Wealth of Nation's Poorest 165 Million is 10X Bezos' Wealth (so there's that)

Jeff Bezos net worth is now $171.6 billion. (It would be nearly a quarter of a trillion if not for his divorce settlement.)

The bottom 50% of Americans hold 1.4% of the country's wealth.
Bezos holds 0.15% of the country's wealth.
So, Bezo's wealth is 10% of the total held by the poorest 50% of (or 165 million) Americans.

So that's kind of interesting.

Alphabet (Google) Joins the Trillion Dollar Club

This week Google joined Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in the trillion-dollar valuation club. 

Location matters.
Microsoft and Amazon headquarters are 11.7 miles apart.
Apple and Google headquarters are 8.7 miles apart.

In 1901 US Steel became the first billion dollar company.
1955, GM, first to hit $10 billion
1995, GE, first to hit $100 billion
1999, Microsoft, first to hit $500 billion
2018, Apple, first to hit $1 trillion.

Here are some things you may find by googling Google.

Larry Page DOWNLOADED THE INTERNET in 1996 as part of his doctoral work at Stanford.

Larry Page grew up in the Bay Area and his dad was a big Grateful Dead fan, had a weekly radio show about the Dead. When Google could afford it, Larry Page hired a chef who had worked for the Grateful Dead to feed his employees. Every winter they had employee trips up to Squaw Valley and one year, Google employees were coming back to the chef to ask what had been in the ganja goo balls that was making them hallucinate.

3 years ago someone at Google told me they were spending $2 billion a year on employee meals. (Food - the fuel of knowledge workers - is free at Google.) I'm sure that has gone up. I don't think they serve ganja goo balls anymore.

In 1998, Jeff Bezos was so impressed with Page and Brin that he invested $250,000 in Google, buying what is now 6.6 million shares at the equivalent of 4 cents per share. (It closed today at $1,479.52 a share, so up 39,059X on Bezos investment.)

From Gates to Bezos - What the Change in World's Richest Man Tells us About a Shift From an Information to Entrepreneurial Economy

On America’s west coast there are examples of what the popularization of entrepreneurship could look like at the regional and company-level.

Silicon Valley continues to attract more venture capital and to create more wealth than any country in the world. The folks in the Bay Area have created an entrepreneurial economy.

Further north in Seattle, Jeff Bezos has created an entrepreneurial company.

Jeff Bezos recently emerged as the world’s richest man and is the world’s only triple-digit billionaire. Bezos is an entrepreneur. He has also created a platform that has popularized entrepreneurship. Not only does Amazon have more than 500,000 employees, it has "2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, [and] millions of Amazon Web Services developers.”  And, Bezos reports, "In 2017, for the first time in history, more than half of units sold on Amazon worldwide were from third-party sellers."[1] 

Bezos isn’t doing all the entrepreneurial lifting at Amazon; he’s got millions of co-entrepreneurs and the result is that as they struggle to become rich they inevitably increase his net worth. People who create, make or ship products hope to get rich by selling through Amazon. Jeff Bezos is just one of the millions of entrepreneurs who use the platform that his team has built.

Knowledge workers turn raw data into knowledge in the same way that factories turn raw materials into products. A computer makes knowledge work far easier and during the 1980s and 1990s, the personal computer became ubiquitous as knowledge work evolved and became more common. Microsoft provided the PC’s operating system and software like Word, Outlook, and Excel and for Microsoft it was like having a patent on forks and spoons when people stopped eating with their hands.

In 1995, Bill Gates became the world’s richest man by creating tools that enabled knowledge workers to do their work. In 2018, Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man by creating tools that enabled entrepreneurs to do their work. From the last couple of decades in the 20^th century to the first couple of the 21^st century, the source of new wealth was shifting from making knowledge work easier to making entrepreneurship easier.

Sometimes what is most obvious deserves the closest scrutiny. A region that has created record amounts of wealth. The world’s richest men? Those might just hold clues as to how the economy is changing. Successful economic policies in this century will popularize entrepreneurship.

Three categories of successful 21^st century economic policies will be “follow the lead of Silicon Valley,” create an entrepreneurial track in education, and make it easier for employees to act - and be rewarded - like entrepreneurs

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[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm

You'll Always Be an Idiot at Most Things

Jeff Bezos is the world's richest guy, worth $112 billion at age 54.

In his annual letter as CEO of Amazon, he shared some advice about high standards that struck me as valuable. 

It is worth reading in it's entirety here:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121161/d456916dex991.htm

One of the questions he asks is 

whether high standards are universal or domain specific. In other words, if you have high standards in one area, do you automatically have high standards elsewhere? I believe high standards are domain specific, and that you have to learn high standards separately in every arena of interest.  

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Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble. You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots. There can be whole arenas of endeavor where you may not even know that your standards are low or non-existent, and certainly not world class. It’s critical to be open to that likelihood.

I would go further and word it a little differently. You will always be awful at most things. 

Let's say that you are an eloquent, wonderful speaker. It would be widely impressive if you were a great speaker in two or three languages (most people do well to pull off eloquence in one) but regardless, you will be an absolutely hopeless speaker in the vast majority of the world's languages. You're limited even within your own domain of speaking.

And let's say that you're wonderful at toplologic phases of matter within math theory. Generally speaking, the closer you are to world's best the more specific is your knowledge. If you're an expert in one math domain you are likely only okay at other math theories or speed of computation, say. And of course you will eventually hit academic areas (medieval history, epigenetics, etc.) in which your knowledge and mastery are woefully short of the standards we'd expect of someone earning a bachelor's degree in that subject.

Even baseball players are rarely great hitters and great pitchers; such people come along about once per generation. The Angels have such a player in Shohei Ohtani, an incredible player who has an ERA of 3.6 and batting average of .333. He's amazing, but this is something I know: no NBA or NHL playoff team wants his help right now. Ohtani is terrible at most sports. (Well, terrible by world-class standards. You'd likely still be happy to have him on your team - any team - at a family reunion picnic.)

We're awful at most things, okay at a few, and - if we're lucky - wonderful at one or two.

So what does this mean? First of all, as Bezos points out, be humble. Secondly, know your limitations or trust the guidance of someone who does, someone who can tell you what you're great at and can do for a career and what you might just want to do for fun, what to improve at and what to simply abandon. Third, realize that you will always need other people; they can do well things that you can't do at all. Fourth, be careful about believing that your success in one thing predicts anything about success in another. And that brings me to Trump.

Trump might be the most gifted media magnet of my lifetime. He grabs our attention and holds it. 40% of Americans love him and 60% hate him but everyone stares aghast. He drove up the ratings of the very media outlets he attacks, simultaneously working to undermine their credibility by hollering "fake news!" while driving up their ratings by causing us all to tune in to see what crazy things he's said and done and whether today he has moved closer or farther from criminal charges. He's a natural genius at media.

Sadly for us citizens, high standards are domain specific. Trump doesn't understand how dependent are modern markets on trade, immigration, and disruption. He dismisses science and experts as less credible than his gut or the TV pundits he finds most appealing. This natural genius at media is a natural idiot at policy.

Trump should be both an example and a warning for all of us. We all should aspire to be even 1% as good at something as Trump is at media. And if we should be lucky, talented, and obsessed enough to pull that off, we should immediately remember that no matter how good we are at that one thing, we are still an idiot at most things.

And this is kind of cool. It means no matter how good you are, you can admire someone else - billions of others - as better than you. Even if you are Shoehei Ohtani or LeBron James, you could literally be tutored on millions of topics by other people who have mastered things that you won't do, much less be bad at.

So go do your thing. Become great at it if you can. And then be humble about it because, you're an idiot at most things. As Deming said, "You can trust a man who knows his limitations." And your limitations are nearly limitless.