American billionaires have gotten $280B richer since the start of the pandemic

I am not going to defend the wealth of the ultra rich, however, I do think that it is important to call out that the headline is wrong. The increase in wealth of $280B is based on a time period of March 18 to April 10. On March 18th, the market was close to its lows. The SP500 recovered approximately 4.5% from it's lows, thus making the rich $280B richer. If you had stock at this time, as a percentage, you would have seen a similar recovery.

If we wanted to measure impacts on the wealthy, we should measured from February 1st, which was closer to the market high and the beginning of the crisis in terms of knowing the world had an issue. In this case, the billionaire class would have lost roughly $3T dollars from Feb 1 to April 10th, if my rough estimates are correct.

Of everybody, Bezos has been doing very well during this down turn because the bulk of his wealth, Amazon, is custom made for a SIP environment. From February 1st, his fortunes are only down 10%. However, as a class, the billionaires have seen a clear impact to their fortunes during this crisis well beyond Bezos smaller hit.

Actually, and I don't work for Amazon, I think Bezos has done a remarkable job in creating value. Yes he has a ton of money, but he took extreme measures of risk and made incredibly smart decisions. His balance sheet is very strong, and he doesn't need a bailout to emerge very strong.

However, there is a very large class of billionaires that have made bad decisions, ran up debt, and now get the federal government to bail them out. These are the people that I believe deserve to face the moral hazard of creating companies out of other peoples money. Bankruptcy sound horrible, but in reality, if done smartly, it means that the company's assets are sold to a bidder, and the slate is wiped clean. The people that suffer are those that created the massive debt in the first place, and those that financed this massive debt or bought into the system. I am not saying there won't be people that are hurt if we allow some bankruptcies. I do question the "no large corporation should go under." If we had a good computer sim on this, I believe allowing poorly run companies with over leveraged balance sheets to go under would ultimately result in a better business environment.

The rich are richer partly because many are in tech which is doing okay, but mostly because the government is pumping the asset markets with trillions of dollars in cash injections.

I'm 39. I lost my job last September, when the startup I had worked for the last four years had folded.

I don't have a 401(k), and I only had $110k saved. For my entire life, I have I kept my money out of the stock market. I only dabbled a little - only $600 of my savings came from a few shares of AMZN that I bought and sold back in 2017. The rest was from paychecks.

I started to wise up last year, when I read that the yield curve had inverted. I didn't have a clue as to what event would trigger a drop in stocks, but I knew something was coming. So my plan for months has been to buy when most people were panicking, and then to basically just sit on the stocks until cooler heads prevail.

Over a two week period starting on March 16th, I put every cent of my savings into the market. I learned on my feet, dumping the ETF shares I bought (VOO) for only an $89 loss, going directly against diversification, in favor of buying things I think I understand.

And you know what? I'm up 40 grand, and I really believe in the stocks I picked. As the other automakers drive off a cliff, TSLA is positioned perfectly (batteries, autonomy, lower TCO). And AAPL makes great products instead of depending on advertising. (I have other positions, including a bet on Chinese eVTOL maker eHang, but I'll keep this brief.)

What I'm doing is pretty damn risky in the short-term. I could still lose all my gains and much of my principal. And I only have $10k in cash to live off of if I can't find a job.

Hatred of the billionaires - whose companies invent and produce the things that drive our living standards up - also hurts conscientious people like me. Instead of envying the rich, focus on how to get rich yourself.

NB: Gains from stocks are not free money! What I'm doing feels like a full-time job, as I continually worry about losing everything. This involves an incredible amount of research and planning, the ability to take on an incredible amount of risk, and that's stuff that the envious haters never see.

The stock market is a government backed ponzi scheme. It only works if new investors keep buying and the government won’t let it fail.

I wish discussions of networth at these scales were more nuanced. If the stock of your company goes up 50% or whatever, but you can't exactly sell more than x% without tanking it or losing control of the company, it's just so much more complex than you're 50% richer.

This is not to discount that they're filthy rich, and certainly enough of it is liquid for them to buy in essence anything they want. So much discussion about billionaires in the press seems to discuss stock fluctuations as if they were cash injections directly into a bank account, which can't hold at those scales.

How much could Bezos actually liquidate tomorrow without losing control or tanking Amazon? That would be an interesting number. I don't have a clue

And now they are conspiring to make people believe the virus is not as bad as it is, so workers can get back to slaving away, while the government pushes people into their hands by providing no assistance whatsoever.

Ye olde crash things, use spare cash buy them on the cheap from those in distress, lather rinse and repeat game.