
Jeff Bezos sells $1.8bn of Amazon stock - jmsflknr
https://www.ft.com/content/f7d855ac-b465-11e9-bec9-fdcab53d6959
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a-priori
So what? He sells $1B every year to fund Blue Origin alone. Maybe this is one
of these transactions?

On the scale of Bezos' fortune, this is not a significant amount of money.

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27182818284
I hope that it is, because before reaching this comment thread I even thought
"I hope it is to fund Blue Origin"

We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get
at it.

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criley2
>We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get
at it.

NASA alone spends some 10X-20X every year what Bezos does, but some how a
dinky danky 1 billion is now "going after space like we should have been?"

I don't buy it. If NASA's ~22B budget is insufficient, then billionaires
making toys for an order of magnitude less is an order of magnitude more
insufficient.

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NikolaeVarius
Falcon Heavy Flew 3x on a development budget of over 500 million, probably
under a billion with dev -> launch time being around 6 years or so.

SLS current dev budget is over 7 billion dollars in 8 years, and they haven't
finished assembling their first stack.

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criley2
Falcony Heavy only exists because NASA and the taxpayer have given billions to
Tesla to develop it and fly it. To consider SpaceX as anything more than a
small government contractor attached firmly to the side of the NASA budget is
disingenuous. SpaceX itself is hailed as a NASA success for lowering the cost
of launching, and an example of smart government spending.

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NikolaeVarius
News indicates that no government funding was used for its (Falcon Heavy)
development.
[http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2466/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2466/1)

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criley2
This is pointless semantics.

1) Without the billions NASA has awarded Space X prior to Falcon, there is no
SpaceX.

2) Without the billions NASA awarded them during Falcon development for other
projects, SpaceX would have not gotten enough money from investors, who
rightfully valued the company based on their NASA contracts

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sp332
I can't read this article, but looking at other news sources, this is the
usual yearly sell-off he does to fund his rocket ship company.

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amrrs
Do you think it's real/truth of what he says about building Blue Origin? i.e.,
like Mark got to build FB from his Dorm room because heavy lifting of Internet
and Infra are setup, some kid in the future can launch space program because
Blue origin is doing the heavy lifting of putting the foundation.

I mean that seems like a great philanthropic vision, but Jeff Bezos known for
serious business would do that with so much money without any foreseeing
revenue - just for an improved society?

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SuoDuanDao
Bill Gates did something very similar, and we were similarly skeptical then. I
like to think that once you're the world's richest man, your priorities might
shift in a way that's difficult to imagine from the midst of the rat race.

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pmoriarty
I've grown a lot more skeptical of what Gates has been doing with his
foundation after investigative journalists started reporting on it.

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mffnbs
What reports are you referring to?

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erikpukinskis
Here’s one:
[https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/...](https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/unholy-
alliance/olob-bmgf-factsheet.pdf)

~~~
mffnbs
This publication seems to be relying on the reader to have a preconceived
negative bias on GMOs in order to establish some of their arguments. I
understand why a casual reader who's been led to believe that GMOs are
malicious or toxic would find this disturbing, but knowing that GMOs are
basically how we are able to consume most if not all modern food safely, it's
immediately sensationalist to me.

I don't know about the other two topics they address, but I kind of question
the motive altogether.

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erikpukinskis
Nothing wrong with choosing GMO seeds.

Definitely something wrong with trying to force farmers to use them.

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sarosh
The stock sale is apparently to fund Blue Origin.

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rando444
Similar non-paywalled article:

[https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/jeff-bezos-
se...](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/jeff-bezos-sells-1-8bn-
of-amazon-stock-1.3974276)

He's using the money to fund Blue Origin (aerospace manufacturing)

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altmind
Is selling personal stock to fund your other company tax effective? He's
paying capital gains tax when moving money from one pocket to another.

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nixgeek
Hasn’t he been selling good amounts of stock annually for a while now? I
thought he’d decided to put $1bn a year into Blue Origin?

Protected by a paywall but why’s this news? Isn’t it also a fairly small % of
his overall holding in Amazon?

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mruts
Why does he selp stock to fund Blue Origin instead of taking out debt backed
by shares? If the past is any indication, such debt would make way more
financial sense than selling shares.

I don’t know how long he’s been doing this, but he’s leaving billions of
dollars of returns on the table.

And don’t anyone say he doesn’t want the exposure, because he clearly does.

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amerine
Maybe he doesn’t give a shit? For example, if I make 250k/year and you offer
me another 20k a year, but I have to add >10% additional work to my plate...
nah.

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eloisant
He likely has people working full time to take care of his fortune, so it's
not like he would have to micro-manage those solutions.

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buboard
Vacation went over budget

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strikelaserclaw
not if u want to take a vacation to mars

