Wealth Shown to Scale

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

by deepanchor • 5 years ago

107 138 5 years ago

mkorostoff.github.io

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

Missing: median US Black household wealth, $24,100; median US Hispanic household wealth, $36,100. Numbers as of 2019.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

deworms• 5 years ago

Lifetime budgetary impact by race:

White: +$200,000 Black: -$751,000 Hispanic: -$588,000

Puts your numbers in perspective

Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2014-BUD/pdf/BUDG...

inter_netuser3• 5 years ago

where is that in the document?

no hits on the numbers you provided.

petecooper• 5 years ago

I am most grateful for my Logitech MX Master 2 mouse scroll wheel and a shift key. Hold shift, give the scroll wheel enough momentum to undo the parking brake, and let physics do the rest.

bcg361• 5 years ago

Of note: The yearly GDP of america is 21 trillion.

neolog• 5 years ago

Matt if you're here, can you add an atom/rss feed?

yreg• 5 years ago

I find these scrolling websites unergonomic and not at all that good at getting the point across (other than "yeah, it's a lot").

Also, with the text-length budget of that site I think it's a shame it doesn't explain what wealth, profit, liquidity and cash-on-hand is.

Better visualisations imo:

- Tom Scott: A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg

- How rich are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in Minecraft terms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvttV8EIoGA

iratic0• 5 years ago

Nice graphic, but also a bit misleading.

Bezos would never be able to immediately realise that amount of assets in to useful cash. So saying no human deserves this amount of wealth is kind of already fulfilled? He may have 2 or 3 billion as cash maybe.

opheliate2• 5 years ago

The author responds to this at about $14.8 billion into the "400 richest Americans" section, see [0], which they link to.

0: https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...

albertgoeswoof• 5 years ago

There are many, many ways that wealth is realized without spending it. Once you get past a few hundred million you literally cannot spend the money as fast as it comes in.

These billionaires aren't amassing wealth to spend it on things, they're gathering it for power, leverage, status, prestige, legacy reasons etc, and using it to influence and control the world to further their own agenda.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

In Bezos's case, he built a company that literally didn't even exist 27 years ago. It's gotten so huge, because globalization has gotten so effective. That's true of all tech companies: they benefit disproportionately from globalization and network effects.

As far as what to do about it? The only solution could be to break up Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Taxation is not it. The Federal government and the Fed controls the money printer and influences how high these stock valuations are getting. They're a large part of the problem.

We can't print trillions of dollars without side effects in supply, demand and price mechanics. In this case, dollars are chasing productive growth assets as yields in bonds hit the floor and go under zero in some countries.

The growth in inequality correlates with the growth in the national debt, and monetary supply growth.

dillondoyle2• 5 years ago

What's "cash"? A marketable security?

I'm insanely poor by these standards but wealthfront will front me hard cash using my account as collateral with one click i think up to 30%. Super cheap interest rate.

Bezos has way more favorable banking. Even if he was 'only' worth $10-15 billion I bet he could get 2-3 billion in hard cash overnight.

He might not hold a lot of cash, but he doesn't need to he can get it immediately without selling.

inter_netuser3• 5 years ago

Not just that, he could trivially offload 15 billion without price moving at all.

Tons of private equity M&As have happened at much larger valuation.

pydry7• 5 years ago

Bezos would never be able to immediately realise

Why would he want to? Who tries to spend 100 billion all at the same time? Nobody wants 100 billion in cash in their bank account either.

I think you're confusing liquidity and wealth.

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

I agree to an extent with this view, though the reality is complicated.

The wealth of the ultra-wealthy doesn't exist in bank accounts or vaults of gold, but in assets, and largely assets which have appreciated. The $13 billion dollar single-day appreciation in Bezos's wealth wasn't from someone cutting him a check, but as a result of an increase in the value of his holdings (largely Amazon, Inc., stock).

And liquidating those holdings would not result in receiving the full closing-bell price for that day --- a movement the size of Bezos's on the market would itself influence the price. (A very similar situation exists for other novel assets, notably cryptocurrencies, whose "market value" is something of a polite fiction.)

At the same time ...

... the ultra-wealthy can excercise their wealth without liquidating or spending it, largely by using it as collateral against loans or for investments in other areas. At sufficient scale, the mere threat of making a move in some direction (investing in an industry or market or backing a politician, party, or legislative initiative).

In both instances, the key point is that money doesn't behave at these scales as most people reading this are given to understand. Much as with relativistic physics and quantum mechanics, our quotidian experiences don't give us the proper intuition for these phenomena.

carnitine3• 5 years ago

At this point I think there must be a propaganda campaign to convince people down this line of thinking. Bezos could realistically liquidate the majority of his wealth, though obviously not all at once. Look at how much Gates has liquidated.

kfprt2• 5 years ago

A society that is extreme in one category is likely to be extreme in other categories as well.

durnygbur2• 5 years ago

Europeans were very fond of killing each other in the first half of 20th century for the profit of the richest industrialists. Divide, agitate, conquer, reap the profits.

kfprt2• 5 years ago

War is a Racket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

bb1233• 5 years ago

I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that they will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionaires. Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.

kortilla5• 5 years ago

This is absolutely it. Any taxes on just the ultra wealthy raise so little money for the rest of the population that any large scale money raising requires taxes on doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, etc.

Pro-government spending advocates don’t like to emphasize this because people become a lot less supportive of these things when they see members of their own community getting hit.

dillondoyle2• 5 years ago

I would say rhetorically that ex post facto (am i using that right? kind of like caused by definition) taxes on the ultra wealthy that don't achieve that aren't actually taxes that target the ultra wealthy, but rather just marketing.

I think Biden has tried get ahead of that issue with his no higher taxes on 400k pledge. We'll wait to see the reality though.

esarbe6• 5 years ago

It would certainly help if the ultra wealthy and global corporations would just pay their fair share rather than use possible combination of barely-legal structures to avoid being taxed, bribe officials to create special exemptions, offload money to tax heavens and scare-monger about losing jobs whenever an actual tax increase is due.

The USA cannot even properly finance the IRS to go after the super wealthy tax cheats. Their bought-and-paid-for politicians would rather the IRS stick it to the little guys, ffs.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Any taxes on just the ultra wealthy raise so little money for the rest of the population that any large scale money raising requires taxes on doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, etc.

That's very much untrue. What is true is that no one even bothers reducing the favorable tax treatment of the ultrawealthy, only taxing high-end labor income and pretending. As long as both long-term capital gains and pass-through business income are extremely tax-favored, it doesn't matter what rates or brackets you set for normal income, you arent really taxing the ultrawealthy. You could raise tremendous revenue by eliminating those favorable categories and treating all income as income, and only raising nominal rates by adding new brackets above the current top bracket. The reason that isn't done isn't that you can't raise enough revenue that way, its because the ultrawealthy are very good at propagandizing that the forms of income they earn vastly disproportionately ought to be untouchable.

nly• 5 years ago

The problem is you can't tax freedom.

Having a big pile of leverageable assets, even if you have little income, gives you a lot of insulation from many of the costs and risks we all come across in life. For example, freedom from paying rent, freedom from having to obtain and service debt, and freedom from having to worry about job security.

Meanwhile your doctors and lawyers give 40% of their income to the state and still have student debt, mortgages, may be forced to live in a high CoL area, and may have to live with high stress.

And every day people don't really understand wealth. There's a dumb competition advertised on TV here in the UK where you can win a £3M ($4.2M) house on the coast, and a sports car. While it's glamorous, upending your life to move to live in this home is deeply impractical for most people. The cost of maintaining and protecting it would likely cost the entirety of a median UK salary. That's not freedom.

refurb10• 5 years ago

Absolutely. It reminds me of way back when the NDP (left-wing party in Canada) was asked "who is rich?" and the answer was "a family of 4 making more than $60k per year". That honesty did not go over well at all, but it's the truth. There aren't that many ultra-wealthy. To raise real money, the definition of rich pretty quickly drops to the top 10-25% of income earners and suddenly some dude making $80k per year is being told he's rich.

BasilPH• 5 years ago

Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.

What are examples of this happening?

cloudfifty9• 5 years ago

What this attitude says to me is that too many people have more solidarity with the ultra rich than their peers. Not to even mention those whose income is lower than their own. Hence, a tax on the ultra rich, is somehow very likely - in their mind - going to affect them as well. On the contrary however, a benefits cut, or perhaps a benefit grant, is just a waste of cash and will never benefit them somehow, even though things like paid vacation in Europe is universal.

I'm sorry but to me this attitude hasn't worked out all that well for the common man in the US (no vacation, parental leave, health care etc), but still you believe in the propaganda by default.

bb1233• 5 years ago

Hah, I'm not from the US (I'm actually from one of those European nations you mention) and I see it from a different angle - the tax burden on higher income earners here is so enormous that people will find ways to work less to keep their earnings down, as the government just takes most of it. It has become a problem with doctors particularly - they will often opt to work fewer hours in order to earn less, as it simply isnt worth the extra time. This has made doctor access harder, which is a double disaster when you realise that the tax payer is the one who paid to train them in the first place. It is hard to argue that people paying tax in that bracket aren't doing enough already, and shouldn't be weary of any proposed increases in taxation.

newdude116• 5 years ago

I don't understand the concept or the graphics are rendered wrong on my computer.

Better would it be do explain with a standard distribution (what wealth isn't). Lets assume that 1 SD of income corresponds to 10 cm. So 3SD or 60cm, basically your screen size, corresponds to 99.7% of the population.

Some random data from the internet: "The median household income in Franklin County Ohio is about $43,000 although the average household income is closer to $54,000. The standard deviation of household incomes is about $30,000. You pick a random sample of 50 households. What is the chance the average household income in your sample is over $60,000?" https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3

Household income may be even two earners. But assuming broadly 50k, sd 50k per person to make it easier and taking into account more affluent areas, only a few people make more than 200k per year.

Now lets assume Bill Gates or the Oligarch of your choice makes 10% ROE on his wealth. If he has 100 Billion, this is 10 Billion a year. This should be 200,000 Standard Deviations. If one SD corresponds to 10 cm, this should be 20 km on our scale.

So we can see the income of 99.7% of the population on our screen, but Bill Gates income would be 20 km away.

(Hope I made no mistake, feel free to correct)

PennState used an extraordinary bad example to teach the normal distribution, they chose a case where you have a fat tail distribution.

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

xkcd's "Money" graphic gives a sense of other value comparisons, in a somewhat logarithmic sense, ranging from $1 to the roughly $2.4 quadrillion dollars of all human economic activity to date (as of 2012 when the infographic was made).

https://xkcd.com/980/

GaneshSuriya• 5 years ago

Genuinely curious question. How do you guys pull xkcd comics just like that? Do You save interesting comics for future use or do you remember the comic and google it to find it?

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

Some I remember generally. A very few I recall directly ("Duty Calls" is 386, as in the Intle chip.)

"Money" made an impression at the time. I DDG'd "xkcd money" to pull the URL.

Other times I just suspect that there's a relevant xkcd and try some keywords.

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

Erm, how about the wealth/money controlled by the Federal government? That's much bigger than anything shown here.

dredmorbius5• 5 years ago

And, in theory at least, belongs to and serves the people as a whole.

Not one single solitary exclusive and extraordinarily privileged human being.

esarbe6• 5 years ago

In theory. In practice, this wealth is controlled and overseen by privately owned commercial banks that look out for the interest of their owners, i.e. primarily the super-wealthy.

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

in theory at least

creating inflation sure helps people as a whole!

sooheon9• 5 years ago

The rich aren't the enemy, rent-seekers are.

They may overlap, and Bezos may be both, but wealth and capital on their own are orthogonal to justice.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=...

sidcool• 5 years ago

Genuine question. Ia rent seeker being used as a metaphor here?

sooheon9• 5 years ago

The economic definition is being used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

(there is debate about which activities qualify, but the gist is obvious)

esarbe6• 5 years ago

Rent-seeking might not be the only problem. Worker exploitation is also a serious issue on my list. How on earth can someone defend not paying a living salary for a full time job?

Add to that that the legal framework (talking about the USA) is seriously skewed to favor employers and disadvantages workers and any attempts to unionize. This has to stop.

cousin_it• 5 years ago

How on earth can someone defend not paying a living salary for a full time job?

Putting the employer on the hook for more aspects of the employee's well-being (healthcare, living wage) only increases the gap between employed and unemployed, therefore increasing the bargaining power of employers. I think it's better to have society provide a basic standard of living (most importantly housing and healthcare) to all poor people, employed or not.

refurb10• 5 years ago

What is a "living salary"?

If I'm a single mom with 3 kids, is the "living salary" the same as a single 20 year old who lives at home?

imtringued3• 5 years ago

Money is a public good as well. Money taken out of circulation is bad for the economy and drives a big chunk of economic problems in society. It's easy to tax so the valuation argument doesn't even make sense. There are companies with $100 billion or more in their bank accounts. That's a million paychecks that didn't happen.

Isn't it weird how it is possible to prevent other people from working by simply withholding money? Meanwhile we expect the people who couldn't work as a result of this withholding of money to keep working, we consider them lazy and not worthy of sympathy.

sooheon9• 5 years ago

Great point, but worker exploitation (like so many other problems) flow out of perverse rentier structures. In fact this is one of the first principles discovered about how rent works, termed the "law of rent" by David Ricardo over 200 years ago. I.e. that the rent collected from productivity will always be such that the remaining wages are only exactly as good as the "margin of production", a.k.a. the next best alternative to engaging with the labor economy, subsistence living. This is why you can have exploding productivity and still subsistence standard of living for labor, where the entirety of the excess is captured by rentiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent

imtringued3• 5 years ago

I agree, Amazon isn't a public good. There is no way that Jeff Bezos owning Amazon shares makes me worse off.

Land is a public good. We have to compete for it but that doesn't mean private individuals should get a cut of the public wealth around the plot of land merely by owning it. It only makes sense to tax it or to turn it over to public ownership (the transition would obviously take decades).

LeonB4• 5 years ago

There is no way that Jeff Bezos owning Amazon shares makes me worse off.

They use their market dominance to reduce the income of authors resulting in less choice and lower quality books for you to read, while increasing the price of available books.

They use their vast wealth to buy out or strike deals with competitors, preventing any challenge to their hold on the industry.

As market maker and participant they use their exclusive market data to undercut their own providers resulting in more hoarded wealth for them but a less creative and productive society for all.

They engage in continual astro-turfing which alters public debate away from whatever is really going on and toward what the mega wealthy owners want people to believe.

And much much more.

LeonB4• 5 years ago

I’m surprised that people continue to share that graphic with a straight face.

If “rent-seeking” contributes to people becoming wealthy then the two notions don’t remain orthogonal. The chances of finding more rent seeker among the wealthy is far higher than more rent seekers among the non-wealthy.

Additionally the size of “problems” that a single low-wealth rent-seeker causes is not equivalent to the amount of “problem” created by a single high-wealth rent seeker.

sooheon9• 5 years ago

I agree with all of your points and still believe that rent seeking is the root cause to be addressed, not wealth in and of itself. Wealth is just stored labor. It is value neutral, and everyone has the right to the fruits of their own labor. It is only rent, unjustly collected from others' labor via force or monopoly that is illegitimate.

esarbe6• 5 years ago

Nice work!

People don't really have an understanding of how much wealth has been coalescing in the last thirty years and this is a good start as showing them how skewed things really are.

Seriously; this is dangerous. Concentrating that much wealth in such few hands is bound to have negative consequences. And all of us professionals really should get onboard trying to tackle this.

vishnugupta3• 5 years ago

I'm learning economic concepts so some of my notions and questions end up being naive. Would appreciate if someone could clarify/answer this.

It's a fair guess that vast majority of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon equities. Which are valued as such by the participants in US equity market. A thought exercise, what would happen if he were to liquidate all of that $180+B in equities? Safe to say he will get less than $180B in cash that could he could use for charities, moonshot projects etc.,

There's also a matter of confidence. How will the markets react if the founder of Amazon were to liquidate his Amazon holdings? So it seems to me that not all of his wealth is usable. Does it mean we need better ways of gauging wealth? Especially when trying to assert things like "X% of his wealth is enough to house all homeless veterans for an year". His wealth is locked up in some form which though is valued in USD won't translate 1-1 to other forms of wealth.

pydry7• 5 years ago

You're hypothesizing that he might want to spend 180 billion dollars in a single day?

If you don't assume that it makes no sense to assume he'd want to liquidate it all at once.

Liquidity != wealth

Illiquid wealth != unreal wealth.

It's really odd how many people seem to have been led to believe it is equivalent though... I'm curious to know where they all picked up this misconception.

Folcon4• 5 years ago

I mean that is broadly how we come to compare wealth, we don't spend much time going into the weeds of how that number came into being and what assumptions were made there. So I'm not surprised that some people think that of money.

That being said he has gone through a divorce, he did lose a good chunk of his assets pretty quickly. Sure it was just a reallocation of assets, but unless you specifically want all of that money in cash you don't need do actually sell it. Banks for example will give you cash against the value of shares, allowing you access to liquid funds while you're slowly selling the equity.

Anything specific cause you want to spend all of that money on will probably have a limit at which you can spend at, there just isn't enough stuff in the world or people offering services to absorb all that wealth instantly. Trying to cure all the world's diseases will very quickly consume all lab and relevant researcher capacity, which will only grow at the rate people start skill retraining to this new lucrative career.

So I'm not sure it matters? I mean assuming the underlying share value doesn't freefall for some reason.

iamgopal3• 5 years ago

Also factor in his capacity to raise more fund. Tomorrow if he go public with his space company, his wealth will increase

wildfire2• 5 years ago

I'm guessing you did not scroll far enough along to read the response to this exact argument:

https://github.com/MKorostoff/1-pixel-wealth/blob/master/THE...

Bezos has been selling his shares for years.

The market is still betting that Amazon can exploit more people faster every year and earn money (i.e. profit) from them.

sebzim4500• 5 years ago

He'd certainly get much less than $100B, but he'd still get a lot. The share price of amazon is mainly driven by the revenue/expenses/growth opportunities of the company, which will not have changed just because bezos is cashing out, so it won't collapse completely.

That's not unique the the ultra rich, though. Many people have most of their wealth locked in a house. If they needed to sell at very short notice they would have to sell at a significant discount.

Eldt• 5 years ago

Collateral based loans

matesz• 5 years ago

People are keeping wealth in holdings because they are not taxed. If they would liquidate they would have to pay let's say for the sake of the argument half of it as tax. I don't think market is a problem here.

The bigger problem is what are you going to with that money? Obviously not consumption. You are not going to buy more tshirts and burgers.

You are going to invest in pet projects, like google glass or Bezos cockrocket [1]. Or finance some causes, like Gate's attack on malaria - good stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMY23kgcKQ

ollifi• 5 years ago

Why 50%? Assuming we are talking about Bezos and AMZN the max tax would be 20% for long term capital gains?

strken• 5 years ago

There's a pretty big difference between owning $180bn and owning Amazon. At this scale he's more like the monarch of Amazonland than the owner of Bob's Dry-cleaning.

I'm not sure that implies there should be a regime change in Amazonland, though. In some ways it implies the opposite. Annex Amazonland, overthrow King Bezos, and you're faced with the challenge of administering the damn thing yourself.

avianlyric2• 5 years ago

Bezos has already stoped administering Amazonland. The king has found ambitious lackeys to do that work.

Why don’t we overthrow the king, then reward those that remain to keep the whole thing going.

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

So it seems to me that not all of his wealth is usable

Bezos is the richest, so we don't have examples quite at that scale. That said, we have some pretty big (eg gates, buffet) announcing liquidation & donation without anything bad happening. So, he probably could sell his amazon shares and do something else with them.

You are approaching some "it's complicated" questions that occur at scale though. It's true, for example, that if Bezos wanted to liquidate immediately, that volume of shares is probably more than the market could buy. It might temporarily crash the stock, if handled wrong. Finance people know how to do this right though, so I think we can say that all of that wealth is usable.

There's also the other side, what Bezos would spend that wealth on? You can only buy what exists. Say Bezos decides to solve homelessness and housing scarcity in his state forever. He sells his amazon shares (slowly, carefully) and buys half a million houses. There aren't that many houses for sale, so rices would skyrocket. Say he decides to build instead, to avoid that. The state only has so many builders, roofers, cement shops, cranes... only so much capacity to produce houses. Building or buying half a million houses in Washington quickly is probably near impossible. You might cause detrimental side effects by trying. Normal people couldn't buy a homes, because Bezos has bid up the price of everything. OTOH, builders and pre existing property investors will get rich. Inflation probably happens.

This is the kind of problem governments often face. At some scale, common sense economic concepts/abstractions like the cost of building a house break down and underlying realities leak in. Only so many houses exist.There's only so much labour, materials, capacity to produce.

A rung or two higher up the meta ladder, a common demonstration of macroeconomic weirdness is the "paradox of choice." What would happen to an economy if everyone saves 100% of their money? All shops & restaurants are empty. There's no work. Businesses fail, default on loans. Share prices crash. It's simply impossible for a whole economy to save. Saving (and more controversially, borrowing) doesn't exist at macroeconomic scale. An economy can't save or borrow. Shutting down car factories today doesn't make it produce more cars tomorrow. So, we can't all save for a car this year to buy one next year.

vishnugupta3• 5 years ago

Thank you for a detailed and informative response.

....only has so many builders, roofers, cement shops, cranes... only so much capacity to produce houses....only so much labour, materials, capacity to produce.

IMO the underlying problem to solve is mobilisng this capacity. And the $$ to do so needn't come from rich people. The US anyway has been running budget deficit, there's also this ~$2T infrastructure bill. Some of that money could be used to solve housing/health/education problems and as an added benefit it'll provide jobs to the US citizens. I'm sure this will have 2nd order adverse effects but they I guess they won't be as disruptive.

I am not saying inequality is a problem; but taxing rich doesn't seem to solve it. It will lead to endless debate and lost time. It will take the focus away from the underling problems which is rotting basic human needs -- food/health/housing/education. The government should address underlying causes that lead to inequality and spend on infrastructure in a big way.

csomar2• 5 years ago

You are focusing on numbers which will lead you nowhere. The reason the US has a struggling population is that the US has a population that didn't have a good education and training. If you want to make a population richer, you need to train people to do things (ie: Plumbing, installing an Air Conditioner, becoming an ophthalmologist, etc...). As evidenced by the latest stimulus checks, giving people money will only create inflation and a shortage of low-wage workers. The US is very rich and connected, so lack of raw resources is not one of its issues.

Jeff Bezos can have $200bn+ in the bank without affecting the economy. The effect of seizing these $200bn and distributing them is the same as quantitatively easing them into the economy. Some people exert power through work or politics. Some people have none and want to exert power through "journalism" and "shaping opinions". It's all fun and games until these people are elected (through populism probably coupled by a recession); which is when you need to prepare your luggage and get the hell out of such a place.

carnitine3• 5 years ago

Quantitative easing swaps bank reserves for high grade bonds. How is that remotely equivalent to the forced liquidation and distribution of equity?

onion2k• 5 years ago

His wealth is locked up in some form which though is valued in USD won't translate 1-1 to other forms of wealth.

You should also consider that Bezos can access his wealth in more ways than simply selling his stock. It can be used as security against debt for example. Should Bezos decide he wanted to he could borrow many billions of dollars secured against some of his Amazon stock today (assuming his contracts with Amazon don't preclude doing that). Bezos could also donate stock to a charitable trust, which could then sell it with much less market disruption. Or he could use dozens of other financial mechanisms available for accessing his wealth.

durnygbur2• 5 years ago

I'm always wondering how the capital gains work for the rich, or rather how they work around it. In case he sells the Amazon stock, it means he is due 28.6% American capital gains tax ie. 53 billion USD? I don't think so... the wealth of the richest basically have multiplied in the last 2 years...

perryizgr8• 5 years ago

No single human needs or deserves this much wealth.

Why not?

exporectomy2• 5 years ago

Yes. That was a rather arrogant stab of jealousy. Big piles of concentrated wealth sometimes gets spent on important projects that governments (ie. normal people) won't or can't do.

somefuckingguy• 5 years ago

Let's just pray that our feudal overlords invests wisely!

iamgopal3• 5 years ago

Means with Top 5 country defense budget, we could solve all humanity’s problems? Who are we kidding really ? Why target rich people?

iamgopal3• 5 years ago

A simple calculation can show that, with just defense budget of top 10 country, the world could install enough solar cell to power the world day and night, forever. But will we do it ? I don’t think things can go stupider that this. Future generations will see us in the same level of stupidity with which we see flat earth believer from centuries ago.

yonatron• 5 years ago

Re: "No single human needs or deserves this much wealth." Thanks for your opinion. That's all it is. There's no validity to that position. Wealth is not based on need or "deserving". In Jeff's case it's based on smart business, hard work and accomplishment. What have you accomplished?

Tycho• 5 years ago

I can think of no better illustration of the inequality in our society than this: the poor and middle class drink £5 bottles of wine purchased from Aldi, while the rich drink £50,000 bottles of wine. It’s truly shocking.

pembrook• 5 years ago

While I love the UX of this site and how well executed it is, I think it’s spreading misconceptions about how the world works.

Human behavior is driven by contagious imitation (monkey-see monkey-do), and we all pile into the same behaviors at the same time, so this inequality will always exist. No matter how equitable the system.

Of all the content on the internet, 1% of it gets 99% of the traffic. Of all the movies on Netflix, 1% get 99% of the eyeballs. Of all the businesses on earth, 1% get 99% of the customers. Of all the stocks in the stock market, a tiny percentage generate ALL of the returns. I could go on and on.

Fundamentally, value-creation in a connected world results in an exponential (log) function, not a linear one.

And people’s brains turn to mush when trying to comprehend exponential vs. linear growth.

You can look at similar wealth curves in the supposedly more equitable nordics to see how similar they are if scaled up to a population the size of the US. On an exponential curve, extending the x-axis 100X further results in equally extreme outcomes like Jeff Bezos.

Basically, everything humans do results in extreme inequality.

So while we should certainly raise taxes on the mega-rich, the goal shouldn’t be eliminating exponential inequality altogether. Because it’s a base property of humanity.

compsciphd• 5 years ago

the scales apparently change?

it took me a lot longer to scroll through bezos orannge than 185x the 1 Billion Blue rectangle.

tasuki• 5 years ago

Why is it a problem for Jeff Bezos to have this much wealth?

As a human society, we produce and we consume things. It sucks if some people consume a lot and not enough is left for others. I'd rather see us pile on people who overconsume rather than on those who overproduce.

rogerb• 5 years ago

A lot of the comments (not all) really personalize the issue by using Jeff Bezos as the villain, when it's the system and laws that have allowed him to capture so much wealth that is the problem. And IMHO, that's the part that needs addressing, by putting a progressive tax in place.

Jeff's not the enemy - he's been amazingly successful within the rules that we as a society have made. Some of these rules are oppressive and bad and we should fix them.

jpn• 5 years ago

Bezos's wealth comes out to be about $500 per person.

I would be more than happy to pay $500 to another Bezos that provides my life was as much value.

Amazon is so convenient!

laverya• 5 years ago

I wish they included a few more things at the end, like "US National Debt", "Total US Government Debt", etc.

iJohnDoe• 5 years ago

Best way to wrap your mind around wealth.

1 thousand seconds = 16.6 minutes

1 million seconds = 11 days, 13 hours

1 billion seconds = 32 years

1 trillion seconds = 31,688 years

Maursault• 5 years ago

The top 400 wealthiest could purchase 246 Nimitz class aircraft carriers, and still have about $2B in change ($5M each). The US has 10 (of 20 total US carriers). Or, put another way, the top 400 could duplicate the entire US Navy fleet 5 times over (so, like, 55 super carriers, 100 carriers, 340 destroyers, 330 submarines, 2560 F/A-18E/F, etc.) and still have $370B in change ($925M each).

Wealth Shown to Scale

Related Stories