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How Much Money Jeff Bezos Made Since You Started Reading This Page
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- fenaer 8mo agoAnd yet I feel I always come back to this: _What can I, as an individual, do to counter wealth inequality?_ It feels like breaking my fist against a brick wall.
- niek_pas 8mo agoThere’s not much you _can_ do on your own. Vote, get politically involved on a local level. Try to change people’s minds.
- Aeglaecia 8mo agoI feel like a few people tried recently but they missed
- dudefeliciano 8mo agoso then let's just give up altogether?
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- thousand_nights 8mo agoi'm kinda jaded because it seems the type of people that get into politics do it to gain money and power.. so voting always feels like picking the lesser of two evils
- carlmr 8mo agoI think idealists often get into politics as well, but they're not cold, calculating and power hungry enough to get into the important positions.
- bell-cot 8mo agoStart by just attending a some meetings of your local school board, city council, etc. Sit, watch, and maybe take notes. Compare the reality with local press coverage (if any) of it. Try analyzing the social dynamics. Talk to other ordinary citizens about it. If the only people paying real attention to gov't leaders are the greedy and power-hungry, then few decent people will run for office. And very few of those win.
- wiseowise 8mo agoNot only that, but one rotten apple can kill decades of work (see Trump, Putin).
- navane 8mo agoThere are very concrete actions an individual can take against wealth inequality of another individual.
- wiseowise 8mo agoAnd then what? Another bald head will replace them, but this time with an army of peons on their side to protect them president style, because for them it is much easier to buy loyalty of even 1000 men than it is for you to rally people to your cause.
- iso1631 8mo agoGiven the number of assassination attempts on Trump, some which got very close, it makes me wonder how effective those peons can actually be. But yes, generally this is how druglords work.
- wiseowise 8mo agoThat’s because Trump needs to show his face. If you’re making billions as a CEO you can protect your identity, there are billionaires in Germany that hadn’t shown their faces online in decades.
- glerk 8mo agoWhy don't you start your own Amazon?
- Sayrus 8mo agoLet's assume he does and is very successful, he makes $1T. Then what? Giving it all away won't resolve growing inequalities. Using it to influence medias and politics?
- glerk 8mo ago[flagged]
- wiseowise 8mo agoBecause obviously anyone who disagrees with the system is a toddler. What shaped your mindset? Are you a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thinking that defending Bezos and the likes will put you at the table with them? You know you can respect them without simping for them, right? You’re a maggot to them, just another dust particle.
- glerk 8mo ago[flagged]
- csoups14 8mo agoWhy should someone need to start a business just to have as good a life as their parents did? Why is today's wealth inequality optimal for society? Rich people in the past got by just fine. They started businesses, succeeded, lived incredibly comfortable lives, all while earning a smaller multiple more than the people working for them. The centralization of wealth is a sign of a sick society, especially when people who provide labor suffer and get less of the pie.
- wiseowise 8mo agoNot saying that you shouldn’t vote or try to change things, but nothing short of starting massive revolution with military insurrection and enforcement is going to change anything.
- JuniperMesos 8mo agoI'd much rather live in a society where Jeff Bezos has more wealth than me and I can buy things on Amazon, than in a society where Amazon no longer functions as a company because it was destroyed by a military insurrection and also the leaders of said insurrection have unequal access to resources compared to most other people (because they're the leaders of a military insurrection; there's not a whole lot of equality in a military)
- wiseowise 8mo agoSupposedly you’ll be at the helm, Lenin style. Also, who said anything about Amazon? Why are you myopic? The whole system is rotten to the core when a single person can make it in a minute more than 99% of world’s population and not use the money to advance the world. And before you mark (ha, get it?) me as a communist – I’m not against wealth and personal ownership. It’s one thing to own a Ferrari and an expensive home, and is another to live in a cookie clicker world watching number go up and doing nothing with it but multiply the money.
- JuniperMesos 8mo agoAmazon is the reason Jeff Bezos has a lot of money, and why you've heard of him and not a number of other people who have similar amounts of money.
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo agoI'd much rather neither, but apparently that's utopian. Dictatorship is an almost inevitable outcome of huge wealth inequality. At the very least political checks and balances erode rapidly, because most politicians, judges, and media people love easy money. If a billionaire throws money at them they'll do whatever they're told to do. There aren't many systems that protect non-compliers from negative consequences when they're surrounded by corruption.
- ricardo81 8mo agoUsing alternatives surely helps. I think so many people use Amazon because of familiarity and predictable delivery costs (free IIRC with Prime). A lot of the time other web stores can offer the same value.
- RobotToaster 8mo agoTitle I of the Smith Act prevents me from answering that question.
- iso1631 8mo agoA classic example of how the vaunted "First Amendment" doesn't actually help. Sure after a couple of decades it might be repealed, and your conviction would be quashed. Doesn't mean it doesn't stop the damage in the first place.
- cronin101 8mo agoSerious (but not easy) answer: You can move to a different country that more aligns with your moral standings or interests. You're (presumably) a valuable asset that will provide a net-positive contribution wherever you move, and a loss will be incurred when you emigrate. It's a huge undertaking, but you _can_ vote where your tax money gets sent. You can ensure it bootstraps a more equal system instead of propping-up an unequal one. I did this myself, and I feel good about having done it.
- butterbomb 8mo ago[dead]
- cronin101 8mo agoYou don't need to be rich to get a working visa (assuming you are a competent software engineer -- plenty of places in Europe will hire you, and there is a path to citizenship). You'll have to reassess what a "software engineer" salary looks like, but this is unironically part of the pathway towards living in a more-equal society where perhaps we shouldn't be earning 3x as much as everyone else just because we can invert a binary tree.
- smokel 8mo agoWhat you can do depends highly on your skill set, your network, and your willingness to spend effort on this. If you feed this into a decent chatbot, or in an Ask HN, you might be surprised.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bilekas 8mo agoWell this is motivational /s
- HelloUsername 8mo agoThis was flagged in 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145356
- ukblewis 8mo agoI wonder if instead of shaking their fist at the sky in anger with billionaires, we could run influence campaigns to: Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. (I don’t super trust politicians to tax them more and I am not sure that taxing them would even be effective given that there are always tax havens and loopholes, but persuasion should be possible, not extraordinarily expensive and have a high cost-benefit IMHO)
- wiseowise 8mo ago> Collect enough money to run marketing campaigns for billionaires to give more money to charity. They’ll just counter it with an army of cheap tik tokers portraying you as soyjack and campaign of disinformation.
- AdamN 8mo agoWhat I always find peculiar about this is the wealth disparities even at the highest levels. Andy Jassy for instance, or David Solomon (CEO of Goldman), have less than 1% of the bulge bracket class and certainly have similar work demands and impacts.
- maxilevi 8mo agoIt was never about hard work its about who owns the means of production. And it turns out the best way to amass huge amounts of wealth is creating something so you have ownership and working on growing it for decades. Jeff had similar compensation as jassy when he was ceo. It’s just that he is also the owner.
- nephihaha 8mo agoThe "means of production" has been one of the clarion calls of Marxism. It is more about who controls those means than who owns them. They can be officially owned by a government (so called public ownership), a co-operative (or "people's committee"), shareholders or a board, but in reality controlled by an individual it or a handful of individuals. That pattern continues after revolutionaries "seize the means of production" as well.
- cmiles8 8mo agoWhile I’m not a huge fan of the budge bracket class existing, I would say that: 1. Bezos once said something along the lines of don’t judge me by how much money I have, rather look at how may other wealthy people I’ve made. That view may be over simplifying some things, but it’s not completely wrong either. 2. Jassy or Solomon are just employees at the end of the day. Well paid, but they didn’t create the company. The system rewards those that create the thing a lot more than those that run the thing. 3. I’m vastly more critical of trust fund folks than someone like Bezos. He created true value in the economy and has been rewarded for that. Trust fund folks that simply live off that income are generally not productive members of society. They live the lifestyle then live purely because of a rich relative and, with rare exception, would be unable to have earned that wealth themself as their performance in society is poor relative to those who created the wealth.
- ricardo81 8mo agoSo basically the time it takes him to make a cup of tea he's surpassed the net worth of 99% of the world.
- general_reveal 8mo ago[flagged]
- wiseowise 8mo agoI’m surprised tech bros still think they have the world by the balls when there’s an existential threat to their career, lol.
- ruairidhwm 8mo agoTo be fair, I suspect he doesn't make his own tea xD
- aaron695 8mo ago[dead]
- SanjayMehta 8mo agoHuman nature is so strange, we always look up at the oligarchs or sideways at the Jones, but we never look at those who are not doing as well as us.
- erikerikson 8mo agoSpeak for yourself
- SanjayMehta 8mo agoMy father was a refugee who studied under street lights. I sold shaving cream door-to-door to pay for textbooks. I am speaking for myself and others like me.
- erikerikson 8mo agoNow, sure, but you also wrote: > ...we always look up at the oligarchs or sideways at the Jones, but we never look at those who are not doing as well as us. Which uses universal language to incorrectly declare the behavior of all humans. I assumed you were writing in good faith and reporting you find true and in my writing rejecting your claim. Maybe there's no one doing worse than you but I doubt it because here you are, with clear, well written english. Do you not offer them a helping hand? The real problem with your statement is that there are many of us who do look at and after those who are not doing as well as us (and some of those are quite wealthy). A group of us spend every Tuesday to collect food from stores with which to prepare a meal that we send to homeless encampments around town and then serve to anyone who shows up (usually around 100) for dinner. We provide a positive environment, build relationships, and help them to get clothes, toiletries, services, and emergency shelter. I and many others give substantial portions of our incomes to reduce poverty and disease across the world. I have been lucky to write software that has helped resolve the violence of genocide and open source software that has lifted businesses and made starting them more accessible. I have spent the core of my mind's considerations on trying to understand why the world functions as it does and how that can be improved, how we can move the standards higher, and how we can include everyone. In all of this there are many ways I have made decisions that make my wealth less, my comforts lower, and my time and mind more strained but I will not cease and I am not alone. So... When you claim that everyone only looks to those who are doing better I assert that you can speak for yourself. The belief that it's all every person for themselves and dog eat dog is false. It's bad for hope and bad for seeing reality.
- haght 8mo agoHonestly, I don't care how rich the rich are. The thing is, that for most part the poor become richer alongside the rich. Yeah, the gap widens, but what does it matter, if you also become more rich?
- shafyy 8mo agoMany reasons, but one reason is because having obscene wealth also means having obscene power. Power to influence politics and power to exploit workers.
- rglullis 8mo agoAt this scale, it's not about material wealth. It's about power. The issue is not that Jeff Bezos can buy an yacht and you can only buy an used RV for your weekend trips. The issue is that Jeff Bezos can buy a whole newspaper to shape public opinion and decide what laws get passed, and you can do nothing more than write a blog post about it.
- altern8 8mo agoSure, but the website focuses on material wealth.
- kasey_junk 8mo agoAnd yet someone much less rich than him has him kowtowing and has caused him to nueter that paper. If the last year has shown me anything, it’s moneys not all it’s cracked up to be on the power front.
- rglullis 8mo ago> And yet someone much less rich than him But with a lot more power than him. (At least for the moment)
- dudefeliciano 8mo agoand a dead guy with much less money and power that the guy you are referring to is still influencing his decisions
- k_kelly 8mo agoPeople shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird. Yes there is growing wealth inequality in the world. Because we invented a way to turn capital in to more capital without humans. Bezos is just the first of many. He also has on average made other people richer than he has pocketed, he doesn't own more than 50% of Amazon, his investors (shareholders, pension funds, the US government) have all done incredibly well out of his vision and enterprise. I love Prime, I love AWS, I love that I can get rare books over night at a great price. Should he be wealth capped? Should he innovate less as he get's more? Not as long as the primary way he makes money is through computers, that would just be self defeating. As someone who lives in Europe, the tech sector is America's growth engine and has defined the gap between the two economies, we'd love a Jeff Bezos.
- gambiting 8mo ago>>People shaking their fist at this on hacker news is weird I mean I know(at the back of my head) that HN is owned by Y Combinator which is all about creating startups that explode and make you a billionaire. But personally I come here for the actual hacking - gameboy games running on a pregnancy test, that kind of thing. Bezos making more money than GDP of a small country in a day is a thing that kinda deserves us shaking our fists at it - it means the global system is broken, if one man can have this kind of power. But in a way, it's nothing new - emperors and khans had more riches than any current billionaire, comparatively. On the other hand, they were actual rulers, not just "regular" citizens.
- vmaurin 8mo agoMoney is not a good success metric https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html Bezos is making a lot of money. But it doesn't mean it makes the world better. Prime or AWS can still work fine without having Bezos making tons of money
- FpUser 8mo agoFew big dicks take over everything and as the result they buy media, they buy government / laws, and having less and less competition they also have way too much power over the employees. All for convenience of overnight delivery? Are you sure this can not be achieved without Amazon? And what are you going to do if Google, Amazon, whatever else that controls good chunk of your life cuts you off? No fuck it.
- rglullis 8mo agoI'll repeat here what I am saying since 2022 [0]. Focusing on wealth inequality does not work. Concentration of wealth is a symptom of the large problem of concentration of power. Get rid of the mega-corporations, and it will be virtually impossible to have this much wealth in the hands of a single individual. Just put a cap on the size of a company. Break any corporation that has more than 150 employed people. Count independent contractors as employees if more than 1/3 of their income is dependent on any single customer. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
- samiv 8mo agoWon't take long until the apologist come in defending the billionaires, how they create businesses and value and prop up the economy with their spending yadi yadi. When the process that skews the wealth distribution has run this course, the billionaires and their cronies own everything and you have nothing do you think they'll show up to pay your child's education or your health care or your elderly care? They won't. They'll kick you to the curb and remove democracy since any real democracy is a direct threat to them. Then they'll continue their lavish parties on their yachts while you and your family go hungry in the slums.
- bpt3 8mo agoWhy are you assuming we're all dependent on the billionaires in the first place? I pay for my child's education and healthcare myself, and expect to continue to so whether Bezos is a trillionaire, a pauper, or anything in between. It ultimately has very little impact on my life.
- samiv 8mo agoIt has very little impact on your life... for now. Maybe you're well off for this not concern you but as a direct example how about Amazon warehouse worker who is squeezed so hard for profits that they live in a car, work 7 days a week without healthcare or vacations or anything? Them being poor is what enables jeff to be rich. Generally speaking whether you realize this or not the economic system creates a competition between entities. And larger richer entities will subsume assimilate and destroy smaller entities when they're looking for that eternal growth with fixed resources. The argument to this always is that "it's not a zero sum game". Except that in practice it is. Economies are growing tiny few percent per year perhaps while the rich people are growing their wealth 10-20% per year. This is only possible by changing the wealth distribution making it effectively a zero sum game. That means wealthy individuals will outcompete poorer individuals for all resources such as housing, education, health care. Everything will be used to extract maximum wealth from the society until there's nothing more to take.
- bpt3 8mo ago
- altern8 8mo agoCool website, but so what..? He risked it all and worked hard to start one of the world's biggest companies, he shouldn't be rewarded for that? I really don't get it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- banach 8mo agoHow 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.
- altern8 8mo agoWell, my main point was that he started one of the world's biggest companies. How many people can do that? Not me.
- gambiting 8mo agoSure, 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.
- altern8 8mo ago
- mcsnaj_znqc 8mo ago[flagged]
- avidruntime 8mo agoThis is an unfair characterization and is against the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bakies 8mo agoHe can spare a couple billion and still be set for millions of lifetimes. I just want some healthcare.
- mcsnaj_znqc 8mo agoAt the expense of who? Who doesn't want to get the best doctor? So what if you want Healthcare? Should the doctor work for you for free? And so on
- bakies 8mo agoHuh? The billionaire? The docs getting paid
- JuniperMesos 8mo agoMasses of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who individually have much less wealth than Bezos are a lot more responsible for the cost you pay for health care than Jeff Bezos is.
- bakies 8mo agoThat's why it cost money, yes. I want Jeff to pay the same portion of his wealth I do to fund healthcare for all.
- bronlund 8mo agoThe word 'made' is a peculiar one. If we are talking about creating value, then the definition of value is also kind of tricky. Does it add anything to the world or does it just move stuff around in a zero sum game. In any case, in my opinion, blaming Bezos for being Bezos, is looking in the wrong direction. The real issue is; who enabled this? And a good place to start, is to look at yourselves in a mirror. We did this. All of us.
- Gigachad 8mo agoThat logic falls a bit flat when people like bezos have the ability to pay politicians and buy news orgs to push his way. Bezos and related are personally responsible for creating the system that allows this.
- bronlund 8mo agoThe logic is sound. That you are doing nothing, is exactly the problem. Not even recognising that there is anything you can do, is more telling about you than of people like Besoz.
- dudefeliciano 8mo agoWho is skirting taxes and commiting labor law and privacy violations? I did not do this.
- bronlund 8mo agoI disagree. In the constant battle between good and evil, doing nothing is not a sustainable strategy.
- iso1631 8mo agoPeople argue that UBI means people won't bother to work Yet any billionaire can quite happily retire to a private island with every possible need catered for. Want to travel to Japan for a photo, just ask your PA and there's a helicopter waiting taking you to a plane by the time you put your shoes on. Anyone with a wealth of $10m can live the life of a very well paid worker ($500k a year) Anyone with a wealth of $2m can live like the average American. Anyone with a wealth of $500k can live "like a king" in cheaper locations. But people carry on working.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- soerxpso 8mo agoNo it's not. It's based on how much he "made" in the first half of 2020, mostly originating from gains in Amazon's stock, in a period specifically selected to inflate the number. If you actually want to display how much Bezos made since the user opened the page, there are many public APIs to get live stock data and you could show the actual live gain/loss. But that wouldn't really support the point you're trying to make, since there would be days where he actually loses more money than most people ever see.
- JuniperMesos 8mo agoAlso anyone who owns Amazon stock in their investment accounts - or who owns the S&P 500 - is also making and losing money when Jeff Bezos makes or loses money, for exactly the same reason.
- tsoukase 8mo agoBillionaires in countries with large inequality, like the developing and the US, are like Gods, not so much in low inequality, like Denmark. There are two ways to diminish their role and position without robing them: reduce the inequality or stop worshiping the consumerism and focus in non-material ideas. Both are difficult but effective.
- duxup 8mo agoI could use a new iPad Jeff… I like to read a bit before bed.
- bloody-crow 8mo agoThose numbers make no sense. According to this website: $116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point. $142k — "basic" Aston Martin Vantage. The base model starts at $192k currently. I don't remember times where new AM was anywhere near 140k no matter how "basic". $182k — Fully loaded Tesla Model S. This one is the most egregious. More expensive than Aston Martin? Come on, a fully loaded Plaid is $115k with delivery right now. Haven't watched further since I was already too flabbergasted by how much those numbers didn't match my expectations.
- helle253 8mo ago> $116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point. Some interns make more than that. I highly doubt the median intern does, even a SWE intern. Please think beyond SF/NYC.
- redhed 8mo agoYeah this is a crazy comment to me. I know multiple people who had entry level Wall Street and NYC/SF SWE offers back in 2022-2023 and I feel like $120k was really good for even an entry level position, let alone an intern. I guess maybe inflation in the past few years might have changed this.
- keeda 8mo agoWhere do I submit a bug report? AMZN is down 2% today but that number still go up. To be clear, wealth inequality is absolutely one of the most critical social problems today, just that simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse.
- customguy 8mo agoFrom the github: The numbers are based on Bezos' $56.7 billion gains during the first half of 2020 (source: Bloomberg and Buzzfeed), which translates into approximately $311 million per day, or $3,605 every second > simplistic numbers like this stifle useful discourse Do they? I would agree that it would be much better to just state the above on the page itself, but not because it makes a practical difference. It probably would make it feel even worse, if that was possible, for people who thinking back on the hardships they and/or others went through in that Covid period.
- StacyRawls 8mo ago[dead]