News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by chimeracoder on Thursday July 27, 2017 @10:44AM (#14865751)
Aside from the fact that he's been aggressively donating his personal assets to philanthropy rather than accumulating them in recent years, it's very difficult to beat the S&P when you're talking about tens of billions of dollars.

At that scale, the S&P isn't even a good benchmark, because it's not like a single investor can just dump that much in an index fund or even in the underlying companies directly.

Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by kobeya on Thursday July 27, 2017 @10:50AM (#14865823)
SPY and the Vanguard version together represent half a trillion dollars of wealth under management. And that's just the top two. So yes, you can dump that much in index funds.
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by TotallyHuman on Thursday July 27, 2017 @11:04AM (#14865947)
That's the same amount he has. Vanguard can't just double their fund like that...
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by LukeShu on Thursday July 27, 2017 @11:14AM (#14866045)
From other comments: Vanguard's 500 index manages ~500 billion (dmoy), Gates is worth ~100 billion (kevindqc). Even so, Vanguard can't just increase their fund by 20% like that.
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by dmoy on Thursday July 27, 2017 @04:03PM (#14868911)
Right you're sorta missing the point though. Vanguard outside of the s&p 500 has another 3.5 trillion or something. They could absorb bill gates net worth.
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by dmoy on Thursday July 27, 2017 @11:06AM (#14865963)
Vanguard's 500 index alone represents 550 billion under management. (It's split into 4+ expense ratio classes depending whether you have 0, 10k, 5m, 50m, 5b or whatever)