Off topic but how much of Jeff's wealth would it take to transform Amazon into the best place to work in the world? Solid pay, fair employment, etc, the whole thing across the board.
Even if it took 2/3rds, Jeff would still be one of the most wealthy individuals in the world.
Jeff could make a real change and set and example. Yet he doesn't and I for one can not understand why after you have more than a billion in wealth you would need any more.
All of his wealth is wrapped up in Amazon stock. If he tried to sell 2/3 of his stock, not only would Amazon's share price tank (the founder is selling most of his stock), but he would lose control of Amazon and his net worth would be cut in half or more due to the stock tanking while he was selling. Jeff Bezos' net worth is simply the amount of shares he controls in Amazon multiplied by whatever the current price of the stock is. It is entirely theoretical and there is no real way for him to actually obtain his "net worth" in cash.
Who's saying he has to sell his stock? He should be giving it away to his employees, all the way to the lowest-wage factory and warehouse workers. They're the ones who make the company work, and he doesn't give a shit about them.
Jeff has been building Amazon since 1994. Do you seriously believe the moral thing for him to do is to give away his shares to some low-skilled, easily replaceable employee who is just looking to make a quick buck ?
>Moore said he's gotten countless buy-out offers over the years, but he couldn't envision selling the business to a stranger. "It's the only business decision that I could make," he said. "I don't think there's anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it. I have employees with me right now that have been with me for 30 years. They just were committed to staying with me now and they're going to own the company."
The people who are strapped to activity monitors in overheated warehouses, packing millions of orders each day, risking contracting COVID, do more to build Amazon and ensure it’s continued existence than Bezos has ever done.
It's very funny how the 'job creators' weren't able to do anything against coronavirus closing and everyone staying at home. If they're so damn good, why did their stocks crater during the COVID-19 quarantine?
He wouldn't need to even touch the shares, the share itself give him control of Amazon and with that, he could institute such change offset against profit margin.
Though many of use foresee many jobs at amazon being candidates for robots and with that, can imagine the last thing Amazon wants are unions that would get in the way of such plans, if such plans were there. Kinda a case of the shoe fits, and drive against empowering those who you eventually down the line, will replace and make redundant.
Also the supply and demand factor, so many companies will only increase employee incentives/remunerations if they find it hard to get and in the current climate, they kinda have lots of people willing to endure what they offer as it's better than nothing. Which is kinda the crux we have seen playout for eon's and sadly, don't see that changing anytime soon.
You make it sound like selling all at once and flooding the market is the only option. He could slowly sell off shares over many years and thereby exchange personal power at amazon for tangible good in the world. He choses to maintain his position because that's where his priorities are. He's within his rights to do that, but let's not pretend one of the most powerful people in the world has his hands tied.
Isn't he doing exactly that with Blue Origin? AFAIK he's selling about $1b of AMZN stock every year to fund it. He's also recently pledged $10b to fight climate change.
To clarify, I'm not arguing one way or the other, I'm just stating that the fact that Bezos' net worth is largely in Amazon shares vs. cash is pretty irrelevant to a discussion of the potential distribution of that wealth.
I like to think that dilemma is why Bezos has pledged a billion a year to invest in Blue Origin. Nice excuse to extract some cash without spooking the market.
Well, many of them sure, but not all of them. For example, Bill Gates has his wealth distributed across a wide range of investments, which means that Gates' ability to turn his wealth into cash is much much greater than Jeff's.
As for the theoretical part, billionaires with all of their wealth tied up in a single company generally only have access to billionaire kind of money through loans with incredibly generous terms that they pay back by selling a bit of their stocks every year.
I don't understand how you think he should go about doing that ?
Do you think he's spending his net worth on a yearly basis so if he refrained from spending 2/3 and redistributed it would make Amazon amazing ? Or are you saying he should kill profitability and let his shares tank by 2/3 ?
I don't really like Amazon but I don't be see what your comment means in practice (I hear it often tho)
The world would not care. Amazon may look like big, but in the ocean of all employers and employees it's a small drop.
Political and cultural shift needs more than just fixing one small place. It needs political and cultural action, simple example won't suffice.
I.e. transforming Amazon could be a small facet of such a campaign as a template and example but mostly worthless without that other work.
You can be an entrepreneurial genious and still not understand how to create political and cultural shifts. So... the program you are suggesting would be quite remarkable and would require remarkable skill and vision. Redistributing profits wont suffice.
I don't think it works like that. Jeff is rich in the same way that Gates was rich in the 90s. Almost all of his wealth is tied up in company stock, and selling a large portion of that would certainly affect the price and his wealth.
It's not like Jeff has a bank account with 100b in it.
That being said, I think the real question here is "could Amazon become the best place to work without losing money?"
My guess is yes. But shareholders wouldn't like it.
It is not about money. Jeff is not going to have more or less money because Amazon has non-competes. US law needs to change to remove non-competes entirely.
Just because he has Amazon stocks of that value doesn't mean he can turn all of that into cash. Economics explained has a great video on the various types of billionaires [1], which uses Jeff directly as an example of the lowest class of billionaire.
Just because the wealth isn't immediately liquid doesn't mean it can't be used. People borrow against illiquid wealth as a rule rather than as an exception. I don't think this argument holds water.
I agree that Jeff could spread his wealth around more and should spread his wealth around more. I think the driving factor is ambition and applies to a lot more people than Jeff. You need a certain amount of ambition to reach Bezos status, how do you turn that off when you get there?
Most people don't until death or near death. Gates is the most recent example to re-shift his ambition to bettering the world... but of course, a non-trivial amount of the world now believes he is trying to put chips in people to track them.
You can make a modest argument for that as it relates to Amazon retail. Mass retail is a hyper low margin business, and one in which the labor skill required is very low, which produces the low incomes: the employees are very easy to replace and the sales & profit per employee ratio is very low.
Bezos doesn't derive more than 1/4 of his wealth from the Amazon retail business however. His wealth primarily comes from AWS.
Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything. Many other tech giants with extreme profits mirror that outcome, including at such companies as Facebook and Google.
Microsoft is the second most profitable non-state corporation in history, and will soon surpass Apple as #1. They're presently generating $52 billion per year in operating profit and will double in size in the next seven or eight years. They learned a long time ago to share the wealth to attract the best talent, because it was more than worth it for the printing press profits they get in return.
More broadly speaking, tech employees in the US as a major sector are the best paid in world history, and they're the most coddled by a large margin. There is nothing remotely like it in any other segment of the global economy.
For 2019, approximately 1.4 million US software developers earning a median of ~$110,000 per year (and that's not total compensation, which leaves out a lot). Show me anything else comparable to that anywhere else on the planet.
Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
> Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
Agreed.
> The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything.
Doubtful. There are careers that in average pay much more. For example, an interventional cardiologist in the bay area makes $500,000 a year in average.
And just as there are software engineers that make more, there are cardiologists that make more.
> Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
Reciprocity means the money you are getting is proportional to the value you created. While you can make money working at a highly profitable company, 100% reciprocity would mean that 100% of the profit and dividends are distributed according to merit. That is not the case.
That means that an NT kernel engineer should probably be making like $10,000,000 a year, for example.
Even if it took 2/3rds, Jeff would still be one of the most wealthy individuals in the world.
Jeff could make a real change and set and example. Yet he doesn't and I for one can not understand why after you have more than a billion in wealth you would need any more.