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Bill Gates is the wealthiest person in the world (or arguably Arnault). You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, bu

Bill Gates is the wealthiest person in the world (or arguably Arnault). You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, but that's not a great metric. When I think of wealth, I think of what you can reasonably acquire. If you multiply Musk's shares in Tesla times the current share price, sure you get 180 billion. But if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them. Without Musk, I'd be surprised if Tesla is worth 20% of its current valuation. To a lesser extent, this is true of Bezos too, although Amazon without him is still a very valuable company. On the other hand, Bill Gates owns 1.6% of Microsoft, which I believe is his biggest holding, followed by Berkshire Hathaway stock. I'd bet he can sell both of those holdings completely without a huge hit to either stock price (but definitely some hit). Same with his farmland and other alternative assets. On top of that, having already sold his Microsoft shares, he's not subject to as much capital gains tax as Bezos or Musk, each of whom pretty much owe 20% of their total net worth the second they want to sell. So on paper, Musk and Bezos are wealthier, but if all of them decided to Scrooge McDuck it and put all their money into a gold filled vault tomorrow, Bill Gates' vault would be the fullest. EDIT: typo above... Originally said that Musk owns 180 bn in Amazon stock :)

rabidferret 6y ago
For purchases like the one in the article, you can absolutely purchase with stock in lieu of cash. This happens all the time, and doesn't have nearly the impact on the share price that selling for cash on the exchange does. How much cash you could get in a vault isn't really a useful measure of wealth since cash isn't the only object of value that you can exchange for goods and services (which you even pointed out in your comment by mentioning gold)
- giantg2 6y ago
  You still have to sell some to cover the real estate transfer taxes since the government doesn't accept stock. With a 1% transfer tax you're still looking at $1.7M. Not too bad though.
- chadash 6y ago
  Cash, or gold, artwork, whatever... Sure you can purchase with stock. But you can't easily purchase with $180 billion in stock without affecting the stock price.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  If Musk started to sell off a significant chunk of stock he'd have to disclose this, and the stock price would take a hit whether it was on an exchange or for farmland.
kolbe 6y ago
Not that it matters who the wealthiest person on earth is, but western capitalists have a small fraction of the wealth that people like Putin and Xi have.
- cmpb 6y ago
  I'm curious about this. Is there any easy way to determine how much wealth Putin or Xi actually has? Or is any discussion about their wealth just anecdotal?
  - kolbe 6y ago
    Pure speculation, but it’s easy to see how people like them can conceal their wealth. One data point is that Gadaffi had by some estimates, $200b in wealth stashed around the globe when they unwound his estate. Bill Browder asserted that, when Vald was consolidating his power, he took half ownership in all of the oligarchs’ business in exchange for not jailing them.
- exclusiv 6y ago
  Putin's is unknown. An advisor said 70B in 2012 [1] Where do you see Xi having comparable substantial wealth? I see 500M to 1.5B. Where do you get small fraction? That's not true at all. I can't even see either of your examples as having more, let alone a multiple. Anyway, the wealthiest western capitalists aren't even accounted for. "author Malcolm Gladwell estimated the value of Rockefeller's fortune at its peak, in today's dollars, at $318.3 billion" [2] It's divided among the family at this point though of course. But of the living individuals that we know (Bezos/Gates/Musk/Zuck), and have accurate info for, your statement is not true. [1] https://money.com/vladimir-putin-net-worth/ https://money.com/vladimir-putin-net-worth/ [2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/how-rich-is-the-rockefeller-family-today https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/how-rich-is-the-rockefel...
  - kolbe 6y ago
    Why on earth would Xi allow his wealth to be known? The media in China isn’t even allowed to cover basic actions of the CCP. But China is a country run by bribes and guanxi. And all bribes flow up. It is possible he has decided to not accept the payments, but very unlikely.
aeturnum 6y ago
> if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them I think this is a good starting point to understanding the "real" value of Bezos' and Musk's fortunes, but I'm not sure it would play out like you say. As you pointed out, the valuations of both of their companies are held up by widely held beliefs about the men. A lot of Tesla's value comes from Elon Musk, super-genius-capitalist, being at the helm. So, if the stock value comes from trusting the humans, it seems possible that Musk or Bezos could sell a large chunk of stock with the right explanation. Like, if Jeff Bezos said he was selling $30bn of stock to contribute to charity right now so he could get critics off his back and concentrate on Amazon...would the price go down? I don't see it.
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  > if Jeff Bezos said he was selling $30bn of stock to contribute to charity right now so he could get critics off his back and concentrate on Amazon I wonder if a lot of people would view that as the CEO version of a politician saying "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family", and immediately try to find the "true" reason he's selling the stock. Perhaps even causing more of a problem than if he had said "I'm selling this stock to buy a _really_ fancy yacht"
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    Maybe? I haven't seen any reactions like that to MacKenzie Scott's contributions.
- NineStarPoint 6y ago
  There’s two parts of how the sale would effect the price. One effect is trust in the business due to it’s shareholders, which could definitely be dealt with yes. The other effect though would be a massive amount of shares entering the market place, which would have purely mechanical outcomes. 30 billion dollars of amazon stock would be about 10 million amazon stock. About 4 amazon stock is traded daily, so that would be 2.5 days of total average amazon stock entering the market over some period of time. This means higher competition between people selling the stock to find people willing to buy it, which would lower the price. The quicker the stock was sold off, the more dramatic this effect would be. 10 million stock also represents about 1/50th of all amazon stock in existence. Another 4/50th’s of that stock also belongs to Bezos. Increasing the amount of stock available to the general populous by a not insignificant amount would also lower the price of the stock, although probably not very dramatically. In the end, those effects probably wouldn’t be too major. I’m actually surprised that so much of amazon’s stock gets traded every day, I wasn’t expecting 4 million stock to be traded daily. Still, it would have an effect that means Bezos couldn’t liquify his position in just a day or two even with a good explanation.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
There's another issue, which constantly bothered me back when "Jeff Bezos is richer than Bill Gates" was a big news item. These comparisons never take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into account. Bill Gates put about half his money into a financial structure with favorable tax treatment. But it's still his money that he controls. There's no reason to ignore it if you're trying to assess how wealthy he is.
- ksdale 6y ago
  It's kind of his money that he controls. He can do a lot with it, but he can't buy a yacht with it... You don't get the favorable tax treatment without a ton of restrictions on how you can spend the money.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Yep but he chooses for it to be restrict this way
    - ksdale 6y ago
      To be a bit facetious, that's like saying that I still possess all of the money I spent on groceries because I chose to spend it that way... at some point it's not my money anymore. I agree that Bill Gates still exerts some control over the money, but if he can't actually do anything he wants with it, then it's not wealth the same way cash, or even stock is.
      - Crye 6y ago
        At a certain point it starts to become silly to talk about wealth as the ability to buy things, rather than the ability to organize a large portion of the world's economic systems. That's specifically what his foundation can do as long as it's within a fairly broad set of parameters.
      - rusk 6y ago
        The point was that this is how he chooses to spend his money. For whatever reason I guess it makes him feel good. Which his cool but he has vastly more autonomy over his money than regular mortals - as do many other HNW individuals, they’re not all as kind hearted as Bill though.
skybrian 6y ago
> Musk's shares in Amazon I think you meant something else here?
dheera 6y ago
> You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, but that's not a great metric. When I think of wealth, I think of what you can reasonably acquire. Exactly. Stock wealth isn't real money because it isn't actionable. You can't sell all of it without crashing. All personal wealth should be measured by how much liquid cash you could get for it in a short term sale. That's also the amount you could theoretically donate towards, for example, averting a short-term humanity disaster. If you needed $100 billion in hard cash to pay for a bunch of things to avert an asteroid or nasty virus, Elon Musk wouldn't be able to provide that sum even if he wanted to.
- mrguyorama 6y ago
  I'd argue if you own a significant fraction of a large company, you have a significant effect on it's decisions. Controlling a giant company and all it's connections, levers, abilities, etc is way more valuable than just a hundred billion in hard cash
traskjd 6y ago
Jeff's going to be so annoyed when he discovers Musk owns 180bn of AMZN stock.
- chadash 6y ago
  Good point :) My mistake!
- hinkley 6y ago
  Clearly he's been learning from Warren Buffet about how to buy stock through proxies.
hinkley 6y ago
Even if you sell it as a divestiture plan, that constant pressure has consequences on the stock price. I think in some cases you can list stock holdings as collateral on a loan, in which case you can derive a similar cash benefit from the stocks as you would get from selling it, meanwhile not incurring the social and political consequences of selling your holding. Bill, as I recall, had a much larger percentage of MSFT when he retired. Microsoft used to dilute their shares via employee stock grants, so I'm not sure how much of that is attrition and how much is divestiture on his part. One source on the internet says he was estimated to owns 4.3% as recently as two years ago. And I see another article from March of last year talking about him leaving the board of directors, and owning 1.36%. I wonder if anyone has analyzed how much of the MSFT stock stagnation that occurred after his retirement could be attributed to his divestiture plan, rather than Ballmer's fault.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  It was reported in the 80's that Gates had regular scheduled (to avoid insider trading allegations and spooking investors) sales of MSFT stock.
- somethoughts 6y ago
  Was just thinking about this the other day. Not only does the incoming CEO have big leadership shoes to fill, the incoming CEO has to deal with the previous founder CEO unloading shares every quarter which essentially appears to the general market as a vote of no confidence. In Ballmer's case he also had to contend with the dotcom bubble bursting.
  - ender341341 6y ago
    I think unless the founder is liquidating en-masse it's usually a non-event. Even in the click-batey articles I read about those they always include something about how it's normal and been planned for the last year when a CEO sells their stock
    - hinkley 6y ago
nrmitchi 6y ago
I completely agree with your overall point, although there are definitely a lot of intracicies here. Overall liquidity is definitely important though. > Musk's shares in Amazon times the current share price This is clearly a typo/copy-paste error since you got Musk/Tesla right in the next sentence.
somethoughts 6y ago
Here's a fun video which discusses the phenomenon you're describing. Its a bit click-baity but does provide an overall summary pretty nicely. Economics Explained - The Ranks of Global Billionaires: Not All Billionaires Are Made Equal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ It even covers the oligarchy scenario :)
damnyou 6y ago
Hmmmmm, I'm pretty sure by that measure Vladimir Putin is the wealthiest person in the world. On top of his own wealth, most of which is unreported, he can use state power to acquire whatever property in Russia he wants.
734129837261 6y ago
What always annoys me with most people out there is that they want to take money from the super wealthy. As if Musk and Bezos and Gates are sitting on stockpiles of Dollars. Their income isn't billions of Dollars a year, that's simply–mostly–the increase in value of their assets. In the olden days they taxed millionaires crazy percentages of income tax. But that was before the digital era. Right now, money is digital and there isn't a gold standard. If you say: "Bezos, we tax you 80% of your income!" you'd see him simply not making any money at all and even collecting food stamps if he wanted to. So the next step would be taxing someone's net worth, which would force Bezos to sell his stocks. And guess who will be buying those stocks. Other money printing governments in the form of their wealthy but sponsored businessmen, mostly from China. Then in a few years Amazon is Chinese-owned. But yeah, Bill and Belinda Gates are at least doing it right. Their foundation is doing so much good for the world and their legacy will be immense for centuries to come. Same for Musk, who single-handedly kickstarted (I'm not saying he did it all himself, I know he didn't) the world to accept electric cars and made rocket boosters that could land again. Bezos, on the other hand? Honestly, more power to him doing what he does. He's playing the game by its own rules. And he's winning. But damn, he isn't doing much good with all those resources, does he? Even Amazon Prime isn't that good...
- mushbino 6y ago
  If we tax the rich more we'll be owned by China? That feels a bit like an insincere argument. Anyone wanting to buy large sums of Amazon stock could do so right now. Hoarding large sums of money isn't really beneficial to society and the huge sums are far past the point of justifying innovation and job creation incentives.
0xB31B1B 6y ago
Musk or Bezos can use their wealth as collateral against other a huge line of credit. At their level of resources, you are more likely to take on a lot of debt to delay realizing gains, they do not need to sell their shares to have other things
- chadash 6y ago
  If you have $100 of stock you can’t borrow $100 in cash against that.
  - 0xB31B1B 6y ago
    You can borrow more than 1:1. You can usually leverage up to 3x. This is literally all of modern finance
l33tbro 6y ago
Putin is the richest person in the world. While we cannot verify it [1], it is estimated to be around $200 billion. [1] https://qz.com/1594989/vladimir-putins-financial-disclosure-claims-little-wealth/ https://qz.com/1594989/vladimir-putins-financial-disclosure-...
fctorial 6y ago
They all have infinite money for all intent and purposes.
umvi 6y ago
What I find amazing is how the richest person in the world also happens to be a really good person. Bill Gates generally just seems humble, kind, and... normal. Imagine if Bill Gates were instead a corrupt megalomaniac - it wouldn't be too hard to slip into amoral hedonism when you have that much money.
- TuringNYC 6y ago
  I think if you scroll back to discussion on slashdot in the 90s, you'd see public opinion in the tech community was very different back then. That said, I agree with your take on Gates.
  - olivermarks 6y ago
    Gates has a much bigger pr organization behind him than Mellon or Carnegie ever did in a previous era of monopolists and oligarchs. Since Gates funds a lot of the western media, (UK Guardian, BBC etc) you never hear any criticism of the WHO (which Gates also effectively owns) or GAVI, which is a Gates Vehicle. This is not a healthy situation at all.
    - zwischenzug 6y ago
      Gates funds the BBC? What?
      - kbenson 6y ago
        I wasn't aware of this, but apparently, yes, he does.[1][2] I think it's important to note that this doesn't have to be because he expects something in return, he could just think funding good news organizations is a good thing to do. It's also important to keep in mind that even if he doesn't expect favorable reporting doesn't mean he doesn't get it anyways as a byproduct. 1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-20-million-to-bbc-world-service-trust https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awa... 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding
CapriciousCptl 6y ago
Another way to look at wealth is as total spending power between now and eternity. Taken that way, it doesn't matter as much if your wealth is tied up in unsaleable stock-- stock afterall represents your claim on the discounted future earnings of a company, so those earnings will be available given enough time. Estimating the true future earnings of businesses, and the amount available to current shareholders of course, isn't easy. But taking the stock market's approximation of that intrinsic value is quick and dirty way to get it. Of course, the caveat is that stocks aren't always efficiently priced.
jklinger410 6y ago
Only un-leveraged wealth should be measured. Meaning Musk and Bezos probably don't even make the top 10.
chaostheory 6y ago
Is Bill Gates, or Musk, or Bezos (pre-divorce) the wealthiest person in the world? What I noticed is that these wealthiest lists routinely exclude royalty from these lists.

rabidferret 6y ago

For purchases like the one in the article, you can absolutely purchase with stock in lieu of cash. This happens all the time, and doesn't have nearly the impact on the share price that selling for cash on the exchange does. How much cash you could get in a vault isn't really a useful measure of wealth since cash isn't the only object of value that you can exchange for goods and services (which you even pointed out in your comment by mentioning gold)

giantg2 6y ago
You still have to sell some to cover the real estate transfer taxes since the government doesn't accept stock. With a 1% transfer tax you're still looking at $1.7M. Not too bad though.
chadash 6y ago
Cash, or gold, artwork, whatever... Sure you can purchase with stock. But you can't easily purchase with $180 billion in stock without affecting the stock price.
ascorbic 6y ago
If Musk started to sell off a significant chunk of stock he'd have to disclose this, and the stock price would take a hit whether it was on an exchange or for farmland.

kolbe 6y ago

Not that it matters who the wealthiest person on earth is, but western capitalists have a small fraction of the wealth that people like Putin and Xi have.

cmpb 6y ago
I'm curious about this. Is there any easy way to determine how much wealth Putin or Xi actually has? Or is any discussion about their wealth just anecdotal?
- kolbe 6y ago
  Pure speculation, but it’s easy to see how people like them can conceal their wealth. One data point is that Gadaffi had by some estimates, $200b in wealth stashed around the globe when they unwound his estate. Bill Browder asserted that, when Vald was consolidating his power, he took half ownership in all of the oligarchs’ business in exchange for not jailing them.
exclusiv 6y ago
Putin's is unknown. An advisor said 70B in 2012 [1] Where do you see Xi having comparable substantial wealth? I see 500M to 1.5B. Where do you get small fraction? That's not true at all. I can't even see either of your examples as having more, let alone a multiple. Anyway, the wealthiest western capitalists aren't even accounted for. "author Malcolm Gladwell estimated the value of Rockefeller's fortune at its peak, in today's dollars, at $318.3 billion" [2] It's divided among the family at this point though of course. But of the living individuals that we know (Bezos/Gates/Musk/Zuck), and have accurate info for, your statement is not true. [1] https://money.com/vladimir-putin-net-worth/ https://money.com/vladimir-putin-net-worth/ [2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/how-rich-is-the-rockefeller-family-today https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/how-rich-is-the-rockefel...
- kolbe 6y ago
  Why on earth would Xi allow his wealth to be known? The media in China isn’t even allowed to cover basic actions of the CCP. But China is a country run by bribes and guanxi. And all bribes flow up. It is possible he has decided to not accept the payments, but very unlikely.

aeturnum 6y ago

> if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them I think this is a good starting point to understanding the "real" value of Bezos' and Musk's fortunes, but I'm not sure it would play out like you say. As you pointed out, the valuations of both of their companies are held up by widely held beliefs about the men. A lot of Tesla's value comes from Elon Musk, super-genius-capitalist, being at the helm. So, if the stock value comes from trusting the humans, it seems possible that Musk or Bezos could sell a large chunk of stock with the right explanation. Like, if Jeff Bezos said he was selling $30bn of stock to contribute to charity right now so he could get critics off his back and concentrate on Amazon...would the price go down? I don't see it.

banana_giraffe 6y ago
> if Jeff Bezos said he was selling $30bn of stock to contribute to charity right now so he could get critics off his back and concentrate on Amazon I wonder if a lot of people would view that as the CEO version of a politician saying "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family", and immediately try to find the "true" reason he's selling the stock. Perhaps even causing more of a problem than if he had said "I'm selling this stock to buy a _really_ fancy yacht"
- aeturnum 6y ago
  Maybe? I haven't seen any reactions like that to MacKenzie Scott's contributions.
NineStarPoint 6y ago
There’s two parts of how the sale would effect the price. One effect is trust in the business due to it’s shareholders, which could definitely be dealt with yes. The other effect though would be a massive amount of shares entering the market place, which would have purely mechanical outcomes. 30 billion dollars of amazon stock would be about 10 million amazon stock. About 4 amazon stock is traded daily, so that would be 2.5 days of total average amazon stock entering the market over some period of time. This means higher competition between people selling the stock to find people willing to buy it, which would lower the price. The quicker the stock was sold off, the more dramatic this effect would be. 10 million stock also represents about 1/50th of all amazon stock in existence. Another 4/50th’s of that stock also belongs to Bezos. Increasing the amount of stock available to the general populous by a not insignificant amount would also lower the price of the stock, although probably not very dramatically. In the end, those effects probably wouldn’t be too major. I’m actually surprised that so much of amazon’s stock gets traded every day, I wasn’t expecting 4 million stock to be traded daily. Still, it would have an effect that means Bezos couldn’t liquify his position in just a day or two even with a good explanation.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

There's another issue, which constantly bothered me back when "Jeff Bezos is richer than Bill Gates" was a big news item. These comparisons never take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into account. Bill Gates put about half his money into a financial structure with favorable tax treatment. But it's still his money that he controls. There's no reason to ignore it if you're trying to assess how wealthy he is.

ksdale 6y ago
It's kind of his money that he controls. He can do a lot with it, but he can't buy a yacht with it... You don't get the favorable tax treatment without a ton of restrictions on how you can spend the money.
- rusk 6y ago
  Yep but he chooses for it to be restrict this way
  - ksdale 6y ago
    To be a bit facetious, that's like saying that I still possess all of the money I spent on groceries because I chose to spend it that way... at some point it's not my money anymore. I agree that Bill Gates still exerts some control over the money, but if he can't actually do anything he wants with it, then it's not wealth the same way cash, or even stock is.
    - Crye 6y ago
      At a certain point it starts to become silly to talk about wealth as the ability to buy things, rather than the ability to organize a large portion of the world's economic systems. That's specifically what his foundation can do as long as it's within a fairly broad set of parameters.
    - rusk 6y ago
      The point was that this is how he chooses to spend his money. For whatever reason I guess it makes him feel good. Which his cool but he has vastly more autonomy over his money than regular mortals - as do many other HNW individuals, they’re not all as kind hearted as Bill though.

skybrian 6y ago

> Musk's shares in Amazon I think you meant something else here?

dheera 6y ago

> You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, but that's not a great metric. When I think of wealth, I think of what you can reasonably acquire. Exactly. Stock wealth isn't real money because it isn't actionable. You can't sell all of it without crashing. All personal wealth should be measured by how much liquid cash you could get for it in a short term sale. That's also the amount you could theoretically donate towards, for example, averting a short-term humanity disaster. If you needed $100 billion in hard cash to pay for a bunch of things to avert an asteroid or nasty virus, Elon Musk wouldn't be able to provide that sum even if he wanted to.

mrguyorama 6y ago
I'd argue if you own a significant fraction of a large company, you have a significant effect on it's decisions. Controlling a giant company and all it's connections, levers, abilities, etc is way more valuable than just a hundred billion in hard cash

traskjd 6y ago

Jeff's going to be so annoyed when he discovers Musk owns 180bn of AMZN stock.

chadash 6y ago
Good point :) My mistake!
hinkley 6y ago
Clearly he's been learning from Warren Buffet about how to buy stock through proxies.

hinkley 6y ago

Even if you sell it as a divestiture plan, that constant pressure has consequences on the stock price. I think in some cases you can list stock holdings as collateral on a loan, in which case you can derive a similar cash benefit from the stocks as you would get from selling it, meanwhile not incurring the social and political consequences of selling your holding. Bill, as I recall, had a much larger percentage of MSFT when he retired. Microsoft used to dilute their shares via employee stock grants, so I'm not sure how much of that is attrition and how much is divestiture on his part. One source on the internet says he was estimated to owns 4.3% as recently as two years ago. And I see another article from March of last year talking about him leaving the board of directors, and owning 1.36%. I wonder if anyone has analyzed how much of the MSFT stock stagnation that occurred after his retirement could be attributed to his divestiture plan, rather than Ballmer's fault.

WalterBright 6y ago
It was reported in the 80's that Gates had regular scheduled (to avoid insider trading allegations and spooking investors) sales of MSFT stock.
somethoughts 6y ago
Was just thinking about this the other day. Not only does the incoming CEO have big leadership shoes to fill, the incoming CEO has to deal with the previous founder CEO unloading shares every quarter which essentially appears to the general market as a vote of no confidence. In Ballmer's case he also had to contend with the dotcom bubble bursting.
- ender341341 6y ago
  I think unless the founder is liquidating en-masse it's usually a non-event. Even in the click-batey articles I read about those they always include something about how it's normal and been planned for the last year when a CEO sells their stock
  - hinkley 6y ago

nrmitchi 6y ago

I completely agree with your overall point, although there are definitely a lot of intracicies here. Overall liquidity is definitely important though. > Musk's shares in Amazon times the current share price This is clearly a typo/copy-paste error since you got Musk/Tesla right in the next sentence.

somethoughts 6y ago

Here's a fun video which discusses the phenomenon you're describing. Its a bit click-baity but does provide an overall summary pretty nicely. Economics Explained - The Ranks of Global Billionaires: Not All Billionaires Are Made Equal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ It even covers the oligarchy scenario :)

damnyou 6y ago

Hmmmmm, I'm pretty sure by that measure Vladimir Putin is the wealthiest person in the world. On top of his own wealth, most of which is unreported, he can use state power to acquire whatever property in Russia he wants.

734129837261 6y ago

What always annoys me with most people out there is that they want to take money from the super wealthy. As if Musk and Bezos and Gates are sitting on stockpiles of Dollars. Their income isn't billions of Dollars a year, that's simply–mostly–the increase in value of their assets. In the olden days they taxed millionaires crazy percentages of income tax. But that was before the digital era. Right now, money is digital and there isn't a gold standard. If you say: "Bezos, we tax you 80% of your income!" you'd see him simply not making any money at all and even collecting food stamps if he wanted to. So the next step would be taxing someone's net worth, which would force Bezos to sell his stocks. And guess who will be buying those stocks. Other money printing governments in the form of their wealthy but sponsored businessmen, mostly from China. Then in a few years Amazon is Chinese-owned. But yeah, Bill and Belinda Gates are at least doing it right. Their foundation is doing so much good for the world and their legacy will be immense for centuries to come. Same for Musk, who single-handedly kickstarted (I'm not saying he did it all himself, I know he didn't) the world to accept electric cars and made rocket boosters that could land again. Bezos, on the other hand? Honestly, more power to him doing what he does. He's playing the game by its own rules. And he's winning. But damn, he isn't doing much good with all those resources, does he? Even Amazon Prime isn't that good...

mushbino 6y ago
If we tax the rich more we'll be owned by China? That feels a bit like an insincere argument. Anyone wanting to buy large sums of Amazon stock could do so right now. Hoarding large sums of money isn't really beneficial to society and the huge sums are far past the point of justifying innovation and job creation incentives.

0xB31B1B 6y ago

Musk or Bezos can use their wealth as collateral against other a huge line of credit. At their level of resources, you are more likely to take on a lot of debt to delay realizing gains, they do not need to sell their shares to have other things

chadash 6y ago
If you have $100 of stock you can’t borrow $100 in cash against that.
- 0xB31B1B 6y ago
  You can borrow more than 1:1. You can usually leverage up to 3x. This is literally all of modern finance

l33tbro 6y ago

Putin is the richest person in the world. While we cannot verify it [1], it is estimated to be around $200 billion. [1] https://qz.com/1594989/vladimir-putins-financial-disclosure-claims-little-wealth/ https://qz.com/1594989/vladimir-putins-financial-disclosure-...

fctorial 6y ago

They all have infinite money for all intent and purposes.

umvi 6y ago

What I find amazing is how the richest person in the world also happens to be a really good person. Bill Gates generally just seems humble, kind, and... normal. Imagine if Bill Gates were instead a corrupt megalomaniac - it wouldn't be too hard to slip into amoral hedonism when you have that much money.

TuringNYC 6y ago
I think if you scroll back to discussion on slashdot in the 90s, you'd see public opinion in the tech community was very different back then. That said, I agree with your take on Gates.
- olivermarks 6y ago
  Gates has a much bigger pr organization behind him than Mellon or Carnegie ever did in a previous era of monopolists and oligarchs. Since Gates funds a lot of the western media, (UK Guardian, BBC etc) you never hear any criticism of the WHO (which Gates also effectively owns) or GAVI, which is a Gates Vehicle. This is not a healthy situation at all.
  - zwischenzug 6y ago
    Gates funds the BBC? What?
    - kbenson 6y ago
      I wasn't aware of this, but apparently, yes, he does.[1][2] I think it's important to note that this doesn't have to be because he expects something in return, he could just think funding good news organizations is a good thing to do. It's also important to keep in mind that even if he doesn't expect favorable reporting doesn't mean he doesn't get it anyways as a byproduct. 1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-20-million-to-bbc-world-service-trust https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awa... 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/funding

CapriciousCptl 6y ago

Another way to look at wealth is as total spending power between now and eternity. Taken that way, it doesn't matter as much if your wealth is tied up in unsaleable stock-- stock afterall represents your claim on the discounted future earnings of a company, so those earnings will be available given enough time. Estimating the true future earnings of businesses, and the amount available to current shareholders of course, isn't easy. But taking the stock market's approximation of that intrinsic value is quick and dirty way to get it. Of course, the caveat is that stocks aren't always efficiently priced.

jklinger410 6y ago

Only un-leveraged wealth should be measured. Meaning Musk and Bezos probably don't even make the top 10.

chaostheory 6y ago

Is Bill Gates, or Musk, or Bezos (pre-divorce) the wealthiest person in the world? What I noticed is that these wealthiest lists routinely exclude royalty from these lists.