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Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

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Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#271

Post by adventured »

bluedino wrote: post #178

I am failing to see how someone who founded a company that hasn't made > $1B in profit over each of the last twenty years can have a fortune of $75B

It's pretty simple. The market has been valuing Amazon - from day one since its IPO - with an eye on the future value of its cash flow / net income. Certainly many investors and competitors have regarded that constant pushing off of the profitability expectations (for two decades), as unfair.

Since Amazon began showing off AWS financial figures, the stock has more than doubled. The market has priced in AWS as being worth perhaps $150 billion or more. AWS is making a lot of money, and it's going to make a lot more over the next five years.

Investors likely expect that given the immense scale of the business and the fact that it's still growing at 20%+ (remarkably), the future prospect of Amazon generating, say, $16+ billion in net income, is reasonable to expect. One can then debate whether it's rational to be granting that valuation to Amazon today, if it'll take another ten years to produce the $16 billion annually (pulling future returns forward, the cause of Microsoft's 15 years of stagnation in regards to its stock).

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#272

Post by ricardo_piano »

antaviana wrote: post #74
samfisher83 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons Bezos picked Seattle was due to Microsoft having a lot of software engineers he could get. So MSFT is a big reason that Bezos is in Seattle. Also it was close to one of the biggest book distributors. Amazon was originally a book store.

I read somewhere that it was related to tax optimization. That is, if you sell a book from California, you have to apply state tax to California residents (38M) but if you sell it from Washington, you don't. So the fact that Washington had fewer potential customers than California (or New York, where Jeff Bezos was working previously), meant a smaller tax bill for its country-wide customer base.

In the book, The Everything Store, the writer tells about Bezos intentions for Washington. It was combination of fewer customers there and a close distance to a large book publisher, there were a few other smaller accompanying reasons like another poster mentioned about msft being in the area as well.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#273

Post by ScalaNovice »

samstave wrote: post #16
webkike wrote: post #6

Unless Putin is on this list I doubt its veracity.

maybe they dont count corruption?

Oh samstave the omniscient,

Can you please tell us which other people are billionaires?

OR

Are you trusting the same publications that George W Bush and republicans turned into paid propaganda to say that Iraq as Le weaponzzz of mass destruction? Remember NYT, WaPo, CNN were the major trusted news orgs that GOP bought.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#274

Post by adventured »

bpicolo wrote: post #52
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 1990 (27 years ago) McDonald's has returned 10.87%, including the Internet Bubble and Subprime Mortgage crashes. March 30, 1990: $7.38 March 29, 2017: $128.84 I am not saying it'll be Bezos, but someone will get there within the next 2-3 decades. [edit] And while I'm at it, AMZN has returned 36%, annualized, over the last 10 years, encompassing the Subprime Mortgage crash.

Inflation alone means eventually someone will. (Just like Rockefeller's adjusted fortune is 300-400billlion)

Rockefeller's adjusted fortune is not $300-$400 billion. It's a lot closer to $30 to $40 billion in fact.

That huge fake number - which has been thrown around the Web for more than a decade - is derived from the GDP share.

It goes like this. Rockefeller in 1915 (pick the year), was worth the equivalent of 1/37th of the US GDP. Therefore, adjusted to today, Rockefeller would be worth $bazillion (1/37th of $19 trillion; which used to be more like $12b-$14b when the fake premise originally started floating about).

If you dig into the calculation that was / is used on that $300-$400 billion, that's where it's coming from in every instance.

In fact, Gates is objectively far richer than Rockefeller ever was, just not in relation to the US economy size at present. Rockefeller was worth between $1 and $2 billion at his peak, in his time. The inflation adjustment on $1 from 1910 to now, is not 300x or 400x. It's closer to 20x to 30x. If it were 300x, Ford's famous $5 per day pay rate (from 1914), would be ... $1500 per day. Laughable obviously; the 300x+ doesn't pass any challenge thrown at it.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#275

Post by Aron »

_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

Amazon quite frequently makes my life better. On the other hand, I can't remember ever experiencing a difficult situation because Bezos is rich.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#276

Post by visarga »

mjfl wrote: post #100
_m8fo wrote: post #84

Everytime I see these types of articles I wonder if we're still in feudalism. Should we really be celebrating that a single individual is worth more than hundreds of millions of people[1]? I dunno, it seems dystopian , like we're enslaved to the system. [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...

I think that's a little hyperbolic. In feudalism the balance of power is enforced by violence, whereas Jeff Bezos got rich because you gave him money in exchange for products. Like, "Hey, here's this cool electronic device called the Amazon Echo for $50." is a markedly different from "Farm here or I'll decapitate you." The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terr…

> I think that's a little hyperbolic. In feudalism the balance of power is enforced by violence

Tell that to the hordes of unemployed people. Amazon is doing it darndest to employ as few people as possible in their warehouses and now are testing drone delivery.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#277

Post by adventured »

archagon wrote: post #245
mjfl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a little hyperbolic. In feudalism the balance of power is enforced by violence, whereas Jeff Bezos got rich because you gave him money in exchange for products. Like, "Hey, here's this cool electronic device called the Amazon Echo for $50." is a markedly different from "Farm here or I'll decapitate you." The fact that you harbor a resentment as if the former is anything like the latter is slightly terr…

Gave money to Amazon, which funneled it to a single individual. I think in a perfect society, this sort of cash flow would be severely tempered.

> which funneled it to a single individual.

You mean, which funneled a small fraction of it to a single individual. Bezos individually got more of it than anybody else, however to pretend that he got all of it, is silly.

Total non-stock compensation paid by the business. Total stock compensation paid. Total investor return since inception. Total benefit to all consumers in convenience and savings. Total benefit to the investor return derived and that capital being put to further use in the economy. And on and on the calculation goes. The money has been funneled to hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of investors overall and millions of consumers (savings from aggressive margin pricing, or just value from various useful products Amazon has provided such as Prime), spanning decades.

Bezos has likely gotten a low single digit percentage of all the value Amazon has created for everyone.

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#278

Post by wtf_is_up »

timothycrosley wrote: post #58
haxton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's moreso the fact that nothing 'new' has really come out of Seattle. Kind of hard to build hype if your two main talking points are 20+ and 40+ year old companies.

Well that's def not true: Tableau, Rover, OfferUp, and countless more http://www.geekwire.com/startup-list/ and that's with only 2.61% of venture investment.

Literally who

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#279

Post by [deleted] »

dkrich wrote: post #255

I know that I'll get skewered for this, but here goes: recently I've convinced myself we are on the verge of a very serious Amazon stock correction. Just today I saw three separate articles (without seeking them out) giving umpteen reasons Amazon is going to a trillion, or that Amazon is only getting started. Then I turned on CNBC during lunch and what are they talking about? Amazon. There's simply too much positive…

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

#280

Post by albeebe1 »

dkrich wrote: post #255

I know that I'll get skewered for this, but here goes: recently I've convinced myself we are on the verge of a very serious Amazon stock correction. Just today I saw three separate articles (without seeking them out) giving umpteen reasons Amazon is going to a trillion, or that Amazon is only getting started. Then I turned on CNBC during lunch and what are they talking about? Amazon. There's simply too much positive…

  Just today I saw three separate articles (without seeking them out) giving umpteen reasons
  Amazon is going to a trillion, or that Amazon is only getting started.
umm, i call bullshit
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