Because Bezos had a vision and his company has executed on it very well, they’ve done a phenomenal job. As a startup, they were far more nimble than B&N and beat them at the market of tomorrow while the latter was bogged down with the market of yesterday.
Amazon has provided a great service that is better than their competition. Amazon has done that. The management, the workers, and yes, the founder and CEO.
I keep going back to the Trump thing because it’s a clear example of a large group of people accomplishing something because we all know the President’s expertise or vision had nothing to do with it. But he is the CEO of the country, so why aren’t you saying “Well if Trump is so incompetent then why did he beat al-Baghdadi? Why didn’t Obama beat him?”. Note that I’m not equating Bezos’ leadership of Amazon to Trump.
Because Trump didn’t create America. He didn’t create the US military. He didn’t organize the teams that executed the mission. If anything, success there was in spite of Trump’s gross incompetence.
But that can’t possibly be the case with Amazon. Bezos wasn’t grossly incompetent, and then accidentally created a company with people that succeeded in spite of him.
Trump also inherited his wealth. Bezos is a self-made individual. How can anyone in America resent that? Think what you will about his current wealth, but he made himself into one of the richest people on the planet, and it wasn’t just because he was lucky, and he didn’t get a loan from daddy to do it, and in a field where there was a lot more money, a lot more resources and a lot more expertise, he beat the entrenched companies to something pretty darn remarkable. And Amazon is not done yet. No, he is not the entire company, but you are not giving him enough credit for the achievements he has made. He has changed the freaking world. No he didn’t cure cancer, and he didn’t create a mountain leveling bomb, but he has changed the behavior of consumers across the world and left a mark on the online landscape… and that’s just one, one industry out of many that Amazon has helped reshape with Bezos at the helm.
Amazon is so freaking big now and in so many areas that Bezos is actually changing the behavior of other companies, other companies he’s competing with while he shapes his. It’s so insane not to see this guy worked his ass off, took a bunch of risks, and challenged and won against bigger and more wealthy competitors on his way up. He was the David, and now we’re supposed to discredit him for that? No. Way.
That’s all it is, Bezos founding and Trump didn’t? Does Lincoln get credit for anything he did in the Civil War since he didn’t found the country?
I’m not saying Bezos didn’t play an important role in making Amazon what it is today. I’m saying there’s a lot of people who have made that happen, from warehouse workers peeing in bottles so you can get your USB cables in two days to the management teams all the way up to Bezos.
I’m objecting to the idea that we wouldn’t have modern e-commerce and online shopping without him. He’s executed very very well, but the idea wasn’t unique to him. He did execute on it very well, as did the tens and hundreds and thousands of people around him. That’s why Amazon is where it is today.
For your analogy to work, Amazon would have have existed for hundreds of years, and the Bezos would have had to have stepped in as CEO 3 years ago, and then largely acted as an incompetent buffoon.
And right now, there is probably a truck driver peeing on the side of the road or in a Gatorade bottle so that you could get your stuff in any amount of time. And that, that’s been going on for decades. There’s probably some person out there who died to make sure we all have electricity most days. There’s someone who got hit while holding up a sign trying to keep drivers and workers dealing with roads so we don’t destroy our cars going over them
You know what you can do when you don’t like the conditions of something, you vote for legislation that’s better for them. And if you think you can do better than Amazon, then you start building your company to take them down. And it will happen one day, Amazon will not be the front-runner forever. It always looks impossible to beat a behemoth, but it never is.
And no matter how much wealth you take, how much class warefare that might happen, that is not going to give those Amazon workers, or any other worker more rights than they have. If you want them to have more breaks, push for laws that make it happen.
I’m on my phone so my responses are sooo slow, so sorry for being brief. FWIW, I don’t resent Bezos for being wealthy and I’m not saying he just got lucky. I just don’t think he’s singularly responsibe for Amazon’s success, nor do I think he was the only one in the 90’s to have this idea (hence my Pets.com references).
I feel like maybe my posts have been unclear or misinterpreted? I don’t have an anti-Amazon or anti-Bezos agenda, I just bought something for them today. They offer a good service and that’s why I use them.
You compared him to out baby in Chief and referenced warehouse workers peeing in cups. I am pretty sure those were not statements meant to inspire praise or credit. The fact that other websites are no-longer with us, and there were a lot of them, a lot of them that failed, just tells how difficult it was to be successful… and that is not Amazon’s only business.
If you look back at my post I explicitly said I wasn’t equating their leadership. I used Trump as a refutation that only the person at the top matters and that the success of organization goes beyond the CEO/President/etc. The peeing in bottles thing is messed up but in that context it was a reference to how hard they work to make their level of service a reality.
Trump didn’t start American. An elected representative is’t really an equivalent to someone starting a company. Trump did start a number of failed companies though, and even with all the advantages and money given to him, he has a long list of failures behind him. I suspect if he took a patch of land and called it Trumpland, we would be talking about how that country failed. Fortunately for us, he isn’t founder of anything when it comes to the nation of the USA.
These guys have a lot of their wealth not stored as liquid cash. You tax them when they cash it in and when they die, and it goes to their estate. There isn’t a single person here who says we can’t tax the rich.
Your question (“You genuinely believe these people are worth what they are?”) implies that you’re measuring “worth” by some other measure than money. But if you’re using money to value what someone is worth, then your question is pointless because it’s tautologically true. “You genuinely believe someone who makes X dollars is worth X dollars?” Well yeah, because you just said that’s how you define “worth”.
