Losing Billions of Dollars in a Single Day Is Hard to Fathom for Anybody
6th February 2018
But especially hard for ‘journalists’, apparently.
NBC news reporter Scott Budman tweeted the following on several billionaires:
Had a rough day? Mark Zuckerberg lost $3.6 billion today. Jeff Bezos lost $3.2 billion. Google’s founders lost $2.3 billion, each. Bill Gates lost $2.2 billion. (Source: Bloomberg)
I can’t imagine waking up one morning and having billions of dollars gone. It’s not like a rough day at the casino when you might lose a few hundred or a grand. That sucks, but you move on pretty quickly. Losing billions? How does a person even react to that. I understand they’re all still billionaires, but it’s mind-boggling to even envision.
The author of this article cites this as if it were a thing. It isn’t.
To say that ‘Jeff Bezos is worth $X billion’ is common but misleading — a more accurate statement would be: ‘Based on the price per share of Amazon stock at moment A, the stock we think that Jeff Bezos owns (we can’t be sure) we estimate to be worth $X billion if he could sell it at that same price, which he probably couldn’t.’
These guys didn’t lose shit. What happened was that the most accurate available estimates of their net worth changed based on changes in the unit used for that valuation — but they are in exactly the same position today as they were yesterday and the day before.
We saw examples of the same sort of low-IQ thinking back in 1987, when a lot of people asked Bill Gates ‘How does it feel to lose $X billion?’; Bill, of course, who still owned the same portion of Microsoft’s capital stock as the day before, rightly treated at them as if they had grown two heads. He understood what was going on and they obviously didn’t.
This sort of thinking is one of the chief defects of ‘journalism’ as practiced today. ‘Journalists’ may have a college degree and work in an office, but their knowledge of the real world is in many respects vastly inferior to that of the average inhabitant of a trailer park. (This is a big reason why Trump so utterly flummoxes the inhabitants of the DemLegHump Media. He knows what he’s doing, because he’s done it before; they don’t, because they’ve never seen it done … and because they’ve never seen it done, it looks like something randomly plucked from the Take A Chance crd pile in a Monopoly game.)
I have very little respect for ‘journalists’ unless and until they demonstrate that they can count to 20 without taking off their shoes. That seldom happens.