions for Bezos's share to be worth 1m and Amazon just isn't growing that fast.
But in any case, it's hard to make a case that it's unfair for a man who started a business to continue to own a portion of that business. And he does pay $1B a year to engineers working in his spaceships, even if he's not much for actual charity.
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Re: Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't understand the concept of fairness, it appears.
Yes, it is fair for a man to own a portion of a business. However, the market value of Amazon isn't the result of Bezos' work. It's the result of network effects, growing markets, international trade, good luck, the hard work of many others and scale effects.
In fact, it has been proven repeatedly that these kind of "success stories" are mostly based on luck and selective perception, because we don't get to hear the stories of the thousands who tried a business and failed.
The feeling of unfairness that people correctly have is indicating that one person is being compensated for something that is far, far beyond what he, personally, invested, created and risked. The rags-to-billionaire stuff is an artifact of the financial and commercial system we have in place, and it violates human nature of fair compensation.
This is increased by the fact that many people risk much more every day (firefighters, soldiers, even truck drivers) than Jeff Bezos ever risked, and for a much, much lower compensation.
This kind of success is more like winning the lottery than it is actual business success. And the millions of losers in the lottery are beginning to realize that it's them who are financing the jackpot payouts of the lucky few.
Re:Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people would in fact argue that gambling, and gains from gambling, are immoral.
What Bezons (and the other Amazon shareholders, and shareholders in general) are doing isn't winning the lottery though. The shares are worth so much because Amazon's workforce produce value that is much greater than they are compensated. It's also highly dangerous to have one company occupy such a dominant position in a market.
Re: Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:3)
Many people would in fact argue that gambling, and gains from gambling, are immoral.
Yes, this is one of the places where the far left overlaps with religious fundamentalists.
The shares are worth so much because Amazon's workforce produce value that is much greater than they are compensated.
This is, of course, nonsense. A guy cleaning toilets in an amazon warehouse doesn't create any more valuse than a guy cleaning toilets in the warehouse of a company which is on the brink of bankruptcy. Stock price and company value have essentially nothing to do with how hard working, educate, or intelligent its average worker is. They are far more influenced by decisions made at the highest levels.
It's also highly dangerous to have one company occupy such a dominant position in a market.
That's certainly
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Re:Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes you are absolutely right. There is nothing in between poor people starving in the streets and out-and-out communism. That's why America in the 1950s and 1950s with it's 91% top marginal rate was a complete bloodbath where hundreds of millions of people died.
You need to grow up.
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You honestly think that there would be mass starvation if Amazon went out of business?
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And the millions of losers in the lottery are beginning to realize that it's them who are financing the jackpot payouts of the lucky few.
Stockholders took nothing from those people. This is a bad comparison.
The whining of losers (Score:3, Insightful)
> You don't understand the concept of fairness, it appears.
Ahh yes, the socialist ideal of fairness, where a farmer that plants a field doesn't deserve to reap the harvest, but everyone else somehow does. Where you would rather the rich be a bit less rich than to help the poor. Where everyone is extremely charitable, but only with other people's money and never their own. Where my extreme effort in digging holes that no one wants or needs is somehow equally valuable to services organized for the benef
Re:The whining of losers (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you're not at the top and you're pushing for this, know that you're not on the winning side. If you're over the age of 28 and you're not yet rich - you've got a very slim chance of getting rich these days. I don't see the logic in championing the limiting of resources to the point that it's 1000x harder for YOU to succeed. Wouldn't it be better for 10000 people to be moderately wealthy than 10 people to be AMAZINGLY wealthy while the rest of the 9990 get by with like 45% being middle class the remaining being poor class and the general direction of that gap is a shift in percentages with the middle class decreasing and the lower and poor classes increasing?
I mean we can argue risk/reward-hardwork/reward shit all day...but the simple fact is that the statistics are showing that it's growing increasingly harder to even be middle class and it's becoming easier and easier to be lower or poor class at best. I don't see the point in championing that kind of capitalism, because it's just leading us towards a future where we end up with royalty in all but title. At least as an American I know our Founding Fathers fought to get away from titles and in today's American society it's not King/Queen/Emperor/Emperoress/Caeser, it's "Chairman of the Board of Directors of XYZ, Inc." or "CEO, ABC Incorporated". Instead of "bow at the waist and do not approach Your Majesty" it's now "make sure you report to work during a pandemic and expect the CEO to be working remotely or in 'meetings' all the day for the next few months."
That's the perception (or reality, take your pick) you're fighting and that's why you see fewer and fewer conservatives in the upcoming generations. Everyone wants the opportunity to do meaningful work, make a fair wage, and live a decent life without having to surrender their dignity, their health, or to be making a penny while the boss makes a dollar.
Re: The whining of losers (Score:3)
Re: The whining of losers (Score:4, Interesting)
But is it fair that your boss makes 10 times as much as his employees? How about 100 times as much? One million times? That's the question here. How much more is considered "fair"?
Re: The whining of losers (Score:2)
I grew up in a farming family and here's the thing: farmers (at least the good ones) pay a fair wage for a fair days work. And as the farmer grows in weath, so do his employees. Will they ever be equal? No, of course not. But you don't have a good and honest farmer making $10 million a year and paying his employees $30-$40K/year. They grow in sync.
They grow in sync up to a point. All that your example really tells us is that you don't know any farmers who have gotten successful enough to be truly rich. If one of these farmers did somehow expand to the point where he was pulling in $100 million profit per year, do you really think he'd start paying unskilled labourers $500,000 per year? If so, you're dreaming.
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Ahh yes, the socialist ideal of fairness, where a farmer that plants a field doesn't deserve to reap the harvest, but everyone else somehow does.
Ah the capitalist idea of fairness where if you happen to be at the field at harvest time and can reap ir you deserve all the wealth because the people who prepared the field and sowed it don't count somehow.
Amazon was built in the USA, a country with a strong, stable government, good education, reliable infrastructure[*], generally passable law enforcement and leg
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Thing is Bezos had a leg up. His parents gave him $300,000 to start Amazon.
The socialist concept of fairness is that everyone should have equal opportunity, and obviously most people aren't able to get a no-strings $300,000 from their family to start a business. That's a pretty massive opportunity, wouldn't you say?
So to make it fair some of the rewards from that opportunity should be shared out, improving social mobility by giving others who don't have rich parents opportunities too.
Re:The whining of losers (Score:5, Insightful)
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You don't understand the concept of fairness, it appears.
Yes, it is fair for a man to own a portion of a business. However, the market value of Amazon isn't the result of Bezos' work. It's the result of network effects, growing markets, international trade, good luck, the hard work of many others and scale effects.
Did Bezos steal from anyone in order to acquire that wealth? Were the people who gave their money to Bezos coerced into doing so or otherwise compelled to against their free will? Just because someone has more and has amassed wealth through some combination of hard work, a good reputation, and fortuitous luck doesn't make it unfair.
The people who remain unconvinced and maintain that it is unfair have a history of implementing policies that not only fail to enrich the people who have less, but have the na
Re:Stupid Beauhd whatifisms (Score:5, Informative)
"Did Bezos steal from anyone in order to acquire that wealth?"
Yes, he sued every legitimate eCommerce site out of existence with his bogus "1 click buy" patent.
"Were the people who gave their money to Bezos coerced into doing so or otherwise compelled to against their free will?"
Yes, by his spurious, patent-troll lawsuits.
"Did Bezos becoming wealthy result in a similar reduction in the wealth of others?"
Yes, demonstrably.
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You remember history very differently than the rest of us. If anything Jeff Bezos burnt through a lot of Amazon money and got very little out of his one-click buy attempts.
But that's a straw-man anyway. You know I got angry on day and kicked a bird? I guess that makes me evil like Hitler right?
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Is that you Jeff?
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What we have here is a bunch of not very wealthy, probably older people who believe hard that if only they can figure out how to screw people in the right way they too will become obscenely wealthy. so they keep supporting the ability to screw others just in case.
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It's got nothing to do with "winning the lottery" he's a patent troll and that's all. He didn't innovate and produces nothing. He lost money for 9 straight years just suing people for using "his idea" of "buying things with a mouse click."
He's a piece of shit who figured out how to abuse the law and that's all.
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However, the market value of Amazon isn't the result of Bezos' work. It's the result of network effects, growing markets, international trade, good luck, the hard work of many others and scale effects.
Indeed, but that isn't unpaid. The network effects, the growing markets, the international trade etc isn't some money that is being unfairly funneled to the CEO, the many other "hard workers" get benefits through direct compensation or indirectly through better lives or better economy.
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No, the problem is his patent. He didn't build shit. He took it, via the courts, from other people who did work hard to build it.
I notice it's all paper money when it's the 1% (Score:2)
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We can't afford UBI the way it's typically presented in the US. That's not to say there's no possible incarnation of it that would work, but typically people ignore the enormous cost of being old.
Currently with all the viral government spending, total spending of US governemnts at all levels is around 45% of GDP. 45%! We're beyond socialist at this point and approaching communist (where government spending is the majority of GDP). Sure, you might not like the form socialism takes in the US, but then, no
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He didn't start a business tho he started a patent trolling scam and deserves zero dollars.
It was intended to spark anger (Score:2)
That's why it was published.
If Bezos is as smart as he is alleged to be, though, he won't let it happen.
Better Bezos than... (Score:2)
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Nobody says he's smart. Being a patent troll doesn't take smarts. It takes just being an asshole.
Beating out Rockefeller (Score:2)
"At the time of his death in 1937, John D. Rockefeller's net worth was the same as $340 billion after adjusting for inflation and taking into account relative GDP at the time. That inflation-adjusted wealth makes Rockefeller by far the richest American of all time and the richest human in modern history."
Re:Beating out Rockefeller (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Beating out Rockefeller (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Beating out Rockefeller (Score:2)
I'm not sure what you're intending to imply re: banks. Banking in essentially its modern form dates back to the late Middle Ages. Lending, bills of credit, fractional reserves, double entry accounting...
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The only reasonable way to compare wealth is how much pussy could he have got for it? Could he have got more pussy with his money back then than Bezos can get with his money now or not?
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Airplanes didn't. Neither did computers. And calling what existed back then "banks" is only technically accurate. If Rockefeller spent his entire fortune, he would not have been able to buy some of the things which you can buy for $1000 or less today.
The knife cuts both ways. If you spent your fortune back then you'd be in the same position. Just because Rockefeller couldn't buy a computer doesn't mean inflation is irrelevant. I'm sure he had newspapers to keep him busy.
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> What matters is what you can afford compared to your contemporaries.
That's subjective. What matters is how well you live. This is the ostensible use of wealth (outside of inheritance).
Comparing against contemporaries is the apples to oranges comparison.
Re: Beating out Rockefeller (Score:2)
How well you live is significantly a factor of the times in which you live.
The King of England in 1709 lived like shit compared to modern standards. Doesnâ(TM)t mean he wasnâ(TM)t wealthier than most Americans living today.
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What matters is what you can afford compared to your contemporaries.
Sure. I agree. Which is why it's absurd to compare purchasing power of Rockefeller and purchasing power of someone (anyone or any entity) with $340 billion today.
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REALLY big assumptions (Score:3)
Re:REALLY big assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976, if these trends continue...
Projections. (Score:4, Interesting)
https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
Real risky move there, predicting that the rich get richer.
That's inflation - until a society collapses, someone's going to tend to become the richest of all time as events occur.
Yeah - yet another thousand times richer than the previous absurd exaggeration of how wealthy a person could be. We seem to do that every 50 years.
It'll be interesting to see how the next round of monopoly exploitation artists perform. Beyond inflation, the rate that the rich are standing above everyone else is reaching increasing scaling issues.
I see some logistical issues with society itself when one person can break so much just by being worth so much more than the bulk of humanity, that their vulnerabilities will just become too tempting, even as we become increasingly peaceful.
Yes - an absurd character like Vladimir Putin can control many, many trillions of de-facto personal wealth right now - but as that gets into the Quadrillions, just the random conflicts would just pile up enough to make the odds poor for anything to survive, no matter how they plan or proxy.
It's a silly story we tell with our resources and ownership systems. It's like a contest of video game cheaters, exploiting rules that they get to manipulate and assign, as we crash the logic the scenario over and over. It's kind of interesting how it works and fails - but it's a silly system to use to manage our shared resources.
Ryan Fenton
Absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
that one person should control that much wealth while people go hungry.
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Re:Absurd (Score:5, Interesting)
There is definitely a good argument to make for a maximum wealth limit. After a point it makes no difference to the lifestyle of the person with the wealth but does hurt a lot of other people.
It's also anti-meritocracy. There is no way Bezos is worth millions of times as much as the average person.
No more billionaires (Score:5, Funny)
Well, one less anyway. Happy now?
Growth in stock share != taking money from people (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never understood why most people take someone's personal wealth, when mostly based in equity, to be something that takes/drains money directly from the poor or average citizen.
Bezos' wealth is based in stocks and grows based on what people are willing to sell stocks for at any given point in time. None of his purportedly soon-to-be trillion-dollar fortune was taken directly from anyone. Should he start selling his shares to atone for his sin of owning a lot of stock in a successful company?? He could never even realistically sell it all in a reasonable period of time, because there wouldn't be enough buyers!
Rich is not necessarily the same as bad, at least for individuals whose net worth is based mostly on holding stock. If you have a problem with that wealth accumulation, take out your ire on the corporations that pay ridiculously low taxes, not people whose wealth grows with the market.
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Re: Growth in stock share != taking money from peo (Score:2)
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Re: Growth in stock share != taking money from pe (Score:2)
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I have never understood why most people take someone's personal wealth, when mostly based in equity, to be something that takes/drains money directly from the poor or average citizen.
Bezos' wealth is based in stocks and grows based on what people are willing to sell stocks for at any given point in time. None of his purportedly soon-to-be trillion-dollar fortune was taken directly from anyone.
It wasn't taken indirectly from anyone, either. It was *created* as Amazon's value grew. This is how the economy grows - wealth is created. It's not a zero-sum game.
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Growth in stock share != taking money from people
It does when the entire financial system is propped up by the federal reserve a largely autonomous entity that uses the military might of the US to direct the course of the history against the wishes of the people that make up the nation.
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With Bezos it's because of the way he acts.
Like he racked up $16,000 in parking fines while one of his mansions was being renovated. The law doesn't apply to Bezos because he is so wealthy. That strikes people as unfair.
He doesn't treat the people working for him very well either. He could, Amazon is hugely profitable and better conditions and pay would only eat into that a tiny bit, but he chooses not to.
Then he sells a billion dollars worth of shares a year to fund his rocket company because he has so muc
So what? (Score:2)
he hasn't gained a thing (Score:3)
Stock is not money. Stock represents a portion of a company. Shares of stock are things. Bezos has not gained shares of Amazon. He's actually been selling some periodically to create cash to support Blue Origin.
If he were to actually try to sell all of his Amazon stock to create this money that is estimated to be his worth, Amazon stock would plummet. He'd have far less money than is estimated.
Why, when somebody creates something and it becomes valuable, do people resent them for retaining some of the value of the thing they created? If he's like all of these other billionaires, he'll never spend more than the tiniest fraction of it on himself. Most of them end up giving nearly all of it to charities that do a tremendous amount of good - largely doing things the government used to do and saving us tax dollars though I'd rather the government spent my tax dollars on R&D.
Re: he hasn't gained a thing (Score:2)
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Because angry, mindless, jealous-and-green-with-envy socialists don't understand math or economics.
Unlike "Way Smarter Than You", who probably believes in trickle-down economics.
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Money is just an intermediary for what his shares give him directly - power. The authority to command armies of people and carry out whatever idea he thinks is good, even if it requires the efforts of thousands of people.
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And those thousands of people are compensated for their efforts.
So whats your point?
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Why, when somebody creates something and it becomes valuable, do people resent them for retaining some of the value of the thing they created?
Much like Bezos himself, you've become convinced that he created something all by himself when in fact he had help from hundreds of thousands of other people, including those poor bastards in the warehouses that now wear catheters or adult diapers because they don't have enough time for a piss break.
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What about Saudi Aramco? (Score:2)
Saudi Aramco had a valuation above $2T at one point. Seems the boss there might have been the first trillionaire.
Well I'll be the world's first Kazillionaire! (Score:5, Funny)
That doesn't sound right (Score:2)
I didn't check the math or anything, but AMZN is barely worth more than $1T. Bezos certainly didn't own all of it. And his wife got half of it in the divorce I assume. It sounds like he must have owned far more of that company than is typical.
Angry People (Score:2)
"The projection has sparked anger on Twitter, noting how many people are financially struggling during the coronavirus pandemic as Bezos rakes in billions of dollars," reports USA Today.
And these are the very same people who keep buying from Amazon. Many are too dumb to realize it, or don't want to have to give up the convenience of Amazon Prime
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Donate a dollar (Score:2)
Oh so that is why Amazon asks you to donate a dollar every time you shop there.
He probably couln't care less. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's market value. And Bezos usually reinvests every black number he can find. Bezos, Gates, Musk, etc. are smart enough to know that they have access to way more wealth than they could possibly spend for themselves usefully and thus do the right thing and try to improve things for the better.
These are all people who are billionaires yet wear the same quality of clothes that I do. None of them can eat more than me without getting fat and all of them are going to die and rot, just the like rest of us. Smart rich people know this and Bezos is one of them.
I still remember when everyone called him nuts. Now he has more value than all the naysayers combined. Good for him. By and large I'm pretty sure he couldn't care less about his paper-worth. He wants to revolutionise the market, and AFAICT he's doing pretty good at it. Aside from that he wants to go to space. A neat endeavor for someone with the resourced to actually attempt that. I'd whish for him and Musk to team up. That would probalby actually get us to Mars.
To be honest, I appreciate that Bezos idea of an internet market platform panned out. If he treats his human pre-robots fair, which he apparently tries to do with a minimum wage of 15$, all the better.
My 2 cents.
-25% (Score:2)
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I'm destitute, I can't afford to travel.
Maybe you could save up a little money by cancelling your internet service.
Re: Please just assassinate him already. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this insightful? It's idiotic. Saving roughly 60$ a month, it's going to take quite a while to save up for a vacation, and difficult to plan it without an internet connection.
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Re: Please just assassinate him already. (Score:3)
Yeah, his employees one day randomly decided to build AWS just for shits and giggles. I hear Bezos was outraged when he heard about it, but by then it was already making billions so he couldn't very well put a stop to it.
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The money isn't in a pile stashed under his bed, comrade. It's out there in the economy mainly working for all of us, with Bezos getting a cut of the profit. Bcause of online commerce, and because of Amazon in particular, each of us is saving money on the things we buy.
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Most of it is in the form of stock certificates, which are probably in a pile in a safe somewhere.
Whether the wealth that those certificates theoretically represent is actually out there working for anyone is an interesting question in the whole map::territory field
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Whether the wealth that those certificates theoretically represent is actually out there working for anyone is an interesting question in the whole map::territory field
What are you even talking about asking if the wealth is actually out there? Amazon has warehouses full of goods they sell to customers, numerous employees that oversee those operations, and a whole host of other side activities such as a streaming platform that a quick glance suggests has well over one million people watching right now.
According to their financial reporting the company had slightly more than $250 billion in operating expenses last year. That's $250 billion spent on employee salaries, bui
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The money isn't in a pile stashed under his bed, comrade.
Well duh. He's not Scrooge McDuck after all - he's Elmer Fudd.
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How so? If Bezos owns $100B of Amazon stock, it's not like he spent $100B to acquire it, and that his (former) money is now out there doing "economy" things when it wasn't before.
And if Bezos were to sell it all for $100B, it's not like huge piles of money would just "disappear" from the economy, and reappear as a pile stashed under his bed.
The $100B of value is just what other people w
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If you think Jeff Bezos isn't fucking *everyone* over every minute of every day, you must be new to this website. There's a new story every other day about how his companies mercilessly shits on workers, consumers, small businesses, the post office, the internet, US taxpayers, state and local governments, and basically all of humanity.
That people continue to make excuses for billionaires is honestly disgusting. It is *literally impossible* to accrue that amount of wealth without being a monopolist piece of
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His workers are adults.
They're capable of making a value decision.
Yet they still go work for him.
WHY IS THAT?
Because working for Bezos is better than starvation... by a small amount.
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Oprah might be the worst one of all. It's hard to even estimate her body count. She made billions bilking gullible hypochondriacs.
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Once you get into the billions, you've already got everything you need and probably just about everything you could want, and it becomes extremely difficult to spend any non-negligible fraction of your wealth on anything you might want. You have to get really creative, like Sergey Brin with his custom flying megayacht. Wealth at this level is really just a high-score counter, which is bad because the stupidly rich are effectively economic black holes.
Re: What a stupid article (Score:2)
With a 45% return. It's not completely out of the question, but seems unlikely. You'd have to be an investing wizard. Or put it all in Bitcoin.
Re: Bezo is getting little compared to others (Score:2)
How is Musk going to accomplish that before Bezos? His net worth is around 36 billion, roughly 1/5th of Bezos.
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