Hi comrades, I'm new here, how do we feel about posting Mastodon content on Lemmy?
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Most of this wealth is in stocks, though. Their worth is based on the number of shares they own of these companies. For every share they sell the value of the other shares drops a bit. So if Musk or Bezos sold all their shares, to have this money in actual cash, not only would they probably bankrupt their company and crash the stock market, but the cash they got out of it would be only a fraction of what this shows on paper now.
You do a structured sale overtime and those do take place even in the billions of dollars without destroying the value of the stock. Also, they can borrow against the value of the stock, usually for extremely low interest rates, to quickly infuse cash. This argument is nonsense. The best recent example is elon buying Twitter. Yes it hurt tesla stock in the short term but it is almost back to the presale value with little impact on his overall networth. The wealth in stocks is very real.
Edit: The elon case isn't even a good example because he was forced to sell the stock much faster than normal.
Also it's not like most people's wealth (if they even have any) is liquid either. Most is probably tied up in retirement accounts, real estate, or funds for unforseen circumstances that you wouldn't touch for ordinary needs.
Elon buying Twitter is really an outlier to begin with, since otherwise there are basically no single expenses that would require that amount of funds to be liquid.
Especially with the mentioned loans, there really is more than enough liquidity available to buy anything you'd ever want.