Elon Musk Close To Surpassing Jeff Bezos as World's Richest Person (bloomberg.com) 119
Elon Musk, the outspoken entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, kicked off the new year by homing in on a characteristically audacious title: the richest person on the planet. From a report: A 4.9% rally in the electric carmaker's share price Wednesday boosted Musk to within $3 billion of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who currently occupies the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 500 wealthiest people. The South Africa-born engineer's net worth was $184.5 billion at 11:40 a.m. in New York, just shy of Bezos, who has held the top spot since October 2017. As chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Musk is also a rival to Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, in the private space race. The milestone caps an extraordinary 12 months for Musk. Over the past year his net worth soared by more than $146 billion in possibly the fastest bout of wealth creation in history.
Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:3)
Re: Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:2)
Am I the only one who so much wants a sane new independent economy??
One with enforced rules that actually improve this forsaken society and species, instead of just ridiculous numbers in ridiculous databases that are somehow channeled into power over us.
At least I hope everyone who resesearched for getting us to the point of mRNA vaccines gets to live in luxury and fame for the rest of his life.
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Nobody who works for a paycheck gets rich, no matter how much of a benefit they provide to society. They may, with hard work, luck, and prudence, become comfortably well off. But to get "rich" you need to be in a position to fuck people over, you need a sociopathic mindset, and you need to actually do it, again and again. Every time you have to decide "Should I do the right, kind, and moral thing, or make another dollar?" you need to come down on the side of making that dollar.
I mean, there's a guy who argu
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Re: Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is why it is "trickle down" and not "trickle up." Although I prefer the old name for the theory, horse and sparrow economics. The idea being, if you feed a horse enough oats, the sparrow can pick some out of the horseshit.
We're the sparrows. We're the guys at the end of the money injection chain. By the time it trickles down, the prices have already gone up.
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Nobody who works for a paycheck gets rich, no matter how much of a benefit they provide to society. ]
That's because if you're working for a paycheck, you probably aren't producing any extraordinary benefit to society. Duh.
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So doctors, teachers, and firefighters "aren't producing any extraordinary benefit?" Then you wouldn't mind no9t using their services?
What "benefit" do owners and landlords provide, that wouldn't be provided by use-ownership (i.e. user control of the resource)?
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So doctors, teachers, and firefighters "aren't producing any extraordinary benefit?" Then you wouldn't mind no9t using their services?
What "benefit" do owners and landlords provide, that wouldn't be provided by use-ownership (i.e. user control of the resource)?
All three are treated like complete shit by society.
Re: Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:2)
But to get "rich" you need to be in a position to fuck people over, you need a sociopathic mindset, and you need to actually do it, again and again. Every time you have to decide "Should I do the right, kind, and moral thing, or make another dollar?" you need to come down on the side of making that dollar.
That or you can make some wise investment decisions. Investing in yourself (i.e. an education) or your own business also counts.
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Investing in your own education may make you comfortably well off, but will not make you rich. Most small businesses fail within five years of startup. Most investments will yield small profits, and still involve exploitation of workers, because you are taking money that could have gone to pay them more. And the more profitable companies generally treat their workers and customers worse. That's what makes them profitable.
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Nutters gonna nut. Here's an idea, if you value the planet over human life, why not rope? Be the change you want to see in the world, set an example for others. Me, I care about the environment but I care about human lives even more.
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Jeff lost half his wealth from a divorce
Nitpick: He lost about 25% in the divorce.
It was still the most expensive divorce in world history.
Re:Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
And to be fair, unlike many other high cost divorces, that one was easily justified. Wife wasn't a gold digger, but someone who built up business alongside Bezos from ground up. She got her share for her work, not for spreading legs for correct guy at opportune moment and then buggering the same guy with a strap-on in divorce court.
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"She got her share for her work"
Nobody gets that much money for "work".
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Of course they do. You just need to be efficient in work that has significant ability to impact a maximum possible amount of people.
You know, like building a novel way to do consumer shopping for most things, building a completely new way of handling data that works for everyone from individuals to huge incorporated entities, building a novel way to pay for things for individuals and so on.
Just because a street sweeper cannot have such an impact because impact of his/her work is limited, doesn't mean that n
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You're going to have to explain how that is not work. Waving it away as "not work" is like me waving you away as "not human".
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That's a fairly interesting belief you have, you non-human entity that posts on slashdot.
Feel free to elaborate.
Re: Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:2)
Thank you.
I feel like we turn everyone into the stereotype of their worst sub-group. Whem really, most people aren't dicks/cunts most of the time, and there *is* hope.
Re: Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:3)
Both Bezos and Musk treat employees poorly, and underpay them.
Therefore they are both dicks.
Bezos underpays by more and treats them worse, though, so he is a bigger dick.
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Both Bezos and Musk created a massive amount of jobs, wealth, and made lives better for billions of people.
Therefore they are both heroes.
It's easy to reduce people to one dimensional caricatures. It's also exceedingly stupid and says far more about one lazy enough to do so than it does about the target of said caricaturing.
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The dude's business is his life, and his workers are his business. His relationship with them measures his character in 4 dimensions, or 11 if you prescribe to certain varieties of string theory.
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Too deep for me. ELI5?
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The dude's business is his life, and his workers are his business.
This looks a lot like the language used to promote slavery. I feel like I'm missing a reference, though.
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It's a rebuttal of the parents' assertion that criticizing the workers' treatment is a "one-dimensional" affair.
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It is a natural tendency to render every concept to simplest possible version to go around the fact that our ability to think in abstract is very limited.
One have to make a significant effort to force yourself not to sink into this mode.
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I feel like there's a "Team America: World Police" [youtube.com] reference in there somewhere.
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When your dick is as big as Bezos', it would be an act of greed not to share it.
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That is shared automatically.
Re: Bitcoin worth as much as a Tesla Model 3 (Score:1)
You got told by a bunch of schizophrenic organized child rapists, that sexuality somehow is the devil, so they could employ eugenics aka only letting church-married people breed, and that somehow, the penisis the worst, ... and you believed! Let that sink in for a moment!
Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:4, Interesting)
But Elon gets things done.
Re:Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't say either are nice or not nice guys. We tend to go off their public show and press releases. With a public CEO it is really difficult to see how much of a good person they really are.
Both gets things done too. However I give Elon credit for a business that makes something that hasn't been successfully done before. Private Space Ships, and Mass Market electric Cars, that people tend to want to own. And he is willing to weather past the hard times to have it accomplished.
Amazon was many of the online stores that was available. Bezos did help make it the #1 online store. But if it wasn't for Bazos, we woud still probably have some other large online store where we buy crap. Perhaps eBay would still be #1. Or Walmart would be a bigger player in the online game.
However for the Electric Car, the traditional automakers just use their designs as a PR Stunt, then have them so underwhelming that little people will buy them. Tesla made a car that had the Range to be useful, and it was faster than most ICE Cars, and they looked like cars, not oversized phisher-price toys.
Re:Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:5, Interesting)
Musk definitely seems less 'evil' than Bezos. i'm sure both have sociopathic tendencies; but Bezos just comes across as ruthless. Acquire wealth and use it to bully and take over other firms/industries to further generate wealth. His business practices in regards to unions, employee pay, etc etc.
Musk's wealth is basically speculation on Tesla, so it's not a fair comparison -- but his companies seem to at least be innovative (in the sense of being first to market; not necessarily first to come up with the idea).
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For both of them, most of their "wealth" isn't actually wealth but speculative confidence. Amazon's P/E is 97, which is not only sky high, but pretty close to Telsa, at 115. Investors are betting hard that both companies are actually going to generate, or at least concentrate, insane amounts of wealth.
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In case of Amazon, the wealth is already heavily concentrated in the company.
Tesla, less so. I'd argue that SpaceX is the more promising of the major companies led by Musk.
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Agreed. I have trouble seeing how Telsa is going to grow into their current valuation. I don't think it's even possible to really estimate the potential of SpaceX.
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Musk really doesn't do a great job of keeping the CEO mask on. It's pretty clear he is, at minimum, kind of a dick
Why does Tesla CEO Elon Musk keep getting himself into a mess? [usatoday.com]
Elon Musk wipes nearly $15 billion off Tesla's valuation by tweeting that shares are too high [marketwatch.com]
Report: Elon Musk Is Kind of a Dick [gizmodo.com.au]
But goshdarnit, he does get a lot done. Amazon
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definitely. and if i'm being honest (and incredibly selfish) musk could genocide kittens around the world, and i'd still be okay with him due to starlink.
okay not literally, but starlink / tesla make the world a better place, as long as you aren't an oil baron or astronomer i suppose.
Whereas amazon is the corporate manifestation of the 'race to the bottom'. The flak that Walmart used to get for destroying main street should be heaped on Amazon a thousand fold.
Being slashdot, i know it's an unpopular opinion
Re: Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:2)
Yes, I agree... at leas Musk means well... in his misguided ways. ... even if 'not suitable' to some not very natural or healthy social norms (like political correctness).
And he has fun
He's still fake and dislikabe of course. But no almost-literal Lex Luthor from Planet Bezos. ;)
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Re:Bezos is actually a nicer guy[?] (Score:2)
My angle on this would be "What is the corporate focus?" I've even been trying to replace light bulb jokes with "All your..." jokes about various foci. Below are a few recent examples, but I really can't figure out what to focus on as regards Elon Musk.
Zero WIng
"All your base are belong to us."
Amazon
"All your shoppings is belong to us."
Apple
"All your sexy toy are belong to us."
Google
"All your
I can: (Score:2)
[Music] "Girls just wanna have fuu-hun!"
You're not getting it. (Score:2)
I've had a drink and I got it. How dense are you?
Musk didn't invent any of the tech though (Score:2)
As for Bezos, he was just the most ruthless. He relentlessly kept price
Re: Musk didn't invent any of the tech though (Score:2)
Yeah, but he *did* have the ability to make them give him money... and gave it to people that should be getting it ... at least partially. I think that's nice and a nice skill ... at least partially.
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Re: Bezos is actually a nicer guy (Score:2)
Bezos seems nice to people who have the same 'functioning psychopath' illnes as he does. I'm saying that without hate, by the way. My bro has the same illness. Also, I am *only* going with my limited experience of who he is. (My bro is also actually nice, most of the time. So stop being so afraid of them! It's not the movies!)
But everyone else can see when it's just *acted* niceness. Such people lack the natural emotion-based behavior and have to emulate it, to get by. Which can go horribly wrong. Even of n
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If you go back to the early days of Amazon .... back when they were only trying to do online book sales, and when Bezos was interviewed on 60 Minutes because of his sudden success in that sector taking everyone by surprise? You see a pretty stereotypical "nerd" type of character... socially a bit awkward but clearly "book smart" and well read, plus somewhat "cheap". (By that, I mean he instituted the now famous "door desk" at Amazon because he though all the pre built desks out there were too expensive. S
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i don't disagree with much of what you say, but "passion for books" is misleading. i doubt he gave much of a fuck about reading or knowledge or enlightenment. it's that books were the ideal medium for a startup to break in with. they're non-perishable (at least in the short-term), have mostly artificial value, and are cheap and robust to ship.
in that sense, yes, he had a "passion for books", but it's more accurate to say "passion for robust tokens in an artificial market".
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oh and yeah i know he was vocally passionate about some book about optimizing your life to avoid regret and made his employees read it (kinda creepy), so don't bother bringing that up. that's not a passion for books; he just got obsessed with one, and shoved it on others. that's the opposite of a passion for books.
re: avoiding regret (Score:2)
Yeah.... I agree that's an odd recurring theme of his, that he really believes is enlightened.
I don't know for sure if he really enjoyed reading a lot of books, or as you assert -- he just liked the nature of them as non-perishable goods with high profit margins? But my sense is that it was a combination of both.
People generally don't form new businesses around sales of products they're uninterested in, and hearing Bezos speak a number of times in meetings and presentations? He comes across to me as a well
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I didn't buy a single thing from Amazon in the last year. Besos is not some kind of hero without which we'd be scratching in the dust. But he would like you to believe that.
Besos built a big shop with vc money, employee abuse and advanced tax avoidance. Woop.
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Out here, Amazon was a life saver. I have mixed feelings about Amazon as a company because I recognize its value but it has unnecessarily awful working conditions for its employees, and lately some of the business decisions it's been making are questionable. What's undoubtedly true though is that without Amazon, much of America's attempts to "work from home" for the last 9 months would have failed miserably. Amazon build a massive vertical product distribution network that covered everything from purchases
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Are there a lot of Amazon type companies in the US? Not really.
There aren't in the UK either in that they're one-stop-shops with their own logistics network. There are however lots of more single purpose shops, and lots of independent logistics networks, and of course the internet, so I can buy stuff from wherever and have it delivered easily. Some of the companies (e.g. groceries) have their own logistic networks of course so they can deliver chilled and frozen food inside a 1 hour timeslot.
And my gut tel
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Hindsight is always 20:20.
eg. You'd be richer then Elon Musk by now if you'd have bought Microsoft shares at the right time then traded them for Apple shares when Apple shares dropped to junk status.
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Re: Better late than never... (Score:2)
I hope you don't plan on spending that imaginary worth money on my work, buddy.
Because if you want me to work for you, you better damn worked for that money!
Try to cash out (Score:2)
Lets see how much worth there really is if its all cashed out.
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2021 seems like it may be a good year for Tesla.
They expect to have completed 3 more Giga Factories (China, Germany and Texas) which will pump out a lot more cars. Their Self Driving Beta is showing a large improvement in its ability over what is non-beta now. While they are other electric cars from more traditional auto makers (or from auto-makers who made an offshoot and pretended to be a startup) which are starting to look really good, they are still going to be compared to Tesla, and trying to ramp u
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Lets see how much worth there really is if its all cashed out.
It never will be because he could never spend it all. Even if he only cashed out a few hundred million he'd be able to live off the interest.
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The thing is, he doesn't want or need to cash out, he'll want to transfer some of that wealth to fund thing at SpaceX at some point, but there might be other ways to do that.
But there's really no need for Musk to reduce his control over Tesla when he can have all his expenses covered by borrowing against a minuscule percentage of his shares.
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SpaceX probably doesn't need much, at least not at the moment. It's out of its biggest money eating phase. Now it's busy eating the space launch market with much lower costs than any of its competitors, making excellent progress in reducing those costs by another unbelievable amount, and starting up another potentially highly profitable ISP arm.
In five or ten years Musk might want to start raiding the Tesla piggybank to fund a Mars base.
lies (Score:2)
Re:lies (Score:4, Informative)
The entire British royal family combined is worth only about 88 billion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... [forbes.com]
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"Worth"
That money does not actually bleong to that inbred bunch of media whores and actual whores, who are more of a stain on democracy than Trump.
"Wealth Creation" (Score:5, Insightful)
Has education failed so badly that this idea is still perpetuated? Market cap is not wealth.
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Wealth is the consumption of goods and services. The top million or so "wealthiest folks" are all about equally as wealthy, in spite of the orders of magnitude difference in their "wealth" as measured by the bean counters, who arent counting wealth.
Sure, private planes, mansions, and sports cars distinguish the "ultra wealthy" from everyday folk, but they use the same cell phones and desktops, drink the same coffee, even eat the same food, and everyone gets to wear clean clo
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In modern financial system, where one can choose to leverage such stock, or even use them as bonds in various insurance schemes, they actually do represent wealth.
A better question is if this sort of wealth is worth having in existence, because it tends to be highly unstable.
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No, even with leverage, it's still not wealth. The sibling post to yours explains it - money is not wealth. You can use money to buy wealth, and you can get people to give you money if you have lots of highly valued stock, but you aren't wealthy until you use that money to buy wealth.
The proof is simple: when you suddenly create $100B of stock value on paper, the amount of goods and services in the world didn't change - no wealth was created. The converse is true of stock crashes: when price x float of a
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All wealth is simply a matter of trust. Money and other forms of currency are merely a vehicle for numerating said trust. In this regard, this wealth is no different. As long as people trust in it, it will remain just as real and usable as any other wealth that enjoys similar levels of trust.
Re: "Wealth Creation" (Score:2)
And highy pointless, in the grand scheme of humanity.
And I certainly won't accept it as payment for my *actual work*.
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Really? You'd break law and not accept legal tender to settle debt in form of money that is paid to you from the bank that leveraged stock to create that money as a loan to someone who bought your work?
Again, this is actual wealth, and it can actually to used to create legal tender through a long financial operation chain. That is not in question. The question is whether this wealth is worth being created the way it is, because of how unstable it is. Because this is how you get sub-prime.
Deserves It (Score:2)
If anyone deserves it he does.
Re: Deserves It (Score:2)
*ba-dum TISS*
10 more minutes each day (Score:2)
If Musk just works a bit harder, maybe getting up 10 minutes earlier each day, he should be able to pull it off.
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Maybe if he had worked instead of spending his time trying and faiing to minimise the problem of Corona...
I am glad he'd doing what he does though, and I do enjoy his non-conspiracy theory tweets.
Elon is a bug in the matrix (Score:4, Interesting)
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He is an immigrant.
Time to admit more people to America simply because they are clever.
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While I have an immense admiration for what Musk achieved, one should keep in mind the associated human cost. I would not work in his companies, for any price.
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Speaking of insuffragettes, let's talk about his wife. I liked her music a few years back. Visions and Art Angels were in heavy rotation on my MP3 player. Based on her interviews and the imagery in her videos [youtube.com] it was clear she was one of the pussy-power types. A bit cringe, but whatever - I'm a furry, I'm used to dealing with cringe.
But when it comes to hooking up with the richest man in the world, who exploits and SWATs his workers? She's marrying into privilege in a heartbeat. Now she drops tracks with tit
Let's be clear: This is not actual money they have (Score:2)
This isn't actual money they can use.
Sure, it helps them raise capital for their companies, but if Bezos or Musk tried to cash out, these numbers would translate into nothing like this amount of actual currency in the bank
.
Tesla shares are overrated (Score:2)
The PE ratio is around 1400 (less than 100 could be considered poor), so obviously investors are betting on future value. The problem is tesla would have to hit it out of the park for the next 5 years with no problems and no competitors to justify this value.
Any bad news will tank the stock.
let's eat the both of them! (Score:1)
Re: let's eat the both of them! (Score:2)
I doubt they're organic.
Unless you count 50% cocaine by weight "organic".
How about world's most excellent person? (Score:2)
The person that *actually* improves the world the most.
That doesn't mean driving it in and insane direction that definitely is the wisest choice *inside* the box of cancerous things that have been accepted as normal.
So definitely not Musk or Zombie Jobs or Trump Or Zombie Kim-Yong Il.
And of course not being just plain evil.
So Darth Bezos the dual-wielder is right out.
Goals (Score:3)
Musk gave $0 in 2020 (Score:2)
The amount of money given by the wealthy plummeted in 2020 from past years, even while their wealth soared [observer.com]. While Bezos promised to give $10 billion for his Bezos Earth Fund, the next nine donors gave a total of $2.6 billion to charity, the lowest level since 2011.
Despite gaining $118 billion from March to December, $3 billion from Tesla stock options alone, Elon Musk gave $0.
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Elon Musk gave $0.
That you know of. ...While cutting carbon by more than anyone else. ...And entertaining space nerds like me more than anyone else.
Net Worth isn't wealth (Score:3)
It may seem like a pedantic distinction, but the implication of wealth is that they have the options available to them that money can bring. Stock does not provide options, cash does.
Gates is still the biggest in my opinion, because something like 50% if his net worth is now in liquid assets. He's free to pursue things that interest him no matter the cost, like fusion power (https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/bill-gates-backed-nuclear-fusion-pioneer-we-can-fill-the-gaps-left-by-wind-and-solar/2-1-887576) and vaccine distribution to poor countries (https://www.wired.com/story/the-wild-logistical-ride-of-the-ebola-vaccines-high-tech-thermos/). Musk is stuck with his shares, and frankly so is Bezos.
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I have no idea if you will see this - and you shouldn't really care - but, damn, that was both interesting and thought-provoking. The kind of comment lowly readers such as I who never comment hope to come across
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Yep. Sell off another couple boondoggles (Score:1)
And he's there!
You just have to find gulible rubes with lots of money to burn.
*Coughs in Richard Branson*