Amazon currently employs 798,000 employees. It touches essentially every household, and based on revenue and customer counts is clearly a well used service with utility for a great many people. It is valued by investors at 1660 billion dollars (1.6T market cap), and in 2020 earned revenue of 386 billion dollars. Those employees seem to feel it's a positive deal for them, and the investors certainly seem happy to value it at that amount. Not everyone is happy, but that is true of most things in my experience. They still seem happier than a lot of people at Walmart or the like.
How much would be appropriate for the person who had the vision (back before Amazon existed) to build it, pulled the right folks together, hired and fired who it took to make it work, and structured them and the work they were doing to produce that over a decade - including all the reviews and direction through good times and bad? 1%? 5%? 25%? Even 1% is 16 billion dollars. Most people would argue it should be a lot more than 5% if you stripped out the dollar amounts and the names.
The question is not just whether what was built (Amazon) is valuable, but also how valuable what would have been built had Amazon not existed. At best that will be a fraction of Amazon's market value. At worst it could actually be negative.
> How much would be appropriate... 1%? 5%? 25%?
I would argue that a flat percentage isn't the appropriate way to apportion. It should be something like 100% (spread amongst shareholders) of the first $1 million, then progressively less as you jump up in orders of magnitude such that by the time you're looking at 100's of billions it's less than 1%.
This models two things:
- The greater the value of the company, the more likely it is that this is attributable to a market flaw rather the providing of genuine societal value.
- There is a societal cost to wealth disparity (aside from political issues, it actually undermines the market mechanism). Thus as your wealth level becomes more extreme, you should have to provide more to society in order to earn the same marginal wealth gain to compensate for this cost.
How little could Bezos have been paid before he would have done something less productive than founding and running Amazon instead? Maybe millions, at most. That's how much he has earned. He's been very lucky to have the right set of talents in the right circumstances. That doesn't make him so ridiculously hard working or his job so unpleasant that he's earned billions.
How much would be appropriate for the person who had the vision (back before Amazon existed) to build it, pulled the right folks together, hired and fired who it took to make it work, and structured them and the work they were doing to produce that over a decade - including all the reviews and direction through good times and bad? 1%? 5%? 25%? Even 1% is 16 billion dollars. Most people would argue it should be a lot more than 5% if you stripped out the dollar amounts and the names.