[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.