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.
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It 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.
The "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.
While 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.
Jeff Bezos started Amazon with family money. Sure, there were richer folks, but few have parents capable of giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars for a business venture.
How about we judge him not by dollars made but by positive actions taken in the world? The number of people he has helped. It would be interesting to see the ratio of people he's helped to people he's hurt. I wonder if it's 1:1 or more like 1:10000?
Under no circumstances should we allow him to define the criteria by which he should be judged. Greed is not a good. Hoarding wealth is just like any hoarding -- a psychological disorder. The reason the wealthy can never be satisfied is because hoarding is a psychological disorder. It will never be rational. It will never be normal.
We can do better as a species.
>" how may other wealthy people I’ve made"
And how many have become more poor? I do not give a flying fuck about how many 5 percenter have made even more money. You either lift society as a whole or you let small part prosper at the expense of the rest.
Some time ago conditions in the US / Canada were that many small people got the opportunity (The American Dream or whatever the fuck it is called).
Now that window of opportunity keep shrinking.
So no, fuck you James
Basically no one has been made poorer by the existence of Amazon, a company that mainly sells cheap consumer goods (or cloud compute) to the masses. The small number of people who have been made poorer by the existence of Amazon are people in the upper 5% or so of American wealth who owned a consumer-facing business that got out-competed by Amazon, and by definition that means that a much larger number of generally-poorer people benefitted because Amazon fulfilled their wants and needs better than the other business did.
Here is one:
https://clje.law.harvard.edu/app/uploads/2025/10/Amazon-Driv...
lots of other if you care to search