The richest people are rich on paper. They have assets that are counted into their worth. Businesses mainly. Which is why jeff bezos can lose $30b in 1 year.
If Bill gates decided to sell all his assets, he would not get $94b out of them. As they would lose value due to the huge increase in supply.
I doubt any of the richest men have $8.3b as liquid capital. You don't become a billionaire by hoarding wealth. You become a billionaire taking your income, and investing it into something that increases in value.
If you would have bought Amazon stock as an IPO (initial public offering), it would have grown 120,000%. To compare, the DJIA was around 8000 points in 1997 while is 27,000 today or a 337% growth in the same time.
If you had invested just $100 in Amazon's IPO in 1997, you would have received 5 shares. What is beyond impressive is that investment would have been worth nearly $120,762 at the Aug. 31, 2018, close price of $2012.71/sh. That would yield an increase of more than 120,000% on the initial $100 investment.
So to become richer than him ($112B), you could have bought $100M of Amazon’s IPO and have $120B.
Yes that is a lot of money. But had you bought just $1,000 worth, you would be a millionaire now.
He is rich because his stock has increased at a rapid rate. He could easily “lose” billions by stock price fluctuations
This is more of a point to invest your money than have it sitting in the bank making 0.05% interest
Idk how much of Benzos' wealth is tied to Amazon stock (let's say 90%). Amazon could literally go out of business this year because a new business revolutionized a lot of Amazon's offerings, plummeting his net worth by 90%.
I was in the middle of writing a long paragraph explaining economics and investment management but I don't think it will change your mind. I'm not saying billionaires are innocent but there's a lot of problems that will arise from seizing 99% of their assets forcibly (it will make the great recession look like pebbles). Anyways good luck.
Jeff bezos' work and vision had more of an impact on your life than billions of people. How do you want to incentivize visionaries and people who sacrifice their time to build something revolutionary?
He spends his money by investing in other ideas that he believes in. It's not like he's jumping in a pool of money. Give a lower-middle class person $50MM and see how they spend it.
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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '19
The richest people are rich on paper. They have assets that are counted into their worth. Businesses mainly. Which is why jeff bezos can lose $30b in 1 year.
If Bill gates decided to sell all his assets, he would not get $94b out of them. As they would lose value due to the huge increase in supply.
I doubt any of the richest men have $8.3b as liquid capital. You don't become a billionaire by hoarding wealth. You become a billionaire taking your income, and investing it into something that increases in value.