[monero-xmr]

If you took all of Bezos' wealth, and evenly distributed it to everyone in America, it would be about $600 per person. If instead you tried to spend it on eliminating the federal deficit, it would knock out about 5% of it.

I would rather Bezos is allowed to try and invest it in something as impactful as Amazon again. He's certainly fair likelier to do it than, say, the US government, or you yourself.

[tfourb]

I would like to see a source for the argument, that because Bezos did something highly impactful once, he is likely to do it again. His personal track record seems to be unimpressive, if you look at his other ventures. Blue Origin is the most well known, but plays a distant second fiddle to SpaceX and arguably others, none of the other companies he is personally involved in have had breakthrough success.

The same is true for other tech billionaires. They mostly have one or a couple of successes that can in any way attributed to them: Gates has Microsoft and his foundation, Musk has Tesla and SpaceX, Twitter is a clusterf*ck, Jobs has Apple, etc. etc.

My impression is that at best, even very giftet people have the opportunity to do a couple of "great things" in their lifetime and most stop after the first. The societal benefit of giving them dominion over unimaginable wealth in the hope that they'll are much more likely to come up with the next game changer is negligible. Historically, the next big innovation has mostly come from someone not yet incredibly rich (but empowered by access to capital, beneficial systems and knowledge, all often provided by the government).

[yowzadave]

This point also highlights the amount of luck that is involved in striking it super-rich. It's not that Bezos was necessarily the "best"; if that were true, the success would be more repeatable (especially given all of the advantages of incumbency/access/wealth/etc). We have decided as a society that we want there to be a small number of lottery winners, rather than a more balanced outcome for everybody.

[nickpp]

Running his first success through now (which his "wealth" pretty much entails) is plenty for us. The "everything store". His second? AWS. Third? Prime. Fourth? One-day-delivery. Bravo!

[Kapura]

[citation needed]

i don't have any fucking money, i can't invest in shit. That's the big difference between Jeff Bezos and Me.

[monero-xmr]

Bezos net worth = 152 billion https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/jeffrey-p-be...

US population = 332 million

152 billion / 332 million = $457 per person (I was over estimating!)

US debt = 33.6 trillion https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock#:~:text=The%20%2433....

152 billion / 33.6 trillion = 0.45%

Wow, I underestimated what Bezos' wealth could pay off in our national debt by an order of magnitude! It could only pay 1/10 of what I thought - only 0.45%! Incredible how much debt the US government has.

In terms of your own situation, assuming you are not disabled and are a healthy adult, then you need to start thinking longterm. Not "how can I become wealthier today", but "how can I become wealthier over 30 years?" The choices you make every day compound. You should work on a positive outlook, getting real skills, and trying to improve your situation every day.

[medvezhenok]

You used deficit the first time, debt the second.

The deficit is currently around 2 trillion dollars, so Bezos' wealth is around 7.5% of the deficit (if it were fully liquid, which it's not).

[monero-xmr]

Regardless, stealing all of Bezos' money to "help society" would accomplish very little.

[gpxyz]

And letting Bezos continue stealing money from his employees is more beneficial to society?

[buzzert]

He’s both stealing from his employees and paying them at the exact same time?

[troupe]

> i don't have any fucking money, i can't invest in shit. That's the big difference between Jeff Bezos and Me.

Bezos's parents when he was born were a highschool student and a circus performer. From him to be where he is today, probably indicates there are other differences.

[suavesito]

Survivor bias, if you like.

[troupe]

How so? If I claim that the only difference between myself and my twin is that they had a 4.0 and I didn't, I'm totally missing the point that the difference is what we did--not where we started.

[gpxyz]

His parents also gave him $300,000 to start Amazon

[nickpp]

Plenty of people willing to give you right now that money if you are willing to try do what Bezos did. This very website was made by some of them, you may have heard of that.

And the fac that his parent had that money to invest in him? Another success of Capitalism.

[gpxyz]

That's awesome to hear! OK, I'm planning to start an online bookstore, and maybe we'll do some M&A down the line and expand to offering cloud services and other subscriptions. Send me a message if you're willing to give me $300,000!

[nickpp]

First, I would suggest you select an idea which is not a verbatim copy of a tech giant of today. Do the due diligence and ask yourself: what is your unique value proposition? What are you gonna compete on? How are you gonna differentiate? How are you gonna reach your prospective customers?

Then how are you gonna use the money I give you in your business to grow it 10x in an about 5-10 years time frame so I can get my investment back? Put together a plan. Call it a "business plan" and put it in writing.

Jeff Bezos had to answer these kinds of questions (and many, harder ones) before he got his first investment. What seems to you as an obvious, trivial idea today was a novel, risky approach 30 years ago.

He did the work and that is why he's rich. We are here commenting on an investor's forum instead and that is why we are... what we are.