People are freely spending their money with Amazon all the time because they find it to be valuable--even paying a premium for having things shipped that they could get by running to the store themselves.

Ruth Georgie Erica is presumably still alive. You could obviously send her payment for whatever value you feel her father brought to your life. Is it absurd that you haven't sent her money or do you only see absurdity in other people's actions and not your own?

Apologies if I am misreading you, but you sound really money obsessed as if that was the only measure in life.

I suspect that both Einstein and Schroedinger went into science because they loved intellectual work, the academic lifestyle, the thrill of discovery, and perhaps the fame and recognition. Because they were successful, they attained that which they wanted (granted, I am guessing at their motivations...)

Bezos set out to build a valuable business and as a result of his success, ended up with... a valuable business.

If you evaluate life meaning purely based on dollars (as you seem to be) then yeah Bezos is ahead. If you evaluate life on more complex criteria as I described above, the scientists got what they set out to get, just as much.

It's less about building something that is useful to many people, and more about selling something that is useful to many people. The fact that what they built was sold by others is a problem they should have thought about.