I think this looks bad, but it's got to do more than look bad. Is a rock concert a drop in the bucket compared to the savings they want, or are they genuinely comparable?
Fundamentally, it doesn't matter if it's irrelevant relative to total budget size, the simple fact is that if you promote a culture of one rule for me, and another for thee then you end up where people couldn't care less about the extra work you want them to do. And that costs you the money. Perception is reality and all that.
Like, it blows my mind that enough people at Amazon thought this was OK as they were laying off loads of people. Clearly the notion of frugality is pretty dead.
The fact that this part is objectively a drop in the bucket is how the execs justify it to themselves, but the fact is that Amazon didn’t need to have mass layoffs and doesn’t need to treat its workers with such disdain. Amazon has plenty of money. The parties the execs throw themselves are just one of a thousand ways they are taking that money they save by firing people and funneling it to themselves and the big investors rather than trying to improve the business itself. And it bodes poorly for the company in the long term, but none of the people involved care about that either.