Are there people actually richer than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
I hear this claim a lot that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would not even be top 100 richest people in America and that there's these shadow people with way more money than them.
I always sense bullshit to these claims as they usually come from people who have never even interacted with a millionaire or claim their buddy Eric once knew a trillionaire.
I am also not talking about families of a few dozen people who might control 1 or 2 trillion seeing as if you divide it evenly thats less than 100bn each. Or a dictator who calculates their countries GDP as their net worth even though most of it is intangible.
I mean actual singular individuals in America or the rest of the world who has near absolute control over their assets to the tune of over 200bn to trillions. Do these people exist or are they just made up villains by people who want to believe there is always something bigger to uncover.
Seeing as most of us work in high finance or grew up around the insanely rich I can guess that a lot of us has been exposed in one way or another to the top of the upper echelon and can make an informed guess.
me
there are people that want to keep a low profile out there for sure.
The lists that are published compiling the richest people in the world are based on publicly available information so they really aren't going to be very accurate given how much private wealth there is in the world. I would think the published net worth of people like Musk, Bezos, etc., where most of their wealth is derived from ownership in a public company is roughly accurate but things get murky real quick when people start disguising their wealth with multiple LLCs and holding companies.
I watched an interview a few years ago with the individual that puts together the top wealthiest people list for Forbes and she mentioned that the lists really aren't very accurate.
Of course there are. Keep in mind most (I'd feel comfortable guessing at least 90%+) of the people who wind up on these "lists" are also tallied up using publicly known data. That thorn in the side of the wealthy. Also, the catastrophizers decrying the "wealth" of the people we know about also fail basic Econ 201 in that their wealth is tied to volatile instruments like their equity shares of the companies they're known for. So on paper Musk/Bezos/Gates/etc have that kind of net worth based on whatever the last ticker print was on market close at 4:00 EST. Then there's people like the Perots, Crowe family, Cuban et all who are supposed to be worth those huge values but it's all based off of one-time transaction values such as "I wonder what Cuban could get for selling the Mavs and his stake in AAC tomorrow?".
Basically, think of the whole concept of the millionaire next door but turn it up one or two more notches. They certainly exist and we know it because plenty of us on this board have either worked for or with a person or family that ticks that box.
I'd type another chapter on things like hiding value in charities, non-marketable assets, artificial debts to try and zero out net worth/income, transfer pricing valuation/tax avoidance plans, etc but I'm still waking up.
Edit: Eat Domino's and escalate those local franchise owners beyond members of the millionaire next door club.
Please do share though, sounds very interesting.
I understand where you're coming from but $200bn+ in assets that belongs to a random private citizen with little to no public paper trail seems off. I am sure there are quite a few billionaires that no one or very few people know but once you cross that 25bn+ line I feel like a whale that large would start making some waves it just can't help it.
And thats not discounting that people are claiming Elon isnt even top 100 in America, insinuating that there is a sizable plethora of private non public individuals who hold upwards of $300bn to $1Trn not as a family but as a single person. Like I said I believe a whale that big will always make a few waves that someone will spot
You said it yourself, private citizen. There'd be a papertrail, but it wouldn't have their name on it. I agree that it'd be harder and harder the more and more wealth is involved. But impossible? No.
Think about it another way: all those massively expensive apartments there on Park Ave. Homeboy just sold his for 2x what he paid for it ($200mm), and never lived in it. That's one unit, and the only reason we knew about it is because he's a well known hedge funder. How many other units in that building are worth $100mm, sitting empty, and have a ghost's name on the deed for privacy reasons? How many of these individuals own multiple units just as an off-book store of wealth/value to hold in silence until they want to sell?
With that example in mind, look at the notoriety of the Chinese buying up swaths of SF or Vancouver sight unseen at already inflated prices and driving local markets way up just in order to park their money somewhere stable and fixed. Hell, there's a subdivision across the street from my condo building that is entirely empty and while on the "lower value" end of this scale are all still $7-12mm homes. In the years I've lived here, I've only ever seen TWO people actually spend any time there, and it was just for a weekend. Otherwise they all pay HOA dues, utilities, have a 24/7 security guard that probably makes well over market because these people just think it's a rounding error to their checking accounts and don't care so long as it keeps the illusion up and break-ins down (and break-ins means attention, of any kind).
I would reject the notion that someone could be completely off the radar and be worth hundreds of billions like Bezos or Musk. Tesla and Amazon are enormous entities that people have heard of, and it takes that level of splashiness in order to have an entity large enough that your net worth would be that high.
The real caveat is the one that Forbes already explicitly says in its methodology: it doesn’t take into account the wealth of royalty or dictators. That’s where the real fun begins. Nobody really knows the net worth of a Vladimir Putin or an MBS, and yet both of them likely already control more money than Bezos and Musk or could at least seize that much through nationalizing Rosneft, Saudi Aramco, or liquidating oligarchs as political enemies. Once you’re the leader of a country and can form death squads, other people’s money has an uncanny way of becoming your money if you wish. So no, nobody off the radar, just the people we know have clout in their home countries.
You voiced my doubts in a very clear way. I feel like it would be very difficult to have that kind of money and be a shadow individual that no one has heard of and isn't on every wall street guys radar.
Even if you count royalty and dictators, they are still fairly public individuals that can be found on google with their biographies on wikipedia. As someone pointed out even the largest estimates of Vladmir Putin's net worth is 200bn and thats Vladmir Putin the head huncho of Russia, thats still puts him below Elon.
I highly doubt there is some bloke or lady in London, Florida, Texas, LA, NY or even Switzerland and China who have 200bn - 1trn+ to themselves and are fully private citizens.
I am sure there are shadow billionaires to the tune of 1-20bn that few people know like Jho Low before he was arrested. Anything more than 50bn to 100bn to trillions like some people claim seem very far fetched to me.
Agree with you on nearly anything. To be like a Mars, or Koch, or Cargill kind of deal is just too tough without any scrutiny. Only place I don’t agree is with measuring world leaders’ net worth. I don’t think that’s quite as static as you’re making it out to be. Read my response to Drumpfy below.
I've heard of people paying $250k to be kept off of such lists
Both of these things can simultaneously be true:
1. Beyond a certain level of wealth, it is impossible to entirely suppress knowledge of that wealth or conceal it. Too many people work for you. Too many business ventures in too many markets.
2. There are wealthy people who would otherwise appear on the Forbes list who pay Forbes not to appear on the list in order to maintain a lower profile.
I think what you said is correct, but it can’t be implemented above a certain level of wealth.
Elon's got a higher net worth than all but the top 3 African countries' entire nominal GDP.
r/wallstreetbets users giving price targets
Elon is apparently worth 269 billion dollars, which is 69 billion higher than the maximum estimate of Putin's wealth, 200 billion. Holy fuck. Do you guys think it's sustainable?
Do I think Musk is sustainable? I think the bull case for Tesla is replacing the country’s autos with a nationwide electrified taxi system, which is unlike any automaker in history. We’ll see where that goes.
I don’t know that the maximum wealth Putin possesses is just what Rick Gates or Bill Browder says. I think it’s what he could seize from his enemies too. Maybe he doesn’t want to spend the political capital on liquidating people because he thinks he has what he needs already. That doesn’t negate his ability to liquidate a few oligarchs and put him over the top.
Putin, yes. Musk, no. Putin's is tied into hard assets (that anyone knows of) and cashflow items like natgas consortiums. Musk's "wealth" is tied to shares who's prices are influenced and valued according to whatever pitch the associates at Vanguard tell their index fund PM and convince them that Tesla is going down so dump the shares now which means Musk has to go along for their ride. Not to mention the calculus involved of if Musk were to liquidate all his shares right now which would not be for the one-time lump sum value (then there's the tax debate and it's effects on people like Musk or the shadow wealthy who have plenty of plays to run in order to minimize their taxabe footprint). And then Musk wouldn't have control over Tesla anymore either, so he'd just be some dude with a ton of money and no power (which is really what this metric is meant to be a proxy of).
Occam’s Razor would probably say no.
But he is not american :/
I think Economics Explained has a lot of issues, but this specific video is spot on for your question. There probably aren't people who could liquidate that much (ignoring dilution from liquidation), but there are many who could still afford certain things.
I would rethink this exclusion of families with dozens or hundreds of people because dividing the assets by the whole list of people nets less than $100B. In many of these families I imagine the actual decisionmaking is concentrated within the hands of a select few.
I agree with this take. If you think about it, there are only a few paths to massive wealth:
1) Head of State (clearly not an unknown individual)
2) Owner of Public Co. (known person)
3) Owner of Private Co. (Can be unknown)
4) Inheritor (Unknown)
There are really only two some what discreet paths to Musk/Bezos money. I think the most plausible scenario for this "secret wealth" would be a very old family whose money has not been spread among hundreds of heirs. The Cargill/McMillans are super loaded, but among 100+ share holders, not as dramatic. Same issue for a lot of the children of the gilded age robber barons here in the US.
I think there are a lot more "mid-level billionaires" out there than most people realize. Imagine you own 100% of a closely held private co. The #100 on the list of largest private co's in America makes $4.7 Bn (estimates) top line. Hypothetically, you have even a 5% net income margin, thats up to 235mm a year you COULD take out of the business. Imagine you move down the line and into the obscure world of 1-2Bn dollar equipment distributors & auto parts manufacturers. You get become a billionaire just off of ownership distribution before we even think of the equity value.
I don't know about individuals, but there are families that dwarf them for sure. The House of Saud and Rothschilds both certainly have combined assets worth over $1 trillion.
I think the Rothschilds are very interesting. They were some of the first to really pioneer writing trusts for wealth preservation as I understand it.
I can only imagine what 300 yrs of compound interest ends up at. But it may be totally sliced and diced into various family branches
I don't really know how you can keep serious coin in 1 family for generations (more than 3). I guess strict primogeniture for the bulk of the $$?
Ali khamenei
Kim Jong
Sultan of Brunei
Muammar Gaddafi
Salman Al Saud
Putin
Xi Jinping
Bhumibol Adulyadej
Xi literally is the dictator of China, there's no doubt that he's loaded and he can kill anyone complaining about it. Of course he has political enemies, but for the moment he has enough power to make sure that he's the one writing the rules.
I bet some of those Arab oil tycoons are pretty fucking rich, but probably not richer than bezos all things considered but who knows. I feel they’re probably more liquid than most American billionaires
Putin?
Would not say there are any individuals that directly control more than 200bn+ and are private. You can make a pretty solid case for MBS or Putin because they pretty much control the countries they are in. But for sure there are plenty of extremely old money families who have existed from the "feudal" times in Europe and still retained/grew much of their wealth over centuries and that number is pretty obscure but they exist with well over 200bn+ in net worth in one concentrated family line of sorts. Given human history, it is simply impossible that all that feudal wealth has been fully distributed. As others have said, a lot probably exists under unnamed holding companies, LLCs, land ownership etc.
Another interesting thing to think about is despite the massive net worths of Bezos and Elon, how much of that really translates to how much power they have in their country. Atm, both of them are just messing with each other (Bezos funding Rivian for example). You got guys in other countries who have a lower net worth but have exponentially more power. For example, Ambani is worth about 100bn or so but has such a major grip on India that he controls most of the industrials, telecoms, energy of the country and could get any politician to dance for him if he wants too. Heck the man literally had Beyonce give a private concert for his daughters wedding and lives in a 700 foot tall skyscraper by himself and with his family.
Heads of State / Dictators are really the only people that can rival Musk and Bezos in terms of wealth, but I'm sure there are other people like Bill Hwang out there who are completely off the radar but have amassed fortunes in the multi-deca billion dollar context.
I think another factor to consider is how much access individuals have to liquid cash. Sure, Bezos and Musk are very rich on paper, but at one point Jho Low and even now Mohammed bin Salman probably had / have more easily accessible / controllable cash at their disposal
Yes I believe there are. I know you mentioned to avoid politicians, but the truth is that many of them are incredibly wealthy. For example the ex Philippines president stole billions of tax payer dollars and hid them in a Swiss bank account and the Philippines has never been able to retrieve that money. I assume there’s many other people out there who have done the same whether it’s Putin or the sultan of Brunei etc. I also believe that old money families could possibly be worth more as well since they’ve had generations of compounding wealth.
however, I don’t really think about topics like these very much because it all seems a little conspiracy-ish and to be honest I don’t care how much money someone else has as I should only worry about my situation
Accusantium culpa magnam et sapiente quo similique doloremque nisi. Quaerat cupiditate repellat cupiditate eveniet. Nesciunt exercitationem perferendis iste corrupti. Aut quaerat accusantium aspernatur velit numquam praesentium et. Impedit aut sint fugiat recusandae sunt quae.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Quos eos voluptatum inventore placeat blanditiis. Nisi nostrum velit aut quidem ad. Non est doloremque laudantium vel incidunt.
Sunt quibusdam quo sint voluptatem. Voluptatem nulla numquam nostrum aliquid animi commodi harum. Repellendus illo ab et vel et.
Atque tempore doloribus doloremque corporis doloribus esse. Dicta hic numquam saepe totam. Quis voluptatem sint vero.
Qui debitis ab quia vitae occaecati ut minus vel. Maxime pariatur veniam quaerat saepe. Quibusdam aut deserunt impedit et neque saepe esse. Itaque ipsam accusantium vero corrupti. Aut id labore sit reiciendis molestiae sunt dolor.
Eligendi consectetur ut aperiam tenetur voluptatem. Consectetur eum aliquam rerum recusandae ab quo enim. Et inventore minima consequatur accusantium vel cupiditate minima. Amet fugit maxime mollitia.