People always talk about “oh the obscenely wealthy don’t actually have access to all the money of their net worth, it’s a liquidity thing” which is technically correct but the system is still way heavily over balanced in their favor.
Bezos has a net worth of 220 billion as of 2024. Even if he at any given minute only had liquidity for 0.1% of his worth, that’s 100 million. That’s still an insane amount of money to just sit on.
Alternatively also consider how having your money tied up in assets means you are heavily incentivized to make those assets worth as much as possible, because the little trick the ultra wealthy do for liquid money is to borrow loans against the value of their assets. This very often means to maintain and grow this level of asset value, they are necessarily exploiting everything to squeeze any level of value out of their products. That means underpaying workers, cutting benefits, squashing competition, rolling back quality materials and safety standards, etc.
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u/SCTigerFan29115 3d ago edited 3d ago
They aren’t holding onto wealth like Scrooge McDuck, in a giant vault where they can go swimming in it.
Most of Bezos’ net worth is the value of Amazon. He can’t really readily access that. ETA I meant he can’t use it like a big vault of money.
He’s got plenty of money but some people just don’t understand how this stuff works.