I don't really believe in the "donating all of your tens of billions of dollars" either. However, he is right that Bezos lacks imagination if that is all that he can think of doing with his money.
First off, how about not maximizing the profit from Amazon for himself and for speculative shareholders and increasing worker salaries instead?
Second, how about keeping prices as low as possible for consumers? They made record profits, and multiple X of what Amazon made like a couple of years ago, and yet they still increased Prime subscription prices, for instance.
But Bezos could also lower his company's commissions and increase commissions for affiliates (which I think were also lowered like a year ago), as another example.
There are so many more ways in which Bezos could "do good", without "having" to make billions of profits himself and his shareholders. So either he really lacks the imagination to do stuff like that, or he's just using that reason as an excuse to seem like there's no other option than for him to make so much money, because in reality he loves making all of that money for himself. But he likes to pretend he doesn't and that he would "do more" if he could.
I really don't believe in this whole thing of "pleasing shareholders at all costs, and bottom-feeding on the poor (both regular workers and consumers) as much as possible to do that." Also, Bezos himself used to believe that pleasing shareholders didn't have to be the company's #1 priority for a decade and a half, even if his reason then wasn't "to do good" but "grow as much as possible first".
I'm not sure what is happening lately, but there is a clear trend of corporations bottomfeeding more and more and squeezing all the money from the bottom up. My guess is it's a combination of increased corruption in Congress and of "buying of politicians" (it has become much easier to do it), a failure of anti-trust laws and enforcement, allowing big companies to grow ever larger and have less competition, as well as increased corruption/greed at the top of these companies (their boards being more and more willing to compensate themselves and the top-level execs more and more every year, to the detriment of workers and consumers).
To be fair, Bezos isn't rich because Amazon makes loads of money and has fat margins. Amazon was loss-making for most of its existence, and probably only became profitable thanks to AWS. He's insanely rich because shareholders don't care about Amazon's current profits, but just like its growth.
You mean he could make less money by running his company inefficiently and that would be good for people? Why single out Amazon workers and affiliates though? What if he gave cash to, I don't know, all optometrists, or something? Eventually, it's just giving away money to someone. Space travel is different - it's creating value on its own.
Exploit is the wrong word. It's America and they're free to quit. Nothing's keeping there except their own desire for money. They won't starve without that job so it's not wage slavery. They simply choose to do it.
And why affiliates? The GP proposed giving money to internet advertisers. They are surely not the most deserving group of people on Earth.
> They won't starve without that job so it's not wage slavery. They simply choose to do it.
Aren't those people paid close to minimum wage? People on minimum wage don't live in an utopia where they have all the freedom in the world to move around as they wish, unlike Silicon Valley employees being paid 200k per year.
I'd say Bezos has a lot of work to do on the "taking better care of his employees" front.
And regarding space travel at this point it's just an intellectual fetish based on reading/watching SF (and I'm a big fan of SF...). Except for the "single point of failure" thing, which hasn't truly been an issue for the last 65 million years, we should be fine on Earth for the next decades, at least.
We seem to have avoided catastrophe as a species a few times cutting it real close.
And those haven't been really big incidents either.
Anyway, Musk's strategy in making space travel cheaper is a right one. Throwing more money at it directly is likely to result in inefficient solutions. It requires time and work add much as some money.
Setting up a Bezos space university would be a good start. And figuring out education without (much) bureaucracy and sinecures.
Space travel (especially long range) is interesting in that tackling it rewrites solving a whole lot of ancillary problems. Social, political, educational, biological, agricultural, physical etc.
First off, how about not maximizing the profit from Amazon for himself and for speculative shareholders and increasing worker salaries instead?
Second, how about keeping prices as low as possible for consumers? They made record profits, and multiple X of what Amazon made like a couple of years ago, and yet they still increased Prime subscription prices, for instance.
But Bezos could also lower his company's commissions and increase commissions for affiliates (which I think were also lowered like a year ago), as another example.
There are so many more ways in which Bezos could "do good", without "having" to make billions of profits himself and his shareholders. So either he really lacks the imagination to do stuff like that, or he's just using that reason as an excuse to seem like there's no other option than for him to make so much money, because in reality he loves making all of that money for himself. But he likes to pretend he doesn't and that he would "do more" if he could.
I really don't believe in this whole thing of "pleasing shareholders at all costs, and bottom-feeding on the poor (both regular workers and consumers) as much as possible to do that." Also, Bezos himself used to believe that pleasing shareholders didn't have to be the company's #1 priority for a decade and a half, even if his reason then wasn't "to do good" but "grow as much as possible first".
I'm not sure what is happening lately, but there is a clear trend of corporations bottomfeeding more and more and squeezing all the money from the bottom up. My guess is it's a combination of increased corruption in Congress and of "buying of politicians" (it has become much easier to do it), a failure of anti-trust laws and enforcement, allowing big companies to grow ever larger and have less competition, as well as increased corruption/greed at the top of these companies (their boards being more and more willing to compensate themselves and the top-level execs more and more every year, to the detriment of workers and consumers).