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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

Anyone with a gun can hold anyone else, you don't need to be "powerful".

This is certainly not true if the "anyone else" is Jack Ma. If I gave you gun, and asked you to "hold" Jeff Bezos, you would certainly not be able to do it.

Where am I? Where is Bezos? What are the additional hypothetical details of this scenario? Do I know how to use a gun in this scenario (I do not IRL)?

I've only met one billionaire, but he was definitely not guarded by anyone, and had I the inclination, skills, and firepower, I could have easily taken him at gunpoint.

I don't accept the notion that Jack Ma is guarded 100% of the time, that's movie fiction.

Many billionaires, famous people, and ex-leaders of countries have bodyguards when they go out in public. Bezos has bodyguards.

Some billionaires are relatively unknown, so maybe they get away without needing that.

> Anyone with a gun can hold anyone else, you don't need to be "powerful".

> had I the inclination, skills, and firepower

That's a very big "had I", and certainly not "anyone with a gun" as you said previously.

Let me put it this way: suppose you're Bezos or Jack Ma and had access to unimaginable resources, comfort, and security from the best of the best. Surely it would be absolutely trivial to hire someone so that the vast, vast, majority of people with guns wouldn't be able to get to you, no matter how hard they tried, even _with_ so-called inclination and skills?

I'm not even referring to having guard detail around them all the time; when you're that important and hundreds of billions of market cap depends on your very existence, their entire schedules will be mapped down to the smallest detail to minimize risk of harm to them, since if they were to get kidnapped, it would immediately wipe billions off the stock price. Do you really think that the only reason Bezos hasn't been captured is because ordinary people with guns just chose not to do so, and if anyone wanted, they could just kidnap Bezos easily? What percent of ordinary people like you or I have "skills" and "inclination" that can beat that hired by Bezos' billions?

I hear you, I just don't think it's as common to hire a team of bodyguards as media portrays it to be, and yeah I generally do think the only reason Bezos remains safe is because nobody has earnestly tried, not because he's got some hyper-sophisticated security apparatus at his command (and even if he did, I still think it's largely theater, and a person who actually manages to get a gun in proximity of Bezos/any person generally won't have much of a problem using it at that point). People just aren't looking to kill one another, generally, even the more polarizing people.

But message received -- Jack Ma probably would have a team of bodyguards, and the people who could get past that probably wouldn't need to manipulate markets using his appearance on a conference call to make money.

I was wrong, I see that now!

It is not so much about having a team of bodyguards 24/7 with you, but about having a security team in the back office that will oversee all the details of your schedule so that you just are not in a scenario where this is possible. (Eg no appearance at predictable place and time etc )

If the "anyone else" is a billionaire, then, yes, you do, even to get access to them to point the gun, bypass the guards, abduct them, and keep them.

And we're talking about state-level actors here doing the holding, not some random nobody with a gun. Those don't have any need for "insider trading".

You're talking about state-level actors, not me. My point is that it doesn't have to be the Chinese government (though it probably is, if he's being held and isn't just in hiding).

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