Some Blog Site

There was news recently that Jeff Bezos was to spend $600 million on his wedding. He denied it, which these days is part of the PR script for modern celebrities or companies – something gets leaked, the main character denies it, then it turns out to be true. But in this case the supposed wedding date came and went and there were no follow-up reports of said wedding actually happening. Which if a wedding did cost $600,000,000 you would think it would be hard to hide it.

Anyway, before it was denied and subsequently didn’t happen, there were a lot of reactions to the news. So now you’re getting my thoughts on the matter.

My first thought was how do you spend that much money on a wedding? Maybe buying a private island and making that the destination for a destination wedding, but the reports said it would happen in Aspen CO.

After digesting various reactions, my conclusion is that it would have been good for him to spend that much money on a wedding. Yes, it is ridiculous, but he has ridiculous amounts of money so that should be par for the course.

No matter what you think of Bezos or other billionaires, the fact is that he has that money. The options now are he can keep it or he can spend it. Of those options, isn’t spending it the better choice for the general economy?

I imagine the money would have gone to a number of local businesses in the Aspen area. Certainly not all the money, but even a small percentage of half a billion dollars would be noticeable to area businesses. And yes other areas besides Aspen would probably need it more, but my point is the money is moving from a billionaire to non-billionaires.

Some of you may be thinking that sounds like trickle-down economics and you don’t like trickle-down economics, but again what’s the alternative – you’d rather Bezos keep that money to himself? I know some people may have other ideas of what should be done via new laws or such, but I’m looking at this based on how things are today.

And yes, he could give the money away to charity like Gates or Buffet are doing, but I see that as a subset of the spending option. Or maybe I should call it the not-keeping option. Either way, you’re giving money to someone else for them to do something with it. The difference between charity and not is if the giver receives a tangible benefit. But to the general economy, there’s not much difference – $600m moves from one person to an area. Better the money moves that direction than the other.

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