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firecall

Here’s a basic question I have:

So he’s only worth that much on paper. He’d have to sell everything to get a big pile is cash.

Would there be enough money sloshing around to buy all his shares and assets at the indicated value?

I guess there is, but surely he wouldn’t get that much if he had a fire sale? LOL

What about all the billionaires combined?

Bezos, Musk and so on.

Could they just sell everything?

Do other people have enough money to buy what they have?

I suppose they do if you extend the net wide enough…

Just seems crazy to me and meaningless.

It’s madness :-/

What are they hoarding it all for?

I just dont understand it at all.

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Good questions !

In a sense, the whole world is leveraged now. We can monetize everything. If you want to understand a bit about finance Matt Levine newsletter is excellent.

He talked about how a singer can be a billionaire in today's world. Just calculate the present value of his future expected revenues, and sell a portion of it. A company of 1.

Re your question - if Musk or Bezos decided to liquidate their holdings, both stocks would crash, but probably not in the same proportion.

Amazon is a very established business with big, consistent profit and while it's valuation is high, it's not outrageous. Tesla on the other hand, has 99% of it's valuation derived from future promises and Musk's personality. If he was to sell a significant part, the stock would crater 90% (and mind you, if it craters 90% it would still be worth more than Ford and GM combined !).

No, it's not actually possible to liquidate that much. But it doesn't really matter. It's so much money that the exact amount doesn't really matter. It's just an estimate. The estimate is high, but since that "fire sale" will never actually occur, it's all just numbers.

As for what they're all hoarding it for... well, Musk at least is really good at spending money on things that make him happy. He now runs the world's most important forum and has a ton of control over who gets to say what and who gets heard. He just bought the Presidency -- by means that were arguably illegal, but since the President controls the Justice Department, it doesn't matter. He wants to own Mars, and he's spent billions to do it.

Bezos seems less good at it. He did buy a newspaper and swung it in a way that helped buy him the election, too. He's also got a rocket company, though he's not as good at it. In general he seems to be trying to just make the number go up, more than he wants to do anything with it.

Bill Gates is throwing his money at a variety of charitable causes, with mixed success. A lot of it is comparatively un-sexy stuff, like getting people vaccinated, but its relieving a lot of suffering.

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