[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.