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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

If you gave the $300,000 Bezos got from his father to 10,000 random Americans in 1994, none of them would have created a company the equivalent of Amazon's scale.

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How many of those 10k would have the same background? We can pretend Bezos' dad raised him in a "normal" middle class background then randomly dropped 300K on him, or we can acknowledge he is the business equivalent of an Olympic athlete.

Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband Bezos?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen

So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.

But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.

Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.

I assumed the parent post was talking about his adopted father. The man who raised and dropped $250k on Bezos was Miguel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Bezos

Miguel worked at Exxon for 32 years as an engineer and a manager. It's not like he was the CEO or anything close to that. There would literally be hundreds of thousands of people in a similar position to him across the world.

Also worth noting that Jeff Bezos was(and I think still is) the youngest person who ever became a senior VP at DE Shaw. That is a position earned by merit alone.

I think you are agreeing with the poster you are responding to, right? Bezos is the equivalent of an Olympic athlete: a combination of innate talent as well as opportunity.

More or less. Money provides an environment where high achievement becomes possible, it isn't just start up funds.

10k random Americans, sure.

10k random Americans with backgrounds in software and a business idea? Not so clear.

You also seem very certain that Amazon's scale is a good thing, overall, which I remain unconvinced of.

> You also seem very certain that Amazon's scale is a good thing, overall, which I remain unconvinced of.

What do you find unconvincing about roughly 30 billion in net income and free cashflow in 2023?

That's one metric, that only reflects Amazon's function as an income generator.

I view businesses through other metrics as well, including their impact on society in a variety of different ways. From some of those perspectives, it is not clear to me that Amazon (where I was the 2nd employee) is a net benefit.

This Amazon the company specifically or online shopping in general? E.g. if Amazon hadn't been made and some other online retailer had dominated (or even if there had been many!)

Both.

That may be true, but I don't think that's really the crux of the argument. This article talks about how Amazon was initially funded by Bezos' family members: https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/jeff-bezos-parents-in.... The bigger point is that relatively very few parents (like a couple percent maybe?) would be in a position to give their kid $250k to start a new venture, and it's not that surprising that the most financially successful people in the world needed both: intrinsic talent and drive, and a huge amount of support from their birth circumstances.

The way I like to put it is that both of the following are true:

1. Bezos is uniquely talented and driven, and his success depended on that

2. Bezos' success also depended on him having an uncommon level of access to capital at a young age.

The reason I like to say "both of these are true" is that so often today I see "sides" that try to argue that only one is true, e.g. libertarian-leaning folks (especially in the US) arguing that everything is a pure meritocracy, and on the other side that these phenomenally successful people just inherited their situation (e.g. "Elon Musk is only successful because his dad owned an emerald mine")

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