Bezos is in it for the long haul. He's probably the most impressive business person there is right now. Buffett and Musk are impressive in different ways.
Jeff is only worth about 50 billion dollars (only what, 4x Musk?). Plus his rocket company is only landing suborbital flights. What scrub.
Musk is more innovative in areas that matter for meaningful human progress (SpaceX as opposed to Wal-Mart 2.0), but I believe as far as "business" is concerned Bezos is on top right now.
They have different priorities. Personally I'm a Musk fanboy.
Bezos made money on Amazon before he started Blue Origin.
Plus Bezos doesn't have an obsessive internet cult worshipping him.
Tesla has ~3,000 employees
SpaceX has ~5,000
Solar City has ~13,000
PayPal has ~13,000
Total: 34,000 as they stand today which is a very generous measure since it's years after Musk left PayPal and he doesn't even work at Solar City afaik.
Amazon has ~222,000 employees, roughly 8x larger than all of those companies combined, not even counting Blue Origin, WaPo, or w/e else Bezos owns, and they did $107,000,000,000 revenue last year, slightly more than all of Musk's companies' combined value.
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...
[0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...
The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when
Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud. [2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_clo...
Unless we're enabling larger ecosystems around what they've done that creates even more. So far I'm seeing very little in terms of ecosystem around Musk's companies. On the contrary, he seems more focussed on doing exactly the opposite (like Tesla's focus on going around local car dealers).
It is not possible to be making things that nobody can afford to buy. This is because consuming or otherwise using something that already exists has no real cost. This is Say's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law ).
And Henry Ford paid his workers a high wage because he tried a low wage and had massive, business-crippling problems with employee turnover. Working on an assembly line is hell. One minute of analysis will show that it can never be more profitable to a company to sell product to its own paid workers than to just not make the product in the first place.
Today, most mainstream economists reject Say's law.
...and it would be hard to accuse mainstream economists today of all being Keynesians.
edit: <i> to asterisk
Google search enables the people and ideas that are found on the other end of it. People pay for ads to help their businesses to be found which provides value for them and helps those other business to create jobs as well as profits to investors.
Amazon also enables the people selling good through it. AWS enables a lot of people via technology and resulted in an entire ecosystem around what it does.
Tesla is making electric cars, which is great. They're employing fewer people and doing very little in the way of surrounding ecosystem. The closest thing happening there is the Powerwall home batteries that create some opportunities for electricians. They did open up the specs for batteries though and that definitely could create some type of ecosystem, but that remains to be seen.
SpaceX won't be creating an ecosystem anytime soon. Maybe one day and it's certainly worthwhile R&D but the value to society is harder to find.
I'm sure it will happen eventually, but where things stand now Bezos stands as much more accomplished.
People want a Tesla. SpaceX (and I do like this) is really open compared to Jeff SECRECY! Bezos' Blue Origin.
What do these people do? I mean, for the other companies you quoted, there are physical products to be designed, manufactured, mounted or moved, I get it. But Paypal?
I am not even touching on the foresight of AWS or his stewardship of the company in general. I think he deserves far more credit than you are giving him.
This sort of comparison is a silly thing, a hero worship kind of behaviour un-characteristic of HN. However people still want something to compare. How about instead of just being capital etc add some other measures like business risk, turning around from absolute failure, fighting david and goliath in same industry, building something that was just given up by all etc . Again these measures are subjective and there could be somebody else who may like building a steady growth or being more charitable and equitable etc.
We like to see the world and measure it up in the way its important to us. When somebody says X is the greatest person, then realise that he is measuring with the qualities he finds important.