Bernie Sanders is at it again, again. And again, also.
On twitter today, Bernie stated that Jeff Bezos' income is "$215 million per day." Okay, Jeff Bezos is in fact worth a lot of money, but does he actually make that much in income? A quick trip to your calculator would tell you that $215 million per day would equal $78 BILLION per year. Maybe that seems possible for the worlds richest person, but it isn't. It just plain isn't. Amazon's gross income in 2018 was $71 billion. So do you honestly think that after "cost of goods sold," they decided to pay Jeff Bezos $78 billion from their $71 billion gross?
This is simply what Bernie does. He takes the fact that Amazon's stock has moved up a decent amount in the last few days, determined the market value of Amazon, and then determined how much Jeff Bezos' 18% ownership increased in value over the last few days. By this logic, where were Bernie's tweets about how Bezos "lost" $1.6 billion per day last October? No where to be found because of course, that doesn't fit his agenda.
The bulk of Bezos' "worth" comes from his ownership of Amazon. This means that when you say he earned $X-amount, you're talking about the value he earned if he were to in fact sell all of his shares today. Something he hasn't done, meaning that he hasn't technically "earned" this money. If you own stock in any company, you've probably seen the value of your portfolio increase and decrease by substantial amounts over time. On a day where the market is up, does that mean you "earned" what ever the increase was that day? No, because you didn't sell your stocks.
There's one other market factor Senator B.S. isn't mentioning. Jeff Bezos' current value of stock might be $100 billion, but he would get no where close to that if he decided to sell his shares on the open market. This would flood the stock market with a supply of shares that it doesn't currently want, meaning the value of those shares would need to decrease to the point that enough people would want to buy his 18% worth of shares. In all actuality, that "$100 billion value" might only get him $50 billion by the time the selloff is finished. That's whats happening when the stock prices is crashing by the way- someone (or a lot of someones) are selling their shares. The market is flooded with supply, and the price drops to the amount that meets the current demand.
If you made it through this article you've learned more about the stock market and basic economics than the bulk of Sanders' followers have learned in their lives.
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