9 ms·

Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Have Time to Be CEO of Amazon

56 points by alexrustic 6y ago

mnd999 6y ago
He couldn’t just do it as a 12 hour night shift then?
- ignoramous 6y ago
  The answer is in the article: Bezos told me that the tremendous personal resources he had amassed liberated him. "I won't spend any time in my life working on anything I don't think is important," he told me. "I'm just not going to. I don't need to."
  - _Microft 6y ago
    The parent comment might have alluded to the circumstances that an Amazon fulfilment worker may find themselves in.
  - Funes- 6y ago
    >"I won't spend any time in my life working on anything I don't think is important," he told me. "I'm just not going to. I don't need to." Letting all the otherwise important economic intricacies and potential efficiency regarding the implementation of UBI, isn't the aim of such a measure exactly what Bezos is describing here? To free oneself (laypeople in UBI's case) from personally irrelevant tasks in order to enjoy a more fulfilling life? Perhaps this could be an indicator that what is currently a huge privilege should in the future be a commonality.
    - randmeerkat 6y ago
      I frequently wonder how many Einstein level ideas have been lost because people have to work meaningless jobs with mediocre bosses to put food on the table instead.
      - savanaly 6y ago
        Is Einstein the best example to use here? He famously derived the theory of relativity while working a "meaningless job". [0] Now, would he have derived it if he had had access to the HN and twitter skinner boxes? That's another question. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/06/opinion/l-einstein-changed-world-on-office-time-650993.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/06/opinion/l-einstein-change...
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Dollars are claim checks on other people’s resources, very often on their time. You can’t just give a bunch of dollars away without either incurring an offsetting amount of time/resources to back them, or to devalue them and their siblings. If you like food with your meals and your garbage hauled away, at the end of the chain, someone has to work to get that food to your table and the garbage away. (I’m generally pro-UBI, but can’t figure out how to pay even a subsistence level of UBI in a sustainable way, and certainly not enough that would allow a leisurely life for most.)
      - nobodyknowsyoda 6y ago
        I mean that’s for the free market to take care of. If fewer people want to haul your garbage then the price for garbage hauling will go up. Higher demand for labor means workers have leverage to demand better working conditions, and inventors and incentivized to invent new technology: better PPE for workers, robotic garbage trucks, underground garbage tunnels, etc
      - overlords 6y ago
        Basic Income is the same thing as Welfare + Taxation, but done more efficiently. Prominent economist - Greg Mankiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cL8kM0fXQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cL8kM0fXQc Removing the needs assessment also removes the geographic location requirement, and that allows to deflate the land value inflation that is the real cause of inequality today.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        The critical difference is the amount per person and the number of people included. Welfare spending for 2020 is estimated to be around $1.9T, around $1.0T of which is means-tested, and $0.7T is Medicaid. Total federal receipts were around $3.4T. If you believe that the entire adult population should receive the equivalent of a $15/hr minimum wage job that was worked 2000 hours per year, you need to fund $30K/adult. There are around 250M adults living in the US, meaning that paying each of them $30K would require more than twice the total federal tax receipts for this program alone. If you restrict it to citizens only (rather than all lawful residents), it's still basically double. Even assuming you could cut every other federal function in half, you would still need to raise taxes by +150% (to 250% of current) just to pay for a $15/hr equivalent to adults only. Add in a smaller amount per child and you could be looking at tripling current tax levels. With the top marginal rate already higher than 33%, it's obvious that those tax increases will not hit only "the rich". Then, does $30K/adult provide for everyone to "enjoy a more fulfilling life" given the inflation that would occur to pay for the UBI? I think it does not. There is no doubt that UBI and taxation is more efficient; it's the simple multiplication that is a problem.
wombatmobile 6y ago
'I'm not going to put productive energy into anything that doesn't improve civilization. Why would I? What would I be trying to do?” Um, help workers get off food stamps? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-amzn-job-pay-rate-leaves-some-warehouse-employees-homeless https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-am...
- amelius 6y ago
  "Yeah, those workers are only a temporary problem that will be gone when we have the automation in place." /s
  - mathgladiator 6y ago
    The sarcasm may not be too far off. I used to have ambitions to build a company, but now the future plan is to pick up the task of being a solo developer. Why? people are the worst and I have no desire to have anyone on payroll. Those workers are definitely a temporary problem until those warehouses are 100% automated. Once all the people are gone, all the labor concerns are gone as well. No more safety. AC costs are minimized to what is needed for product safety. No more restrooms with no more plumbing. Just machines which ingest goods and distribute goods.
    - apocalypstyx 6y ago
      >Why? people are the worst No offense intended. But do you classify yourself as part of humanity? Or one of the good ones? I mean, I know one or two people who profess to think this, and they admit they themselves are just as disgusting, so at least I can have some respect for their self-reflection.
      - rpdillon 6y ago
        A charitable reading is that there are many parts of running a business, but managing employees/contractors is definitely one of the most difficult to get right while also being perceived as peripheral to the core goal; if you can still accomplish a mission you care about without bringing in all that extra work, it might be preferable. As an engineer, this reading resonates for me to some degree. I'm naturally more interested in engineering problems than I am by payroll, performance management, and hiring.
buran77 6y ago
> I have spent time with the founders of all the Big Tech companies. In their hearts, they all seem to believe they are still idealists. They dismiss the charges that they are society-destroying monsters as noise. Only hard data convinces them that their companies are being destructive, and when that happens, they course-correct rather than tearing things apart and starting from scratch. But there is no escaping one fact: The giant public companies they built are no longer dream factories but hard-edged businesses, optimized for profit and serving shareholders who push for even bigger yields. Things rarely change because most (all?) founders and CEOs truly believe they're doing good. Whether it's just attachment to their vision despite it being an overall loss for society, or doing the math and concluding there's marginally more good than bad, or maybe just justifying a small "bad" as a price for the big "good". They are never the ones paying the price for that bad so that won't disturb their world view. That's one common trait I discovered in almost every successful CEO or founder, the capability to brush aside any criticism in their pursuit of their vision, as long as the price highlighted by that criticism fell on shoulders outside of the company.
- _zamorano_ 6y ago
  It's not just founder and CEOs, though. Nobody believes he's the bad guy no matter the outcomes. It's a convenient cliche for movies but just that
  - bredren 6y ago
    Here’s looking at you Facebook.
  - buran77 6y ago
    It's a lot more obvious for those categories because the money rolling in with barely any negative consequence strengthens their view beyond anything that a counter-argument can counter. Unlike normal scale issues where you may be convinced (or even see yourself) you were doing wrong even with the best of intentions, with successful founders and CEOs that's nigh impossible. They genuinely cannot acknowledge this because even hard numbers will look like "it needs a small tweak but my vision and implementation are still great".
medium_burrito 6y ago
Is it time to coin the term "Elon Envy"? "When a billionaire is insecure because Elon Musk gets all the press and adoration and is pulling humanity's sorry ass forward more or less by himself (as a corporate leader)."
- Jamieee 6y ago
  "Elon Envy", because the only way to try to compete with one of Musk's many side project is to make it their primary focus.
- tanelpoder 6y ago
  Billionaire Problems are real!
- xxpor 6y ago
  If I were Jeff I'd be calling up Elon and thanking him for taking all of the attention away so I can do what I want. Perhaps I just don't have the ego to be a billionaire.
  - elindbe3 6y ago
    IDK Elon gets some (deserved in my opinion) love. Jeff seems to be the butt of more of the "kill the rich" rhetoric such as the guillotine outside his house. Personally if I was a billionaire, I would do everything possible to keep my name out of the media and pop culture.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      >IDK Elon gets some (deserved in my opinion) love. Jeff seems to be the butt of more of the "kill the rich" rhetoric such as the guillotine outside his house Agreed, but I kind of figure that comes with the territory. Elon is called an idiot and a charlatan more often because of things like Hyperloop and the Joe Rogan interview. I'm probably projecting but that'd hurt me more than the guillotine.
      - 6y ago
PartiallyTyped 6y ago
> “I won't spend any time in my life working on anything I don't think is important,” he told me. “I'm just not going to. I don't need to.” How about contributing to dealing with global hunger and lack of education? Consider what would have happened had we actively helped developing countries become developed? That change alone would have accelerated the rate we make discoveries and improve technology simply because there are more brains at the task. Sure his Day One fund exist, but until proven otherwise, I will take the cynical perspective and doubt the rich are willing to do anything besides pay lip service with respect to homelessness/lack of education. He could start by paying his workers a decent wage.
- maxwell 6y ago
  Global obesity is actually a bigger issue than hunger now. Based on his quote, sounds like he realized Amazon is no longer important to him. The chair role is to give the impression that he's still involved, like Gates and Schmidt. He can do whatever he wants, so has seemingly decided on full Dr. Evil, with the front conglomerate, obsession with rockets, and even the friggin' hollowed out mountain.
  - tenacious_tuna 6y ago
    Maybe this is a nitpick, but I don't like the phrasing of "X is a bigger problem than Y" as it implies a global standard for how we should address suffering, and (perhaps this is merely my interpretation) your phrasing and tone sound dismissive. On one hand we have people who are starving because they don't have access to a reliable food source. On the other, we have people who have severe health complications due to poor nutrition/obesity/whatnot. I believe it is also a mistake to compare relative suffering--e.g. perhaps (hypothetically) more people are obese than starving, but starving sounds more painful than being obese: these comparisons also run afoul of subjective experience and understanding. Both problems are significant, and require attention which we are capable of doing, as a civilization: we can multi-task. I believe it is naive to frame them in opposition to each other as well. Apologies if my reading of your post is not what you intended.
    - 6y ago
stevespang 6y ago
Elon Musk would look exactly like Jeff Bezo's scalp if it was not for multiple hair transplants. Look closely at images of Musk when he was younger. Go figure.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jdkee 6y ago
How about not using megacycle shift work? https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its-warehouse-workers-into-brutal-megacycle-shifts https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its...
dang 6y ago
All: if you're commenting, please make sure your comment contains more than shallow indignation. Perhaps you don't owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. We're looking for curious conversation on HN. Reflexively dumping on someone or something you dislike is not interesting, no matter how righteous you are or feel. When lots of people start doing it, it compounds into a nasty thread and ultimately a nasty community. Think of it like peeing in the swimming pool. You're asked to avoid that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

56 points by alexrustic 6y ago

mnd999 6y ago

He couldn’t just do it as a 12 hour night shift then?

ignoramous 6y ago
The answer is in the article: Bezos told me that the tremendous personal resources he had amassed liberated him. "I won't spend any time in my life working on anything I don't think is important," he told me. "I'm just not going to. I don't need to."
- _Microft 6y ago
  The parent comment might have alluded to the circumstances that an Amazon fulfilment worker may find themselves in.
- Funes- 6y ago
  >"I won't spend any time in my life working on anything I don't think is important," he told me. "I'm just not going to. I don't need to." Letting all the otherwise important economic intricacies and potential efficiency regarding the implementation of UBI, isn't the aim of such a measure exactly what Bezos is describing here? To free oneself (laypeople in UBI's case) from personally irrelevant tasks in order to enjoy a more fulfilling life? Perhaps this could be an indicator that what is currently a huge privilege should in the future be a commonality.
  - randmeerkat 6y ago
    I frequently wonder how many Einstein level ideas have been lost because people have to work meaningless jobs with mediocre bosses to put food on the table instead.
    - savanaly 6y ago
      Is Einstein the best example to use here? He famously derived the theory of relativity while working a "meaningless job". [0] Now, would he have derived it if he had had access to the HN and twitter skinner boxes? That's another question. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/06/opinion/l-einstein-changed-world-on-office-time-650993.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/06/opinion/l-einstein-change...
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Dollars are claim checks on other people’s resources, very often on their time. You can’t just give a bunch of dollars away without either incurring an offsetting amount of time/resources to back them, or to devalue them and their siblings. If you like food with your meals and your garbage hauled away, at the end of the chain, someone has to work to get that food to your table and the garbage away. (I’m generally pro-UBI, but can’t figure out how to pay even a subsistence level of UBI in a sustainable way, and certainly not enough that would allow a leisurely life for most.)
    - nobodyknowsyoda 6y ago
      I mean that’s for the free market to take care of. If fewer people want to haul your garbage then the price for garbage hauling will go up. Higher demand for labor means workers have leverage to demand better working conditions, and inventors and incentivized to invent new technology: better PPE for workers, robotic garbage trucks, underground garbage tunnels, etc
    - overlords 6y ago
      Basic Income is the same thing as Welfare + Taxation, but done more efficiently. Prominent economist - Greg Mankiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cL8kM0fXQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cL8kM0fXQc Removing the needs assessment also removes the geographic location requirement, and that allows to deflate the land value inflation that is the real cause of inequality today.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        The critical difference is the amount per person and the number of people included. Welfare spending for 2020 is estimated to be around $1.9T, around $1.0T of which is means-tested, and $0.7T is Medicaid. Total federal receipts were around $3.4T. If you believe that the entire adult population should receive the equivalent of a $15/hr minimum wage job that was worked 2000 hours per year, you need to fund $30K/adult. There are around 250M adults living in the US, meaning that paying each of them $30K would require more than twice the total federal tax receipts for this program alone. If you restrict it to citizens only (rather than all lawful residents), it's still basically double. Even assuming you could cut every other federal function in half, you would still need to raise taxes by +150% (to 250% of current) just to pay for a $15/hr equivalent to adults only. Add in a smaller amount per child and you could be looking at tripling current tax levels. With the top marginal rate already higher than 33%, it's obvious that those tax increases will not hit only "the rich". Then, does $30K/adult provide for everyone to "enjoy a more fulfilling life" given the inflation that would occur to pay for the UBI? I think it does not. There is no doubt that UBI and taxation is more efficient; it's the simple multiplication that is a problem.

wombatmobile 6y ago

'I'm not going to put productive energy into anything that doesn't improve civilization. Why would I? What would I be trying to do?” Um, help workers get off food stamps? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-amzn-job-pay-rate-leaves-some-warehouse-employees-homeless https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-am...

amelius 6y ago
"Yeah, those workers are only a temporary problem that will be gone when we have the automation in place." /s
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  The sarcasm may not be too far off. I used to have ambitions to build a company, but now the future plan is to pick up the task of being a solo developer. Why? people are the worst and I have no desire to have anyone on payroll. Those workers are definitely a temporary problem until those warehouses are 100% automated. Once all the people are gone, all the labor concerns are gone as well. No more safety. AC costs are minimized to what is needed for product safety. No more restrooms with no more plumbing. Just machines which ingest goods and distribute goods.
  - apocalypstyx 6y ago
    >Why? people are the worst No offense intended. But do you classify yourself as part of humanity? Or one of the good ones? I mean, I know one or two people who profess to think this, and they admit they themselves are just as disgusting, so at least I can have some respect for their self-reflection.
    - rpdillon 6y ago
      A charitable reading is that there are many parts of running a business, but managing employees/contractors is definitely one of the most difficult to get right while also being perceived as peripheral to the core goal; if you can still accomplish a mission you care about without bringing in all that extra work, it might be preferable. As an engineer, this reading resonates for me to some degree. I'm naturally more interested in engineering problems than I am by payroll, performance management, and hiring.

buran77 6y ago

> I have spent time with the founders of all the Big Tech companies. In their hearts, they all seem to believe they are still idealists. They dismiss the charges that they are society-destroying monsters as noise. Only hard data convinces them that their companies are being destructive, and when that happens, they course-correct rather than tearing things apart and starting from scratch. But there is no escaping one fact: The giant public companies they built are no longer dream factories but hard-edged businesses, optimized for profit and serving shareholders who push for even bigger yields. Things rarely change because most (all?) founders and CEOs truly believe they're doing good. Whether it's just attachment to their vision despite it being an overall loss for society, or doing the math and concluding there's marginally more good than bad, or maybe just justifying a small "bad" as a price for the big "good". They are never the ones paying the price for that bad so that won't disturb their world view. That's one common trait I discovered in almost every successful CEO or founder, the capability to brush aside any criticism in their pursuit of their vision, as long as the price highlighted by that criticism fell on shoulders outside of the company.

_zamorano_ 6y ago
It's not just founder and CEOs, though. Nobody believes he's the bad guy no matter the outcomes. It's a convenient cliche for movies but just that
- bredren 6y ago
  Here’s looking at you Facebook.
- buran77 6y ago
  It's a lot more obvious for those categories because the money rolling in with barely any negative consequence strengthens their view beyond anything that a counter-argument can counter. Unlike normal scale issues where you may be convinced (or even see yourself) you were doing wrong even with the best of intentions, with successful founders and CEOs that's nigh impossible. They genuinely cannot acknowledge this because even hard numbers will look like "it needs a small tweak but my vision and implementation are still great".

medium_burrito 6y ago

Is it time to coin the term "Elon Envy"? "When a billionaire is insecure because Elon Musk gets all the press and adoration and is pulling humanity's sorry ass forward more or less by himself (as a corporate leader)."

Jamieee 6y ago
"Elon Envy", because the only way to try to compete with one of Musk's many side project is to make it their primary focus.
tanelpoder 6y ago
Billionaire Problems are real!
xxpor 6y ago
If I were Jeff I'd be calling up Elon and thanking him for taking all of the attention away so I can do what I want. Perhaps I just don't have the ego to be a billionaire.
- elindbe3 6y ago
  IDK Elon gets some (deserved in my opinion) love. Jeff seems to be the butt of more of the "kill the rich" rhetoric such as the guillotine outside his house. Personally if I was a billionaire, I would do everything possible to keep my name out of the media and pop culture.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    >IDK Elon gets some (deserved in my opinion) love. Jeff seems to be the butt of more of the "kill the rich" rhetoric such as the guillotine outside his house Agreed, but I kind of figure that comes with the territory. Elon is called an idiot and a charlatan more often because of things like Hyperloop and the Joe Rogan interview. I'm probably projecting but that'd hurt me more than the guillotine.
    - 6y ago

PartiallyTyped 6y ago

> “I won't spend any time in my life working on anything I don't think is important,” he told me. “I'm just not going to. I don't need to.” How about contributing to dealing with global hunger and lack of education? Consider what would have happened had we actively helped developing countries become developed? That change alone would have accelerated the rate we make discoveries and improve technology simply because there are more brains at the task. Sure his Day One fund exist, but until proven otherwise, I will take the cynical perspective and doubt the rich are willing to do anything besides pay lip service with respect to homelessness/lack of education. He could start by paying his workers a decent wage.

maxwell 6y ago
Global obesity is actually a bigger issue than hunger now. Based on his quote, sounds like he realized Amazon is no longer important to him. The chair role is to give the impression that he's still involved, like Gates and Schmidt. He can do whatever he wants, so has seemingly decided on full Dr. Evil, with the front conglomerate, obsession with rockets, and even the friggin' hollowed out mountain.
- tenacious_tuna 6y ago
  Maybe this is a nitpick, but I don't like the phrasing of "X is a bigger problem than Y" as it implies a global standard for how we should address suffering, and (perhaps this is merely my interpretation) your phrasing and tone sound dismissive. On one hand we have people who are starving because they don't have access to a reliable food source. On the other, we have people who have severe health complications due to poor nutrition/obesity/whatnot. I believe it is also a mistake to compare relative suffering--e.g. perhaps (hypothetically) more people are obese than starving, but starving sounds more painful than being obese: these comparisons also run afoul of subjective experience and understanding. Both problems are significant, and require attention which we are capable of doing, as a civilization: we can multi-task. I believe it is naive to frame them in opposition to each other as well. Apologies if my reading of your post is not what you intended.
  - 6y ago

stevespang 6y ago

Elon Musk would look exactly like Jeff Bezo's scalp if it was not for multiple hair transplants. Look closely at images of Musk when he was younger. Go figure.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jdkee 6y ago

How about not using megacycle shift work? https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its-warehouse-workers-into-brutal-megacycle-shifts https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gk3w/amazon-is-forcing-its...

dang 6y ago

All: if you're commenting, please make sure your comment contains more than shallow indignation. Perhaps you don't owe billionaires better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. We're looking for curious conversation on HN. Reflexively dumping on someone or something you dislike is not interesting, no matter how righteous you are or feel. When lots of people start doing it, it compounds into a nasty thread and ultimately a nasty community. Think of it like peeing in the swimming pool. You're asked to avoid that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html