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Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

How many of the decisions that determined whether Amazon would become worth >$1T or yet another mediocre web store were made by warehouse workers? Jeff is primarily responsible for Amazon's success. For making Amazon what it is, him being worth ~10% of the whole company is a totally reasonable compensation

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He's entitled to more than your average amazon employee, warehouse worker, and probably any other employee: YEAH sure. But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker. I'm merely making an argument that it's hard to objectively determine how much more one employee is entitled to the corporations stock pie than another based on merit. Amazon and it's 800,000 employee base built Amazon into the >$1T behemoth it became due simply to the fact one man can't do it alone. A lot of those employees may not have been able to make the important decisions that Jeff Bezos was able to, but they instead contributed blood and sweat. I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself. By that metric he is overcompensated and others are under.

>simply being a decision maker.

This right here shows you don't understand what it takes to make a trillion dollar company.

They were a book seller that eventually expanded into an online Walmart, that ended up becoming the largest cloud provider in the world.

Just look at Borders/Barne's and Noble if you want to see two companies that were actually in a better position in the same industry 25 years ago. That's the difference between 'simply a decision maker' and an average CEO.

> I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself.

This is actually just false. He essentially just proved you could. [0]

[0] Reality

It’s not like he gets a $207B salary. That’s the worth of the equity that has increased over time.

He literally has a percentage of the company and it’s increased in value.

So he’s not paid such an astronomical salary. His salary was about $1.6M [0] as his fortune comes through his stock in founding the company.

I agree that it would be absurd to pay someone $1B, but it’s odd complaining that his assets shouldn’t appreciate in value.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/much-does-jeff-bezos-per-143450179.ht...

> But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker

> I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself

Being 1000x smarter or more productive isn't why Amazon is with >$1T though, and saying "simply being the decision maker" is very dismissive of the hardest part of his job.

I think it's likely that there were a few (Maybe tens) of key decision that largely determined Amazons trajectory. If Bezos was wrong on those, no >$1T company. That's why he's worth 1000x more.

Sure, employees didn't have the chance to make those decisions themselves but why does that matter? Opportunity will never be equally distributed. Bezos happened to flip 20 heads in a row, and got to reap the rewards.

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