Jeff Bezos could become world's first trillionaire

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Jeff Bezos could become world's first trillionaire, and many people aren't happy about it

A company projected Amazon's Jeff Bezos could become the world's first trillionaire, sparking critical responses to the entrepreneur and his wealth.
www.usatoday.com

According to Comparisun, a company which allows small- to medium-sized firms to compare different business products, the world’s first trillionaire will likely be Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Their projection shows Bezos reaching trillionaire status by 2026. The company said their projection is based on taking the average percentage of yearly growth over the past five years and applying it to future years.

Comparisun shows Bezos’ net worth grew an average of 34% over the last five years.

As of Thursday morning, Bezos’ net worth was estimated at $143 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, whilch tracks the worth of the world’s richest people daily. Compared to last year, Bezos’ worth has surged by more than $28 billion.

The projection has sparked anger on Twitter, noting how many people are financially struggling during the coronavirus pandemic as Bezos rakes in billions of dollars.

“Jeff Bezos is about to become the world’s first trillionaire while we’re about to enter a depression,” said Twitter user @Thomas_A_Moore.

Talk of Bezos’ potential trillionaire status follows public protests by Amazon employees over their safety as they continue to work during the coronavirus pandemic. On May 1, workers for Amazon and other companies including Instacart held a strike protesting a lack of “adequate protection in the workplace.”

Amazon said it spent more than $800 million in the first half of 2020 on safety measures including masks, hand sanitizer and additional hand-washing stations at warehouses. The company also hired 175,000 new workers to keep up with demand as millions of consumers lean on Amazon to have goods delivered while stuck at home.
 
I’d certainly have more respect for Bezos if his workers were well paid and had good benefits as well as being a leader in safety precautions at his warehouses. But he doesn’t and hasn’t. Instead, his enormous wealth is based on following the ideal of paying not one cent more than he has to and following the minimal amount of safety. Here’s a man that could be the gold standard of fair practices and outstanding safety precautions. Instead, he’s racing towards a trillion dollar wealth and losing the respect of an awful lot of people in the process.

Why do people like him…a genius at building a phenomenal business…refuse to do the right things? Is that final couple of billions worth having people look at him in disgust?
 
Pattylt said:
Instead, his enormous wealth is based on following the ideal of paying not one cent more than he has to
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That’s pretty much the Amazon strategy in a nutshell. To compliment that they also keep their own profit margins lot on consumer goods. Sometimes you will see a big player in a game temporary lower profit margins to kill competition. But for Amazon the their strategy on that is not temporary. It’s their mode of operation. Many laws that consider price look at “consumer welfare.” This creates a situation that existing laws had not predicted. Since the pricing structure isn’t short term it isn’t predatory.

Additionally Amazon makes a lot of their money off of web services and selling infrastructure to those that need it. Ex: Netflix, which is in some markets an Amazon competitor, is also implemented through services hosted by Amazon.
Pattylt said:
Why do people like him
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Speaking as a Software Engineer by practice and by degree I can tell you that accolades are handed out not by humanitarian position or ethics while operating in this field, but but success. Outside of the community of software engineers I couldn’t tell you what the most significant factors are in gaining praise. There are a lot of people that don’t care for Apple products, but still recognize Apple as a smart and successful company. When it comes down to the bottom line (which is measured in dollars) they are.
Pattylt said:
refuse to do the right things?
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I don’t think that ethics is part of the evaluation. Law is. But law and ethics don’t have perfect overlap.
Pattylt said:
? Is that final couple of billions worth having people look at him in disgust?
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May depend on whether or not the person evaluating that question is a share holder or not. Being a beneficiary of the company’s success might be an influential factor in perception.

That said, I’ve got to get back to reading. I’ve just made some extra money writing some tutorials on using Amazon Web Services and have a few more articles that I’ve still got to publish.
 
Perhaps because the business model is built on cheap and overworked labor.
 
Heck, they’ve got the government as one of their largest customers.

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Hard not to be successful as a titan in business when the government is asking you for help.
 
Yes, it is. To my mind, the best thing that could happen to Amazon is unionization. It would have to be one huge movement to overcome the opposition to it but, if successful, amazing changes would take place.
 
It should be obvious the new Gilded Age is here.

It will be helpful to think of Jeff Bezos as the modern day John D. Rockefeller who once said “competition is a sin” on his way to near total domination of the critical levers of the American post-Civil War economy. That is, oil and railroads.

The influence of the original Rockefeller lives on in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which was written to force the breakup of the Rockefeller companies. Later the impulse that created the Anti-Trust Act also created the Robinson Patman Act which regulated retail pricing cartels.

The enforcement of both Acts is quite lacking in recent decades. While there is always space for capitalism, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Robinson Patman Act together served as a recognition that capitalism could go too far. Today, we have the specter of crony capitalism that is riding the new Gilded Age as we see critical industries engaging in rampant regulatory and legislative capture. Defense, higher education and health care, just to name three industries that have been financialized against the common people.

As we have seen the growth of crony capitalism since the 1950’s, it should be apparent that it ultimately doesn’t matter which letter between D and R follows a president’s name. The names change, but the rackets don’t change, they just take more with every new Administration.
 
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Dr_Meinheimer said:
Hard not to be successful as a titan in business when the government is asking you for help.
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It is worth mentioning ing that all three of the big USA based Cloud service providers supply computing needs to the government. I believe it was Microsoft that won a big contract for their Azure service. Amazon makes the claim that they dis not win it because the president doesn’t like Bezos and is demanding a review of the decision.
 
This is how we find ourselves with manufacturing all outsourced to China.
 
Pattylt said:
Is that final couple of billions worth having people look at him in disgust?
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I know he isn’t looked on favorably in Hawaii where he bought land and then proceeded to sue his neighbors in order to acquire their lands. His neighbors are often native Hawaiians who have inherited their lands from their ancestors and now comes this rapacious mainlander.

His house will sit empty for most of the year while homelessness is rampant.

Lots of expensive million dollar homes on Hawaii owned by outsiders, which sit empty while locals working 2 to 3 jobs can’t even afford a starter home.

Shameful

Update: made a mistake here. It was Zuckerberg who did this in Hawaii not Bezos.
 
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The consumer is king, whether the consumer is aware of it or not. I hear a lot of talk of repatriating manufacturing back to Western countries, but supply chains between Asia and the West have been steadily built since the 1950s, and China began to integrate into that chain by the end of the 1970s. The costs of moving manufacturing back into Western countries, or at least countries that generally share our democratic ideals, would be a monumental undertaking, and more pertinent to these discussions, would cost enormous sums of money. That means consumers will have to pay a lot more for a great many goods. In some cases, supply chains as such don’t really exist in Western countries at all. I doubt, for instance, there any significant chip fabrication facilities anywhere in North America anymore, beyond prototyping facilities. All of that was offshored many years ago, and now the bulk of the integrated circuits and other chips used in everything from computers to smartphones to, heck, the microcontroller in your average washing machine, are all fabricated in China.
 
niceatheist said:
I hear a lot of talk of repatriating manufacturing back to Western countries, but supply chains between Asia and the West have been steadily built since the 1950s, and China began to integrate into that chain by the end of the 1970s. The costs of moving manufacturing back into Western countries, or at least countries that generally share our democratic
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WSJ did a story on this. They focused on Apple, but the discussion is applicable to other companies and items.

 
Yes, it’s complex…very complex. One thing that may boost the move out of China is this pandemic. All the tech companies are aware of the costs and benefits of China. It’s more than just the wage differences. China built those modern automated factories to lure businesses there in the first place…competing against our severely aging factories here and in Europe. Suddenly, they could match US quality, ship it the US quickly and at lower prices. Their government helped them enormously to do this.

To bring it back to the US, I’m not sure how it could be done. Capitalism doesn’t look favorably on the government building factories for private enterprises to use. Tariffs just push manufacturing to India and Vietnam . India is an easy choice as part of any tech sold there must be partially manufactured there. So, several companies are moving parts of this to India. Would the US ever enact a similar law? How much incentive should the US give to move at least part of manufacturing back? And prices will reflect all of this. iPhones are ridiculously expensive already. Then there’s Samsung! And cars. Beats me what’s the best move…
 
Oops, made a mistake here.

It wasn’t Jeff Bezos who sued his Hawaiian neighbors. It was Zuckerberg.
 
And now China, a hostile nation is now being a big bully to its neighbor nations and there isn’t anything that the West can do.

China knows it has the upper hand all thanks to corporate greed and the love of slave labor.
 
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The US could sign on to the TPP and begin the process of economically encircling China.
 
Pattylt said:
China built those modern automated factories to lure businesses there in the first place…competing against our severely aging factories here and in Europe. Suddenly, they could match US quality, ship it the US quickly and at lower prices. Their government helped them enormously to do this.

To bring it back to the US, I’m not sure how it could be done.
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I feel like there may be some jobs that are just gone. If wages in the USA are found to be “too expensive” that could be motivation to increase tooling and automation to get the jobs done with less people.
 
True

Even if all manufacturing were to come back here, not all all of the jobs lost will come back.

I think goods can still be manufactured here at a competitive price, due to widespread automation.
 
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ThinkingSapien said:
If wages in the USA are found to be “too expensive” that could be motivation to increase tooling and automation to get the jobs done with less people.
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Absolutely! The old manufacturing jobs of yesteryear are gone for good. Today, if we rebuild factories they will be run with far fewer people for the actual running of the plant. But, it will create a whole newer class of workers…those that design and maintain the automation. Just as cars killed the buggy industry but created thousands of new jobs, automation will as well. I’ve watched automation revolutionize the hospital laboratory and while it reduced the number of Med Techs to run them, it increased the people needed to keep them up and running as well as more people needed to enter and process the specimens to get them ready for the automated lines.
 
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