Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Here's what I've come up with to visualize wealth in the United States. Suppose you start counting, going up by 1 million dollars every second, and people sit down when you reach their net worth. Most people will sit down immediately. After about 9 seconds, people in the "1%" will start sitting down. Near the 17 minute mark, billionaires would start sitting down. Donald Trump would sit down just before the hour mark. A day later - an hour and 10 minutes into the second day of billionaires sitting down - Bill Gates would sit, followed by Jeff Bezos just three minutes later.
The point of this is there's a huge range of billionaires (analogous to comparing 17 minutes to a day). The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds). (I should also mention that there should be huge error bars on reported net worth numbers.)
Just take the use of dB in acoustics or the magnitude system in astronomy.
The root of the magnitude system in astronomy can be found in the logarithmic nature of the eye as a sensor as well.
It's funny because I first imagined the seeing/hearing comment as pitch & color, rather than volume & brightness. Pitch certainly feels somehow naturally logarithmic. But we can hear linear differences as easily as we can hear logarithmic differences. Within certain ranges, of course.
Citation needed. I've never heard of human senses being anything else than logarithmic.
So, I think no citations are needed to explain basic absolute limits and the simple fact that logarithmic perception is only valid "within certain ranges." But, since you asked for citations, here are some starting points for understanding lightness perception, and how it's not quite logarithmic even in the middle of the valid range.
http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_intensity_response.htm
"All this only scratches the surface of the complexities of eye response to light intensity, but should illustrate well that the common notion of it being described as simply logarithmic is oversimplification, to say the least."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightness
"At first glance, you might approximate the lightness function by a cube root, an approximation that is found in much of the technical literature. However, the linear segment near black is significant, and so the 116 and 16 coefficients. The best-fit pure power function has an exponent of about 0.42, far from 1/3."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#Visi...
"The eye senses brightness approximately logarithmically over a moderate range (but more like a power law over a wider range)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold
"For white light, the absolute sensitivity found was 5.9 x 10−14 watts / steradian-cm2"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(luminance...
"100 Mcd/m2 Possible retinal damage[1]"
https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot...
see page 276, Fig. 16.2 "Approximate ranges of of vision regimes"
http://retina.anatomy.upenn.edu/~rob/lance/units_photometric...
See "Light levels important to vision"
Give a person a meter and they'll take a kilometer. Ehh?
The goal of the comment you replied to, however, is to demonstrate the vastness that orders of magnitude have. It's to compare average people to super-rich, and get a stronger intuitive sense of how much wealthier a billionaire is than the average person, and how much wealthier Bezos is than the average billionaire. Using a log scale doesn't help that goal at all, a log scale actively compresses the range and prevents intuitive physical comparisons & analogies.
1) First stages of the visualization would show people from country where the money measure doesn't mean anything at all
2) Then powers of ten later it show how disparately "rich" people are in countries where this measure has a little more significance
3) Powers of tens later you see big companies and rich billionnaires like in this article == Money Is Power (Jeff Bezos is not going to buy one billion baguette de pain tomorrow I can assure you that)
4) Then of course you see higher in the scale huge aggregate of macro economics stuff which no one really have control over or understands
The point here isn't to say that Bezos will buy a billion baguettes, but it is show to show that he could buy 90 billion baguettes and feed every single person on the planet several times over. There are only a few people who could do this. And, of course, they won't.
EDIT: I meant simply that 90B baguettes would go as far as they go, and 90B baguettes is several times more than 7B people. I was only demonstrating magnitudes in the context of a thread about magnitudes. I am not suggesting that either baguettes or Bezos are a permanent and global solution to world hunger & politics, but either way I can't afford to buy very many people baguettes.
Because, even if they did, buying baguettes won't fees the hungry; acquiring food isn't the hard/expensive part, distributing it is. And it's not hard in a “We know how to make it work but have insufficient funds dedicated” way, but in a “we don't know how to do it effectively at any cost” way.
Jeff Bezos CANNOT solve world issues like this (food crisis for our example). This is so silly I don't know even where to start. Theses issues were not solved in our countries thanks to the Jeff Bezos of 1817... What makes you think that giving 1 / 10 / 100 billion dollars would feed Africa for example ? Describe to me all the steps I'm very interested
Say you have $1M. Then Donald Trump might have 200 times more than you, or $200 M (they were saying he's not really a billionaire). But Bill Gates has 200 times more than him -- $40 B. (And apparently now Bill Gates has $90 B).
And I guess you could extend it further say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings, which is 200x less than the Silicon Valley employee.
So people think that there are three classes: poor, middle, class, rich (Donald Trump). But there is actually another full class above him: the super-rich like Bill Gates.
Doubtful. Even if you assume a minimum wage of $10, which is well above the Federal minimum (but slightly below some state minimums), that's 500 hours of wages. That's almost three months of 40 hours work weeks where you put every penny into savings. Before taxes. Before living expenses. The vast majority of Americans have far less than $5k in their savings account.[1]
1: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Economy
[2] http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/money-is-not-a-sign-of...
Democratize their companies. control them by employment or by employee or government committee if they are too big. Make the big corporations work for the benefit of everyone, rather than shareholders and owners.
For what it's worth US laready has large ownership stakes in such corporations as AIG, Amtrak, USPS, Freddie Mac, etc.
I guessed all of these values, I might do the actual math at some point, but not right now.
You may notice that comparing things across panels is more difficult than the effortless comparison of two categories within a single panel. It's easy to understand conceptually when you study this map that the insurance industry in the US is a lot more money than Kate Middleton's wedding dress. But you don't see visually and immediately how much more money, because they're not side-by-side in the same units.
On a log scale, plotting everyone's income puts Bezos and Gates side by side with very little visible difference, while the difference between someone who makes 20k a year and someone who makes 10k a year has a larger log difference. That emphasizes the ratio of difference, rather than the absolute difference. The log scale completely hides the fact that you could pay 75,000 people 20k a year with only the amount extra that Bezos has over Gates.
Your suggestion to use log scales hides that fact, and shows the ratio of $20k to $10k as visually larger than the ratio between $92.3B and $90.8B. That is why log scales are counter intuitive and not great for physical analogies. You asked, I answered.
I really wish this point was better understood. The rhetoric around the "1%" has completely missed the point, as the vast majority of the 1% is comprised of our doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people. Pitting the poor and working classes against them makes no sense. The real problem is the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth [0].
http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equal... [0]
The 1% is roughly half a million in yearly income or ten million in net assets (remember to subtract your mortgage from that!). It is true that this goes beyond the ultra wealthy to largely include "doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people", but that doesn't mean most doctors, etc. are in the 1%.
There's an urban legend that 19% of people think they are in the 1%, but the actual poll was that 19% of people think they would be affected by tax cuts affecting the 1%. I'd like to see a study of what percentage of people think they are in the 1% or soon will be, because I bet it's a lot more than 1%.
So you have a term that was meant to vilify the ultra-rich, but makes the average doctor, etc. worry about being vilified.
How many people live in the Valley?
This is nonsense. Your source compares the wealth of the richest few people to the net worth of the "poorest" 50% of people. Net worth takes into account debt, and it happens that the half of the population with the lowest net worth has a total amount of debt about equal to its total amount of assets, so its total net worth is almost zero. A little more credit card spending, and an eight year old with a nickel in his pocket will have "more wealth than the poorest half". Needless to say this is not anything like half of the world's wealth. The total wealth of individuals is (according to my quick Google search) something like $250 trillion, and that presumably doesn't take into account wealth held by governments.
It's also silly to use net worth to identify the "poorest". Supposedly Donald Trump had a net worth in 1990 of negative 900 million. Your source's calculation would presumably call him the "poorest" person in the world and his presence would subtract $900 million from the wealth of the "poorest half". Is that sensible?
The richest people are very, very rich compared to most individuals. But no individual has much compared to the wealth of the whole world, and I suspect the share is shrinking. In the 19th century JP Morgan bailed out the US government, rather than the other way around!
A more interesting analysis would be to look at the distribution of total lifetime consumption.
The cash from the loan is an asset for the borrower, until it is presumptively paid to a third party.
Look at it this way -- if a company A has an EBITDA of $20k/year and company B has an EBITDA of $40k/year, the MBAs will have no problem assigning values to these companies. And companies can increase their earnings by going into debt such that their net worth as measured by these calculations can increase. But substitute a human in, and suddenly everybody has negative net worth.
Even if we could confiscate his and all similar holders of wealth money we could not pay for government for even a year.
the realization we must have is that this amount of personal wealth is not harming the worlds poor and it really doesn't harm those of us here.
the world has such incredible poverty because of government. Government that does not respect property rights, rights to one's self, nor the product of their work.
What makes capitalist societies work is property rights and it is that incentive which provides the stable society many of us enjoy.
If you want to raise the poorest in the world up you do so by encouraging their governments to respect the property rights of even their weakest citizen. To respect the earnings of those who work.
Some Uncommon Knowledge video of Thomas Sowell makes an interesting point about how the real question is not to ask why people are poor, that's the default position he claims. The real question to ask is why is there wealth in the first place.
The 1% on the other hand, are rich enough to enjoy outsized political influence, but poor enough to retain some economic anxiety, and be genuinely affected by changes to taxation, inheritance, redistribution, etc. And they are numerous enough to form a corporate whole that acts to protect its own interests.
The 1% are the middle managers of the world's socioeconomic hierarchy. They don't possess great power individually, but their collective power to shape the culture is vast, and has a tendency towards toxic outcomes as they attempt to safeguard what wealth they have managed to accumulate.
Great analogy btw. I might have to borrow it to explain it to other people.
I'm as pro-capitalist, pro-democracy, pro-make-a-fuck-ton-of-money as you can get... But even I am blown away by the wealth of some of the top billionaires.
Just think about the good that some of that could do for the country. Put it into science. Put it into social welfare systems. I don't care, put it into something!
I don't know what the solution is. The naive comment would be if you make above X billion everything else goes to some re-distribution fund... Obviously that will turn a lot of people off. But the point is, I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth.
Capitalism: pro competition, pro markets. Corporatism: anti-competition, Freedom Markets™.
Conflating the two is the biggest failing of modern leftists, such as myself. We can hardly criticize, mitigate our modern winner-takes-all economy until we stop defending it.
"All the good you can do with this tons of money" Money at that scale is power. Bezos could give away a little each year to a science institut for example, but it would not work for short term stuff. You are not going to discover 1000x more stuff tomorrow by pouring billions in science. But for a long term goal yes Jeff Bezos could nudge more people getting into science if he wanted that. And that's what he might do for Space exploration / technologies (at least that's what he publicly says) and that is called... Investment.
So which investment is the best ? Who knows ? Who has the power to decide it ?
PS : not spending its own money is NOT throwing it away, it increase power purchase of all others people that uses the same money. Spending it increases money circulation and can cause inflation for example.
PS2 : "I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth" who said anyone was given money because he "needed" it ? We don't live in a communism utopia
What makes you think gates and bezos aren't corrupt?
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/
http://www.bezosfamilyfoundation.org/ <- Jeff's parents, not Jeff
> "we are impatient optimists working to reduce inequity"
Ironic considering that these foundations literally exist because of the consolidation of wealth and resources, aka, inequity.
And if the global trend of further wealth consolidation is any indicator, they're not succeeding.
It already has. Bezos has created value for millions of people and businesses, generated huge tax receipts and completely revolutionarised entire industries.
People with this level of money are equivalent to kings or other monarchs. On some level it really isn't their money at the same time. When he dies, it's not his money any more.
They could've done something for the country. They could've put $1,046.00 into science. Cut a $1,046.00 check to a social welfare system. Yet they chose to exchange $1,046.00 for a single share of Amazon.com.
They can though. wanna buy a car for 150k, sell off some shares, buy a car. right?
Honestly, though, even the interest on whatever liquid assets they do have probably yields more than my current savings total.
Now I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about how awesome it would be to be rich. One day I added up what it would take to have the most obscene, ridiculously opulent lifestyle imaginable...private jets, presidential suites, chauffers, megayachts, basically anything and everything imaginable that I would possibly want if money were no object. I never surpassed a requirement for more than $20M per year. $20M per day is ludicrous...and that's just what it would take for him to not get any richer.
Then you grossly underestimated your requirement. The first Google result on the subject of megayachts, for example, tells me that they cost tens or hundreds of millions to build (the record is 600M) and that their yearly upkeep can be on the order of 10% their build cost.
So that alone would eat a good chunk of your 20M. Now consider how much more you could spend on palaces (plural, because they don't move) than you could on your humble dinghy.
And yet, there was a time when the richest were significantly richer than they are now.
Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller was worth at least four times as much as Bezos is.
($340B in 2017 USD)
The $340 billion figure is from a semi-nonsensical calculation that is popular because it yields eye-popping large numbers. They figured Rockefeller's assets equaled 1.5% of the US GDP at the time. And 1.5% of the current GDP would be about $340 billion dollars. But assets as a fraction of GDP is not very meaningful. It's like saying if I moved to a country with a small GDP such as Samoa I'd be richer than Bill Gates.
In effect, the $340B Rockefeller number is big because the US economy has grown. The worst part is many websites often confuse the scaled-GDP numbers with constant-dollar numbers, resulting in much confusion.
Honest question - can anyone refute the claim that it is currently not the point in time when the largest share of wealth is in the smallest number of hands?
Our culture tells us that our motivation to do better (or more) work should be the power to dominate others (being rich is just that).
And that's just what humanity will have to change in the coming years: Change our culture to replace the incentive of domination with humane incentives and values.
You could spend 1 million dollars a day for 270 years before you ran out.
Individual investors pretty much all do worse than market.
EDIT: obviously that means there is skill involved. But it seems that professional managers are close enough in skill that luck is the dominant factor.
That is, if you could figure out which listed companies were going to fare the worst and build a partial index fund with the rest, you'd beat the index.
Similar research style to short selling but with less downside.
For example, Twitter's prospects on its own don't look so great right now. But if that induces you to avoid owning Twitter, you miss out on a quick profit (perhaps even a big one!) if some larger company decides to buy it.
Wealthfront, for example, currently cites a 3-year annualized return of 5.67% on its best batch of portfolios (ie tax-advantaged), and a 5-year annualized return of 9.44%.
By contrast, a pure S&P play would have provided 10.09% annualized over 3 years and 15.17% over five. Links are here:
https://www.wealthfront.com/historical-performance http://quicktake.morningstar.com/index/IndexCharts.aspx?Symb...
I don't believe BillG had all his money in S&P index funds. But he and/or his managers were able to find other investments that did even better. That's not easy to do, given markets of recent years, as the Wealthfront data indicates.
At that scale, the S&P isn't even a good benchmark, because it's not like a single investor can just dump that much in an index fund or even in the underlying companies directly.
But yeah any halfway sensible plan will leave a billionaire fantastically wealthy even in failure.
The average American lifespan is 2.4 billion seconds.
If you were shoveling 100 dollar bills, you could actually do some damage in the relatively short term (you could probably reasonably shovel $5k-10k/10s, or $500-1k/s, so you could burn through a billion every 1.5-3 weeks (assuming you never sleep or eat).
If you were working a 40hr week shoveling hundreds, it would take 6-12 weeks to burn through a billion.
If you were doing the same but with singles it would take 6-12 _years_ to burn through a billion.
So if you started with $30B - it would take between 180 and 360 years to get rid of all that money by shoveling it into a furnace.
You could literally have a few generations of heirs whose job is shoveling money into a furnace and they would be considered significantly wealthy for most of those generations.
You could perhaps argue that his work in education will lead to a more capable tech workforce in the future, but even then, the returns won't go to him.
Fewer people in the world dying from polio and malaria? Not all returns have to be monetary, or measurable.
Edit: I'm just trying to understand why you think it's more precise to label what Bill Gates is doing as "philanthropic investment" as opposed to "giving money away."
For example, consider the following scenarios:
- I pay for my college.
- I pay for my son's college.
- I pay for my niece's college.
- I pay for a stranger's college.
- I pay the university directly so that more strangers can attend.
It doesn't seem like there's a hard line anywhere. Probably just two ways of looking at the same thing, which for me anyway has an effect on how I use my money (I don't want to "give it away" but am happy to "spend it" on making others' lives better).
It's crazy how Thomas has more than double the karma of the next highest person.
How much of his fortune has he actually spent?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...
>As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation.[1][9]
Citations: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation-timeli... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-16/bill-gates-retakes...
Apparently he is worth 90 billions. Let's assume he has donated 2 more billions in the last 4 years to make it 30 billion. That means he donated 25% of his worth to his foundation. I'm sure he has donated money to other things.
I hardly call being a eugenicist "making the world a better place". The Nazis tried it too. They also thought they were "trying to make the world a better place". Bill Gates is a notorius eugenicist.
Isn't this site basically run by programmers? Ya'll can't type into a search engine though? I mean really?
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal...
Bill Gates certainly isn't the first to play the philanthropy card after a ruthless spell in business. There was John Rockefeller before him.
Joel on Software Story about Bill Gates: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Bonus Bill Gates Pancake Problem story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...
that story just reeks of the blind idolization that goes on with these people. you see it in musk devotees as well. yes, these people are smart, successful, and driven. but they aren't literal incarnations of comic-esque super geniuses or intellectual gods. they are people who's primary power is their drive.
how about just respecting their drive and intelligence rather than putting it on a pedestal? think originally and don't be some dumb slave that bows down to supposed super intelligence. question whether those people really have the capability to understand a certain novel idea, because they may not. they got to where they are because they followed a path and followed it HARD, meaning there are maybe paths they didn't have time to consider.
So this means that Bezos was thinking about data mining and machine learning in a presentation about generalist engineers at least 1/2 decade before this became common place.
Today he has my utter respect on how he tranformed and how he spent his money.
Humanity is very close to eradicating polio forever, thanks to Bill Gates and Rotary.
Bill Gates is a luminary who created the largest software development company known to man. I will give him the respect to hear him out about any subject he feels he can contribute in.
Education isn't just a matter of what information is presented, it's about how it's presented and all the complex issues around that.
The point is that there's real complaints from actual educators about the views on education that Gates Foundation promotes, including the whole overemphasis on testing and more… I'm not certain of all the details, but for an example:
But if Gates was just doing everything great for education, we can still question the concept that wealthy business owners have the power to influence things like science and education. This is one of the more subtle yet still troubling aspects of wealth inequity (of the capitalist sort in this case).
Microsoft's impact on the world has been overall negative in my view compared to the likely counterfactual of a world-without-Microsoft, but that's too speculative to get into. It's undeniable that Microsoft got big more on the effectiveness of how it played the game of business within our social/corporate/government/market system than on the quality of the products.
Anyway, issues in education as my example? Just one starting point: http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Gates-Effect/140323/
I do wonder if not having anything on the line contributes to our blind spots in this area. If something doesn't affect us, it takes much longer to realize when things have gone very wrong.
Sure, someone who says "Do as I say, not as I do" can have good advice, but at the end of a day, a doctor who wont take his own medicine is suspect in my mind.
I think the CS building at many of the top CS schools are named after him.
If you're giving back, maybe you took too much.
"He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, and my anti-corruption activities would no longer be tolerated."
Nobody has managed to prove Putin is sitting on the claimed wealth and Putin / his circle has denied it. I seriously doubt anyone is going to step forward with the evidence necessary to prove it, for obvious reasons.
Ah, found it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/world/europe/russia-dmitr...
The video, with English subtitles, as almost 24M views:
I've been told that Arab sheiks in Saudi Arabia and the UAE laugh at the claims of Gates or Bezos or Slim being the richest person in the world. Same would happen with the Russian plutocrats, and whomever controls Chinese companies at the moment. There are other strange arrangements like Ingvar Kamprad and IKEA (which is supposedly a nonprofit but Kamprad is effectively a dictator and uses company funds for whatever he wants).
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and...
but I was referring to hereditary mineral rights, which is really more about political power and the (very expensive) maintenance of an oppressive regime. those mineral rights eventually convert into oil on tanker ships but it's really incredibly precarious and a single political shift (internal revolution, invading army, etc.) makes it all vanish in a heartbeat.
the amount of oil-on-ships wealth that an Arab tyrant has on hand at any given time is relatively modest. most of the wealth is future claims to continue selling that oil, and that's not a very liquid form of wealth at all.
Though that's much of Venezuela's present problem.
Also the U.S. and Canada. Fracking, deep water, tar sands.
Can you post a source? The link you posted only talks about IKEA.
Here are some attempt at explanations:
https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-the-Arab-sheikhs-among-the-m...
The Forbes methodology rules ranks individuals rather than large, multi generational families who share fortunes.
A WikiLeaks document mentions lots of behind-the-scenes ways that the arab royals siphon money. So I guess it's impossible for Forbes or anyone to know their true net worth:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/wikileaks-saudi-roy...
Two other families nearby hit the ~$2B range but you'll never hear about it unless you're floating on a boat when their name comes up.
Also its easy to bequeath your descendants wealth easily that way.
Some have laughed right back:
Anyway..... abstractions sometimes fray at the extreme ends. The concept of property doesn't quite apply to Putin.
Years ago, I had a conversation urban planner mate about some building that couldn't be changed (preservation) or used (building codes & safety). I argued that this makes it public property Him -'You can't just take property off someone'. Me - 'We already have, haven't we?' He couldn't get his head around my meaning.
Around here (Ireland) landowners often "own" roads that border their land. This ownership amounts to a responsibility for cutting hedges and paying taxes on it. They don't (I think) have any rights to it that others don't.
Ownership is a set of rules about what an owner can do with something. If you own an apple, but aren't allowed to eat it, gift it, etc. do you really own it?
Does the King of Saudi Arabia (another candidate for wealthiest man) "own" everything in the country? I think he has the legal right to do anything with any thing. Does he own all "public" assets controlled by the crown, like Saudi Aramco (valued somewhere between $1trn and $10trn)? If not where's this distinction?
The only right left is to not let someone else have it I guess ?
That is an interesting point, but in terms of the Russian Oligarchs I think part of the distinction is they are (and have been) attempting to export that wealth and diversify it so that if they do lose power they will still be insanely wealthy. Maybe not 200bn wealthy but still massively wealthy. That is why the Magnitsky act is so important [1], because it makes it harder for them to move their money out of Russia. Granted a lot of wealth is coupled with control over natural resources and industry, but the more I read the more I realize Russian (like probably chinese and US as well) money is everywhere and much harder to track. The Saudis I'm sure do the same things in terms of investment, but whether they do so with as much secrecy and in avoidance of sanctions I'm not sure.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/21/politics/russian-adoptions-mag...
I don't see how that's an actual distinction because the same thing applies just as well to the house of Saud and Saudi Arabia in general. Do you honestly think the house of Saud didn't put a bit of wealth aside for the unlikely event they might be removed from power?
For whatever reason, it's become acceptable to just assume that certain countries are "ultra corrupt" while others are supposedly "corruption free". In reality, none of this applies because, in reality, the practices of corruption just differ from country to country depending on the local laws.
Corruption always finds a loophole and in many places established forms of corruption are not even recognized as such. Case in point: Germany
How many people would think Germany is a country ripe with corruption? The super punctual, super correct, super bureaucratic Germans could never be corrupt, right?
Well, Germany was among the last countries who ratified the UN convention against corruption, as a matter of fact, it was the last EU country to ratify it. It took German parliament 11 years [0] to ratify that UN convention against a lot of opposition. High profile German politicians publicly complained that if the UN convention was ratified it would be impossible for them to keep working like they've been working.
That's quite long and vehement opposition against something that would usually just be regarded as the sensible thing to do, I'll leave the reasons for that strong opposition up to your imagination.
[0] https://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/11_years_afte...
But... I don't agree with your leanings. All countries are corrupt to some degree, but degrees do vary. I think it dangerously lends to extremism, thinking of issues of corruption in either-or terms or some close proxy.
Like many other German corruption scandals, these were never properly investigated/charged. With time people simply forget about this kind of stuff, but it happened and it very likely still happens because getting caught before didn't have any real consequences for them, so why would they stop?
> All countries are corrupt to some degree, but degrees do vary.
Indeed, but the practices of corruption also vary, often dictated by culture, so how does one really "measure corruption" in such a way that it's actually comparable? Imho that's quite a difficult, if not impossible, task because it involves a lot of subjective value judgments.
By that definition, Putin does own the entirety of Russia, "private" enterprises included.
> That all changed in July 2003, when Putin arrested Russia’s biggest oligarch and richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin grabbed Khodorkovsky off his private jet, took him back to Moscow, put him on trial, and allowed television cameras to film Khodorkovsky sitting in a cage right in the middle of the courtroom. That image was extremely powerful, because none of the other oligarchs wanted to be in the same position. After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky. From what followed, it appeared that Putin’s answer was, “Fifty percent.” He wasn’t saying 50 percent for the Russian government or the presidential administration of Russia, but 50 percent for Vladimir Putin personally. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, and my anti-corruption activities would no longer be tolerated.
What does he mean "appeared that Putin's answer was"?
Well, clearly, he wasn't in the room for the meetings and it's not like there are published minutes, so the answer must be inferred from external evidence. So the claim is that the visible behavior f actors and flows of business suggest that Putin has been granted control, if not on-paper ownership, of half the business of the various Russian oligarchs as payoff for not destroying them each individually.
Did Putin become drastically richer in the following years while the oligarchs became poorer? In what way?
Our global economy is trending towards benefiting only the most ruthless, even at the very top.
For example - Bill Gates could not buy a Ferrari LeFerrari (from the factory) because they would not sell it. Obviously there is a healthy second hand market - which Ferrari also tries to limit.
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/herjavec-ferrari-laferrari/
(EDIT: Better article)
Your numbers and sources are clearly better.
Are there even 10,000 of those "hyper-cars" out there to be bought?
Generally these cars are very limited production runs starting at 500 examples for the "common" ones (seriously) down to single digit numbers models for the very very exclusive ones. The Lamborghini Veneno Roadster is a recent example: http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/g4107/lamborghini-venen...
It's, like, on the other end of the spectrum of where you name your tunneling company 'Boring Company'.
Fun fact: the guy who drew it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne) sold off his 10% equity in Apple for $800.
How amazing would it be for a man with that much wealth to set some aside for his children, whatever he thinks establishes their life and his duty to them, and then make it his goal to have nothing by the time he dies.
Set up foundations to kill hunger, diseases, etc. But as death approaches and the years drag on, really ramp up the giving.
"Bill Gates: Net worth $0" would make an amazing headstone for a man who spent the latter part of his life giving.
But by default, I'd not want to put that burden on my children. In a perfect world (for me), I'd give them enough that enable them to do whatever they want, selfishly. I don't mean selfishly in the negative sense.. but from my perspective I'm giving them a gift. I want them to have a life without fear, worry, or struggle. If they wanted to live their entire life relaxed and on the beach, so be it - that's my gift to them.
If, instead, they wanted to manage billions of dollars, focusing on making money to give money like a non-profit, then great! But that's not a "gift" I'd give anyone, more of a job, from my perspective.
what?
He is the second richest person on Earth, why be sad? =)
I'd be more worried about the power/political influence these individuals wield. There is generally an incestuous coterie of the rich that one gets access to after a certain point, where the destruction of freedom is lubricated with champagne and caviar. Bildeberg/IMF/WTO/G20 etc. are symptomatic of such cabals of corporatocracies and their retainers in the state apparatus that wield power over the world.
[1] https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iVJAUVVd7l0...
But, I don't know any of this, just speculating. Do you know more?
Escobar at his height had an estimated wealth of $30bn - with inflation that is very much in the same ballpark.
And he had a huge share of his wealth in cash - you might know the anecdote that his operation spent $2,500 a month on rubber bands to bundle up cash...
Nobody knows what the wealth of today's global drug kingpins is, but I would be surprised if El Chapo Guzmán weren't worth tens of billions.
Wow, that is very shocking! I frankly thought there was too much chaos to obtain >$10bn. Hell, I'd even be impressed with >$1bn. Guess I don't give them enough credit, and I also give countries ability to manage the crime lords too much credit.
They're currently pegging Gates at sitting on $43 billion in cash out of his $90.8 billion total fortune. His investment vehicle, Cascade, is well known; I assume that's one way Bloomberg is attempting to keep tabs on the cash level. I've occasionally checked Bill's numbers on the Bloomberg Billionaire's list, I don't recall his cash level ever being so high. You can essentially guarantee that if the $43b is even remotely accurate, nobody else on earth is topping that (save for an extraordinarily rich leader / royalty, but even then $43b is immense).
Most of the richest billionaires have their wealth heavily tied up in one or a few businesses. Gates, among the hyper billionaires, is rare in the sense that he's basically sitting on a giant investment portfolio at this point, meaning he can turn most of it to cash dramatically easier than his peers.
See: 2007-2009.
Gates for example, is dedicating his wealth to important causes such as eliminating malaria. If he does something foolish and rides a massive stock market bubble back down while he's fully invested, that could mean $30 or $40 billion less for attacking such problems in the next 10-20 years (there's no guarantee the market will come back to these levels soon, it could take a decade or multiple decades).
If the market drops and stays low, he could easily be put into a situation where it's again time to perform some asset liquidation for funding purposes for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That is, those market 'losses' would become non-recoverable at that point.
Sitting on $90.8 billion as he is, there is a good argument to be had given how high this market is, that that's a vast amount of money for him to distribute versus his age. He has N time left in his life, and an incredibly sum to dispose of yet and he isn't making nearly enough progress on that front versus his standing wealth.
Between Gates & Buffett, and assuming modest growth in their current wealth levels, the Gates Foundation has to figure out how to productively distribute perhaps $250+ billion yet over 25-30 years. The target was to do so in Bill / Melinda's lifetimes, then they shifted it to within a decade or two of their passing. That's not going to happen, they have too much money and can't dispose of it fast enough.
The housing bubble wasn't subtle.
The stock market presently trading at an extremely elevated multiple is not subtle (much less while simultaneously US GDP growth is averaging historic lows, and global growth is just OK). Simply put, stocks have soared without the earnings to support the move, it's overwhelmingly multiple expansion.
It doesn't require a magic 8-ball to be prudent and lighten up after the S&P and Dow have tripled from the bottom in 8 years.
https://nrf.com/2015/top100-table
The difference, of course, is that Bezos controls a much larger portion of AMZ than the Waltons control of WMT.
None of them are anywhere near John D. Rockefeller, who had an inflation-adjusted net worth of $392 billion, equivalent to 1.5-2% of the entire U.S. economy at the time.
I don't know that I agree with it or not, but that is the thinking and it isn't completely unreasonable.
Note that Bill Gates has been getting a lot of money from Warren Buffet and other rich people. I don't know the break down (it is likely public information: I just don't care to look it up), but it isn't fair to say Bill Gates is working on his own, though he is clearly giving his valuable time.
Yeah I don't know about that. The majority of rich people decide what they want to do is make as much money as possible and distribute it to family members. It's there money so obviously they have the right to do just that.
I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates in that he has chosen to be as effective with his money as possible in positively impacting the world. I believe he has committed to giving away 99% (or 99.9%?) of his money to noble causes before he passes. As well as inspiring others to make similar pledges.
Microsoft's business practices, in my view, introduced greater inefficiency into the software and business ecosystem. They were a parasite that drained resources from every healthy business "organism" and no amount of philanthropy can make up for the opportunity cost paid for Gates to amass his wealth.
How is giving people something they want "depriving" them?
I have little use for Microsoft software, but, you know, lots of people like it.
I remember that era well. There were always plenty of machines available that didn't pay the so-called "Windows tax". I know. I bought (and installed Linux on) many of them.
You know what? The number of people (again, including me) who didn't want Windows? That was a rounding error, dude.
So yes, many of those machines sold with Windows pre-installed didn't have another operating system, but that doesn't mean that if Microsoft hadn't broken the law (those contracts they forced on OEMs were illegal) that people would have still chosen to buy those computers with Windows pre-installed. I consider people who were forced to use Windows because of the lack of alternatives killed by Microsoft's illegal business practices to be similarly paying the Windows tax.
Had BeOS gotten any reasonable market share, it would have quickly become a huge threat to Microsoft. It was miles ahead of Windows in terms of quality and some of its features are still, 20 years later, better than we have in current operating systems.
People (especially the kind of people who installed alternative operating systems) could, and did, assemble their own machines without paying any "Windows tax". At all.
Yes, some manufacturers cut a bulk deal to bundle Windows with complete systems.
No, that didn't make it impossible (or even particularly difficult) to avoid the so-called "Windows tax".
BeOS didn't even run on Intel hardware at first, btw. When I used BeOS (and I have used it, hands-on... have you?) it only ran on PPC machines. The port to Intel happened after the Return of Jobs and the decision to use NeXTSTEP (which became OS X) for new Macs. That's what killed BeOS, not the "Windows tax". The port to Intel was a late desperation move.
I'm tagging out now. I have better things to do than rehash a war that was over 25 years ago.
OMG...are you intentionally trying to be obtuse? This isn't exactly controversial stuff I'm talking about. There was a lawsuit and Be is very much on the record about Microsoft's tactics.
The lawsuit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microso...
Gassée's email: http://techrights.org/2008/08/19/oem-tactics-beos/
> ...assemble their own machines...
Do you even understand what OEM means? It has nothing to do with user-assembled machines. Yes, the minority of people who built their own systems could avoid the Windows tax. If you want to talk about a rounding error, that's basically the definition. We're talking the full systems that had Windows pre-installed. In order to not violate their OEM licenses with Microsoft, the only way those vendors could ship BoOS pre-installed was to dual boot with windows and give users absolutely no indication that BeOS was installed.
Get your facts straight before you start calling people names.
Which almost exactly overlapped the number of people who wanted to run Linux, or had even heard of it.
As noted above, BeOS didn't even RUN on Intel during the time in question. Gassée bet his company on persuading Apple to adopt BeOS as the new Mac OS.
He lost.
Congratulation, sir, I humbly admit to being trolled. With a little improvement, you might convince me you're human and pass your eponymous test.
Anyways, I'm done arguing events and facts I experienced first hand with someone so intent on ignoring what actually happened.
Id love to know the analysis on this.
I deliver to amazon addicts and prime-ers. Although, yes, they order often (5-6 days a week) the volume of items by count is tiny compared to a shopping cart at a store.
You mean Bezos? Well of course, he's CEO of Amazon and I don't think the board or shareholders would tolerate him saying "this is such a good idea that would make us tonnes of money, but we'd better give the opportunity to someone else"
I'm actually kind of amazed that Amazon has managed to plow so much money into their business without shareholders throwing a fit. The usual modus operandi of activist shareholders now is to get the company to pay out as much money as possible to shareholders while investing as little as possible into R&D. They've even managed to squeeze Apple into stock buy backs! Amazon seems to have avoided this and is thus able to invest lots of money into their business units, and look at how it's paid off for them (amazingly well).
Regarding Amazon eating the world, I'm not that concerned about it honestly. If Amazon starts acting like a monopoly, regulators will step in and force them to divest from certain business segments. If Amazon gets lazy and starts charging people higher prices or offering a more limited selection, then people will vote with their wallets and order from somewhere else.
So on the whole I still see Amazon as a net positive. They're pushing the rest of industry to innovate in ways we haven't seen before (logistics, online shopping, cloud services, assistants) and this is a win for consumers.
Sure, there's been some high profile bankruptcies/fire sales from competitors who haven't been able to adapt (e.g. Sears in 6 months), but I have to ask: do you really want to prop up companies that cannot compete in the market? That doesn't make sense from a consumer or economic perspective.
Haven't they already? Their breadth is insane
KSS M DDS ZUMZ SSI JCP JWN ASNA BKS TUES BGFV FRAN BKE KIRK SMRT GCO FIVE SHLD BURL BBBY SPLS APRN
1yr (excluding dividends): amzn + 42.90% (even excluding today still +39%) deathByAmzn - 25% (today also up... hmmm).
For what its worth, AMZN isn't the whole story of retail. There's a PE story there too [1].
[0]: There's an official one out there if you google, but I disagree with some of it. I exclude Walmart because its a big enough competitor to survive, as an example. Also i don't have a desire to track 54 stocks for this purpose.
[1]: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/its-more-than-amazon-why-reta...
As far as I understand, at best you can subtract your donations from your income, so you won't have to pay income taxes on those donations. Even if you can subtract the donation directly from your taxes, you still lose the same amount of money.
Either way the philanthropist loses at least as much money as the taxes he would've paid without the donations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I just wish there was a Bezos/Gates-level billionaire who care as much about life extension via SENS. That's the only thing of equal importance I can think of that needs long term vision and financial support.
May be a more important question is why those people lack those things you mentioned. If for instance Bill Gates/Jeff Bezos never existed, would it make those poor people richer? You are not addressing the problem when you simply vilify the rich as the cause of the poor's woes. Your argument is intellectually dishonest and I think it stems from unnecessary envy.
If iPhone manufacturing is your only gripe with this world we find ourselves in, I'd say we've got it pretty good.
the market is not democratic, those who control more wealth and capital necessarily have more power.