#Bezos Financials

[reviewsduniya]

Jeff Bezos's Net Worth in 2024

Explore Jeff Bezos’s Net Worth in 2024, featuring an in-depth breakdown of his salary—revealing the precise figure that shapes his wealth and also career highlights, income sources, investments, personal life, and prospects. It effectively delves into Jeff Bezos’s background, achievements, and challenges and provides valuable insights into his financial journey.  Gain unparalleled insights into…

[cortis0l]

We NeEd BiLliOnAiReS fOr ThE eConOmy

MAGA fantasy land billionaires:

Billionaires in real life:

I guess No Face is realistically like a billionaire; uses the promise of wealth and then eats the people lol. But it feels like libel slander to taint No Face's name by associating him with Musk and the like.

[curious-kitchen-witch]

In case you were wondering I am totally chill 100% of the time and definitely don't spend like a quarter of my paycheck on stuff for my craft every couple weeks

[kdkeenan]

Surviving the Fourth Reich

Political cartoon by Bramhall for the NewYork Daily News. I don’t know what’s going to happen under the Fourth Reich any more than you do. The election hit me like the Acme Safe hit Wile E. Coyote, and I disappeared beneath the weight of it for a while. I needed to think, to process the horror that just happened. Although it was less a present horror than a realization of the nastiness to…

[bitcoinversus]

Top 10 Billionaires Gain $64 Billion Following Trump's Election Victory

The re-election of President Donald Trump has impacted the financial standings of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Collectively, the top ten billionaires experienced a remarkable increase in their net worth, totaling $64 billion. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, emerged as the most substantial beneficiary. His net worth soared by $26.5 billion, reaching approximately $290 billion. This…

[rage-against-the-cistem]

guys i'm conducting a scientific experiment. i wanna know what happens if you send one cent through paypal. i will even write an article to sum up my findings.

try here

[remove-the-stairs-bitch]

.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sigal Samuel at Vox:

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image. It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful. “It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.” As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won reelection, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.

The broligarchs’ vision: Science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality

The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors. Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he��s viewing it as an instruction manual.

Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said. And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.” All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or übermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Common-sense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work.

[...]

The broligarchs — because they are in 21st-century Silicon Valley and not 19th-century Germany — have updated and melded this idea with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.

Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence. For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all, and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.

Vox has an insightful article on the disastrous vision that broligarchs like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg subscribe to.

[porterdavis]

Lord have mercy on our souls. All else is lost

Jim Wright posted this:

Musk and his team of dodgy 18-year-olds went into sensitive government networks, hooked up their own storage systems, and downloaded the personal information of every American.

Various politicians, some even Republican, are in the words of Susan Collins "very concerned." The press is variously surprised, appalled, and aghast. There are rising calls for Musk's removal.

BUT, here's the part they're all missing: Even if we throw Musk out, HE STILL HAS OUR INFORMATION.

He still has our personal information. All of it. All of your private information. Everything the government knows about you. Your identity, your bank accounts, your credit cards, your tax information, the property you own, all of it. Every detail. There's a reason why that information was protected. Musk's companies now have it and whoever they decide to sell it to has it. If one of those unvetted, uncleared, unknown 18-year-olds made a copy, they have it. If any of them are compromised, if Musk's corporate data systems are penetrated by our adversaries, then they have it too. China. Nigeria. Hackers. Thieves. Enemy intelligence agencies. Marketing executives.

There's nothing to stop Musk. He doesn't work for us. He's not accountable to the people or their representatives in any fashion. And he has repeatedly demonstrated that his loyalty to American is tenuous at best. His only allegiance is to profit.

What do you think Trump will do with that information?

This is the greatest Identity Theft in history.

___

Addendum: Musk now has all the personal and financial information of his rivals. Bezos. Zuckerberg. Trump even.

Give that some thought.

[scarlettgauthor]

A plea

Readers! Billionaire-haters! Comrades! I have a request for you, from the bottom of my self-published indie author heart:

Please buy your books from places other than Amazon.

I am not saying do not buy books. I am definitely not saying pirate books (authors need to be paid in order to keep writing). I am just asking you to shift your purchasing to a non-Amazon platform. Any of the non-Amazon platforms.

We all know that Bezos is using his bajillions of dollars to make the world an actively worse place. We know he's sucking up to Trump because all billionaires are the same, and all they care about is their money. We know he's at least partially to blame for this second Trump presidency. I think the world would be a much better place if Amazon didn't exist.

I hate Amazon and Bezos as much as it's possible to do, but I literally can't survive as a self-published author without selling on Amazon. I earned $1094.26 in royalties (through Draft2Digital) in January, and $863.46 of that was from Amazon sales. Even with the criminally low royalties I get from Audible because I choose to sell elsewhere instead of locking myself into their monopoly, I get between $200-300 a month in royalties from them as opposed to $75-150 a month from Author's Republic, which publishes my audiobooks to everywhere else on the internet.

I hate depending on Amazon, but I can't quit Amazon unless readers do.

My plea to readers is this: Get off Amazon. Get off Kindle. See if you can buy books directly from the independent authors you like (like through my shop on my website!). If you depend on Kindle Unlimited or Audible subscriptions to keep up with your voracious reading habits, try your local library instead. You can get so many books and audiobooks through Libby!

If I was getting 80% of my sales through avenues other than Amazon, it would be easy to take the financial hit and drop them. Currently it's the other way around, and unfortunately I do still need money to live.

I know for many people doing a complete Amazon boycott is not possible. I still occasionally use Amazon for stuff like printer toner, or camp chairs for a concert on short notice, or other housewares I would be happy to buy in an actual store except that in-person shopping has been so degraded by Amazon that's no longer an option. I'm not perfect, and I'm operating within a system that is stacked against me.

But books aren't any of those things. They're not two-day free delivery on groceries and pantry staples for a disabled person who can't safely leave the house. They're not a houseware that you'd have to drive a full hour to buy in person from the one shop that still has it available. There are so, so many other options available in the world for book purchasing, even if you don't have access to a cool local bookstore.

Even if you can't get to a Barnes & Noble.

Even if you don't have a good local library.

There are OPTIONS.

(I, for one, love Bookshop.org, but just look at the Books2Read link for Red, the Wolf, and the Woods! There are 14 non-Amazon retailers, plus I sell direct! Bookshop has just launched ebook sales to support local bookstores, too!)

Please, consider changing your book shopping habits! Ask your friends to change their book shopping habits! It's a small thing, but it's a small thing that means a big improvement for authors, and for the world.

Thank you.

[lesb0]

It's hard to explain this to financial illiterates but you and me are much, much financially closer to "poor" millionaires than the poorest rich. You need to rewire your brain to understand that the black square and green square are THE SAME CLASS. these people all serve the same ruling class of billionaires and ultra high millionaires.

this is the best visual reference I've ever seen to explain it

billionaires thrive on selling the narrative that everyone else needs to define their wealth into faux micro factions delineating middle from upper, when the difference between $1 and $100,000 is like a penny to them. I know MANY millionaires who have become evicted and hotel homeless multiple times. they are quite literally the working class, and have been forcibly made aware that they aren't so far away from the baristas they used to look down on. But the real rich can buy and sell a home just because they casually needed a place to vacation in for a few months. Billionaires are absolutely terrified that we could ever gain class solidarity, because this thin illusion of "wealth disparity" between thousands and never framing our thinking in millions is exactly what's keeping them in power

(The blue cube goes on for 2 more pages, Bezos' goes for over 100 pages).

Black women who save up for a telfar or get treated to fancy dates on the weekends aren't the ruling class, you are just racist and extremely ignorant about wealth.

We are all literally a giant servant class for 5% of people because that is the ideal function of end stage capitalism. the sooner we can accept this fact, the better.

[gunsandspaceships]

How rich is Tony Stark?

Throughout his superhero career, Tony's net worth in the MCU has always been between $10 and $20 billion. How much is that? Let's talk about Tony Stark's real financial resources and purchasing power.

The numbers themselves don't tell us anything, so we'll compare. Some real billionaires are much richer than him (Elon Musk - $210 billion, Jeff Bezos - $195 billion, Bill Gates - $129 billion). Huge difference, don't you think?

Let's list Tony's expenses: he founded and funded Damage Control. He covered the cost of the destruction caused not only by the Avengers, but by everyone they fought. He funded scientific projects and charitable foundations. He covered all the Avengers' expenses (compound, equipment, tech, vehicles, quinjets, food, medical and legal services, staff, team members' salaries, etc.). He made Iron Man suits and equipment for himself, Peter, Rhodey, and later Pepper. It takes a LOT of money to cover all of this. And it's all pure expense. He didn't make any profit from it.

Reminder: He's not nearly as rich as Musk, Bezos or Gates. How much can these guys do, buy and finance? Less than you think. Now divide by 10 to get an idea of ​​how much Tony could.

I'll help you: we'll count in Helicarriers. Let's say Tony had $20 billion (that's max). The price of one real aircraft carrier is 13 billion dollars. Helicarriers, even the basic ones (from The Avengers and AoU), are much more advanced (they fly, have retro-reflective panels that cover them entirely, and have a fancy interior with expensive equipment on board). It will cost much more. Let's give it a price tag of $20 billion. That is - Tony could only buy 1 Helicarrier and get $0 in his bank accounts.

Or another example: how much did the Battle of New York cost? Secretary Ross showed us - $88 billion in property damage. Tony would need another $70 billion to cover the cost of this one battle.

BUT let me tell you, his $10-20 billion isn't even real money. It's net worth. He would never have seen that $10-20 billion in cash or been able to use it. Because these are assets: shares and property he had. He would have to sell them, then pay taxes, and only then would he see the actual amount of money he could use. Which is about half of the net worth - $5-10 billion. Thus, his purchasing power would amount to a small insignificant fraction of the Battle of New York, or 0 Helicarriers, or even 0 real-life aircraft carriers. That's it. This is why the Avengers never had their own Helicarrier - Tony COULD NOT AFFORD ONE.

He didn't have unlimited resources. He couldn't buy everything. Stop imagining him as Scrooge McDuck. He had to work several jobs to provide for the team and protect the Earth. Alone. Where were Thor and Black Panther's resources?

Conclusion: no, Tony wasn't that rich. He worked his butt off to be a wallet of Earth's protection, in addition to being its shield. Remember that.

[seneca-zero]

Games workshop released their end of year financial report. Nothing spectacular or unexpected, but what might be an interesting tidbit, is that they have a time limit till the end of december 2024 to agree on the creative guidelines with amazon or nothing comes from the deal. It sounds probably more dramatic than it is.

But mark my words

The chuds and right wing grifters will probaly be pumping all kind of brain dead takes into the web. That Geedub is standing valiantly against the woke mob or that Jeff Bezos personally wants fem marines or some other crap with some Cavill jerking on top.

I feel it in my bones that these lying culture war tourists will try to make a fuss out of some standard procedure.

[shelleysmary]

gotta laugh at everyone who has ever said that "~unLiKE tHe pEtEr jACkSoN fILmS~ the trop people don't care about tolkien, don't care about middle-earth, it's a soulless adaptation for the money just because amazon is behind it" because (and i say this while also saying fuck amazon, fuck jeff bezos. it goes without saying - two things can be true at the same time, i can't believe it bears repeating)

how do you think films and television get made?? hate to break it to you, but it's all for the money. new line cinema didn't say "we love tolkien, pj, let's do this for free!" they were literally looking for a franchise hit when they decided to take the films over from miramax - which is exactly what every studio and their mom is trying to do now!!! it's movie business, baby! to say the people behind trop - the actors, the casting directors, the production designers, the vfx artists, the art directors, the armorers, the costume designers, the set decorators, the makeup artists, the ADs, the carpenters, painters, prop-makers, steelworkers, laborers, animal handlers, sound editors, miniature builders, stuntpeople, craftspeople, movement and dialect coaches, trainers, lighting techs, jewelers, etc. - don't care about the story they're telling???? is a wild reach. obviously they work for the showrunners who work for amazon who care the most about making a profit, but so did peter jackson and new line!! wanting your project to be financially and critically successful is not an inherently evil thing, come on guys, are you still buying into the starving artist fallacy 😭

there are tons of little nods to the silmarillion and other parts of the legendarium in the rings of power. yes, there are also changes and goofs, but lotr and the hobbit film trilogies also had their fair share of changes and goofs. i just think that "these people didn't read the books/this is just a money grab/pj & co. cared about the source material while these losers clearly don't" are tired arguments used to justify subjective opinions, not to mention the way it reeks of revisionist history considering the way tolkien purists initially took great issue with deviations made in lotr and especially the hobbit.

it's almost like...the most hated tolkien adaptation is ever the current one.

[hiveswap]

I see that people online can't differentiate between the rich and the financially comfortable, so i propose a new term: Neonobility. Is a guy with a pc a neonoble? You can tell he isn't from the term alone. Is jeff bezos a neonoble? Yes. Go do what you gotta do

[dropoutconfessions]

I wanna start off by saying that I agree with the fans who say that the rep of trans women and transmisogyny affected comedians on dropout isn't enough (because it is orders of magnitude less than the rep of cis people and less than 1/10 the rep of transmisogyny excluded trans comedians iirc).

But I have to disagree with some folks I see calling Sam and Brennan greedy rich assholes as an explanation for why they don't wanna platform transfemmes. Because when we talk about class, it's very important to separate specific levels of "rich" between comfortable and ultra wealthy.

Robert Reich of all politicians is not going to hoard wealth, but he probably did make Sam's life growing up more comfortable than most people and gave him some financial grace to pursue comedy. But Dropout as it used to be was bleeding money in 2020. They have less than a million paid subscribers, and they share profits with the cast AND they're paying the wages of the crew. However much money Sam and Brennan are making, it is nothing compared to a billion dollars. It's not clear how much they make, but say Sam is worth $50 million (a high random number that I think is still way too high for what he'd have). That's still only 5% of $1 billion. We are all closer to Sam's level of wealth than he is to, say, Jeff Bezos. Any kids he and his wife may have are going to have a comfortable life, and he is probably going to have a good retirement, but I think you still have to look at the scale of things. And Brennan is likely making less than Sam while still being financially stable, but he clearly knows what it's like to be broke and starving and is still heavily affected by that past to this day.

Is it possible that Sam and the folks in charge of hiring casting at Dropout think TMA folks are less likely to bring profit and that's why they don't hire them? I don't know. I'm not psychic. But the image of them some people push in regards to their class is straight up wrong.

DEFINITELY more TMA comedians besides Persephone (I love her and I would actually want to see more of her in addition to other new cast members) should be hired as cast for Dropout shows in general. I think Sam should/could also pass off hosting duties of Game Changer at the very least and possibly Make Some Noise, too, bc the amount of cis men representation from him and Brennan alone in comparison to any trans people but especially TMA people is insane. They're always going to have the seasons they ran, and they can still be cast once in a while.

But I really think this lack of representation started as a blind spot rather than evil intent to squeeze as much profit out of Dropout as possible the way some people think it is. If it continues after all this conversation about it (they film like a year in advance, so maybe some grace can be given), yeah, I'm going to be upset. I already canceled my subscription, though, tbh just because the statistics of rep in terms of cis men/women and transmascs/transfemmes is extremely disproportionate for the kind of work they do.

I haven't personally seen people make it a "greedy white cis men" thing, but yk, I'm not omniscient, could be a part of tumblr doing that. I personally don't think it's an intentional thing, that's the vicious part of normalized bigotry/lack of diversity, you don't notice it until you do.

I will say though, I don't think Sam needs to stop hosting either Game Changer or Make Some Noise, he's addressed them being his dream projects and like, a love letter to game shows, I don't think either would be as good without him.

But like, they're creating a lot of new shows, there's clearly space for new regulars on Dropout. There's space for us to be included, just gotta wait for them to answer our ask for an invite and all that.