Google says Amazon has 566000 employees (which blows me away a bit) and the average salary is between $58k and $146k (awfully big range, but w/e) making it between about $32B and $83B.

Bezos' per-minute wage is still less than what Trump pays models & pr0n stars to **** him

So what?

So, chop his head off.

I'm happy to be contrarian and claim that the people who created the most practical way to communicate and connect with humans in our time, the cheapest and most efficient way to purchase goods of our time, and the leading developer of non-oil dependent cars and space travel have had an overwhelmingly positive effect on society.

What if those methods were ubiquitous and the people at the top were merely the beneficiaries of the Brownian motion of network effects that they had little or nothing to do with creating?

I don't think that's accurate. What they came up with was unique and revolutionary at the time. How many people laughed at Bezos and believed Amazon was doomed to fail because they were losing money for years?

I think plenty of companies were doing online shopping essentially exactly the same as amazon. Amazon became the place to buy so it became the place to sell so it became even more so the place to buy and so on. What % of that was down to Bezos and what % to good fortune and the fact that because of network effects it had to happen somewhere? That's the % of Bezo's money that we should take at guillotine point.

Seems like all that will do is force companies to stay private. A gift to hedge funds and other people who already have money.

You think threatening to guillotine rich people isn't the most practical way to implement equitable taxation policy? Bit weird.

Well this is getting more philosophical, but I'm a lot more comfortable letting the government provide healthcare, education, food, basic rights, etc. than I am about them determining how much a company/person "should" be allowed to earn in the market.

Again, Amazon pretty clearly was uniquely willing to have a riskier long-term view of innovation. It's like the Sixers tanking in basketball, something nearly all other teams didn't have the stomach for. You're going to hate on company for not following typical hit-and-run take short term profits at all costs corporate tactics for once?

No. People just won’t allow companies to be valued on the open market. Easiest way to hide wealth.

Cool story bro.

Not all that clear imo. They are certainly a company who's risks paid off but do you congratulate the guy who hits a one outer in a huge pot on their poker skills?

I think you'll find lot of companies with essentially exactly the same business model as amazon in the early years of the dotcom boom that utterly failed. Is thst because of bezos or because of random chance? I'd say mostly the latter. I just don't think one human is $150 billion smarter/more driven etc than another human.

Taking away the pot from the guy who hit the one outer because he didn't deserve to hit it doesn't make the game more equitable.

I mean depends on your definition of equitable I guess but yeah it does, assuming you spread it out amongst all the other players.

poker analogies are, of course, always terrible - but boy that one is a doozy

Social media and ordering stuff online and delivering it were absolutely 100% a lock and Besos and Zuck were just the lucky winners in industries that favor monopolies.

Musk stuck his neck out ahead of the market. The Prius was more important than Tesla, but Tesla has been important. I guess the rocket stuff too, though it seems like billionaires trying to get to space and colonize Mars was kind of inevitable.

If you do it for every one outer sure. I fully support Bezos paying much higher taxes than he currently is. You seem to be arguing for only taking away pots based on your interpretation of how well someone played the hand.

Not really. My interpretation is that anyone with a net worth > say $10,000,000 almost certainly hit a 1 outer somewhere along the way and that if it were practical to do so they shouldn't be allowed to keep wealth that only accrued to them through chance.

Lol....clueless as ever.

Median total compensation of Amazons workforce ex Bezos is $28,466. Straight from the horses mouth (page 30).

While they didn't file an average wage, spoiler alert.....it ain't anywhere near your upper bound of 146k....It's likely substantially lower than your lower bound. Primary sources microbet; primary sources.

I wouldn't be surprised if the average is way above the median.

If I wanted to create the most fair, most competitive, most fun poker game that rewarded skill and determined the best players, I would start out by making sure everyone had basic necessities such as food and shelter, because someone that has to worry about how to feed their kids for half the day won't have enough time to become a successful poker player. I would also give everyone access to healthcare and medicine, since of course getting sick for an extended period of time would put anyone at a competitive disadvantage.

In addition, I would make sure everyone gets poker books, HUDs, solvers, internet access, and a macbook pro. It's evident that I can't figure out who is the best if some people have massive technological advantages over others. I want the people with the greatest combination of talent and work ethic to rise to the top.

Then I would likely develop some sort of system where the biggest winners gave some of their profits back to the losers, to keep everyone happy and with enough of a bankroll to keep playing. This could come in the form of very high rakeback for the least successful players, direct dividends, or increased coaching and assistance.

I would probably take particular care to protect the legality of poker in every jurisdiction, and monitor the police to ensure that they're not preventing anyone from playing based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation. I would also be on the lookout for threats, harassment, and discrimination by poker dealers, bankers, and other players.

Finally after setting everything up, I would start the game and let the players play.

What I would NOT do is gather a person or a team, have them observe a poker game, and after every hand decide how well everyone played and distribute the pot accordingly. While this might seem logical and fair and produce superior results for a hand or two, it becomes obvious that over any reasonable length of time the results of the poker game will be a better predictor of success than the opinions and biases of the judges, as well as being far less prone to corruption and with a strong, objective, meritocratic public image.

What I would also NOT do is guarantee everyone the same or nearly the same amount of chips after the game since in my opinion no one would want to play or study poker in that case.

It probably depends on what you mean by 1 outer. Every player in the NBA hit a one-outer genetically, but very few hit a one outer in the way you probably mean.

I tried reading this book and couldn't make it past maybe 20 pages. Can you explain the point of it in case I try again?

Depends on what you define as way above the median.

I estimate at minimum ~1/3 of Amazon employees are directly employed in fulfillment centers (they have approximately 100 fulfillment centers) and those jobs pay an average of 15 bucks an hour.

The Seattle metro, where the vast majority of the highly compensated positions are, employees ~45000 people. And that includes fulfillment and distribution in the area. So what percentage of the 45k are the high paid engineers, managers, etc.? Idk but there just can't be that many relative to a workforce of 566k people.

Granted a meteoric stock rise has created some ludicrous comp for the professional class in Seattle due to RSU's, but I doubt the company wide average comp is within 10% of microbet's lower bound.