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I think this challenges us to consider two questions:

1) Does he deserve this money based on the things he did?

2) Should any one person, regardless of how much they deserve it, hold this much wealth?

This comments section shows that people disagree strongly about both #1 and #2.

But I think even if you answer YES to #1, you can still build a reasonable case that the answer to #2 should be NO.

And if that's the case, I don't think the resentment comes from the fact that he's got all this money and didn't properly earn it. Instead, it comes from the fact that when you have one person with this nearly unfathomable amount of wealth (and power), there are a lot of second- or third-order consequences that are undesirable.

I am a distributist, of the classical type represented by G.K. Chesterton, and believe that society works best when the ownership of productive property is widely distributed. That doesn't mean I believe in robinhoodism (i.e. forcible redistributions of wealth), but that concentrated ownership is to be avoided, and public policy should reflect this.

What's great about the free market is that your and my concept of "deserving" is irrelevant. We can have totally opposing moral compasses and intellectual opinions on all manner of topics, but the buyers determine who deserves what. And the market determined he deserved it. If you want that money, you make a better product in the market.

I think that's what drives leftists crazy - that no matter how much they hem and haw, they can't force the market to bend to their own version of morality. If you want to dethrone amazon, then create something better that free people choose with their own wallets.

The concept of the free market does not exist in modern American society. Free market relies on the concept of supply and demand being the sole basis of an economic system. Amazon's lobbying efforts to congress. Strongarm tactics for establishing warehouses in small towns with promises of high pay (effectively forcing a large population of a towns workforce to leave local jobs, building a reliance on Amazon within that community as few other businesses can provide what Amazon provides).

Amazon has the money and the power to bend the market to their own will. That's not a free market. They have the supply, and they'll force your demand to them one way or another.

You are following absolutist thinking. There are indeed aspects that make America not a perfect free market. But is a free-er market than any other large developed economy. I purchase from Amazon, as well as many other web and brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon does not force me at gunpoint to buy from them.

I don't understand why building a warehouse in a small town, where people voluntarily start to work for them (presumably by offering better pay, working conditions, and opportunity) is a bad thing. You have a zero-sum, incorrect understanding of market forces and how the economy works.

Because the idea of free market capitalism, in the way Amazon lobbies for, is detrimental to the common good of the people. Which, per our own Constitution, is supposed to be the primary focus of our government.

Free market capitalism (specifically Amazon's method) significantly results in market dominance, a macro-economic reliance on that company succeeding, and reduces social mobility among working class Americans.

Market Dominance: Amazon has, in basic terms, brought upon the Walmart Effect throughout the US. And exacerbates the effect within the small towns where they build their warehouses.

Macro-Economic Reliance: As Amazon employs 1.1m Americans, the macro-economics of America have become reliant on Amazon succeeding. Resulting in a fear, or at least a trepidation, in interfering with whatever Amazon wants to do. The threat of mass layoffs due to any state/local/federal regulations would have profound effects of the American economy. Something that, back when free market capitalism was seen as the most equal way to ensure competition, was not possible, and most likely not even conceived as being likely.

Reduction in Social Mobility: Building off of the Market Dominance bit, this reduction in wages and revenue for small businesses/local businesses reduces the ability of everyday American citizens to build a successful business to provide social mobility for them and their children. And for employees, yes, they make great money working at an Amazon factory. But talk to many Amazon employees and they'll tell you it's grueling, backbreaking work. And when they have enough and decide to quit or are fired there are, typically, no jobs in their local area that either pay that well or that they may qualify for.

I'm not saying Amazon is forcing you at gunpoint to buy from them. I'm saying that Amazon, due to our government's failure to intervene earlier on in their growth, has crafted the free market around them, has made it to where it's more difficult/annoying/impossible to not buy from them.

They have the best product. It is not illegal to compete with them - anyone can start a warehouse or a web-based store, or a cloud hosting provider, or a last-mile logistics firm, and on and on. And there are tons of competitors. People choose Amazon because it is the best, hands down.

It’s not impossible to not buy from them. It’s quite easy not to. You just choose to do so, because they are the best.

But then whoever successfully creates a company that replaces Amazon will be wealthy. If the goal is to try to make sure no one becomes and outlier success, we can't have that. :)

People complain that some people get extremely rich but fail to realize that they do so by increasing the average standard of living for a large number of people. Amazon provides conveniences that did not exist 50 years ago and it does make people's lives easier, provides more free time, provides jobs for a large number of workers, provides companies a way to get their products to customers, etc.

Are you familiar with "The Wal-Mart Effect"? It describes the impact on local economies when a Wal-Mart opens. Spoiler: It isn't good. Far from being a net producer of good, decent-paying jobs, it tends to wreck the local competition, driving small-business owners out of business and into low-wage employment.

These days, "The Amazon Effect" is probably even more worrisome, because it's much more diffuse.

When companies can rely entirely on economies of scale, rather than innovation, to crush competition, it's possible to have immediate effects (such as lower prices) that are beneficial, but knock-on effects (such as the broader impact on the economy and the quality of jobs available) that are insidious and deleterious.

Yes. Walmart has a big impact on local economies. Especially small rural communities. Tractors had a similar impact on agricultural workers when they started displacing labor.

If you calculate what impact Walmart has had on the average standard of living, would you claim that it has driven it lower? There are obviously going to be some people and segments that aren't able to adapt quickly, but that is the case with anything...and even those individuals are going to benefit from goods being available at lower prices.

It’s amazing how people worship this supposedly perfect former world of “mom and pop shops”, ignoring the terrible prices and selection. Wal Mart won because consumers liked it better - far better. If we wanted to subsidize tiny stores that were worse on every metric, you are essentially making a museum or charity, at the cost of damaging the entire society via higher prices and worse products.

"The free market" will always result in:

* Companies doing what's best for their profits; not what's best for people. * Companies becoming so large that they are literally impossible to compete with. * Customers choosing what's cheapest and/or most convenient for themselves, regardless of human/societal/environmental cost.

Defending this concept of a "free market" is an excuse for saying "making money in a way which doesn't hurt the world is too hard for me so let's not even try".

Why have the biggest companies on earth risen and fallen? And sometimes risen again? What seems indestructible now, may be a failure in 10 years.

Blackberry, Kodak, IBM, US Steel, Blockbuster, Direct TV. These companies are far smaller proportionally to what they once were. No one considers them empires, or on the cutting edge.

Hand waving away the free market as corrupt ignores the perfect track record of capitalist societies vs. every other single system ever tried.

In general, I can agree with your view as a good outcome. But the problem is - who gets to decide what is too much?

I see you're in tech and an author (btw, I've come across your book before, congrats!) and I bet MOST people would also think that you have "too much" because it's more than them, and "what do you really do to earn it? type on a keyboard? That's not real work."

Because I don't want to someone to have the power to say "hey xyzelement, your FAANG salary is unreasonable and we're going to take it away for greater good" (and ditto for my wife's medical salary), I don't feel it's right to do it to anyone else.

I find "your salary is too much and we're taking it away from you" to be extremely reductive. (Even, dare I say, maliciously obtuse.) This isn't some radical policy change, it's more or less how our current system was designed, if we chose to enforce it. Instead, you and your wife probably pay more taxes than our ultra-rich. Offloading that burden onto everybody else does not feel right to me.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...

Wealth isn't quite zero sum but it is adversarial. If someone has a lot of it they can use it against you. Use it to propagandize against your class interests, use it to manipulate the political environment to your detriment. The wealth may not be zero sum but the power it represents certainly can be.

"How many people has he '''made successful'''" is a fuzzy and already biased metric, how do you decide on that one? Why not "how many people would have had a better job if not for his company" or "how many liters of urine in soda bottles because of his policies?"

Wealth is concrete and measurable. People can differ on what exactly the consequences of wealth inequality are but I think nearly everyone will agree that it measures something worthwhile to know.

Ridiculous. The ONLY way to build wealth in a capitalist system is to provide value to other people. Case in point: Bezos and every other billionaire in the US.

You are missing the point. The only way Bezos can take a cent from you is if you willingly give him the money. In contrast, in a socialist system, the government takes money from you regardless of whether you want to give it or not. Spoiler: no one wants to give it. Governments are 91283128391823918293819381x more evil than billionaires.

It's revealing that in your stripped down little illustration it's just me and bezos. Bezos all alone, no one to help him, I just give him, personally, the money for the things I want.

In my understanding labor is the resource billionaires extract their wealth from, worker exploitation is the mechanism they use to do it. Between the two of us I don't think I'm missing the point here. I've seen your point before but it's a red herring. Allowing power to accrue so dramatically to individuals is the problem, not whose micro-decisions allow them to claim a sliver more of it.

Bezos wasn't holding guns to the heads of Amazon employees. To the contrary. The existence of Amazon created more demand for workers which resulted in more options for them, as well as better pay and working conditions.

Where do you get your worker exploitation from? That is absolute nonsense.

ok

Sure but I think when you get down to it, the thing people take issue with is the fact that companies can be owned like this in the first place. It creates real-estate like dynamics on a thing that can expand indefinitely. The idea that I can own 50% of a company and that I retain 50% ownership when the company (in the band of people sense) grows to be 100,000x the size is in a lot of ways really dumb.

If my sole proprietorship goes from 1k to 1M annual revenue then it's easy to argue that I absolutely earned all that money. If a bunch of people join the company on that journey to 1M then it's a lot less clear how much I did and what work I have a legitimate claim to the fruits thereof. I think we're so used to the current state of employment contracts just being contractors with 401k's that we don't consider that it could work differently.

I largely agree - I have no personal issue with someone earning a lot of money (good for them) and I'm not convinced it comes at the cost of other people's real earnings or living conditions. Indeed Amazon and similar services are very convenient, and allow me to focus my attention on more meaningful things (i.e. Terraria).

I must say though that I do worry about people having enough money to bend the "rules" of the market. I.e. paying for lobbying, having an outsized say on regulation, or wielding influence over politicians to give special tax favors, etc.

The direct problem there has to do with laws, not wealth - but it must be said that increasingly massive wealth does unlock corrupting influence that would be otherwise infeasible.

You should resent your masters, the people who can afford to spend huge sums of money to suppress minimum wage increases, or benefits for gig workers, or greater public oversight. These people are making every other person's life worse, except for those who can also isolate themselves in a wealth bubble.

The policies of wealth and unbridled capitalism in the USA have stifled wage growth, increased homelessness, and driven down life expectancy. You should be mad about this. You gain nothing by trying to hold a moral high ground.

The fact that you conceptualize of people with more wealth than you as "masters" totally explains your stance on this topic. I struggle to feel how Bezos "enslaves me" or makes my life worse (and on the flip, I can easily name 3 ways he makes my life better.)

I suspect one's perspective on this depends a lot on one's a-priori sense of victimization and it's just not what I lead with. So yes, I can see that how you feel makes you think what you think, but it's not for me.

> I struggle to feel how Bezos "enslaves me" or makes my life worse

That's great for you! But have you considered the radical notion that other people with different circumstances to you exist?

Do you know anyone who works for Amazon? How are they treated? Do you know anyone who works for a company who supplies Amazon? How are they treated? Do you know anyone who purchases products from Amazon? Who delivers those products, and how are they treated?

I perceive that folks are more or less lining up to work for Amazon even in the roles you're describing, meaning it represents meaningful opportunity for them in contrast to their other alternatives.

The Amazon delivery guys I interact with seem pretty happy. I read the same things you read about the horrors of warehouse work but it's pretty hard to know how much of that is spin vs real vs normal. Again, presumably if it was the worst people won't work there.