
Jeff Bezos Is Just $5B Away from Being the World's Richest Person - huangc10
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-27/amazon-surge-places-bezos-within-5-billion-of-world-s-richest
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drenvuk
Has there ever been speculation as to who the richest person in the world is
when taking into account private funds instead of just public? Would the list
be any different?

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rapsey
I'm sure there are a number of __old __money families that control wealth of
at least an order of magnitude higher. They are powerful enough to not make it
visible and directly tied to them. Rothchilds are most likely effectively
trillioners.

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charlesdm
Do you have your tin foil hat on? Intergenerational wealth breaks down
relatively quickly when dealing with significant numbers of heirs to a family
fortune. Most will probably still be UHNWIs, but that's it.

~~~
rapsey
A family whose wealth was built by their knowledge of how to manage wealth let
their fortune dwindle? If I'm a crazy conspiracy theorist for finding that
hard to believe I guess I am.

~~~
charlesdm
As a family, they'll be worth a lot. But not that much. We're probably talking
100-200+ descendants over the centuries. Some will have done well in life
(e.g. doubled / tripled / quadrupled their inheritances), others will have
wasted it all.

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rapsey
You are speaking in certainties and making baseless assumptions to come to
your conclusion.

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charlesdm
So are you? The things I brought up are relatively common sense. Common sense
aside, I also know several old money families (some 3rd generation
entrepreneurial, some old 12th century EU aristocracy) and I'm partially
basing my assumptions based on what I've noticed and what they've told me
about similar families they know.

If you feel the need to prove the Rothschild family are trillionaires, go
ahead + best of luck.

~~~
rapsey
> So are you?

What certainty am I speaking in? I'm making a clearly expressed assumption
that they are using their family core competency of managing wealth and not
pissing it away.

> The things I brought up are relatively common sense.

If you mean common sense as in having no sense how to properly manage wealth.
Which is what very few people on average understand.

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tunap
House of Saud seems to have a pretty good _grip_ on retaining wealth. Did
someone say "trillions"?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud#Wealth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud#Wealth)

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eutropia
Meanwhile, I'm "just" 5B away from becoming the word's 324th richest person.

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thaumasiotes
1\. Bill Gates divides his money, half into his personal bank account[1], half
into a tax shelter.

2\. Various other people hover around the value in Bill Gates' unsheltered
personal account.

3\. "Bill Gates is passed up as the richest person in the world!"

Let me know when their net wealth exceeds the value of the wealth controlled
by Bill Gates.

[1] metaphorically

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whack
If only every billionaire had a "tax shelter" that saved millions of lives.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-is-bill-gates-
bet...](http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-is-bill-gates-better-than-
batman-2012-1)

~~~
tanderson92
thaumasiotes' point is not that Bill Gates is not a philanthropic individual,
it is that most estimates of wealth are not accounting correctly for the total
amount of wealth he has accumulated. He is simply using his wealth for more
moral actions.

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thaumasiotes
I'm not even talking about "the total amount of wealth he has accumulated". If
he went spectacularly broke, that wouldn't take away from his lifetime
earnings, but it would take away from his current wealth.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is under his direct control and the
money goes where he thinks it should go. It's fundamentally identical to a
personal entertainment fund. There is no reason to leave it out of estimates
of his current worth.

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Chris2048
To be clear, are these estimations of wealth "money in the bank" wealth (minus
liabilities), or "worth of assets in the eyes of investors"?

Things like stick price are, in my opinion, a fickle thing. Until you sell
yours stocks/shares for money, their value is still shifting.

In that sense "wealth" is similar to "perception"/"confidence" \- it's not the
same thing, because you have to figure in market/investor hype/rationality.

~~~
earlyriser
What would you call "money in the bank"? I mean when you have this kind of
money you cannot just put it in the bank... probably even at the kind of money
a tech worker has. To my knowledge, these estimations are based on the worth
of assets.

~~~
Chris2048
"money in the bank" means assets that might only vary by inflation/FX etc, not
dependent on a specific stock price.

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roryisok
"just" $5B.

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andrewstuart2
It's closer to reality when you consider that this is a 6.3% increase over his
current net worth.

But yes. It's a ridiculous sum of money to be thrown around casually.

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roryisok
That little B makes it so easy.

"Jeff Bezos Is Just $5,000,000,000 Away from Being the World's Richest Person"
reads slightly differently

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melling
Yes, it reads like a click-baity headline. Read the HN comments. It worked.

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amgin3
Well, I'm just $1B away from being a billionaire.

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amorphid
You're closer than I am.

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Overtonwindow
"Just"

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rubyfan
I'm just a billion dollars away from being a billionaire.

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buryat
that's closer than some people

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vacri
Louis CK has a great bit about going into negative dollars when his bank
charged him a fee for not having enough money. "Now I have negative ten
dollars. I gotta raise ten dollars just to be broke. If something's free, I
can't afford it!"

~~~
dx034
That's why in some statistics, 10% of the US population counts as the poorest
people in the world. Starving people in developing countries usually have
exactly $0, in the US most students finishing college are technically poorer
than most of the world's population.

Doesn't reflect reality in any way though.

~~~
dopamean
There's a story that Ivanka Trump told to a documentarian about how her father
told her once that a homeless man they passed on the street was richer than
them because of how much debt they were in. IIRC she told that story because
it was supposed to demonstrate something about her family's humility. I always
thought it was a pretty dumb thing to say.

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coldcode
His company's profits are minuscule by any historical valuation but Amazon
stock is at an insane valuation. For this value to be justified he would have
to become the world's only distributor of everything.

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adventured
That's an extreme exaggeration.

Amazon's market cap at close today was $438 billion.

To match Google's earnings multiple, Amazon would need something in the
ballpark of $14 billion in net income.

They're chugging toward $200 billion in sales. $14b in net income off of that
is very reachable. Even if we apply a much more conservative premise to it,
they're still growing above 20% - maybe it takes them $280b in sales to get to
$14b in net income; they're going to get to that sales level within six or
seven years plausibly. AWS alone is all but guaranteed to generate $5+ billion
in operating income within a few years. The issue isn't whether Amazon will
one day justify ~$400 billion, as that's very likely, it's how far from the
future are the gains being pulled. 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?

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appleiigs
Amazon has $136B in sales, which produces $2.4B in net income (1.7% margin).
How do you get $14B in net income from $280B in sales?

With a 1.7% net income margin, Amazon would need $824B in sales to get $14B,
compared to the $135B now.

As a reference, Walmart is largest company in the world by revenue at $438B.
Apple $233B.

The P/E ratio tells you how many years to recover the cost of your investment.
Amazon is at 187 years.

~~~
vacri
> _As a reference, Walmart is largest company in the world by revenue at
> $438B. Apple $233B._

Weird that the catchcry for one is selling the cheapest crap possible, and the
catchcry for the other is premium blend, no discounts. What about us poor
folks in the middle? :)

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sbuttgereit
You're either "aspirational", meaning that you shoot for the expensive Apple
products rather than a simple run of the mill PC for status reasons, or you're
"thrifty", meaning that since you've blown most of your cash on a few
aspirational products, you can only afford Walmart for anything else you want
to buy.

Yes, I'm being a bit glib, but there's some truth in that analysis. People in
the middle do try to buy some higher end goods in areas they want to signal
status on... they do so selectively, but if they can afford it and its a
product that makes a desired statement, they go for it. An Apple product that
a billionaire would typically buy is often the same model that a middle income
earner can buy, yet everyone knows they aren't the cheapest things around. On
the other hand, if you're buying expensive in one area, you're also probably
buying cheap in other areas, so Walmart, Ross, etc. are on the table for the
middle earner as well.

For middle of the road price/products there's less prestige so you don't get
that and there's can be debatable quality difference... so... the appeal can
be less for something middling.

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Naritai
I've read other market analyses that say basically the same thing - there's no
money to be made in being a 'good brand', you'll do much better chasing either
high-end market or competing on cost. That's why companies like Gap & Macy's
are suffering, whereas each of Louis Vuitton / Burberry and H&M / TJ Maxx have
been expanding like crazy.

