How Much Money Jeff Bezos Made Since You Started Reading This Page

fenaer

And 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.

bilekas

Well this is motivational /s

HelloUsername

This was flagged in 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145356

ukblewis

I 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)

AdamN

What 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.

ricardo81

So basically the time it takes him to make a cup of tea he's surpassed the net worth of 99% of the world.

SanjayMehta

Human 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.

haght

Honestly, 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?

k_kelly

People 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.

rglullis

I'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

altern8

Cool 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.

iso1631

People 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.

bronlund

The 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.

soerxpso

No 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.

tsoukase

Billionaires 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

I could use a new iPad Jeff… I like to read a bit before bed.

bloody-crow

Those 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.

keeda

Where 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.