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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 thoug
by 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 agoOh 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 agoYeah, fair point. Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
- kortilla 4y agoNobody 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.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI think too many people equate fiction and lies. Stock prices and market caps are not complete lies (the company is still worth something) but they are fictions. I like to think of fiction as "a lie that tells a truth that cannot be told any other way" (adapted from Albert Camus). Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.