What is the alternative? For people not to own the things they create?
He doesn’t seem to like unions, which in principle would ensure his big powerful corporation was being fair to the labour force.
The problem: there is no risk.
Even if you go completely bankrupt, you still can get a simple job like everybody else.
The only way this would be fair if the risk was losing $171.6B in case of failure.
Bezos came from a privileged background. What was the big risk involved that makes his current level of success so sacrosanct? It's not like he'd be thrown in jail (or worse) if the company had failed. He would have moved on and started a different company or gotten another 6+ figure job.
I may "own my home", but I still have to pay property tax on it.
Bezos owns 11% of Amazon which means over a trillion dollars in value is shared by other people who own pieces of Amazon.
Just look at some great FOSS projects: Linux, GCC, ...
He didn’t create all of that, he led and directed the efforts of others, who could’ve earned more form their blood, sweat, and tears if he had not.
This is not to deny he’s a smart, highly complement business leader whose management skills acted as a force multiplier that means it was Amazon rather than, say, Walmart, who is the dominant online retailer.
It’s just that saying he deserves all of that $171 billion seems as wrong to me as saying he deserves none of it.
Is it any surprise then that a lucky few who forgo cash in favor of worthless pieces of paper become super rich after the stock rises?
1. https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-criticized-ending-wareh...
And depending on your role at amazon, you get equity.
Imagine is 98% of net worth was in your home. You can't mortgage that without giving up control. This is why even Bill Gates really only started being truly philanthropic at a grand scale once he had decided to relinquish control in Microsoft and pursue his philanthropic endeavors. It was only at that point was he free to do something with that wealth.
We would all be better off letting Bezos build wealth and then tax it at the end. There's going to be a lot more tax money to work if you tax at the end of the prosperity.
To steal a cliché from a different sector, I believe that when a corporation is “too big to fail” is becomes a threat to the governments which it operates under and the societies which it operates in. There are many ways to manage this risk, and I am not qualified to study their pros and cons — taxation is a simple solution, and I will accept that simple solutions are probably bad solutions. This does not mean that there are no better solutions.
Obviously all the past and present employees created those products, many of which are based on, or dependent on research funded by govt, and also enabled/reliant on a stable society, rule of law, an educated workforce and customer base, transport networks, electric grids, and all kinds of other infrastructure.
The social bargain here is that successful companies then pay back those external govt/societal costs with taxes.
Except in this case ...
Jeff deserves a lot of credit for building Amazon; it is now a $1.44T company. But $171B is 12% of that, which for a single person is a lot. Maybe the other million+ people who helped Jeff build Amazon received a smaller share than they deserved?
I'm just asking what kind of guardrails if any might be appropriate moving forward now that we can see for ourselves how the current system is working for everyone.