[loloquwowndueo]

What will really make it sink in is looking at what the highest paid athlete you know of earns in a year and estimate what their earnings are while they’re just there sitting in the couch, having a meal ($25k accumulates during an average meal) or taking a crap ($2500) - they earn about $200k in their sleep, for example.

Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

[climb_stealth]

Mindboggling, thank you. Right on that note is one of my favourite tweets on the internet:

> Have you ever considered the possibility that Jeff Bezos just works 130 billion times harder than you?

[Ferret7446]

It's not about how hard they work, it's about how much value they provide, or the worth of the assets they own if they sell all of their assets without a price crash

[missedthecue]

It's not accurate to think of his billionaire status as compensation. Jeff Bezos owns ~10% of a $2.2T company. That's the whole story. He never even took a penny of stock comp his entire career at Amazon.

It really is an important clarification. I have worked at startups where the founders worked several times harder than I did and they ended up with $0 and one of them in debt.

[anonym29]

Obviously he isn't working 130 billion times harder, but he may be some combination of 130 billion times as much (privileged upbringing × strategically focused × economically impactful × smarter × harder working × luckier × n other relevant factors) than the typical American, that I can seriously consider.

I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definition for "fair share" to mean everyone pays the same amount of direct cash transfer into the system and gets the same amount of direct cash receipt out of the system.

[JadeNB]

> I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definition for "fair share" to mean everyone pays the same amount of direct cash transfer into the system and gets the same amount of direct cash receipt out of the system.

Pays to whom? Verifying this claim seems to require a definition of "the system." If you literally mean all money expenditure, then almost certainly this is literally true. But it's not obvious to me that the expenditure on, for example, Bezos' vanity space trip benefited "the system" more than someone spending a much smaller amount, but dispersed more widely through the community. Or, if it did, it's not obvious to me that the additional benefit was in any reasonable proportion to the additional expenditure.

[anonym29]

>Pays to whom? Verifying this claim seems to require a definition of "the system."

Taxes paid to governments. "The system" being governments - federal, state, county, city/locality.

Cash receipts out of the system would include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, WIC/SNAP, cell phone vouchers, housing vouchers, transportation vouchers, SSI/SSDI, and even all tax credits (including indirect tax credits, like Elon Musk receiving a tiny percentage of total Tesla profits, which are themselves a non-100% percentage of vehicles sold, which are themselves purchased overwhelmingly with customer money that does not come from tax credits, of the percentage of cars sold that are even eligible for tax credits).

And yes, I do count those slivers of indirect EV tax credits as receipts for Musk, however significantly those dollars are diluted before they reach Musk, and count them against his contributions (which include the highest individual income tax bill ever paid by anyone in history).

[Paracompact]

> I also figure he, like Elon Musk, pays orders of magnitude more than his fair share, if we consider the definition for "fair share" to mean everyone pays the same amount of direct cash transfer into the system and gets the same amount of direct cash receipt out of the system.

I appreciate the clarity, but this is a bizarre definition of fair share. Do you really believe that everyone gets the same amount of usage from, and contributes to the same amount of wear and tear on, municipal and infrastructural resources? Do you believe that industrialists do not ravage the earth and society while chasing profits? These externalities measure in the billions (when they can even be quantified at all) for players like Amazon.

[anonym29]

>Do you really believe that everyone gets the same amount of usage from, and contributes to the same amount of wear and tear on, municipal and infrastructural resources?

No, I do not believe that, but it's worth noting that taxing income has no direct relationship to usage-based taxation of public resources. There are people who pay millions in income taxes while making negligible use of roads, and there are net tax recipients who contribute no net taxes at all driving 40-ton 18-wheelers inflicting vastly more damage to roadways than 99% of people. If we want to tax externality costs, we should tax externality costs, not income.

>Do you believe that industrialists do not ravage the earth and society while chasing profits?

Regarding externality costs: see above. Income and externality costs are not the same, nor are they necessarily closely correlated.

[Paracompact]

Of course! I think carbon taxes and the like are a great idea. If we had the social technology and the social consensus to enact pay-what-you-use schemes for everything, we might be close to a utilitarian utopia already. (For example, I have no idea how to compute the marginal benefit to an individual derived from living in a society that values egalitarian access to higher education, even if that individual does not choose to access those resources directly; but such would be necessary to pursue a rigorous calculation of that individual's fair share.)

Lacking that utopia, we have to estimate. You say income taxes are an unfair mechanism; what do you think is fairer?

[anonym29]

Consumption taxes, rather than production taxes.

Taxes are a disincentive - this is why we tax vices.

We want to disincentivize rampant, mindless consumerism that fuels the externality costs, right?

Tax buying things - any things - all things - much heavier, tax the act of working to earn an income to survive much less.

Want to buy a car? Pay a big tax. Want to work hard to earn money to pay your bills and feed your family? Shouldn't be taxed for that.

[WalterBright]

A friend of mine, after a ski accident, looked for a knee rehab place. The one he found was patronized by pro athletes. He said they worked out like mad. He asked them why, and they said that if they didn't get back in shape, the $$$$ gravy train for them was over.

[lurk2]

I was sure your numbers were wrong but if we assume $200,000 in your sleep means $600,000 a day, that’s $219,000,000 per year.

Bezos has an estimated 220,000,000,000 dollars as of May 2025. $220,000,000,000 per year / $219,000,000 per year = 1004.6 years. Wild.

[WalterBright]

Let's have some fun. $600,000/per day, with an annual investment return of 7%, reaches $220b in 64 years, not 1004.

    import core.stdc.stdio;

    void main() {
    double wealth = 0;
    double pay = 600_000 * 365;
    double api = .07;
    for (int year = 0; ++year;)
    {
        wealth = wealth * 1.07 + pay;
        if (wealth >= 222_000_000_000.0)
        {
            printf("year = %d\n", year);
            break;
        }
    }
    }

[anonym29]

There appears to be an unspoken normative view being asserted throughout the thread that people who do not invest their money and take advantage of compounding should achieve outcomes comparable to those who do invest their money and take advantage of compounding, essentially idealizing the elimination of the opportunity cost of not strategically deploying capital, discounting the benefits accrued to those who can do the math and choose to act upon it rationally, and privileging the act of spending all disposable income on nonproductive ends. I suspect a nonzero amount of motivated reasoning is at play on behalf of those who choose to spend disposable income nonproductively on depreciating liabilities rather than assets; this seems closely psychologically related to regretting self-failure to optimize for long-term economic outcomes that is directed back as spite at those who successfully optimize for long-term economic outcomes.

[lurk2]

The point is that you can’t catch up, even making more money than you could ever reasonably hope to earn. If you had $220,000,000, you can catch up to Bezos in 60 some-odd years; but by then he will also have been compounding at 7% per annum, and will have north of $19,000,000,000,000, which is around 2/3rds of America’s GDP today. Of course, Jeff Bezos will be dead in 60 years, but this leads us to the core of the debate: What did Jeff Bezos’ children do that would warrant their wealth?

[anonym29]

I don't need to catch up or get anywhere remotely close to Bezos be financially satiated. If tens of millions of people can achieve financial independence, comfort, and safety, without the privileged upbringing, essentially just through the decision to strategically navigate life with financial independence as a goal, rather than social conformity as a goal, why does it matter if others have more?

7% annual compounding is a decent floor, but it's an iron law that sophisticated investors can't outperform. AMZN is has certainly compounded much faster than 7% per year over the last two decades, and access to that investment was democratized the entire time.

Wealth isn't morality, being wealthy isn't a sin, and wealthy people's offspring have no burden of justification to "deserve" their wealth.

Insisting otherwise is a direct attack on the fundamental right to private property that underpins western civilization.

When the US government provides the same equal protection to all citizens, including those who contribute nothing but violence and suffering to everyone around them at the expense of taxpayers, what horrific atrocity are Jeff Bezos' children of that warrants confiscation of millions or billions of lawfully and voluntarily acquired wealth?

[WalterBright]

I'd like to emphasize that anyone could have invested their $ into AMZN at any point since the IPO, and would have reaped very handsome returns.

Those who didn't have no justification to complain about it.

I'm rather angry with myself for not investing in Nvidia.

[lurk2]

> I don't need to catch up or get anywhere remotely close to Bezos be financially satiated.

No one does. The issue comes when they start using that money to acquire political power. He wasn’t joking about seeing your margin as his opportunity.

> Insisting otherwise is a direct attack on the fundamental right to private property that underpins western civilization.

Western civilization includes a history of taxation, expropriation, and probate fees. No amount of libertarian revisionism will change this.

[WalterBright]

> The point is that you can’t catch up

That's not the point at all. You cannot catch up with anyone who is ahead of you and you follow the same investment protocol.

> What did Jeff Bezos’ children do that would warrant their wealth?

Allow me to reframe. Why should anyone else get it? It's Bezos' money and he can distribute it as he sees fit.

[lurk2]

> You cannot catch up with anyone who is ahead of you and you follow the same investment protocol.

This is true and a major critique of capitalist growth economics; it privileges those who were born into wealth and those who were simply born earlier than others. To an extent, this is natural. An elder in a tribe of hunter gatherers will necessarily possess more knowledge than an infant, but no one would seriously suggest that this kind of inequality could be done away with. The issue is when that advantage compounds exponentially year over year. If it just stopped there we could all get rich and live with robot butlers, but the general tendency in these kinds of scenarios is for the new money to take control of the political process via media influence, bribery, or force, and to use political power to acquire further wealth, not via competition and creative destruction, but by monopoly (I would argue a lot of the tech giants are technically already here).

As a long-time and well-regarded member of this forum, I assume you are familiar with Peter Thiel. Thiel and a number of his affiliates have been funding political influencers for the last ten or so years. JD Vance and Blake Masters both came out of Thiel’s camp. The goal here is ultimately not to remain agents of competitive market capitalism, but to seize control of the political process. There’s an argument to be made that the world would be better off with the political process being under the control of technologists than the various democratic mafias that comprise post-national states, but I don’t think it’s a very compelling one. First, it undermines the entire premise that capitalism as a social arrangement enfranchises everyone via the market (if this were true, political power would be superfluous). Second, we are talking about the people who gave us Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (2005) and then gave us Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (2025); they have a proven track record of making things drastically worse than when they started.

The whole critique of capitalism (which is not necessarily a critique of markets in and of themselves) is that exponential growth will lead to economic inequalities that will inevitably be exploited by unscrupulous actors who then undermine the entire system to benefit themselves.

> Allow me to reframe. Why should anyone else get it? It's Bezos' money and he can distribute it as he sees fit.

Bezos will be dead by then. The question then follows: Why should we respect the wishes of dead men, when there is no obvious social benefit to respecting these wishes? There is a feasible (if contentious) argument that Bezos “created” and thus “deserves” his wealth, but it seems undeniable that his children did not earn it, so the only justification we have left is a dead man’s wishes. It may be that the social benefits of inheritance are greater than the potential benefits of confiscation (dividing Bezos’ wealth would only yield about $31 per person). I have reservations about both theories; I’m just presenting them as well as I understand them.

[herval]

Intuitively it makes sense that someone that owns a bunch of assets will have tons more money than a performer?

I think the sportsman case is actually harder to accept for most people - “how can someone that ‘just’ kicks a ball around earn $200k sleeping?!”

[ninju]

There's a comparison between Michael Jordan, at his prime, and Bill Gates

https://www.spiegl.org/humor/jordan_gates.html

[loloquwowndueo]

Oh that’s the one I was thinking about! Thanks!!

[kwanbix]

What is crazy is that they probably pay less taxes (percentage wise) than you and me. If they pay any taxes.

Warren Buffet was famously quoted saying it was otrageous' his Secretary Pays 2x's his Tax rate.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-warren-buffett-ca...

[WalterBright]

> Then realize they would need to earn that much for 800 years to have as much money as Jeff Bezos.

If they would invest the money, they would accrue exponentially more money. Most seem to just spend the money on silly stuff, and wind up with nothing (according to an ESPN documentary on it).