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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

That's the power of leverage. Good for him. He is one of the greatest investors of all time, just only investing in growth of his own company.

I don't think any human needs that kind of wealth, but I also don't begrudge him of it. He earned it.

The problem with society is not that there are rich people - there always have been and always will be. It's in fact a sign of a healthy economy. If you have no inequality, it also means you have no growth or innovation - everyone is equally poor. Cuba and Soviet Russia tried to be examples of this kind of society, and few would argue they are desirable models to emulate.

The problem is rather the number of people who can't find steady employment, earn a livable wage, and take care of the basic necessities of food, shelter, and health. That does need to be addressed, and the sooner the better.

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He earned it? And what about all the people who work and worked at Amazon and built all of it?

Yes he did, he took the risks, not them. He quit his high paying job and risked his financial future by opting to start Amazon. He sacrificed endless amounts of free time and sanity to build an empire. That's why he owns a large piece of it.

You could argue that maybe the employees should have a greater share in the company, and that could be correct. Many of the early employees no doubt did. But at the end of the day, they choose to work at Amazon over somewhere else. But they didn't take the risk, if it hadn't worked out they would've moved on to the next thing without batting an eye.

A good economic system must reward successful risk taking, otherwise nobody would do it, and nobody would have jobs. Whether it needs to reward it this much is another question entirely.

We do have a mechanism for redistributing wealth to maintain to a fair society, called taxes. It just doesn't work at all if you don't earn income, but instead accumulate wealth via capital growth like Jeff Bezos.

Some countries have a small tax on wealth, e.g. 0.5% of total wealth, per year. I'm not sure how well that works.

> if it hadn't worked out they would've moved on to the next thing without batting an eye.

As would Mr Bezos; that's the point of a limited-liability corporation, he's only liable for the amount of money that he invested.

What about them? They signed a contract when choosing to work for Amazon. They can negotiate their compensation before signing. They can renegotiate after signing. If they don’t like what Amazon offers, they can go somewhere else.

It boggles my mind how much credit is given to the workers when it was Bezos who: knew how to hire the right people, started the company, provided the compensation and benefits, and has taken on the most risk.

Well, he might have taken the most risk, but let's be real, it was everyone else who did the work.

The CEO is the one who makes the most important/difficult/risky decisions and the company's fortunes rise or fall depending on how good is his or her judgement. That's called leverage.

That's why CEOs and founders are so highly compensated, they can earn their entire paycheck with one good decision. Funnily enough they don't always personally lose if they make bad decisions at the helm.

I don’t understand the value of your first sentence. It’s obvious Bezos didn’t build it by himself. No one who believes in capitalism believes that.

yet you think the workers are getting "too much credit"?

First of all, many (most) of the people who work at Amazon are not engineers or managers in a position to "negotiate", and don't have "somewhere else" to go to work and get the money they need to eat. They cannot "renegotiate after signing", which in these situations is something traditionally done via worker unions, which Bezos has worked very, very hard to disable.

Second, without the workers who, according to you, don't deserve any credit, Amazon (the entire thing) wouldn't exist. These "right people" Bezos hired were workers, and hiring them is not what built the company. "Starting a company" is not exactly hard work. And he didn't personally provide the compensation and benefits out of his own pocket (besides the first 300K "from Jeff Bezos and his family" according to Quora), it was always investors' money, or the money generated by Amazon itself (who was running thanks to these people being compensated). None of these things are usually talked about, it's just Bezos and Amazon on the news. Do you really think that "the workers" are getting too much credit, when they never get none?

In a free market, workers are always in a position to negotiate. They can always renegotiate.

Is Amazon the only employer in the USA? No. So workers always have somewhere else to go for work.

The workers credit is the compensation they agreed to when deciding to work for Amazon. Nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing special about accepting employment. That’s what the majority of people do.

“It’s just Bezos and Amazon on the news” because Bezos willed Amazon into existence, a company that brings endless value to millions of people. You are right, starting a company is not difficult, but creating a company that brings so much value is.

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