Seth Godin is one of my favorite thinkers. Today in his blog (published impressively and relentlessly daily), he made the observation that “monopoly is the opposite of capitalism.”

Monopoly. The goal of the game of Monopoly is to bankrupt all of your opponents. game is over when money an unregulated capitalism has grown — the concentration of money

Jeff Bezos read the National Enquirer’s e-mail threatening to publish pictures of his deck or duck or d*ck and in a moment of self-reflection he realized he has more chips than the house than anyone else. He upped the ante, called their bluff and published e-mails he received from David Pecker’s attorneys.

And taking a moment here, today Jeff Bezos’ wealth is $131B dollars, down from $159B just a few weeks ago … to which we give a low hmmm …

And David Pecker! If his last name were not capitalized, would it be censored as p*cker? Would we read of Dave packer, picker, pucker? We cannot print p*cker but Pecker is okay. And the media has had a field day with the coincidence of d*cks and p*ckers.

Amazon employs approximately 600,000 people! Whoa. Running some simple numbers:

600,000 * $50K salary/employee = $30 X 10E9 or $30B or 23% of a Bezos ($30B/$131B) = .23

Or 2,620,000 persons * $50,000/person = 1 Bezos

Definitions (from the Googles):

Plutocrat: a person whose power derives from their wealth

Oligarch: a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence

See also Howard Schultz running for President.

The US national thoughts and prayers debt surpassed $22T dollars on Tuesday, February 12, 2019.

Let’s run some numbers:

Population of the US: 325,700,000

US National Debt, February, 2019: $22,000,000,000,000

-OR-

$67,546/person

A rise of $1,000,000,000,000/US citizen = $3,070

Since inauguration on January 20, 2017, Trump has made 161 visits to golf clubs at a cost to taxpayers of $91,000,000.

Driving for dollars.

By way of comparison, the 2018 earnings of the 5 highest paid golfers in the world (pay+salary/winnings+endorsements):

  • Justin Thomas: $51M
  • Rory McIlroy: $75.4M
  • Jordan Spieth: $84.2M
  • Phil Mickelson: $82.6M
  • Tiger Woods: $86.6M

And that all adds up to: $379.8M