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by llbbdd 9 days ago
I mean as far as I know no human being is even a billionaire anyway if you only count cash. It's one of the things the "eat the rich" crowd is particularly bad at internalizing, that there's a difference between value and money that can be spent on food or hospitals.
3 comments
mixdup 9 days ago
It is much more feasible for Jeff Bezos to sell a billion dollars worth of Amazon tomorrow or Bill Gates to sell a billion dollars worth of MSFT tomorrow than it is for Elon to sell a trillion dollars of SPCX even over a year's time

I get that net worth is more than just cash, and that is not what I meant and it's pretty obvious that isn't what I meant. It may not just be cash on hand but if an asset is completely illiquid at it's purported value, is it actually worth that?

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llbbdd 7 days ago
It is, because of the time component of money. Money is a way of storing the value of labor in a manner less affected by time. If you sell it all at once, its value is greatly reduced. All investments include that time component. Point-in-time net worth doesn't have much value as a measurement in part because of this.
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hansonkd 9 days ago
2,000 gold bars were stopped out of iraq. and that is just what was stopped / reported.

Dictators and autocrats may or nay not have cash sitting in a bank account, but there are most likely multiple with $1B in gold.

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llbbdd 7 days ago
Gold is value, you cannot take it to a grocer and buy food.
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msdz 8 days ago
Somewhat doubtful. (The first part of your statement, anyway. Of course the difference between abstract "value" and hard, spendable "money" is a thing.)

Like Mr. Hanson said in my sibling comment, some rulers are (or were!) bound to have amassed incredible amounts of resources. For historical/non-present-day examples, consider looking into figures like Jakob Fugger or Mansa Musa.

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llbbdd 7 days ago
I have no idea why the adjusted net worth of people who died centuries ago would have anything to do with money in the modern day. And at a glance, neither of your examples had billions of dollars in cash, which is the point I was making. They may have had a lot of value tied up in illiquid investments, which is exactly like Musk's valuation.
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