[QuixoticQuibit]

So Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (and other stupidly rich executives) created hundreds of billions of dollars of value themselves?

Of course not. They got their through exploitation. Any profit that a business has is value not being paid back to the actual workers who created the value of the company through their labor.

Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.

[jurassic]

If your skill is moving boxes onto a delivery truck your work is not more useful/valuable as part of Amazon than at a small traditional company with no scalable internet components. The excess value in these companies should flow to those who took risks to set them in motion and continue leading them. Asserting this ownership premium is theft is pretty ridiculous on the face of it.

Also, imagine if the guy loading trucks for Amazon did make 100x more money just because he’s connected to a high-growth internet company. The economy would be thrown into chaos because no logistics workers would be willing to do less remunerative but essential work like unloading food at the grocery store without substantial wage increases that get passed to the consumer as higher food/gas/delivery prices. Many sectors without productivity growth would get annihilated by Baumol’s cost disease, and consumers would have to spend a much larger share of their income on anything that is trucked around (which is basically everything we buy).

[nickpp]

> Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.

Of course. However, some of us had had a positive impact on the society measurable in Trillions, usually through ideas and entrepreneurship. It is preferably for us a society to encourage such endeavors.

Neither Bezos nor Musk have created that value by themselves. They did it together with investors, partners, employees and clients, all of whom were rightly and fairly compensated and became better because of it.

The only unhappy are those who did not participate to any of it, but they have no right to complain, just envy.

[maverick-iceman]

> The only unhappy are those who did not participate to any of it, but they have no right to complain, just envy.

What is right or wrong is just semantics, in reality a mob with pitchforks doesn't care about semantics.

Humans have forced the redistribution of resources concentrated in few hands since the beginning of time

As an entrepreneur the quality of life you provide to people has a really short shelf life, as soon as the hedonistic treadmill adjusts , people start looking at the monetary reward that the entrepreneur got for providing such quality of life...and all of a sudden they think it's not fair because hedonistic treadmill made that monetary reward becomes excessive in retrospect.

Bezos critics have been using Amazon in the current form ever since the early 2010s now, and Amazon rate of innovation has dropped, so hedonistic treadmill did catch up and now they want Bezos head.

Same thing happened with Microsoft. The transition from 3.1 to Win95 was something which shocked the whole world, people were talking about honorary President Bill Gates.

Rate of innovation slowed down from Win95 to Win98 and all of a sudden people began looking at Bill Gates 150B wealth back in 1999 and pressure mounted to break up Microsoft and arrest Bill Gates and expropriate his wealth