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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.
Yeah, it’s so fucking wild.
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
No, Bezos has basically the same amount of money. Still absolutely wild.
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.
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That’s real nice and all but curiously, nobody ever says that.
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When did compound interest even get invented?
Not far enough back to make a difference I’d wager
Compound interest when charged by lenders
Today “compound interest” usually relates to reinvested dividends and amortized growth/appreciation of investments (e.g., stocks, bonds) simply because non-predatory loans are designed for payoff within some fixed term. So if the term “compound interest” applies, something unexpected is happening (e.g., default) and the loan will be bundled and sold at a discount to collections.
Not far enough back to make a difference I’d wager
I’ll take that wager! 5k daily, ignoring inflation and leap-years, compounding annually (not quarterly) at 10% annualized ROI, gives us the standard annuity formula
1.1 * 5000 * 365 (1.1n-1) / 0.1
where n is the number of years, which
… in 100 years becomes ~278 billion (e11)
… in 200 years becomes ~3.8 million billion (e15)
… in 300 years becomes ~53 billion billion (e19)
… in 400 years becomes ~721 thousand billion billion (e23)
… in 533 years becomes ~231 billion billion billion (e29)
If that sounds incredible to you, you’re not alone. It’s the result of a hyperbolic growth curve that starts slow but keeps accelerating indefinitely, and 533 years is a very long time in market terms, so you easily reach the silly-numbers range.
Edit: the numbers before were napkin computation. I edited this to use the standard annuity formula which should be more accurate. Point should be the same though. Exponential growth is crazy.
100% agree with the point you’re making and 100% disagree with the math that you did to get there.
Lol you’re right! It looks like the final number I gave was only for 400 years. I didn’t actually reach 533.
Also I was rounding numbers midway through like a pen and paper physics computation. Since that error scales exponentially, even if I had gotten to 533 the final number was guaranteed to be off.
Update: fixed it
even $1 at 1% compound interest gets ridiculous after a hundred years
$2.70
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DAMN YOU AND YOUR MONSTER MATHS!
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.
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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.
If you made 7000 dollars every hour since Jesus was born, you would still not have as much money as Jeff Bezos.
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.
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.
Off with his head
Hahaha can’t even show up to protest. Who would build the guillotine?
taxes or the guillotine. decapitilization or decapitation.
I prefer the first option, but ultimately the outcome is what’s important.
Both
bUt hE GivE TO CharITY! i BELievE HiM! gOoD wHiTE MasTEr!
You need 548 years
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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
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Yea, I guess we need to watch that new Netflix show about the billionaire killing serial killer to get better analogies 🤷♂️
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).
You’re also missing the point. In your scenario, someone else did the work and the person with the money got more money as a result. This is what we mean when we say you can’t earn a billion dollars - you’re just skimming off other people’s work
If you don’t think it’s fair then don’t borrow my $10 for pepper seeds! Find something else to do to earn your own money. I’ll buy the pepper seeds myself and keep the profits.
By the way, I’ve grown peppers myself. It’s very easy. The sun and the plants do 99% of the work. Claiming that “you did all the work” by germinating and transplanting a few seeds is quite silly.
Nobody said it wasn’t fair. But that’s not working for money. That’s explicitly the point of investing.
If you grow your own peppers, yeah you’d be working for the money. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Digging up nonsense about how ‘hard’ the work is in your random example is irrelevant and wildly out of touch.
Let me quote GP because it seems like you’ve already forgotten what they said:
you’re just skimming off other people’s work
Now how do you reconcile that with this:
Nobody said it wasn’t fair
Either you’re just flat out lying when you say this, or you think “skimming off other people’s work” is fair. Which is it?
It’s not a charitable way to phrase it, but it’s not inaccurate. ‘Fair’ is wildly subjective. The concept itself is not unfair, but the application certainly can be. Regardless of whether it’s ‘fair’ or not, the general point is that it isn’t work.
I don’t know what you do for a living, but that’s the clearest and most engaging explanation of interest rationale I’ve ever heard. You’d be a great teacher.
I’m betting he is a landlord, perhaps a banker, some bootlicker professon for sure.
No I’m betting teacher, trainer or something aligned where they have to invent relatable analogies. That was top tier. I’d like to hear them explain the banking system, how money is invented from thin air by a mortgage, for example. Someone once explained it to me but it’s gone in the mists of time.
Edit: Also I don’t get the hate. Am not picking up ultra-capitalist screw the worker vibes. Maybe tone it down so people can just be themselves and chat?
I’m not a teacher but I do volunteer to tutor high school kids whose families are from Somalia. I used to be in the mathematics teaching program in university but I decided not to become a teacher. I love to teach but I’m not equipped to deal with all of the other stuff teachers have to put up with (angry parents, disinterested / defiant students, standardized testing, failing school systems).
Don’t let the people throwing around “bootlicker” bother you. These folks are totally lost in a pit of resentment. They’re basically left wing MAGA types. The two groups are going to tear apart western civilization if they have their way. I’m hoping sanity will one day prevail.
You’re going to be a great bootlicker one day too. Dumb as a rock, can’t remember simple concepts, sycophant extraordinaire.
lol ok. Have a nice day.
