Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion, even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. In other words, he’s created $2.4 trillion of value for other shareholders—plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.
Jensen Huang is worth $164 billion, while NVIDIA’s market cap is $5 trillion. That’s $4.8 trillion of value for other people (not to mention the immeasurable value created for non-equity stakeholders).
Larry Page and Sergey Brin? $300 billion vs. $3.3 trillion. That’s $3 trillion of value for everyone else. And remember how bad search was before Google and how clunky email was before Gmail?
Mark Zuckerberg? $248 billion vs. $1.8 trillion.
The list goes on. There are hundreds more examples across technology, energy, medicine, manufacturing, and every other industry that keeps the American economy running and our society flourishing.
Billionaires don’t extract value from the rest of us. They create value FOR the rest of us, in exchange for just pennies on the dollar.
We should be grateful for every last one of them.