[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.