Jeff Bezos sells $1.8bn of Amazon stock
ft.com
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On the scale of Bezos' fortune, this is not a significant amount of money.
We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get at it.
The comment also glosses over the ~70 currently active missions on NASA's plate[0]. NASA also had some major success with good media coverage for other missions to Saturn[1], Jupiter[2][3], and Pluto/Kuiper Belt[4].
Please don't belittle the amazing work that has been accomplished by all the people involved over the decades just because it's not part of pop culture. They've accomplished those things despite having to walk the political tightrope and nearly anemic funding.
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=Al...
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cassini
[2] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/galileo
[3] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.ht...
I'm not trying to dismiss all the effort that goes into it, but from a, I suppose selfish, perspective it's a lot more important to enable humans to be a spacefaring species than it is to send probes themselves.
I guess I'm just too enamored with the Apollo missions and such.
Are not robotics many times more efficient money wise than sending a human? Robotics don't need near as much support as humans do, and can be sent one way without much moral quandary.
Can you imagine the costs and technology required to send humans out on a voyager mission.
We'll not send humans to the ground level on Venus, and humans would not see anything other than atmosphere from the orbit, compared to radar mapping of the Venuses surface, for example.
I guess the main benefit of sending humans is that exploration/troubleshooting can be more real-time (for the people in the spacecraft).
Where can we really send humans? Moon, Mars maybe, orbit of Mercury/Venus? We also probably want to get them back, so these missions will be complicated by the fact that we don't like to throw away highly trained specialists.
What can people do there that is not possible with robots?
In a world where reaching orbit is cheap, satellites can be cheap too. If it breaks down, go fix it, or bring it back and put up a new one. If it’s twice as heavy as it could be, but also twice as cheap, that becomes a win.
Imagine if all cargo sent from China had to be sent in single-use cargo planes. Everything being sent would be designed around this. Making a cell phone one gram lighter but $10,000 more expensive would be a huge win. All of the cargo would be incredibly valuable. A naive analysis might therefore indicate that sending stuff on reusable ships instead of expendable cargo planes wouldn’t save you much money, since the cargo itself is most of the cost.
NASA alone spends some 10X-20X every year what Bezos does, but some how a dinky danky 1 billion is now "going after space like we should have been?"
I don't buy it. If NASA's ~22B budget is insufficient, then billionaires making toys for an order of magnitude less is an order of magnitude more insufficient.
SpaceX has already demonstrated such possibilities.
SLS current dev budget is over 7 billion dollars in 8 years, and they haven't finished assembling their first stack.
1) Without the billions NASA has awarded Space X prior to Falcon, there is no SpaceX.
2) Without the billions NASA awarded them during Falcon development for other projects, SpaceX would have not gotten enough money from investors, who rightfully valued the company based on their NASA contracts
I've never been in a private business without its fair share of lazy layabouts and corrupt executives except maybe the startups I've worked for.
NASA has more than 17,000 employees that do
- medicine and biomedical research
- all sorts of earth science research including things like geology, climate, ozone depletion
- astronomy
- design new mission hardware
- fund and maintain a portion of the ISS
- maintain 10 field centers
I mean, they have 46 current missions... https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current
Blue Origin is developing a rocket. Pretty big difference.
For example, why is NASA so involved with climate change? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to have much to do with space exploration. It could be possible that actual NASA funds devoted solely to space exploration are a lot lower than the total spent by billionaires on space exploration.
They've actually written an article explaining that https://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_science/history/
So, why not do both, and prioritize the money accordingly?
Who knows what the next stages will bring? if we mine platinum and gold-heavy asteroids, we can make common use of previously-rare elements, or (as Bezos wants) foster an environment for heavy-polluting, but critical industry, to go off-world.
Never mind that the entire technological evolution necessitated by the process can be used to better humankind's lot.
Not to mention, securities regulations vary significantly by legal jurisdiction, and most of the knowledge that people have about how securities are actually traded are informed by soundbites from media and dramatic representations in movies.
Hell, I worked at HSBC in various roles for several years, and took as much finance training as I could while I was there, and I don't really understand a lot of the rules and regulations in the jurisdictions I work in (mostly Canadian and US places).
I mean that seems like a great philanthropic vision, but Jeff Bezos known for serious business would do that with so much money without any foreseeing revenue - just for an improved society?
I don't know about the other two topics they address, but I kind of question the motive altogether.
Definitely something wrong with trying to force farmers to use them.
>I don’t know why there’s an attitude of “Its philanthropic! It’s good!” Some of it is not.
Its not good just because its philanthropic, its good because they are investing money fighting diseases that nobody is interested in curing because there is no money in it (because the victims are from poor countries). A prime example is tuberculosis.
Also to your specific point - according to their own website https://agra.org/faqs/#1518765023405-cb110e47-d755
"AGRA has never taken a monocropping approach to agricultural development. We have invested millions of dollars in breeding minor crops grown by smallholder farmers in order to help them maintain diversity even as agricultural systems intensify."
I'm not going to blindly believe them, I'll give them a chance to make their case...
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/quick-links/gran...
Some of my friends working in the drug discovery domain are on that list and so I know for a fact that the money, or atleast some of it, is going towards a noble cause.
Indeed.
If I was independently wealthy and only had 1 million extra, I can immediately think of a ton of stuff I'd start doing with it that would not directly benefit me. If I had tens of billions that I did not need to survive I would absolutely do something like develop my own rocket. I wouldn't stop there either.
Mars 2020 has a 2.5 billion dollar price tag, if I had Bezos-money I would absolutely try and send a lander/rover pair to both Mars and the Moon except I wouldn't have a bunch of science equipment on it, I'd purely be going to record the best VIDEO and photos that I could on both purely to get people interested.
Even if I couldn't get a government to let me do a lander, simply sending orbiters that could capture 1080p video of the approach and several times around Mars and the Moon, and then taking days, weeks, months to transmit it all back, just throwing that up on YouTube would be worth the spend to me just to see it, and the amount of people that would likely inspire to be interested in things bigger than just them, bigger than politics of this or that country, bigger than Earth could be truly profound.
I'd open source the designs of the equipment too and creative commons the video for general use and allow entities to obtain commercial use on a sliding scale depending on their intended use. If a student wants it for something, give me 10$ and a producer credit, if some big studio wants it, still be very fair but obviously charge more.
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If I had to spend 1 million at once... I'd probably fund a pilot of an idea I have for an alternative way of applying philanthropy while simultaneously helping individuals not only get good CV experience but also cover part of their educational experiences, I'd rather not say more than that because I'm actively trying to find someone to back the pilot. There's 1 trillion pledged through the Giving Pledge and if even 1 billion of that was used this way, we could create more than 200 million hours of service and help 50k people pay for most of a 4-year degree while providing good CV experience and directly helping in potentially thousands of communities.
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If I had to spend it all at once, on multiple projects...
- I would find 20 students to give 5k each towards tuition
- I would set aside 500k to attempt to create manufacturing trade training, to some degree, digitally on a monthly subscription model (something cheap, 10-20$ a month) and build community tools on this platform. People could learn a lot of the basics and theory and then try and find people in need of apprentices. Hobbyists could also use it to improve their knowledge base. Eventually I'd try to leverage this to partner with one or more major manufacturers to create virtual versions of their machines so people could practice on a perfect simulation of real equipment in a virtual environment (either VR or just on a monitor) not unlike flight simulators so they can develop good habbits without damaging expensive tool heads or ruining materials learning. Also building in some sort of gamification could help encourage people to learn these skills and would hopefully create a good base of new people to apprentice with real equipment for these trades.
- The remainder, I'm not sure. Some would probably go to some of my favorite YT creators like LGR, Gaming Historian, Townsends, etc.
I really... dislike... that a lot of philanthropic people take their money and throw it at hiring academics to sit around and think about problems - or worse - fund charities they control and then pay those people to largely evaluate other philanthropic endeavors to then hand grants off to.
I have a GED, non-profits and NGOs won't touch me with a ten foot pole becuase I don't have at least a Masters and a bevy of accolades. If I had a good idea or project they also wouldn't fund me because, on paper I've not made some great accomplishment(s) and don't have a string of letters after my name and social swagger and as a white male I don't even fit the mission of some philanthropic persons because I'm not a woman or I'm not a person of color or I'm not fro an economically depressed area. I'm not saying it's wrong to champion those types of people and attempt to help them I'm just saying... I don't like it.
If I was independently wealthy (I need a million or less, sadly I'll work til the day I die though based on my current net worth after 16 years of full time employment) I would spend my free time not chasing more wealth, I'd spend it doing stuff to better an individual, better my community and/or better the species.
Instead, I worry about if I'm going to be able to pay my bills most months and spending 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there looking at what the wealthiest people of the world are doing and more oft than not just shaking my head.
Bezos, I like Bezos, he's got a vision and he's chasing it with large cash infusions from his own pockets. Sam Altman, much lower net worth but same thing... he seeded Y Combinator Research out of his own money and now he's throwing himself full time at Open AI, Sam believes in that and can put his sole focus on it while not needing to worry about income or a future career path. Some of these people though, they have tens of millions of dollars (or tens of billions of dollars) and they still run companies, still heavily invest via VC funds/firms, still have this podcast and sit on these 3 boards and own these 12 companies all trying to make more more more money, and then are like "yeah, yeah I'll write a letter pledging I'll eventually give up half of my money".
Feh!
Do something!!!!
I'd fund a side concern that grew trees to couple-of year-mature sapling level, for planting either commercially or for CO2 absorption. The former hopefully funding the latter.
it's come up a lot in the news recently - the whole 'plant trees, save the planet' thing - but it's genuinely something I've wanted to do for years. Here in urban UK we cut down trees way more than we put them back up again.
And then the same thing for Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn.
I think if we ever do send a manned mission, someone needs to be sent specifically to act as a videographer and that with what we learn from JPL Mars Helicopter Scout we need to make a bunch of drones to go with the manned mission too purely for video collection for licensing for video games, VR experiences, movie. You could recover all of the cost of the video equipment plus a good deal more just licensing that video out at fair rates because people like you and me would LOVE to see that.
It's always chapped me that we've never had good high resolution photos or video. I get why, tax payers don't care about space and it's a hard enough sell as is so space agencies want to get as much scientific data as they can but argh, even some 720p of the Moon would be amazing.
It can be both. Companies like Google improve the society with their search engine and also have profits.
Now, in-context (https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-interview-axel-sp...), he is saying that with an implicit "usefully", and I don't want to pretend he was saying what I am about to say, but it does sum it up very well.
He has so much money he doesn't even know how he can spend it, it is simply the last option left of a thing to buy that no one else can. It is a vanity project.
If he really wanted to cause positive change in the world, he could start by making Amazon less anti-consumer and anti-worker. It is well documented how bad Amazon is in those aspects, and the fact he has such insane wealth proves it doesn't have to be.
I love space, and I love seeing advancement in the area—I truly do. However, there comes a point at which you must ask if the investment is justified when compared to what else could be done with that money. I think Bill Gates focuses a lot more on actually helping improve the world (again, not that it justifies the cost of the way that wealth was obtained). The real answer is that it should not be possible to amass such insane wealth—as it simply means too much power in the hands of a few people. It is nice that there has been a spate of the ultra-wealthy trying to do philanthropic things, but it doesn't mean the system is working.
When you're a multibillionaire you can do the same thing - just now instead of sports tickets, you can afford entire sports teams.
Mr Bezos, who is the world’s richest person according to Forbes, has lately cashed in about $1bn worth of Amazon stock a year to fund his rocket venture, Blue Origin. In October last year, he said he planned to spend “a little more” than that in 2019.
Blue Origin, which was founded in 2000 and is funded entirely by Mr Bezos, is targeting its first manned space flight on New Shepard, its reusable rocket, later this year.
In May Mr Bezos unveiled a new lunar lander, which he said was the first step towards colonising the moon. “It’s time to go back to the moon — this time to stay,” he said.
No specific reason for this week’s sale was given in a series of regulatory filings published late on Wednesday. Amazon declined to comment beyond the filings.
In April, Mr Bezos agreed a divorce settlement with his former wife MacKenzie that saw him retain three quarters of his stake in Amazon. Ms Bezos said she would hand over all her interests in Blue Origin and the Washington Post newspaper to her former husband as part of the settlement, as well as her Amazon voting rights.
Following this week’s sales, Mr Bezos’ remaining Amazon stock holdings are worth around $109bn, at Thursday’s opening price of around $1,878. The company’s shares have fallen since it reported a spike in expenses last week, due to its investment in one-day shipping.
Although Amazon’s net income in the three months to June rose by 3.6 per cent to $2.6bn, earnings of $5.22 a share fell short of Wall Street’s estimate of $5.58, while its profit guidance for the current quarter also missed analysts’ projections.
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https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/jeff-bezos-se...
He's using the money to fund Blue Origin (aerospace manufacturing)
Protected by a paywall but why’s this news? Isn’t it also a fairly small % of his overall holding in Amazon?
I don’t know how long he’s been doing this, but he’s leaving billions of dollars of returns on the table.
And don’t anyone say he doesn’t want the exposure, because he clearly does.
Regardless, Jeff Bezos is most certainly not managing his finances himself, he probably has an army of peons advising him on everything.
Unlike income, the raw tax footprint would be at long term capital gains tax rate of 20% + 3.8% and Washington State has no tax on this kind of transactions.
He can get a further 50% deduction on that moving half the money to a foundation he owns and controls completely. If he had any carryover foundation donations in the past then it applies here too.
Any prior substantial long term capital losses offset this as well
and his other non-amazon projects likely pass through Net Operating Losses directly to him (if structured as a partnership)
He probably pays 8% tax on this if that, doesn't have to worry about margin calls, its totally free and clear.
If he's doing it that way, he's doing it wrong. The right way is to donate the stock to the foundation directly -- this avoids realizing the capital gain and still earns the deduction; possibly a slightly higher deduction because you can claim it at fair market value without selling and selling that much stock will likely reduce the price.
I would have to check the SEC filings here, because Jeff may be already selling it through his foundations and the media itself may be aggregating the ownership back to Jeff
The feds would get lots of extra revenue from closing these loopholes, too. But lobbying really is effective so nothing gets done, I guess.
I think its a shame that people don't understand the tax code and express their disdain by getting their favorite politician to "tax the rich" by raising "income" taxes, because thats all their gullible constituents know about from their personal experience, and this outcome only affects wage-workers like them.
There is almost zero benefit in accurately explaining this because it might actually change.
The suggestion I responded to about borrowing instead of selling would further reduce the fed's revenue. I don't consider that a loophole either.
A loophole for me would be using inadvertent outcomes of unclear regulatory guidance in a way that people didn't expect. Or passing a law yourself and then using it.
Hedges like that are for people who can’t afford to cover the downside. Bezos can, so a hedge would just lower the value of his overall holding.
What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.