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Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

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Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#251

Post by lnanek2 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #135
personjerry wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations should never be allowed to get this large. Why? Bonus question: Why should governments be allowed to get that big?

Let's start with the premise that "representative government is the union of the people" and "profit motive is not always the best incentive for action in society", and go from there.

What about starting with the premise that "a successful corporation offers goods or services people want for less cost than competitors" whereas a successful government organization "exhausts their budget every fiscal quarter and successfully demands more". Which is doing more good for the people? I've worked for both and know which I'd choose.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#252

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #204
agloeregrets wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably for the rest of his life. At a net worth of $1 billion and assuming he lives to 100 that is $23 million dollars a year to spend, which reasonably, he could only spend around $5-10 Million if he tried. He is worth what, $150 Billion? By the fall he probably will be. He could find a group of 10,000 people of the same age, spit the money evenly and each person would have $340k per year, a large enough sum to…

> Nobody should ever have a $1B worth. How does this work? Forced sale of assets? Who determines the market price of the assets, if they’re not highly liquid?

When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income. This is true even if there is no public market for the shares at that time (something that caused headaches for many early dotcom stock option grantees).

It's is an obvious precedent for taxing somebody who has "received" wealth via the route that Bezos has done.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#253

Post by paxys »

GizmoSwan wrote: post #137

He has bought a new 0.5 billion dollar boat this year. https://themarketherald.com.au/magazine/the-pursuit-of-comfo... Bill gates is still renting. What do you think he was going to do with all that cash. After few years he will review his life after vacationing becomes dull for the workhorse.

> Bill gates is still renting.

What does that mean?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#254

Post by sjg007 »

bobo_legos wrote: post #25
mc32 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he’ll take a cue from Bill Gates and get involved in philanthropy. Alternatively he might get more involved in Blue Origin?

I think he's probably bored at this point. Whats there really left to do at Amazon? AWS and the website are eating the world. He's 57. Why not at this point go play with his rockets and spend time inside that WaPo newsroom that he loves.

As chairman and being involved in the WaPo newsroom and possibly K street would actually help Amazon. But you'd probably have to enjoy politics and does Bezos? Bezos built Amazon so is he OK with it being chopped up if it comes to that or not?

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#255

Post by dralley »

vasco wrote: post #206
agloeregrets wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably for the rest of his life. At a net worth of $1 billion and assuming he lives to 100 that is $23 million dollars a year to spend, which reasonably, he could only spend around $5-10 Million if he tried. He is worth what, $150 Billion? By the fall he probably will be. He could find a group of 10,000 people of the same age, spit the money evenly and each person would have $340k per year, a large enough sum to…

Why would you give that money to worse allocators of capital? He's generated 1.3 million jobs. How many jobs would you sacrifice in order to limit Bezos to whatever wealth cap you think is appropriate? By definition you will sacrifice them, so the question is at what cost is it too much and how much money is too much money? Also who decides that, is it you?

How are you measuring "efficient allocation of capital"?

Amazon has been very successful at squeezing "efficiency" out of their employees, where "efficiency" is defined largely as abusive conditions and poor wages. While they may be a large employer in raw numbers, vast numbers of their employees depend on public assistance. UPS, USPS, and FedEx seem to pay consistently higher wages. And on top of that, like most "supermassive" companies, they are very "efficient" at dodging taxes.

Yes, this is "efficiency" in the financial sense, but it is by no means net positive at the societal level.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-turnove...

https://www.ttnews.com/articles/amazon-thrives-fedex-deliver...

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#256

Post by lotsofpulp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #252
lotsofpulp wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody should ever have a $1B worth. How does this work? Forced sale of assets? Who determines the market price of the assets, if they’re not highly liquid?

When you get issued stock options at a company, you immediately become liable for taxes on them, since they are treated as income. This is true even if there is no public market for the shares at that time (something that caused headaches for many early dotcom stock option grantees). It's is an obvious precedent for taxing somebody who has "received" wealth via the route that Bezos has done.

How about land? IP? Or a private company? Surely, only people that get issued options aren’t subject to a $1B max.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#257

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jl2718 wrote: post #80
ww520 wrote: post #22

Wow. I still remember when Amazon started as an online bookstore selling books and people kind of laughed at the idea, and the time Amazon kept losing money and refused to post an earning and people got mad. Amazing long game.

Interestingly, it seemed at the time that books were just about the least exciting things being sold on the Internet, and the shipping costs looked fatal to the business. You could buy just about anything, and everybody was going out of business trying to compete on big ticket items like electronics and movies and games and beanie babies. Not much competition on books online (anybody remember the “Duwamish book store…

There was competition. Bookstacks.com had been in business with a telnet-only interface for more than a year before Amazon.

As noted by others, the shipping cost-to-item-average-cost ratio is precisely why Jeff chose books to start with. But yes, he also looked way out (even if he couldn't see as clearly as some people seem to think he could).

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#258

Post by easton »

mywittyname wrote: post #145
ianai wrote: post #87

I’m just going to piss into the wind a little. After seeing what happened to Microsoft and Apple after they lost their founder CEOs, I don’t welcome this news as freely as others might. We’re not necessarily likely to see the company go directions that are for the better. (Maybe though this is really a rant about Cook. Amazon has lots of room to improve. Looking at all those forged brand names, for instance.)

Apple is doing quite well under Cook. Same with Google under Pichai. Microsoft had some pains during the Balmer years, but I think that's partially due to the anti-trust suit making them gunshy and Balmer being a generally poor choice as a tech CEO, but they are doing very well with Nadella. I expect Amazon to be as ambitious as ever. Though, I am slightly afraid of a shift in focus towards AWS over retail. But I sus…

Google isn’t doing all that well under Pichai, they haven’t launched a successful product under him since Chromebooks (I guess GCP, but when you are that size and . It’s possible that Google is only ever going to be an ads company, but based on their corporate rhetoric I don’t think that was the goal.

Apple Silicon Macs aren’t really raking in cash yet, but Mac sales are up $1B in the last quarter, so by time transition is complete they will be.

Re: Email from Jeff Bezos to employees

#260

Post by ryall »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #160
unethical_ban wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with the premise that "representative government is the union of the people" and "profit motive is not always the best incentive for action in society", and go from there.

I dispute that premise. I'd hardly call America "unified" at the present moment; we are in such a state of disunity that many are refusing to accept election results. Pervasive as Amazon, Google, et al. may be, they are still much easier to escape than the United States government.

I'd hardly call America a country with a governmental system that's representative of the people
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