[W4ldi]

> Tell me how a person can "earn" enough money by doing work that produces 60,000 lifetimes worth of wealth. You can't.

By providing value or services to people which they want to spend money on. It's pretty simple actually. Though not simple in execution.

[Kapura]

Jeff Bezos had the idea of "what if we put a store online," and because he was the most successful at executing the idea of selling stuff using the computer, he deserves effectively infinity money? That seems like a super radical position, imo.

No one person has ever invented something good enough that they deserve an infinite amount of money. Maybe if somebody cures cancer some day.

[David_Axelrod]

AWS is the backbone of the internet, amazon warehouses are some of the most efficient in the world, lowering costs for everyone. People subscribe to prime in droves because of the value they get from it. Even if you zoom in to smaller assets, amazon has huge impact. Twitch brings a lot of people joy, same with kindle and even Alexa a few years ago.

"Selling stuff using the internet" probably makes you feel smart/superior but it infantilizes the company's contributions to the rest of us.

[jdmn73]

But Bezos didn't invent any of that stuff. As the other commenter said, he executed best on 'put a store on the internet' and made a bunch of money doing that. He then used that money to either acquire other businesses, like Twitch, or hire other people to invent more things, like AWS. That's the whole point of what OP's comment. Bezos took something completely reasonable for a single person to do, 'put a store on the internet' better than anyone else in the mid-90s, and used that as an entry point to reaping benefits from the ideas and the labor of hundreds of thousands of other people over decades.

[nickpp]

Yeah, if it was so easy why didn't anybody else do it?

Better yet, pick an "easy" idea from right now and go ahead and execute it. Then come back and report how "easy" it really is.

[Draiken]

Give me his parents initial investment and put me back in the days he started Amazon and I would.

Wait, I take it back. I wouldn't be able to exploit people as much as he did because I have a conscience. But I'd still be wealthy enough to live a comfortable life.

Stop glorifying luck as hard work. He was lucky. Wealthy parents and lived in a time where shopping online was not big yet.

This hard work myth is so annoying.

[nickpp]

Plenty of people willing to invest in you right now if you can manage to come up with an idea and are willing to work at it as Jeff Bezos did.

Offering people jobs which they can freely accept, reject or negociate is not exploitation.

You can glorify luck as much as you want, but hard work is the best way to maximise your "luck surface area". I've known plenty of people with countless wasted opportunities because they weren't willing to do the (hard) work.

[David_Axelrod]

You do realize you're on hackernews, a platform built by YCombinator right? You can apply with your startup just like anyone else and, if you're good enough, they'll invest half a million dollars.

I can't wait to see what you build.

[felurx]

Yeah, you're right, he was massively lucky too. But even with that, does he deserve this much wealth for this? Would he deserve this much money if executing that idea was incredibly hard?

[thunky]

Does someone deserve to make a small fortune every year pushing keys without breaking a sweat, while someone that scrubs his toilet is living check-to-check?

Unlike luck, hard work has nothing to do with it.

[randomdata]

While some businesses are able to create regulatory moats that prevents (by military force, if necessary) consumers from spending their money elsewhere, I'm not sure what stops consumers from spending their money elsewhere when it comes to Amazon? I see nothing that it offers which is meaningfully unique. Anything I have ever considered buying from Amazon is also available at the 'mom & pop' store down the street.

If consumers actively choose to trade an IOU that offers future goods or services (that's what money is) to Bezos for something Bezos is offering now, and not to you for whatever it is you are offering now, I guess he "deserves" it, no? Surely people should have autonomy in who they decide to make trades with?

[nehal3m]

Bezos is not the one you’re buying from, he just forced himself in between you and the seller. He offers nothing but a platform. Whoever you choose to trade with on Amazon, he’s there to take some off the top.

[randomdata]

Actually, access to use the platform is what you are buying. In fact, Bezos gives the products you are interested in to you for free as an incentive to buy into using his platform. He then, of course, is able to use the proceeds from you buying into using the platform to pay for the product he gave away to you for free, and keeps some for himself to justify operation of the platform.

If that particular platform doesn't interest you, why pay for it? As before, the store down the street probably sells the same thing. There is nothing I know of that Amazon sells that you can't also get somewhere else.

[earnesti]

Those people who bought his products, invested in his company or otherwise increased his wealth, thought that he deserves the money, as they got something valuable in exchange. I don't think the opinion of an unrelated party matters that much.

[monero-xmr]

If you took all of Bezos' wealth, and evenly distributed it to everyone in America, it would be about $600 per person. If instead you tried to spend it on eliminating the federal deficit, it would knock out about 5% of it.

I would rather Bezos is allowed to try and invest it in something as impactful as Amazon again. He's certainly fair likelier to do it than, say, the US government, or you yourself.

[tfourb]

I would like to see a source for the argument, that because Bezos did something highly impactful once, he is likely to do it again. His personal track record seems to be unimpressive, if you look at his other ventures. Blue Origin is the most well known, but plays a distant second fiddle to SpaceX and arguably others, none of the other companies he is personally involved in have had breakthrough success.

The same is true for other tech billionaires. They mostly have one or a couple of successes that can in any way attributed to them: Gates has Microsoft and his foundation, Musk has Tesla and SpaceX, Twitter is a clusterf*ck, Jobs has Apple, etc. etc.

My impression is that at best, even very giftet people have the opportunity to do a couple of "great things" in their lifetime and most stop after the first. The societal benefit of giving them dominion over unimaginable wealth in the hope that they'll are much more likely to come up with the next game changer is negligible. Historically, the next big innovation has mostly come from someone not yet incredibly rich (but empowered by access to capital, beneficial systems and knowledge, all often provided by the government).

[yowzadave]

This point also highlights the amount of luck that is involved in striking it super-rich. It's not that Bezos was necessarily the "best"; if that were true, the success would be more repeatable (especially given all of the advantages of incumbency/access/wealth/etc). We have decided as a society that we want there to be a small number of lottery winners, rather than a more balanced outcome for everybody.

[nickpp]

Running his first success through now (which his "wealth" pretty much entails) is plenty for us. The "everything store". His second? AWS. Third? Prime. Fourth? One-day-delivery. Bravo!

[Kapura]

[citation needed]

i don't have any fucking money, i can't invest in shit. That's the big difference between Jeff Bezos and Me.

[monero-xmr]

Bezos net worth = 152 billion https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/jeffrey-p-be...

US population = 332 million

152 billion / 332 million = $457 per person (I was over estimating!)

US debt = 33.6 trillion https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock#:~:text=The%20%2433....

152 billion / 33.6 trillion = 0.45%

Wow, I underestimated what Bezos' wealth could pay off in our national debt by an order of magnitude! It could only pay 1/10 of what I thought - only 0.45%! Incredible how much debt the US government has.

In terms of your own situation, assuming you are not disabled and are a healthy adult, then you need to start thinking longterm. Not "how can I become wealthier today", but "how can I become wealthier over 30 years?" The choices you make every day compound. You should work on a positive outlook, getting real skills, and trying to improve your situation every day.

[medvezhenok]

You used deficit the first time, debt the second.

The deficit is currently around 2 trillion dollars, so Bezos' wealth is around 7.5% of the deficit (if it were fully liquid, which it's not).

[monero-xmr]

Regardless, stealing all of Bezos' money to "help society" would accomplish very little.

[troupe]

> i don't have any fucking money, i can't invest in shit. That's the big difference between Jeff Bezos and Me.

Bezos's parents when he was born were a highschool student and a circus performer. From him to be where he is today, probably indicates there are other differences.

[suavesito]

Survivor bias, if you like.

[troupe]

How so? If I claim that the only difference between myself and my twin is that they had a 4.0 and I didn't, I'm totally missing the point that the difference is what we did--not where we started.

[gpxyz]

His parents also gave him $300,000 to start Amazon

[nickpp]

Plenty of people willing to give you right now that money if you are willing to try do what Bezos did. This very website was made by some of them, you may have heard of that.

And the fac that his parent had that money to invest in him? Another success of Capitalism.

[gpxyz]

That's awesome to hear! OK, I'm planning to start an online bookstore, and maybe we'll do some M&A down the line and expand to offering cloud services and other subscriptions. Send me a message if you're willing to give me $300,000!

[RivieraKid]

Imagine a bunch of guys start looking for oil. One guy is first to find a massive oil field because he started looking first, he's luckier, smarter and harder-working than others. If this guy wasn't born, the society wouldn't be worse off by much, the oil would still be found, but maybe few months later.

That's the type of Jeff Bezos' wealth, it's mostly "discovered" rather than earned.

[silviot]

> It's pretty simple actually

That's true. You just need to exploit your fellow humans! Make them work for you but never pay them for the full value they bring. Always pay them the least they will still accept. So you get a piece of their pie. Your position of power will allow you to do so, and people will see your position of power as "natural" and will see no problem in the exploitation.

[Gud]

No, not by "providing value". By owning a certain percentage of the value providing-machine.

[ninkendo]

And people who buy up companies, take them apart piece by piece, slash all spending, lay people off, sell the parts piece by piece, and pocket all the money? Are they providing value?

[acover]

See zombie companies in Japan.

If it improves the allocation of resources (like labor) then it provides value.

[armchairhacker]

This is true: the services companies like Amazon provide are worth more than 60,000 lifetimes of money could provide without them.

The question is: how many other people, with the wealth Jeff Bezos had when he was younger, would be able to create something like Amazon? The reason he did and not someone else, how much of that was a combination of opportunity and luck?

Capitalism is a fine system, but extremes like this are a problem. And the fact that once companies get big enough, they can start to become inefficient and worse (in price + quality), because they get benefits like lobbying and owning the entire production process which potential competitors don’t.

[comte7092]

Providing value that you are able to price.

Amazon was built on top of layers and layers of public goods that provide surplus value that Bezos and others are able to package into a product: postal services, roads, internet infrastructure, open source software, etc.

Indeed, there should be many people on this forum that understand that providing value is a relatively small part of the problem (see: any of a host of heavily used open source projects), it’s the “spend money on” part of the execution that matters.

The whole question then becomes, who actually created the value that is being paid for in this scenario?

Certainly, Bezos created a company that did many innovative things and made the correct decisions for him to win out over his competition. However, the concept of an online store wasn’t really all that novel. Such a store would have been impossible to create in the 1970s, but suddenly it became so in the 90s and there were plenty of potential competitors popping up at the same time because external conditions made it possible. Additionally, because the entire concept was new, he didn’t have to compete with an existing behemoth like Amazon is today (though of course the incumbent physical retail giants of the time shouldn’t be downplayed, nonetheless, starting an online everything store today is a very different proposition).

The issue isn’t “did Bezos create something novel and valuable”, but rather “how much value did he create, and how much did he just benefit from an existing pool of value waiting to be tapped, that was created by the rest of society”? To that end, it’s not a question of whether Bezos might “deserve” to be wealthy, but rather, how wealthy?

The consistent framing, as illustrated by your comment, is that our capitalist system inherently gives just dues to those that create value, and is often accompanied by the line that taxing the rich is “punishing success”. But the countervailing point is that it is often the case that the very rich receive outsized gains as the benefit from common resources, and they ought to pay back into that public trust in due course as they have benefitted from it the most.