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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's any coincidence that Jeff Bezos specifically was leaked.

He has been straying into politics in DC very very heavily, and it looks like he's making enemies. I suspect that is also the reason we see near-daily anti-Amazon posts on social media.

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He's literally the richest man in the world. If the leaker's purported motive is to expose tax avoidance by the ultrawealthy, it would be very strange for Bezos to not be in the leaked data.

I don't think ProPublica describes in exact specificity the scope of the data, other than it contains "the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years". And it includes Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and Elon Musk — a group of guys who, along with Bezos, are not considered to be politically aligned.

Richest from running a public company [holding stocks] not necessarily the richest overall.

We hope for more leaks about all these other people who are richer than Bezos.

Who is richer? Forbes says he's #1.

https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

Possibly oligarchs and middle eastern royals, those kind of people.

People whose wealth cannot be calculated as known equity valuation * disclosed equity held. That doesn't necessarily mean anyone is richer, but they very well could be.

There are likely dozens, if not hundreds of criminal kingpins with more wealth. It’s just not in their name, only controlled by them.

Why do you think this?

Because making and selling cocaine globally (not to mention other drugs) must bring in tens of billions every year, and they have been doing it since the 60’s.

The ”human banking” method is very popular in transnational organised crime. Just look at how Putin has hidden his assets.

Some folks suspect Vladimir Putin is the richest man in the world, but there isn't the sort of public documentation that would land him on the Forbes list.

https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-politics/terrible-crimes-made...

Forbes ranks public, acknowledged wealth. Regents, oligarchs, gangsters, opaque family trusts, etc. are out of scope.

^ So would this mean: If we have to show our work on who is richest, Bezos is the richest man.

If we were to guess and not be able to prove it, maybe it would be Bezos or regents, oligarchs, gangsters, opaque family trusts

> regents, oligarchs, gangsters, opaque family trusts

Quite certain it is regents, oligarchs, gangsters, opaque family trusts.

While you're not at all saying this, it would be silly to try and analyze private and unacknowledged wealth, primarily because it would be more difficult to evaluate the wealth.

The tax returns need some relative value to compare against to show effective tax rates. If most of that wealth is illegal and well hidden, it's going to be pretty difficult to compare a tax return against and get anything meaningful from. At least in these cases, the wealth is more glaringly obvious in the open and can be more reasonably compared to tax records.

You misunderstand that list. It's not the worlds richest. Bezos is actually pretty far down (probably 100 people or more richer than him in the world).

I was worrying about some loophole Jeff Bezos was abusing but no, his hack is that he has no income. What a joke. Time to move on from this garbage article. They didn't expose anything except that Jeff Bezos has strong faith in Amazon stock.

Exactly he is stepping on the toes of those who own the media - its why the UK Press beats on the BBC and British Telecom.

BT has a lot a negative press about its sports investments but Murdoch's sky doesn't

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