Bill Gates Is No Longer The World's Richest Person After Amazon Stock Surge (cnn.com)

"Jeff Bezos has leapfrogged Bill Gates again for the title of world's richest billionaire..." announced CNN Money. An anonymous reader quotes their report. Amazon stock jumped 13.5% on Friday after the company turned in another incredible earnings report -- more than a quarter-billion dollars in profit in three months. Bezos owned nearly 80 million shares in Amazon as of August, according to the most recent available data from FactSet. He made more than $10 billion from the one-day stock surge and is now worth well over $90 billion. At the end of trading on Thursday, Gates occupied the top spot in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $88 billion. Bezos had $83.5 billion, and his big day on Friday was more than enough to close the gap.
In July sales for Amazon's self-created holiday "Prime Day" were actually higher than they were on Black Friday. Amazon's sales for the quarter were $11 billion higher than they were a year ago -- increasing 29% even before an additional $1.3 billion from Whole Foods sales, for total sales over three months of $43.7 billion.

Amazon now also projects that their yearly revenue from AWS will be $2 billion higher.

Comments

Mutual funds (1780)

[raymorris]

You're right that investing a lot in a single stock is certainly risky, especially over the short term (it's reasonable to think General Mills or Walmart will make money in the LONG term).

The risk is greatly reduced by mutual funds, which allow small investors to easily diversify - they are investing in a hundred different companies, along with many other investors. Because they hold so many different companies, mutual funds, especially index funds, are pretty predictable. Some of their holdings will do very well, some won't, so the fund as a whole will return about 7% over inflation over a period of years.

Where you're slightly off is the timing. Mutual funds, or investment funds as they were called, were created around 1780 by Abraham van Ketwich. So you're absolutely right on the concepts, just 200 years off on the timing.

  401(k) is a TAX rule. It says investment profits will be taxed when you take the money out to spend it, if you don't spend it before retirement age. It has nothing whatever to do with the risks of the investments people can make. You can apply the 401(k) tax rule to be extremely safe investments like US Treasury bonds, or to risky investments like startup companies or oil futures.

Fair to call this obscene wealth?

[newbie_fantod]

His single-day profit (which, if spread out over a year, would amount to > $27 million per day) exceeded the GNP of 123 separate nations, and his estimated total wealth exceeds the GNP of 174 nations.
http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/PNB2.html/

Re:Bill Gates is only #2 because he is generous.

[ShanghaiBill]

So you are saying that the market voted with their wallets. Which made Microsoft the most popular.

No. People were not given a choice. If you walked into a computer store in the 1990s, you had a choice of Windows, Windows, or Windows.

Windows had the apps because it had the users. It had the users because it had the apps. That gave Microsoft monopoly power, which they badly abused in ways that were later deemed illegal, to crush competitors and sabotage open standards.

It didn't have to be that way. The Internet was developed on open standards. Anyone can access the Web, anyone can connect a server, anyone can create a browser. The standards for transmitting content, and displaying pages is standardized. There is no good reason that it couldn't have been the same for OSes. We could've had a standard framework for GUIs and desktop apps, that would work on all platforms. Apps would not be "Windows only", and developers would not have to write in Javascript and run in a browser just to get cross platform capability.