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Comment by mixdup | Hacker News Reader

Buying Tesla is just buying SpaceX. When they roll up Tesla, it will be in a stock deal not real money. None of this is real money and I would argue that Musk is not the world's first trillionaire because there is no reality in which he could get that money out of SpaceX

I mean, if he wanted to sell tomorrow, who COULD spend $2-3 Trillion to buy it, and who WOULD? Anyone with that kind of money to spend today knows what a scam it is

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Sure, it's reasonably likely they merge at some point but the ratio between the prices at that time will be different than the current ratio, so it still matters which share you buy today.

Especially since Musk is heavily incentivised to merge them at a price favourable to spacex since he has a much larger share

Musk may not have a few billions liquid on his cashing account, but he have something better: collateral to raise a few billions for everything he may want.

I mean as far as I know no human being is even a billionaire anyway if you only count cash. It's one of the things the "eat the rich" crowd is particularly bad at internalizing, that there's a difference between value and money that can be spent on food or hospitals.

2,000 gold bars were stopped out of iraq. and that is just what was stopped / reported.

Dictators and autocrats may or nay not have cash sitting in a bank account, but there are most likely multiple with $1B in gold.

Gold is value, you cannot take it to a grocer and buy food.

It is much more feasible for Jeff Bezos to sell a billion dollars worth of Amazon tomorrow or Bill Gates to sell a billion dollars worth of MSFT tomorrow than it is for Elon to sell a trillion dollars of SPCX even over a year's time

I get that net worth is more than just cash, and that is not what I meant and it's pretty obvious that isn't what I meant. It may not just be cash on hand but if an asset is completely illiquid at it's purported value, is it actually worth that?

It is, because of the time component of money. Money is a way of storing the value of labor in a manner less affected by time. If you sell it all at once, its value is greatly reduced. All investments include that time component. Point-in-time net worth doesn't have much value as a measurement in part because of this.

Somewhat doubtful. (The first part of your statement, anyway. Of course the difference between abstract "value" and hard, spendable "money" is a thing.)

Like Mr. Hanson said in my sibling comment, some rulers are (or were!) bound to have amassed incredible amounts of resources. For historical/non-present-day examples, consider looking into figures like Jakob Fugger or Mansa Musa.

I have no idea why the adjusted net worth of people who died centuries ago would have anything to do with money in the modern day. And at a glance, neither of your examples had billions of dollars in cash, which is the point I was making. They may have had a lot of value tied up in illiquid investments, which is exactly like Musk's valuation.

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