[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.

[Draiken]

A few, sure. But plenty?

Even inside the US, that's a very small niche that's present mostly in a few places like in SV, Seattle and NY (I'm sure there are a few more, but you get my point).

The startup world is more about connections than hard work or competence. How many ridiculous startups get money because they have connections with VCs? How many very good ideas never get funding because they aren't in that circle? How many startup founders are 2, 3, 4 startups in and keep failing up? And those who can't bring those ideas to life because they work 2 jobs to sustain their families?

There's more than an order of magnitude of hard working people that will never even get a chance of becoming billionaires compared to the lucky few that were in the right place, at the right time, with access to resources and sometimes were even hard workers (this one is not required, despite the myth).

Meanwhile I've met many incompetent people that hardly work and are still successful business owners and millionaires because... they were already rich.

It's how the world works today. Maybe it'll always be like this, but I like to think we can change it.

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

Yes, it is if you're the only shop in town. If you can't leave the poverty treadmill because you can barely afford rent after working these ridiculously low salaries. I could go on.

I find it appalling how so many assume that people working in the Amazon warehouses are full of opportunities everywhere and they choose to work there, so they can't complain. I know we're mostly software engineers that are well paid but we could make an effort and put ourselves in their shoes for a second, couldn't we?

No, it's not black and white like your comment is claiming it is, and it never will be.

There's a big difference between choosing to pay the lowest amount possible without having people literally starve to death and a decent living wage. There's still a ton of exploitation that turns into profit for the few at the top, but they could at the very least treat people like... people.

If Bezos (or any other billionaire) chose to reduce their profits a few percent points, they'd already be able to provide a much better life for all of their employees. In my book, even putting the profit debate aside (exploitation of labor), that's exploitation in the moral sense too.

[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.

[gpxyz]

And letting Bezos continue stealing money from his employees is more beneficial to society?

[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!

[nickpp]

First, I would suggest you select an idea which is not a verbatim copy of a tech giant of today. Do the due diligence and ask yourself: what is your unique value proposition? What are you gonna compete on? How are you gonna differentiate? How are you gonna reach your prospective customers?

Then how are you gonna use the money I give you in your business to grow it 10x in an about 5-10 years time frame so I can get my investment back? Put together a plan. Call it a "business plan" and put it in writing.

Jeff Bezos had to answer these kinds of questions (and many, harder ones) before he got his first investment. What seems to you as an obvious, trivial idea today was a novel, risky approach 30 years ago.

He did the work and that is why he's rich. We are here commenting on an investor's forum instead and that is why we are... what we are.