He provided more economic/productive value to the world than 100,000,000s of people.
Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.
Nope, Bezos didn't create more value than 100,000,000s of people. How could he? He started it, sure, he owns it and he directs it, but Amazon employs 341,000 people. Those are the people who generate the bulk of the value produced by the Amazon company, yet they share in very little of the value they produced. Would you say a CEO is responsible for all the value the company makes? Would you say it's fair for a feudal lord that "owns" a land to keep for himself 90% of the value his land produces while 100 people toil for 12h a day and barely have enough to eat? It's absurd. You can't defend this.
Oh yeh, because creating a startup is a breeze isn't it ? And most anyone could simply drop every commitment in their lives and like 4 years later they're rich! Why doesn't everyone do that, given they're free to do it ? Well, because they're not free to, not at all.
90% of people are strapped into financial obligations and have families. None of these people can afford to risk starting a business, even if they would be good at it and had the money, support and contacts required. Even among the usually already wealthy people who can afford to risk a startup, 90% of them fail.
What you're really saying is: if you inherited the freedom to risk creating a startup, and you are one of the lucky 10% who make it a success, then you deserve to enjoy the rewards.
Absolute nonsense. People start companies in extremely difficult positions in life and only some of them succeed. No one said it's easy.
But that doesn't change the fact that every single one of Amazon employees is free to leave the company and start their own tomorrow. You don't have to have complete financial security to be "free" to do something.
No, I just don't assume that you need to have a million dollars in your bank account to start a business. There's way too many people on HN who think that to run a startup you need investment money, offices, dozen employees, marketing campaigns etc etc.
You don't. You can start small, out of your own bedroom if you have to, and then grow from there. There's plenty of stupid advice like "if you're not making million dollars within 3 years of starting then there's no point" but it's just not true.
> 90% of people are strapped into financial obligations and have families.
So they have to prioritise what is important, if they feel that starting a business is more important, they will avoid getting financial obligations and starting a family.
This is also part of the overall risks, you might be better off just being an employee with a normal life instead of being a failed entrepreneur.
Hacker News gets about 300K unique visitors per month. That's ~0.0042% of the world population. Hardly a representative sample to make those kinds of ridiculous statements.
wait, didn't you time-travel in your argument ? You said if you feel like starting a business, go back in time and not have a family or take-on debt - may as well say they should have been born into a rich family with a good education, contacts and an inheritance to gamble with
If you are young and your inner voice is telling to work on your idea then it's better not to take debt like a house loan or an expensive car loan. Similarly tell your partner to wait for marriage/kids.
Of Course a rich kid won't have to do these sacrifices but the rich kid will probably not have the same intensity and drive as the middle class person who wants to succeed.
You're begging the question (and yes, that's proper use): why should all the rewards go to those who've taken some risk?
What of the risks taken by others? Are there uncompensated risk-bearing activities?
Are there activities with low risk but high return?
Suppose, say, dropping a drill bit next to the guy who's just blown in a gusher? Or securing control of the pipelines, railroads, and refineries by which that oil must make its way to market?
What risks do employees take, they are getting a salary. If they are not happy they can leave and get another job. The founder has to put everything in it, his money, time, relationships, reputation. This is not "some risk", he cannot just walk away.
What prevents a founder from walking away and getting a job exactly?
I did it, so I know it can be done.
Founders reap rewards of their risk-taking almost immediately, and it accelerates exponentially from there.
This really cuts to a major point of contention in modern politics - exaggerated pity party for the hardships of the most powerful people in society.
It is a privilege to take such risks, and if you are in doubt, go get a soul-crushing treadmill job and watch the fruits of your labour flow elsewhere.
> What prevents a founder from walking away and getting a job exactly?
He/she can do that but the sacrifices are greater compared to just being an employee.
> go get a soul-crushing treadmill job and watch the fruits of your labour flow elsewhere
I am from India, I have seen abject poverty. I know it's a privilege to take such risks, my original point was focussed more on HN demographics not the poor people who I know cannot take such risks. Poor people who cannot take such risks is a totally different conversation
Of late, employee risks include being on the short side of an extremely unbalanced power relationship. This includes unilateral and eternal NDAs, claims on all work, non-competes (including in such "industries" as sandwich shops, hairstyling, and auto repair), drugs tests (which risk drugs convictions), and more.
Jobs mobility may be limited by blacklists or other forms of discrimination: H1-B visas or other immigration status, social, religious, gender/sex, issues (not legally, in most cases, but de-facto), and more.
Employees are committing just as much of their fungible time, and often appreciably all of their available resources, which for roughly half the population net out to roughly zero. Figures I've seen suggest that about that number could not come up with $500 - $2000 (amount varies) on a 1-2 week notice -- that's far less than the amount required for, say, a business-appropriate wardrobe, transit or transport access, apartment deposit, and a month's food.
And that's within the US/EU/AU/JP/UK. It's considerably worse in much the rest of the world.
What risk? That they'd spend money on something that made them no/less money?
Other than their initial investments business owners are protected from almost all the risks their businesses take on. Company debts aren't personal debts and individuals can't be forced to work to repay the debts they cause the business to take on. Worse still these safety nets aren't paid for as these companies don't make a profit.
Whilst I won't discount the work Bezos has done the reason he's come out 1000s of times better off than other Amazon workers is because of his initial gamble.
It's not like the workers don't take on risks either. Almost all paid work is paid after the fact. If your employer goes bust you don't get paid
In what way do employees not also take all of those risks?
The degree of risk might be different but employees are also betting on the success of your business.
You only have to look at the recent US election to see that people are taking all these risks.
Whilst I imagine a lot of people on HN see these risks as negligible they do still exist and it can go wrong.
> If you believe in your idea get a loan from family, friends or banks or get a high paying job save money and then start your business.
I don't understand if this is supposed to be a joke or you are really that sheltered and clueless. Just get a loan from your family and get started? You are aware that for the vast, vast, vast majority of people this is not an option that's available to them, right? Get a high paying job and save money? Jesus Christ, but how?? How do you do that if there are no such jobs for you, either because of your location or because of your lack of education? Surely you would tell a 14 year old working 12h a day making cheap sneakers in Bangladesh to either ask his parents for money or to save his 0.25$ an hour salary and start a company, without an education. After all, this is perfectly feasible and if you don't so it you deserve to stay poor.
You are comparing apples to oranges, my comment was for people who visit HN not for poor people in US or elsewhere. I agree poor people cannot afford to take such risks.
Someone working in a fulfillment center making ~40-50K each year won't be able to put together 100K capital to risk, even with family and friends.
A large portion of HN readers are entrepreneurs, a lot of stories here tell the tale of failure, the burden and how to bear it. Yes it's not easy.
And then there are people for the "not easy" is virtually impossible. Because they can't even start a business with any chance to succeed.
I'm not saying, that because of this Bezos should give more to the employees, but it'd be good if these inherent inequalities were better managed by society.
Yes, he did. This value doesn't come from all the "monkey" jobs that most of his employees do. It comes from the ability to produce ideas and making them happen by managing that 341,000 people. You completely underestimate the value of directing a company like Amazon.
Except Jeff Bezos doesn't produce those ideas, or make them happen, or directly manage 341,000 people.
All of that is done by his employees. The ideas, the innovation and the execution are done by people other than him, while the credit and most of the value they create is taken by him.
Imagine I find a way to create bread from thin air and don't tell anyone else how to do it. Assume the value of a loaf of bread to a consumer is 1 dollar. I sell 100 loaves for 99 cents each, because that's what the market will bear. How much money have I made? 99 dollars. How much value have I created for everyone else? 1 dollar.
Now imagine instead I give away 100 loaves for free. How much value have I created for everyone else? 100 dollars. How much money have I made? Zero.
Do you now see the problem with estimating a person's usefulness to society by looking at their net worth?
That's not really how consumer surplus works. Just because "the market will bear" a certain price, does not mean the value to a given buyer is that price. In reality, there are probably some who really do only value the loaf at $1, but others would be willing to pay $1.10, $1.20, or even more before the transaction was no longer break-even. You might make an attempt to capture this surplus as well (this is called price discrimination), but it's notoriously difficult to do with commodities.
Also, there is no actor in the world economy who is having an effect like your metaphorical bread-give-away-er. So while it might hypothetically have been better if someone had built Amazon out of the goodness of their heart and operated at cost to all users, that is not one of the alternatives we have to decide between. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such altruists are out there waiting in the wings. If anything, they'd have a competitive advantage, if they did exist, because they'd be able to offer lower prices.
That's a fantasy. An analogy taken too literally. People lionize John Galts and imagine that they are their organizations. They aren't. Just because he started it and called the shots doesn't mean he literally is Amazon. That's a fanciful way of thinking and it's disastrous for us mortals to take it literally. Amazon is all the people working there, who, while well-paid compared to all the other serfs, actually get a paltry share of the fortune they generate collectively.
Very complicated systems, like computer hardware and software systems, particularly services and distributed systems, do have this un-intuitive property of amplifying competence differences.
healthcare.gov is one visible and notable example where thousands of "trained and certified professionals" made a huge mess, and like 10 volunteers from silicon valley cleaned it up.
You could hire 100000 or 200000 such contracted professionals and the value produced would be even lower. Sure, most of the blame is with the management structure, which the ~10 volunteers bypassed and overrode. But the results stand. A few people in the right place can produce more value than orders of magnitude more people doing the wrong thing for whatever reason.
EDIT to better address your point: very few people could have done as well as Bezos in his position. Take any of the CEOs HP has had in the last decade, put them at the head of Amazon, and it would have done a lot worse. Put them all there, it would have done worse. Bezos gets a huge value multiplier for practical reasons.
I never said he "was amazon". I am talking about his contribution to amazon.
All those "serfs" are not really risking their own personal wealth. They take home their pay win or lose for amazon. They are not serfs. They are getting paid for their work.
That's not about what he did do or did not do. In reality there's no concept of "fair pay" or "just earnings". In fact, Bezos doesn't even matter, personally. What matters is that he owns an asset (Amazon) that appreciated in value. Obviously, his "net worth" is tied to this holding. It appreciated because it provided desirable services.
Now, preventing it can be done in two ways, and only two ways - either limit Amazon's appreciation in value (curb the company), or limit the person's holding in Amazon, meaning that if you started as a founder of a company having 50% of the total shares, your holdings will decline as the company's worth rises. Does this seem reasonable to you?
This isn't thinking far enough outside the tiny box of this specific economic order at this specific point in history. For example, we could have co-ops instead of corps.
The vast majority of businesses fail, and many businesses go through cycles where they make less money than they spend. How can the average person take on the risk of not getting paid for years? One year of non-profitability would be a death sentence for a co-op if people can't get paid and flee.
A corporation allows the average person to get paid while someone else takes on a risk with their money.
I don't think money is a good proxy for "adding utility to people's lives". It's a good proxy for "good at playing the money game". A nurse won't be paid $1B if she saves a CEO's life, and he is able to go and make his company billions as a result. A clever business person might, if she saves the CEO in some other aspect, as she can setup a provision first.
That being said, I don't think money has much to do with merit, either. It's just the output of a function that you are either good at optimizing or not.
Not saying that what you are implying is wrong, but empirically speaking working hard/relative merit do not correlate to proportionate monetary rewards in our current system. The idea of a pure meritocracy is an interesting one, I wonder what some of the outcomes would be.
I don't think that's the entirely the case. True it's not zero sum, but it's not free either. There is absolutely wealth transfer. For example, if he were poor, many middle class Seattle residents would have far more purchasing power in their current real estate market. Amazon have expanded rapidly and transplanted most of the cogs who are building the Bezos empire.
The many displaced multi-generational residents of Seattle and San Francisco might not refer to this phenomenon as beautiful.
Perils of capitalism in it's absolute form. We celebrate these people for becoming rich and we will celebrate again for giving back their money like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
