71–80 of 124 posts
> Bill Gates was last person to attain 12-figure fortune in 1999 $100B nearly 20 years ago, just before the federal antitrust case decision against Microsoft. Makes me wonder how much concentration of wealth would occur if regulation was not in place.
All of history up until modern times is an example of unregulated wealth accumulation. It sucked.
But yeah. 'In medio virtus est', etc.
I know it's "political" but so is an individual having a net worth of $100 billion. It is well worth the watch unless, of course, you're a billionaire snowflake and don't like the reality that there are 500,000 homeless people and 45 million people living under the poverty line in America.
Bezos is an advocate for basic income, but I question his motives. Is it because he is genuinely concerned for others and society, or does he want to avoid the pitchforks at his doorstep when Amazon gets blamed for mass unemployment? Coupled with the fact that he's the richest man on earth, it's very apparent he will have a target on his back if he doesn't already. Maybe his motives don't matter. Maybe we just need t…
It may sound like a bad idea that might put us in a communistic economic order, but just like UBI, we can perform experiments to see if a universal income-limit, UIL, has any negative impact.
But okay, Bezos will probably not be a proponent of that idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sarcasm was not directed at him, but at us, and our lack of ability to come up with an economic system that can properly evaluate what somebody is worth. E.g. We have a legal system that decides when somebody is right or wrong, and it mostly matches with what people feel is right or wrong. Why can't we have a similar system that decides what somebody is worth?
Isn't that what a free market system does? Bezos' net worth is decided by what people freely decide his stock is worth.
Bezos is an advocate for basic income, but I question his motives. Is it because he is genuinely concerned for others and society, or does he want to avoid the pitchforks at his doorstep when Amazon gets blamed for mass unemployment? Coupled with the fact that he's the richest man on earth, it's very apparent he will have a target on his back if he doesn't already. Maybe his motives don't matter. Maybe we just need t…
Where UBI provides a lower-bound on income, and preliminary experiments are showing that it has no detrimental effect on the economy, perhaps we should think about the opposite. It may sound like a bad idea that might put us in a communistic economic order, but just like UBI, we can perform experiments to see if a universal income-limit, UIL, has any negative impact. But okay, Bezos will probably not be a proponent o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where UBI provides a lower-bound on income, and preliminary experiments are showing that it has no detrimental effect on the economy, perhaps we should think about the opposite. It may sound like a bad idea that might put us in a communistic economic order, but just like UBI, we can perform experiments to see if a universal income-limit, UIL, has any negative impact. But okay, Bezos will probably not be a proponent o…
It seems better to just have an actually progressive tax system. Effective tax rates on the rich are really low in the US right now. If there is an income limit there really is no incentive to make any more money so a progressive tax will probably give you a lot more taxes.
Yeah, but for long people were convinced that UBI does not stimulate people to work, but that is just not how it works (experiments show). If the incentive is there at the lower end, why not at the higher end? Why don't we run that experiment as well?
We might find out that if somebody is focused only on money, he or she does not make a good CEO. So the impact may be even better than just a financial one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
P/E is not a meaningful metric. The 10x rule of thumb doesn’t work for all companies. For one, not all companies have the same level of infrastructure—Amazon has a lot of warehouse and distribution infrastructure, not to mention all those AWS servers they own, etc. you should properly subtract that out before doing the calculation. Even still Amazon has a crazy high valuation, just not insanely high. Not sure I’d bet…
It would take way more than 300 years of profits at the current level to justify the stock price. That's crazy high. Even if AMZN could 10x their earnings overnight by stopping expansion or something, they'd still have a 30x - meaning way more than 30 years of future profits at this level. Either that, or they'd still have to grow that much. Stocks are in a clear bubble. Snap, AMZN, Tesla, and also BTC are stupid, an…
The market is clearly anticipating Amazon is going to get a lot larger yet. They're still growing at ~25% annually (minus Wholefoods), despite approaching $200 billion in sales. There's also no question that it's extremely richly valued here no matter what their growth is over the next five or so years.
Bezos is an advocate for basic income, but I question his motives. Is it because he is genuinely concerned for others and society, or does he want to avoid the pitchforks at his doorstep when Amazon gets blamed for mass unemployment? Coupled with the fact that he's the richest man on earth, it's very apparent he will have a target on his back if he doesn't already. Maybe his motives don't matter. Maybe we just need t…
That mass unemployment isn't going to happen. The US is going to have an immense labor shortgage over the next 20 years in fact, no matter what AI + robotics do. It's extremely simple math: low population growth (that will get worse) + modest immigration rate (that will get worse) + modest economic growth + large number of retiring workers = labor shortgage for decades to come.
Besides, Amazon is hiring hundreds of thousands of workers, while its chief labor competitor, Walmart, is simultaneously not slashing its 2.3 million employee base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would take way more than 300 years of profits at the current level to justify the stock price. That's crazy high. Even if AMZN could 10x their earnings overnight by stopping expansion or something, they'd still have a 30x - meaning way more than 30 years of future profits at this level. Either that, or they'd still have to grow that much. Stocks are in a clear bubble. Snap, AMZN, Tesla, and also BTC are stupid, an…
Amazon won't have a hard time eventually generating $20+ billion in net income (assuming very low net income margins of 5%). AWS by itself will hit $10 billion in operating income in three to four years. That business accounts for at least half of Amazon's present market cap. If AWS were a stand-alone publicly traded company, it'd have at least a $250 billion market cap right now. The market is clearly anticipating A…
Cloud services are also a competitive business and margins I think will erode eventually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking whether it's too late to buy I think makes no sense... if it were, immediately market forces would drive up the price. If it were too soon, immediately market forces would sell. You can ask anyone, any individual, of course and they'll have a particular answer which will differ. But I wouldn't be quick to trust a particular answer over the answer of the market (which IS the stock price), unless the particular…
The stock price at any point in time is set by about an equal number of investors thinking it'll go up as those that think it'll go down.
an individual with a billion shares has more of an impact on a share price than an individual with one share.