[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!