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Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person
- cies 10y agoAny reason why the Rothchilds never show up in these lists? My best guess there is some sort of "who's the richest game" for some new money players (who's fortune can be tracked), where old money prefers obscurity.
- notliketherest 10y agoMost extremely wealthy people hide their wealth through corporations / trusts / etc and never show up on these lists.
- bpicolo 10y agoThis sort of info isn't technically pure public knowledge, right? It's mostly estimated based on stock ownership figures where they're publicly listed I would guess? Probably less a matter of hiding than just not-public-info.
- thesagan 10y agoThey may have it spread across a larger family and in opaque investment vehicles, etc.
- conception 10y agohttp://www.snopes.com/rothschild-family-wealth/ http://www.snopes.com/rothschild-family-wealth/ Basically, after three generations a single persons wealth is distributed out enough to get dropped from these sorts of lists. Jeff might be the 2nd richest in the world - it's highly unlikely his grandchildren will be ranked as such.
- alex_young 10y agoGood point. One family that is directly measurable however: offspring of Sam Walton. Bill G is a distant second by that yard stick: https://www.forbes.com/profile/walton-1/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/walton-1/
- dopamean 10y agoOr they're just not as wealthy as conspiracy theorists say they are.
- bbctol 10y agoThe Rothschilds aren't that rich, and there's a lot of them. Old money may prefer obscurity, but it also doesn't go that far anymore.
- wahern 10y agoThere being alot of them is, I think, precisely how they became so wealthy. Until the modern financial era, banking was predominantly built around personal relationships, and especially family relationships. A bank in London had no reason to cash a check drawn on a bank in Paris, or value a Letter of Credit given by a bank in Frankfurt, unless the London bank trusted the other bank would honor the liability, and honor it timely. This was especially true the larger and more complex the transaction. As a banking consumer you wanted to use a bank that would honor instruments from and have its instruments honored by the most and the most important banks across Europe. Those banks were often part of a consortium of family-owned banks, because under economic stress the family-owned banks would always honor their commitments to each other, and offer each other low-interest loans to help another member bank stay afloat.
- flippyhead 10y agoWoot! Go go Seattle billionaire club!
- huangc10 10y ago> Amazon’s founder has added $10.2 billion this year to his wealth... It's not even April yet...
- jwdunne 10y agoEnd of financial year tomorrow.
- huangc10 10y agoeh is it? I thought it's end of Q2 tomorrow only. The $10 billion is probably the addition of Q1 and Q2 so far this fiscal year.
- pjschlic 10y agoFTA: "Amazon’s founder has added $10.2 billion this year to his wealth and $7 billion since [Nov 8th]" - I'm going to interpret that as meaning that it's 10 billion over the course of a full year, which makes more sense than making losing 3 billion in December and making 10 billion in Q1/Q2 which would be necessary for your interpretation (of 10 billion in Q1/Q2) to make those numbers make sense.
- jwdunne 10y agoSorry I'm mistaken. The end of the fiscal year is the 5th of April in the UK. In the US, I think this is different. So this is a more dramatic result considering.
- bdcravens 10y agoThe US fiscal year ends on September 30, but companies can set their own fiscal year. (Many C corps do end it at specific quarters)
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y agoSo is Bezos our modern day Carnegie or Rockefeller?
- pvg 10y agoNope. Those guys managed to be quite a bit richer, by a substantial factor.
- zdean 10y agoAs a reference example, Rockefeller was worth over $300 billion in 2007 dollars: https://www.google.com/search?q=Rockefeller&oq=Rockefeller&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=Rockefeller+wealth&* https://www.google.com/search?q=Rockefeller&oq=Rockefeller&a...
- nroets 10y agoThe $300 billion was estimated by assuming that his assets expand with US economic output. That makes no sense because the US population grew substantially (and the US economy has diversified into many new fields).
- mythrwy 10y agoOne thing about Carnegie (as opposed to either Bezos or Gates) is that he came from very humble circumstances and in fact poverty. Both Bezos and Gates had a bit of a leg up as they came from moderately well off families and were afforded expensive educations and opportunities. (Not attributing their wealth exclusively to this but think it was necessary in these cases).
- webkike 10y agoUnless Putin is on this list I doubt its veracity.
- samstave 10y agomaybe they dont count corruption?
- zzzeek 10y agomaybe they should.
- astrodust 10y agoWhen you're embezzling money the last thing you want is to reveal enough information about your stash to show up on these lists. Saddam Hussein obviously had tons of liquid assets but the totality of them was never truly known. It was all squirreled away, and likely stolen by the caretakers when his regime imploded and the threat of retribution was removed. How much did Pablo Esbobar have at his peak? We can only guess, but given the staggering cash-flow rate of an estimated $500 million per week, perhaps as much as $30 billion. This is 1980s dollars, too. Adjusted for inflation that's absolutely nuts.
- samstave 10y agoin the /r/conspiracy realm - it is widely believed that the reason for Gaddafi's execution was to go after the billions he had - and to take him down. The idea is that the Benghazi fiasco was let loose by the state dept so that HRC could loot Libya... its not provable - but the fact is that Gaddafi was one of the worlds richest ppl - and the rumor is that HRC and cabal stole all his loot. He was worth a reportable 70 billion.... and unknown amount off-books... He was murdered for his money. And anyone who says that is not true is fucking clueless about what the fuck is actually happening in this world at that level. http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/573aeac75632a39742ed39a0/ http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/573aeac75632a39...
- alnitak 10y agoHow is Bezos making money? Amazon doesn't seem to generate enough dividends to reach this amount of wealth, or does it?
- bpicolo 10y agoIt's primarily Amazon stock going up in price. Started year at 750, 874 now.
- alnitak 10y agoaha makes sense. So basically the worth of his shares went dramatically up.
- erikig 10y agoBezos owns about 83M[1] shares of Amazon which are currently $875. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Amazon-does-Jeff-Bezos-own https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Amazon-does-Jeff-Be...
- eloisant 10y agoIt's only by choice that Amazon doesn't generate dividends.
- jondubois 10y agoThat's speculation. Maybe the low prices are the real reason why Amazon is doing so well.
- timothycrosley 10y agoFor all the hype Silicon Valley gets, the companies of the world's 2 richest people are in the Seattle area.
- draw_down 10y agoPeople are usually including Amazon and MS when they use the metonym "Silicon Valley".
- timothycrosley 10y agoReally meant San Fran. An extreme disproportionate amount of investment dollars go there considering just how much value has come out of Seattle with much less starting capital.
- powera 10y agoWasn't Microsoft founded in Albuquerque?
- timothycrosley 10y agoYes, but Bill Gates grew up in and returned to Seattle to build the company up
- mythrwy 10y agoYes. And Bezos is from New Mexico also. Strange because New Mexico consistently ranks near last in quality of life, employment prospects and education.
- astrodust 10y agoNot surprisingly both left New Mexico and set up shop somewhere more civilized.
- wl 10y agoa) "San Fran" is not used by most locals. b) Silicon Valley is 30 miles or so south of San Francisco.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoSome fun facts: Jeff Bezos owns 80.9 million shares of AMZN (or did in September), which is about 17% of the company. Over 60% of the company is held by institutional shareholders, led by Vanguard. His annual salary is $100K. He appeared in Star Trek Beyond as a Star Fleet official. In his spare time, he runs a spaceship company.[1] I've always admired Amazon and have been a customer of theirs since the late 90s when it was mainly a bookseller. For a while I owned a few hundred shares, but sold them for a slight profit. Had I held onto them... sigh... Jeff Bezos is one of America's great entrepreneurs, along with Gates, Musk, Ellison, and a handful of others. This is America at its best. We could do worse than to produce such amazing and successful technology innovators. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoWith a little math, we are not-too-many years from the world's first US$ trillionaire. Using Mr. Bezos as the example: US$ 72,000,000,000 Annualized gain of, say, 10% on AMZN stock Over a period of 27.6 years 1.1^27.6 * US$72,000,000,000 = ~US$ 1,000,000,000,000 Just in time for his 80th birthday.
- finid 10y agoOne variable is missing from your math - the inevitable stock market crash.
- loeg 10y agoAssuming 27 years of 10% compounding is quite the leap.
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoSince 1990 (27 years ago) McDonald's has returned 10.87%, including the Internet Bubble and Subprime Mortgage crashes. March 30, 1990: $7.38 March 29, 2017: $128.84 I am not saying it'll be Bezos, but someone will get there within the next 2-3 decades. [edit] And while I'm at it, AMZN has returned 36%, annualized, over the last 10 years, encompassing the Subprime Mortgage crash.
- bpicolo 10y agoInflation alone means eventually someone will. (Just like Rockefeller's adjusted fortune is 300-400billlion)
- adventured 10y agoRockefeller's adjusted fortune is not $300-$400 billion. It's a lot closer to $30 to $40 billion in fact. That huge fake number - which has been thrown around the Web for more than a decade - is derived from the GDP share. It goes like this. Rockefeller in 1915 (pick the year), was worth the equivalent of 1/37th of the US GDP. Therefore, adjusted to today, Rockefeller would be worth $bazillion (1/37th of $19 trillion; which used to be more like $12b-$14b when the fake premise originally started floating about). If you dig into the calculation that was / is used on that $300-$400 billion, that's where it's coming from in every instance. In fact, Gates is objectively far richer than Rockefeller ever was, just not in relation to the US economy size at present. Rockefeller was worth between $1 and $2 billion at his peak, in his time. The inflation adjustment on $1 from 1910 to now, is not 300x or 400x. It's closer to 20x to 30x. If it were 300x, Ford's famous $5 per day pay rate (from 1914), would be ... $1500 per day. Laughable obviously; the 300x+ doesn't pass any challenge thrown at it.
- mvpu 10y agoThanks to you. And me. Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet have our paychecks covered. Warren's companies take most of what we spend offline, Jeff's companies take most of what we spend online.
- godgod 10y agoCouldn't have happened to a shittier person. I don't like Jeff Bozo's ties to the CIA and the propaganda they push through WAPO. Amazon is a great company a great product but I think Bozo should stick to Amazon and not try to push his social agenda. Same goes for those Koch asshats on the other side. I do like what he's doing through his space exploration company. That's cool. He just needs to stay away from politics and manipulating society.
- tabeth 10y agoEverytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian, like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...
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- andrepd 10y agoAbsolutely. Did this person work more or does he have more merit than 100.000.000s of people? It's absurd.
- _cairn 10y agoNot saying that what you are implying is wrong, but empirically speaking working hard/relative merit do not correlate to proportionate monetary rewards in our current system. The idea of a pure meritocracy is an interesting one, I wonder what some of the outcomes would be.
- tucaz 10y agoThere is also the fact that money (and value) is not a zero sum game. Bezos making billions doesnt mean that the money was taken from someone else in the sense that that person cannot have it anymore. The opposite is also true. If he was poor it doesn't mean that I would have more money. Value creation is a weird but beautiful thing.
- lawnchair_larry 10y agoI don't think that's the entirely the case. True it's not zero sum, but it's not free either. There is absolutely wealth transfer. For example, if he were poor, many middle class Seattle residents would have far more purchasing power in their current real estate market. Amazon have expanded rapidly and transplanted most of the cogs who are building the Bezos empire. The many displaced multi-generational residents of Seattle and San Francisco might not refer to this phenomenon as beautiful.
- israrkhan 10y agoit is amazing how Bill Gates remain richest person in the world despite donating billions to Melinda & Gates foundation.
- legulere 10y agoYou know what would have been even more amazing? If Microsoft had not landed in its monopolistic position it had. Then all that money that landed at bill gates which is even more, could have been spent earlier on philanthropic means.
- behrlich 10y agoWhy do you think that money would have necessarily gone to philanthropy?
- rajeshp1986 10y agoThat is not necessarily true. That money might not have saved lives. You cannot say that for sure.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWell, he is worth over 80Bn, so even if he gets only 5% return...
- nier 10y agoWould it be possible for a guy like Jeff to sell all his stock and convert his wealth to, let’s say, gold? The motivation for my question is my doubt that the different sources of wealth are comparable. So this ranking is hypothetical. Wouldn’t the stock price drop if someone was to sell so many shares?
- tucaz 10y agoI believe you are correct. In theory he would be able to turn all his assets into money, but probably he would loose huges amount of it in the process due to the effect you mentioned. I guess these rankings are just rankings. It's an abstract way to value what someone have (or could potentially have) with no relationship to absolute truth.
- badosu 10y agoI am sorry for sidetracking on this, but I need to understand why I am reading so much 'loose' here on HN. Is this error being used with intent? I have no interest in shaming grammar errors, it's just that I am seeing this too often here, in the same place where I read great arguments. English is not my native language, so maybe this is a colloquial use of the word?
- houst0n_ 10y agoMe too!! Nah its an error.. I don't know why it's made so often.. Maybe it was happening all the time and we only started noticing it? It irritates me far less than your/you're tho ;)
- Keyframe 10y agoKudos to him, hopefully he will go all in on some crazy idea eventually. I still have this feeling amazon (as in online store) isn't all that big outside of US/english-speaking world. I do have a question though. When you have that much net worth and you get plastered all over the press about how much you have... What do you do then? What's your life then like? Seems like a nightmare, especially if you have kids and family. Do you become a prisoner of your own wealth then, guarded by people - never be able to just roam about, take a random tourist tour with your spouse, a road trip or whatever? Money is nice to have, but there are things you definitely lose, it seems. Is it worth it to be at that level?
- blueside 10y agountil the competition is completely annihilated, jeff is not content.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoYou say that like it's a bad thing.[0] If you had a business (assuming you don't for the sake of argument), no competition would be amazing! People could ONLY come to you for your product or service. [0] The truth is in the middle.
- ionised 10y agoMonopolies are only good fore the monopoly and bad for everyone else in society. Monopolies mean no choice, no competition, low innovation and high prices
- wging 10y agoAt his stage he's got the ability to fund his ideas effectively and still stop well short of 'all in'. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin
- ricardo_piano 10y ago>hopefully he will go all in on some crazy idea eventually Blue Origin? He does have his own space ship company.
- uw777 10y agofunny thing is.. announcement to be made later
- bluedino 10y agoI am failing to see how someone who founded a company that hasn't made > $1B in profit over each of the last twenty years can have a fortune of $75B
- mjfl 10y agoI think when computing profit you subtract capital investments into the company. These capital investments become assets/equity on the balance sheet, contributing to the wealth of the shareholders without being counted as "profit". Amazon did this a lot.
- azinman2 10y agoFirst, profit is after paying your staff (including him). Regardless, he owns a bunch of stock, and that stock has a price. It's not like all those billions are in cash.
- adventured 10y agoIt's pretty simple. The market has been valuing Amazon - from day one since its IPO - with an eye on the future value of its cash flow / net income. Certainly many investors and competitors have regarded that constant pushing off of the profitability expectations (for two decades), as unfair. Since Amazon began showing off AWS financial figures, the stock has more than doubled. The market has priced in AWS as being worth perhaps $150 billion or more. AWS is making a lot of money, and it's going to make a lot more over the next five years. Investors likely expect that given the immense scale of the business and the fact that it's still growing at 20%+ (remarkably), the future prospect of Amazon generating, say, $16+ billion in net income, is reasonable to expect. One can then debate whether it's rational to be granting that valuation to Amazon today, if it'll take another ten years to produce the $16 billion annually (pulling future returns forward, the cause of Microsoft's 15 years of stagnation in regards to its stock).
- friedman23 10y agoBecause Amazon has continually reinvested it's revenue into more capital and the value of that capital is worth significantly more than $75B?
- nojvek 10y agoWorld's two richest men from Seattle tech companies. I hope some of this money translates to venture capital. Number of successful startups in Seattle pale in comparison to SV
- gitah 10y agoThey're also neighbors who live in the same neighborhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medina,_Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medina,_Washington You can kinda see both of their mansions (covered by privacy hedges) when driving across the SR-520.
- nojvek 10y agoThat's just nuts. Should have bought a property in Medina back in the day. Would have seen great appreciation by today.
- nshelly 10y agoFounders choosing to live outside the biggest metro areas (e.g. NYC, SF Bay Area, LA) are often more "control-motivated" as opposed to "wealth-motivated" [1], and thus bootstrap their companies longer while keeping more equity. Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, etc took more rounds of financing. If you go one step further, in small businesses in rural areas the founders have almost 100% equity. [1] N. Wasserman. The Founder's Dilemmas. 2012.
- dkrich 10y agoI know that I'll get skewered for this, but here goes: recently I've convinced myself we are on the verge of a very serious Amazon stock correction. Just today I saw three separate articles (without seeking them out) giving umpteen reasons Amazon is going to a trillion, or that Amazon is only getting started. Then I turned on CNBC during lunch and what are they talking about? Amazon. There's simply too much positive sentiment around this company and it makes me very nervous. It reminds me of 2007 when everyone was making a killing on real estate and the idea was laughable that the market would reverse. The stock is way overbought and the only questions I have are "by how much?" And "when is the reversal coming?" There are other reasons I'm skeptical about Amazon remaining at its current valuation. One major one is that the meteoric rise in the stock price has coincided nicely with the economic recovery. Amazon's ecommerce business is one that's built for good times. It remains to be seen how they fare in downtimes. What I mean by that is that much of what I see people buy on Amazon (myself included) are largely frivolous gadgets that one simply wouldn't buy in a time of economic fear. Right now people largely feel wealthy and feel comfortable shelling out for prime memberships and willing to pay a premium for convenience. In a down economy that's the first thing to go. Of course a down economy will weigh heavily on most companies, but I believe especially so on Amazon because it is a stock that is already overbought and relies on people buying shit they don't need for the sake of convenience. Apart from that I believe they will face increasing competition from Alibaba, Walmart, and others. Finally, there are the numbers. Despite the $400+ billion valuation, Amazon did less that a billion in profit from their ecommerce business last quarter! The stock shot up because that was higher than analysts predicted! I have serious doubts about the long term profitability of Amazon's ecommerce business. Physical delivery of goods, particularly last mile delivery is just too expensive. Sure, drones might come but I wouldn't base an investment on that hope. My prediction is that an economic downturn is going to send this stock into a tailspin.
- ricardo_piano 10y agoAmazon already went through 2 downturns. Dot com bubble and the last recession. During the recession they faired extremely well. they've been facing tough competition from Walmart since the late 90s. Alibaba is still miles away from competing in the same areas as Amazon although that will change with time. For now, if you're a consumer, aliexpress is only good for buying cheap low quality items. If there's something they've figured out, it's logistics and how to deliver a product as fast and cheap as possible. Everything about their system is optimized for this. Now with their venture into contract companies to deliver goods they can bypass more expensive UPS delivery. Now do I think they're stock is overvalued? Yes, but I don't see a doomsday scenario happening.
- aabajian 10y agoWorth noting that Gates leads by a $10 billion margin.
- adventured 10y agoAnd that's after Bloomberg weirdly adjusted his net worth down by about $12-$15 billion recently, right before he was about to cross $100 billion again for the first time since the dotcom bubble. They left a note on his profile in the billionaires list that says: "The net worth history for Bill Gates was changed to reflect a revised approach to the valuation that was applied on Jan. 27, 2017." Which is probably another way of saying, that he put in a favor with Michael Bloomberg to not show him crossing $100 billion, as he doesn't want the headlines.
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- nodesocket 10y agoBuffett should just buy a bunch of $AMZN so he keeps on par with Bezos. Buffett is not greedy, but he is ultra competitive. I look forward to going to my first annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting this May.
- known 10y agoaka legalized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
- sudhirj 10y agoI just don't get this complaining about wealth concentration - for every person capable of complaining on an online forum that some people have 100 to 1000x the wealth they do, there are also likely to be more people that exist who have 1000x less than you. How exactly am I any more entitled to the wealth of those richer than me, than are those poorer than me entitled to my (relative) wealth? It seems to me that the problem with the totem pole is that each level is logarithmic, but always talked about in absolute terms. If my boss makes 10x and her boss makes 10x of what she makes, aspiring to 100x my wealth looks like a completely impossible goal in my lifetime - but it's really just two promotions. An argument could be made that some people try to sabotage those attempting to climb the totem pole, but once someone has reached the top and did not illegally interact with anyone they passed on the climb, why all the hate?
- edge17 10y agoYou seem to be missing basic irrational aspects of human nature.
- efaref 10y agoThe problem isn't that Bezos has 1,000x my net worth. He has 1,000,000x my (approximate) net worth. One millionth of my net worth is seven cents, so Bezos:me is me:$0.07. The graph isn't logarithmic. It's shaped like this: | | | ____________|
- terryf 10y agoWhat difference is there between 1000x and 1,000,000x ? Should there be a cap somewhere? I just completely fail to see how this is anything other than being jealous of someone elses's success. Please do explain.
- efaref 10y agoIt's not about being jealous of a particular person's success, it's more about observing the problems with a world where a tiny fraction of the population capture and control over half of the wealth. If that were problem free, then fine. But it's not. Think of it as a symptom of an illness, and we should work to get the fever down.
- 72deluxe 10y agoIt is interesting to know that Bill Gates is still the world's richest. Thinking about how little I have directly spent with Microsoft is interesting. I bought Windows 3.11 from a computer fair. I got Windows 95 from school (proper CD, not a pirate). I bought a computer that came with Windows 98 (and a lame Cyrix processor), got an XP licence from a case someone was throwing out, skipped Vista, bought Windows 7 Pro system builder from eBay (proper version, no pirate copy, I don't like pirating software). I then got a free upgrade to Windows 10. Hardware, I think I bought an xbox 360 controller for the PC. I got given an old generation 1 xbox (since retired) and a load of games. Bought Office 2003 from eBay (proper version, OEM with hardware to satisfy licence) when Office 2007 was all the rage (so it was cheap). I think my brother once bought a Sidewinder joystick (had the footprint of a large dinosaur, such a big piece of hardware). Then I used the Express editions of SQL Server (MSDE before that), Express editions of Visual Studio and now the Community as I am a Lone Ranger developer at home. Oh and I bought a laptop that had Windows 10 on it so I guess they had a cut of its value. So basically Microsoft have had very little direct money from me, despite basically being responsible for my employment for the last 15 years (I write apps under Windows). I have spent more money with Parallels Inc as they force me to "upgrade" every year (every other year if I can help it) despite Apple introducing a new virtualisation layer a couple of releases ago. So thanks Bill.
- laughfactory 10y agoHe would be wise to cash out now while the getting is good. Amazon has an enormous problem with counterfeit goods in many categories. Unfortunately, when the implosion happens it will likely be incredibly fast and catastrophic. How might this happen? People get sketched out by their own, or other's experiences with fraud on Amazon, and simply decide to buy from other sources. I suspect this is a tipping point situation where it's not a slow decline, but instead a very fast one. For instance, my wife and I used to do most of our non-grocery shopping on Amazon. But recent horrific experiences (in spite of Jeff and his team stepping in to rectify things) and questions about what we'd actually get if we order something from Amazon means that now we don't buy nearly as much--mostly just Kindle books now. I just think that at some point most of their customers will stop shopping with them all at once because of fraud concerns, they'll stop subscribing to Prime, and next thing we know the company will be broken up and sold piecemeal. I'm afraid Amazon thinks they have a lot more time than they actually do to think about what, if anything, they want to do about the problem.