The biggest technological breakthrough since the internet is worth about as much as just one man, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.
His net worth is estimated to be $132 billion, mainly from Amazon shares, while Amazon’s net income is only around $2 billion a year.
Bitcoin briefly fell below a market cap of $132 billion yesterday, slightly recovering today but still to a comparable level with Jeff Bezos at around $138 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, in turn, is worth quite a bit more than ethereum, the smart contracts platform that might usher in a fourth industrial revolution of peer to peer machine payments.
While Musk is worth more than Bitcoin Cash, the global decentralized currency that allows for pretty much instant and free payments while having a very limited amount of only 21 million coins.
If we add Gates above, then these four men are worth as much as the entire global market cap off all digital currencies and tokens. That includes ICOs and other businesses that have raised billions.
The companies they founded are of course worth far more. Amazon is worth nearly 3 times more than the combined market cap of all cryptos.
Facebook, which merely allows grannies to share pictures with each other, is worth nearly twice the global market cap of all cryptos.
Most of this wealth comes from shares of the publicly traded companies they founded or bought. Bezos, for example, owns the Washington Post, a paper that was keen to call cryptos a bubble but never wondered whether four men being worth as much as some countries is a bubble.
All four, we’d think, have a highly vested interest in share prices rising. When that stock money goes to cryptos instead, they might not be too happy. Thus Gates goes out to make all sorts of comments.
Still, all four perhaps have earned their wealth in funding innovative companies, but how is the wife of Steve Jobs worth more than Bitcoin Cash when the only achievement seems to be that she married Jobs.
When congressmen talk about the real economy, they never wonder how giving tens of billions to individuals who happen to be born to wealthy men is in any way helping the “real economy.”
Because though sure we are some of these rich young men and women will use higher wealth levels than some countries in a productive manner, they did not really earn a penny of it.
That’s especially the case compared to millions of workers that actually produce this wealth who have not seen a wage rise in a decade, yet keep seeing the net worth of these men rise year on year.
Then they say crypto is the culprit for opening the gates to wealth creation and for undermining discriminatory laws that ensure any spare savings have to go to these four men because the only real way for the masses to invest is to buy shares of public companies.
Not highly profitable medium companies, not highly promising start-ups. Investing in those is illegal by the force of the Securities Act 1933.
No, the only choice is to invest in these global corporations that run the media, run congressmen through “donations,” and run the economy because these global corporations have a tendency to become monopolies due to in effect buying discriminatory laws.
So the high street has become global chain after global chain, with no competition able to enter because of staircases of regulations raising costs of entry to millions which you can not raise in funding because it is illegal.
Unless, that is, the funding comes from these four rich men and other rich men like them, who go on to become richer and richer in a new feudal aristocracy of sorts enforced by the laws our elected “representatives” maintain or even pass in our day and age.
