Absolutely. Did this person work more or does he have more merit than 100.000.000s of people? It's absurd.
Idk about "working hard" or "merit" because who cares if someone has to work super hard for 2 days to produce the same results another person can produce in 10 minutes.
Those employees are free to start their own companies. If you take the risk of starting a business then you should get the rewards if it succeeds.
90% of people are strapped into financial obligations and have families. None of these people can afford to risk starting a business, even if they would be good at it and had the money, support and contacts required. Even among the usually already wealthy people who can afford to risk a startup, 90% of them fail.
What you're really saying is: if you inherited the freedom to risk creating a startup, and you are one of the lucky 10% who make it a success, then you deserve to enjoy the rewards.
But that doesn't change the fact that every single one of Amazon employees is free to leave the company and start their own tomorrow. You don't have to have complete financial security to be "free" to do something.
You don't. You can start small, out of your own bedroom if you have to, and then grow from there. There's plenty of stupid advice like "if you're not making million dollars within 3 years of starting then there's no point" but it's just not true.
So they have to prioritise what is important, if they feel that starting a business is more important, they will avoid getting financial obligations and starting a family.
This is also part of the overall risks, you might be better off just being an employee with a normal life instead of being a failed entrepreneur.
Of Course a rich kid won't have to do these sacrifices but the rich kid will probably not have the same intensity and drive as the middle class person who wants to succeed.
What of the risks taken by others? Are there uncompensated risk-bearing activities?
Are there activities with low risk but high return?
Suppose, say, dropping a drill bit next to the guy who's just blown in a gusher? Or securing control of the pipelines, railroads, and refineries by which that oil must make its way to market?
What risks do employees take, they are getting a salary. If they are not happy they can leave and get another job. The founder has to put everything in it, his money, time, relationships, reputation. This is not "some risk", he cannot just walk away.
I did it, so I know it can be done.
Founders reap rewards of their risk-taking almost immediately, and it accelerates exponentially from there.
This really cuts to a major point of contention in modern politics - exaggerated pity party for the hardships of the most powerful people in society.
It is a privilege to take such risks, and if you are in doubt, go get a soul-crushing treadmill job and watch the fruits of your labour flow elsewhere.
He/she can do that but the sacrifices are greater compared to just being an employee.
> go get a soul-crushing treadmill job and watch the fruits of your labour flow elsewhere
I am from India, I have seen abject poverty. I know it's a privilege to take such risks, my original point was focussed more on HN demographics not the poor people who I know cannot take such risks. Poor people who cannot take such risks is a totally different conversation
Sunk cost fallacy.
Jobs mobility may be limited by blacklists or other forms of discrimination: H1-B visas or other immigration status, social, religious, gender/sex, issues (not legally, in most cases, but de-facto), and more.
Employees are committing just as much of their fungible time, and often appreciably all of their available resources, which for roughly half the population net out to roughly zero. Figures I've seen suggest that about that number could not come up with $500 - $2000 (amount varies) on a 1-2 week notice -- that's far less than the amount required for, say, a business-appropriate wardrobe, transit or transport access, apartment deposit, and a month's food.
And that's within the US/EU/AU/JP/UK. It's considerably worse in much the rest of the world.
Other than their initial investments business owners are protected from almost all the risks their businesses take on. Company debts aren't personal debts and individuals can't be forced to work to repay the debts they cause the business to take on. Worse still these safety nets aren't paid for as these companies don't make a profit.
Whilst I won't discount the work Bezos has done the reason he's come out 1000s of times better off than other Amazon workers is because of his initial gamble.
It's not like the workers don't take on risks either. Almost all paid work is paid after the fact. If your employer goes bust you don't get paid
Financial, health, relationships, reputation, opportunity are some of the risks.
Are you saying that an employee getting a salary has the same risks as an entrepreneur?
Whilst I imagine a lot of people on HN see these risks as negligible they do still exist and it can go wrong.
The degree of risk is completely different. We can keep on arguing but there are some things you will only understand when you take the leap yourself.
Starting and running a successful business is not easy which is why the rewards should go to the risk taker.
I don't understand if this is supposed to be a joke or you are really that sheltered and clueless. Just get a loan from your family and get started? You are aware that for the vast, vast, vast majority of people this is not an option that's available to them, right? Get a high paying job and save money? Jesus Christ, but how?? How do you do that if there are no such jobs for you, either because of your location or because of your lack of education? Surely you would tell a 14 year old working 12h a day making cheap sneakers in Bangladesh to either ask his parents for money or to save his 0.25$ an hour salary and start a company, without an education. After all, this is perfectly feasible and if you don't so it you deserve to stay poor.
It's frightening.
A large portion of HN readers are entrepreneurs, a lot of stories here tell the tale of failure, the burden and how to bear it. Yes it's not easy.
And then there are people for the "not easy" is virtually impossible. Because they can't even start a business with any chance to succeed.
I'm not saying, that because of this Bezos should give more to the employees, but it'd be good if these inherent inequalities were better managed by society.
I am not talking about the people making ~40-50K each year. I am talking about the software engineers in Amazon.
Creating a better managed society is a complete different conversation.
All of that is done by his employees. The ideas, the innovation and the execution are done by people other than him, while the credit and most of the value they create is taken by him.
Now imagine instead I give away 100 loaves for free. How much value have I created for everyone else? 100 dollars. How much money have I made? Zero.
Do you now see the problem with estimating a person's usefulness to society by looking at their net worth?
Also, there is no actor in the world economy who is having an effect like your metaphorical bread-give-away-er. So while it might hypothetically have been better if someone had built Amazon out of the goodness of their heart and operated at cost to all users, that is not one of the alternatives we have to decide between. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that such altruists are out there waiting in the wings. If anything, they'd have a competitive advantage, if they did exist, because they'd be able to offer lower prices.
healthcare.gov is one visible and notable example where thousands of "trained and certified professionals" made a huge mess, and like 10 volunteers from silicon valley cleaned it up.
You could hire 100000 or 200000 such contracted professionals and the value produced would be even lower. Sure, most of the blame is with the management structure, which the ~10 volunteers bypassed and overrode. But the results stand. A few people in the right place can produce more value than orders of magnitude more people doing the wrong thing for whatever reason.
EDIT to better address your point: very few people could have done as well as Bezos in his position. Take any of the CEOs HP has had in the last decade, put them at the head of Amazon, and it would have done a lot worse. Put them all there, it would have done worse. Bezos gets a huge value multiplier for practical reasons.
All those "serfs" are not really risking their own personal wealth. They take home their pay win or lose for amazon. They are not serfs. They are getting paid for their work.
Now, preventing it can be done in two ways, and only two ways - either limit Amazon's appreciation in value (curb the company), or limit the person's holding in Amazon, meaning that if you started as a founder of a company having 50% of the total shares, your holdings will decline as the company's worth rises. Does this seem reasonable to you?
A corporation allows the average person to get paid while someone else takes on a risk with their money.
That being said, I don't think money has much to do with merit, either. It's just the output of a function that you are either good at optimizing or not.
A nurse will be paid a substantial sum if she is one of very few that can save the CEO's life.
Bezos making billions doesnt mean that the money was taken from someone else in the sense that that person cannot have it anymore.
The opposite is also true. If he was poor it doesn't mean that I would have more money.
Value creation is a weird but beautiful thing.
The many displaced multi-generational residents of Seattle and San Francisco might not refer to this phenomenon as beautiful.