
Jeff Bezos's Net Worth Just Broke $100B - myroon5
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/jeff-bezos-fortune-hits-100-billion-on-black-friday-stock-surge
======
justboxing
AMZN, the stock, is trading at a P.E. Ratio of nearly 300.
[http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN](http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN)

Serious question: Considering that it nearly doubled over the past year, is it
already too late to buy Amazon stock? Or not? What's the upside?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Asking whether it's too late to buy I think makes no sense... if it were,
immediately market forces would drive up the price. If it were too soon,
immediately market forces would sell.

You can ask anyone, any individual, of course and they'll have a particular
answer which will differ. But I wouldn't be quick to trust a particular answer
over the answer of the market (which IS the stock price), unless the
particular answer is from a particular person, like a buffett, a domain expert
or an alien from the future or someone with insider knowledge.

At least, that's the theory haha. I know it's a shitty answer.

~~~
WalterBright
The stock price at any point in time is set by about an equal number of
investors thinking it'll go up as those that think it'll go down.

~~~
ryanx435
its not an equal number of investors, its an equal number of buy and sell
orders at a certain price.

an individual with a billion shares has more of an impact on a share price
than an individual with one share.

~~~
WalterBright
Yes, you're right.

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JAFTEM
Bezos is an advocate for basic income, but I question his motives. Is it
because he is genuinely concerned for others and society, or does he want to
avoid the pitchforks at his doorstep when Amazon gets blamed for mass
unemployment? Coupled with the fact that he's the richest man on earth, it's
very apparent he will have a target on his back if he doesn't already.

Maybe his motives don't matter. Maybe we just need to focus on getting basic
income as jobs are wiped away by Big N.

~~~
nazz
What is big N?

~~~
reducesuffering
Big 4, Big 5, or however many big tech co’s you want to include.
Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft

------
tzm
> Bill Gates was last person to attain 12-figure fortune in 1999

$100B nearly 20 years ago, just before the federal antitrust case decision
against Microsoft. Makes me wonder how much concentration of wealth would
occur if regulation was not in place.

~~~
protomok
Bill Gates has also given a lot to charity, from the article - 'Gates, 62, who
has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be
worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t given away almost 700 million
Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity,
according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.'

~~~
barrkel
Charity is problematic too, though. It's subject to the whims of the wealthy,
and worse it's damaging to the dignity of recipients - it denies them agency
in their own well-being. I say this having been the beneficiary of charity
myself: needing to be grateful to someone else is a kind of psychological
servitude.

We'd be better off with an economic system that values agency and lives worth
living a little more than efficiency and profit, that ends up bio-hacking
people to buy more food and mind-hacking people to control their attention.

I don't know how to help make that happen, but I'm pretty sure basic income
isn't the right answer either.

~~~
Pyxl101
The charities that Gates tends to invest in don't just distribute goods to
needy people. His charities try to tackle core societal problems like fighting
malaria in Africa:

[https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-
Health/Mal...](https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-
Health/Malaria)

[https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-
Health/Dis...](https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-
Health/Discovery-and-Translational-Sciences)

> Working closely with other global programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates
> Foundation, the Discovery & Translational Sciences program aims to create
> and improve preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic interventions for
> infectious diseases as well as other conditions that affect mothers,
> infants, and children. We do this by identifying and filling gaps in
> scientific knowledge, creating or implementing new technology platforms that
> can accelerate research in support of our goals, and investing in
> potentially transformative ideas.

> All of our investments advance the goal of creating solutions that can be
> deployed, accepted, and sustained in the developing world. To speed the
> translation of scientific discovery into implementable solutions, we seek
> better ways to evaluate and refine potential interventions—such as vaccine
> candidates—before they enter costly and time-consuming late-stage clinical
> trials.

There's nothing about fighting malaria that denies people agency in their
well-being as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
barrkel
The problems are not just agency, but also whimsy.

Charity is basically a combination of guilt assuaging, ego food and social
proofing. I think we'd be better off with democratically controlled funding,
or economically allocated funding, from a self-sufficient demos, for things
like the battle against malaria.

Charities like Gates's typically turn into long-lived foundations which
acquire politics and agency of their own, not entirely benign. They need to be
connected to their benefactors by some structure of control, like democracy or
economics. A big pile of cash and investments isn't that; it's independence
from control.

Yes, democracy also has problems, it would be great to figure out something
better. But democracy is still better than oligopoly, even if they're benign
today.

~~~
edanm
I think you're wrong. Democracy is also subject to whims, but with the
government, you basically have one player. With charity, at least you have
"competition".

E.g. look at groups helping promote minority rights (civil rights movement,
LGBTQ movement, etc). These were political no-goes, but small groups cared a
_lot_ about these issues, so they helped push them through, via charity and
other means. If you were _only_ OK with charity being done democratically,
i.e. via majority rule, then these movements couldn't exist.

~~~
barrkel
The government is the people. It's a particular disease of the American public
to believe otherwise.

Yes, bureaucracy isn't efficient. But ultimately its decisions reflects the
demos. If the people don't believe in positive government, it will be poor,
like the US. But it isn't always that way (but it is usually still
inefficient).

Lobby groups for minority interests are orthogonal to charity, or should be,
otherwise money will buy more political influence than the demos warrants.
That is, minority influence should be proportional to people involved, not
money spent.

~~~
edanm
"The government is the people. It's a particular disease of the American
public to believe otherwise."

1\. I'm not sure it's a great move to decide that people who disagree with you
are wrong, or "diseased". (Obviously you're using the word disease
metaphorically. Still, I think it's a bad attitude).

2\. I'm not American.

As for the rest of your comment, I didn't say anything about the efficiency of
bureaucracy. I'm not sure anything you said refutes anything I said.

"That is, minority influence should be proportional to people involved, not
money spent."

I'm not sure that's a great measure. Minorities are by definition smaller
groups of people than the majority. If the minority wants something the
majority disagrees with (e.g. civil rights movement), then if we're weighting
simply by the size of groups, then the civil rights movement probably wouldn't
work. We should be _also_ weighting by how much each group "cares", and money
is, to some extent, a measure of that. Not that it's a perfect system, but is
there a better one?

Btw, this is why democracy isn't just about majority rule - it's considered
fundamental to democracy to also have minority protection and similar.
Otherwise minorities would always lose.

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FlyingSideKick
Who cares? I don’t understand why the media wastes their time with stories
like this or how much movies earned over the weekend.

~~~
afterburner
It has some relevance as to the future. If Bezos was bleeding money, he might
change Amazon's direction. If summer blockbusters started tanking, there might
be fewer in the future. It's feedback, it's not necessarily the most useful
information but it's not useless.

Now, endless discussion on a topic when there's hardly any new information (as
24h news stations do), _that 's_ useless...

------
holydude
So his net worth is now more than the GDP of my country. Scary.

~~~
seizethecheese
GDP is a flow, net worth is a stock. Not sure how this became a standard
comparison.

~~~
adventured
Because there are very few things to reference, that most people have even a
modest comprehension of, that have the scale of $100 or more billion.

Despite the comically predictable replies such posts (GDP vs wealth) always
get in threads like this, it's a perfectly valid way to relate size.

The parent didn't say they were the same (in my observation in seeing this
same line play out dozens of times over the years, the parent comment almost
never says they're the same). The replies are jumping to that assumption as a
very low bar way to make themselves look smart.

It's no different than articles that routinely point out the size of a plane's
wingspan or the height of a rocket, compared to a building or a football
field. The point is to provide the reader with something to stand it next to
mentally.

~~~
davidivadavid
No, it's not a valid way to relate size, because we're talking about different
units (dollars vs. dollars per year).

That's like saying it would make sense to compare a plane's wingspan to the
speed of a bullet.

------
jacobush
Not spending nearly enough on rockets.

~~~
garmaine
I too am disappointed about this. Elon Musk is a scrappy bootstrapper by
comparison. Blue Origin could be reaching so much further than they currently
are...

~~~
reducesuffering
Just because Musk can run both Tesla and SpaceX doesn’t mean Bezos can run
Blue Origin and frickin Amazon at the same time. That’s overseeing 500k
employees. I think that it’s a safe bet we’ll see a lot more from Blue Origin
when Bezos steps down from Amazon.

~~~
garmaine
Probably. I’m more complaining about ambition though. Blue Origin isn’t trying
to change the game fundamentally in he way SpaceX is. Regardless o whether
they are hitting deliverables, the deliverables aren’t interesting.

~~~
Robotbeat
Blue Origin has just as ambitious goals as SpaceX. Millions working in space,
industrialization of space to the extent that it actually starts reducing
industrialization of Earth, etc. They even have a rocket on the drawing board
somewhere, New Armstrong, that will likely be a 1-for-1 competitor with BFR,
if not larger, and with full reuse (like BFR).

But as far as actual execution, yeah. SpaceX is way ahead and Blue Origin has
been incredibly slow. Um, I mean "gradatim."

------
cityzen
Interesting talk from Bernie Sanders about wealth inequality and the state of
the economy:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao7iC9b5Mk0&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao7iC9b5Mk0&feature=youtu.be)

I know it's "political" but so is an individual having a net worth of $100
billion. It is well worth the watch unless, of course, you're a billionaire
snowflake and don't like the reality that there are 500,000 homeless people
and 45 million people living under the poverty line in America.

~~~
rukittenme
Jeff Bezos having $100bn is no more political than me having $20. Where you
draw the line is completely arbitrary. Bezos didn't acquire his fortune by
stealing from people. He made it by providing goods at a lower cost than his
competitors. Which means everyone that helped make Bezos wealthy are wealthier
as a result of that interaction.

~~~
cityzen
I do not know how reliable this is but it looks legit. If it is true, Amazon
spending almost $10 million on lobbying and is the 15th highest spender when
it comes to spending. Top issue? Taxes. How is Bezos so f’ing rich? Amazon
doesn’t pay any real taxes, prob less than 1%.

I’m sorry but your $20 is not the same as his $100 billion

[http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023883](http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000023883)

~~~
edanm
While you may be completely right about Amazon and tax lobbying, this is only
a _part_ of the story of how he's so rich. Parent comment was right in the way
that matters, IMO: Jeff Bezos being rich is _mostly_ not at the expense of
anyone else, quite the opposite - it's as a result of the value he's created.
Even if he's paid less in taxes than he "should have", those taxes would've
been 0 if he hadn't created the value and therefore wealth that he's created.

------
amelius
That man has done so much for humanity, I believe he really deserves that
$100B.

~~~
tryingagainbro
if you're being sarcastic, I am sure he doesn't care. "Humanity" is
complicated...maybe he'll make up for all with one invention on his space
venture.

He did save people a lot of money, but then he did also cause many stores to
go kaput. So, how do you judge?

~~~
amelius
The sarcasm was not directed at him, but at us, and our lack of ability to
come up with an economic system that can properly evaluate what somebody is
worth.

E.g. We have a legal system that decides when somebody is right or wrong, and
it mostly matches with what people feel is right or wrong. Why can't we have a
similar system that decides what somebody is worth?

~~~
WalterBright
Isn't that what a free market system does? Bezos' net worth is decided by what
people freely decide his stock is worth.

~~~
amelius
No, because it doesn't align with what people feel is right.

~~~
edanm
I'm not sure you're right. Clearly _you_ don't feel it's right, but it doesn't
seem like you're necessarily in the majority here, at least not in a way that
is actionable. People may complain, but it doesn't seem most people are
actually doing something about this. (Or at least, looking e.g. at the last
elections in the US, there isn't necessarily a majority that agrees with you.)

BTW, as to the broader point, I mostly disagree - I think our current systems
is pretty good at figuring out how much value each person has created, and
letting them capture a portion of it. (That's what the system does, not
"decide how much someone is worth")

~~~
amelius
> I think our current systems is pretty good at figuring out how much value
> each person has created, and letting them capture a portion of it.

You are basically saying that Jeff Bezos has created more than 100x the value
of, say, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, and Donald Knuth
combined?

I think you forget how achieving near monopoly status is like gambling, and
how much it depends on being first to market, and about convincing investors
(for years Amazon has run on a loss, not sure how they do now).

~~~
edanm
"You are basically saying that Jeff Bezos has created more than 100x the value
of, say, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, and Donald Knuth
combined?"

An interesting point. I think most of the above people have created a lot of
value as well. It's hard to quantify, so I think it's _possible_ that Amazon
has created more value.

However, I think it's far more likely that, while they created lots of value,
they haven't captured most of it back. Arguably, that's because they didn't
try to, which is a totally reasonable decision for them to have made.

~~~
amelius
> However, I think it's far more likely that, while they created lots of
> value, they haven't captured most of it back. Arguably, that's because they
> didn't try to, which is a totally reasonable decision for them to have made.

Yes, because going for money takes effort. This means that people who have
hoarded a lot of money and wealth have spent time on capturing money and less
time on producing value. Now we can ask, do we want to reward that kind of
behavior by giving these people money and thus power, and wouldn't we get
(i.e., select) better leaders if we assigned rewards based on true value?

------
quickthrower2
Just think: Someone with 1M bitcoin (which is conceivable if they got in early
enough, hello Satoshi!) could overtake Bezos with just one more of those 20x
increase in the price of bitcoin.

