How do tech billionaires make their wealth liquid?

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I know a majority of Bezos’ and Musk’s net worths are stock ownership. But they obviously would want to make actual cash. So do they just sell a bit of their stocks every year? How do they gain their ownership back then, aren’t they just decreasing their ownership of company stocks? Would they just buy more stocks then? And if so, isn’t that an endless loop of nothing? Sell your stocks to get money, but then buy the stocks back for more ownership of the company?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

What makes you say that investors as a general class wants to make “actual cash”. Actual cash is a failure of investment. The investor understands their risk/reward tradeoff and tries to optimize their holdings to match this risk/reward preference.

No billionaire wants to hold a billion dollars of cash. The mindset has got to be forward looking. The idea that the be-all-and-end-all desired state for investors is to hold on to cash is completely wrong.

Founders and executives of public companies cannot trade their shares in that company freely. They are allowed to do so only at particular times and with predeclared amounts. There are also contracts involved that might stipulate how much they must maintain etc. It is far more likely that the Bezos and Musk holdings in their companies will be transferred to some kind of trust fund or organization.

Over the years, they have already diversified their personal assets into many other investments none of which they will likely ever disclose. This is what they probably use to fund their activities.

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