Untouchable Amounts of Wealth

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos own 16%* of Amazon.

Assuming Amazon goes up 10% tomorrow and the rest of the S&P 500 is unchanged, their stake in Amazon would be worth more than 0.5% of the entire index.

Will the Bezos family fortune last forever? It’s hard to imagine it going a different way, although there is some precedent for American royalty losing it all.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was once worth $5 billion, but when his descendants had a family reunion a century later, there wasn’t a millionaire among them.

Unless Amazon implodes in Jeff and MacKenzie’s lifetime, it’s likely that future generations will be rich forever. Suspend reality for a second and assume they sold all their shares tomorrow at the market, and then they put all of the proceeds into a money market account yielding 1.8%. That would kick off about $3 billion a year.

$3,000,000,000 a year.

That doesn’t need to be put into perspective, no sinks need to be let in. You get it. It’s too much money to spend.

Josh and I spoke about all this and more after they announced earnings, check it out.

*I know they’ve sold stock since this article was written, but close enough.