As a columnist for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle works for the Post’s owner, a man named Jeff Bezos. Over the past two decades, McArdle has had numerous other prestigious bosses. She boasts a solid career in high-level journalism, having worked for The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Economist and...
This week, ProPublica published a long, detailed article that blew the roof off two burning and intimately related questions currently in the news: wealth inequality and taxation. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic and numerous pundits in the media have...
Having done the accounting on the wealth of the 12 richest Americans, MarketWatch’s editor, Shawn Langlois, points to what he sees as “a disturbing milestone.” Led by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the economic and political clout of what Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy...
What is the point of having a billion dollars? Most people would say, after observing the behavior of recent billionaires, that the point is to turn the first billion into multiple billions. If you don’t spend it or bury it in the ground, money grows. That’s a law of nature. And when you have...
Even in times of plague and massive unemployment, a three-way race has emerged at the top of a rising US stock market, the economy’s major league. Amazon has been competing with Apple and Microsoft for the title of the richest company in the world. All three weigh in with a market cap at above...
A year ago, there was only one person in the world whose fortune clocked in at over $100 billion. At the time when Jeff Bezos reached that plateau, most people felt that because it was so exceptional, the English language didn’t need a specific word to describe that category of person. Now,...
A raging controversy has broken out about Elon Musk’s latest SpaceX project to blanket the Earth’s lower atmosphere with 42,000 satellites. It has already begun to be implemented. Musk generously wishes to enable internet access across even the remotest corners of the globe. Astronomers have...
Forbes has followed Jeff Bezos on his pilgrimage to India this week. On January 15, the journal reported on Amazon’s declared ambition to help boost the Indian economy. The magazine reports: “Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said on Wednesday from New Delhi that his e-commerce...
Amazon and Jeff Bezos were so desperate they needed the generosity of the citizens of New York to help them pay their future rent. If any of us formulated the plan to move to New York and either buy a house or build one, we would begin looking at the price of property to decide whether or not we...
Charlie Munger, the supposed alter ego of Warren Buffett, “significantly” takes on Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. Those who know his name know Charlie Munger as Warren Buffett’s alter ego. They attribute to him a similar level of unassailable wisdom about stocks, even though with a net...
