Except he does not. His assets are valued at 400B, provided that he pinky swears not to try to actually sell them, in which case they will be worth much, much less.
He can only share his shares and assets at 400B if the market thinks they're worth 400B, and if there are enough buyers for all 400B. And once he starts selling, the market might re-evaluate the worth of the shares.
Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
That is the meaning of what I call orderly liquidation. Sales are usually structured in order not to crash the market.
That being said, just because you need to structure a big sale does not mean it can not be done, or that you can not leverage your asset to have cash available at short notice. For instance, a loan with your actions as collateral will let you structure your divestment over years for a very moderate price.
Again, what I’m describing is not science fiction, it’s litterally what happened with twitter.
Imo it would be a harder challenge to find valuable stuff to buy than to divest orderly.
> Isn't Twitter a good counterpoint? I vaguely recall Musk had a hard time liquidating shares to buy it?
From what I remember, the issue was more along the lines of him making an offer without thinking it would be accepted, and then be under the gun because he was not prepared. Even then, he eventually found a reasonable financing scheme.
Selling a billion dollars of amazon via blocks etc with limited market impact? Probably doable if not super cheap.
3-400b? No way. There isn't capacity, you would cause a massive dip in prices. The timelines you would have to exit over would be very long, so disclosure also causes market reaction.
Loans work to an extent, but you get risk adjusted and eg 1bn of amazon stock is pretty low risk whilst 100bn is high risk. Concentration/size vs market cap and adv matter.
You can do it all, at a price, but it would be a lot lower than the current stock price for obvious reasons
If Bezos declared he was selling all his amazon stock - the market would react badly. Both due to the scale of inventory and the implications of his alignment and investment.
Dimon sold some stock and it was front page news, and it wasn't that much.
I'm pretty sure that he didn't liquidate $50bn in stock to get the money for buying twitter. (That $50bn includes the 20% capital gains tax, that leaves $40bn in cash)
