[makomk]

Even most workers at big corporations are more like nurses and doctors than butlers and chauffeurs: the goods and services they produce ultimately go to ordinary consumers, not multi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos. The billionares get wealthier, and that wealth is measured in the same dollars as ordinary people's wages, but it's not the same thing at all. For an ordinary person, especially someone less well off living paycheck to paycheck, those dollars represent a claim on actual goods and services they can use. Bezos' wealth is mostly just the shares he owns times the last price they traded at. There is no way to transmute a chunk of Bezos' wealth in nominal value of shares into there being more income representing more ability for normal people to buy stuff that helps them live, even though both are measured in the same units. If anything it's the other way around: supplying ordinary people with more goods and services more efficiently makes his net worth go up and supplying less makes it go down. Failing to understand this lead to some really bad thinking early on in the Covid pandemic when share prices dropped and people interpreted this as proof that concern about the economic consequences of Covid measures was just wealthy people complaining that their horde of wealth was dropping.

[simonh]

Some good points there. I frequently see comments, even here, complaining about people like Bezos and Musk's wealth as though it was literally a pile of cash. Musk in particular has almost no cash at all, his wealth is entirely in the form of ownership stakes in his companies. The only way he could spend that is by selling those stakes and losing control of the companies.

I shed no tears for the guy, he's legit super rich, but he cannot just spend 100 $Bn. In order to bid for Twitter he had to sell a big chunk of Tesla and take loas out against a lot of his shares. Like I said, super rich, but within some real constraints.

Having said that of course he could cash out. Bezos is doing exactly that, Bill Gates still owns a chunk of Microsoft but he's sold a big part of his shares to fund his philanthropy. You absolutely can turn those valuations into real money, but only by either taking big loans against them which eventually need to be settled, or selling up.