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Wealth shown to a pixel scale (2021)
- tapland 3y agoI really wish there was another way to scroll. A lot of scroll wheels are, if you can believe it, not made for scrolling dozens of pages worth at a time and some even make noise while doing it!
- pjerem 3y agoI doubt Jeff Bezos’s scroll wheel makes noise when scrolling this.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> I really wish there was another way to scroll. ...there is. If you want to do a lot of scrolling, you click the mouse wheel. Then you just move the cursor down to scroll down or up to scroll up. You don't move the wheel at all. You can also use the various keyboard navigation options, like pgdn or the space bar.
- trothamel 3y agoDoesn't work for me - I'm not seeing a horizontal scrollbar.
- sergiotapia 3y agoHow do you scroll right?
- gabrielgio 3y agoShitf + Scroll Wheel
- sixothree 3y agoright arrow?
- Helmut10001 3y agoScrolling does not work (Chrome and Firefox), only right-arrow-key.
- tiku 3y agoSo absurd.
- HPsquared 3y agoAt that point it's not really comparable. Bezos doesn't have that many houses, meals etc. It just means he has control over a lot of assets.
- demondemidi 3y agoYeah a lot of people - like my elderly parents - don't understand stock valuation fluctuates and is not cash in the bank, and that his liquid assets are so obfuscated through bizarre holding mechanisms that no one really knows what these people are worth. That's why the Forbes list is a joke, I forget which billionaire said it but basically, "You don't know how much we are worth and you never will." I'm not even sure they know what they are worth ... how can someone with a thousand shell companies keep track? They just jet from one house to another, and their staff takes care of everything. I'd forget too if I slept in a different house every week.
- dbingham 3y agoI think this was designed with mobile in mind. It works great dude swiping on mobile.
- TheSockStealer 3y agoIt worked for me and I think this is actually really informative. However, vertical scroll, please
- hk1337 3y ago> Scroll Right It was fun for a bit but it got old.
- W4ldi 3y agoWho cares? All of this is just envy. The author doesn't want the rich person to be rich. It's not about whether everyone is wealthy or not. Let's say we distribute Bezos money to everyone. That's 24 Dollars per person. It would change nothing. Nada.
- wredue 3y agoMassive wealth hoarding impacts everything from social programs to inflation to who can own a house to who can afford to have kids. This is a serious economic issue.
- brvsft 3y agoMost of his wealth is AMZN stock which never existed before Jeff Bezos made Amazon. What exactly do you think he is hoarding? Wealth is not zero-sum.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wredue 3y agoMost of his wealth being Amazon stocks makes this companies treatments of employees WORSE not better. The fact that one person can steal so much wages from his employees while simultaneously also getting “paid” through their equity, and that stealing wages and wage growth from his employees is viewed as positive is everything that’s wrong with capitalism.
- pipes 3y agoWhat does "hoarding" mean here? Amazon's value is reflected in its share price, this isn't decided by one person or entity. When someone or some entity buys or sells Amazon stock they are deciding what they think the stock is worth. He owns a large amount of this stock because he founded the company. Is he hoarding Amazon stock? Do you mean there is a finite amount of wealth and he has hoarded it somehow in Amazon !? He worked to make his company as valuable as possible, which is what his job was.
- titzer 3y agoGiven a reasonable benchmark of $3 million to retire comfortably in most places in the US, Jeff Bezos could retire a mere 60,000 times. Tell me how a person can "earn" enough money by doing work that produces 60,000 lifetimes worth of wealth. You can't. Instead, Jeff is the beneficiary of a system by which he extracts an increment of the benefit that every person participating in the system derives (presumably over the old system). It boggles the mind that the system allows some people to accrue that much wealth by summing the indirect benefit to other people and yet some other people are stuck spinning their wheels their entire lives. Inequality is extreme.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- W4ldi 3y ago> Tell me how a person can "earn" enough money by doing work that produces 60,000 lifetimes worth of wealth. You can't. By providing value or services to people which they want to spend money on. It's pretty simple actually. Though not simple in execution.
- Kapura 3y agoJeff Bezos had the idea of "what if we put a store online," and because he was the most successful at executing the idea of selling stuff using the computer, he deserves effectively infinity money? That seems like a super radical position, imo. No one person has ever invented something good enough that they deserve an infinite amount of money. Maybe if somebody cures cancer some day.
- monero-xmr 3y agoIf you took all of Bezos' wealth, and evenly distributed it to everyone in America, it would be about $600 per person. If instead you tried to spend it on eliminating the federal deficit, it would knock out about 5% of it. I would rather Bezos is allowed to try and invest it in something as impactful as Amazon again. He's certainly fair likelier to do it than, say, the US government, or you yourself.
- onpointed 3y agoYet, if you confiscated (taxed) the entire wealth of the top 400 ($3.2 trillion) that would not even cover an entire year of the U.S. federal budget ($5.5 trillion). https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
- xutopia 3y agoThat's a comment that I hate. They could still be taxed an appropriate amount. Why should the majority of the tax burden be on the middle class? We pay a larger percentage of our income in taxes than they ever did.
- nickpp 3y agoThe reason investment are taxed as they are is to encourage them. Society as large gains much more from what Bezos did than Bezos himself. However, were we to discourage his entrepreneurial act 30 years ago (and others entrepreneurs as well) - we’d all lose.
- golergka 3y agoThe only appropriate amount to tax anybody is 0.
- mschaef 3y agoWhere does that leave you funding commonly useful services? (Military, Police, Roads, etc.)
- srackey 3y ago“If you found a company and it’s too successful, that wealth should be taken from you.” “I see, and who should take the money?” “The government!” More commie drivel on the front page of HN. I thought this was an entrepreneurship forum?
- Camus134 3y ago[dead]
- adriang133 3y agoIt's crazy, right? It's always baffling how otherwise very intelligent people like Google/Meta engineers are communists. They're basically brain dead outside of their immediate area of expertise. These people have no idea what wealth means, it would indeed be a problem if Bezos was consuming all his $100B+ but he isn't. The value he created through Amazon is likely orders of magnitude greater than his net worth. If you agree that nobody deserves or needs that wealth, then please move to Cuba or North Korea. And enjoy your life, there's no Bezoses there.
- 2023throwawayy 3y agoYea, we’re crazy dumb idiots for thinking it’s not great that so many people are literally starving and homeless and one dude has more wealth than Smaug.
- srackey 3y agoThe federal government spends 25 times Jeff Bezos’s net worth each year. They’re also the ones tasked with making sure people aren’t starving and homeless. You’re crazy dumb idiots for thinking Bezos having money is connected at all to homeless and hungry people existing (in fact, I’d think you’ll find those things are negatively correlated — the USSR and Mao’s China had no billionaires, but boy did people go hungry!)
- dahart 3y ago
- nickpp 3y agoNow compute all the value Jeff Bezos added to our society. It’s the sum of the value each Amazon customer/seller/employee/investor extracted by using it. I bet it’s an order of magnitude larger. What a tremendous deal we got: such an amazing value at the tiny price of the part Jeff got to keep. No wonder capitalist societies are leapfrogging societies dabbling in various forms of watered down communism.
- jandrese 3y agoJeff Bezos is never going to love you, no matter how brown your nose is.
- c54 3y agoBasically the idea is whether one’s accumulation of wealth is actually tied to their positive impact on society: does wealth accrue in a morally correct manner? In Capital, Piketty argues no. For cases like bezos (or Gates, Musk, etc) it’s at least the case that they did give something to our society. However those people benefitted from countless other inventions before them whose inventors did not benefit from to the same tune as the super wealthy. For every computer billionaire there are hundreds of researchers who worked on transistors, internet protocols, and so on, in order to make something like Amazon possible. SpaceX benefits incredibly from NASA research. Etc. And those are the ones where we can at least contend they did something. On the other hand you have people like Lillaine Bettancourt, the daughter and heiress of the L’Oreal fortune. Piketty writes: > Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years—increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt—the heiress of L’Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier—increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes. > In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working. In other words wealth does not accumulate in line with what you’ve done for humanity. It’s not a “tremendous deal” without bounds. We’re told that rich people got rich because they deserve it, and that’s just a pernicious self-aggrandizing lie we’ve inherited from Calvin and others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology) I definitely think accumulation is an incentive and some people do greater things than others, but I think our system is distorted in that it considers some to have done so so so much more when that’s not really the case.
- Mistletoe 3y agoHow much do you think Jeff could get of that $185 billion liquid? I've always wondered about these ways of calculating net worth, especially ones including stock. Once they tried to liquidate even a small amount of it, the price would crash as you go lower and lower to find buyers and word gets out you are trying to sell. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketdepth.asp I'd like to see a list of wealthiest individuals based on diversified liquid assets they could reasonably be expected to sell. I always imagine it is some old family that has gold, commodities, treasuries, stocks, real estate, etc. etc.
- mschaef 3y agoOften times, people with this sort of wealth will extract value by borrowing against the stock as collateral.
- sethev 3y agoAmazon wouldn't be worth less if someone else owned it and he only owns 10% of the company. So all of it.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI disagree with both points. I do not think Amazon stock liquidity could absorb 185 billion in stock sales. Elon sold about $23 billion in Tesla stock from April 2022 to December 2022 to buy Twitter and my memory was the stock going from about $400 to $100 that year. Of course there are other factors in the decline but it’s certainly a component of it. Bezos would need to sell almost 10x that much.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2021) Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22998347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22998347
- xyzelement 3y agoI find this kind of thing maliciously obtuse. It's malicious because it's designed to breed resentment through unintentional or intentional ignorance. Using Bezos as an example - an interesting proportion would be something like: how many customers (eg, people who find his work valuable) does Bezos have versus an average American? How many people has Bezos employed and made successful (or at the very least, gave them a better job than they would have otherwise?) vs an average American. To wit, it doesn't make sense to compare "wealth" without also talking about "impact" in a case like Bezos. The other ignorant thing is this makes it seem like his wealth is some sort of zero sum game where if he has a dollar that means you don't have it. The reality of his wealth is something like this: he owns a chunk of Amazon, AND Amazon has grown to be valuable and valued. The same guy, had Amazon gone nowhere, would have nothing. The mechanism of him becoming rich is primarily the world collectively deciding that the thing he has built is valuable, rather than him taking dollars out of your pockets. Why does this bother me? Because I find things that breed resentment in the world to be a detrimental evil.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoWealth isn't quite zero sum but it is adversarial. If someone has a lot of it they can use it against you. Use it to propagandize against your class interests, use it to manipulate the political environment to your detriment. The wealth may not be zero sum but the power it represents certainly can be. "How many people has he '''made successful'''" is a fuzzy and already biased metric, how do you decide on that one? Why not "how many people would have had a better job if not for his company" or "how many liters of urine in soda bottles because of his policies?" Wealth is concrete and measurable. People can differ on what exactly the consequences of wealth inequality are but I think nearly everyone will agree that it measures something worthwhile to know.
- adriang133 3y agoRidiculous. The ONLY way to build wealth in a capitalist system is to provide value to other people. Case in point: Bezos and every other billionaire in the US. You are missing the point. The only way Bezos can take a cent from you is if you willingly give him the money. In contrast, in a socialist system, the government takes money from you regardless of whether you want to give it or not. Spoiler: no one wants to give it. Governments are 91283128391823918293819381x more evil than billionaires.
- armchairhacker 3y agoWhat about material goods? My understanding is that this wealth can’t be converted into materials without running into shortages (e.g. Jeff Bezos could theoretically purchase billions of hotdogs or acres or medicine, but in practice we’d run out). I believe we produce over 100% of the food we need to feed everyone but under 200%, and logistics / food waste is another issue. Among the housing crisis there are a lot of vacant apartments and buildings with extra space, but idk if there are enough to give everyone a furnished apartment with plumbing, electricity, proper heating/cooling, and access to community. Also debt. Debt isn’t material so it could be paid with the excess wealth (or the government could just say “your debt is gone”). The problem is that now you have to pay the companies who are owed the debt, and what will they spend the money on? If they just save it like Jeff Bezos, good, but if they spend it on more materials we run into the same issue. And you can’t just not pay the debtors or getting a loan becomes much, much harder. I think inequality is a serious issue, I think it’s very obvious and the website does a great job conveying it. But I also don’t think it’s as simple as “just redistribute the money”. The bigger issue which I think everyone has good reason to want to support is logistics: getting people what they need and want, as efficiently as possible, while reducing waste.
- onedognight 3y ago> The bigger issue which I think everyone has good reason to want to support is logistics: getting people what they need and want, as efficiently as possible, while reducing waste. And when everyone supports something, someone can become fabulously wealthy working on this, like shipping magnates, railroad magnates, oil magnates and Jeff.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zubairq 3y agoI scrolled through all of Jezz Bezos waealth. Doesn't feel like that much when you scroll through it like that. When I hear the number $185 Billion it sounds like it should be a lot larger
- preommr 3y agoWealth inequality is bad. But arguments like the one in the link are pointless - Bezos could have 10x the money he does and it has nothing to do with humanitarian efforts. The government spends way more, countries spend way more and problems don't get fixed. I'd like to see that 9 billion for all cancer treatments graphed against the trillions americans spend on healthcare cumalatively. Or if we really wanted to be snide about it, the total americans spent on pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Billionaires shouldn't exist because market forces and taxes should eventually chip away at that wealth. But people make it seem like all the world's problems will be solved if billionaires just suddenly lost their wealth.
- troupe 3y agoImagine a scenario where the entire population is starving. That is a bad situation. Now imagine that a few people figure out how to create food and as a result, almost everyone has enough food to keep themselves alive, but the people who discovered the way to make food have billions of times more food than the average person--way more than they need. I am much more concerned about raising the standard of living for the average person than being worried about trying to prevent someone from being wildly successful. Personally, Amazon has increased my standard of living and the same is true for a large portion of the US...which is why the company is so valuable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- garbageoverflow 3y agoI think a less radical idea would be to, once and for all, force all billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes and then use the amount they paid extra to solve some of the worlds problems. I didn't do the math so I don't really know what could be done with such sums.
- itsyaboi 3y agoHow do you imagine the "forcing" would happen, hypothetically speaking?
- dlsuekdhf 3y ago[flagged]
- lionkor 3y agoI may be stupid, but he doesn't have that money, right? We all know this is net worth, and what he has is likely only a small fraction of this. In fact, if he was to try to liquidate this wealth, it would go poof due to how the market works, right? So, why is the author so mad about it? If I make a company and sell one percent to someone for 1000 USD, my net worth would rise by around 100k (as a bad example), but have pretty much none of that. Right? Thats what this is, isn't it? Im sitting there with 1000 bucks which I spend on the next phone, and im dirt poor with a lot of """wealth""". I find these comparisons a bit disingenuous
- aimor 3y agoFor what it's worth, the author addresses your questions here: https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...
- lionkor 3y agoYeah, he can obviously liquidate some of it, and use a lot of that wealth as leverage etc. but that doesn't make the graphic any less deceptive
- jryan49 3y agoHe doesn't literally have all that money liquid to spend. Isn't that just the value of a part of Amazon? And if he tries to turn that into cash wouldn't the value of Amazon crash due to the selloff? I'm not saying he doesn't have tons of wealth or that he deserves this much "leverage" but I think it's disingenuous to make a graph like this trying to compare dollar to dollar value to actual things and how much they cost?
- jryan49 3y agoI found this https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE_PAPER_BILLIONAIRE.md https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE... addressing those concerns.
- tornato7 3y agoThis is old, but still very cool. I like to look at it the other way - here are some stats to make Bezos seem poor: - Invest $8.30 at 10% interest for 250 years and you're richer than Bezos - Jeff Bezos couldn't afford to buy all the houses in Coronado, California (a small island that's approx. 8 square miles of city) - If Bezos put tried to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with gold coins (a la Scrooge McDuck) it would be less than 6 inches deep before he ran out of money
- RivieraKid 3y agoConsumption inequality is also an important thing to consider. There's no way Bezos consumes (spends) $180B during his life. As long as he's not spending the wealth, wealth inequality is not a huge problem. He said he plans to give most of his wealth to charity but didn't specify any numbers. Another thought - if he gives all the money to the bottom 60% and they start spending, the net effect would be that economic output would stay roughly constant but consumption would be redirected from the top 40% to the bottom 60%.
- karmakaze 3y agoThese are the 'damn lies' form of statistics. It starts out showing 2D representations, then switches to a linear format. It also uses sideways scrolling which is cumbersome than vertical which would be far more natural (but people are too used to scrolling far in this direction so let's do something awkward). It's hard for me to say what 'dimensionality' accurately portrays magnitude of wealth. Showing us say 2d projections (pictures) of 3D cubes might correlate, but I suspect that it more of a logarithmic than cube root relationship.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoHow did you determine that? I saw no indication that the scale had ever changed (from the starting definition of 1 pixel per $1,000). At a certain point it tells you how much money a vertical column of pixels represents, but that's still based on the original scale (factored by the fixed height of the shaded region).
- karmakaze 3y agoThe first three areas are shown as square-shaped rectangles. Then at $1b, it switches to using a fixed height thus the 'size' is a linear dimension $amount/height rather than sqrt($amount). Technically all these have the correct number of pixels, but we can perceive a larger magnitude range when laid out in squares rather than long rectangles with a limited/fixed height. There's nothing special about using a line, square, or cube to illustrate amounts. However if I were trying to have people actually get a sense of a large range I would use cubes as that's the highest dimension we can intuitively grasp. e.g. picking up a metal object of visible volume weighs about as much as we expect.
- zephrx1111 3y agoI don’t understand, did Jeff robbed somebody to get the money?
- anter 3y agoIs it just me or is there a noticeable increase of the "left to far left" comments on HN recently? I don't remember seeing that much of a "eat the evil rich exploiting the poor and virtuous" stuff here before. People migrating from twitter?
- pharmakom 3y agoIncreasing inequality leads to polarized politics Millennials being locked out of developmental milestones Covid showing that sometimes governments can be effective
- theironhammer 3y agoBecause Jeff Bezos knows how to create monopolies. He was able to create those monopolies because Republican and Democrat govt's had weakened anti-monopoly laws. Capitalism thrives on competition.
- aristofun 3y agoIt’s sad to see how dumb (even somewhat educated) people just spread inequality per se as the root cause of all evil or the main problem to adress. We (relatively smart STEM people) must understand that first, there’s ergodicity to inequality and many other more important metrics and issues to address. And second, that it is poor people who need to be helped, not rich people who need to be robbed. Inequality per se shows nothing about the quality of the society. Don’t stand still - educate yourself, educate your friends. We need to be strong and supress dumb people’s narratives. They lead to nothing but wars and destruction :(
- b3nji 3y agoMoney isn't finite, because someone has more than you doesn't mean they are taking from you. Envy isn't a virtue. Focus on what you can change in your life to be better than the old you, don't compare yourself to others, it won't go well.