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Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

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Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#371

Post by monocasa »

WalterBright wrote: post #336
lefrenchy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit, so what you’re saying is proven false already by history? It’s so insane to me that people honestly believe that we need billionaires to fund all their hedonic desires in order to achieve anything good and useful as a society. It’s provably false and frankly an absolutely pessimistic view of society and humanity.

Government did indeed put man on the moon. But they did it at an insane and unsustainable cost, which is why the moon was then abandoned. Musk/Bezos/Branson are making space travel a paying proposition, which makes all the difference.

The Apollo program was about $120B in today's money all said and done. And that's with 1960's manufacturing processes. The complete Gemini program was about $10B.

Blue Origin is up to ~$10B already and hasn't even gone orbital yet.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#372

Post by pb7 »

ModernMech wrote: post #225
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complain to your senators, then? Congress is who sets the algorithm defining how taxes are owed, not the taxpayers themselves. Have you ever written the IRS a check for more than what you owe them (or declined to accept a tax refund)?

I've been trying to get a meeting with my Senators to express my opinion, but they won't have me. They regularly take meetings with corporate lobbyists though. I wonder what it is they're telling my Senators? Sure wish I had $10 million to spend on lobbyists like Amazon.

You elected Senators that don't care about your opinion. Maybe you should be more mad at them and less mad at Amazon who provides millions of people with exactly the goods and services they promise.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#373

Post by [deleted] »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #339
ixacto wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to make humanity a multi-planetary species, Mars is just the beginning. The moonshot is just a tech validation, then we can send humans to the rest of the planets and the belt too. Figuring out how to solve pollution on Earth is also doable with modern technology. We can terraform Earth to be more habitable as well, we could melt the antarctic icecap and colonize it. Maybe even make a new civilization there w…

Am I the only one who calls bullshit on this? Let's say Elon pulls off going to Mars and establishing a permanent colony within the next 50 years. What plausible doomsday scenarios are there where everyone on Earth dies, but the people on Mars survive and are completely self-sustainable and able to grow their population exponentially? I mean, even if 99.99% of all humans on Earth are killed, there will be several ord…

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Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#374

Post by dumbfoundded »

WalterBright wrote: post #343
Hokusai wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are 100% right. A million people can own $1000 in a corporation, or 1 person can own $1,000,000,000. The company has the same capital but wealth is distributed differently. Even if we needed big corporations, we still do not need billionaires.

Countries without billionaires are mired in poverty. Billionaires can make high risk investments. A million people won't.

Governments actually make the risky investments. From infrastructure to nukes to the internet to space travel to particle colliders to fusion. The governments that have made these investments are the ones that do the best job of representing the interests of millions of people.

If you take the limit of concentrating wealth, you get a dictatorship. They don't seem to do much. It's hard to believe in democracy and insane wealth concentration at the same time.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#375

Post by ramesh31 »

mucholove wrote: post #363

Dudes and dudettes. Before you ask for higher taxes—hear me out. First, recognize the trajectory. Bezos is the definition of someone living out the American dream. The corporate interest may be trending towards a monopoly—but this is a guy who was abandoned by his biological father, adopted by an immigrant, and was able to use his skills, smarts and efforts to achieve the easiest way for me to buy something. Second—f…

>and was able to use his skills, smarts and efforts to achieve the easiest way for me to buy something.

And a small loan of $200,000 from his parents. Also that.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#376

Post by kristjansson »

asciimov wrote: post #260
cowgoesmoo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn't he need to sell stock eventually to service the loan payments?

Not necessarily. The wealthy put up $-worth of shares as collateral to borrow $$$$-worth of money from the bank at low interest rates. The bank doesn't just sit on those shares, they use them to generate money for themselves. For example, say the Bank takes $250M in Amazon shares from Bezos and loans him $1B. If the bank projects that the price of Amazon is going down, they short that $250M in shares. If Bezos did ne…

It's the other way around? You borrow substantially fewer dollars than the value of the shares you pledged as collateral so that the bank doesn't call the loan if (when) the value of the shares changes.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#377

Post by prepend »

BingoAhoy wrote: post #201
agorabinary wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of the decisions that determined whether Amazon would become worth >$1T or yet another mediocre web store were made by warehouse workers? Jeff is primarily responsible for Amazon's success. For making Amazon what it is, him being worth ~10% of the whole company is a totally reasonable compensation

He's entitled to more than your average amazon employee, warehouse worker, and probably any other employee: YEAH sure. But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker. I'm merely making an argument that it's hard to objectively determine how much more one employee is entitled to the corporations stock pie than another based on merit. Amazon and it's 800,000 employee base built Amazo…

It’s not like he gets a $207B salary. That’s the worth of the equity that has increased over time.

He literally has a percentage of the company and it’s increased in value.

So he’s not paid such an astronomical salary. His salary was about $1.6M [0] as his fortune comes through his stock in founding the company.

I agree that it would be absurd to pay someone $1B, but it’s odd complaining that his assets shouldn’t appreciate in value.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/much-does-jeff-bezos-per-143450179.ht...

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#378

Post by [deleted] »

RIMR wrote: post #120
skeeter2020 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I am interested to see this award program's effects in 10-20 years One of the challenges of this "pay it forward on steroids" approach is that it will likely be hard to attribute measurable changes to the original investments. It does seem notable that Bezos has captured a huge set of resources, then paid it out to others for redistribution under their policies and procedures; he's essentially acting like a govern…

He has more capital than entire nation states. It's absurd that we celebrate this kind of undemocratic power in America.

[deleted]

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#379

Post by cantrevealname »

abrodersen wrote: post #198
ironrabbit wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, but how do you pay off these loans except by later selling stock (and paying capital gains tax)?

When you die, your heirs get the stock with "step up basis", meaning the cost basis used to calculate capital gains resets to the market price at time of death. So if they sell right after you die, they pay no capital gains tax.

Heirs in the United States don't pay capital gains tax, but doesn't the estate of the super rich guy have to pay up to 40% in estate taxes on all his assests (with an exemption on the first ~$5M)?

Jeff Bezos is worth $200B. If he died, his estate would have to pay 40% estate tax on $195B in assets (first ~$5M being exempt), which is $78B in tax. That's still a hell of a lot tax. I know there were some loopholes used by the Walton family and other super rich, but isn't the above how it's supposed to work?

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#380

Post by [deleted] »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #285
BingoAhoy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's entitled to more than your average amazon employee, warehouse worker, and probably any other employee: YEAH sure. But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker. I'm merely making an argument that it's hard to objectively determine how much more one employee is entitled to the corporations stock pie than another based on merit. Amazon and it's 800,000 employee base built Amazo…

>simply being a decision maker. This right here shows you don't understand what it takes to make a trillion dollar company. They were a book seller that eventually expanded into an online Walmart, that ended up becoming the largest cloud provider in the world. Just look at Borders/Barne's and Noble if you want to see two companies that were actually in a better position in the same industry 25 years ago. That's the d…

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