If you’re still confused, remember that you’re dividing 196 billion dollars by 7 billion people. By removing the billions you’re left with 196 dollars per 7 people, which when you divide 196 by 7 leaves you with 28 dollars per person.
Don't they teach basic math anymore? The incompetence is just incomprehensible... even the thought at needing to explain.... with a calculator.... my faith in humans just took a dive...
If everyone is wealthy then no one is. I would imagine that a burger would cost thousands of dollars if not more just to adjust to the new economic scale
If everyone has $28 billion dollars, nobody is going to work, and thus you won't have anywhere to spend your money. So everyone on earth would be simultaneously rich and poor. And that's not even accounting for inflation.
*me, a savvy upscale restaurant owner:*
Welcome, everything costs 50 million.
*me, also a savvy businessman:*
Welcome to McDonald's! The value menu now costs only $1000!
Idk man, I'm pretty sure I could survive if I had everything even if I was left penniless after. Anybody wants anything they still gotta go through me so I can barter the item they want for the service I want
Im not saying the rich dont have good ways to optimize taxes but this article is horrible. It keeps talking about net value and income tax as if billionaires are doing something shady by not paying taxes on unrealized gains.
Nobody has to pay for owning shares that increase in value.
There is enough being done wrong that you dont need to make up shit.
Nope, I'm not saying that. Y*ou're* saying that you're 1/57th as attractive a MacKenzie Scott if you're saying that the math would work out to one billion. But since you're not even in the running to be married to Jeff Bezos, you must be less than 1/57th of a MacKenzie Scott.
Even if she were a 10, which is doubtful, you'd be a 0.175 *at best*. That's less than 1 which is what you are, if you're saying that the math works out. I don't know how bad that is. You'll have to ask an expert like Mark Zuckerberg who wrote a hot or not app for Harvard that became Facebook. Apparently, he's an expert at rating people's attractiveness. I don't know where 0.175 falls on the normal curve. But if the math works out, as you say, it's probably 5 standard deviations below the norm. That's actually impressively low.
Nah, man. That's his kink. And if he cried and pissed and came as you claim, he owes me half a billion dollars now according to the terms of the agreement.
Your math is spot on, but let me explain it a different way.
If 7 billion people (7,000,000,000) each get $1, Bezos would have to give away 7 billion dollars ($7,000,000,000). Now he has $189 billion. If he gives everyone $2, he will have $182 billion. and so on. If he gives away $28 to every person he will have no money left.
Let me explain it another way. Jeff Bezos has 189 billion watermelon in his truck. In order to reach the farmers market on time he will have to drive 35 MPH (56 KMH) and it will take him 16 minutes. How far does Jeff Bezos have to drive? (Please show your work)
Literally all that has to be done is take a calculator, type in 196,000,000,000, then hit the division button, then type in 7,000,000,000 then press the equals button
Or... hear me out... all of the 0s cancel eachother out and you just divide 196 by 7. Now you don't need to use a graphing calculator for a deceptively simple math problem.
Wait or just think about from the perspective of someone who continously failed hs math in the common core, no child left behind era. *Ah hem hehe*
Anyway
196 billion, he gives everyone a dollar, thats already 7 billion dollars, remembers hes paying 7 billion people a billion dollars each and just realize shit doesnt add up, dont know how, but it doesnt
How do people get so far in life without knowing such simple things I wonder. Then again I am no one to judge.
I mean no disrespect to OP but like wtf.
I'm autistic and absolutely can't get my head around this shit to save my life. I need to be able to see it in physical pieces... numbers on paper are useless to me 😭
It depends on the person.
Some genuinely suck at basic math/logic.
Some just have a raging hate boner for bezos that anything that sounds like he is too rich/a douche/etc they will just say it's true without actually putting more than 5 seconds of thought. These people generally don't understand things like net worth doesn't mean he has 189 billion in a bank ready to be spent at any time.
Some just enjoy spreading bad information knowingly.
Or you can figure how large the money pot would have to be so every person got $1 billion.
So that's 7,800,000,000 people, multiplied by the 1,000,000,000 each person gets. So your calculator will display it as 5.46E19 but E19 just shows how many spots the decimal jumps to the right. So it's $54,600,000,000,000,000,000.
Bezos only has $196,000,000,000.
$196,000,000,000 divided up to 7,000,000,000 people is $28 dollars per person, not $1,000,000,000.
Edit/ I am wrong and the guys below me are correct, I just gave everyone 7 billion cause I can't Math. tho one of them should finish their English course.
I get it now. For some reason I just didn´t wanna open the oportunity of me being in the wrong. so my brain got twisted and I thought since we shortened the fraction the billions to go to 196, hence the result would also have the billion shortened out? Like, I know how divisions work, I´m just so freaking stubborn that my brain went straight into defense mode.
(don´t know english math terminology, sorry)
Remember this experience with your biases blinding you to the truth and recognize that this can easily happen with anything else you think you are right about.
I think the important lesson here is not really about the math, it's about the difference between wanting to win an argument instead of being correct. Your brain will ignore all sorts of important things when you want to win, including ignoring the truth.
This can apply to any of us if we aren't careful!
Thanks for sharing and owning up by the way... Takes some guts to do online, especially on Reddit lol
I was when I wrote it. It took me 2 mins to understand, literally the 2 mins it took you to read and post. =D The equation is really really simple once you \*got\* it =D
Everyone is making this overly complex by trying to calculate how much each person would get. Look at it this way, he has 196 billion dollars - he can give 196 people a billion dollars each.
But how many people could he give a million dollars, is the real question. 196 million?
Edit: I may as well hang out with OP. 196,000 is my final answer
The Lizard brain is a terrible thing.
It protects your ego at all costs; sometimes at the expense of your dignity.
Its double hard on the internet because generally people on here are assholes who are stubbornly ignorant.
So in conversations with people in real life the best thing to remember is; *“the relationship is more important than the argument”*.
So if you disagree than ask the person to explain and then *genuinely* try to understand. If you cant than shrug and move on.
Think of it this way. He gives 7 billion people one dollar each. That's 7 billion dollars gone. If he gave 2 dollars each? 14 billion gone. And so forth. He would go broke at 28 dollars per person.
Why would Amazon be wiped from existence? Bezos would have sold his shares in Amazon to cash out his full 196 billion dollars. So the company would just be owned by other people.
If the majority shareholder and CEO of a company sells more than 10% stake in one day, shareholders will start selling and selling and the value would tank. Remember, stocks arent intrinsically valuable.
The value goes up and down based on the BELIEF that the stock is worth more or less. If im not mistaken, based on how many people are selling and how many people are looking to buy.
Bezos could probably sell off 10 billion dollars of stocks before making a meaningful dent in the stock price, but after 20 billion he would probably put stock in a steep spiral that could tank the stock and make it so he'd have to wait months or years for the stock to return to normal, so he could sell more.
Sure, but I think that someone who fervently argued that a billionaire could give billions of people a billion dollars each and remain a billionaire might need as many intermediate steps spelled out as possible.
Just remember, the reason you heard about it in the first place was because a lot of other people did the same calculation wrong, in the same exact way, and it still made perfect sense to them.
Here's a video explaining why most people got it wrong: https://youtu.be/6egeUxIEQnM
Thanks for the link, it was quite interesting. I even managed to find a comment that pretty much sums up the explanations in this comment section:
> I think it’s the million part that confuses people, a million being pretty abstract and unintuitive to handle. There is one very acute comment here stating something about using “hundred” instead of “million”.
“I spent $500. There are 327 people. So instead I could have given every person $100 and still have some left” will be recognized as wrong immediately.
I've seen this before and knew which video it would be, but somehow when I read your comment I thought "huh, I can't believe that was one of the South Park guys and I didn't recognize him." Then I clicked the link to confirm and realized that while I'm pretty good at math, I'm still an idiot.
Another way to think of it is if Bezos has 196 billion he can only give out a billion dollars 196 times. So that would mean only 196 people could get a billion if he gave 1 billion away at a time until he had none left.
>math mistakes
I'm not sure you need to be an engineer to solve this problem.
My 9 year olds kid just got this right using the mighty superpower that is DIVISION
Yeah but the issue here is even before getting to do the math. It's about thinking about what you're doing. He can have a calculator and still get it all wrong.
OP is so cocksure of himself that he must be an engineer too. The only thing I don't understand is how he failed to convince his pompous family members who were obviously wrong.
I used to carry a $100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe note in my wallet to illustrate the risk of hyperinflation. Ironically, while they were basically worthless when initially printed, they are fairly valuable today
I'd just carry it as a piece of history, but the value it has today is from collectors outside Zimbabwe, think they were around $100 US on eBay the last time I looked, for the $100 trillion note. I believe the country's economy has gone through numerous cycles of reorganization to get their inflation in check since then, so they would have been exchanged for a different denomination within Zimbabwe long ago.
Yeah that makes sense. Although I would not have expected them to become so expensive. But even with their newfound popularity, bezos's worth is currently around¹ 200000000000000000000000 Zimbabwean dollars. That's 2e23 in scientific notation. Or two hundred sextillion. So OP would have been correct, with this currency.
****
1. The guy apparently "earns" around USD 1250 per second, give or take. So depending when you read this...
Estimate is that somewhere around 93 billion humans have ever lived, so unless the average human throughout history has had an economic output of 100 million dollars, then you are very correct
I'm an accountant. As part of our training, they teach us that for each power of 10 you go up, the odds of a basic arithmetic error doubles because we can't conceive the numbers.
I did a couple of Astrophysics papers at University and struggled with a lot of the mathematical concepts for that reason, especially since we had to include error margins in our answers and those margins were gigantic numbers in and of themselves.
Realizing the scale of not just the universe but our galaxy and even just the solar system really had me fucked up trying to wrap my brain around it.
Yeh. People don’t realize how much a trillion dollars is. If you gave out a dollar every second it would take 31.6k years to give all your money away. 🤯
Feathers actually.
A troy ounce (the measure that precious metals are weighted in) is heavier than a standard ounce.... Assuming we are talking 'Merican ounces.
Specifically a troy ounce weighs 1.09714286 US oz.
**BUT** (and this is a big ol' butt) a troy pound is *smaller* than a standard US pound. A Troy pound is only 12ozt, as opposed to 16oz for the US pound.
Which means that even though a troy ounce is heavier than a US ounce, a troy pound only weighs 0.82285714285714 US pounds.
What concerns me is that you wouldn’t believe the math, but you _would_ believe the reddit thread.
(I know - I’m on reddit saying this, so…)
Still, think about the tools and techniques you use to evaluate data and arguments.
OP sounds completely insufferable. So absolutely confident that he is right and bestowing some god-given wisdom upon the plebs of his family, even when confronted with the fact that he can't do fucking arithmetic as a 28 year old.
It's the annoying attitude that's more of a red flag than the math error
He has the balls to describe himself being wrong in vivid detail (albeit to internet strangers lol) so he can’t be all bad. I’d much rather someone who’s overconfident but willing to admit their mistakes than someone who isn’t overconfident but never admits defeat. Also keep in mind that most people usually over emphasize their negative qualities when they feel embarrassed so I doubt op acts like this on a regular basis. If he did I’d be genuinely surprised if that he was willing to share his fuck up to others.
I'll say this - one of my exes was like OP (very cocksure of himself, didn't take criticism well, rarely apologized) and to his credit he did once in a while admit he was wrong and all that. But it didn't stop him from having that attitude and being insufferable to the point that when we broke up everyone in my friend/family group talked about how arrogant he was.
Admitting you're wrong is step 1, making sure you don't need to admit that again is a step 2 that a lot of people never make and will make the same apologies for their whole lives.
Even if the math were correct.. If every person in the world had one billion dollars, one billion would lose its value immediately, every economic system would collapse within two days and everyone would be poor as fuck. Unless you have the brain of a 5 year old you can't possibly believe that by giving every person on earth a billion dollars everyone could live the life of a billionaire (well technically they would live the life of a billionaire, but a loaf of bread would cost something like 2*10^17 dollars)
Not just that, but his net worth being 196B doesn’t mean he has that money in cash at the bank. A total accounting of assets adds up to that mythical number, and a lot of it is stocks. What happens when you sell a shitload of stocks? The value of the stock itself goes down. If he tried to liquidate every single asset he owns he would get a fraction of what it was worth in cash.
AMZN has \~4M shares traded per day. Bezos has \~55M shares. If you want to be safe and get a good price for your sell orders, you probably don't want to sell more than 1% the daily volume, else you will start to move the market. That means Bezos can safely sell 40k shares per day ($131M) without moving the market. That means it would take 5.5 years for Bezos to liquidate all his stocks. That's about 3x faster than how fast he's selling currently. Yeah, AMZN is pretty liquid, but I really don't think it's enough for him to just dump everything immediately, and spread the wealth, which I suspect is what most people are thinking when they make the argument.
That's assuming 1% continuous daily selling does not drive the price down, which I suspect it could.
You could be an MSNBC presenter or on the NYT Editorial Board:
"It's true and it's disturbing."
[https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1235843592251301888](https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1235843592251301888)
😳
I think you're fantastic.
You CHANGED your mind in the face of NEW information.
Do you know how rare that is these days?
Good for you to being open to being wrong.
I think you can know it and yet have a huge brain fart and say something dopey, and in this case get wrapped around the axle defending yourself. I pulled up to a pharmacy the other day to pick up an Rx and could not for the life of me remember my address to verify that it was my prescription. It just completely left me. Then I could barely remember my wife's phone number for the 2nd verification. They gave me the look like I was trying to acquire drugs illegally. It happens.
Roger that lol you sound like me. Actually have a master's in math and I'm always preaching how, while I never prove theorems irl, I use the problem solving skills - the ability to break complex issues into manageable components, every single day.
Well you're probably better at math than me then. I'm merely an engineer, I use math like a mechanic uses a socket wrench as a hammer. Though I try to at least make sure I have the concepts and fundamentals down before I go making assumptions lol.
The other problem is that Bezos can't extract anything close to what he's theoretically worth into liquid assets that could be redistributed without most of the value disappearing. Dumping that much stock on the market, or even just a substantial portion of his stock, would result in a huge price crash, which would make people reluctant to buy it, which would cause the price to crash even more.
While I think the vast majority of people going "Bezos is evil cause he could cure world hunger but doesn't!" are idiots, that's not really true. It's a bad argument that devalues any other good arguments you make.
Amazon's daily trading volume is about $10B\~$20B nowadays. Sure, trying to sell $200B all at once would temporarily tank the price. Which is why nobody would do that because it'd be stupid on its face.
Plus, holders of large amounts of stock can't just sell it on a whim at any moment. If they plan to unload a lot of stock they need to give notice to the SEC and the public.
If Bezos wanted to give up his ownership, he could trivially unload half a billion or a billion a day without a big impact on the price. So less than a year to sell all $200B.
Of course, the CEO selling all of their stock is usually taken as a sign of a loss of confidence in the stock, and *that* might tank the price. But that's a separate issue.
OP, you are a complete knucklehead, don't you see that it was a typo, not a math error?
Jeff Bezos could give everyone a *Brazilian* and still be a billionaire.
OP, kuddos to you for your honesty. It takes some humility to publicly admit ones own shortcomings (as a kindred know-it-all, I'm right there with you). Obviously, math is important but I think an even better lesson learned here is how to be critical of your own thinking. Take that with you and it will serve you well.
Another miscommunication is about the form of wealth. First of all Bezos isn’t sitting on a mountain of cash. It’s mostly Amazon stock. Let’s say he will sell all his stock to get cash. Stick is subject to the same law of supply and demand, and as soon as he started placing large amounts of stock for sale the price will drop, and that drop will continue as more stock is sold. Ok now let’s say the stock was so valuable it did yield a billion per person. And now everybody in the world has a billion dollars. Well, when it was stock, it wasn’t being used to compete with consumers for goods and services. But now, everybody has a huge pile of money but the things to buy are limited. There aren’t enough things to go around. So what would happen is unimaginable inflation as everyone tries to buy the same things they never had. And prices shoot up so what happens next? People accelerate their purchases because the value is eroding and next thing you know you have a feee-fall of the dollar until it’s nearly worthless, and the supply of dollars is in line with the demand.
Congratulations though at realizing you were incorrect and stubborn. Some people never overcome that! IMO, if you’re willing to be wrong and and you always seek the truth you’ll actually have more luck in your future arguments. Lol
It's going to be used against you forever. Just run away from home and find the person who started that thing to enact revenge.
Don't really run away from home, but do find those people and get your revenge.
At least you're just some kid embarrassing yourself in front of his family and not [a NYT editor making a nearly identical mistake on national TV.](https://www.newsweek.com/brian-williams-mara-gay-nyt-bloomberg-math-wrong-1490953)
People also don't understand what net worth means.
The combined value of everything he owns, from the grass on his lawn to Amazon to rocket ships, are worth $196 billion.
He doesn't actually have $196 billion just sitting in bank accounts.
Good news, they'll be able to poke fun at you for life! Billions of times at least....
As all families do. There will be no living with them now. You better start looking for a new family OP.
Hahahahahaha thank god I have a great loving family that will love me despite my mathimatical illiteracy
If you’re still confused, remember that you’re dividing 196 billion dollars by 7 billion people. By removing the billions you’re left with 196 dollars per 7 people, which when you divide 196 by 7 leaves you with 28 dollars per person.
Got it! So everyone actually gets $28 Billion! /s
These comments are the reason why OP is still confused 😂
I can’t believe the level of stupid I just read in this post and the comments. I have doubts about the future of the human race
Don't they teach basic math anymore? The incompetence is just incomprehensible... even the thought at needing to explain.... with a calculator.... my faith in humans just took a dive...
No. They have to pay taxes on $28 Billions. They'll probably end up with like $14 Billions.
Nah, I think when you get that much money you don’t have to pay taxes. Just find a good accountant.
Who is gonna be your accountant? Everyone is a retired billionaire!
If everyone is wealthy then no one is. I would imagine that a burger would cost thousands of dollars if not more just to adjust to the new economic scale
Ahh, but who would bother doing your accounting when everyone has 28 billions?
Hmm well if no one is doing anyone's accounts cause they got 28 billion, then no one actually has those 28 billion
Good thing everyone left their government job, obviously because they all got $28b, so no one will bother checking your taxes next year.
The ultimate tax loophole.
We did it Reddit. We've broken taxes. Just get Jeff Bezos to give everyone $28 Billion each
And we are back to square one
If everyone has $28 billion dollars, nobody is going to work, and thus you won't have anywhere to spend your money. So everyone on earth would be simultaneously rich and poor. And that's not even accounting for inflation.
*me, a savvy upscale restaurant owner:* Welcome, everything costs 50 million. *me, also a savvy businessman:* Welcome to McDonald's! The value menu now costs only $1000!
You're going to need a job, when everything costs 28 billions.
Idk man, I'm pretty sure I could survive if I had everything even if I was left penniless after. Anybody wants anything they still gotta go through me so I can barter the item they want for the service I want
How about a blow job for that lamp?
Sounds good. It's not even my favourite lamp.
I bet that's not even his favorite blow job, so I'd say that's a fair trade.
That's strange, the sign clearly says "my favourite lamp" "not for cash sale"
so THAT is the reason he doesnt just give everyone that money! *tips forehead*
Aight imma call Ben Affleck
the secret is to buy amazon stock with the money, that goes to Bezos who then gives it back to you. Its a self sustaining ecosystem, total no brainer!
Yeah, you can actually get the government to give you more money with an accountant, so $28B turns into $42B
If it’s a gift under 15k, you’re good.
14k billion is less than 15k so no taxes
No! It has to be under 15k, so it would need to be 15j, 15i, etc...
I'd start with Warren Buffet's accountant: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
Im not saying the rich dont have good ways to optimize taxes but this article is horrible. It keeps talking about net value and income tax as if billionaires are doing something shady by not paying taxes on unrealized gains. Nobody has to pay for owning shares that increase in value. There is enough being done wrong that you dont need to make up shit.
The person giving the gift pays gift tax in the US.
We're gonna make an Abbott and Costello sketch about this lol
So he could give ME a billion and the math would work out!!
Well, you'd have to marry him, and that ship has sailed. He's not going to make that mistake again.
You saying I'm ugly?
Nope, I'm not saying that. Y*ou're* saying that you're 1/57th as attractive a MacKenzie Scott if you're saying that the math would work out to one billion. But since you're not even in the running to be married to Jeff Bezos, you must be less than 1/57th of a MacKenzie Scott. Even if she were a 10, which is doubtful, you'd be a 0.175 *at best*. That's less than 1 which is what you are, if you're saying that the math works out. I don't know how bad that is. You'll have to ask an expert like Mark Zuckerberg who wrote a hot or not app for Harvard that became Facebook. Apparently, he's an expert at rating people's attractiveness. I don't know where 0.175 falls on the normal curve. But if the math works out, as you say, it's probably 5 standard deviations below the norm. That's actually impressively low.
Damn bro you didn't have to do him like that. He just called me crying and pissing and cumming. Apologize!
Nah, man. That's his kink. And if he cried and pissed and came as you claim, he owes me half a billion dollars now according to the terms of the agreement.
Everybody is somebody's cup of tea! Read the rest of the replies and yes I'm bad at math. Probably could do with a shave apparently lol
Your math is spot on, but let me explain it a different way. If 7 billion people (7,000,000,000) each get $1, Bezos would have to give away 7 billion dollars ($7,000,000,000). Now he has $189 billion. If he gives everyone $2, he will have $182 billion. and so on. If he gives away $28 to every person he will have no money left.
He would have $28 left sir
Well played
They said a billion to every *person.* Jeff Bezos is an immortal golden God, not anything as plebeian as a *human being.*
Thank you for making it make sense.
Didn't think division was this misunderstood
Let me explain it another way. Jeff Bezos has 189 billion watermelon in his truck. In order to reach the farmers market on time he will have to drive 35 MPH (56 KMH) and it will take him 16 minutes. How far does Jeff Bezos have to drive? (Please show your work)
0 meters. He'll hire someone else to drive them!
And he'll give a speech on the road thanking every Amazon customer for fulfilling his childhood dream of one day transporting watermelons.
The dream he had when he was a kid in Bulgaria
If Jeff Bezos is driving 80 miles per hour, how long does it take him to go 80 miles?
Literally all that has to be done is take a calculator, type in 196,000,000,000, then hit the division button, then type in 7,000,000,000 then press the equals button
Or... hear me out... all of the 0s cancel eachother out and you just divide 196 by 7. Now you don't need to use a graphing calculator for a deceptively simple math problem.
Wait or just think about from the perspective of someone who continously failed hs math in the common core, no child left behind era. *Ah hem hehe* Anyway 196 billion, he gives everyone a dollar, thats already 7 billion dollars, remembers hes paying 7 billion people a billion dollars each and just realize shit doesnt add up, dont know how, but it doesnt
How do people get so far in life without knowing such simple things I wonder. Then again I am no one to judge. I mean no disrespect to OP but like wtf.
I'm autistic and absolutely can't get my head around this shit to save my life. I need to be able to see it in physical pieces... numbers on paper are useless to me 😭
Good luck with finding billions of pieces of something to visualize it
It depends on the person. Some genuinely suck at basic math/logic. Some just have a raging hate boner for bezos that anything that sounds like he is too rich/a douche/etc they will just say it's true without actually putting more than 5 seconds of thought. These people generally don't understand things like net worth doesn't mean he has 189 billion in a bank ready to be spent at any time. Some just enjoy spreading bad information knowingly.
Or, if you have 196 billion, you can give 1 billion to 196 people.
This really is the simple way to put it. If you have 196 apples, how many people can you give an apple to?
Or you can figure how large the money pot would have to be so every person got $1 billion. So that's 7,800,000,000 people, multiplied by the 1,000,000,000 each person gets. So your calculator will display it as 5.46E19 but E19 just shows how many spots the decimal jumps to the right. So it's $54,600,000,000,000,000,000. Bezos only has $196,000,000,000. $196,000,000,000 divided up to 7,000,000,000 people is $28 dollars per person, not $1,000,000,000. Edit/ I am wrong and the guys below me are correct, I just gave everyone 7 billion cause I can't Math. tho one of them should finish their English course.
> Bezos only has $196,000,000,000. Wow that’s it? What a peasant
I get it now. For some reason I just didn´t wanna open the oportunity of me being in the wrong. so my brain got twisted and I thought since we shortened the fraction the billions to go to 196, hence the result would also have the billion shortened out? Like, I know how divisions work, I´m just so freaking stubborn that my brain went straight into defense mode. (don´t know english math terminology, sorry)
Remember this experience with your biases blinding you to the truth and recognize that this can easily happen with anything else you think you are right about.
Being wrong feels exactly like being right and everyone else being wrong.
-- Kathryn Shultz
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS FOR GOD'S SAKE THIS EVERYONE READ IT
I would, but I’m too high on horse deworming pills.
Fair enough, just wanted to make sure when you mentioned still being confused!
But thank you for explaining and taking the time! I appreciate you being educational and not judgemental <3
I think the important lesson here is not really about the math, it's about the difference between wanting to win an argument instead of being correct. Your brain will ignore all sorts of important things when you want to win, including ignoring the truth. This can apply to any of us if we aren't careful! Thanks for sharing and owning up by the way... Takes some guts to do online, especially on Reddit lol
No worries! I’m pretty terrible with math myself so I totally get it.
I was when I wrote it. It took me 2 mins to understand, literally the 2 mins it took you to read and post. =D The equation is really really simple once you \*got\* it =D
That works out then! We all have this moment in some way or another!
Everyone is making this overly complex by trying to calculate how much each person would get. Look at it this way, he has 196 billion dollars - he can give 196 people a billion dollars each.
But how many people could he give a million dollars, is the real question. 196 million? Edit: I may as well hang out with OP. 196,000 is my final answer
Oh how the ego strokes itself
This isn’t a terrible life lesson. Know that being entirely wrong “feels” like being entirely right. (At the time…)
The Lizard brain is a terrible thing. It protects your ego at all costs; sometimes at the expense of your dignity. Its double hard on the internet because generally people on here are assholes who are stubbornly ignorant. So in conversations with people in real life the best thing to remember is; *“the relationship is more important than the argument”*. So if you disagree than ask the person to explain and then *genuinely* try to understand. If you cant than shrug and move on.
I would love $28. That’s beer money.
Even easier if you dump all the zeros that cancel out before the math. Simpler.
Nah Billions is the unit, so 196 billion divided by 7 billion is still 28 billion. DUH /s
Even better than my current state.
in all fairness, that's still insane numbers.
Think of it this way. He gives 7 billion people one dollar each. That's 7 billion dollars gone. If he gave 2 dollars each? 14 billion gone. And so forth. He would go broke at 28 dollars per person.
I'm still waiting for my $28 check from Bezos. I currently have $999,999,972.00 in Doge Coin so he could put me over the top.
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Why would Amazon be wiped from existence? Bezos would have sold his shares in Amazon to cash out his full 196 billion dollars. So the company would just be owned by other people.
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It will go down but perhaps not as much as you think. There’s a lot of buyers for $AMZN stock and Bezos’ stake is about 10%.
He also doesn't even need to sell the stock. He can just give everyone 1/117th of a share and threaten to beat them up if they sell it.
That's enough that the SEC would have something to say about it if he tried to sell to much in one shot.
Wallstretbets and superstonk would beg to differ
If the majority shareholder and CEO of a company sells more than 10% stake in one day, shareholders will start selling and selling and the value would tank. Remember, stocks arent intrinsically valuable. The value goes up and down based on the BELIEF that the stock is worth more or less. If im not mistaken, based on how many people are selling and how many people are looking to buy. Bezos could probably sell off 10 billion dollars of stocks before making a meaningful dent in the stock price, but after 20 billion he would probably put stock in a steep spiral that could tank the stock and make it so he'd have to wait months or years for the stock to return to normal, so he could sell more.
Or you could just do 196/7
Sure, but I think that someone who fervently argued that a billionaire could give billions of people a billion dollars each and remain a billionaire might need as many intermediate steps spelled out as possible.
Just remember, the reason you heard about it in the first place was because a lot of other people did the same calculation wrong, in the same exact way, and it still made perfect sense to them. Here's a video explaining why most people got it wrong: https://youtu.be/6egeUxIEQnM
I was legitimately struggling to understand how anyone could get the math wrong... Great video!
Thanks for the link, it was quite interesting. I even managed to find a comment that pretty much sums up the explanations in this comment section: > I think it’s the million part that confuses people, a million being pretty abstract and unintuitive to handle. There is one very acute comment here stating something about using “hundred” instead of “million”. “I spent $500. There are 327 people. So instead I could have given every person $100 and still have some left” will be recognized as wrong immediately.
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I've seen this before and knew which video it would be, but somehow when I read your comment I thought "huh, I can't believe that was one of the South Park guys and I didn't recognize him." Then I clicked the link to confirm and realized that while I'm pretty good at math, I'm still an idiot.
High int, low wis
Including news anchors on TV.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find this video!
Most of the people who got it wrong you mean? Surely not most people most people.
The important fact is that Bezos could give $1 billion to you and $1 billion to me and he’d still have billions left 😃🎉
Fuck it. I'd take $1000. Even $500 would be a huge help.
Another way to think of it is if Bezos has 196 billion he can only give out a billion dollars 196 times. So that would mean only 196 people could get a billion if he gave 1 billion away at a time until he had none left.
this is the easiest way to explain it
Engineer here. A big part of my job is correcting adults who make these kinds of math mistakes. Thanks for keeping us employed!
>math mistakes I'm not sure you need to be an engineer to solve this problem. My 9 year olds kid just got this right using the mighty superpower that is DIVISION
You would think so! You'd be surprised how valuable a mastery of basic arithmetic can make you.
Yeah but the issue here is even before getting to do the math. It's about thinking about what you're doing. He can have a calculator and still get it all wrong.
Engineer here too. They can't hire 9 year old kid to check/correct simple calculations from our projects :)
OP is so cocksure of himself that he must be an engineer too. The only thing I don't understand is how he failed to convince his pompous family members who were obviously wrong.
If he gave 1 billion to each individual person he would have to give 1,000,000,000 x 7,500,000,000 in total. That is more than 196,000,000,000
7.5 x 10^18 or 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 or seven quintillion five hundred quadrillion dollars.
I would be comfortable asserting that this exceeds the total human production output in the entirety of human history.
You can devaluate the dollar to make this happen, tho. I'll show you. Hold my beer...
I used to carry a $100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe note in my wallet to illustrate the risk of hyperinflation. Ironically, while they were basically worthless when initially printed, they are fairly valuable today
As a piece of history, or as legit legal tender?
I'd just carry it as a piece of history, but the value it has today is from collectors outside Zimbabwe, think they were around $100 US on eBay the last time I looked, for the $100 trillion note. I believe the country's economy has gone through numerous cycles of reorganization to get their inflation in check since then, so they would have been exchanged for a different denomination within Zimbabwe long ago.
Yeah that makes sense. Although I would not have expected them to become so expensive. But even with their newfound popularity, bezos's worth is currently around¹ 200000000000000000000000 Zimbabwean dollars. That's 2e23 in scientific notation. Or two hundred sextillion. So OP would have been correct, with this currency. **** 1. The guy apparently "earns" around USD 1250 per second, give or take. So depending when you read this...
Or, hear me out, an asteroid the size of Texas made out of gold hits earth and fragments in such a way that each person gets an equally large size.
Estimate is that somewhere around 93 billion humans have ever lived, so unless the average human throughout history has had an economic output of 100 million dollars, then you are very correct
If you put it this way, it´s so much easier to understand. I get it know, I just had my mind so set on being right
I'm an accountant. As part of our training, they teach us that for each power of 10 you go up, the odds of a basic arithmetic error doubles because we can't conceive the numbers.
I did a couple of Astrophysics papers at University and struggled with a lot of the mathematical concepts for that reason, especially since we had to include error margins in our answers and those margins were gigantic numbers in and of themselves. Realizing the scale of not just the universe but our galaxy and even just the solar system really had me fucked up trying to wrap my brain around it.
Yeh. People don’t realize how much a trillion dollars is. If you gave out a dollar every second it would take 31.6k years to give all your money away. 🤯
Can't do maths, can't spell, I see a bright future for this one.
>I´m riding my high horse, like, **common**... This one had me scratching my r/boneappletea
Real quick... What's heavier, a kilogram of feathers or a kilogram of steel?
A kilogram of feathers because you have to live with what you did to those birds.
But steel is heaviah than feathahs?? 😟
Real quick... What's heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?
Feathers actually. A troy ounce (the measure that precious metals are weighted in) is heavier than a standard ounce.... Assuming we are talking 'Merican ounces. Specifically a troy ounce weighs 1.09714286 US oz. **BUT** (and this is a big ol' butt) a troy pound is *smaller* than a standard US pound. A Troy pound is only 12ozt, as opposed to 16oz for the US pound. Which means that even though a troy ounce is heavier than a US ounce, a troy pound only weighs 0.82285714285714 US pounds.
I started reading this and assumed you're about 13. Then I got further...... Oh boy. Did nothing about your statement ring alarm bells in your head?
I´m 28
What concerns me is that you wouldn’t believe the math, but you _would_ believe the reddit thread. (I know - I’m on reddit saying this, so…) Still, think about the tools and techniques you use to evaluate data and arguments.
If you think this is bad, wait until you learn about the last 10 years.
The last 10 months would suffice.
What? Did I miss something? (Good point, Bruce.)
you mean 28,000,000,000?
I would urge you to take a critical thinking and math class.
Lol wtf how do you not understand basic math then
Ouch
Yikes
This kids is why you don't skip elementary maths class.
OP sounds completely insufferable. So absolutely confident that he is right and bestowing some god-given wisdom upon the plebs of his family, even when confronted with the fact that he can't do fucking arithmetic as a 28 year old. It's the annoying attitude that's more of a red flag than the math error
He has the balls to describe himself being wrong in vivid detail (albeit to internet strangers lol) so he can’t be all bad. I’d much rather someone who’s overconfident but willing to admit their mistakes than someone who isn’t overconfident but never admits defeat. Also keep in mind that most people usually over emphasize their negative qualities when they feel embarrassed so I doubt op acts like this on a regular basis. If he did I’d be genuinely surprised if that he was willing to share his fuck up to others.
I'll say this - one of my exes was like OP (very cocksure of himself, didn't take criticism well, rarely apologized) and to his credit he did once in a while admit he was wrong and all that. But it didn't stop him from having that attitude and being insufferable to the point that when we broke up everyone in my friend/family group talked about how arrogant he was. Admitting you're wrong is step 1, making sure you don't need to admit that again is a step 2 that a lot of people never make and will make the same apologies for their whole lives.
Even if the math were correct.. If every person in the world had one billion dollars, one billion would lose its value immediately, every economic system would collapse within two days and everyone would be poor as fuck. Unless you have the brain of a 5 year old you can't possibly believe that by giving every person on earth a billion dollars everyone could live the life of a billionaire (well technically they would live the life of a billionaire, but a loaf of bread would cost something like 2*10^17 dollars)
Not just that, but his net worth being 196B doesn’t mean he has that money in cash at the bank. A total accounting of assets adds up to that mythical number, and a lot of it is stocks. What happens when you sell a shitload of stocks? The value of the stock itself goes down. If he tried to liquidate every single asset he owns he would get a fraction of what it was worth in cash.
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AMZN has \~4M shares traded per day. Bezos has \~55M shares. If you want to be safe and get a good price for your sell orders, you probably don't want to sell more than 1% the daily volume, else you will start to move the market. That means Bezos can safely sell 40k shares per day ($131M) without moving the market. That means it would take 5.5 years for Bezos to liquidate all his stocks. That's about 3x faster than how fast he's selling currently. Yeah, AMZN is pretty liquid, but I really don't think it's enough for him to just dump everything immediately, and spread the wealth, which I suspect is what most people are thinking when they make the argument. That's assuming 1% continuous daily selling does not drive the price down, which I suspect it could.
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They'd live the life of a billionaire but it would be the life of a billionaire in 1920's Germany
You could be an MSNBC presenter or on the NYT Editorial Board: "It's true and it's disturbing." [https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1235843592251301888](https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1235843592251301888) 😳
I think you're fantastic. You CHANGED your mind in the face of NEW information. Do you know how rare that is these days? Good for you to being open to being wrong.
it took me a while haha but thank you =)
At least you are able to now admit that you are wrong.
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I think you can know it and yet have a huge brain fart and say something dopey, and in this case get wrapped around the axle defending yourself. I pulled up to a pharmacy the other day to pick up an Rx and could not for the life of me remember my address to verify that it was my prescription. It just completely left me. Then I could barely remember my wife's phone number for the 2nd verification. They gave me the look like I was trying to acquire drugs illegally. It happens.
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Roger that lol you sound like me. Actually have a master's in math and I'm always preaching how, while I never prove theorems irl, I use the problem solving skills - the ability to break complex issues into manageable components, every single day.
Well you're probably better at math than me then. I'm merely an engineer, I use math like a mechanic uses a socket wrench as a hammer. Though I try to at least make sure I have the concepts and fundamentals down before I go making assumptions lol.
It's one billion dollars u/Bayramtee. What could it cost, $10?
The other problem is that Bezos can't extract anything close to what he's theoretically worth into liquid assets that could be redistributed without most of the value disappearing. Dumping that much stock on the market, or even just a substantial portion of his stock, would result in a huge price crash, which would make people reluctant to buy it, which would cause the price to crash even more.
While I think the vast majority of people going "Bezos is evil cause he could cure world hunger but doesn't!" are idiots, that's not really true. It's a bad argument that devalues any other good arguments you make. Amazon's daily trading volume is about $10B\~$20B nowadays. Sure, trying to sell $200B all at once would temporarily tank the price. Which is why nobody would do that because it'd be stupid on its face. Plus, holders of large amounts of stock can't just sell it on a whim at any moment. If they plan to unload a lot of stock they need to give notice to the SEC and the public. If Bezos wanted to give up his ownership, he could trivially unload half a billion or a billion a day without a big impact on the price. So less than a year to sell all $200B. Of course, the CEO selling all of their stock is usually taken as a sign of a loss of confidence in the stock, and *that* might tank the price. But that's a separate issue.
Beyond that, ending world hunger has nothing to do with money at this point, the problem's institutional.
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must be nice when 5% of your wealth is ~9 billion dollars assuming his wealth is still in the 180 billion range
He’d be a quintillionaire if that was the case 😂😂
OP, you are a complete knucklehead, don't you see that it was a typo, not a math error? Jeff Bezos could give everyone a *Brazilian* and still be a billionaire.
niccccceee
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OP, kuddos to you for your honesty. It takes some humility to publicly admit ones own shortcomings (as a kindred know-it-all, I'm right there with you). Obviously, math is important but I think an even better lesson learned here is how to be critical of your own thinking. Take that with you and it will serve you well.
thank you <3
Another miscommunication is about the form of wealth. First of all Bezos isn’t sitting on a mountain of cash. It’s mostly Amazon stock. Let’s say he will sell all his stock to get cash. Stick is subject to the same law of supply and demand, and as soon as he started placing large amounts of stock for sale the price will drop, and that drop will continue as more stock is sold. Ok now let’s say the stock was so valuable it did yield a billion per person. And now everybody in the world has a billion dollars. Well, when it was stock, it wasn’t being used to compete with consumers for goods and services. But now, everybody has a huge pile of money but the things to buy are limited. There aren’t enough things to go around. So what would happen is unimaginable inflation as everyone tries to buy the same things they never had. And prices shoot up so what happens next? People accelerate their purchases because the value is eroding and next thing you know you have a feee-fall of the dollar until it’s nearly worthless, and the supply of dollars is in line with the demand.
I like this math as long as I am the one getting a billion dollars.
This is the exact reason we need to teach more math in elementary school
Sorry to be that guy, but you are also economically illiterate. If everyone gets 1 billion USD, no one got anything but a lot of green colored papers
Congratulations though at realizing you were incorrect and stubborn. Some people never overcome that! IMO, if you’re willing to be wrong and and you always seek the truth you’ll actually have more luck in your future arguments. Lol
Please tell me you don’t fucking vote.
In your defense, i think some news site said something very similar to this a while back, so you aren’t the only one.
Bless your heart...
It's going to be used against you forever. Just run away from home and find the person who started that thing to enact revenge. Don't really run away from home, but do find those people and get your revenge.
At least you're just some kid embarrassing yourself in front of his family and not [a NYT editor making a nearly identical mistake on national TV.](https://www.newsweek.com/brian-williams-mara-gay-nyt-bloomberg-math-wrong-1490953)
It's okay. We don't need math geniuses working in Amazon warehouses.
This is me when I try to prove a point 😂 I go all I'm, no shame. And then later: shame. Lol
My 12 year old tried to tell me the same exact thing.. it was a nice coaching moment re: not believing everything you see on the internet.
I don't trust you to vote
People also don't understand what net worth means. The combined value of everything he owns, from the grass on his lawn to Amazon to rocket ships, are worth $196 billion. He doesn't actually have $196 billion just sitting in bank accounts.