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Amazon's Jeff Bezos Surpasses $100 Billion Net Worth (bloomberg.com)
Amid optimism for Amazon's Black Friday sales, Jeff Bezos' net worth jumped above $100 billion on Friday. The Amazon CEO's fortune reportedly surged $2.4 billion to $100.3 billion, after the retailer's shares grew more than 2 percent on Black Friday. Bloomberg reports: Online purchases for the day are up 18.4 percent over last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and investors are betting the company will take an outsized share of online spending over the gifting season. The $100 billion milestone makes Bezos, 53, the first billionaire to build a 12-figure net worth since 1999, when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hit the mark. Bezos's fortune rose $32.6 billion this year through Thursday, the largest increase of anyone on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world's 500 richest people. Amazon have climbed 5 percent this week alone.
He's a self made and highly motivated person with great interest in advancing technology and getting us into space. It is valuable to the human race to have a few such individuals working to do stuff that governments are too bogged down in venality and bureaucracy to achieve. Technocrats do a pretty good job of improving the world.
it's a good thing for a single person to command that much wealth.
The total net worth of all Americans is about $90 trillion. $100 billion is less than 0.1% of that. John Rockefeller once owned 2% of all the wealth in America, so Bezos is 20-fold poorer.
A democracy can't survive that kind of power imbalance.
That would be a concern if all "the rich" were on the same side. They aren't. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The WaPo exposed Roy Moore's sexploits, and has championed other liberal causes. This cancels out the Koch Brothers.
Something's got to give.
"The rich" have had undue influence for at least the last 10,000 years (wealth accumulation mostly coincided with the invention of agriculture). Yet somehow we have muddled through.
Cough...as of the first quarter of 2010, the Federal Reserve estimated that total public and private debt owed by American households, businesses, and government totaled $50 trillion...cough.
As a wise man once said, it's all air.
The total gross worth of all Americans is about $17tn. Hence the term Gross Domestic Product.
GDP is a measure of annual production, not accumulated wealth.
So that means that the net worth of all Americans is somewhere in the negatives.
Baloney.
The problem I have with that idea is that it never ever stops there. Why cap wealth at $10B, or even 100 million? Surely 50 million is enough? Or 10? The vast majority of people in this world have a net worth of $1M so let's make that the cap. And then you end up with what we have here, with every "fortune" of over €25.000 slapped with a "wealth" tax.
Bottom line is: you don't get rich taxing rich people, as individuals they own a lot but there aren't enough of them. Take Bezos' fortune from him and the next guy will do a better job of hiding it in a tax haven. No, in the end it is the middle class they will come after. Always. Because that's where the money is.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
bezos pockets the surplus value of labor he gets from temp agencies - think about it - in the past people could sell their labor on the open market and make a living - now the rich are getting richer because they've set up a system where workers can't do that - they have to go through temp agencies, contractors, and so on - so their pay is capped - essentially bezos and the rest are pocketing the surplus value that workers are creating rather than paying them