Business

Amazon founder’s net worth has risen $33 billion so far in 2017. With strong performance for Amazon’s Black Friday sales, Jeff Bezos’ net worth jumped above $100 billion on Friday. The Amazon CEO’s fortune reportedly surged $2.4 billion to $100.3 billion, after the retailer’s shares grew more than 2 percent on Black Friday. Bloomberg reports:

“Online purchases for the day are up 18.4 percent over last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and investors are betting the company will take an outsized share of online spending over the gifting season. The $100 billion milestone makes Bezos, 53, the first billionaire to build a 12-figure net worth since 1999, when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hit the mark. Bezos’s fortune rose $32.6 billion this year through Thursday, the largest increase of anyone on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people. Amazon have climbed 5 percent this week alone.”

“The $100 billion milestone makes Bezos, 53, the first billionaire to build a 12-figure net worth since 1999, when Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates hit the mark… Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t given away almost 700 million Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996.”

Walmart has announced Mobile Express Returns, a new program that aims to make returns of online and in-store purchases fast and painless, Business Insider reports.

The program will launch in November and be immediately available for orders sold and shipped by Walmart.com. In-store purchases and online orders from third-party sellers will be eligible for the program in the near future, and the retailer plans to make the program available in all 4,700 of its US locations.

Mobile Express Returns should create a fast and easy process for product returns. Allowing consumers to make returns with a quick trip to the store may draw them back to Walmart.com for future sales, as 62% of consumers say they are more likely to shop online if they can return in-store.

Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for his contributions to the field of behavioral economics. CNN Money reported:

Thaler, 72, was cited for his research in the psychology of economic decision-making.

His theory explains “how people simplify financial decision-making by creating separate accounts in their minds, focusing on the narrow impact of each individual decision rather than its overall effect,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Thaler’s work is well known outside academic circles. His 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness,” which he wrote with law professor Cass Sunstein, became a popular hit.

They argued that by understanding how people make decisions, behavioral economics can be used to tackle many of society’s major problems and influence public policy. Both The Economist and the Financial Times ranked it the best book of the year.

Jeff Bezos has surpassed Bill Gates as world’s richest person. Bloomberg reported: A surge in Amazon.com Inc. shares Thursday morning in advance of the online retailer’s earnings report has propelled founder Jeff Bezos past Bill Gates as the world’s richest person.

Shares of the online retailer rose 1.3 percent to $1,065.92 at 10:10 a.m. in New York, giving Bezos a net worth of $90.9 billion, versus $90.7 billion for Gates. If that holds through the 4 p.m. close, Bezos, 53, will leapfrog Gates, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Gates, 61, has held the top spot since May 2013.

Meanwhile, Facebook Inc.’s intraday gains have helped pull co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, 33, within $200 million of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett, 86, who’s currently ranked fourth on the Bloomberg index with a net worth of $74.5 billion.

Apple plans to launch its own Venmo, a money-transfer service that let users conveniently send money digitally to other iPhone Owners. Could the money-transfer service be called Apple Cash? Recode reported:

The company has recently held discussions with payments industry partners about introducing its own Venmo competitor, according to multiple sources familiar with the talks. The service would allow iPhone owners to send money digitally to other iPhone owners, these people said.

One source familiar with the plans told Recode they expect the company to announce the new service later this year. Another cautioned that an announcement and launch date may not yet be set …

The new Apple product would compete with offerings from big U.S. banks as well as PayPal, its millennial-popular subsidiary Venmo, as well as Square Cash in the increasingly competitive world of digital money-transfers.

These services have typically been money losers for the new entrants in the space, but are seen as the gateway to the next generation of payment and personal finance services that could upend traditional consumer banking relationships. They are used for everything from splitting dinner bills to paying rent.

Apple has also recently held discussions with Visa about creating its own pre-paid cards that would run on the Visa debit network and which would be tied to the new peer-to-peer service, sources told Recode. People would be able to use the Apple cards to spend money sent to them through the new service, without having to wait for it to clear to their bank account.

In Silicon Valley, talented engineers are earning around $200,000 a year, and receive some amounts of equity that can turn into valuable nest eggs later in their careers. Still, for many high-income earners, they are quitting their $200,000 tech jobs and the most common reason is unfair treatment. San Francisco Chronicle reported:

The study, by the Oakland, California-based non-profit Kapor Center for Social Impact and Harris Poll, asked a nationally-representative sample of 2,000 adults who had voluntarily left a tech job in the last three years why they chose to abandon their cushy workplaces. Were they enticed by a better opportunity? Did they decide to take time off to care for children? Did they desire a shorter commute?

The answers the “tech leavers” gave were eyebrow-raising in that they suggest the extent to which feelings of mistreatment drive people to leave even the most elite jobs. They also show the way the same workplace can be a vastly different experience depending on a person’s background.

Overwhelmingly, workers of all backgrounds cited “unfairness or mistreatment” within the work environment as the most common reason for leaving. Thirty-seven percent said it was as “major factor” in their decision to quit. Unfair treatment was cited twice as often as being recruited elsewhere.

Latest GDP shows that the U.S. economy stalls in the first quarter of 2017 with slowest growth in 3 years. The gross domestic product increased at a meager 0.7% annual pace in the first three months of the year. The slow down reflected the weakness in consumer spending that is likely to rebound in the coming months.

Consumer spending rose by only 0.3 percent, a steep drop from the 3.5 percent rate in the previous quarter. MarketWatch reported: “The pullback in consumer spending is unlikely to last, though. Americans spent less on gasoline, home-heating fuel and clothes after a spell of unseasonably warm weather in February—the second hottest on record. That is unlikely to be repeated in the spring. More important, household finances are in the best shape in years amid record stock market gains, a strong labor market and gradually rising wages. Americans have more money to spend and that is reflected by rising home sales.”

Personal saving was $814.2 billion in the first quarter, compared with $778.9 billion in the fourth. The personal saving rate — personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income — was 5.7 percent in the first quarter, compared with 5.5 percent in the fourth.

Becoming a landlord is a tough, full-time job. If you want a passive investment, you’re much better off putting your money in the index mutual funds. Being a landlord can make a lot of money, but it requires real effort. In an article on Popular Mechanics, Tom Chiarella warns prospective landlords:

People will flush anything down a toilet. Curlers. Popsicle wrappers. Combs. I’m not saying they do it on purpose. Maybe they didn’t notice the jet-black comb on the blazingly contrasting white porcelain floor of the toilet bowl. Maybe they just flicked the handle and down it went. Accidents happen. But when you’re the one kneeling on a damp bath towel on a Wednesday afternoon, fishing around in a toilet with a thirty-foot snake, I’m telling you: You see some stuff. Poker chips. Warning labels. Handfuls of expired vitamins.

There was an afternoon when I, the landlord, stood with a plumber as he ground around for about fifteen minutes until he broke through the offending blockage. Moments later, an artichoke leaf floated up, then another, and another. Seriously: artichoke leaves.

Chiarella then offers some advice for prospective landlords.

You have to have rules. Don’t let them smoke. No candles. No parking in the alley. No oil changes in the alley. Forget animals—no dogs. No cats. Birds, lizards, and reptiles too. No signs in the window. No mattresses in the dumpster.

Don’t use the word rules. Say policy. A policy is not meant to be broken.

You are the landlord. Remember that. The lease is your best tool. At the outset of every agreement, customize the lease. Know every clause. How it works. What it means. Rewrite them regularly, even if a lawyer tells you not to. Then sit with the tenant at a bar or coffee shop and read through the whole of it before the signing. Attach addendums for clarity. State the policy. Make notes. Cross things out. Then make them initial every single thing. None of this makes the lease more binding, but it does make things clear. Clarity, I found, is a better motivator than the threat of small claims court. Clarity, plus a good security deposit.

No stories. My dad was right. Stories are trouble. Nothing good ever follows the words “I was cooking bacon under the broiler . . .” For a landlord, all stories end on a broken aquarium. Or maggots in the unplugged refrigerator. That double-pane window that “fell out” during some Halloween party. The climax of a story belongs to the tenant. The denouement is the landlord’s burden alone. And it generally involves a mop.

Drive by your property every day. Every day. Pick up stray soda bottles. There are always stray soda bottles. Come back tomorrow. You’ll see.

Lastly, Chiarella gave an important landlord advice that he received from his father. “You never let the tenant start telling a story,” he said. “That never ends well. A story always leads to an excuse or to an explanation, some reason you should give them a break.”

Kushikatsu, a Japanese dish of deep-fried skewered meat and vegetables, is common in a town where Hiroe Tanaka grew up. When her father died, he left behind a recipe for the fried meat on a stick that would change her life. The lost recipe from his dying father made Tanaka a multimillionaire.

This story seems to come straight out of a fairy book. As a child, Tanaka loved to eat kushikatsu. Her father spent countless of hours mastering this dish made by battering skewered meat and vegetables while working as a a real estate agent. To her father, cooking is an art. When Tanaka was 21, her dad passed away and left her a handwritten recipe for Kushikatsu.

Now this street food is popular for Japanese laborers. With the guidance on how to cook the seemingly simple dish, Tanaka is now a multimillionaire as a vice president of a company named after her.

“I pay tribute to my father every day,” Tanaka, 46, says in an interview. “It all happened because of the recipe.”