Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Like the late 1920s, we saw losses in purchasing power of the average American, the collection of wealth among the top 1%, and disruption of our civic spaces as a result. I think the thing that many Americans aren't aware of was just how violent that time in US history was[1].
The US economy isn't just about how comfortable the average US citizen is, it is also a measure of how much cushion there is in our society between us being frustrated looking at a job board and being angry and armed in the streets. The teachers strikes in Oklahoma, Florida, and W. Virginia are showing the rise of Unions (much like in the gilded age as well). Protest and civic engagement must be our response, we should take signs like the wealth of Bezos as a cautionary tale, rather than something to simply marvel at.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Matewan
When you look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and perhaps even Gates, they had near total control over some aspect of the American Economy. And they used that control to make incredible profits.
Amazon is trying to do the same, but they haven't done so yet. Their retail business is not wildly profitable (if at all). They haven't monopolized online retail (and may never be able to do so).
Amazon may be the next Walmart, but they're not the next Standard Oil. And the market has priced in huge expectations that Amazon will eventually have to meet, or investor exuberance will wane.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic.
They're hiding profits and just plowing all the revenue back into the business while undercutting both competitors and their own employees.
It's an open question if Amazon will ever be able to raise prices and reap those promised profits without losing marketshare to the many players that would love to take them down.
Right now I view Amazon as a very profitable web hosting company and a retail non-profit.
Google and Microsoft, for comparison, were both much faster to get to monopoly-level marketshare. Amazon, at 24 years old, still isn't there.
Would you rather be Pullitzer (advertising magnate) or Vanderbilt (transportation)? I'll take the latter every time from a pure $$$ standpoint. Bezos is actually trying to be both.
Of course that analysis ignores that the retail business is what allows Amazon to have an advertising business. But the GP is largely accurate. Amazon is most well known for their retail but it's not really what makes them the money. AWS is their cash cow and advertising is becoming their second.
I stopped buying shit from Amazon and haven't had a problem finding things elsewhere. Yeah, I pay 1% more... big deal. Fuck those guys.
That's mischaracterizing the situation. They're not unprofitable because they're charging less than they could, they're unprofitable because they pour their profits immediately back into growing other business avenues. If Amazon spent a quarter or two slowing/halting the development of new business ventures they'd immediately be profitable. If they spent a year doing that and also trimming prior unsuccessful ventures they'd be quite profitable.
According to TechCrunch[1], Amazon controls 49% of the entire e-commerce market, and 5% of the entire retail market overall. They're also in a position to jockey for even more market share as retail continues to move online.
Amazon is in the perfect position to completely own e-commerce, so it's quite possible that we're just early in making our comparison.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...
And we've seen what they can do when a competitor emerges like diapers.com. They bury them in the ground Walmart of the 90s style.
As could have been 25, 26, 32, 35, 37, etc
If you were a betting man, would you bet 49% is a high water mark?
Comcast, for instance, isn't really a monopoly. There are numerous other big players in that industry. But the thing is that instead of "undercutting competitors" and "buying market share" the competitors all agree to cooperate and split up the market. The result is when you buy something from Amazon, you're hitting quite close to the wholesale cost of that item. And when you pay your high speed internet bill to Comcast, what you're paying is some large multiple of the real cost of service.
Often repeated, but wrong. Their financials might show almost no net income (just $3B) but that's just because they choose to reinvest every dollar of gross profits into themselves to grow.
Just look at their income statement: in 2017 they invested $23B into "R&D". These are profits they could have just taken.
Obviously, reinvesting in themselves has been a fantastic choice. That's how they were able to grow their revenues ~10× over the last 10 years ($20B to $180B)...
As long as reinvesting works so well, you will keep seeing a "meager" net income of $3B yearly.
I doubt we'll be so lucky this time around. Things are about to get absolutely brutal for the 90%.
Not advocating, and I doubt I'd be one of them holding a pitchfork, but it is something to keep in mind.
I find it difficult to imagine an uprising against the 1% in America any time soon, but if it did happen I can absolutely imagine the police siding against the 1%.
I think the chance of the police or military siding against the 1% is incredibly small.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/22485.m...
Successful uprisings by the masses against the elites almost always involve substantial fractions of the military, police, and other security services defecting, either abandoning their gear or taking it with them and turning it against the elites.
Until we get robots replacing guys with guns, that's going to be a recurring failure mode for narrow elite rule.
Assuming the revolting army was full of tech geeks, the best we could hope for is a drone/robotic army that uses technology. Because jocks most of us are not. LOL.
Although I doubt it'd reach the point of massive insurrection. That would require a total loss of trust in the government, and I think we're still far from that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/29/ameri...
So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons - have access to guns?
That's a bad reading. Even if everyone in a household with a gun owner have access to guns, that would mean 33% of households implies exactly 33% of people if gun ownership is distributed among households with no bias by household size. It doesn't imply more than 33% of people unless gun owning households are larger than non-gun-owning households.
There are many non-gun owners that are without a doubt for owning guns.
What part of calling them a vocal minority seems inaccurate?
33% on a binary trait (one either does or does not own at least one gun) is clearly a minority.
Merely owning guns is different than possessing the physical ability and training in weapons and tactics to use them effectively, especially versus military or paramilitary forces (National Guard and Border Patrol is a much more likely initial pro-government force than police). Not only are they equipped and trained with the same weapons civilians may have, they also have automatic weapons, nightvision, grenades, armored vehicles, helicopters, tear gas, sonic weapons, fire trucks, and a lot more.
The fact is that the select few protect themselves with rolls of the sons and daughters of the masses. Sure, plenty of them will turn their weapons on their fellow countrymen for a paycheck, but how many? And for how long?
And especially once those bullets start flying, how useful is the money being paid to those guards? How long before they have all the money they could ever want and no one will sell them food?
In our hyper-connected world, we lose people jobs when they crack a racist joke on twitter. How hard will it be to find the 1%'s executioners?
For example, I don’t know what food you’re talking about because in my wild fantasy scenario, all of the freeways have been destroyed and Walmarts and grocery stores are empty. Mass starvation, plague, panic, electricity is off, no communication systems work other than the military. They have seized anything useful. They have tanks etc, which helps a lot. As far as ‘who will sell them food’... you’re talking about a highly armed military force fighting a civil war? Do you think people are going shopping at Kroger with the other side or something? This isn’t the French Revolution. This is 80 years after millions of people died in gas chambers in Europe, right? The next major wars are not going to be very friendly.
Sure, Shock and Awe was successful, but it was nothing more than a raid. The US Army did not conquer Iraq, at least on the medium term. They barely control most of the territory.
Its not a scenario that I really want to think about since its so brutal. But it can happen, and the war is likely to be a prolonged battle.
Not to mention, the unrest in the Motherland will let other rogue forces run amok internationally as they jostle for supremacy over each other. I can't see any of that ending well.
If the govt or millitary hold so much tech that you end up in a hunger game scenario, and the population is oppressed (but unlike hunger games, the oppression comes in the form of feeble food and entertainment - ala, bread and circus).
The people feel comfortable enough to not want to revolt. Yet, ignores the minority that do get harsher treatment, because doing so puts their own lively hood in jeopardy.
I think though that far beyond contemplating who is shooting at who with what, the more interesting question is what does victory look like for the 1%? Just shoot everyone who complains until there's nothing but peaceful staff left?
If you're talking an actual war of attrition between the classes in the US, you'd be crazy to bet on the rich. It's not even a question of "if" they can win, their win condition DOES NOT EXIST and cannot exist. The more disgruntled people who are killed, the more people become disgruntled, until you have the entirety of the damn country saying "wait a minute, why am I shooting my fellow citizens because Mr. Bezos wants a 10th house?"
If this gets to a place of violence, and if the Rich of today allow it to get to that place, they have assured their own destruction, it's simply a matter of time. The best thing they could be doing right now is supporting measures to help out the common people, if for no other reason than their money cannot stop the torches.
Edit: I'm rambling a bit here but I guess my counterpoint basically boils down to: let's assume that the Rich get full control of the US Military and it's assets to end civil insurrection and restore economic order. How do they do it? What orders do they give? Where do they send the missiles to dismantle the resistance? Which neighborhoods get power cut? Who gets banned from twitter? And how does it end?
I'm just not seeing a way that such a conflict would end where Amazon (or anyone else) could simply resume business as usual.
Any conflict where the U.S. disintegrates will likely spread worldwide, too, as other nations take advantage of the power vacuum to press their own claims. So emigration is unlikely to be a solution for people who wish to remain neutral.
The endgame for the 1% is likely to become lords or petty kings of little feudal domains. They may offer to provide security services to their employees in exchange for economic service. They wouldn't be global titans of industry, but they'd be heads of their little fiefdoms. The smart ones will avoid major military action, instead only clearing the local area around their corporate offices of populist insurgents. If the insurgents want to fight other insurgent groups, that's their business; they can all kill each other off.
Endgame for the 1% is being in a position to gain the spoils of war and to take less damage than your competition.
Private security forces and tech/AI are wildcards - we haven't had anything like the former since feudal mercenary days, and we haven't had anything like the latter ever - but could also form the basis for power centers.
That US military is also neither attacking its own citizens it has filial and friendly ties with, nor attacking people who look and talk like it.
Modern armor and missiles don't accomplish much when the enemies main goal is to just live as they want to (instead of conquer territory or resources).
No sane country would lend us money to wage war on our own people/economic infrastructure.
And mass insurrection would disrupt the supply chain. Nothing is warehoused these days, so the country would fall apart.
Maybe I'm a pessimist. Maybe I should start digging my shelter.
On a more serious note, a population is only peacefully policed at the enjoyment of the people. The critical mass of insurrection beyond which a population can no longer be policed is low. In my lifetime I have seen riots in LA, Baltimore, and Ferguson, to name just three. And those were of minority populations. If the entitled "obese" hegemonic population were part of the insurrection, it might be more difficult to put them down.
Disease, war, some other ecological disaster... a divided and very unequal nation cannot respond to these stresses. This is what ultimately balances things, it's a shame that so many many lives will have to be destroyed in the future because we are too timid to fix the problem now.
Basically troll the party in red states, some might actually get elected on a platform similar to Bernie but tweaked to appeal to right wingers, and then we can work from left/right to pull the masses to a center that's more progressive less corporatist.
We do have a very strong Federal government, but it's designed to funnel money to various interest groups.
By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
AWS has made it way cheaper to start and scale many kinds of tech startups, and paved the way for firms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, and the entire vps ecosystem.
Bezos is a master of infrastructure execution. This is extremely rare, as we can see from the fate of Jet and Azure. Year after year the genius of his business tradeoff decisions and strategies become more clear. This is why he's wealthy. What we need are more people with that kind of vision and ability to see the big picture and solve real, unsexy problems.
Before AWS I had dealt with Dell as a part of several startups. The sales people were shady and they tried to milk every penny out of the customer for semi-proprietary hardware that was expensive to support. People flocked to AWS to escape the kind of predation and mediocrity championed by Dell.
Most readers of HN have the technical ability to have started AWS but (if they were of age at the time) did not see the opportunity and the path to execution. Bezos did. Let's give him some credit. I think he's one of the most remarkable visionaries of our age.
50% of Americans can't come.up with 500 bucks in case of emergency.
So, unless you're implying that everyone who has "a checking account" has more than 7.3 trillion dollars, sorry, it's just not the same.
I'm not denying that there is extreme inequality between poor in America and poor in Africa or India.
But let's not make false comparisons between having a banking account and being in the top 30 wealthiest individuals. Having a banking account is not the same as having 7 trillion dollars in wealth.
[1] https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... (year 2013, page 21)
He didn't do this, his workers did. How many of his workers are making minimum wage, with no health insurance or health insurance they can't afford deductibles for? How many of his warehouses don't have air conditioning? How many people working for Amazon are forced to pee in bottles, pushed beyond their limits?
He's not sitting there shipping all packages, not sitting there soldering amazon echo's, his workers are.
$150 billion shouldn't exist for Bezos and Bezos alone, as the wealth should be spread around the company to the workers who actually do the work. We likely wouldn't be this situation of extreme inequality if this was the case. It's disgusting selfishness that is allowed by our current system.
selfishness is allowed? Is it possible to disallow a core human trait?
Likewise, disallowing envy (or selfishness) by itself is not possible, but making illegal the actions that result from those feelings can (and sometimes should) be outlawed.
All that said. Amazon needs to take a long hard look at how they manage their warehouses and fulfillment centers when it comes to workers rights and common decency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Historiography_and_ev...
Most paint it as a failure of capitalism, the rest as a direct result of government manipulation of the banking system, trade disruption caused by Smoot-Hawley, and huge tax increases.
Depending on who you ask, the New Deal was either ineffective because it was fundamentally flawed, or ineffective because it wasn't big enough and didn't raise enough debt. [2]
Basically, "economic science" as usual...
Absolute numbers are important, but the rate of change more so. Were unemployment raising to 25% or already going down? It's the difference between those 19% being a meager improvement and staving off absolute disaster.
It seems unlikely that some huge portion (say, > 90%) of those historians further believe that New Deal policies had no or little positive effect on the Great Depression. Are the "credible historians" just the ones who happen to agree with you on this topic?
So yes, I believe that most of those 51% and 74% believe the effect was nonexistant or small. Typically, something like "if FDR had spent as much on the New Deal as he did during the War, it would have ended the Depression". [1] (I.e., it was too little, as in my previous comment.)
I welcome any references to historians claiming the New Deal largely fixed the Great Depression. (Or really, any option from a historian more positive than the quoted article.)
Or...you know, just silently downvote this comment :)
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-depression-of-1929-3306...
We actually have a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't during the Great Depression and mainstream economic historians[1] seem to have reached a rough consensus.
In school, though, we teach the Great Depression through the lens of political history. So for that purpose it doesn't matter what was really causing it, just what people at the time thought was causing it.
[1] I'm excluding Marxists, Austrians, MMTers, etc here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Mainstream_ex...
EDIT: A while ago Krugman had a very good piece trying to explain how deflation can cause problems. Different sorts of economists often disagree about whether its interest rates or aggregate quantities or expectation traps or whatever that's the most important aspect of tight or loose money but they all agree that these things are real and meaningful and generally explain depressions. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
> New Deal
The New Deal is the arguably the worst economic policy in US history. It turned the Great Recession into the Great Depression [1] [2] and has been an economic anchor on the US ever since [3] [4] [5]
That it has popularly been given credit for the WWII-era economy is doctoring history. That it still further has become the epitome of good economic policy is unbelievable.
[1] http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D...
[2] https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/06/05/tru...
[4] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
[5] https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/11/new-deal-stimulus-opinions...
• 50th percentile is 21900,
• 90th is "only" 50600,
• 95th is 70400, that's the salary required for the 220K average UK house.
• 96th is 78800
• 97th is 91300
• 98th is 11000
• 99th is 159000, that's the salary required for the 500K average London house.
It really only takes off from 97th percents. Wealth diagram is probably going to look like that too.
I noticed that I used an older version, so the number have increased a little. The trend is the same though, with
50th: 23200
90th: 53100
95th: 75000
and taking off after that.
Food was actually destroyed during the New Deal to create artificial scarcity in agricultural produce:
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.html
This destruction of agricultural stock was based on the idea that the problem in the economy was low nominal prices, when that was merely the symptom of the contraction in the money supply as a result of widespread defaults and an erosion in lending.
The low nominal prices were a natural reaction to the reduced money supply, that enabled consumption levels to remain at their pre-crash levels. With their efforts to increase nominal prices by creating artificial scarcity, all the New Deal officials did was reduce economic output, and with it, consumption levels, resulting in lower quality of life.
On a positive note, it is encouraging to see a much broader of diversity of opinion on certain topics lately, where one year ago many of the comments in this thread would have been heavily downvoted. I believe there is a genuine change of sentiment underway even among the well paid tech classes.
If you’re smart you can self-educate yourself in many areas to a better level than 80% of the ivy-league alumni. What you don’t get is: - certificates with prestige - network - extrinsic motivation
With the internet what it is, there ought to be a way to make this evaluation process less labor intensive.
Anti social folks who don’t go to college will very likely still be anti-social if they do.
The main benefit of a standardized certificate is that it helps people evaluating your skills do so more easily. There’s no question that a smart hard-working self-taught super-social person will have a harder time than a less skilled person who has a respected institutions stamp of approval.
Rent can be fixed by moving. A lot of people move out of California and NY for a better life. Companies will follow.
College and education are being disrupted. Hopefully online courses and independent certification can fix the problem soon.
Healthcare is expensive because people in US are obese and unhealthy. And there is a lot more treatment for previously untreated problems but at a very high price. Go walk around a hospital to see where your insurance money is spent.
An excerpt from the article:
"Dr. Baumol’s insight in the 1960s was that costs inevitably rise fastest for things that are difficult to automate, including medical care, garbage collection and the live performance of a Mozart string quartet.
It came to him in the middle of the night.
“It was 4 in the morning,” he recalled in an oral history. “I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up! I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again.” His theory became known as Baumol’s Cost Disease."
Do you have data to back that up?
Why not golden instead of gilded? Per capita incomes are at an all time high, in real terms, and growing; violent crime per capita a historical low; and life expectancy high, though it could be higher. We are on the verge of tremendous technological advances in propulsion, AI, biology and energy. And more people are educated enough to wonder at those advancements than ever before.
Real median household income in the United States is up 20% from 1984. At 0.5% a year, that's less than it could be. But it's still objectively better than it was then, and much better than it was after WWI. Life today is better--for most Americans--than it was at virtually any time in the past.
Except that Standard Oil probably had real oil (asset) and Amazon now has an inflated valuation based on potential future earnings.
Apple to Oranges in my opinion.
> The US economy isn't just about how comfortable the average US citizen is
If people are comfortable, they'll accept whatever. Look at the middle-easter countries (Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait). Look at the American people pre-2008 crisis.
The people of America are being squeezed by relentless financial predators (like banks), expensive wars that they have to fight and support (or maybe not but they are paying the price), globalization, expensive bureaucracy, etc...
Amazon has a dominant market position in online sales. It's not a natural resource but it a position that affords it strong economies of scale and, eventually, monopoly rents, just like those earned by Microsoft, Facebook or Google in their markets.
Network effects are the oil of our age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...
> When I worked at Amazon we had to run around the warehouse, bc if our pick rate fell below a certain number we stopped getting paid. There were bottles & bins full of piss at odd points, bc you were penalised for toilet breaks. A co-worker attempted suicide on-site bc of the stress
Source: https://twitter.com/OwennnThomas/status/1007957414577090560
> Workers at Amazon warehouse in Minnesota say they've suffered exhaustion, dehydration, injuries while working without air conditioning.
But he just doesn't care.
That would be why.
Amazon exists to make Jeff Bezos and the shareholders as rich as possible, full stop.
Imagine you have 100 people working for you, and off of each person, you make 10 cents a day. Now imagine you grow your business and you have 1,000,000 people working for you. At 10 cents per person per day, you're now making $100,000 a DAY! You're rich! If you wanted to give back to your employees, just remember that each one produces 10 cents of profit. If you gave them all 10 cents extra per day, it means nothing to any one of them, but your business now makes $0 profit.
http://techland.time.com/2011/09/21/amazon-employees-carried...
A billionaire built on modern slavery?
Most of these people don't own their own house. Many of them have probably never travelled outside of the country.
That's not his entire company, thats just his own personal wealth. Imagine if his c-suite and upper management all pitched in too.
His shares are market-priced. He is "worth" $150Bn because of today's share price, but there is no single pool of money available to buy him out. So in practice, he is worth a billion here, a billion there, so long as he doesn't scare the fishes.
If he transferred his shares to his employees, the price would crash and each employee's slice of the pie would not be worth $256,000 any more.
The same goes for creating a massive new supply of RSUs or share options. These dilute existing shareholders who, unsurprisingly, resent that other people get for free or at a discount what they paid for at market price. Accounting rules require these to be considered as expenses, meaning the reported profit or loss looks worse.
What would work better for Amazon's lowest-paid workers would be a higher wage. It's a more predictable and effective source of wealth sharing than showering lottery tickets from a helicopter.
[0] https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=AM...
For 2018 they might produce $6b in net income, assuming they don't go on a big spending spree (which they're prone to do). They'll average perhaps 600,000 to 650,000 employees for 2018. So their net income per employee ratio is going to be closer to $10,000. It'll still be nowhere near the $33,000 the parent claims.
$33,000 in net income per employee would require near $20b in net income this year.
Amazon does in fact have extraordinarily razor thin margins, in their retail business. AWS is very profitable, with ~25% style operating income margins. It's providing all of the net income Amazon is generating now, retail essentially reinvests its thin margins right back into growth and improving fulfillment.
Walmart has 2.5% to 3% net income margins for example. Facebook is typically up at 40% to 50% for comical contrast. Amazon's retail business will spend most of its existence with 2% to 5% type margins.
Costco had a 2% net income margin for 2017. Target was at 3.9%. High volume, low margin retail is a horrendous business, very few operators can survive with such perpetually low margins. You have to execute at an extraordinary level.
So exactly how much more do you think they should be paid?
This is the thing I think many people miss. Many companies operate on pretty thin margins. And while Amazon is well known for reinvesting their profits right back into the company, that's also the reason that they can afford to hire hundreds of thousands of people and pay them quite well for what is some of the most unskilled labor there is. You're looking at $13/hour for literally moving boxes.
Another way of looking at this is that we'd agree that America, as a whole, is quite a rich nation. Yet the surprising thing is that the entire GDP for this nation doesn't actually work out to be all that much. The GDP is of course just the sum value of the market value for all goods and services in this nation. If we completely split all proceeds from the sale of these goods and services up and divided it equally between each person, it'd only be about $60k. So exactly how much would be a fair share for a box mover in your view? Amazon has them hitting just below 50% and again I think it's quite remarkable that that's even possible.
And one final point here, keep in mind these values I've been mentioning here are averages. Talking about $15/hour for flipping burgers in [expensive city] is not really meaningful due to what is invariably localized price inflation. Many of Amazon's fulfillment centers are in areas where $13/hour is worth much more than $15/hour is in [expensive city].
I think a lot of the criticism on HN of capitalism is misguided and fails to account for some of the things you pointed out as well as the enormous rise in living standards over the last 200 years or so, but there does seem to be a tendency for successful people to accumulate far more wealth than they can reasonably spend.
The people who are struggling to make ends meet at the bottom end could do with one though.
With a $20T GDP that would be a $300B net worth in today’s dollars or around 200% what Bezos is worth.
Don’t worry. This second gilded age that we are living in is on track to ensure we have a trillionaire in short order.
For one, Rockefeller grew rich quickly coz there wasn’t as much regulation as compared to what Bezos had to face.
On the other hand, Rockefeller wasn’t in the Internet age and Bezos banker on the exponential rise of internet.
I am sure there are many more variables.
Eh, Bezos got rich off of not having to pay state sales taxes while his brick and mortar competitors did.
But AWS makes up for that IMO.
Back then, federal income tax was way way lower than what it is today. At some point the highest income tax bracket was 7% but today it's 37%.
I'm not a history buff but Google says social security taxes first started in 1937. That could be potentially another 13% less taxes paid back then.
Also Google says corporate tax was hovering around 12% during the 1920s but it's upper 30%s now.
Imagine how fast you could gain wealth if the govt. only took 20% of your income instead of 50%.
Bezos rode the boom in the internet revolution.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali
That's close enough, and hardly make him "a pauper compared to JDR".
And of course, you got to also examine how the rest of "America’s total economic output" was divided back in JDR era compared to today.
Perhaps JDR had 1.5% of US output, but the rest was more equally distributed. E.g. today Bezos might have "just" 0.75% but a larger percentage than in JDRs time might be held by people like Bezos (and in all likelihood it is).
In other words, what's important is how much more not just the richest man, but the top say 100 rich commanded then and now?
Two paupers = a king?
Why bother with historical comparisons ? I hear it frequently reported that Putin is currently worth $200 Billion ...
This combination of fake reviews and counterfeiting is what I think threatens Amazon's position. I don't make many large purchases on Amazon any more as a result of the risk, and those that I do make are fulfilled by the manufacturer so I know what I'm getting is legitimate.
I thought I was the only guy looking for patterns in Reviews and grammatical style to eliminate fake reviews.
Amazon has an insane amount of traffic making it the ideal choice for Chinese electronics makers who have lived or studied to america. They understand western marketing and psychology and it's fairly easy for them to manufacture clones of something that works really well in those countries at lower cost. The products are often flooded with 5 stars rating , mostly incoherent.
"By the time of his death in 1937, estimates place his net worth in the range of US$300 billion to US$400 billion in adjusted dollars for the late 2000s (decade)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...
An earlier major technical university endowed by the richest person of the time is a pretty awesome place... (he says with no bias whatsoever. :-)
The real thing that's needed is investments in high-risk, long-term fundamental research. Companies have a very hard time doing things with long, risky timelines (and justifiably so, they have a bottom line to account for in general). In _all_ fields.
This system simply does not work.
Mary's Place is really his only contribution to Seattle. It houses a whole 65 families.
The largest line item (29%) is supporting the least efficient 1st world healthcare system
The second largest item (23%) is supporting blowing up foreigners
The third item (13%) is just paying accrued interest from previous overspending
The fourth item (7.5%) is the first that may be considered humanitarian, unemployment.
The fifth item (6%) is us paying for thr psychological and physical trauma that blowing up foreign nationals causes our own veterans.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/taxday/2...
Sorry Bezos, you've still got some catching up to do. Lifetime earnings are what really count, even if you give it all away to charity.
Because someone else will be making billions ... over your back.
> 2. To satisfy or appease (hunger or thirst, for example).
> 3. To appease or calm: assuaged his critics.
People who would feel guilty with billions don’t get billions. And I would argue they shouldn’t. If you’re a billionaire, you get to unilaterally do things others can’t. Like pioneer space travel or explore under-appreciated branches of medicine.
Compare Amazon to something done by government like the highways. When I order something on Amazon it nearly always arrives exactly on time as expected. Highways are always in a state of disrepair and congestion, and get worse every day.
This is not an example of why Bezos wealth should be used to build highways. Every penny of his wealth was earned by offering services in a competitive market better than the alternatives. With government infrastructure there typically are no alternatives and so nobody cares or expects much.
Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy, he's someone who has made it so much cheaper to build a startup. Remeber the days when the first $200K of fundraising would go straight to Dell for a bunch of bare metal hardware? Contrast that to AWS. He's done the same in many areas of the economy.
As far as amazon being that great, a lot of the time their stuff is in fact late, and people on their marketplace sell counterfeit items. They also treat a lot of their workers like garbage.
I agree with you on your other points, he's effectively beaten the competition and Amazon is great in many ways, partly because they are so, so convenient, but I wouldn't paint him as some saint of good capitalism
Not really. It's not an actionable metric but it doesn't change the fact he's filthy rich and I wish I could trade net worth with him.
>Bezos is not an enemy of the little guy
Indeed, he's the opposite. I clear international freight through customs for a living... it amazes me how many people/companies import direct to Amazon for FBA selling.
Yeah, Amazon certainly hits you hard with fees if you go FBA and even just using Amazon as a payment method is more expensive than a traditional credit card merchant account (I know it's Chris Bair's most expensive way to be paid by customers for Keto Chow) but Amazon offers all sorts of exposure for enterprising individuals and companies.
As lousy as compensation to employees may or may not be, there is no shortage of people willing to take the rather well-paying jobs (Amazon starts at like 13$ an hour in Indy with minimum wage being 7.25).
Let's say someone has $100. Cold Cash.
Let's say someone has $100. In xyz Asset.
Comparing both in terms of wealth is not fair and square.
First. They might have different purchasing power. Bezos can't liquidate $150bn of AMZ stock without slippage. If he could, then there must be another party willing to put $150bn of cash. Not many such parties in this world have that kinda cash laying around.
Second. They have different volatilities. $100 in cash is worth roughly $98 by next year. $100 in xyz asset might be $50 or $200.
Third. Holding an asset might have unrealized tax positions. I don't know the fiscal laws of America. But I think bezos will have to pay a significant portion of the liquidated asset since he is going to make profit. If you have $100 in cash, you don't have to pay anything. You already "realized" whatever profit.
But sure Bloomberg and Forbes would like to make headlines. That's their business.
What I'm trying to say is that this number is meaningless. Literally. Some asset management company has $6trillion under their management. That's x40 times more $$ power than bezos. But the bosses of these companies don't get as many headlines. Have you heard of BlackRock?
I prefer the Cliff Asness bubble definition, "the term bubble should indicate a price that no reasonable future outcome can justify."
Looking at a lot of those markets, it is definitely possible to see future outcomes that make the current prices justified.
The stock market? After the tax cuts, Shiller P/E is on the low side of the 20s now. With another few years of solid earnings growth, there's definitely a possibility of justifying these prices.
The bond market? Look at 90s Japan. That could easily justify those possibilities.
Art and real estate? We have more rich people who want to have their capital flee countries like Russia/China than ever. That is a trend likely to continue.
So I'd refrain from using "bubble". Valuations are stretched, but not absurdly so.
Which means it's paper wealth. Which means there's no way he could turn any significant fraction of that into USD or any other form of value without obliterating the value.
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/jeffrey-p-be...
If the economy tanks, it makes Amazon's review data and free shipping even more valuable. If I'm strapped for cash I'm less likely to walk into a retailer and pay top dollar for something with no reviews.
If Walmart or Alibaba or some other sufficiently large enough company wanted to buy Amazon, they absolutely could. And they'd probably pay a premium over Amazon's current market cap!
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Mark-Cuban-save-his-wealth-fro...
For example, suppose Bezos decided he really hated Rupert Murdoch ($15B). If Bezos decided he could happily live on a mere $100B, that would leave him $50B for the "Destroy Murdoch" project. Might not be able to actually destroy Murdoch for that, but could probably make his life very annoying.
Yeah, it's so mere that there are n't too many examples to cite.
Whether that would prompt somebody to try a takeover of a different network is anyone's guess.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42329731
Hell you could start an Internet TV channel and still be successful.
That said, the Murdochs are not selling Fox Network, which is usually what folks are thinking of in this context. They're selling the movies, TV series etc in exchange for a juicy slice of Disney.
That's just unfathomable.
so Bezos could buy a house for roughly 1 in every 330 adults in the U.S.
J. Bezos does not have 150 billions baguette and cannot buy 150 billions baguette with what you think his wealth is
He wouldn't be able to do it> And all his riches couldn't stop the planets demise from a insane economical concept, who's crazy ess he took to the next level.
I think this is an interesting point. Has Amazon grown industrial production and shipping and therefore increased net CO2?
Possible counterclaims:
- more informed purchasing leads to fewer discarded items
- centralized shipping is more efficient than driving your car to the store
It does seem like in the limit Amazon could have a profoundly positive effect on the net carbon of our products. It doesn’t seem like they are optimizing for that right now. Although and optimal strategy there would probably be growth first and then carbon efficiency when the growth levels off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_... https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-art...
Bezos is less than half the wealth of the people at the top of those lists. Puts this into context.
(Edit: up 50%, sorry you are right, I meant 150% of his previous net.)
E-commerce is a very competitive market and yet Amazon grows every day. Why? Because consumers trust Amazon's reviews and return policy. It's way better than what most retailers offer. The reviews are unparalleled and offer consumers tremendous power against firms that try to rip them off.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/qaddafi-200-billion-richest-2...
Are these educated opinions?
Well it's not economic discourse at all, it's political discourse.
>Is there any universe in which this conversation leads to a reasonable place?
You're against the conversation in general? It seems that you think discussion of inequality leads inevitably to the idea that we should engage in violent revolution. If that's the case maybe violent revolution is the most reasonable place.
I am literally pointing out that the top few comments were centered around violent revolution and police obesity. I'm not saying "inevitable slippery slope", I am literally describing the content of the first few comments at the time. If your conclusion from this is that violent revolution is the most reasonable then you just wanted violent revolution in the first place.
And no, this conversation didn't lead to a reasonable place, seeing as you're now here saying that I, because of a hacker news comment, am justification for violent revolution.
Our current version breaks down in the global internet economy with digital platforms and digital retailers, where simple brands combined with external capital have the ability to turn companies into supermassive black holes for consumer attention. As we know from math, singularities need special care, so we better start thinking about how we could fix the situation.
What is scary is the math when calculated in how many person-years someone like Bezos can buy. Divide his net worth by a reasonable cost for a soldier. Bezos could hire vastly more troops than Henry VII could have in his day.
$150,000,000,000 / $80,000 = 1,875,000 ... he could theoretically field an army large enough to sway any modern conflict. In person-buying potential, his wealth is on par with Genghis Kan or Stalin.
also, that link uses an unnamed source they themselves call "unreliable" to come up with 200M, as was the basis of the commenter's point.
Re: monarch, the rule of law is the baseline for not being one. And laws don’t really apply to Putin. He’s able to hold onto the presidency for as long as he wants it, and assassinate whomever he wishes.
Without seeing into the future, everything since 1917 has been the latter.
[1] https://difference.guru/difference-between-a-monarchy-and-a-...
If spent over a single year it would be 3rd highest expenditure (second is China with 150-228 billion)
Could fund a military the same as France or Britain for 3 years
Equals the combined spend of Britain France and Germany over 1 year.
Could fund Greek or Swiss army for 30 years
Or Venezuela for 144 years
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_militar... [2] https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/1_Data%20for%20all...
"-To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
-To spend the next third making all the money one can.
-To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes."
Gates has been very public about the plans for his wealth since at least the mid 90s, famously saying that his kids would only inherit a few million. He's regularly committed very large amounts of his capital and time to his philanthropic organization since it was started in 95.
I admired him back then, and even more-so now that he's followed through on his commitments and his encouragement for other billionaires to do the same.
I get the impression that he understands that hoarding huge amounts of wealth commits you to using that wealth for the public good more than most other billionaires.
Jobs was never publicly philanthropic (and actually shut down a lot of Apple's internal philanthropic work himself when re-instated as chief), and the best that we've gotten from Bezos so far is the nebulous message that philanthropy is in his future, but not now. Even Zuckerberg is doing better on that front.
Bezos may turn it around and surprise us, but right now we don't really have much data to support that.
Gates did. He was no Larry Ellison, but he was a raw competitor. He wanted Microsoft to win. And his vision of what a computer could be was limited to “whatever the best thing Microsoft could come up with is.” Jobs didn’t care what Apple the company was capable of, he was driven by an external vision of what the world needed and he shaped Apple to match that.
Gates killed a lot of good companies out of sheer competitive ferocity, and we suffered because of it. Computers are less good today because Netscape and Word Perfect and Samba were mercilessly fucked with. And we’ll never know how many products were delayed by decades because of the chilling effect Gates deliberately created. I think in a real sense he owes us for that.
Jobs did what he thought was best for computer users. We can debate whether he knew what was best, but I think his approach comes with less karmic debt.
It would be interesting to see when/if bitcoin reaches $1 million USD. That Forbes list would get totally disrupted.
The US dollar is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US, which makes it "real" in some sense
That's the silliest thing I ever heard.
Anyone with more than $50K net worth is or ought to be keeping nearly all of it in investments of some sort, what you're calling "virtual money". It's no more virtual than your 401(k) or Schwab account or home. By your logic, nearly the entire American economy "doesn't mean anything."
But he's got most of his investments in one sort, stock in AMZN. It's not a secret that there isn't $150bn of liquidity at the B/A price. If he tried to unload those shares he wouldn't get anywhere close to their calculated value. That's what GP means by "virtual" it exists on paper but any tangible use of that quantity will change it . Not only is there not enough liquidity at that price, but once the market learned he was unloading a substantial quantity the price would become depressed (not sure what the technical term for that is).