Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

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NoMoreNicksLeft

>So yeah, Jeff Bezos made $260 billion dollars, but an alternative that could have happened was "Jeff Bezos makes $50 million and every Amazon employee gets a much more fair share of the happy customers' money."

Jeff Bezos famously took an $80,000/yr salary. Bezos didn't make $260 billion, or anything within 1/1000th of that. He built a company, that through some inane estimations his share of which might be $260 billion.

For him to not have that imaginary $260 billion would be for the company to not be built at all. So, if that's what you want, you're at least consistent... but no one else would think that a particularly good idea. Quite a few people like being able to order things online and receive them quickly. They don't want to have to go back to stomping through Walmart, hoping that the store has what they need.

I think part of the problem is that if you can slap a label on someone of "Eleventy billion dollars", everyone's brain malfunctions and treats it as a literal fact, regardless of the truth of the label. When you don't want billionaires to have billions, what you're saying is that you don't want them in control of those billion dollar companies. But do you not want the companies to exist, or do you just want someone else in control of those companies? And who?

Dollars are the way we denominate wealth - no one who understands this thinks that these numbers represent cash that they hold. But that's a far cry from it being imaginary.

This seems to come up on every thread like this. Owning 9% of a company that generates ~$80B in profits and employees 1.5m+ people is literally a massive amount of wealth and putting a dollar figure on that is both straightforward and accurate.

Anyone who owns a house can understand that liquidity and net worth are two different things. But shares of Amazon are far more liquid than a typical home.

In case you need a real example, Bezos personally funds Blue Origin by selling around $1B worth of Amazon stock each year. That's 11000 people earning their salaries + a huge amount of capital investment that are all funded from this so-call "imaginary" money. I can assure you that each time those people get a paycheck, it's just as real as yours.

>Dollars are the way we denominate wealth

Sure, but we also attach imaginary dollars to things that wouldn't and can't sell for those imaginary dollars, or even large fractions. And I expect older children to at least catch on to that fact, but a great many adults never seem to.

> and employees 1.5m+ people is l

So is that what the leftists hate? That he employs 1.5 million people? You want that to stop. That's the the part of the him being a billionaire that hurts the most?

>and putting a dollar figure on that is both straightforward and accurate.

If that were true, he could sell it for that valuation tomorrow. But as soon as he tried, the amount would drop, and the company might even be in peril. So it's neither accurate nor straightforward. It's convoluted and overestimated.

>In case you need a real example, Bezos personally funds Blue Origin

So that's the part of his wealth that you despise... that he employs people making spaceships? Those 11,000 people are the problem?

You're not even staying consistent in your own replies in this one comment. Let me boil it down: are the 11,000 people who earn their salary at Blue Origin getting real money or not?

My point is has nothing to do with despising blue origin - it's just a direct contradiction to your absurd belief that this wealth is imaginary. You can't fund that big a company on imagination!

>are the 11,000 people who earn their salary at Blue Origin getting real money or not?

Are they earning (collectively) $260 billion? Are they earning anything like a significant fraction of $260 billion? Is the amount they collectively earn, whatever the total, coming out of Jeff Bezos' wealth, subtracted from it, or are they paid out of several different funding streams such as the government contracts and commercial revenue?

And you think this is somehow some sort of gotcha question. "Look, I've proved that Jeff Bezos has $260 billion!" (or whatever the amount was supposed to be). You're unable to think clearly or correctly on the matter. It's scary how confused you are.

I'm actually making a very simple point. You said most of Jeff Bezos wealth is imaginary / not real. But he's proven that he can turn it into cash at a rate of at least $1B per year.

And again, he only owns 9% of Amazon. Of course if he dumped all of that stock at once the price would go down, but Bill Gates sold almost all of his Microsoft stock for cash and Microsoft stock has continued to go up. Jeff Bezos could certainly do the same and come out the other end with around $260B in cash - but he has zero reason to go do that..

Here's another way to look at this: do you have a retirement account? Is the money in there imaginary? If not, why not?

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