[k_kelly]

People shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird.

Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans.

Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise.

I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.

[vmaurin]

Money is not a good success metric https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html

Bezos is making a lot of money. But it doesn't mean it makes the world better. Prime or AWS can still work fine without having Bezos making tons of money

[FpUser]

Few big dicks take over everything and as the result they buy media, they buy government / laws, and having less and less competition they also have way too much power over the employees. All for convenience of overnight delivery? Are you sure this can not be achieved without Amazon? And what are you going to do if Google, Amazon, whatever else that controls good chunk of your life cuts you off?

No fuck it.

[gambiting]

>>People shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird

I mean I know(at the back of my head) that HN is owned by Y Combinator which is all about creating startups that explode and make you a billionaire. But personally I come here for the actual hacking - gameboy games running on a pregnancy test, that kind of thing. Bezos making more money than GDP of a small country in a day is a thing that kinda deserves us shaking our fists at it - it means the global system is broken, if one man can have this kind of power. But in a way, it's nothing new - emperors and khans had more riches than any current billionaire, comparatively. On the other hand, they were actual rulers, not just "regular" citizens.

[dudefeliciano]

People licking Bezos, Musk, Thiel & co's arse on "hacker" news is more weird IMHO

[soerxpso]

"hacker" news is owned and operated by a large and wealthy venture capital firm

[dudefeliciano]

we all know, pehaps they should give up the name and call it vcnews, since so many people get triggered when hacker topics are discussed here.

[altern8]

Same here.

I don't get the outrage. Our system needs incentives to get people to do great work. If you do one-of-a-kind work, shouldn't you get rewarded proportionally?

There is 1 Amazon. It's not easy to create Amazon from scratch.

[gambiting]

>> If you do one-of-a-kind work, shouldn't you get rewarded proportionally?

Are you allowed to think that the reward that Bezos is reaping isn't proportional to his achievements?

[altern8]

You are.

Who should decide what's proportional, though? Should there be a committee that says, Bezos is capped at X billions, and any money he makes after that gets confiscated?

[wiseowise]

There should be a committee that says if you have wealth in billions you should pay proportionally more in taxes than common populace.

[bpt3]

Good thing the US already has the most progressive tax code in the developed world, and what you described above already happens.

[altern8]

Why punish success..?

[dudefeliciano]

Taxes are not a punishment, a person earning exponentially more than the average person can also afford to pay more taxes, and it will not even begin to affect their quality of life. How is that so hard to understand?

If you don't want to pay taxes i take it you don't want to live in a civilized society, then you are welcome to leave.

[wiseowise]

I’m having serious trouble taking your comments as not a trolling attempt.

[dudefeliciano]

> Who should decide

How about a government that acts for the good of the people, rather than for the companies?

> gets confiscated?

funny way to refer to taxation

[gambiting]

I don't know, but societies seem to determine these kinds of things just fine through democratic processes, usually - why is the tax system where I live structured such that everything below 100k is taxed at 40% but everything above is at 60%? How is that any different? These are just numbers we came up with.

And yeah, I don't have the answer to what the number is for people like Bezos. Maybe there isn't one - maybe he can own whatever amount of money he likes, but every person with wealth above 1BN is banned forever for making politican donations, either personally or through proxies. Enjoy your life with your hard earned money, do whatever you like - but don't use it to influence politics.

Again, I'm not seriously suggesting this - just saying that as societies we determine many things which are right for the greater whole already, why not this? And I really want the answer to be "because we haven't sat down to think about it yet" and not "because Mr Bezos gave us 100M last year for our campaign we so won't be looking into it".

[altern8]

Sure, so influencing politics with money should be outlawed (or perhaps it is already..?). Why not.

That's not the type of conversations I hear, though (including from you). People always seem to focus on punishing people that are more successful. And that can only happen by force, where somebody has to decide what you can and cannot do and then steal whatever you lawfully earned.

[wiseowise]

> proportionally

What is proportional? Shall we crown him god? Allow him to keep slaves? Put him on a pedestal? Do you even know how much is it: a billion? If you strip him off 95% of his wealth, he’ll still have more than you can achieve in your 10 lives. He is disproportionately well compensated.