How much he worked has nothing to do with what he is earning - there are people working three jobs out there who barely make ends meet. The page illustrates the absurd level of inequality our society has reached, a level that pure numbers are useless at illutrating.
Well, my main point was that he started one of the world's biggest companies.
How many people can do that? Not me.
> How many people can do that?
The answer is simple: By definition only about 100-300 people.
There's only 100 of the "worlds biggest companies" (assuming this refers to the top 100). And companies are usually started by 1-3 people.
Similarly: There's usually only 4 participants in the top 4 of a tournament bracket.
(The question is a bit: what does "can" even mean in this context and the answer im hinting at here: It's not individual skill that creates companies ex-nihilo. It's our economic system that produces companies.)
Sure, but let me ask you this - do you think there should be any limit to how much wealth can one person own? Like, to take it to the extreme - say Bezos owned every single media corporation, evey factory and every farm in the US, buying it with his "hard earned" money - would that be fine? Like, he started one of the world's largest companies, why shouldn't be allowed to own everything, right? What if he(completely legally) starts giving hundreds of millions of dollars to politicans so they just start doing what he wants instead of what their constituents want? Is that ok too?
I think we can both agree that hard work and one of a kind achievement like this should be rewarded. But I suspect we will disagree on whether the reward should have a limit or not. I don't want Bezos to give up his wealth and live on 50k/year. But I don't want him to be so wealthy he can influence politics both home and abroad.
He also avoids paying taxes, and commits labor and privacy law violations. Who can do that? Not me.
He didn't "risk it all." He was never going to end up on the street in a tent if Amazon failed.
And a lot of what he did risk was other people's money.
Which is how Amazon works anyway. Everyone who relies on Amazon - the authors, the drop shippers, the small traders, the warehouse staff, the drivers, the white collar employees - can be rug-pulled at any moment for any random reason.
And Amazon lives off indirect government welfare. Pay at the low end is so miserly nearly a quarter of employees rely on SNAP.
> He risked it all
What exactly did he risk that justifies this reward?
> and worked hard
How hard exactly? How much harder than a doctor, firefighter, waiter, or just your average joe could he possibly have worked to justify earning a million times more.
> to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that?
No, he really, really shouldn't. Not that much, not even remotely that much.
> I really don't get it.
It is absolute poison for society, for the whole of humanity, that a single person can own that much, hold that much power, with zero accountability.
> He risked it all
No he didn't. He tried a business venture like thousands of other founders on this site, and got insanely lucky.
Sure, all entrepreneurs risk it all. They quit their job to pursue something that can fail and make them bankrupt.
Was he lucky? He had an intuition that books could be sold on the internet because you don't need to test them out before buying. Luck might have been part of it, but I hadn't thought of that in 1990-something, I was playing AOE II all day instead.
Let us ignore the specific case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, let us look at a generic founder starting a company that turns into a billion or trillion dollar company making the founder a billionaire.
The founder founded the company but the billions were earned by the thousands of employees working for the company. The founder alone would not have earned a single dollar without the employees and there would not be a company the be employed by without the founder.
If you start a business, you create a company to isolate the business risk from your personal risk, if the business does not work out, the company goes down, the founder should be fine. You will probably risk some of your personal money as a founder in many cases, but how much of a reward do you want for that? If you risk a million and make a billion, is that not more than enough? Did you really start a business where you expected to fail with more than ninety-nine point nine percent?
On the other hand, even if the founder would not get an oversized portion of the profit, because that money would get distributed to many employees or many sold products, the effect is relatively small, it would neither make all employees earn millions nor the product significantly cheaper. Bushiness owners making billions is just being in a position where you can take a little money from very many others and that adds up.
Also founders getting rich is capitalism not working as intended. The point of an economy is to provide goods and services that people want as efficiently as possible. Business making a lot of profit means that things are not as cheap as they could be and competition is supposed to correct that. Making a profit is a mean to an end, an incentive for the creation of businesses to satisfy demands, it is not the end itself.