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You realize that Bezos didn't built Amazon on his own, right? There are many, many people who worked for that company (and many of these in this very forum), an
by TremendousJudge 6y ago
You realize that Bezos didn't built Amazon on his own, right? There are many, many people who worked for that company (and many of these in this very forum), and all they got was a monthly salary. They own nothing. We are living in the alternative. Most of the people who built Amazon don't own anything of what they created.
- danhak 6y agoThey were compensated for their labor. That’s how employment works.
- ben_w 6y agoIn an ideal world, it would be. He doesn’t seem to like unions, which in principle would ensure his big powerful corporation was being fair to the labour force.
- TremendousJudge 6y agoYou said "people not owning what they create" as though it was an unthinkable option. It's literally what most people do for a living, you said it yourself. What makes Bezos special? Why does he deserve to own ALL the creation of all of these people? I guess it can't be because he came up with the idea of Amazon, right? It is usually pointed out in SV that "ideas are worthless" after all
- dingaling 6y agoSo why wasn't Mr Bezos merely compensated for his labor?
- barrenko 6y agoWhat's the argument here. Salary is a salary precisely because of this reason. You get a small something, or you in a non salary scenario get either zero or something way bigger than a salary.
- amelius 6y agoThe deal is: you either get a salary or you carry a risk. The problem: there is no risk. Even if you go completely bankrupt, you still can get a simple job like everybody else. The only way this would be fair if the risk was losing $171.6B in case of failure.
- brandon272 6y agoThis "they took a risk!" stuff is just success worship crap grilled into people in our culture to justify someone amassing more wealth than most of us can even mentally comprehend. Bezos came from a privileged background. What was the big risk involved that makes his current level of success so sacrosanct? It's not like he'd be thrown in jail (or worse) if the company had failed. He would have moved on and started a different company or gotten another 6+ figure job.
- cyrksoft 6y agoThey received a salary in compensation. I salary they chose to accept. Bezos took all the risk. If Amazon failed he would have failed while employees would have gotten a salary. Risk taking is rewarded.
- TremendousJudge 6y agoI'm pretty sure that if Amazon had failed at any point, all of its employees would have been out of a job (and not just the engineers, also the thousands of minimum wage employees), and it's not like Bezos would personally be billions in dollars in debt to the investors of the company -- companies don't work like this, at least in the US. What was exactly the risk taken here by himself, personally?
- cyrksoft 6y agoAmazon was founded in 1994, more than 25 years ago. You are talking about Amazon in 2020. There were many points throughout those 26 years were it could have gone down. The risk he took was building the company from zero, hiring people and paying them a salary. Amazon now employs over 800000 people. If you think that has no merit and Bezos took no risk, then you really don't understand how things work.
- voisin 6y agoMaybe those people need a union to increase their bargaining power to obtain a greater share of the means of production!