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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.
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.
As of four years ago, Bill Gates had already given away $28 billion, and has given away more since then. Jeff Bezos gives away very little of his fortune, favoring the same "I can use my money to make more money and do more good later" path his company follows. If Bill hadn't given away a large portion of his money, he would still easily be #1.
Should that even be a desired title - richest person of the world? Gates (and dozens of other billionaires) is giving away much of his fortune to charity. I hope Bezos does the same.
Somebody please help me, but a quarter-billion of dollars in profit is 250 million dollars, right? How is that incredible? I guess for Amazon who posted losses for decades (cause they reinvested every penny into the company) any kind of profit is a good thing, but I wouldn't call 250 million a lot of profit for a company of this size.
This mainly tells me, Bezos can't think of anything more to grow the company, not that Amazon had a good quarter.
Or is this one of those slashdot editor gaffes?
Neither Bill or Jeff are the richest person in the world and never were. Valdimir Putin is richer than both put together (love that revolution) and there are individuals and families throughout south Asia that could buy out both of them with pocket change.
There is a lot to wealth besides stocks traded publicly on U.S exchanges.
If you want to wallow in superficial American media fantasies that's fine but it doesn't make anyone smarter.
If you think it doesn't matter consider the fact that Trump is widely regarded as a rich guy but if his and his whole family's balance sheet were accurately reported he would probably have negative net worth. Do you think the glassy-eyed crowds would have voted for him in such big numbers if that was how he was generally known? I sure don't.
> Should that even be a desired title - richest person of the world? Gates (and dozens of other billionaires) is giving away much of his fortune to charity
I'll leave the "should" to others and just point out a couple factual things. As you said, people who get mega rich typically give away most of it to charitable causes. Also, they tend to get that rich partially because they do want the high score a drive to be "the richest" motivates them to build things like Amazon and US Steel. Carnegie didn't amass billions (which were used to build libraries) because he needed to the money to pay bills, he was winning the game. They go so big because they're trying to get the high score in a very interesting game, American business. Once you have a billion, another billion is just for fun and "win" compared to the other guy (Musk etc).
Thinking about that, btw, is one way to understand Trump's personality - he very much enjoys being the biggest, richest, flashiest. Winning the game. And he knows that APPEARING big, and looking rich, helps get press, which helps get actual wealth.
It doesn't become taxable until it's sold / changes hands.
Thirty four characters live here.
The stockmarket was always a gambler’s den until they made IRAs and 401ks in the 1970s. Now somehow it’s safe enough for retirement funds.
This need to invest in stocks has predictably made the surge in stocks inevitable, and insane metrics (300:1 P/E) the norm in any popular thing people heard of and will look into with enthusiasm.
Baby boomers will be retiring in great amounts the next decade (medicare will go from covering 20 million people to 80m by 2030) and they’re gonna want to cash their chips in, so to speak. Like any other commodity, there’s gonna have to be people next in line with the money to buy it to prop up prices. I’m pretty sure its not possible, and that the decades long bull surge that accompanied the baby boomers their whole life, will turn into a hell of a bear market for us - nothing like the dot com bomb or 2009 or other blips on the map. I say in about a decade, give or take 3 years.
Even if he "only" leaves one billion to each of his kid, that's still more than enough money for a lifetime of worry-free luxury.
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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.
The world's richest people are rich enough to keep themselves out of the public eye and off lists of the richest people. They own things like countries.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
And if you are clever. you can put it in a holding company and just have people become directors or retire. Some US Banks were doing this with land titles. Rather than paying cities to register changing deeds of ownership (requiring a $60 fee per property), they would simply register their property management agency as the owner of every property, continue to collect the mortgage payments, repossessing where necessary, and make the profits. They ended up being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars for cheating taxpayers.
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"Bill Gates Is No Longer The World's Richest Person..."
Think how painful that must be. Okay, everyone, let's send him a dollar to help him get back on top.
Can someone enlighted us, why people say that SOMEBODY is WORTH something, instead that they have wealth that is worth something...?
I wouldn't buy "Jeff Bezos" for any amount of money, but I would happily receive some of his wealth, which IS worth something.
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/
I have read one of those "Top 50 Billionaires" lists once, and it's funny how not a single person on the list got rich selling things to the defense department. The absence made it pretty obvious that some people were able to choose not to be listed.
Certainly you should pay attention to the expenses. As you said, those with higher expenses don't consistently best the indexes, so generally you're better off buying an index fund with very low expenses.
I own both index mutual funds and index ETFs. You can, of course, get higher risk ETFs. A leveraged gold ETF is more risky than just buying gold, which is more risky than almost any mutual fund.
Now I'm considering investing a part of my investment opposite my job prospects, so if my industry goes to shit my investments will do well, counter-balancing the weaker job prospects. In particular, I'll have an opportunity to buy my employer's stock pre-ipo. That SHOULD make a nice gain after the lock-out period. However, if things don't go well for the company I could end up losing both my investment and my job. It therefore seems prudent to consider counter-balancing that risk with investment which will likely do well if my company doesn't.