
Jeff Bezos is the richest person in history - mcone
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/09/technology/jeff-bezos-richest/index.html
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bdwalter
Depends how you define richest while saying "in history"

From Forbes... By the time Rockefeller died in 1937, his assets equaled 1.5%
of America's total economic output. To control an equivalent share today would
require a net worth of about $340 billion dollars.

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tromp
> Forbes put Bezos' net worth at a mere $104.4 billion.

I've rarely seen a less appropriate use of the word "mere"...

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prepend
Sam Walton used to be the richest person ever until he died and his wealth was
split up amongst his children. He had $100B in 1992.
([https://www.investopedia.com/university/sam-walton-
biography...](https://www.investopedia.com/university/sam-walton-
biography/sam-walton-net-worth.asp)) Considering WalMart stock is up 5x since
then, and not even accounting for inflation or dividends that would make him
worth $500B today.

It makes sense that retail would lead to “richest person we’re aware of.”

~~~
psychometry
Both have full-time employees on public assistance programs, too.

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prepend
This is a good point. But I expect that any large corporation has employees on
public assistance programs.

Walmart in particular has really high rates of employees on public assistance.
Amazon seems to have quite a few as well. I think both are due to having lots
of employees near minimum wage.

It’s important to judge this clearly as it may not be the employer’s fault or
responsibility for employees being on assistance programs. I think this is
because assistance programs calculate based on family size and employers pay
based on an individual.

I’ll give an example with national numbers. The actual values vary quite a bit
by state, but the spirit of the example stands.

The national poverty threshold for a single person household is $12k. For the
same household with a child it is $16k. Three kids is $25k. And it keeps
increasing.

Federal minimum wage is $7.25. That comes out to $15k of full time work or
$12k for part time work.

A single person can’t make minimum wage and work full time. But add in a few
kids or a dependent relative and they drop under poverty. But employers don’t
change your pay.

So to tell how unjust Walmart or Amazon is, you need to evaluate what
assistance programs employees are on and for what reasons.

Or I suppose we could shift to a society where employers pay you based on your
household need. But that will likely be really sucky for people who aren’t
healthy and young.

Source: [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-
series/demo/income-p...](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-
series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html)

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whack
The article itself contradicts the headline. Is CNN really taking a page out
of BuzzFeed?

 _" The Amazon CEO's net worth reached $105.1 billion Monday_"

 _" Gates ... net worth was briefly above $100 billion back in April 1999,
when the internet stock bubble helped to inflate the value of his holdings.
Adjusted for inflation, $100 billion in 1999 would be worth $148 billion
today._"

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mrgreenfur
Does anyone else see this as a scary evidence that technology is accelerating
the consolidation of money to the few that succeed? How long did it take
historical figures to reach this level of wealth vs Bezos in the last ~20
years? This should be a huge warning sign to nearly everyone, instead of
celebrated.

~~~
8bitsrule
Of all the aspects and effects of Amazon's style of business that I find
troubling, Bezos' money is the least of them.

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olympus
One caveat: Bezos is the richest out of people that we can get an accurate and
publicly available estimate of their wealth. It doesn't count people like
Vladimir Putin because we don't actually know how much he's worth- but many
suspect that it could be more than 100 billion. It also doesn't count
families, such as the House of Saud, which has several members worth over 10
billion, and the entire family might be worth over a trillion.

[http://fortune.com/2017/07/29/vladimir-putin-russia-jeff-
bez...](http://fortune.com/2017/07/29/vladimir-putin-russia-jeff-bezos-bill-
gates-worlds-richest-man/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud)

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montrose
According to this list, Rockefeller and Carnegie were several times richer:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures)

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bdavisx
It's a sad commentary on capitalism that two of the richest people in history
(Bezos and Walton) companies treat many of their employees like shit.

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sharemywin
This was pretty interesting in terms of all time wealthiest people:

[http://time.com/money/3977798/the-10-richest-people-of-
all-t...](http://time.com/money/3977798/the-10-richest-people-of-all-time-2/)

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boysabr3
I'm always in awe of Amazon's sustained growth. Bezos has built a company that
has innovated constantly (after a tumultuous start in the late 90s) and at
scale:

\- AWS was launched in 2006 when Amazon had < 15k employees.

\- Kindle was launched in late 2007 with 20k employees.

\- Echo was launched in 2014 with 150k employees.

It's no surprise he's the richest in history. Will be really interesting to
see how he spends his money over the next 2-3 decades.

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melling
Would you be even more surprised to find out that he’s not the richest in
history?

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boysabr3
Nope, doesn't really matter if he's the richest or not. I think lots of
companies could learn a lot from how Amazon innovates. I don't think you can
deny that they are categorically better than many others at their size /
scale.

