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Jeff Bezos's Net Worth Just Broke $100B
- tzm 9y ago> Bill Gates was last person to attain 12-figure fortune in 1999 $100B nearly 20 years ago, just before the federal antitrust case decision against Microsoft. Makes me wonder how much concentration of wealth would occur if regulation was not in place.
- patrickaljord 9y agoGoogle and Apple and the inability of Microsoft to cash on both the web and mobile (where all the money was in computing in the 2000's and 2010's) is why Microsoft stock and Bill Gates net worth lost value. Not thanks to regulations but thanks to the market.
- keldaris 9y agoWell, to be fair, some of their inability to cash in on the web could be attributed to the regulatory hurdles (especially in Europe, but with global consequences) they faced in their attempts to push IE as part of the OS, etc. I do agree with you that market forces (courtesy of some wrong strategic decisions made early on and a willingness to stick to them for too long) were the predominant factor, though.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI definitely remember them being much tamer and less aggressive when they got into trouble. I think it also hurt their public image.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoMSFT Market Cap: $642.317B $20 Billion income a year Lots of dividends over the years. if this is lost value...I'd take it.
- afterburner 9y agoAll of history up until modern times is an example of unregulated wealth accumulation. It sucked.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoWell, without wealth accumulation we'd still be hunting with sharp stones. But yeah. 'In medio virtus est', etc.
- afterburner 9y agoAre you talking about funding research, essentially? That's an example of wealth being spent on the common good. Problem is when it's accumulated without spending it on the common good, or even worse spent only on increasing the accumulator's power.
- skrause 9y agoI don't think this has a lot to do with the antitrust case. His wealth simply peaked at the height of the dotcom bubble and then went down again because of the stock market crash in 2000.
- IkmoIkmo 9y agoIt doesn't have to do with either. Microsoft stock is worth more now than it was in 1999, and that's without factoring in dividends. e.g. this year it paid out $12b in dividends. Today's dividends are part of its valuation today, but dividends paid out ten years ago is just cash that's gone out of the company to an owner, reducing the value of the company, and isn't really part of today's valuations. That is to say, he'd have received billions in dividend payments for two decades and he'd still own the same share of the company that's now worth more than it was in 1999. The reason he isn't as rich is because of charity.
- paulpauper 9y agoand Paul Allen got a huge chunk too, whereas Bezos is the only one
- adventured 9y agoThat's a flawed premise. Bezos owned less of Amazon at its IPO, than Bill Gates did at the Microsoft IPO. His parents became billionaires via their holdings in Amazon. 20 investors put in $50k each to start Amazon. Any of them that held up to this point, became billionaires. You're confusing concentrated wealth, versus total wealth created. Amazon has plausibly created wealth for more investors, precisely because it has had fewer very large owners; more of the company was distributed into more hands.
- protomok 9y agoBill Gates has also given a lot to charity, from the article - 'Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t given away almost 700 million Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.'
- thesagan 9y agoCharities that may not have been as necessary under a less concentrated wealth scenario. And he still gets to call the shots with a charity.
- jandrese 9y agoFor what it is worth, Bill spends a lot in the third world, where a more equitable US would have minimal impact on the standard of living.
- clubmg 9y agoMeanwhile America looks more and more like a third world country thanks to the billionairs like Besoz and Gates that hog much of the wealth and resources of our country. By hey Amazon Prime and Microsoft 10 are worth it right?
- comboy 9y agoIt would look more like a third world country without guys like Gates and Bezos. I'm really surprised by all the hate in this thread towards wealthy individuals who worked hard to attain it. Especially in this environment, where people try to figure out ways to be one of them. It's HN FFs. Also, maybe UBI just seems reasonable to Jeff, like it does to many people. He really doesn't need it for anything which he couldn't have many other simpler ways.
- joering2 9y ago
- heurist 9y agoRockafeller got up to around $340 billion in today's dollar. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and a few others built huge fortunes before the trust busters and regulation came along.
- justboxing 9y agoAMZN, the stock, is trading at a P.E. Ratio of nearly 300. http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN Serious question: Considering that it nearly doubled over the past year, is it already too late to buy Amazon stock? Or not? What's the upside?
- paulpauper 9y agoSo many people have gotten burned by betting against Amazon because it has a high PE ratio. When you remove the cap-ex , the PE ratio falls dramatically. https://greyenlightenment.com/not-worried-about-tech-bubble-and-how-hbd-can-be-used-to-beat-the-market/ https://greyenlightenment.com/not-worried-about-tech-bubble-... I think it goes to $2000/share soon (as in a few years). disclosure: long amazon
- icantdrive55 9y agoI'm beginning to wonder about Amazon in the long run. I know it's sacreligious, but Wallmart brought most of their prices down to Amazon levels, and offer free shipping on orders over $35, and no Prime yearly fee. Brick and mortar businesses are stepping up to the competition.
- dforrestwilson 9y agoThe quote in that article disparaging MBAs is funny, because Amazon famously prefers lots of MBAs.
- libertyEQ 9y agoWhile AMZN might grow into their valuation eventually, there are many other equities that are seemingly undervalued given their current fundamentals. I wouldn't try to short AMZN, but I would look elsewhere for investment opportunities; and, while trite, the advice to invest using ETFs that spread your risk is probably a better strategy.
- garmaine 9y agoP/E is not a meaningful metric. The 10x rule of thumb doesn’t work for all companies. For one, not all companies have the same level of infrastructure—Amazon has a lot of warehouse and distribution infrastructure, not to mention all those AWS servers they own, etc. you should properly subtract that out before doing the calculation. Even still Amazon has a crazy high valuation, just not insanely high. Not sure I’d bet against it though.
- jacobush 9y agoNot spending nearly enough on rockets.
- garmaine 9y agoI too am disappointed about this. Elon Musk is a scrappy bootstrapper by comparison. Blue Origin could be reaching so much further than they currently are...
- reducesuffering 9y agoJust because Musk can run both Tesla and SpaceX doesn’t mean Bezos can run Blue Origin and frickin Amazon at the same time. That’s overseeing 500k employees. I think that it’s a safe bet we’ll see a lot more from Blue Origin when Bezos steps down from Amazon.
- garmaine 9y agoProbably. I’m more complaining about ambition though. Blue Origin isn’t trying to change the game fundamentally in he way SpaceX is. Regardless o whether they are hitting deliverables, the deliverables aren’t interesting.
- Robotbeat 9y agoBlue Origin has just as ambitious goals as SpaceX. Millions working in space, industrialization of space to the extent that it actually starts reducing industrialization of Earth, etc. They even have a rocket on the drawing board somewhere, New Armstrong, that will likely be a 1-for-1 competitor with BFR, if not larger, and with full reuse (like BFR). But as far as actual execution, yeah. SpaceX is way ahead and Blue Origin has been incredibly slow. Um, I mean "gradatim."
- opportune 9y agoBut don't they have different goals? I thought Blue Origin was a little more bootstrappy in that they aren't trying to rely on federal funding / subsidies and are trying to get revenue from tourism
- holydude 9y agoSo his net worth is now more than the GDP of my country. Scary.
- depr 9y agoThis is not a great comparison: net worth vs market value of goods over time. E.g. what if GDP was measured in decades instead of years?
- adventured 9y agoIt's a perfectly good comparison in fact. Let me show you how that works. Did you know, the Stratolaunch has a wingspan wider than the length of a US football field? The equivalent reply would be: geez, that's a terrible comparison, because the Stratolaunch is not a large plot of ground, they're entirely different things! GDP is obviously not inherently measured in years. GDP has no set measurement period of time. GDP can be measured in quarters (and frequently is), years, decades, etc. It's most commonly measured in a one year span of time though, and it's likely safe to believe that's exactly what the parent was referring to. One should give people the benefit of the doubt on their intellect and knowledge, imo.
- dwohnitmok 9y agoEh I think the intuition the parent is trying to get at is that GDP is really in some sense a measure of flow, that is it is a measure of quickly money is exchanging hands weighted by how much money is being exchanged. Hence it feels more akin to comparing something like joules to watts rather than comparing the same dimension of two non-like things. Put another way, yes Jeff Bezos could more than double the GDP of the country in question if he donated his entire net worth as someone else's income. But so could someone with a trivial sum of money (say a single U.S. dollar) by creating a series of dummy transactions with someone else where they constantly exchange the same sum of money back and forth for dummy "services." Yet at some level it seems weird to compare Jeff Bezos with this hypothetical person. That being said, that's just an intuition. GDP is actually calculated as a dollar amount not a rate. As such I think there's still some worthwhile explanatory value in using GDP as a measure against static monetary amounts in the same way that you can say "this swimming pool has the same amount of water as the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a day" (to the best of my knowledge such a large pool does not exist).
- JAFTEM 9y agoBezos is an advocate for basic income, but I question his motives. Is it because he is genuinely concerned for others and society, or does he want to avoid the pitchforks at his doorstep when Amazon gets blamed for mass unemployment? Coupled with the fact that he's the richest man on earth, it's very apparent he will have a target on his back if he doesn't already. Maybe his motives don't matter. Maybe we just need to focus on getting basic income as jobs are wiped away by Big N.
- cirgue 9y agoUBI is an enormous boon to anyone who's business is directly sensitive to consumer's disposable/discretionary income. Bezos is the textbook definition of such an actor.
- QAPereo 9y agoRealistically, BI won’t save him, or his progeny when/if it comes down to “pitchforks” any more than the French aristocracy could throw potatoes at starving peasants and hope to live. I can’t imagine how much good someone would have to do to justify concentrating a hundred thousand million dollars in their person. When so much of that probably wasn’t fairly subjected to taxation... well... maybe he deserves some “pitchforks” at his door, or st least some angry government accountants and lawyers.
- kbutler 9y agoThis is just crazy to me. Every purchase at Amazon is made because it makes the purchaser better off. Amazon out-competes by serving the customer better. If Bezos also benefits, that's great - he's made the world a better place. I'd love to richly reward millions of people for making the world better like Amazon has. Save the pitchforks for negative-sum beneficiaries - companies and individuals who benefit by leeching/destroying value (e.g., most financial "innovation", big pharma using legal tactics to avoid competition, etc.)
- QAPereo 9y agoNothing you said in any way justifies not paying tax.
- reader51 9y agoI can't even fathom having this amount of wealth.
- amelius 9y agoThat man has done so much for humanity, I believe he really deserves that $100B.
- rrhd 9y agoletting you order stuff online is "so much for humanity"?
- tryingagainbro 9y agoif you're being sarcastic, I am sure he doesn't care. "Humanity" is complicated...maybe he'll make up for all with one invention on his space venture. He did save people a lot of money, but then he did also cause many stores to go kaput. So, how do you judge?
- amelius 9y agoThe sarcasm was not directed at him, but at us, and our lack of ability to come up with an economic system that can properly evaluate what somebody is worth. E.g. We have a legal system that decides when somebody is right or wrong, and it mostly matches with what people feel is right or wrong. Why can't we have a similar system that decides what somebody is worth?
- WalterBright 9y agoIsn't that what a free market system does? Bezos' net worth is decided by what people freely decide his stock is worth.
- amelius 9y agoNo, because it doesn't align with what people feel is right.
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- FlyingSideKick 9y agoWho cares? I don’t understand why the media wastes their time with stories like this or how much movies earned over the weekend.
- afterburner 9y agoIt has some relevance as to the future. If Bezos was bleeding money, he might change Amazon's direction. If summer blockbusters started tanking, there might be fewer in the future. It's feedback, it's not necessarily the most useful information but it's not useless. Now, endless discussion on a topic when there's hardly any new information (as 24h news stations do), that's useless...
- cityzen 9y agoInteresting talk from Bernie Sanders about wealth inequality and the state of the economy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao7iC9b5Mk0&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao7iC9b5Mk0&feature=youtu.be I know it's "political" but so is an individual having a net worth of $100 billion. It is well worth the watch unless, of course, you're a billionaire snowflake and don't like the reality that there are 500,000 homeless people and 45 million people living under the poverty line in America.
- rukittenme 9y agoJeff Bezos having $100bn is no more political than me having $20. Where you draw the line is completely arbitrary. Bezos didn't acquire his fortune by stealing from people. He made it by providing goods at a lower cost than his competitors. Which means everyone that helped make Bezos wealthy are wealthier as a result of that interaction.
- cityzen 9y agoI do not know how reliable this is but it looks legit. If it is true, Amazon spending almost $10 million on lobbying and is the 15th highest spender when it comes to spending. Top issue? Taxes. How is Bezos so f’ing rich? Amazon doesn’t pay any real taxes, prob less than 1%. I’m sorry but your $20 is not the same as his $100 billion http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023883 http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023883
- rukittenme 9y agoYou got me there. I hate the income tax and the morons who write the tax code. We're in good company on that front... https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/897763049226084352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxbusiness.com%2Fmarkets%2F2017%2F09%2F19%2Fwhy-amazons-tax-bill-is-puny-compared-to-rivals.html https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/89776304922608435...
- edanm 9y agoWhile you may be completely right about Amazon and tax lobbying, this is only a part of the story of how he's so rich. Parent comment was right in the way that matters, IMO: Jeff Bezos being rich is mostly not at the expense of anyone else, quite the opposite - it's as a result of the value he's created. Even if he's paid less in taxes than he "should have", those taxes would've been 0 if he hadn't created the value and therefore wealth that he's created.
- quickthrower2 9y agoJust think: Someone with 1M bitcoin (which is conceivable if they got in early enough, hello Satoshi!) could overtake Bezos with just one more of those 20x increase in the price of bitcoin.