3w ago

earned it all

Anti-Corporate Movement @lemmy.giftedmc.com

earned it all

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Bezos makes ~$2,500 every SECOND. His big idea? Get a bunch of funding to heavily undercut local bookstores and operate at a loss while destroying local businesses such that he could take over as a near monopoly. And it’s highly doubtful that it was his idea, but it worked because when you’re willing to cheat against those not willing to do the same you’re gunna win.
- Best part is Amazon can't even manage to shop books without destroying them at this point.

Here's the math since I was curious
1492 was 194,440 days ago * $5000 = $972,200,000
Forbes put bezos at $209,000,000,000 for 2025
- The author of the tweet didn't go far enough. Should have gone for for 1 million USD instead. Even if you made 1 000 000$ every day, it would still not be enough.
  Absolutely insane.
  
  shit, I was about to write that you overshot by a few zeroes, and then I looked closer and put the commas and everything, and you're right: 194,440,000,000.
  
  Well it says that you wouldn't even be a billionaire. That's right up against the limit for being a billionaire.
  But yeah bezos has over 200x that money
- nEt WoRtH iS nOT sAlaRy
- I feel like compound interest would be important here
  
  It cracks me up that compound interest gets raised every time someone makes an argument about just how much money billionaires have. As if the only reason we're not billionaires is because we were too dumb to invest the $5,000 we've been making every day since Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
  
  When did compound interest even get invented?
  
  No it isn't because it's an imagery used to show how absurd that amount of money is. 5000 a day is easy to grasp and a few hundred years is easy to grasp.
- I'm more interested about the 5k/d. That must be excluding compound interest. Like, all the money if just being stuffed into mattresses, or something. OTOH, having your money in a bank account might have reset you to zero in 1929.
- Does this account for inflation?
  
  Can you even do that since this is before USD was a thing
  
  Inflation makes the money you earned longer ago worth less, so it would be an even less amicable comparison.
- Yeah but what if you have compound interest?

Whenever a capitalist says he got wealthy through hard labor ask him whose.

Conservative logic: Giving poor people a small amount of money will cause them not to work, whereas passing laws that benefit billionaires will cause them to create jobs.

If you made 7000 dollars every hour since Jesus was born, you would still not have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

Here is Bezos' wealth represented to scale.

It’s a mental illness
- Maybe but there are also lots of people with mental illness who manage it and are still decent people. Not every sociopath is a serial killer but every billionaire is fucking evil. The decision to acquire great wealth at other's expense and use it only for yourself is something else.

It makes me think of hoarders. It just happens to be the case that money is universally sought-after, and so we think "it make money, is good!" But it's not much different from someone with stacks of ancient newspapers filling 98% of their living space. It's not like Jeff could actually spend all of that money even if he wanted to. He has more than he could ever need to live the most lavish and privileged of lifestyles, including giving the same to several generations of his offspring. He could still go to space and do all that crazy shit with 10% of what he has in his bank account. It can't be normal.

548 years to a billion dollars at 5k per day. Saved you a calculator.
- Thank you, now try telling this to my debt collectors

Off with his head
- Hahaha can't even show up to protest. Who would build the guillotine?

bUt hE GivE TO CharITY! i BELievE HiM! gOoD wHiTE MasTEr!

taxes or the guillotine. decapitilization or decapitation.
I prefer the first option, but ultimately the outcome is what's important.
- Both

You need 548 years

Bezos does not make a billion dollars in a week, unless you count certain short term gains based on random variation of the stock market, in which case he also loses a billion dollars in some weeks.
- Over the last 6 years he's gained ~150B. That puts it at 410M per week on average over that time period.
- That poor man. How does he cope?
  
  ikr. I'd just die of embarrassment if i made less than $150B in a few years.
- So how much does he profit off of amazon every week?

Ehh I think we are forgetting about compounding interest.
- that's true, but still think about how long it would still take.
  
  Yea, it would take a long time.
- wat

But you'd probably be getting compound interest.
- You're missing the point. The point is that "no-one works for a billion dollars". Making money for free because you already have money (aka interest) is not working for that money.
  
  I think you're missing the point. People attempting to represent "the left" (which tends to consider it's grasp on reality and interpretation of data a strength) sometimes put out completely inaccurate bullshit. In this particular example, people that can do math see right through it; thus discrediting a lot of the other (not bullshit) stuff the left comes out with.
  
  I'm not missing the point, I get it. It's just like, ugh, imagine if you're witnessing someone in this magical scenario where they get so much money ($5k a day), but they still aren't putting it into any sort of accounts that gets interest. It's like watching your friend win the lottery and then buy more lottery tickets or something. I can't help but just be like "noooooo wait! Don't do that!"
  It's worth pointing out that $5k a month, with 1% interest is still worth only $10 million after a hundred years. Which is using a more realistic vehicle for wealth growth and still shows how insanely wealthy billionaires are. The tools wouldn't let me plug in more than a hundred years and I didn't bother calculating more by hand. https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator
  
  Investing your money is not “making money for free” it’s providing your money to someone else so they can use it to make money. Then you make money when they make money. It’s capitalization. You risk losing all of that money if the investment fails. If you work a job you put your time and effort in and get paid for that but if the company fails you lose your job, they don’t take away your house.
  It’s no different from a loan. Suppose you lend your friend $10 to buy some pepper seeds and they grow a bunch of peppers, sell some of them for $20, keep the other peppers, and collect seeds from the peppers so that they have even more seeds next year. Is it really fair if they just pay you back $10 next year? No!
  They used your $10 to buy the seeds they needed to start with, they earned themselves $20 from pepper sales, plus they got to eat some peppers and even ended up with more seeds than they originally bought. They should pay you back more than $10 for the simple reason that you did not have use of your $10 for an entire year, so you did not have the ability to buy those pepper seeds and make the profit yourself.
  That’s the time value of money. It’s why we pay interest on loans. Because to not do so is to saddle the lender with unfair opportunity costs, in addition to the risk of losing their money (maybe the peppers all die and your friend tells you they can’t pay you back the $10 anymore).

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