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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

The monetary award corresponding to the Nobel Prize is only 0.0005% of the net worth of Jeff Bezos.

The societal value of Amazon must be huge ...

Would I argue that the societal value of Amazon is actually huge (AUC-wise). Amazon positively impacts all of it's employees, consumers as well as other companies (my company wouldn't exists if AWS hadn't paved the wave for cheap cloud computing).

Anyway, it is certainly a mistake to equate generating socieltal value with financial gains. In many settings there is a strong positive correlation (Amazon IMO), others where it's weak (research) and yet others where it's negative (drug dealing).

That’s sort of an absurd comparison. Some rich guy 125 years ago…

Anyway, it would be great, however, if society (we!) did value science, research, etc much more.

We could collectively decide to cure cancer(s).

We could collectively decide to create a better material than plastic.

We could collectively decide to create better batteries so renewables become more feasible.

We could collectively develop safer nuclear power…

We could do such much more..

> That’s sort of an absurd comparison.

Making the comparison would be absurd only if the difference in payoff wasn't so absurd.

it's a bad idea to compare cash to a number in a computer which estimate share value (taking future cash flow into account)

What? Besos can sell his stocks in a few months and turn it into cash. Even if he can't sell everything, let's say he can "only" get 50B in a few months. Eventually he will be able to sell it all if he wants to, there are buyers. Even his ex wife is now one of the richest women in the world so...

That’s a specious comparison. Nobody awarded Bezos his wealth.

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