[boysabr3]

I'm always in awe of Amazon's sustained growth. Bezos has built a company that has innovated constantly (after a tumultuous start in the late 90s) and at scale:

- AWS was launched in 2006 when Amazon had < 15k employees.

- Kindle was launched in late 2007 with 20k employees.

- Echo was launched in 2014 with 150k employees.

It's no surprise he's the richest in history. Will be really interesting to see how he spends his money over the next 2-3 decades.

[melling]

Would you be even more surprised to find out that he’s not the richest in history?

[boysabr3]

Nope, doesn't really matter if he's the richest or not. I think lots of companies could learn a lot from how Amazon innovates. I don't think you can deny that they are categorically better than many others at their size / scale.

[innagadadavida]

Every wealthy billionaire would have committed an "original sin". For the Kennedys it was bootlegging and insider trading, for Gates, it was anti-trust violations. All Bezos is doing is slave-driving his employees -- fairly benign and unlikely to get him into trouble.

[boysabr3]

Lots of friends at Amazon (US, IN, EU) who would categorically disagree on being slave driven. He is more aggressive and less favorable on "perks" than other companies in the bay area, but no where close to a slave driver (and no, I'm not taking you literally here).

I don't have data and so won't make a factual claim but can personally attest that work cultures can get significantly more aggressive / stressful / unreasonable at well funded + known tech companies in Asia. I don't think you realise how high up the totem pole Amazon is when it comes to work cultures and I also don't think you realise that there are many out there who like working at Amazon just because of it's work culture.

That being said, totally concede to the possibility that Amazon / Bezos _could_ have done questionable things starting up. I'm not aware of any but feel free to point them out.