Thanks for the link. I'm a bit skeptical of that number ($700B). Intuitively, it's just a very large amount of money to hide without anyone noticing. It should be relatively easy to track down most of it.

However, after searching for follow-ups on that story, I wasn't able to find any news article saying that any significant (>$1B) amount of wealth was found. There were $664M that were frozen in Switzerland, as well as an undisclosed amount in the EU [1] (but both freezes were annulled in the meantime). Additionally, there were some properties and luxury cars he owned in Western cities [2].

All of these (and some generous extra for wealth he was able to hide) would add up to wealth in the order of billions, but most likely below $70B, and definitely below $700B.

[0] https://dailynewsegypt.com/2018/11/25/the-years-long-tale-of... [1] https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/396228/Egypt/P... [2] https://cifar.eu/6-years-later-mubaraks-billions/

Royal families and dictators are big secret. There is an ongoing mystery about lose of a $128B (yes billion!) in my countries (Turkey) CB budget which they don't talk or give any clue and it's just a recent thing. Imagine beyond this, offshore accounts and freeports.

At some point I guess you run into definitional questions around what counts as wealth or ownership. If you could seize any building in your country at will, do you own all of them? What if you could probably only size a few dozen before people started getting angry about it? Etc.

The same goes for stock, though. When we talk about billionaires, most of that money is invested somewhere. So nominally it's worth $X because it's N shares worth $Y each; but if they try to sell them all off rapidly, that would drive the price down. Finding enough buyers might also get tricky.

I sometimes think this is overrated. Bezos has as much stock as anyone but if he sold it all in the course of a year I don't think it would lose value. Musk probably would - but only so many people on the top of the list (at least I think)are in a position where there company worth would drop dramatically from the founder selling.

The real trick is using it as a collateral for loans. So yeah, this is even more complicated in practice.

That's exactly why successful companies generally have to pay more than their stock value to go private.