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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

$94.6 billion net worth at present per Bloomberg.

I know he is basically guaranteed to be running all of these sales off a sale schedule set far in advance for obvious reasons. However, I'd probably be doubling up those $1 billion sales until/unless this market gives out.

Raising $6 or $10 billion - enough to fund Blue Origin for maybe a decade - by selling out of a $94 billion base, sure beats doing the same out of $26 billion (where his net worth was at just ~33 months ago).

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A $68 billion increase in net worth in 33 months must be some kind of record.

Well in real terms Bill Gates in the dot-com era might still have the edge.

Gates went from $10 billion to ~$78 billion ($68b gain; he topped out near $100b around Dec 1999) in about four years from mid 1994 to mid 1998. With an inflation adjustment, it's probably in his favor or very close.

Masayoshi Son went from around $2 billion in early 1995, to $77 billion by the peak in late 1999 / early 2000 or so.

Yasumitsu Shigeta was worth $42 billion briefly in February 2000, up from $1 billion a year earlier. Then basically lost it all just as fast. For just a one year gain, he might hold the record (Bezos is up $29 billion year to date).

Were you just sitting on these data?

"The man sitting across from him, a 40-something businessman with auburn hair, wearing a navy Italian suit jacket with a white shirt, worn casually, spoke in a thick American southern accent that hid the wiseness beyond his years and began with the net worth of various highly wealthy people, comparing their wealth to the time it took to obtain said wealth. Intrigued and slightly astounded, he jokingly asked the man, 'Were you just sitting on this data?' The man just laughed."

I'd like to be the protagonist in more of your stories.

I never liked computers growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, not really anyway. I loved technology but I was mostly indifferent toward computers, regarding them as boring, constrained tools. Two of my neighbors had Windows 2.x machines, my interaction with them consisted mostly of gaming. At home we had an old commodore and some unusual other system (which had an awesome cartridge based rip-off clone of pac-man), both were about as interesting to me as a toaster. My father had purchased them at some point - in theory for business purposes - they didn't seem to get used much. I liked building things and I hated having other people tell me what to do with my time or brain. From an early age, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur of some sort and I thought I might want to go into the aerospace field. Then in late 1994 I was introduced to the World Wide Web. That changed everything about how I viewed the world, I couldn't get enough of it. I grew up in Appalachia, a world apart from the kind of intellectual stimulation I craved. The potential of the Web was immediately obvious, it was like being hit with a sledgehammer. Suddenly you go from feeling disconnected from the world, to chatting with thousands of people from all around the planet on the WebChat Broadcasting System. Ecommerce, primitive streaming, communities, message boards, personal home pages, search, internet time, online gaming, blinking text, spinning gifs, applets, instant messaging, frames, oh man. Working on a solitary PC always felt like I was a TV repairman. With the Internet, the Web, you could be Spielberg, it was a platform seemingly infinite in potential to build upon. You didn't need permission, you didn't have to jump through red tape, you could just dial-in and start doing. I was enthralled by the era in general, it was an epoch, the big bang. Since it was simultaneously my formative teen years, the memories from 1995-2000 or so, are extremely vivid. Everything about the Web seemed incredible, every new site & service, no matter how silly. The stories from that time are permanently imprinted into my brain because of that. I had a pretty good recollection of the specifics, I double checked the exact figures.

When I see comments like these, I want to just sit them down and know all about their life.

I guess there are far worse things one could be sitting on.

All of this is entirely dependent on whimsy.

Amazon P/E is basically in the clouds.

They and Telsa in some ways are basically impossible to value.

So, people make difficult guesses.

Though I agree that because AMZN could probably simply 'turn on profit' at any time, and so the classical P/E is not a great measure ... at the same time ... a small dip in something could ruin them.

It only takes just a little bit of return to 'normal P/E' to wipe most of that out.

It's all emotion and intellectual pontification right now, and that's a crazy place to own a stock.

> though I agree that because AMZN could probably simply 'turn on profit' at any time

I'm confused—Amazon is profitable already, no?

They are barely profitable.

Massive revenue, tiny profit.

So, this makes their P/E ration quite massive and crazy as well.

Usually companies are based on the present value of all future earnings, kind of implying a P/E multiple of like 8 or 25 or whatever. Amazons is crazy high.

This is because it's assumed that Amazon could, at any time, start declaring massive profits, but they chose to re-invest instead.

They only became profitable recently, like 2016 time frame.

I can't help but wonder what it's like to have that kind of money.

Does such a person ever wake up, and wonder how the dice rolled so amazingly in their favor?

Or do they wake up and stand proud, recognizing that they are so successful because of their own hard work and intelligence?

Do they ever think about how insane life is that they ended up with 94 billion, while some people are starving?

I'm not making any moral projection here. I'm not saying there's anything right, or wrong, about that situation. I'm just genuinely curious what it feels like to be in their shoes.

There are people in the world who’s life would be more transformed by your wealth than your’s would be by Bezos’.

How did you wake up this morning?

Also not making a moral projection here. We just tend to look up instead of down.

I've never heard anyone say it like that. It's given me pause.

Extremely well said.

Bezos has taken to recently calling his immense wealth, his "Amazon lottery winnings." Which gives you an indication that he is fully aware of the role good luck has played in his life. I'm sure it's also meant to disarm or preempt criticism to an extent, Warren Buffet has done the same thing the entire time he has been famous & wealthy (using various explanatory concepts such as "the ovarian lottery," and joking about how he'd be dinosaur lunch in a different time given how a vicious carnivore might respond to his capital allocation skills). To the extent that Bezos's wealth is particularly wildly outsized, I'm sure - based on what he has said - that he recognizes it as being well beyond just the result of hard work and intelligence (both of which he usually gets credit for).

> Does such a person ever wake up, and wonder how the dice rolled so amazingly in their favor?

More likely they wake up thinking about how to further weight dice rolls into their favour, even those stretching years into the future.

I'm just genuinely curious what it feels like to be in their shoes.

The contemplation of this question satisfies ones need for introspection. Whether it's Bezos, or someone you are not there is great value in trying to answer this.

Struggle and pain and want is cleansing. Constant success can be a house of cards for children.

Wealth, enormous, is a burden. Just making it is freedom. Imo.

As he cant understand our life anymore we cant understand his.

I don't know the answer, but how do you feel every morning waking up knowing your top 1% of the world and top 0.xxxx% of the history of all man kind? I don't think you think about it too much and keep doing things... Maybe even wine a bit :))

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