Jeff Bezos is the richest person in history | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos is the richest person in history

money.cnn.com

20 pointsmcone18 comments

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.

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

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

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...) 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.”

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

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...

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."

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.

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

No not at all. In my opinion Capitalism is working just as intended -- we have newer families (Gates, Bezos, Zucks etc) that are now dominating the older ones (Carnegies, Rockefellers, Waltons). This is all in a span of less than 100 years.

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... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

According to this list, Rockefeller and Carnegie were several times richer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...

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.

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

http://time.com/money/3977798/the-10-richest-people-of-all-t...

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.

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

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.

Every wealthy billionaire would have committed an "original sin". For the Kennedys it was bootlegging and insider trading, for Gates, it was anti-trust violations. All Bezos is doing is slave-driving his employees -- fairly benign and unlikely to get him into trouble.

Lots of friends at Amazon (US, IN, EU) who would categorically disagree on being slave driven. He is more aggressive and less favorable on "perks" than other companies in the bay area, but no where close to a slave driver (and no, I'm not taking you literally here).

I don't have data and so won't make a factual claim but can personally attest that work cultures can get significantly more aggressive / stressful / unreasonable at well funded + known tech companies in Asia. I don't think you realise how high up the totem pole Amazon is when it comes to work cultures and I also don't think you realise that there are many out there who like working at Amazon just because of it's work culture.

That being said, totally concede to the possibility that Amazon / Bezos _could_ have done questionable things starting up. I'm not aware of any but feel free to point them out.

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