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