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.

Comments

Raise Your Hand

[Anonymous Coward]

If you believe that Bezos really has $billions in his checking account.

Re:Raise Your Hand

[alvinrod]

Nobody has billions in their checking account. Anyone who has substantial amounts of wealth (and a clue what to do with it) has almost all of it invested or tied up in land or other valuable assets. The only people who have tens of millions of dollars immediately at their disposal are drug lords or foolish lottery winners.

Re: Raise Your Hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Make no mistake. Legions of Butt Hurt SJWs will read that headline and think Bezos is hogging all the money in America, leaving nothing for them.

And they will be the one's to raise their hands.

Plus, anyone with two brain cells to rub together know that my post was sarcasm.

So, my dear asshole, you won't be registering anywhere with the name Rocket Scientist any time soon.

Re:Raise Your Hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Billionaires most certainly do (or can) hold billions in cash -- in the form of treasury bills, not checking accounts. The reason is the limit of $250,000 on FDIC insurance, which is useless for someone who needs to hold billions in cash. Treasury securities are considered equally riskless (or better) in terms of getting your money back, but without the limit. Treasury bills are cash for the big dogs, including pension funds, mutual funds, banks, foreign governments, and other institutional investors. They provide a form of liquid cash that scales into the billions.

Re:Raise Your Hand

[swillden]

Anyone who has substantial amounts of wealth (and a clue what to do with it) has almost all of it invested or tied up in land or other valuable assets.

In the case of Bezos and Gates, essentially all of it is in AMZN and MSFT stock, respectively. Which is why their net worth is tied to the share prices. Were they to try to cash out, their massive stock sales (and the lack of confidence indicated by their decision to cash out), would cause the stock price to drop. So their actual available cash is less than their net worth. OTOH, they can easily borrow billions with their stock as collateral.

Re:Raise Your Hand

[Huge_UID]

Anyone with substantial amounts of wealth has rapid access to cash via extremely low interest rate loans.
Sources:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/0717/Zuckerberg-s-1-percent-mortgage-Why-does-a-billionaire-need-a-loan
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-rich-people-can-borrow-money-at-very-low-rates-of-interest-nearly-free-Regular-savers-must-borrow-at-much-higher-rates-of-interest

Re:Raise Your Hand

[mattack2]

$1.5 billion of stock isn't a "massive stock sale"?

https://www.geekwire.com/2015/...

Re:Raise Your Hand

[Maritz]

False. But I see from your posting history that you are a person of low IQ. Did you eat paint chips as a child? Do you continue to do so today?

Not only is he right, and you wrong, but you're a dickhead. Sorry bud.

Nobody should have that much money.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. Why not laws that break up the estate of people that accumulate more than say 1000x the median net worth?

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[kilfarsnar]

We have anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. Why not laws that break up the estate of people that accumulate more than say 1000x the median net worth?

Because Capitalism is America's religion and the dollar its God.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[alvinrod]

It won't work. You'll end up with people finding all kinds of clever ways to avoid the problem, similar to how the rich avoid paying taxes on large amounts of their wealth by the use of various loopholes or even legal methods of minimizing their tax burdens.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not even the fucking same thing.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[__aaclcg7560]

A story that my father told me... Someone asked a millionaire during the Great Depression to divide up his wealth and give to every American. The millionaire handed that person a dime for his share of the millionaire's wealth..

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[lucasnate1]

You could make the next Amazon if you weren't too busy worrying about stopping other people from trying because of your butthurt.

Isn't this true for you as well? Clearly, you could make the next Amazon, but for some reason you prefer to quarrel with people on slashdot.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[aicrules]

Yep, I choose to be where I am. I have had the desire to do something entrepreneurial like that, but wasn't willing to take the risk. That wasn't Jeff Bezos fault. Nor was it Bill Gates fault. In fact, Bill Gates is one reason I even considered many of those ventures in the first place.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[aicrules]

If you create a better Amazon, Jeff Bezos 90 billion will make its way to you. There may be finite money, but it never stays in one place forever. The only thing that lets it stagnate is the same type of thinking that assholes like you who think because the fat kid HAS 10 pieces of cake that regardless of how he got them, he should be forced to give 9 of them away. What if he had 10 birthday parties to go to that day and got a piece of cake at each one? And what if he's taking them home to his 9 siblings who weren't invited? Would you force him to give up the 9 pieces then? You're butthurt that you didn't make Amazon and also you're clearly a moron.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, if your team is consistently winning because they're hitting a winning formula and they surpass the median wins per venue, then they should have X amount of their titles, winnings, trophies, awards, etc. divvied up to lesser teams."

The marketplace has adapted. Most major sports have a marketplace rule that penalizes success in the name of balancing the market. For example, the NFL sequences its draft so weaker teams have the opportunity to select earlier in the hopes of getting better players. Do they take away your trophies? No, but they try to make it harder to earn the next one.

"How about individual athletes that train hard and are just good at their game? Same deal, sorry guys/gals, you were simply too good in your area, so we're stripping you of some of it and giving it to other people."

Again, the marketplace has adapted. Your contract is too expensive, we are going to cut you so we do not have to pay you this year (NFL). Some sports have fully guaranteed contracts (MLB) but there are cases where you lose money for being too good. You hope the market will reward you but you can never assume that your perceived value will always be paid by the market.

Are they literally taking money away from these people? No. But the marketplace is adjusting and penalizing them for success to balance the market. The market chooses how to balance itself collectively. In some cases, for the good of the market it is an acceptable response to take value away from a market participant.

"Because that would be stupid as fuck. Much like you."

If the market becomes so out of balance that it can no longer function, everyone in the market loses. If a participant in the market is so short sighted that all they can see is their profits, and not the cost to the market of those profits, where in the end they lose everything because of those profits? Well, who is the stupid one now? And don't say that you'll just take your profits and walk away, because your profits are your company's value (stock) so when the market collapses and your stock is worthless, you have nothing to walk away with.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[dogvomit]

You (and many other sibling posters) are fighting a straw man. The OP didn't suggest taking the wealth away from Bezos. Not at all; let him enjoy the crap out of it. The proposal was to take more wealth from estates. That means the guy who earned it is dead. And man, he just cannot enjoy a dime of it after he's dead. It is the absolutely ultimate in fair tax, since it has absolutely zero impact on the person whose money it used to be.

--
Happy happy oh my friend

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[avandesande]

accumulation of wealth by a small minority is deflationary and this is why our economy is moribund

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[kilfarsnar]

Opportunity is God here. Take it or leave it, that's up to you. Some people try and fail, some people try and succeed, that is opportunity. You could make the next Amazon if you weren't too busy worrying about stopping other people from trying because of your butthurt.

Ah, so some people have God and some do not? Does everyone have an equal opportunity? I think not. Can everyone have 90 billion dollars if they just work hard enough and succeed? Or does the system require that we have a few winners and many losers? Further, what if Jeff Bezos had 90 trillion dollars and everyone else had one dollar? I guess he would have just earned it, right?

Look, I don't have a problem with some people having more than others. But it's a matter of degree and proportion. I don't see how Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates could have added so much value that they are due 90 billion dollars. And I'm typing this on a Windows PC on a keyboard I bought from Amazon. As my absurd hypothetical above illustrates, it is a matter of degree. Nobody, by themselves, can add 90 billion dollars worth of value. They may have had a great idea and the drive to see it through, and they deserve to be rewarded for that. But really, when one accumulates $90 billion they are taking more than they deserve.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, because brutally punishing success always works out to society's benefit in the end.

If there's anything our tax code has taught us, it is that the people with means will find ways of still being people of means. You start passing laws that limit people arbitrarily, and you'll find the people that applies to will no longer be above that arbitrary limit - instead transferring that wealth to holding entities, relatives, trust funds, etc.

Also, on-paper wealth versus liquid currency. Just as Amazon's stock is up today, making Mr. Bezos worth $90B, it could just as easily have a bloodbath cutting that worth substantially. Yes, he'll still be okay in the end should that happen, but just how would you plan to enact such a statute on people that don't have that $90B sitting in a vault or checking account.

Anyone (i.e. you) who says "there outta be a law" probably never even thought about it much more than "I don't like that, so I want the government to do something about it."

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[upl8n87447]

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.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[butzwonker]

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.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[kilfarsnar]

If you create a better Amazon, Jeff Bezos 90 billion will make its way to you.

That's not even close to true. History is littered with the bodies of better ideas that failed anyway. Ever hear of Tucker Automobiles?

There may be finite money, but it never stays in one place forever. The only thing that lets it stagnate is the same type of thinking that assholes like you who think because the fat kid HAS 10 pieces of cake that regardless of how he got them, he should be forced to give 9 of them away. What if he had 10 birthday parties to go to that day and got a piece of cake at each one? And what if he's taking them home to his 9 siblings who weren't invited? Would you force him to give up the 9 pieces then? You're butthurt that you didn't make Amazon and also you're clearly a moron.

No one is butthurt, so calm your tits. I know it makes it easier for you to dismiss people by saying they are just jealous, but it doesn't make it true. Concentrated wealth is a threat to the republic and social stability. Again, I don't have a problem with some people being rich, but it is a matter of degree. I don't envy Bezos' or Gates' wealth. I make plenty of money and have a comfortable lifestyle. However, the fact that they have that much money means other people, like the people who cook their food, don't have enough. Wealth of that magnitude is a drain on society and the economy. I'm not saying it should be taken away, but I am saying it probably shouldn't have been accumulated to begin with. Such wealth accumulation should be discouraged. How, I don't know. Reasonable people can disagree.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[kilfarsnar]

Interesting idea.. So, lets apply that everywhere

Why would you apply it everywhere?

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[kilfarsnar]

"You have more money than me! You shouldn't be allowed to have more money than me!" is pretty much the only argument I ever hear from people who are salty that someone has a lot of money. It's friggin juvenile.

You should listen more closely, because there are a number of reasons why vast wealth is bad for everyone but the wealthy person.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[HumanWiki]

Interesting idea.. So, lets apply that everywhere

Why would you apply it everywhere?

To show the ridiculousness of the post's title "Nobody should have that much money" --- Because that's all the same idea.. Sorry, you made too much of X based on other people w/o regard to anything other than the count of money.. So, we're going to take it from you and give it to others that don't have as much.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[kilfarsnar]

Interesting idea.. So, lets apply that everywhere

Why would you apply it everywhere?

To show the ridiculousness of the post's title "Nobody should have that much money" --- Because that's all the same idea.. Sorry, you made too much of X based on other people w/o regard to anything other than the count of money.. So, we're going to take it from you and give it to others that don't have as much.

Oh, okay, so not any real-world reason then.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[tsqr]

The proposal was to take more wealth from estates. That means the guy who earned it is dead.

It might mean the guy who earned it is dead, but it that isn't the exclusive meaning, or even the principal meaning, of the word 'estate'. Consider consulting a dictionary before accusing people of strawman arguments based upon your opinion of word meanings.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[apoc.famine]

My siblings and I are close to an order of magnitude more well off than our parents, based on a bit of hard work, and a bit of luck. They have associate degrees and dad is a one-man-shop, and mom worked 20 hrs a week once we were all in school. They managed to get 8 college degrees in 3 kids on well below the median household income. I'd have to do some math to figure out how close to the poverty line we were back in the day, but my guess would be probably in the 200% range.
 
Hard work on our parts and some good work ethics helped a ton, but looking at the kids we grew up with, we had some serious advantages that they didn't. We had a stable household with minimal substance abuse problems. We didn't have anyone in and out of jail in our immediate family. We didn't have any chronic health issues. As dad was self-employed, we didn't run into lay-offs or wage reductions. If he needed more money, he'd work more. When work got thin he'd branch out and barter things that he'd taken in trade instead of money when he had a good amount of work.
 
We all took out student loans, but dad and scholarships covered more than 50% of our undergraduate degrees. We all paid them back by our late 30s, because dad was all about not living in debt, and we got that mindset from him. So a family of fairly poor kids suddenly are upper-middle class, which is an amazing change for our family.
 
When I look at how much didn't go right for a lot of my childhood peers, I realize how lucky I am. Expanding that to the ultra-rich, and it's clear how a bit of luck can utterly change your life. Dad got a bonus and invested in the right company at the right time. Mom inherited a run-down property just before a building boom in that area. A business partner gets a giant contract, and needs someone ASAP, and you just happen to be going golfing with them. Your college drinking buddy gets his dad to invest in his startup, and he makes you a partner.
 
If you're super rich, it would likely be an ego-buster to have to admit that you just got lucky. Which is, as you noted, how we get things like "Women Who Work".

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's your solution to an entrenched aristocracy? Because that's where we're headed. Wealthier people have better connections, their children have more opportunities, they have better access to health care, better education, better food, safer transportation, etc. Ensuring their kids will have an even easier time increasing the family wealth, not through hard work, but simply for being born out of the right womb.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[dogvomit]

When talking about taxation, it really is the principal use, at least in my experience. I doubt the AC will clarify it, though. Re-reading his post, it sure looks like he or she was talking about something like expansion of estate taxes.

--
Happy happy oh my friend

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[tsqr]

When talking about taxation, it really is the principal use, at least in my experience. I doubt the AC will clarify it, though. Re-reading his post, it sure looks like he or she was talking about something like expansion of estate taxes.

The OP said, "Why not laws that break up the estate of people that accumulate more than say 1000x the median net worth?" An expansion of estate taxes? Sounds more like a proposal for expansion of the Sherman Antitrust Act into the private sector to me.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[infolation]

To put his 'personal' wealth into perspective, I calculated it's more than the total GDP of

Tuvalu ($34m), Kiribati ($167m), Marshall Islands ($183m), Palau ($293m), Federated States of Micronesia ($322m), Sao Tome and Principe ($350m), Tonga ($403m), Dominica ($520m), Comoros ($620m), Vanuatu ($773m), St. Vincent and the Grenadines ($775m), Samoa ($786m), St. Kitts and Nevis ($903m), The Gambia ($965m), Grenada ($1,027m), Guinea-Bissau ($1,155m), Solomon Islands ($1,184m), St. Lucia ($1,385m), Antigua and Barbuda ($1,398m), Seychelles ($1,405m), San Marino ($1,592m), Cabo Verde ($1,636m), Belize ($1,743m), Central African Republic ($1,780m), Djibouti ($1,894m), Liberia ($2,111m), Bhutan ($2,115m), Lesotho ($2,267m), Timor-Leste ($2,498m), South Sudan ($2,914m), Burundi ($3,133m), Maldives ($3,379m), Guyana ($3,437m), Suriname ($3,570m), Swaziland ($3,770m), Sierra Leone ($3,981m), Montenegro ($4,126m), Togo ($4,434m), Barbados ($4,588m), Fiji ($4,640m), Mauritania ($4,714m), Eritrea ($5,352m) and Malawi ($5,492m)

Total $89,814m

- International Monetary Fund (2016) GDP values

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[butzwonker]

So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.

- that is absolute lunacy.

Not really, it follows directly from classical microeconomics, as the diminishing value of money is empirically well-confirmed, under the assumption of utilitarianism. I'd challenge the utilitarian assumption if I were you and wanted to make a cogent argument.

In case of a wealthy person working actually means using his money and connections and all of his capabilities to produce more, so by limiting the amount of money he can earn you are limiting the usefulness of what he does.

It may be less useful than he thinks - others can do the very same thing, but they will get more utility from the same amount of discretionary income or an even lower one. Moreover, while there are certainly some unusually talented exceptions like e.g. Warren Buffet, it is fair to say that they are not the rule but that generally speaking very rich people are as replaceable and useful as anyone else. It is also implausible to assume that very rich people, as a tendency, work because they want to earn more money ("another dollar"). They have almost no incentive to do so because of the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's far more plausible to assume that, as a tendency, they work because they like their work. That's also the reason why Bill Gates has no problems with giving away much of his money. He likes to work with finance and on interesting projects, but he couldn't care less about personal gains.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[butzwonker]

False. It has a direct effect, in that the same amount of money provides greater utility to the poor than to the rich; but it also has an indirect effect, that it reduces the incentive for people to work in order to become rich.

So higher salaries for lower paid jobs automatically cause less incentive to work? I don't think so...

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[TeknoHog]

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

False. It has a direct effect, in that the same amount of money provides greater utility to the poor than to the rich; but it also has an indirect effect, that it reduces the incentive for people to work in order to become rich. Less work gets done, less stuff gets produced, and less utility is provided.

Good point. I'm generally wary of any scheme of simply taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. For starters, people sometimes compare the total wealth of rich people to annual income levels of regular folk. So if you just take all the money and spread it around at once, what do you do next year when there are no rich people left?

In practice, there would probably be a simple solution: people will spend their extra money on products made by somebody, so some people would be rich again, and the cycle could go on forever. It seems a bit silly, but it's kind of what we do here in the Nordic countries with our gargantuan tax levels and social programs.

As the GP says, some skill is required to manage your wealth. This often involves investments that provide jobs for other people. For a silly example, should you sell your factory equipment to better feed your workers? I'm sure a lot of people are grateful for having jobs provided by some capitalist pig -- not everyone has the knack for entrepreneurship, or being otherwise self-employed.

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[LynnwoodRooster]

Concentrated wealth is a threat to the republic and social stability.

IF that wealth is taken from others by force, I would agree. In the case of Bezos and Gates, they actually BUILT that wealth, creating new companies where people voluntarily put their money (via purchasing products and buying shares). I don't think that threatens a republic at all, rather it is the result of a well functioning republic - success based more upon merit than heritage or political position (isn't it curious how our elected politicians enter office worth $1 million, and all retire worth tens or hundreds of millions?)

Re:Nobody should have that much money.

[lucasnate1]

Let's say that I live in a society where there's a lottery. In the lottery you can either win and become "king for a week" or die. Many people join the lottery, most die, but some become "king for a week". Some would say that the guy who won "king for a week" deserves to do whatever he wants, because he took a risk. Others would say that this entire lottery system is stupid and causes deaths, either through losing or through a king's misdeeds. In my eyes, this system is what unrestrained capitalism is. I do believe that financial success is a function of talent, but it is also a function of luck, the same luck that can put you in the street. I am not sure we need to live in a world with such a violent lottery.

Re:Sounds pretty good eh America!

[amalcolm]

Carnegie did a pretty good job of distributing money in America and elsewhere, and he was Scottish/American, so maybe there is hope ....

If Amazon ever sees a profit, he'll be even richer

[elrous0]

[sings] Someday, somewhere, somehow!

Re:If Amazon ever sees a profit, he'll be even ric

[xlsior]

They have been profitable for a while now: http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/2...

Re:Sounds pretty good eh America!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, Gates has been automatically selling off 20? million shares of Microsoft every quarter and been giving it to his foundation. He's been giving away billions of his money for years. He would be the wealthiest if he wasn't giving so much away.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. -Epictetus

Re:Meh

[__aaclcg7560]

A good book to read is "The Richest Man In Babylon" by George S. Clason. If you can set aside 1/10th of your earnings and reduce your wants, you will grow rich in time.

Re:Meh

[__aaclcg7560]

You're an annoying, irritating, ankle-biting pest most of the time.

I don't like my critics either.

But every once in a while you come up with something insightful, or even important to say. This was one of those comments.

You're welcome!

Couldn't happen to a more underserving individual

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did it take till he had 80 billion in the bank and 2017 before he went to Twitter of all places to ask for ideas of philanthropy? He deserves his wealth as much as Steve Jobs did.

Billionnaires

[pr0t0]

I can't help but wonder what it's like to have that kind of wealth. Money in general, and maybe the concept of value must nearly be meaningless for most expenditures, at least until the amounts reach some ridiculous level like 10's or 100's of millions. Maybe all that's left is not about how much you have as much as it is how much you kept from someone else getting...just for bragging rights.

$90+ Billion at only 53 is pretty astonishing. Then I thought, "Wait, what's Mark Zuckerberg's age and net worth?" Zuck is 33 and worth about $69 Billion. Then I wondered how today's billionaires compare to the dynastic US families of old.

John Rockefeller had an estimated net worth of $336 in 2010 dollars
Andrew Carnegie - $310 Billion
Henry Ford - $190 Billion

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Billionnaires

[swb]

Don't forget Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose estimated wealth in current money was something like $190 billion. So rich at the time he was able to use his own money to raise an army to fight Spartacus during the Servile Rebellion. Gates, Bezos, etc, are *rich*, but when they're able to personally fund the Afghanistan war they'd be Crassus rich.

One thing I've never seen is a measure of past era people's wealth as a ratio of their wealth to the economies of their era. I suspect that many of them would have been relatively richer than contemporary era barons. Bezos is super rich, but the economy compared to Rockefeller's era is vastly larger.

Re:Billionnaires

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes, because spears and tanks cost about the same.

Re:Billionnaires

[apoc.famine]

Not that I'll ever get anywhere near that rich, but if I ever got even 0.01% that much money, I'd be retired and running a philanthropic organization. I just don't understand how you keep accumulating money at that point without feeling like the greedy asshole you are. You're and your family are set for life. Now let another 1000+ families get set for life instead of hogging it all.
 
Honestly, how do you accumulate more than say $5 million without intense guilt for how much excess you have, and how many people could be helped with the money you're hoarding? $1 million? Maybe not quite enough to retire on, especially if you have to pay your own health insurance. $5 million? Without even investing you could take a $100,000 annual salary for 50 years. That should be good enough in most parts of the US to live very well.
 
But beyond that? I just don't get it. I think I'd feel like a tremendous asshole for hoarding that much wealth.

Re:Billionnaires

[gman003]

Spears and tanks, no. But a chariot cost about as much as tank, in terms of fraction of total labor (ie. not just labor to produce from raw materials, but labor to produce those raw materials and the labor to feed all those other laborers).

It turns out the monetary value of killing an enemy soldier is pretty much constant across time periods. So the amount you're willing to spend to do it is also pretty much constant.

Re:Billionnaires

[Zero__Kelvin]

Wow ... one wonders what other "facts" you can pill out of that ass!

Re:Billionnaires

[Subm]

> John Rockefeller had an estimated net worth of $336 in 2010 dollars

I thought he had at least four hundred dollars.

Diversification

[albeit unknown]

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.

Bill Gates ws richest before 2013 as well.

[vossman77]

Interested Wikipedia article that tracks the richest over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Interestingly, Bill Gates was the richest from 2000 to 2007, when is fortune kept going down every year. Carlos Slim and Warren Buffet over taking him sometime and then in 2013 Gates is back on top.

Kudos

[avandesande]

Automating the screwing of vendors, employees and customers simultaneously has it's rewards.

Re:Couldn't happen to a more underserving individu

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did it take till he had 80 billion in the bank and 2017 before he went to Twitter of all places to ask for ideas of philanthropy? He deserves his wealth as much as Steve Jobs did.

Agreed

Re:Sounds pretty good eh America!

[MachineShedFred]

And he (rightly) doesn't want to be the richest guy in the graveyard.

Looks like it's going according to plan.

World's KNOWN Richest Person

[schwit1]

What is the financial wealth of Vladimir Putin or the owners of Saudi Aramco?

Re:World's KNOWN Richest Person

[lifeisshort]

And marked to a specific point in time at that: https://qz.com/1040292/bill-gates-retook-the-title-of-the-worlds-richest-man-from-jeff-bezos-after-only-a-few-hours/

Russ from Silicon Valley

[t0qer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

For some reason that clip makes me think of what runs through Bezos and Gates mind.

Re:Bezos isn't the richest man.

[quintus_horatius]

He's probably not even the 10th richest.

The Rothschilds are left off of all these lists intentionally.

Maybe not intentionally, or not by the publishers of such lists. There's at least two problems with calculating the net worth of a family like the Rothschilds:

• It cannot be counted easily from the public records. You are very likely correct in suggesting that they put effort into keeping a low profile, so they distribute their wealth around in real estate and trusts. The calculation of Bezos' wealth is based on his ownership in Amazon, which is part of the public record.
• The money is held by a family. No single individual controls all of it. Taking the net worth of any single person, if it were possible, would show relatively paltry sums compared to a Gates, a Bezos, or a Buffet. Adding up the assets owned by the family-at-large, on the other hand, would probably show an astronomical number that dwarfs them.

It's quite possible that some of the people on the Forbes 500 would rather not have that kind of publicity, as you say, but their wealth is part of the public record so there they sit. I'm not saying that Jeff Bezos is such a person, as I suspect he likes and cultivates this kind of notoriety, but there may be one or two.

Please tell us more

[NotQuiteReal]

"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.

Re:Please tell us more

[dogvomit]

Tell us how you will allocate the funds better than the person who created this "excessive" wealth.

Certainly the subject line was poorly chosen, but this part of your post suggests you didn't read the post you replied to. The anonymous coward did not suggest allocating funds better than the person who created the wealth. The suggestion was to break up the estate. Estates in this context are what is left after the person who accumulated it has died. It would be absurd to argue that a dead person knows better how to allocate the wealth he left behind than our civil government. Dead people are dead. Breaking up their estate will not bother them in any way. They won't know or care.

The Republican zeal for somehow preserving estates escapes me. What could be more fair than society reclaiming wealth from someone who neither knows nor cares about it?

You may argue that their heirs have somehow inherited the savvy. I think that's a bogus argument, but it has worked for royalty for a zillion years.

--
Happy happy oh my friend

Re:Please tell us more

[DigiShaman]

The problem is lack of velocity of the wealth. It's being consolidated to the top 1% in what amounts to a Ponzi scheme. I want to see more of that wealth moved from Wall Street and into Main Street.

I'm not asking for a handout. I'm asking for an opportunity to leverage that wealth into productivity. And yes, that means working for it.

Re:Please tell us more

[PlaynBass]

Republicans have not really cared about fairness since the Dixiecrats jumped ship and joined the Democrats. Then they found Jesus and read Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and learned how to better manipulate the US public by capitalizing on every crisis that came along.

A rising tide once lifted all boats. Now the only ones afloat are those that are bringing in cheap crap from the cheapest sweat shops that can be found the world. All the others have been sunk by the tidal waves of greed and corruption that now rules politics.

Re:Please tell us more

[PlaynBass]

To be fair, the corporate Democrats have been trying hard to gin up their game ever since Jimmy Carter left the White House to build houses.

Billions in a checking account

[WillAffleckUW]

It's called a money market account backed by dividend paying securities and investments.

And only poor people keep their cash in a checking account.

Sheesh.

Real wealthy people (Trump isn't one) invest their money.

Re:Billions in a checking account

[sycodon]

I believe he simply forgot the /S

The sarcasm was pretty much dripping from that post. You'd have to be pretty thick to miss it.

I'm moving up too

[Anonymous Coward]

I get paid Friday, and expect to capture the 5,758,235,578th spot when I do. Look out Bezos, I'm on your heels!

Congratulations

[ichthus]

Congratulations to Jeff Bezos, and to all of the people who have been gainfully employed by Amazon - in American and around the world. Congratulations to the shipping companies and their employees as well, who have benefited from the extra business that Amazon has spawned.

I hope that he will be benevolent and generous with his wealth, and I hope that Amazon will continue to succeed in providing jobs and services to people around the world.

Donations wanted!

[Futurepower(R)]

"Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person"

Clearly, we need to send Bill Gates some money. Can you afford a few dollars?

Re:Donations wanted!

[jae471]

For less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day...

Second-Richest Person

[Citizen of Earth]

This is a contest for the world's second-richest person. The world's richest person is Vladimir Putin with a net worth of $200B, miles ahead of Jeff Bezos.

Hard to comprehend

[Dareth]

It is hard to comprehend how much money they have. To put it into perspective, figure out what just he decimal part of their wealth is.
"$90.9 billion, versus $90.7 billion" .9 Billion and .7 Billion is how much? What is the .2 Billion dollar difference in their wealth?

Re:Hard to comprehend

[ausekilis]

The Federal Poverty Level of a single person is ~$11,800/yr. At that rate, that poor bastard would need to work at the same wage for 16,949.15 YEARS to just earn the difference between Jeff and Bills net worth ($200Mil). Hell, at $100K a year for a working professional, that's 2,000 years.

  Further perspective, Land owners like Ted Turner made $1.7Billion (in the 1980's) and owns 590,823 acres - just shy of 3 Rhode Islands. Not sure how much Ted spent on his land, but imagine a ranch 45 times that size... or nearly 150 Rhode Islands.

The difference between Gates and Bezos

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates has donated huge parts of his fortune to charity.

No children that I know of

[shanen]

Well, if I ever got a mod point, then I'd be inclined to give you at least an "informative" for that. However, I'm not certain it's Putin, though the high-end estimates for Putin's wealth do go as high as $200 billion. Other estimates put him as low as $20 billion. Dark money is YUGE, even compared to Tor. Sometimes I wonder if Putin is really a puppet and front-man working for someone who is even better at hiding.

I'm actually most interested in seeing #PresidentTweety's laundry receipts for Putin's dirty rubles. The secret of his tax returns is that Trump went bankrupt and his only assets are his cut from the laundry business. You aren't bankrupt until your creditors give up on you, and they gave up on Trump decades ago. The only thing that saved Trump was his underworld connections who needed cleaner money. Now you know why he's in such a panic, eh?

Oh yeah. I should note that if Trump is really the secret puppeteer behind Putin, then he's the greatest actor of all time. I know he's a great liar, but NO way I can believe that one.

Re:Bezos isn't the richest man.

[LynnwoodRooster]

You don't even need to go to the Rothchilds. The Walton family is worth somewhere around $150 billion, minimum... But imagine if Bezos' and Gates' families merged...

Billy and Bezos

[maxrate]

What's great is Bill (basically) doesn't even work anymore, gives his money away, all from simply selling software - and as of only now slipped to #2 :) Jeff has to sell cloud and everything under the sun from groceries to drones, set up warehouses keeping Amazon rolling to surpass Bill ! - Congrats to both of them! What an amazing journey they both continue to experience. Sad to see Steve Jobs go, gotta enjoy it while you're here and now.

Outliers

[DarthVain]

I forget the reference, but it was basically a study of Billionaires and how they came into their money. The results basically fell into 3 groups. The first, which by far was the most common, was they just inherited it (something like 70-80%). The second was they inherited millions and were very successful with it (something like 15-20%). The third was those that went from nothing to become billionaires, which were basically a statistical outlier.

So indeed "equal opportunity" has little to nothing to do with it. If you really want equality, or re-distribution of wealth the answer is pretty simple, reform the estate tax. However the rich and powerful also have a lot of disproportionate amount of political influence, meaning that is not going to happen. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing, simply a cap as to how much can be transferred would do it (i.e. eliminate the ludicrous amounts). However even then there are a LOT of loopholes which would also need to be closed which people already take advantage of such as overseas assets, corporate assets, etc...

Pyramid scheme

[NewYork]

MNC == Pyramid scheme