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Comment by SunshineTheCat | Hacker News Reader

Take 100% of their salaries and profits and it would make a negligible, likely unnoticeable difference in this issue.

I find that hard to believe when their margins are double what they were a decade ago.

I'm not sure if there's a more sophisticated way of doing this. But just looking at revenue vs net income for 2024 suggests McDonald's operates at about a ~33% margin.

I'm not suggesting everyone would be a millionaire with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. But, to suggest America's skyrocketing inequality has nothing to do with the poor being unable to afford a burger is a bold claim to make.

Because if the wealthy are not extracting their fortunes from American companies, what then?

Sounds like a great start!

Amazon made $311B in 2024, they employ 1.5 million people.

That's $200k an employee, on top of what their regular salary is.

McDonalds made $15B and employ 150k people, that's $100k per employee.

So no, not negligible in the slightest.

Where did you get the $311B number? Because I get a net profit of $59.25B which is only 40k per employee. This assumes that the company doesn't need to keep any profit for future usage which may or may not be case depending on how big their war chest is. Not to say that 40k couldn't be life changing for many of the Amazon employee but the 311B number seems to be pulled out of thin air.

You're correct, it's wrong. I googled it, guessing AI just hallucinated that.

Are you under the impression the only expense a company has is payroll?

Profit is after costs+investments removed, not just payroll.

According to AI, they paid 5.3 billion in dividends and a have about 2 million in employees.

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