Earlier quoted context omitted.
For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Ok, I'll bite. Why? It's not like there's some natural law against it, so you need to provide an argument for why you think they shouldn't.
Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
I think corporations should get absurdly large. You know, I’m saying things without substantiating them. No offense, but anti-Corp is cool these days. Virtue signaling without thinking on one’s own.
Being pro too large to fail corps has always been suspicious.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#163From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…
Yeah - the man is 57, and at this point does NOT have to work anymore...probably for the rest of his life. Looks like he still intends to run his philanthropies, Blue Origin, and the Post, but after the type of run he has had, he's probably taking some more free time while he's healthy. I try not to fall into the "cult of personality" trap, but Amazon is where it is _because_ of Bezos, and it'll be fascinating to wat…
I think you pass the point of not having to work somewhere prior to 130B net worth.
I'm worried about what happens to Amazon with Bezos gone. A good outcome would be something like Apple and Tim Cook. A bad one would be Microsoft and Ballmer, it will take a while to see which type this ends up being.
Either way losing Bezos as CEO is a bummer.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
> It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. > Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Or maybe we should convince a larger swath of humanity to unite behind an idea larger than "nationhood" or "my country".
Maybe I'm just pessimistic but I doubt that will happen until there is a clear existential crisis for humanity.
It will always be a matter of "us vs them" it's just a matter of who is "us" or "them"
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
> It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. > Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Or maybe we should convince a larger swath of humanity to unite behind an idea larger than "nationhood" or "my country".
A for-profit corporation seems like a terrible candidate for such a position.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
> It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. > Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Or maybe we should convince a larger swath of humanity to unite behind an idea larger than "nationhood" or "my country".
Moreover, Politicians are largely corrupt and in pretty much every country, they have a bad rep. Why should they rally up the public to support them?
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#167From https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... >Fellow Amazonians: >I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be a…
For comparison, using national total wealth, that makes Amazon worth more than Saudia Arabia, Denmark, Portugal, or New Zealand. It's $280.5 billion in revenue in 2019 put it above the GDP of Romania, Peru, Ukraine, etc. Corporations should never be allowed to get this large.
I don't get the comparison here tbh. The valuation of of AMZN is based on assets + future time-discounted dividends. While, those wealth figures for Saudi Arabia are just assets. After all Saudi Aramco, which is mostly state owned, is worth about 1T.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#168It will be interesting to watch how Andy Jassy as head of AWS (dealing with building out data centers, SW partnerships, API uptime, negotiating with Intel, designing Graviton CPUs, etc.) will be able to transition to such things as Prime Video content licensing discussions and goal setting for Whole Foods and the nuances of warehouse distribution labor disputes. As a founder of Amazon - having built Amazon from nothi…
Anecdotally I have heard that Amazon as a company does delegation very effectively. Individual departments have complete autonomy over their own business decisions, and this applies on the engineering side as well.
I do agree that the shitstorm over warehouse workers, automation, unionization etc. is only going to get a lot worse over the next few years, and Jassy may even find handling that becoming his primary job.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Why? Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big?
What do you mean by "get this big"? Governments aren't defined by a market cap, but rather by the services they provide to their citizens. Consider that a private company's only goal is to enrich its shareholders, and they have no responsibility to the people or places around them. They are only accountable to their shareholders and the government. A governments responsibility is solely to its citizens who also contr…
That's a pretty narrow definition of a government. I hardly think that's been the case for most of history and I don't think that's actually the case in the majority of nations to date, even at the surface.
Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
#1701.3 million employees, wow!
Would be interesting to know how they are split by geography and function
And pay. With the discussion in other threads about whether corporations should be able to compete with nations, is Amazon's wealth-distribution better or worse than various nations?