Let Bezos keep his money
July 2nd, 2025
In my feed today is a little tease to inspire greed and envy:
The article explains that we can figure this out using division: $237 billion/341,891,315 = $693 per US resident. Not exactly a life-changing amount.
US federal, state, and local governments run thru about $10 trillion a year, so if we gave it to them, Bezos’s $237 billion would fund them for about a week.
Either way his companies would no longer exist, and the 1.5 million people who work for those companies would lose their jobs. Plus of course no more Amazon packages.
You might wonder – how did Bezos get all that wealth (I won’t say “money” because almost all of it is invested in companies – warehouses, factories, etc.)? Well, he’s one of those super talented people who create giant companies out of little more than talent and work (and of course the work of those 1.5 million people who get paid for helping).
Such people are really rare – there are only a few dozen of them in the world. But when they have large amounts of capital, they can do great things. People with $700 in their pocket can’t do much to change the world. So how about instead we leave the wealth with the single person who has proven that they can do something wonderful with it? Jeff Bezos.
(Plus, you know, he earned it…paid the taxes due and everything.)
July 2nd, 2025 at 5:06 pm
I make a similar argument when I see people complain that a CEO makes so much more than his employees: divide his compensation by the number of employee-hours, and see how much of an hourly raise they’d actually get. (It’s a pittance.)
Division is powerful. But this same argument can be used for “evil”: divide a government program’s cost by the number of people, then the number of days in a year, and voila! It’s less than your daily coffee!
Wouldn’t you pay that much “for the children”?
July 2nd, 2025 at 7:15 pm
Sure. The point I’m trying to make here (maybe not as clearly as it could be) is that Bezos accomplishes more with the money than either individuals or the government would.
His fortune would be gone in days if given to the government, and would make hardly any difference to individuals in the long term. Yet 1.5 million people have jobs and we get Amazon out it.
And, of course, we all *gave* him that money freely. in exchange for all the Amazon stuff we buy. He paid taxes on it, so it’s his to do with as he sees fit. But what he in fact is doing with it is probably way better than what the rest of us could do with it.