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The 3rd paragraph is wrong. Bezos didn’t fund his space adventure with profits. He funded it with equity (or probably debt against his equity). His equity is v

The 3rd paragraph is wrong. Bezos didn’t fund his space adventure with profits. He funded it with equity (or probably debt against his equity). His equity is valued at 34 times the Amazon profits annualized. The workers did make Amazon valuable but it wasn’t profits.

bawolff 1y ago
That's being pretty pedantic. Its not even technically correct as the original sentence was "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program." They didn't say he funded his space project with amazon profits, they are saying that as a result of the profits bezos was able to fund a space program. Which is undoubtedly true as the amazon equity wouldn't be worth much if amazon wasn't making any money .
- drysine 1y ago
  So "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program" is only misleading while technically correct.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Eh, not really. This is just, in practice, how profits are extracted from this sort of company (and most sorts of companies; for various reasons, the phenomenon of a company paying out most of its profit in dividends is dying out) at the moment.
pyrale 1y ago
These days, the formal difference between the two is really hard to grasp, and mostly depends on which way accountants find they’ll pay less taxes. There is no point nitpicking someone because they used one term instead of the other: Bezos’ fortune is derived from Amazon’s activity, and the rest of us has no interest in changing our vocabulary to abide by some obscure tax code rule.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  It wouldn't be a proper HN comment if it didn't nitpick a single word in an entire article.
Workaccount2 1y ago
The project is spearheaded by writers with a strong ideological bend. There isn't going to be nuance about financial structures.
sashank_1509 1y ago
Adding to that, most of these workers are probably working on Amazons unprofitable or barely profitable business. AWS is most of Amazons profits, retail was losing money till very recently and maybe recently is profitable

bawolff 1y ago

That's being pretty pedantic. Its not even technically correct as the original sentence was "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program." They didn't say he funded his space project with amazon profits, they are saying that as a result of the profits bezos was able to fund a space program. Which is undoubtedly true as the amazon equity wouldn't be worth much if amazon wasn't making any money .

drysine 1y ago
So "...generate profit so great their boss was able to finance his own private space program" is only misleading while technically correct.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Eh, not really. This is just, in practice, how profits are extracted from this sort of company (and most sorts of companies; for various reasons, the phenomenon of a company paying out most of its profit in dividends is dying out) at the moment.

pyrale 1y ago

These days, the formal difference between the two is really hard to grasp, and mostly depends on which way accountants find they’ll pay less taxes. There is no point nitpicking someone because they used one term instead of the other: Bezos’ fortune is derived from Amazon’s activity, and the rest of us has no interest in changing our vocabulary to abide by some obscure tax code rule.

ryandrake 1y ago
It wouldn't be a proper HN comment if it didn't nitpick a single word in an entire article.

Workaccount2 1y ago

The project is spearheaded by writers with a strong ideological bend. There isn't going to be nuance about financial structures.

sashank_1509 1y ago

Adding to that, most of these workers are probably working on Amazons unprofitable or barely profitable business. AWS is most of Amazons profits, retail was losing money till very recently and maybe recently is profitable