Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/bezos-surpasses-gates-as-world-s-richest-ahead-of-amazon-results

by fargo • 9 years ago

462 399 9 years ago

vanderZwan• 9 years ago

Hasn't Bill Gates mostly been focused on spending his fortune as effectively as he can on philantropy for the last decade or so? In that light it's more amazing it took that long.

rottyguy• 9 years ago

even more amazing is that a lot of his [gates] fortune has been amassed as a result of one money manager after his departure from msoft.

okreallywtf4• 9 years ago

Got any more information on that? I would be interested to read about it.

pyrrhotech• 9 years ago

his wealth has barely beaten the s&p 500 since he left though. The growth is more to do with the bull market in general than the specific feats of his money manager

torrent-of-ions• 9 years ago

I seem to remember reading that Gates is still earning more than he is "giving away".

libria• 9 years ago

What a jerk

TeMPOraL• 9 years ago

That sounds like a sustainable approach to giving.

Pica_soO• 9 years ago

Immortal being needs some runway.

snegu4• 9 years ago

Why is "giving away" in quotes? Do you think he's actually keeping it and committing massive fraud?

sqeaky4• 9 years ago

I am easy to classify as an anti-microsoft zealot and I am convince Gates is doing immeasurable good with his work in Africa against malaria. I haven't really looked into in the past year or so though.

nerdponx• 9 years ago

Interesting point. Maybe we should consider "total lifetime net worth accrual" instead of current net worth.

adam12• 9 years ago

Better yet, total lifetime charitable giving.

martinmusio7• 9 years ago

right! they have different focuses. Nevertheless, this trend will strongly continue!

ekianjo• 9 years ago

spending his fortune

How much of his fortune has he actually spent?

kevindqc2• 9 years ago

Just for his foundation, as of 2013 he had donated 28 billions.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation.[1][9]

Citations: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation-timeli... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-16/bill-gates-retakes...

Apparently he is worth 90 billions. Let's assume he has donated 2 more billions in the last 4 years to make it 30 billion. That means he donated 25% of his worth to his foundation. I'm sure he has donated money to other things.

aiyodev• 9 years ago

That's what the press release says. But his promises have yet to catch up with his income.

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

Wikipedia almost always classify every billionaire as philanthropist for no good reason. The only exception is Bill Gates who is trying to make this world a better place.

Ascetik3• 9 years ago

The only exception is Bill Gates who is trying to make this world a better place.

I hardly call being a eugenicist "making the world a better place". The Nazis tried it too. They also thought they were "trying to make the world a better place". Bill Gates is a notorius eugenicist.

randyrand• 9 years ago

Honestly, I feel like if you're a billionaire its hard to not be a philanthropist.

sah2ed• 9 years ago

The only exception is Bill Gates who is trying to make this world a better place.

Bill Gates certainly isn't the first to play the philanthropy card after a ruthless spell in business. There was John Rockefeller before him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller#Legacy

neiled• 9 years ago

I was surprised by this. Anyone know the levels of philanthropy of Bezos vs Gates? I've ready many times of the great work and resources (money and otherwise) that Mr Gates has contributed to many causes.

tuna-piano• 9 years ago

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/business/media/jeff-be...

bluGill• 9 years ago

A lot of rich people have decided the best thing for them to do is get as much money as they can and leave it to a worthy cause after they die. That is they spend their life investing and reinvesting, overall doing what they know best: making more money. Often it takes money to make money, and by not giving it away now when an opportunity to invest a lot of money comes up they have that money where as if they had donated it they wouldn't have it to earn more. When they die the amount they have to give is then overall much greater than if they had given away large parts of it.

I don't know that I agree with it or not, but that is the thinking and it isn't completely unreasonable.

Note that Bill Gates has been getting a lot of money from Warren Buffet and other rich people. I don't know the break down (it is likely public information: I just don't care to look it up), but it isn't fair to say Bill Gates is working on his own, though he is clearly giving his valuable time.

BoiledCabbage• 9 years ago

A lot of rich people have decided the best thing for them to do is get as much money as they can and leave it to a worthy cause after they die.

Yeah I don't know about that. The majority of rich people decide what they want to do is make as much money as possible and distribute it to family members. It's there money so obviously they have the right to do just that.

I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates in that he has chosen to be as effective with his money as possible in positively impacting the world. I believe he has committed to giving away 99% (or 99.9%?) of his money to noble causes before he passes. As well as inspiring others to make similar pledges.

curun1r5• 9 years ago

The problem with this theory is that it disregards opportunity cost. This is what I don't get about everyone that lionizes Gates and everything he has done with his billions. Those billions came from depriving others. What would those at Netscape have done with the extra billions if they hadn't been forced to sell for a fraction of what they could have become? What would those at BeOS have done with their money if Microsoft's illegal OEM deals hadn't made them fail? What would all the businesses who were forced to spend money they didn't have to on Microsoft software have done with it if it hadn't flowed to Microsoft instead?

Microsoft's business practices, in my view, introduced greater inefficiency into the software and business ecosystem. They were a parasite that drained resources from every healthy business "organism" and no amount of philanthropy can make up for the opportunity cost paid for Gates to amass his wealth.

VMG• 9 years ago

Prime Day paid off it seems

DannyB2• 9 years ago

This probably does not change Bill Gates' enjoyment of day to day life, or lack thereof, whatever the case may be. It depends on whether Bill Gates is obsessed by these kinds of facts, or whether he can enjoy life without a tiny hand size measuring contest.

Verdex_22• 9 years ago

Hear hear. Bill Gates is trying to kill malaria. He doesn't care about having the biggest number next to his name when he dies. He wants to be the guy who's known for killing hunger in Africa.

gk12• 9 years ago

There's nothing to suggest Jeff Bezos cares about the contest, either. He's focused on growing his company, just as Bill Gates was 20 years ago.

graphitezepp2• 9 years ago

This is actually a shame if Bezos doesn't do anything good or interesting with it. Seeing piles of money go back into the money making game is sad compared to what a pile of money does in the hands of a Gates or Musk.

notheguyouthink4• 9 years ago

Frankly, I'd love if Bill Gates had nearly zero at his death.

How amazing would it be for a man with that much wealth to set some aside for his children, whatever he thinks establishes their life and his duty to them, and then make it his goal to have nothing by the time he dies.

Set up foundations to kill hunger, diseases, etc. But as death approaches and the years drag on, really ramp up the giving.

"Bill Gates: Net worth $0" would make an amazing headstone for a man who spent the latter part of his life giving.

Chris2048• 9 years ago

tiny hand size measuring contest

what?

Tharkun• 9 years ago

That would a Trump joke. He doesn't seem to be offended by penis size jokes, but seems oddly sensitive about jokes regarding the size of his (tiny) hands.

steanne• 9 years ago

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/10/graydon-carter-don...

fgandiya2• 9 years ago

Probably a PC term for "dick waving contest"

boramalper• 9 years ago

This probably does not change Bill Gates' enjoyment of day to day life

He is the second richest person on Earth, why be sad? =)

dumbfounder• 9 years ago

Congrats dude, well earned. I expect him to put some serious space between him and rest of the pack in the next 10 years.

droidist2• 9 years ago

Damn it, why did I sell half my Jeff Bezos stock

krapp• 9 years ago

Just imagine the quality of head wax he can afford now.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

There is a wax brand on Amazon that has 5,237 5 star reviews all posted within the last week. He should try that one.

kelukelugames• 9 years ago

Is this a bald joke?

drewmate• 9 years ago

Ceci n'est pas une blague chauve

miguelrochefort• 9 years ago

I call 100 billion by 2019.

pepehuehue• 9 years ago

I call (Bezos will be worth) 100 billion before 2019.

bvm3• 9 years ago

Is there a measure of the most fully liquid richest person? i.e. the individual that holds the most cash.

gk12• 9 years ago

People at that level try to hide their cash, so that's a difficult list to make.

bvm3• 9 years ago

I feel like it might be fun (though ultimately utterly utterly worthless) to make a kind of 'best guess' one. I have genuinely no idea where one would start...

randomdata• 9 years ago

At a single moment in time? Average over the year? I would imagine that the individual changes as investments are bought and sold throughout the day.

adventured4• 9 years ago

Bloomberg tries to track that.

They're currently pegging Gates at sitting on $43 billion in cash out of his $90.8 billion total fortune. His investment vehicle, Cascade, is well known; I assume that's one way Bloomberg is attempting to keep tabs on the cash level. I've occasionally checked Bill's numbers on the Bloomberg Billionaire's list, I don't recall his cash level ever being so high. You can essentially guarantee that if the $43b is even remotely accurate, nobody else on earth is topping that (save for an extraordinarily rich leader / royalty, but even then $43b is immense).

Most of the richest billionaires have their wealth heavily tied up in one or a few businesses. Gates, among the hyper billionaires, is rare in the sense that he's basically sitting on a giant investment portfolio at this point, meaning he can turn most of it to cash dramatically easier than his peers.

njarboe• 9 years ago

Berkshire Hathaway is really just a bunch of separate businesses tied together by Warren Buffet and the quick access to the pile of cash Berkshire Hathaway has. Exception proves the rule I guess.

apexalpha• 9 years ago

Holding your money cash is a pretty bad idea... Why wouldn't you invest it.

differentView• 9 years ago

So you can swim in it in your money bin.

adventured4• 9 years ago

Holding your money in cash can be an extraordinarily good idea.

See: 2007-2009.

Gates for example, is dedicating his wealth to important causes such as eliminating malaria. If he does something foolish and rides a massive stock market bubble back down while he's fully invested, that could mean $30 or $40 billion less for attacking such problems in the next 10-20 years (there's no guarantee the market will come back to these levels soon, it could take a decade or multiple decades).

If the market drops and stays low, he could easily be put into a situation where it's again time to perform some asset liquidation for funding purposes for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That is, those market 'losses' would become non-recoverable at that point.

Sitting on $90.8 billion as he is, there is a good argument to be had given how high this market is, that that's a vast amount of money for him to distribute versus his age. He has N time left in his life, and an incredibly sum to dispose of yet and he isn't making nearly enough progress on that front versus his standing wealth.

Between Gates & Buffett, and assuming modest growth in their current wealth levels, the Gates Foundation has to figure out how to productively distribute perhaps $250+ billion yet over 25-30 years. The target was to do so in Bill / Melinda's lifetimes, then they shifted it to within a decade or two of their passing. That's not going to happen, they have too much money and can't dispose of it fast enough.

seanmcdirmid• 9 years ago

Not to mention the bugs (from what I learned watching breaking bad).

Integer• 9 years ago

I have a nomination for the most concentrated private cash stockpile: a Russian police colonel kept 131 Million USD in an apartment.[1] [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-14/russians-...

bvm3• 9 years ago

I used to work a night shift in a cash depot that routinely stored over £200m. It was famously the subject of a heist, and the robbers only quit at £30m because they couldn't fit any more in. That was a lot of money.

Verdex_22• 9 years ago

Steve Yegge Story about Jeff Bezos: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...

Joel on Software Story about Bill Gates: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

Bonus Bill Gates Pancake Problem story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...

Allvitende• 9 years ago

Great reads. Thanks!

nikofeyn3• 9 years ago

that steve yegge story is...anti-climatic. you mean bezos pointed out he left off data mining and machine learning in a presentation about generalist engineers? what vast and yet cutting insight! ugh.

that story just reeks of the blind idolization that goes on with these people. you see it in musk devotees as well. yes, these people are smart, successful, and driven. but they aren't literal incarnations of comic-esque super geniuses or intellectual gods. they are people who's primary power is their drive.

how about just respecting their drive and intelligence rather than putting it on a pedestal? think originally and don't be some dumb slave that bows down to supposed super intelligence. question whether those people really have the capability to understand a certain novel idea, because they may not. they got to where they are because they followed a path and followed it HARD, meaning there are maybe paths they didn't have time to consider.

hunterjrj• 9 years ago

Well, this story was posted in 2011 and although Yegge doesn't specify a date, I think it's safe to assume that the story took place years before the blog was posted as Yegge had by then already moved on to Google.

So this means that Bezos was thinking about data mining and machine learning in a presentation about generalist engineers at least 1/2 decade before this became common place.

thavalai• 9 years ago

The seeming "idolization" is probably to make up for what he wrote about Bezos (and Amazon) in his famous "accidentally public" post that preceded it: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

psyc• 9 years ago

Reducing Bezos' intellect to a banality like "drive and intelligence" tosses out a lot of fascinating particulars.

gizmodo59• 9 years ago

Joel's anecdote was refreshing to read! Thanks for the share! Bill Gates is definitely remarkable

Bromskloss• 9 years ago

More to the point statement of the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting

shimon_e• 9 years ago

Somewhere there is a community of retailers that hates Amazon as much as Slashdotters hated Microsoft.

rralian• 9 years ago

I think that's a community of ex-retailers.

giarc• 9 years ago

I think their last name is Walton.

Turing_Machine5• 9 years ago

And yet Walmart is still much larger than Amazon. In 2015, Walmart had sales of about $508 billion, while Amazon only had $83 billion. AMZ barely cracked the top ten:

https://nrf.com/2015/top100-table

The difference, of course, is that Bezos controls a much larger portion of AMZ than the Waltons control of WMT.

None of them are anywhere near John D. Rockefeller, who had an inflation-adjusted net worth of $392 billion, equivalent to 1.5-2% of the entire U.S. economy at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller

efficax3• 9 years ago

I find it weird to report on this like it's a race or competition. His net worth bump right now is entirely due to rash market speculation and the recent tech bubble. When the crash comes (and it will), AMZN could easily be down to $500 in a week, and he'll just be insanely rich again.

zoren2• 9 years ago

When will this crash come? And how do you know?

efficax3• 9 years ago

Because markets move in cycles? We've had multiple crashes in the past 40 years, most recently in 2008. Markets always crash, it's what they do.

HillaryBriss• 9 years ago

they've been saying that since 1997

efficax3• 9 years ago

And the tech stock market crashed in 2000-02. We're back on a rebound, especially in the past 5 years. Bubbles burst, it's literally the one reliable law of markets since the advent of joint stock companies.

undersuit2• 9 years ago

I bought some Amazon stock when it was ~190. I sold at ~310 because I was happy with my profits. The crash is always coming.

odiroot• 9 years ago

I wonder how does his security detail look like.

_Codemonkeyism• 9 years ago

I was one of the guys writing M$ and annoyed by the shady business practices of Gates.

Today he has my utter respect on how he tranformed and how he spent his money.

andreygrehov• 9 years ago

Interesting. Anything you could share with us?

donatj• 9 years ago

I'm personally more than a little impressed on his anti malaria work.

iicc• 9 years ago

https://www.gatesnotes.com/2017-Annual-Letter

quadrangle6• 9 years ago

I think a shift from apparently grotesque capitalist of the worst sort (embrace-extend-extinguish, FUD, anti-competitive practices, abuse of monopoly and on and on) to a philanthropist of a decent middle-ground sort who still extends his power through philanthropy (such as working to be in the position to dictate education policy and education-related technology through Foundation funding — despite not deserving any say in that field) merits at best a form of respect that remains less than "utter".

pm902• 9 years ago

Correct. Don't get me wrong, I 100% respect and appreciate what he is doing, not just by giving but also actively engaging in educating the American public about important issues they wouldn't be aware of otherwise. But in being charitable later in life, he is kinda following in the footsteps of people like Carnegie (gave a ton to CMU) and Rockefeller (gave to many places but UChicago is probably the most famous).

backtoyoujim• 9 years ago

I am struggling with the idea of using property rights to create financial inequity so that one man's moral stance can be furthered through charity.

antaviana• 9 years ago

He happened to be some kind a Robin Hood, taking it from the rich (who could afford buying his software as opposed to pirating it) and giving it to the poor.

ttoinou12• 9 years ago

Robin Hood stole from the government people to give it back to taxpayer, depending on the story you read :)

eip• 9 years ago

You should probably do a little more research.

m12k• 9 years ago

Officially at least - there is a chance that Putin is actually the richest person in the world: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/bill-br...

"He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, and my anti-corruption activities would no longer be tolerated."

adventured4• 9 years ago

That would be unofficially.

Nobody has managed to prove Putin is sitting on the claimed wealth and Putin / his circle has denied it. I seriously doubt anyone is going to step forward with the evidence necessary to prove it, for obvious reasons.

MisterBastahrd2• 9 years ago

Putin doesn't need to be personally wealthy. He's got the largesse of the Russian government at his disposal and a populace which has been conditioned for generations to support the person in power.

e40• 9 years ago

What is known publicly is certainly an indication that he is criminally wealthy. I can't find the reference right now, but there's a Russian bureaucrat close to Putin that makes a small salary, yet he has a large villa in Italy and many other properties, totally many millions of <insert currency> of net worth. There was even a Russian citizen that was documenting and publishing the info and using drones to video him at his Italian villa. I wish I could find that link, it was fascinating.

Ah, found it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/europe/russia-dmitr...

The video, with English subtitles, as almost 24M views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwlk7_GF9g

GFischer2• 9 years ago

There's a LOT of people that are richer than Gates or Bezos, but many don't have their fortunes personally tied or traceable to them.

I've been told that Arab sheiks in Saudi Arabia and the UAE laugh at the claims of Gates or Bezos or Slim being the richest person in the world. Same would happen with the Russian plutocrats, and whomever controls Chinese companies at the moment. There are other strange arrangements like Ingvar Kamprad and IKEA (which is supposedly a nonprofit but Kamprad is effectively a dictator and uses company funds for whatever he wants).

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and...

metaphorm2• 9 years ago

asset liquidity matters though, right? amazon or msft stock are highly liquid. stolen renaissance paintings, giant palaces in the middle of a desert wasteland, and hereditary claims to mineral rights are not very liquid assets.

rglover• 9 years ago

I mean that Ikea thing is brilliant. May not be the most honest but damn impressive circumvention of the system.

cx1000• 9 years ago

I've been told that Arab sheiks in Saudi Arabia and the UAE laugh at the claims of Gates or Bezos or Slim being the richest person in the world.

Can you post a source? The link you posted only talks about IKEA.

indiedevlpr3• 9 years ago

Considering Western world and its media's solipsism, this might be true.

xzel• 9 years ago

This is very true. For example I have some family friends that would easily crack into the low end of the Forbes billionaires list but they operate their business legally in the islands south of America (sorry for vagueness, it is intended). No one has ever come knocking from Forbes and they like it that way.

rsync• 9 years ago

"I've been told that Arab sheiks in Saudi Arabia and the UAE laugh at the claims of Gates or Bezos or Slim being the richest person in the world."

Some have laughed right back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcaIA9SU7o

sparkling• 9 years ago

The article and specifically this statement consists of unverifiable myths and speculation. Or, as people like to call it today, "fake news".

dalbasal4• 9 years ago

This kind of thing is a reminder that money, wealth, ownership and related concepts, aren't really real. They're cultural constructs, abstractions, rules....

Anyway..... abstractions sometimes fray at the extreme ends. The concept of property doesn't quite apply to Putin.

Years ago, I had a conversation urban planner mate about some building that couldn't be changed (preservation) or used (building codes & safety). I argued that this makes it public property Him -'You can't just take property off someone'. Me - 'We already have, haven't we?' He couldn't get his head around my meaning.

Around here (Ireland) landowners often "own" roads that border their land. This ownership amounts to a responsibility for cutting hedges and paying taxes on it. They don't (I think) have any rights to it that others don't.

Ownership is a set of rules about what an owner can do with something. If you own an apple, but aren't allowed to eat it, gift it, etc. do you really own it?

Does the King of Saudi Arabia (another candidate for wealthiest man) "own" everything in the country? I think he has the legal right to do anything with any thing. Does he own all "public" assets controlled by the crown, like Saudi Aramco (valued somewhere between $1trn and $10trn)? If not where's this distinction?

agumonkey• 9 years ago

If you own an apple, but aren't allowed to eat it, gift it, etc. do you really own it?

The only right left is to not let someone else have it I guess ?

okreallywtf4• 9 years ago

Does the King of Saudi Arabia (another candidate for wealthiest man) "own" everything in the country? I think he has the legal right to do anything with any thing. Does he own all "public" assets controlled by the crown, like Saudi Aramco (valued somewhere between $1trn and $10trn)? If not where's this distinction?

That is an interesting point, but in terms of the Russian Oligarchs I think part of the distinction is they are (and have been) attempting to export that wealth and diversify it so that if they do lose power they will still be insanely wealthy. Maybe not 200bn wealthy but still massively wealthy. That is why the Magnitsky act is so important [1], because it makes it harder for them to move their money out of Russia. Granted a lot of wealth is coupled with control over natural resources and industry, but the more I read the more I realize Russian (like probably chinese and US as well) money is everywhere and much harder to track. The Saudis I'm sure do the same things in terms of investment, but whether they do so with as much secrecy and in avoidance of sanctions I'm not sure.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/21/politics/russian-adoptions-mag...

JetSpiegel• 9 years ago

I would quote Dune. The measure of "ownership" is if you can destroy something.

By that definition, Putin does own the entirety of Russia, "private" enterprises included.

elmar2• 9 years ago

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." - Frank Herbert, Dune

0xbear5• 9 years ago

I don't believe it. Is he rich? Without a doubt. Is he "richest in the world"? Not a chance. Three letter agencies from all over the world would be all over such juicy evidence given his lack of compliance with the wishes of their governments.

qaq3• 9 years ago

To understand the scale of corruption a fairly senior but fairly far from the top police official had on the order of 500 mil USD confiscated.

Veratyr2• 9 years ago

Full context:

That all changed in July 2003, when Putin arrested Russia’s biggest oligarch and richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin grabbed Khodorkovsky off his private jet, took him back to Moscow, put him on trial, and allowed television cameras to film Khodorkovsky sitting in a cage right in the middle of the courtroom. That image was extremely powerful, because none of the other oligarchs wanted to be in the same position. After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, it appeared that Putin’s answer was, “Fifty percent.” He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, and my anti-corruption activities would no longer be tolerated.

What does he mean "appeared that Putin's answer was"?

dragonwriter2• 9 years ago

What does he mean "appeared that Putin's answer was"?

Well, clearly, he wasn't in the room for the meetings and it's not like there are published minutes, so the answer must be inferred from external evidence. So the claim is that the visible behavior f actors and flows of business suggest that Putin has been granted control, if not on-paper ownership, of half the business of the various Russian oligarchs as payoff for not destroying them each individually.

bmcusick• 9 years ago

This is wonderful news for humanity, in the long term. Bezos is dedicated to expanding humanity into the solar system in a more sensible way than Musk is. O'Neil cylinders are really the way to go for a lot of reasons, and that's the vision that Bezos is dedicated to. More money for that is fantastic.

I just wish there was a Bezos/Gates-level billionaire who care as much about life extension via SENS. That's the only thing of equal importance I can think of that needs long term vision and financial support.

door7• 9 years ago

billionaire capitalists are not good news for humanity

Karunamon• 9 years ago

That seems like the kind of broad brush statement that could never be substantiated.

cmahler72• 9 years ago

pretty much every technological advancement and the quality of life improvement that came with it is through capitalism. There's a reason that Cuba and Soviet Russia were basically trapped in time

vixen99• 9 years ago

Why not? These billionaire capitalists don't force people to work for them nor do they force people to buy their products and services - but people do in large numbers. A sort of democratic vote against your submission. Are the people who don't buy into their products suffering in some way? Explain!

slice_of_life3• 9 years ago

I agree. Don't forget Amazon still has so much it's doing with its current projects. Bezos has been really impressive. If you haven't read The Everything Store, you should get it - great book.

1_2__4• 9 years ago

This is possibly one of the most insane comments I've ever read.

StreamBright3• 9 years ago

I think there is no more or less sensible way. The only way is the way that actually works. Right now non of the options are viable. Going to Mars won't make humanity interstellar species because there are much more serious issues to solve than just going there, starting with the lack of geomagnetic field. If we want to change that we need to build space stations with artificial gravity and geomagnetic field so that people living on it are safe. This is probably a better option than trying to go to a desert planet without geomagnetic field.

nolok• 9 years ago

I cant entirely decide if I find that graph [1] more impressive or terrifying. Look at the time scale and the speed at which Bezos' net worth increased, while starting at the already insane point of 30 B.

[1] https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iVJAUVVd7l0...

kooky5489• 9 years ago

It should be Elon Musk!! He is the ultra billionaire we deserve...

erokar• 9 years ago

As Trump would say: SAD.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

JustAnotherPat2• 9 years ago

I wonder at what point the world's richest will no longer include those philanthropically inclined like Buffet, Gates, and Bloomberg and will be dominated by the likes of Bezos, Slim, and Ortega. (The jury is still out on Zuckerberg and his dubious initiatives)

Our global economy is trending towards benefiting only the most ruthless, even at the very top.

bagacrap• 9 years ago

Lots of billionaires (most?) become more philanthropic after retirement. I don't think we're at a risk of this changing as even the most self-centered billionaire would find more value in spending their money on their legacy rather than buying 10,000 Ferraris.

sqeaky4• 9 years ago

A high end Ferrari goes for about $400,000. So $10,000 is only about $4 billion. For Gates at least, he could do both.

JustAnotherPat2• 9 years ago

Guys like Buffet, Murdoch, Bloomberg, Carlos Slim, etc don't retire. Some may redirect their efforts, but that's the point. The most ambitious continue building their empires.

_pmf_• 9 years ago

Best paid CIA operative.

Dirlewanger3• 9 years ago

So when do we think Bezos will go on the typical billionaire philanthropy track? Actually, a better question is probably will he even? At Bezos' age, Gates was already in a backseat role with most of his non-philanthropic ventures. Though he shares some similarities with Gates, he shows no signs of stopping. He seems actually content with Amazon eating the world, and I don't think it will be a net positive for humanity.

kogepathic• 9 years ago

He seems actually content with Amazon eating the world, and I don't think it will be a net positive for humanity.

You mean Bezos? Well of course, he's CEO of Amazon and I don't think the board or shareholders would tolerate him saying "this is such a good idea that would make us tonnes of money, but we'd better give the opportunity to someone else"

I'm actually kind of amazed that Amazon has managed to plow so much money into their business without shareholders throwing a fit. The usual modus operandi of activist shareholders now is to get the company to pay out as much money as possible to shareholders while investing as little as possible into R&D. They've even managed to squeeze Apple into stock buy backs! Amazon seems to have avoided this and is thus able to invest lots of money into their business units, and look at how it's paid off for them (amazingly well).

Regarding Amazon eating the world, I'm not that concerned about it honestly. If Amazon starts acting like a monopoly, regulators will step in and force them to divest from certain business segments. If Amazon gets lazy and starts charging people higher prices or offering a more limited selection, then people will vote with their wallets and order from somewhere else.

So on the whole I still see Amazon as a net positive. They're pushing the rest of industry to innovate in ways we haven't seen before (logistics, online shopping, cloud services, assistants) and this is a win for consumers.

Sure, there's been some high profile bankruptcies/fire sales from competitors who haven't been able to adapt (e.g. Sears in 6 months), but I have to ask: do you really want to prop up companies that cannot compete in the market? That doesn't make sense from a consumer or economic perspective.

bpicolo• 9 years ago

If Amazon starts acting like a monopoly

Haven't they already? Their breadth is insane

thomasthomas• 9 years ago

No investor pushes for more money back when the company can get a better ROI than the investor. Apple buybacks are a result of not having any better ideas on what to do with their cash stockpile.

mholmes6802• 9 years ago

I keep an unofficial[0] representative "Death By Amazon" google portfolio. current companies tracked, against AMZN:

KSS M DDS ZUMZ SSI JCP JWN ASNA BKS TUES BGFV FRAN BKE KIRK SMRT GCO FIVE SHLD BURL BBBY SPLS APRN

1yr (excluding dividends): amzn + 42.90% (even excluding today still +39%) deathByAmzn - 25% (today also up... hmmm).

For what its worth, AMZN isn't the whole story of retail. There's a PE story there too [1].

[0]: There's an official one out there if you google, but I disagree with some of it. I exclude Walmart because its a big enough competitor to survive, as an example. Also i don't have a desire to track 54 stocks for this purpose.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/its-more-than-amazon-why-reta...

_zl9i2• 9 years ago

The philantrophy thing with foundations is just a tax evasion scheme.

sobani• 9 years ago

Can you explain this to me?

As far as I understand, at best you can subtract your donations from your income, so you won't have to pay income taxes on those donations. Even if you can subtract the donation directly from your taxes, you still lose the same amount of money.

Either way the philanthropist loses at least as much money as the taxes he would've paid without the donations.

Dirlewanger3• 9 years ago

Was it one a century ago when Rockefeller pioneered the practice though?

bau5• 9 years ago

He owns Washington Post which has the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" tagline.

Dirlewanger3• 9 years ago

How deliciously ironic. You won't ever see criticism of Amazon there.

pavlakoos• 9 years ago

Well deserved, I'm afraid.

dluan• 9 years ago

Something in the water in Seattle

swehner• 9 years ago

You guys haven't been keeping up the boycott, have you?!

advertising• 9 years ago

Except it's Putin

losteverything• 9 years ago

From the article " Anyone who joins Prime shops in retail stores 10 percent less, and that number will keep accelerating as Amazon adds more inventory.”

Id love to know the analysis on this.

I deliver to amazon addicts and prime-ers. Although, yes, they order often (5-6 days a week) the volume of items by count is tiny compared to a shopping cart at a store.

0xbear5• 9 years ago

BillG has been giving away something like $2B a year for the past 15 years. He's not really holding onto the title very much.

kens2• 9 years ago

I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. People generally think of normal(ish) distributions like height, where if you're 10% taller or shorter than average, you're a tall or short person, and 40% taller makes you the tallest person in the world. In comparison, wealth has a very, very long tail, making it hard to comprehend.

Here's what I've come up with to visualize wealth in the United States. Suppose you start counting, going up by 1 million dollars every second, and people sit down when you reach their net worth. Most people will sit down immediately. After about 9 seconds, people in the "1%" will start sitting down. Near the 17 minute mark, billionaires would start sitting down. Donald Trump would sit down just before the hour mark. A day later - an hour and 10 minutes into the second day of billionaires sitting down - Bill Gates would sit, followed by Jeff Bezos just three minutes later.

The point of this is there's a huge range of billionaires (analogous to comparing 17 minutes to a day). The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds). (I should also mention that there should be huge error bars on reported net worth numbers.)

ttoinou12• 9 years ago

Why not rather think about wealth on a log scale ?

sushisource• 9 years ago

Log scales aren't intuitive to humans. I think it's a great example because that's sort of what it tricks you into doing.

wolf550e• 9 years ago

Many people cannot visualize log scale.

dahart8• 9 years ago

If your goal is to be able to plot incomes of a wide variety of people and be able to visually see the difference between poor and average as well as you can see the difference between average and super-rich, then a log scale is the way to do it.

The goal of the comment you replied to, however, is to demonstrate the vastness that orders of magnitude have. It's to compare average people to super-rich, and get a stronger intuitive sense of how much wealthier a billionaire is than the average person, and how much wealthier Bezos is than the average billionaire. Using a log scale doesn't help that goal at all, a log scale actively compresses the range and prevents intuitive physical comparisons & analogies.

chubot• 9 years ago

The way I thought about it is that Bill Gates : Donald Trump :: Donald Trump : a wealthy-ish Silicon Valley employee. (This was after a NYTimes article on Trump's true wealth, which was several years before he ran for president.)

Say you have $1M. Then Donald Trump might have 200 times more than you, or $200 M (they were saying he's not really a billionaire). But Bill Gates has 200 times more than him -- $40 B. (And apparently now Bill Gates has $90 B).

And I guess you could extend it further say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings, which is 200x less than the Silicon Valley employee.

So people think that there are three classes: poor, middle, class, rich (Donald Trump). But there is actually another full class above him: the super-rich like Bill Gates.

kbenson2• 9 years ago

say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings

Doubtful. Even if you assume a minimum wage of $10, which is well above the Federal minimum (but slightly below some state minimums), that's 500 hours of wages. That's almost three months of 40 hours work weeks where you put every penny into savings. Before taxes. Before living expenses. The vast majority of Americans have far less than $5k in their savings account.[1]

1: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-a...

MisterBastahrd2• 9 years ago

The average young person working in retail has $0 in savings and ~$200 in his checking account on a good week.

etep• 9 years ago

If Bezos gave all his money to everyone in the world we would all get maybe $13 or so. If all the billionaires did the same we would all get $1000 or so.

csomar• 9 years ago

So you are saying the richest still have potential? I mean we can expect the average person around the world to be able to "yield" $500 for the richest person in this global era. That's like trillions for the worlds richest.

LesZedCB2• 9 years ago

I don't want their money. i want their companies.

Democratize their companies. control them by employment or by employee or government committee if they are too big. Make the big corporations work for the benefit of everyone, rather than shareholders and owners.

faceplanted• 9 years ago

I would just go for using height like you mentioned, if you, an average person is 6ft tall, someone with a better job than you would be up to a foot taller than you, a millionaire would be tall building sized and a billionaire would stretch into space.

I guessed all of these values, I might do the actual math at some point, but not right now.

notfromhere• 9 years ago

I did the rough math. If average net worth in the US is 80k, and bezos is worth $90 billion, then compared to an average 6 foot tall person, Bezos would be ~1300 miles tall; in space altitude from earth, that would be geospatial orbit

loader• 9 years ago

Or to use your height comparison the richest billionaires would be over 6,000,000 feet tall.

slowmovintarget• 9 years ago

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/980/

ttoinou12• 9 years ago

Thank you for the link ! That's what I was talking with log scale. THIS is a log scale visualisation about money

aphextron• 9 years ago

The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds).

I really wish this point was better understood. The rhetoric around the "1%" has completely missed the point, as the vast majority of the 1% is comprised of our doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people. Pitting the poor and working classes against them makes no sense. The real problem is the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth [0].

http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equal... [0]

jon_richards• 9 years ago

The "1%" is weird because it simultaneously includes a lot that people didn't want it to and doesn't include a lot that people think it does.

The 1% is roughly half a million in yearly income or ten million in net assets (remember to subtract your mortgage from that!). It is true that this goes beyond the ultra wealthy to largely include "doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people", but that doesn't mean most doctors, etc. are in the 1%.

There's an urban legend that 19% of people think they are in the 1%, but the actual poll was that 19% of people think they would be affected by tax cuts affecting the 1%. I'd like to see a study of what percentage of people think they are in the 1% or soon will be, because I bet it's a lot more than 1%.

So you have a term that was meant to vilify the ultra-rich, but makes the average doctor, etc. worry about being vilified.

voidmain• 9 years ago

the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth

This is nonsense. Your source compares the wealth of the richest few people to the net worth of the "poorest" 50% of people. Net worth takes into account debt, and it happens that the half of the population with the lowest net worth has a total amount of debt about equal to its total amount of assets, so its total net worth is almost zero. A little more credit card spending, and an eight year old with a nickel in his pocket will have "more wealth than the poorest half". Needless to say this is not anything like half of the world's wealth. The total wealth of individuals is (according to my quick Google search) something like $250 trillion, and that presumably doesn't take into account wealth held by governments.

It's also silly to use net worth to identify the "poorest". Supposedly Donald Trump had a net worth in 1990 of negative 900 million. Your source's calculation would presumably call him the "poorest" person in the world and his presence would subtract $900 million from the wealth of the "poorest half". Is that sensible?

The richest people are very, very rich compared to most individuals. But no individual has much compared to the wealth of the whole world, and I suspect the share is shrinking. In the 19th century JP Morgan bailed out the US government, rather than the other way around!

A more interesting analysis would be to look at the distribution of total lifetime consumption.

Shivetya• 9 years ago

I prefer to realize that even at ninety billion dollars of personal wealth; the full amount is not actually available; is that the US government would consume it in less than ten days.

Even if we could confiscate his and all similar holders of wealth money we could not pay for government for even a year.

the realization we must have is that this amount of personal wealth is not harming the worlds poor and it really doesn't harm those of us here.

the world has such incredible poverty because of government. Government that does not respect property rights, rights to one's self, nor the product of their work.

What makes capitalist societies work is property rights and it is that incentive which provides the stable society many of us enjoy.

If you want to raise the poorest in the world up you do so by encouraging their governments to respect the property rights of even their weakest citizen. To respect the earnings of those who work.

stupidcar• 9 years ago

Actually, it does make sense. While the ability of the super-rich to affect society is enhanced by their wealth, their ability, and need to do so, are reduced by their small numbers. They do not form the kind of large, broadly homogeneous social group that drives long-term changes in society. The sheer scale of their exceptional wealth also lets them make special, individual arrangements that preclude the need to act en-masse.

The 1% on the other hand, are rich enough to enjoy outsized political influence, but poor enough to retain some economic anxiety, and be genuinely affected by changes to taxation, inheritance, redistribution, etc. And they are numerous enough to form a corporate whole that acts to protect its own interests.

The 1% are the middle managers of the world's socioeconomic hierarchy. They don't possess great power individually, but their collective power to shape the culture is vast, and has a tendency towards toxic outcomes as they attempt to safeguard what wealth they have managed to accumulate.

racl101• 9 years ago

I'd either need to start sitting down or be Quicksilver to beat the timer before it gets to my net worth.

Great analogy btw. I might have to borrow it to explain it to other people.

rubicon332• 9 years ago

It boggles my mind that this can happen.

I'm as pro-capitalist, pro-democracy, pro-make-a-fuck-ton-of-money as you can get... But even I am blown away by the wealth of some of the top billionaires.

Just think about the good that some of that could do for the country. Put it into science. Put it into social welfare systems. I don't care, put it into something!

I don't know what the solution is. The naive comment would be if you make above X billion everything else goes to some re-distribution fund... Obviously that will turn a lot of people off. But the point is, I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth.

specialist2• 9 years ago

Capitalism != corporatism.

Capitalism: pro competition, pro markets. Corporatism: anti-competition, Freedom Markets™.

Conflating the two is the biggest failing of modern leftists, such as myself. We can hardly criticize, mitigate our modern winner-takes-all economy until we stop defending it.

ttoinou12• 9 years ago

It doesn't boggles my mind at all, and I prefer Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates rather than more corrupted people.

"All the good you can do with this tons of money" Money at that scale is power. Bezos could give away a little each year to a science institut for example, but it would not work for short term stuff. You are not going to discover 1000x more stuff tomorrow by pouring billions in science. But for a long term goal yes Jeff Bezos could nudge more people getting into science if he wanted that. And that's what he might do for Space exploration / technologies (at least that's what he publicly says) and that is called... Investment.

So which investment is the best ? Who knows ? Who has the power to decide it ?

PS : not spending its own money is NOT throwing it away, it increase power purchase of all others people that uses the same money. Spending it increases money circulation and can cause inflation for example.

PS2 : "I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth" who said anyone was given money because he "needed" it ? We don't live in a communism utopia

throwaway3288322• 9 years ago

There's the little issue of him having to liquidate his shares to put it into charity.

retube3• 9 years ago

Just think about the good that some of that could do for the country.

It already has. Bezos has created value for millions of people and businesses, generated huge tax receipts and completely revolutionarised entire industries.

mahyarm2• 9 years ago

Money begets money through investment, like gravity. In any random distribution of particles you'll eventually have black holes form with gravity.

People with this level of money are equivalent to kings or other monarchs. On some level it really isn't their money at the same time. When he dies, it's not his money any more.

prostoalex3• 9 years ago

The billionaire himself would rarely have a significant pile of cash lying around. Someone somewhere decided to value AMZN at $1,046.00.

They could've done something for the country. They could've put $1,046.00 into science. Cut a $1,046.00 check to a social welfare system. Yet they chose to exchange $1,046.00 for a single share of Amazon.com.

blktiger• 9 years ago

One thing to keep in mind as well is that the net worth numbers are using stock value which most of the ultra rich cannot actually liquidate.

LesZedCB2• 9 years ago

either: all at once, or some very quickly.

They can though. wanna buy a car for 150k, sell off some shares, buy a car. right?

Honestly, though, even the interest on whatever liquid assets they do have probably yields more than my current savings total.

saosebastiao4• 9 years ago

I like to think about it like this: With a wealth of 92.3B, even earning a moderate 8% net return on that wealth, Jeff Bezos needs to spend $20.2M per day just to not get any richer.

Now I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about how awesome it would be to be rich. One day I added up what it would take to have the most obscene, ridiculously opulent lifestyle imaginable...private jets, presidential suites, chauffers, megayachts, basically anything and everything imaginable that I would possibly want if money were no object. I never surpassed a requirement for more than $20M per year. $20M per day is ludicrous...and that's just what it would take for him to not get any richer.

mikeash• 9 years ago

You clearly lack imagination. Monthly trips around the Moon would easily surpass that even without any yachts.

retube3• 9 years ago

8% a moderate return?

piaste• 9 years ago

One day I added up what it would take to have the most obscene, ridiculously opulent lifestyle imaginable...private jets, presidential suites, chauffers, megayachts... I never surpassed a requirement for more than $20M per year.

Then you grossly underestimated your requirement. The first Google result on the subject of megayachts, for example, tells me that they cost tens or hundreds of millions to build (the record is 600M) and that their yearly upkeep can be on the order of 10% their build cost.

So that alone would eat a good chunk of your 20M. Now consider how much more you could spend on palaces (plural, because they don't move) than you could on your humble dinghy.

brandonmenc2• 9 years ago

I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have.

And yet, there was a time when the richest were significantly richer than they are now.

Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller was worth at least four times as much as Bezos is.

maerF0x0• 9 years ago

could you source that claim please?

magic_beans3• 9 years ago

That's a really incredible analogy. Thank you.

tomascot• 9 years ago

Quite the movie plot you got there. Except that people dies and they try to steal money to avoid death, and also changing the time scale

benevol• 9 years ago

The reason for this level of inequality is this:

Our culture tells us that our motivation to do better (or more) work should be the power to dominate others (being rich is just that).

And that's just what humanity will have to change in the coming years: Change our culture to replace the incentive of domination with humane incentives and values.

mcappleton• 9 years ago

I thought no the easiest way to understand is this:

You could spend 1 million dollars a day for 270 years before you ran out.

Tomis02• 9 years ago

Kind of surprised to see this so upvoted, I was under the impression that "top N richest people" articles only impress kids and the immature. Don't have a source for it but I'm pretty sure people with more than a few hundred million in the bank couldn't care less if they're richer or poorer than someone else, as they haven't made their fortune by worrying about frivolous things. But that's just me.

jcmoscon• 9 years ago

So to understand how much money he has let's say Jeff Bezos is walking in the street and sees US$42,000 laying on the ground. He is so rich that it's not worth for him to stop and get the money. It's like you and me seeing a 10 cents coin on the ground. That's his life.

throwaway3288322• 9 years ago

Money frankly is irrelevant beyond a certain point (and most of it is in the form of share holdings anyway).

I'd be more worried about the power/political influence these individuals wield. There is generally an incestuous coterie of the rich that one gets access to after a certain point, where the destruction of freedom is lubricated with champagne and caviar. Bildeberg/IMF/WTO/G20 etc. are symptomatic of such cabals of corporatocracies and their retainers in the state apparatus that wield power over the world.

gpawl5• 9 years ago

Only on a technicality, because Gates's Net Worth doesn't include money in the foundation that Gates controls.

arsenal• 9 years ago

How much of that money is he actually giving away to uplift other people? A lot to catch up on Bill Gates there

4010dell• 9 years ago

Ok, thanks for the info. Now, i can pass rest of my day miserably.

Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person

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