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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Putin tops him. At these levels the dollar value is not a good measure. Bezos owns shares. If he started selling them their value would quickly drop. Monarchs (Putin) are different. They own things outright, or have such influence that they effectively own things that are legally in other people's names. The Saudi royal house has more wealth under their king's control, although not all in his name.

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.

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Interesting idea for a measurement! That amount of money can certainly buy an army, but doesn’t account for equipment, logistics etc. Comparing it directly to military expenditure by states is interesting [1,2]:

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...

In many places soldiers can be had for far far less than 80k. In Africa or Iraq, $5k can buy you a man with a gun to follow you around for a year.

Definitely. You could spend twice the amount India does on military, and they have an army of 1.4 million

But he can borrow against his stock holdings at very low rates I am sure, so its effectively as good as cash.

Can he borrow a hundred billion?

I bet Buffett would underwrite it w/ AMZN stock as collateral.

Yeah, I wonder that, similar to the "dark web", how much of the wealth of monarchs and kingpins doesn't actually register as public knowledge.

Putin's wealth can't be accurately measured by anyone except Putin himself and presumably his financial advisers. It's all just speculation.

Fear is a currency all of its own.

This makes it worse. Reading up on the more high profile poisoning’s he has been implicated in, he is downright scary.

Stalin could "buy" vastly more than a 1.8 million person-years. There were approximate 10x that many Soviet citizens during his lifetime, and he was in pretty much total control of all of them, for as long as he wanted, not just a year.

How much of those assets could a Putin or the House of Saud liquidate before risking a coup? If we're playing speculator, shouldn't we consider risk of "devaluation" for both?

That's why so much of it, and so much of the ruling family, stays outside the country.

I don't think that Putin cares about money. All he cares about is power. Many people can't tell the difference, but Frank can[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYnnm3L12fA

can you please cite putin's monarchic ascendancy? i'm having trouble sourcing even the premise of your claim...

It's hard to nail down Putin's wealth, but some people estimate him to have assets worth somewhere between $10 and $50 billion. http://time.com/money/4641093/vladimir-putin-net-worth/

but nothing on him becoming a monarch? that's the alarming bit to me...

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.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0utzB6oDan0

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.

According to this source [1], dictator not monarch would be the proper term, as the transfer of power for a monarchies is familial, and the transfer of power for a dictator is political/a coup.

Without seeing into the future, everything since 1917 has been the latter.

[1] https://difference.guru/difference-between-a-monarchy-and-a-...

He's been in sole control of Russia for 18 years

Is he going to pass that control to his children? I think that would be the definition of monarchy, not the term length.

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