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People that charge class warfare just don't want anything to change. Wealth accumulated by the rich mostly by burning dinosaurs is just as fictitious as any QE

People that charge class warfare just don't want anything to change. Wealth accumulated by the rich mostly by burning dinosaurs is just as fictitious as any QE from the Fed.

pydry 4y ago
It's only fictitious if Jeff Bezos is comparing his wealth to your wealth. Try to tax it away and use it for something that would benefit everyone and suddenly it becomes a lot less abstract to him.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  It would become a lot less real too. The wealth of people who mostly get it from stock ownership is a complete fiction, driven by the scarcity of shares on the open market. If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding in AMZN shares, the whole company would be worth a lot less. Not due to any sort of magical effect of Jeff Bezos, but due to the market being flooded with supply.
  - pydry 4y ago
    I guess this means if a hypothetical Bill Gates sold off the vast majority of the 45% of Microsoft stock he owned then the company would then be worth a lot less? It really is weird how frequently I see the view you espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so completely disproves it.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      So you think that Microsoft stock price wouldn't go down significantly if Bill Gates put 45% of the company up for sale?
      - coob 4y ago
        He sold most of his MSFT in 2020 when stepping down from the board.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        By that time, he had sold almost all of MSFT. He was a ~2% owner. That sale was a lot more similar in scale to a hedge fund selling a large block of shares than to Jeff Bezos liquidating his holdings.
      - pydry 4y ago
        IIRC put 44% of the company up for sale over a period of many years and the price of microsoft stock did indeed go up during that time. So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        The hypothetical was about selling them all at once, or a very short period of time.
        pydry 4y ago
        A) The OP did not mention this. B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        > A) The OP did not mention this. The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade". > B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k. Now you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would actually only get a fraction of the nominal value ascribed to them. Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade, and if the business avruay survives that long at its current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't), then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they theoretically own.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      In 2020, as I understand it, Bill gates sold less than 1% of MSFT on the open market there: his holding went from a bit over 2% to a bit over 1%. He had been steadily selling over the last two decades. Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's. When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares to buy Twitter.
      - pydry 4y ago
        Overall he sold about 44% of the company. He had about 45%. The guy above was telling me this would drive the price down. You know what actually happened though. The share price went up. The "billionaire shares are imaginary meme" is just a rhetorical trick designed to confuse the economically illiterate. The only interesting thing about this meme is figuring out where it came from and how it was so efficiently pumped into the public consciousness.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Oh yeah, he sold it very, very slowly, over 20 years. The hypothetical I was responding to is suggesting that these billionaires' fortunes be liquidated within a year. Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.
        pydry 4y ago
        Yeah, fair point. Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
        kortilla 4y ago
        Nobody said it’s a fiction. What is a fiction is pretending the current share price * number of shares is what the value is. That’s completely detached from how the stock market works.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      Well what you stated never happened, so not sure what there is to disprove. It took Gates a significant amount of time to wind down his ownership stake in Microsoft.

People that charge class warfare just don't want anything to change. Wealth accumulated by the rich mostly by burning dinosaurs is just as fictitious as any QE from the Fed.

pydry 4y ago

It's only fictitious if Jeff Bezos is comparing his wealth to your wealth. Try to tax it away and use it for something that would benefit everyone and suddenly it becomes a lot less abstract to him.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
It would become a lot less real too. The wealth of people who mostly get it from stock ownership is a complete fiction, driven by the scarcity of shares on the open market. If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding in AMZN shares, the whole company would be worth a lot less. Not due to any sort of magical effect of Jeff Bezos, but due to the market being flooded with supply.
- pydry 4y ago
  I guess this means if a hypothetical Bill Gates sold off the vast majority of the 45% of Microsoft stock he owned then the company would then be worth a lot less? It really is weird how frequently I see the view you espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so completely disproves it.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    So you think that Microsoft stock price wouldn't go down significantly if Bill Gates put 45% of the company up for sale?
    - coob 4y ago
      He sold most of his MSFT in 2020 when stepping down from the board.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        By that time, he had sold almost all of MSFT. He was a ~2% owner. That sale was a lot more similar in scale to a hedge fund selling a large block of shares than to Jeff Bezos liquidating his holdings.
    - pydry 4y ago
      IIRC put 44% of the company up for sale over a period of many years and the price of microsoft stock did indeed go up during that time. So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        The hypothetical was about selling them all at once, or a very short period of time.
        pydry 4y ago
        A) The OP did not mention this. B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        > A) The OP did not mention this. The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade". > B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k. Now you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would actually only get a fraction of the nominal value ascribed to them. Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade, and if the business avruay survives that long at its current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't), then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they theoretically own.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    In 2020, as I understand it, Bill gates sold less than 1% of MSFT on the open market there: his holding went from a bit over 2% to a bit over 1%. He had been steadily selling over the last two decades. Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's. When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares to buy Twitter.
    - pydry 4y ago
      Overall he sold about 44% of the company. He had about 45%. The guy above was telling me this would drive the price down. You know what actually happened though. The share price went up. The "billionaire shares are imaginary meme" is just a rhetorical trick designed to confuse the economically illiterate. The only interesting thing about this meme is figuring out where it came from and how it was so efficiently pumped into the public consciousness.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Oh yeah, he sold it very, very slowly, over 20 years. The hypothetical I was responding to is suggesting that these billionaires' fortunes be liquidated within a year. Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.
        pydry 4y ago
        Yeah, fair point. Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
        kortilla 4y ago
        Nobody said it’s a fiction. What is a fiction is pretending the current share price * number of shares is what the value is. That’s completely detached from how the stock market works.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Well what you stated never happened, so not sure what there is to disprove. It took Gates a significant amount of time to wind down his ownership stake in Microsoft.