[in0v8r]

Here’s another way to look at the staggering amount of money Jeff Bezos has made so far in 2018. Amazon has an estimated total 566,000 employees worldwide. If the company CEO decided to pass along his $40 billion in increased net worth in 2018 to his workers, each of them would get about $70,000—which is more than twice the median Amazon employee’s salary.

These statements are always ridiculous to me. There is no way he could convert $40B to cash and everything else stay the same.

[MR4D]

I think the point of that is to show an order of magnitude. He could always give his stock away on a restricted basis. Same result, right?

[MarkMMullin]

No - as the restrictions fall off, the probable number of sellers rise and the price falls - some of the current value of his holdings reflects the fact that they are not at play in the market - its the old supply/demand at work

[vec]

I think you're getting too tangled up in the specific framing device the article uses. There's no easy way for Jeff Bezos to conjure up $40B in cash to hand out as bonuses, but there are plenty of ways he could have not made that $40B in the first place.

For a dramatic example, Amazon could decide tomorrow to give the entire company a 20% raise and eat the stock price crash. They'd be fine. Jeff Bezos is prioritizing growth and shareholder value but it's entirely within his powers to prioritize other things, like paying his employees a living wage all the way down the pay scale. Amazon would be a slightly smaller and less important company with a somewhat lower share price and the world would be a better place.

When he says that he doesn't have anything other than space exploration to spend his money on what he means, in part, is there's nothing he can change without negatively impacting the metrics he cares about. The point of this argument is that he could choose to care about different metrics.

[NathanKP]

Full disclosure I am an Amazon Web Services employee. The thing to realize about Amazon is that employees (at least on the tech side) are shareholders too, and a large amount of our compensation comes in the form of Amazon stock.

Amazon salary isn't that amazing, its pretty average or perhaps a bit below average for a major tech company. As the article mentions Bezos' salary is only $80k. But the value of the stocks that you get as a tech employee is very significant, and you know that their value is only going to increase. This is why Amazon has a strong incentive to grow the stock price, its baked into the culture based on the fact that so many employees get stock as part of their total compensation package.

On the flip side if Bezos was to cause a stock price crash he'd end up with a lot of very unhappy people on the tech side in Amazon Web Services. Amazon would not be "fine" because they'd lose a lot of tech employees or have to hugely increase salaries to make up for the loss of total value. Basically my point here is that the "shareholders" who are benefiting aren't just rich people, they are also middle class tech employees like me, and probably you and most of the people here on Hacker News.

"Bezos makes $40 billion" is an attractive headline, but he wasn't the only one who made money from the growth in Amazon stock price. Lots of employees at Amazon also saw the value of their stock increase, and I don't think any of us want to see that go down.

[tnzn]

Not every employee in amazon is a well off techie.

[Turing_Machine]

> For a dramatic example, Amazon could decide tomorrow to give the entire company a 20% raise and eat the stock price crash.

Whereupon Bezos would be removed as CEO and sued into a smoking crater.