No one wants to fight the federal government wether they are guilty or not.
"Forbes lists Bechtolsheim's net worth at somewhere north of $16 billion. The SEC fine is less than 0.006 percent of his holdings."
I'd settle immediately too. 900k fine or 400k illicit gains means nothing if you are worth 16B.
> [Andy] has also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years
Do you think that means nothing?
It means nothing. He's 68 years old and worth 16B.
The book "Den Of Thieves" (also about insider trading) makes a good case for why you don't want to fight the federal government, even when you can.
Yes.
Even as other commenters have pointed out his age, let's be realistic at what $1B is (let alone 16!)
Suppose you have an interest rate of 5% over the year. That's a pretty safe level and I'm sure he gets more. That means you're getting $50m for doing nothing (passive income), or just under $137k/day (overly simplified calculation based on yearly return divided by 365. No compounding, so consider lower bound). Try spending that much money a day! Then consider trying to spend that much money AFTER you've already bought a few nice homes, cars, and hell throw in a private jet (cheap is a few million, most are 10-20, and Elon's is $78M[0]). (At 16B, you're closer to $800m/yr or $2.19m/day!!!! $900k in fines isn't even half a day's "sitting on his ass doing nothing" for him, let alone work. [1])
The thing that often baffles me is why these people still work. You can do almost anything you want with that kind of money. But I think this also says something about money, power, and how these people think. It also makes me wonder why people get mad at tech workers with our high salaries (definitely not complaining!).
Maybe I just don't understand business (I'm a researcher, not a MBA, so assume this is correct). But I just don't see how these salaries do anything for these people other than be a high score. The only way I can personally think of spending $10m in a year is by buying a house and I can't imagine wanting more than 2 (and even a $10m house is often too big! In most locations. Yes, I'm aware SF exists).
I just wonder, can't you undercut everyone by taking a lower salary? Which would increase the company value? Or stop pushing deadlines so fast so there's higher quality? Or many other things because there's a ton of C-suit execs getting these salaries. I just don't understand, why work? I have to imagine, a key part must be addiction. Which I can get, I like a fair amount of work, but would rather take money to work as I see fit (but I guess they get this. But you're not at the technical level and personally (thus, highly biased) I find it is far less fun managing people).
I think there's a real disconnect. In how we see billionaires, how they see us, and how they see themselves. That money is just an insane level. fwiw, I'm not even against billionaires. I just don't understand why once people have $100m they don't pull a Anderson or John Bogle. Because money isn't real anymore.
Edit:
let's add some nice numbers at this 5% rate. If you have $20m invested (earning that 5%) you're going to make $1m/yr for life. $100m gets you $5m/yr and $500m gets you $25m/yr. 10B gets you 500M, and $20B means you're a forever billionaire.
Looking at Forbe's list, we got Bernard Arnault, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Ellison (in order). That's $11.3B/yr ($31m/day), $9.9B/yr ($27.1M/day), $9.9B/yr ($27.1M/day (nearly tied)), $8.6B/yr ($23.7M/day), and $7.75B/yr ($21.2M/day) respectively.
With $7.3B you make the $1M/day, which makes you the 367th richest person in the world.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/31983...
[1] (edit add) Let's say that's half a day's work for you and you're a L4 at Google. Using Levels.fyi data, you got a base salary around $178k/yr and so this is equivalent to you dropping $200 ($320 if you include equity) if compared to his passive income alone (which again, is probably >5%). Let that sink in. Technically it is even less than you should value that $200 because he doesn't need to save anything.
[2] If some billionaire wants to drop $50m on me, I'll go live my life reading math books, buy a B200 node (maybe even 2! Or a few more!), and research AGI for the rest of my life. I mean I'll also do that for a lot less too, but hey, that's 2 days of nothing for you Elon or Bezos. I'm sure it is worth more than that in publicity alone. ;)
Simple. They love the work. That’s what they want to do. To become a billionaire you usually have to put in an enormous effort. Not many people are willing to do that.
No doubt billionaires work hard to get there. And no doubt it is a hard task.
I guess part of it is why care about how much money you make anymore? If you care about "score" it seems odd to compare your assets when you can compare your companies' value. Because you can't actually do anything with that money in your bank, and the company's value is a more meaningful metric as to your "value." I think Jensen's rise says a lot more about his value than the $80B in assets or him being in the top 20 richest. (golden handcuffs aside) In that respect Jensen is doing much better than Musk or Bezos. Of course there's tons of metrics to consider but just using this to help ground a talking point.
They are good at making money so it’s fun for them.
On an aside I think Jensen is very good at looking folksy but in the end he is another super driven high achiever. He just expresses himself differently. You don’t get to that level if you aren’t a hard nosed business guy.
Wealth and power, it's all relative. And the competition only becomes fiercer as those measures increase (the top performers being the most competitive).
The person with $5B is not thinking in terms of "enough." Their sights are set on surpassing the $6B guy.
Let's use $800m/yr or $2.19m/day. If a FAANG-grade employee costs $1mm/yr all in (including benefits, HR, managerial overhead, real estate, etc; that's 800 people, or 66 teams of 12. how many random software projects can you think up, just within the realm of math books, B200 nodes, and AGI? Wouldn't you rather study that with other people than by yourself? And fund all the various possibilities you think will pan out?
Healthcare is another one. You have a sick niece suffering from a rare unknown disease. You could plow hundreds of millions of dollars into researching a cure for her disease.
General philanthropy is another easy way to burn money you don't need. take half that $800mm and donate it to all the charities in your immediate vicinity. every bit of pain in the world you can personally see, just give them a million dollars, no questions asked.
But yeah, if all you want to do is spend it on yourself, it's impossible to see how you'd spend it all, because you can't.
There's a limit though, right? Gates is spending it pretty fast except he isn't. It can be hard to spend millions in a day because it takes time to spend that money and your money makes money in that time. At a large enough wealth, you can't ignore the compounding factor because it plays a significant role. If it were even the 2 days standard transaction, then that 2 days generates you another $4m right? And that $4m generates you another $200k/yr (or ~$500/day).
I ran a simulation, because it helps for framing. Start with 16bn, 5% yearly interest, 0 employees, and let your employee cost $400k/yr (L5). Each weekday, take daily interest, and pay the employee's daily salary. There are 104 weekend days, so we'll pay a daily rate of ~$3.5k (I used exact). If it is a weekend don't pay the employee.
In a year you have 261 employees and have made $767 million dollars. That's a pretty profitable year! Oh, yeah, your employees probably made you money too.
If you're a billionaire and did this, you would have lost $1.6m over that year. With $2bn, you profit just shy of $50m.
> Wouldn't you rather study that with other people than by yourself? And fund all the various possibilities you think will pan out?
Definitely. I got 261 this year and we've made a nice profit without delivering a product. Next year we'll double in size and make the same.
> General philanthropy
The reason to do that simulation is to try to guesstimate these things. MacKenzie Scott is well known to be a huge philanthropist. She's richer now than when she divorced Bezos. Of course, Amazon has done much better than 5% per year. But at the same time, she is trying to throw money away as fast as possible. Also according to Forbes last year she gave away $2bn and so far has given $16.5bn away...
That's someone who's twice as wealthy as the person we're talking about, has given away "one Andy Bechtolsheim" AND profited! This is since 2019 btw.
I really cannot stress how large these numbers are. And how different money is at these sizes, because if you do not consider compounding interest (a thing we can often ignore in our daily lives, even if we were multi-millionaires), you're not accounting for millions of dollars. I'm sure there's a way, but it is effectively impossible to spend $100bn. It takes a whole country to do that. Remember, at the start of the simulation you are paying out $1.5k/day, but at the end you're paying $400k/day. Your compounded rate of spending just can't catch up to your compounding rate of earning. The $2bn person doesn't start losing money until day 710.