It really is weird how frequently I see the view you espouse and how nobody who repeats it seems to consider the clearest, most obvious counterexample that so completely disproves it.
So yes, I think what would happen is what did happen.
B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
The OP said "If Jeff Bezos dumped his entire holding [...]". I find it very hard to equate "dump" with "still over the course of a decade".
> B) even if he did it would be kind of like saying that your 500k house isnt really worth 500k because if you walked out on to the street and and asked passers by for offers for a maximum of one hour you would almost certainly not get 500k.
Now you're exaggerating in the other direction. The point is that if these people whose fortune is entirely stock of a massive company wanted to sell all of that stock for cold hard cash on the stock exchange in the same way you or I might sell our stock for a big purchase, they would actually only get a fraction of the nominal value ascribed to them.
Sure, if they do it slowly over the course of a decade, and if the business avruay survives that long at its current valuation (which Amazon might, but Tesla won't), then they can eventually actually get the fortunes they theoretically own.
Im just illustrating the difference between liquidity and wealth.
Contrast that with Jeff Bezos, who owns 10% of Amazon, or Elon Musk who owns over 20% of Tesla. Half of Gates's holding is nothing in comparison to half of Bezos's.
When you sell large share blocks like Gates did, you do it very slowly to avoid market impact. Elon Musk couldn't sell slowly enough to avoid an impact when he sold shares to buy Twitter.
The guy above was telling me this would drive the price down. You know what actually happened though. The share price went up.
The "billionaire shares are imaginary meme" is just a rhetorical trick designed to confuse the economically illiterate.
The only interesting thing about this meme is figuring out where it came from and how it was so efficiently pumped into the public consciousness.
Even so, you don't know how much higher the price of MSFT would be if not for Gates's selling. Other factors just drove the price up faster than he drove it down.
Either way the meme of bezos's wealth being a fiction is comprehensively disproved.
Market caps and startup valuations are fictions. That doesn't mean that they don't say something important - they convey information about who has market power, political power, technological progress, etc. All of those things are worth a lot. Fictions can affect reality. They are frequently more powerful than truths. Theranos, Nikola, and Tesla have all moved billions of dollars of real money on the back of fictional product descriptions.