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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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: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: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.

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

[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.

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.

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?

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.

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: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.

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?