Lend Us A Tenner Jeff

Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos is stepping down as the CEO to become executive chairman and his wealth is put around $198 billion which according to the Observer Newspaper, makes him wealthier than 92% of the world's countries.
It breaks that down to Jeff Bezos making around $321 million per day, $149,353 a minute or $3,715 per second which is obscene by any standards but although it makes a great headline, i find that a bit misleading because he hasn't actually got that amount sitting in his bank account, his wealth is measured in stocks, and stocks are a kind of made-up value.
If i had a company which had a million shares with a value of £1, my company shares are worth £1 million in total, so my company is valued at £1 million.
If i sold you 100 shares at £2 each, the new stock price is £2 and my million shares are now worth £2 million so my company is worth £2 million but it doesn't actually have £1 million more in wealth than it did yesterday.
If my company does really well and more people want to buy shares then i could sell them for £10 a share and suddenly my company is worth £10 million but i couldn't pop off and buy a speedboat just yet because the £10 million is not real money at all and i am not personally any richer.
The only way i would personally make out of it would be if i sold some of my own shares, if i kept 10,000 from the original million and sold them at the £10 a share price, that would raise £100,000 from which approximately 45% would be lost to taxes so i'm left with about £55,000 which is a significant amount less than the £10 million my wealth was measured at originally.
That means that when we hear about Bezo's $198 billion, Elon Musk's $168 billion or Bill Gates $127 billion, it's money that doesn't actually exist sat in their bank accounts as we imagine it.