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Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A surge in Amazon shares Thursday morning in advance of the online retailer's earnings report has propelled founder Jeff Bezos past Bill Gates as the world's richest person. Shares of the online retailer rose 1.3 percent to $1,065.92 at 10:10 a.m. in New York, giving Bezos a net worth of $90.9 billion, versus $90.7 billion for Gates. If that holds through the 4 p.m. close, Bezos, 53, will leapfrog Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Gates, 61, has held the top spot since May 2013.
Bill's wealth is far more diversified than Bezos' . Only a small percentage is now in Microsoft stock, while almost all of Jeff's is in Amazon. The potential volatility of Amazon's stock price makes Bill's wealth much more valuable in real-world terms than Jeff's.
Amazon effectively has a monopoly on online retail sales. They've become a behemoth that has tied up the industry. If the point of strong / successful business is that it leads to a better overall society, then once a company approaches or achieves monopoly, it has the opposite effect. Less competition and less ability for competitors to compete leads to higher prices, lower pay for the workers, a much larger share of revenue going towards profits; which pads the pockets of people like Bezos at the expense of everyone else. Or in other words, it leads to a massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few; as we see with Bezos (just one person at Amazon).
Anti-trust law or tax law that penalizes these companies for having an unfair advantage is the only way we can keep this situation under control. There should be downward pressure at the top and upward pressure at the bottom in order to maintain a healthy economy.
There is no strong indication that becoming that rich is based on substantially more than (mostly) coincidence, based on being at the right place at the right time knowing the right people and other stochastic variables. That's why I don't trust any of those "My secret to financial success" books, they merely illustrate survivor bias mixed with a few truisms. Many rich people like to pretend that they 'made it' by their own intellect and skills, and I don't blame them because it would be kind of embarrassing to have all this money without any real achievement except for being an outlier of some probability distribution. I also don't want to say that none of them have any skills, some intelligence or smartness is certainly required to keep being wealthy and not being ripped off by others like e.g. lawyers (some rock stars lacked this intelligence, for instance), but I do think there is a tendency to overrate one's own contribution to financial success.
As for the claim that nobody should have that much money, it's true that from a utilitarian point of view according to standard economic theory transferring money from the very rich to the poor always increases overall utility in a society, because money has diminishing marginal value. So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
That being said, I can't blame anyone for keeping all his money, although Bill Gates is the perfect example that there is no reason to do so. He's not only willing to give away much of his unnecessary wealth, he even looks at the maximum 'bang for the bucks' when doing so, so kudos to him! Hopefully Jeff Bezos does the same.
My 2 cents.
"Nobody should have that much money." - Wow, what else do you know? Please tell us more about how the world should be.
Also explain how "the median net worth" will not be in a downward spiral under your system of arbitrary confiscation of such net worth.
Tell us how you will allocate the funds better than the person who created this "excessive" wealth.
Let's take a billion dollars and see what works out best; A) Individual billionaire decides to fund a well thought out charity or create more business ventures. Or B) A bureaucratic budget committee figures out what to do with the money.
I'm guessing "A" will work out better for the majority.
Remember, billionaires get that way by creating wealth, not taking it from someone.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Concentrated wealth is a threat to the republic and social stability.
That is a very PC way of saying: "Give us money or some mob will steal it and murder you if you resist." If you are going to be a thug, at least be honest about it.
Again, I don't have a problem with some people being rich, but it is a matter of degree.
So you do have a problem with people being rich if they are "too rich". And you are the one who defines "too rich", but there is no objective standard you can name. Just be honest: You have a problem with people being rich.
Wealth of that magnitude is a drain on society and the economy.
Nonsense. Societies that don't let people become rich don't create as much wealth. The poorest people in the US have far more food than they did 100 years ago because we have technology that makes farming very productive. If the people who created that technology had not wanted to get rich, they would not have done the work to create that technology.
My roommate in school was from a Baltic nation. When he was a teenager in the late 1990s, Amazon was the only way he could get access to books on programming. This allowed him to get into a good school in the US, and have a far better life. If Bezos couldn't create Amazon because some selfish fool thought he might be "too rich", my roommate would have a substantially worse life. Your selfish desire to hold Bezos down would have harmed him and every other person who used Amazon to make a better life for themselves.