"Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the like, make incendiary, emotional posts about how Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc increased their wealth by $X billion (in a day, week, since pandemic) etc.... so they can afford to ( increase pay, provide family leave, paid healthcare for all workers).
The implication is that the companies are highly profitable so are sitting on pile of cash, which isn't true. Amazon and Facebook have like 5% profit margin.
The "wealth" is simply stock being stupid overpriced, due to stupid low interest rates because we have to shove debt into the economy, because Reaganomics created massive structural imbalances. There is no "money" in the wealth, just stupid overpriced stock."
So now it goes from media mentions to politicians and an economist speaking. And you are taking snippets instead of full conversations. Again, stop looking for the question. Your answer is misguided.
So let's look at the Forbes 400. When people are listed on the Forbes 400, it doesn't discuss anything about unrealized. It states X person is worth Y value. It may mention the industry/source of wealth. But it is not a deep dive.
You can argue until you are blue in the face but will still be wrong. The stock market, while it can and has been manipulated, is about the closest thing we have to determine the true value. The whole concept of the bid and ask and then a trade occurring shows value. No stock is overvalued if people are buying it. Someone may have some metric that they feel that it is not worth it, but what is their agenda? Is their agenda appreciation? Is there agenda accumulation? Is there an agenda that they have a short position? I dunno. All I do know is that AMZN trades about 5mm shares a day. So obviously there are buyers and sellers.
And just because the various media outlets are not reporting things the way that YOU determine to be correct does not mean that they are not reporting correctly. It just means you don't like it.
Now as far as AMZN goes and this is where you are showing your misunderstanding. You are looking at profit as the only metric. There are other things on the balance sheet that is why people are BUYING it. Isn't it interesting that for the last five years, AMZN basically adds 50% of its previous year's total assets to the current year's? Hmm.
Looking at what AMZN has done historically, they have gone to the markets for money. They have gotten it. They have taken the money and basically converted it to assets, not profits. They took that money to build out a massive infrastructure and continue to do so. They have done a lot of predatory things during that time, but that is capitalism.
