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Your "harm" by elimination based metric seems rather arbitrary. This rather big bunch of current Amazon employees, if they were cobbled together in a building before they were hired by Bezos, would they have spontaneously created the company? Most probably not. The market sees fairness and reward as proportional to actual creation. This seems just as valid as your abstract reasoning.

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> This rather big bunch of current Amazon employees, if they were cobbled together in a building before they were hired by Bezos, would they have spontaneously created the company? Most probably not

So he did something once and deserves to be paid until he steps down as if he is creating a company everyday? That doesn't seem right to me.

It's not really a metric, just an absurd example to illustrate a point. In answer to your example, I would say probably yes, but not exactly the same and it wouldn't be called Amazon. Amazon bought up and merged competitive companies on its way to success. If Amazon didn't exist, it's likely one of those, or another competitor that fell by the wayside would've taken its place. I think it's extremely unlikely that most of the hard work, good decisions, clever innovations etc that led Amazon to win can be attributed to Bezos personally, as most of the spoils have.

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