Would it be possible for a guy like Jeff to sell all his stock and convert his wealth to, let’s say, gold? The motivation for my question is my doubt that the different sources of wealth are comparable. So this ranking is hypothetical. Wouldn’t the stock price drop if someone was to sell so many shares?
Actually, very large blocks of stock are often worth more than a simple (number of shares) * (most recent trading price per share) formula suggests because of the control premium [FN1].
As further proof, corporate-level transactions like mergers and acquisitions typically see prices exceed recent public trading prices.
It's true that selling a large block of stock without influencing price can be difficult, but that's actually a relatively 'solved' problem in modern finance - banks regularly enter into complex transactions with clients that need to liquidate large blocks of stock and are worried about the impact on share price.
So in a sense, his wealth is "all on paper" and somewhat abstract. But especially for a company like Amazon, it's certainly not predictably less value than a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest.
For large sums, you always run into expense and abstraction problems: real estate is highly iliquid, gold is expensive to transport and store plus subject to market volatility itself, banks sometimes charge fees for exceptionally large cash accounts... sovereign debt and high-quality short-term corporate debt are often used for holding huge sums of cash-like wealth.
Basically, it's risk and abstractions and hand waiving all the way down.
Yep. Bezos owns around 16%. He recently sold about 1% in May 2016 (May 3-5), then another 1% in August 2016 (Aug 2-4). These caused roughly a 1% and 2% decline in the stock, respectively. In both cases it recovered within 3 days.
Obviously if he continued to liquidate his stock at around 2% absolutely per year, he'd reach zero in eight years. Bezos owning zero Amazon shares would be very weird if he was CEO, though. I imagine he could comfortably get down to owning 4-5% of Amazon without damaging the stock too much.
Disclaimer: I own Amazon through VFINX, and if you are Jeff Bezos and taking advice from my comment, uh, don't I guess.
Would just about any bank be willing to write a multi-million dollar loan to Bezos? Also yes, so there's no need for him to sell. He can take out a loan and collateralize it with AMZN stock and thus spend as much as he likes without selling the stock.
He could, but it would be at some healthy discount to the current price.
Normally what people like Bezos do when they want to cash out is take out a big loan using the stock as collateral. That way they don't flood the market with shares.
I believe you are correct. In theory he would be able to turn all his assets into money, but probably he would loose huges amount of it in the process due to the effect you mentioned.
I guess these rankings are just rankings. It's an abstract way to value what someone have (or could potentially have) with no relationship to absolute truth.
I am sorry for sidetracking on this, but I need to understand why I am reading so much 'loose' here on HN.
Is this error being used with intent? I have no interest in shaming grammar errors, it's just that I am seeing this too often here, in the same place where I read great arguments.
English is not my native language, so maybe this is a colloquial use of the word?
No problem at all dude, as I said I have no interest in shaming for grammar, my english is not perfect as well.
I just wanted to check if there was some colloquial use of 'loose' that I was not aware of, as I am seeing this a lot and HN sometimes is a benchmark for me of good writing.
I am glad you received that with sportsmanship, I am totally for having my errors checked out too, have a good one!
Serious comment to compensate for my silly comment: loose/lose actually bugs me more than your/you're errors - because it disrupts my reading of the sentence, especially if read aloud. In most cases the latter error can be glossed over like nothing happened.
