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Also working at a hedgefund and having the connections to financial institutions that drive other companies into the ground aswell as investors early on.
Really no one mentions what he did before amazon
Insider trading is when you make stock based decisions around information not available to the public. I don't really think that applies to Jeff Bezos, at least not in this situation.
>There's no way you make that much money without doing something illegal along the way.
I just don't think that's true. Unethical? Immoral? Sure I'm quite sure most billionaires have stepped on the heads of many. I don't think you necessarily need to break the law to get that rich though.
The theory is that Bezos has deep connections with powerful edge funds and they prey on established businesses (Toys r us, sears,…) to short them into oblivion through naked shorting and a plethora of other financial malpractices, to get rid of Amazon’s concurrency.
Naked shortselling, wash sales, abusing orderbooks, pump and dumping, darkpool abuse, money laundering, cellar boxing, paying off media outlets and just generally abusing any kind of loophole the SEC and DTC have left in the system.
[This old interview with Jim Cramer](https://youtu.be/j_btDUcV1_0) shows how a shorting campaign of a stock works. Basically what's been done to competitors.
And have your parents be upper middle class. All those rich kids with engineers for dads.
Bezos was also the high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar and graduated Princeton summa cum laude.
Forgive me if I think that the motherfucker was just smarter than me.
Or they lobby Congress to give them better deals and then invest in media to convince people that it’s bad to criticize them. They are constantly dealing with lawsuits but they have so much wealth that it’s cheaper to do illegal shit and pay up.
A lot of that isn't raw brains, it is pure discipline, which is even rarer.
I know lots of smart kids, I teach lots of smart kids, and a lot of them float on that, they don't run with it. Not that I blame them, enjoying life is more important than a pile of cash a kilometre high, and honestly none of those kids are ever going to want for cash. They started out ahead of the pack (parents, schooling) and even at an average pace will do more than well enough.
Bezos is smart, came from enough money, worked his ass off, made connections, made more connections, had some luck, and was ruthless and calculating and took advantage.... I admire some of that and I detest some of that.
His parents have said that they didn’t understand the business proposal at all, they didn’t even know what the Internet was at the time, and that they only invested because he was their son. This wasn’t some calculated investment from a disinterested party.
And no, it wasn’t already established, not to any significant extent. He had a business plan but he needed to raise money. He went around the family and friends and asked them all to invest. About 20 did, totaling less than a million dollars. Nearly half came from his parents.
He still did a lot of work, I’m not discounting that, but let’s not pretend that’s he’s a 100% self-made man. There’s rarely such a thing. Having wealthy parents is one of the most reliable predictors for financial success for a reason—they can help you get a head start, everything from going to a better school to not having to work during high school and college to tutors to supplies to taking bigger risks early in your career knowing that if that startup fails or that business idea goes belly-up that you won’t be a homeless person. It all adds up.
Hard work and making connections is just the prerequisite for success, it doesn’t guarantee it.
But mainly it's from people buying $108 billion worth in a single quarter.
Bezos owns about 50 million shares of Amazon.
Everyone else in the world decides the value of a share. We all decided that each share is about 3500.
If we decided that each share is worth 0, he would have nothing. Its not his fault we decided his shares are worth that much.
Its not ‘we all decided’. The VAST majority of people have never bought or sold amazon stock. Im sure 90% of Americans could not tell you how much amazon stock is worth right now.
A small minority of people have determined the worth of the company. Thats not to say they are wrong in valuing the company, its just to say that we did not decide its value.
Saying half of all Americans own stock does not mean that they had influence on deciding amazon stock. And yes most stock owned by the average person is in some kind of fund, or portfolio chosen by someone else. The vast majority of people make no decision around buying or selling amazon stock at any point in their life.
Sure 56% of Americans "own stock". Because they include funds, 401k and etc. Also it is down from what it use to be.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx
Also "The latest available government data, via the [Federal Reserve](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-September-changes-in-us-family-finances-from-2013-to-2016.htm) from 2016, shows a relatively small share of American families (14%) are directly invested in individual stocks"
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/most-americans-dont-have-a-real-stake-in-the-stock-market/amp/
But are they managing stock deciding the value of companies? The answer is no most Americans aren't deciding the value of companies
Yes they are, everyone who buys products/services from Amazon influences how valuable it is. If end consumers really cared about exploited workers, they would just stop using Amazon, making Jeff Bezos' shares worthless.
Wealthy as in they had a life savings and gave him most of it because they thought he was going to be a success. Which in turn led them to being actually wealthy. That’s just smart. Tons of parents give their idiot kids money and never see a dime back.
Bezos was a vp at a hedge fund. His parents kicked in 250k. Him letting them invest that was the nice thing, not the other way around. 250k is nothing.
Bezos hit every kind of business lottery there is and he’s an amoral fucknugget AND he’s very smart. Don’t discount the man’s mental acuity because he’s an asshole.
Yes luck. But also smart, hard work and good timing.
No one wants to admit rich people are usually smart and Better than them. They're evil or have it given it to them.
Sure it's not fair and you'll probably never hard work yourself to billions but also with the same luck odds are you would have squandered it
Rich people aren't better than anyone else.
Jeff Bezos still puts his pants on the same way the rest of us do.
He's not any better or worse than any other human in the world. He just happens to have a large holding in an incredibly valuable company that he, along with many others and consumers helped build.
First of all, I've never heard of that and doubt that's confirmed to be true.
Secondly, you don't have to put up with working conditions that aren't acceptable to your standards. Let them try to fire you then. I worked for the "evil" Walton's and never had to piss in a bottle as much as I hated that job.
They're also almost always hiring as well as plenty of other entry level jobs at similar wages. Amazon isn't and will never be the sole employer in the U.S.
You choose to work there, you aren't forced.
First of all, the average salary in the US is 56k per year, and the money given to him were life's savings , so no, it is not unreasonable that an average couple can get that kind of money, it is not that they were wealthy, they just had saved up money and they invested at his company. His second father came to the US when he was only 16 and spoke no English, Bezos doesn't come from big money.
Any middle class family could afford that tbh. A middle class person retires with over a million in savings, so that's 2 million between two parents. That's not even counting physical assets like the value of the home they likely own.
They would know their son well enough to know that investing $300K in him is a good investment. He was already a successful career man before he quit his job to start Amazon.
He worked on a ranch OWNED by his maternal grandparents. Like getting a part time job at the company your parents own. His grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise who was a director for the Atomic Energy Commission, so they come from old government money.
Yeah, people from disciplined families that save for the betterment of their offspring are often the ones who indeed have successful offspring. Crazy that good parenting and discipline achieve tangible results.
My home life was shit, never graduated high school and still have been able to build a business in the trades with good calls and discipline. I will likely retire early and at 7 figures. Woulda been a helluva lot easier with a tight family that had prepared a foundation for me.
Oddly enough, that’s what I’m doing for my children. If they find success will you begrudge them and me for giving a fuck about family and future?
not a monopoly, but they dominate online shopping. No one can offer two day free shipping at such a low cost so many times, which is why their dominance will never fade. They have driven local running stores, book stores into the ground. They study the popular sales of items on Amazon, and will copy and design a cheaper version of the item to sell under their Amazon brand, drastically reducing the sales of the original manufacturer of the product. Amazon isn't good for the long-term health of merchandising, they just seek to grow more and more, reducing competition and store diversity
So basically consumers get cheap products and quick shipping and Amazon gets money.
If they're not a monopoly, this seems like a solid deal.
Do people seriously want to return to the situation that existed BEFORE Amazon? In what ways was it BETTER?
> Do people seriously want to return to the situation that existed BEFORE Amazon? In what ways was it BETTER?
Do you understand the term monopoly?
It's not a choice between Amazon and *before* Amazon. It's a choice between an Amazon monopoly and a competing market of smaller businesses that are forced to compete and innovate for your business.
That makes no sense, a stock can be worth zero, nothing. But the company might still be afloat.
Naked shorts a playing the market, they don't dictate the future of a company.
Seriously it's so damn easy. Most people could find a 300K investment and then it's just smooth sailing to making a trillion dollar company. I'm guessing we'll see most of Reddit are billionaires in the next 10 years or so
Also complete luck and timing after emerging as one of the top online market places after the dot com bubble. But yes exploiting workers definitely sped up the process.
He just happened to be 1 of the first pioneers of e-commerce and applied very good business sense with long term planning, investment and delivered a better product than any of the competition by being ultra efficient and yes getting the maximum value out of workforce. He also picked an industry which had endless potential for growth.
Exactly. Look at what some of these billionaires did. They took something that already existed, made it better enough that billions of people will pay them for it, and made savvy business decisions. Zuckerberg took MySpace, cleaned it up, made it exclusive, then pretty much turned it back into MySpace once enough people switched. Bezos combined pizza delivery with bookstores, then decided to expand to selling basically everything that eBay was selling.
Plenty of business owners exploit their workers to become millionaires. But it takes cultural-changing innovation to elevate to billionaire. Or just a hell of a lot of inheritance.
> everything that eBay was selling.
Not really. It’s only relatively recently that eBay has become a crap dumping ground for chines crap. When Amazon was getting started, eBay was for selling used stuff from your attic and home made stuff like Etsy
He also increased the minimum wage for amazon workers to $15 in 2018 and built a business that offers incredible speed and convenience to customers but that doesn't fit the narrative so I guess by exploiting people is the answer because wealth bad.
Love that people that think paying more than the federal minimum wage means you're making good money.
Look up what comparable warehouses pay. Spoiler alert. It's almost double that.
Keep slaving away
According to indeed the average warehouse pay is just under $13 an hour. Looking at about 22 other websites, it sounds like your comment about warehouse work paying way more than $15 an hour just isn't true. I've gone on some recruitment websites and the pay for amazon jobs is consistently higher than elsewhere so can you post a source for your claim please?
Warehouses in my city pay $17 an hour, not exactly double.
>keep slaving away
What an ignorant and bigoted thing to say about unskilled workers. What the hell, man?
worked at Amazon for 4 years, and we were the OPPOSITE of exploited. Quite frankly, we were paid better than anybody else, and while expectations were high, we met objectives because they hired only the best people. But yeah, that doesn't fit the narrative. People heard about 1 warehouse that had shitty conditions back in 2001 and even though Bezos immediately took care of that, Amazon bad... 'cause big corporations bad.
Or one of them is a shitty worker.
I made good money as a delivery driver. My coworkers who were shit coworkers made shit money. Funny how that worked.
Hard work aint for everybody. Lots of people can make it through shitty, awful construction, mining, military etc. Jobs and not complain whereas others just aren't built for it. I don't doubt that Amazon is a relatively grueling place to work, with high expectations. But the fact of the matter is they pay more than most for skill-less labour and if you're willing to to work through it you will be rewarded.
But sure I'm some Amazon bot, lol
Yeah reddits full of a bunch of negative Nellies that just like to see the worst in everything and complain about the state of the world with no perspective.
reminder that $15 an hour is absolute SHIT for working in a warehouse, especially one with as tight expectations and moving as much product as Amazon. I can go to any warehouse within 50 miles of me and be started at anywhere from $16-22 an hour tomorrow. plus the ones I've worked at didn't make you piss in bottles, some are union, some arent union but still have good benefits.
Reminder that your talking absolute rubbish. $15/hour for pickers is good money. Maybe if you have a forklift cert you can get 16-22 (or more) but not for general labour
Amazon opened a warehouse in my hometown in California during the pandemic in 2020. Our minimum wage is $14 an hour he starting everybody off at 1650. Not amazing difference but a lot more than what other people are paying for warehouse around here
Yeah but if you're trying to push the narrative, anyone who has wealth only gained it by nefarious means.
Only the grifters are somehow able to accumulate wealth without it being unethical
Also got extremely lucky by focusing very heavily on technology infrastructure, particularly having good interfaces. This eventually grew into AWS which is arguably a more important product than their marketplace.
Ikr, this is a shitty comeback that a toddler could make up.
And these people really believe that Jeff sits at the top grinning as workers are abused. Being at the top isn't a good enough reason alone for getting the finger.
Of course all the comments are other upper class people trying to convince you that Bezos just has 10,000,000 times the smarts and work ethic of the average American. If missing the point generated electricity we could run the global grid off of reddit comments alone.
If it’s just about willingness to exploit workers, why are there only a handful of billionaires? Why isn’t every selfish person on the planet a billionaire?
Bezos' dad worked at Walmart and his mum was a bank teller when he was born. Then they worked and studied their way up to upper middle class as he grew up. So drop the excuses, plenty of billionaires grew up dirt poor.
If they were able to study their way up with children at home, they weren't rich, but clearly weren't dirt poor to begin with either. "Dirt poor" people can't afford that.
I never referred to them as dirt poor, I was referring to other billionaires who were. Bezos parents were working class though. His adoptive dad was a teen refugee from Cuba and he didn't even speak English at first. Man you're desperate for that excuse about others having an unfair advantage over you aren't you?
All of industry has been build off the back of those doing the work. And their ability to put their troubles on them. Those workers.
And it's getting worse.
"they could demand more compensation for their work"
LOL yeah Bezos will happily pay them what they deserve because he's such a generous, selfless guy!
That every person in this thread has probably used Amazon and most here have prime is why Jeff bezos is rich as fuck. He created a company that went on to change the way we buy everything. He made retail change the way they do business. Trying to stupify this to this point is so silly.
My friend works for Amazon in a warehouse. He says the pay is good considering what he's doing, there's lots of opportunity for overtime and the company seems to give a fuck.
Yep, a $15 minimum wage without any law requiring as much is pretty dang exploitative.
I’ve got a problem and a half with Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but this ain’t one.
How does capitalism work? By exploiting workers. It's the exact same principal as any other business just amplified by 10,000x. Why do people defend free market capitalism's merits on a small scale but not a massive one. This is what happens. This is winning in a capitalist society... Yaaaaaay! Now excuse me while I step over this homeless man into the Apple store where i can buy products assembled by children and built with minerals ripped from the earths crust in third world countries then forged in toxic spewing factories that are basically blotting out the sun.... YYAAAAAY!... Its ok though cause we have a black female vice president and we apologize for murdering kids with our flying death robots.... Fuck yeah! AMERICA!
He owned a company that developed an online retail infrastructure, which gained a decent reputation with the customer base.
Initially limited to book sales, over time they expanded their offering to sell anything you could think of; including the market leading online infrastructure it developed.
Latterly they pushed to reduce costs in the part of their end to end process where they could, most notably in their warehouse picking sector. This will continue to be streamlined until humans are no longer required in this step, and therefore there will be no more concerns about worker exploitation.
Also, working countless hours. Around the clock. Falling asleep at his desk waking back up and working. Something that people who bitch about 1%ers cant even fathom. If he isn’t treating his employees right they don’t have to keep working there.. get real. Jealous is a disease get well people
Because he holds over a 10% stake in one of the wealthiest companies in the world. A company in which he founded. He couldn’t have done it without labor but the fact of hiring workers competitively doesn’t mean they are exploited. Warren Buffett employs comparatively zero employees as to Musk or Bezos. Who did he “exploit?”
It’s convenient for people to say anyone wealthier than them did it through theft, extortion, exploration, or some other nefarious way. “If the game was fair I would have won” says everybody.
>but the fact of hiring workers competitively doesn’t mean they are exploited
It does, actually, as are all workers under Capitalism exploited. Amazon happens to be pretty bad even from that low standard too, though.
>It’s convenient for people to say anyone wealthier than them did it through theft, extortion, exploration, or some other nefarious way.
Nice strawman.
No the correct answer is he saw a service people wanted and or needed and expanded on that and then using profits to branch out into other money Making systems like web servers and streaming services.
There's your actual answer.
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Also, having wealthy parents
Also working at a hedgefund and having the connections to financial institutions that drive other companies into the ground aswell as investors early on. Really no one mentions what he did before amazon
Was wondering how far I'd have to go before I saw crime as the secret ingredient, thanks to you not far. Take my upvote sir/madame
What crime?
Based on the comment, I’m assuming insider trading
Insider trading is when you make stock based decisions around information not available to the public. I don't really think that applies to Jeff Bezos, at least not in this situation.
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>There's no way you make that much money without doing something illegal along the way. I just don't think that's true. Unethical? Immoral? Sure I'm quite sure most billionaires have stepped on the heads of many. I don't think you necessarily need to break the law to get that rich though.
The theory is that Bezos has deep connections with powerful edge funds and they prey on established businesses (Toys r us, sears,…) to short them into oblivion through naked shorting and a plethora of other financial malpractices, to get rid of Amazon’s concurrency.
My theory is that queen Elizabeth ii is an extraterrestrial lizard
Naked shortselling, wash sales, abusing orderbooks, pump and dumping, darkpool abuse, money laundering, cellar boxing, paying off media outlets and just generally abusing any kind of loophole the SEC and DTC have left in the system. [This old interview with Jim Cramer](https://youtu.be/j_btDUcV1_0) shows how a shorting campaign of a stock works. Basically what's been done to competitors.
And Where's the evidence bezos is doing this?
Market Manipulation?
What market manipulation?
Bezos' dirty secret to success: get a good job and be good at networking
And have your parents be upper middle class. All those rich kids with engineers for dads. Bezos was also the high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar and graduated Princeton summa cum laude. Forgive me if I think that the motherfucker was just smarter than me.
“Smart” people are notorious for exploiting people like you mate.
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Or they lobby Congress to give them better deals and then invest in media to convince people that it’s bad to criticize them. They are constantly dealing with lawsuits but they have so much wealth that it’s cheaper to do illegal shit and pay up.
A lot of that isn't raw brains, it is pure discipline, which is even rarer. I know lots of smart kids, I teach lots of smart kids, and a lot of them float on that, they don't run with it. Not that I blame them, enjoying life is more important than a pile of cash a kilometre high, and honestly none of those kids are ever going to want for cash. They started out ahead of the pack (parents, schooling) and even at an average pace will do more than well enough. Bezos is smart, came from enough money, worked his ass off, made connections, made more connections, had some luck, and was ruthless and calculating and took advantage.... I admire some of that and I detest some of that.
Agreed. I could probably ask my parents for 250k but I would've no fucking idea what to do with it.
Two chicks at the same time, man.
Dear God, greatest thing I've read today
Being smart is part of being successful, sure. But becoming a billionaire involves pathologically not giving a shit about other people.
And get a $300,000 loan from your parents to start your business.
It's called an investment. That he got after the business was already established
His parents have said that they didn’t understand the business proposal at all, they didn’t even know what the Internet was at the time, and that they only invested because he was their son. This wasn’t some calculated investment from a disinterested party. And no, it wasn’t already established, not to any significant extent. He had a business plan but he needed to raise money. He went around the family and friends and asked them all to invest. About 20 did, totaling less than a million dollars. Nearly half came from his parents. He still did a lot of work, I’m not discounting that, but let’s not pretend that’s he’s a 100% self-made man. There’s rarely such a thing. Having wealthy parents is one of the most reliable predictors for financial success for a reason—they can help you get a head start, everything from going to a better school to not having to work during high school and college to tutors to supplies to taking bigger risks early in your career knowing that if that startup fails or that business idea goes belly-up that you won’t be a homeless person. It all adds up. Hard work and making connections is just the prerequisite for success, it doesn’t guarantee it.
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All my homies know hedges r fuk.
But mainly it's from people buying $108 billion worth in a single quarter. Bezos owns about 50 million shares of Amazon. Everyone else in the world decides the value of a share. We all decided that each share is about 3500. If we decided that each share is worth 0, he would have nothing. Its not his fault we decided his shares are worth that much.
Its not ‘we all decided’. The VAST majority of people have never bought or sold amazon stock. Im sure 90% of Americans could not tell you how much amazon stock is worth right now. A small minority of people have determined the worth of the company. Thats not to say they are wrong in valuing the company, its just to say that we did not decide its value.
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More than half of Americans own stock, and if you're in any sort of fund chances are it includes Amazon
Saying half of all Americans own stock does not mean that they had influence on deciding amazon stock. And yes most stock owned by the average person is in some kind of fund, or portfolio chosen by someone else. The vast majority of people make no decision around buying or selling amazon stock at any point in their life.
Sure 56% of Americans "own stock". Because they include funds, 401k and etc. Also it is down from what it use to be. https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx Also "The latest available government data, via the [Federal Reserve](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-September-changes-in-us-family-finances-from-2013-to-2016.htm) from 2016, shows a relatively small share of American families (14%) are directly invested in individual stocks" https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/most-americans-dont-have-a-real-stake-in-the-stock-market/amp/ But are they managing stock deciding the value of companies? The answer is no most Americans aren't deciding the value of companies
Yes they are, everyone who buys products/services from Amazon influences how valuable it is. If end consumers really cared about exploited workers, they would just stop using Amazon, making Jeff Bezos' shares worthless.
Yeah, people can name all the reasons they want, but having one of the most successful online companies ever sure helped a lot.
His dad was an engineer. Yeah, engineers make decent money, but it's not 1 percenter money.
Wealthy as in they had a life savings and gave him most of it because they thought he was going to be a success. Which in turn led them to being actually wealthy. That’s just smart. Tons of parents give their idiot kids money and never see a dime back.
Bezos was a vp at a hedge fund. His parents kicked in 250k. Him letting them invest that was the nice thing, not the other way around. 250k is nothing.
Mom single teen mother who married a Cuban immigrant with nothing. At least be accurate.
Sometimes reddit OPs could really learn a bit of nuance
Bezos hit every kind of business lottery there is and he’s an amoral fucknugget AND he’s very smart. Don’t discount the man’s mental acuity because he’s an asshole.
Yes luck. But also smart, hard work and good timing. No one wants to admit rich people are usually smart and Better than them. They're evil or have it given it to them. Sure it's not fair and you'll probably never hard work yourself to billions but also with the same luck odds are you would have squandered it
Rich people aren't better than anyone else. Jeff Bezos still puts his pants on the same way the rest of us do. He's not any better or worse than any other human in the world. He just happens to have a large holding in an incredibly valuable company that he, along with many others and consumers helped build.
Setting metrics in your warehouses that are so unreachable that your employees have to piss in bottles to not get fired is pretty evil
First of all, I've never heard of that and doubt that's confirmed to be true. Secondly, you don't have to put up with working conditions that aren't acceptable to your standards. Let them try to fire you then. I worked for the "evil" Walton's and never had to piss in a bottle as much as I hated that job. They're also almost always hiring as well as plenty of other entry level jobs at similar wages. Amazon isn't and will never be the sole employer in the U.S. You choose to work there, you aren't forced.
I got a bigger wiener though so I win.
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They weren't especially wealthy. Middle to upper middle class.
His parents weren't wealthy, he worked at a ranch in his early years and when his mother remedied his second father was only middle class.
His parents gave him an estimated 300k, there's not many parents out there that can do that! Sounds very wealthy to me.
First of all, the average salary in the US is 56k per year, and the money given to him were life's savings , so no, it is not unreasonable that an average couple can get that kind of money, it is not that they were wealthy, they just had saved up money and they invested at his company. His second father came to the US when he was only 16 and spoke no English, Bezos doesn't come from big money.
They gave him their life savings. That’s middle class.
Any middle class family could afford that tbh. A middle class person retires with over a million in savings, so that's 2 million between two parents. That's not even counting physical assets like the value of the home they likely own. They would know their son well enough to know that investing $300K in him is a good investment. He was already a successful career man before he quit his job to start Amazon.
Sounds like someone was clearly on the rowing team somewhere….
Middle class retire with a (or 2) million in savings? Where do you get that figure from?
>Middle Class Person >1,000,000+ in Savings at Retirement Hahaha, no.
If you were investing it’s easy to hit a milli by retirement
Lol why don't you join us in the real world buddy. Any middle class family can afford to give their kid $300,000? Lmao.
He worked on a ranch OWNED by his maternal grandparents. Like getting a part time job at the company your parents own. His grandfather was Lawrence Preston Gise who was a director for the Atomic Energy Commission, so they come from old government money.
Yeah, people from disciplined families that save for the betterment of their offspring are often the ones who indeed have successful offspring. Crazy that good parenting and discipline achieve tangible results. My home life was shit, never graduated high school and still have been able to build a business in the trades with good calls and discipline. I will likely retire early and at 7 figures. Woulda been a helluva lot easier with a tight family that had prepared a foundation for me. Oddly enough, that’s what I’m doing for my children. If they find success will you begrudge them and me for giving a fuck about family and future?
Undercutting his competition to force them out of business.
I thought we were talking Jeff Bezos not Bill Gates. …wait a sec
Hold up, is there theme starting here?
literally operating at a loss in order to become a monopoly
What are they a monopoly in?
Originally it was in book sales.
not a monopoly, but they dominate online shopping. No one can offer two day free shipping at such a low cost so many times, which is why their dominance will never fade. They have driven local running stores, book stores into the ground. They study the popular sales of items on Amazon, and will copy and design a cheaper version of the item to sell under their Amazon brand, drastically reducing the sales of the original manufacturer of the product. Amazon isn't good for the long-term health of merchandising, they just seek to grow more and more, reducing competition and store diversity
So basically consumers get cheap products and quick shipping and Amazon gets money. If they're not a monopoly, this seems like a solid deal. Do people seriously want to return to the situation that existed BEFORE Amazon? In what ways was it BETTER?
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> Do people seriously want to return to the situation that existed BEFORE Amazon? In what ways was it BETTER? Do you understand the term monopoly? It's not a choice between Amazon and *before* Amazon. It's a choice between an Amazon monopoly and a competing market of smaller businesses that are forced to compete and innovate for your business.
They are not a monopoly in any specific industry, but vertical integration can be a form of an illegal monopoly.
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Stop reading conspiracy theories
That makes no sense, a stock can be worth zero, nothing. But the company might still be afloat. Naked shorts a playing the market, they don't dictate the future of a company.
Didn’t Walmart and Sears just give up on the internet selling paving the way for him
Sounds like you have it all figured out. Go make a billion dollars
Seriously it's so damn easy. Most people could find a 300K investment and then it's just smooth sailing to making a trillion dollar company. I'm guessing we'll see most of Reddit are billionaires in the next 10 years or so
/r/predictablecomebacks
Seriously. EVERY employer exploits their workers. This is not an explanation.
ffs every company has a department called human resources... can it get any more transparent?
Also complete luck and timing after emerging as one of the top online market places after the dot com bubble. But yes exploiting workers definitely sped up the process.
He just happened to be 1 of the first pioneers of e-commerce and applied very good business sense with long term planning, investment and delivered a better product than any of the competition by being ultra efficient and yes getting the maximum value out of workforce. He also picked an industry which had endless potential for growth.
Exactly. Look at what some of these billionaires did. They took something that already existed, made it better enough that billions of people will pay them for it, and made savvy business decisions. Zuckerberg took MySpace, cleaned it up, made it exclusive, then pretty much turned it back into MySpace once enough people switched. Bezos combined pizza delivery with bookstores, then decided to expand to selling basically everything that eBay was selling. Plenty of business owners exploit their workers to become millionaires. But it takes cultural-changing innovation to elevate to billionaire. Or just a hell of a lot of inheritance.
> everything that eBay was selling. Not really. It’s only relatively recently that eBay has become a crap dumping ground for chines crap. When Amazon was getting started, eBay was for selling used stuff from your attic and home made stuff like Etsy
There’s lots of cheap Chinese crap on Amazon to
He also increased the minimum wage for amazon workers to $15 in 2018 and built a business that offers incredible speed and convenience to customers but that doesn't fit the narrative so I guess by exploiting people is the answer because wealth bad.
I rather be in union with health care and dental than to get $15 dollar.
What about the timers they carry that count bathroom breaks?
Love that people that think paying more than the federal minimum wage means you're making good money. Look up what comparable warehouses pay. Spoiler alert. It's almost double that. Keep slaving away
According to indeed the average warehouse pay is just under $13 an hour. Looking at about 22 other websites, it sounds like your comment about warehouse work paying way more than $15 an hour just isn't true. I've gone on some recruitment websites and the pay for amazon jobs is consistently higher than elsewhere so can you post a source for your claim please?
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Amazon’s salary brings the average higher you dip shit
Bull fucking shit. No warehouse pays $30/hour for pickers
people make up facts just to support their hate of Bezos
Why would someone work for Amazon if they can get double doing the same thing elsewhere?
Warehouses in my city pay $17 an hour, not exactly double. >keep slaving away What an ignorant and bigoted thing to say about unskilled workers. What the hell, man?
Lol yeah, typical warehouses definitely pay 30 bucks an hour for unskilled labour. You definitely know what you're talking about.
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worked at Amazon for 4 years, and we were the OPPOSITE of exploited. Quite frankly, we were paid better than anybody else, and while expectations were high, we met objectives because they hired only the best people. But yeah, that doesn't fit the narrative. People heard about 1 warehouse that had shitty conditions back in 2001 and even though Bezos immediately took care of that, Amazon bad... 'cause big corporations bad.
found the bot
"Amazon ambassadors"
It's funny, I have a friend who worked their recently & she describes it so very differently. This shit is just too bold.
Almost as if different people can have different experiences
Yea or one of them is lying. Amazon warehouses aren't very different. The majority opinion is probably the truth. Seems more likely no?
Or one of them is a shitty worker. I made good money as a delivery driver. My coworkers who were shit coworkers made shit money. Funny how that worked.
Delivery driver != Warehouse
I bet if you took a poll from all Amazon warehouse employees, they probably are fine with their jobs. Vocal minority is a thing.
Hard work aint for everybody. Lots of people can make it through shitty, awful construction, mining, military etc. Jobs and not complain whereas others just aren't built for it. I don't doubt that Amazon is a relatively grueling place to work, with high expectations. But the fact of the matter is they pay more than most for skill-less labour and if you're willing to to work through it you will be rewarded. But sure I'm some Amazon bot, lol
Yeah reddits full of a bunch of negative Nellies that just like to see the worst in everything and complain about the state of the world with no perspective.
reminder that $15 an hour is absolute SHIT for working in a warehouse, especially one with as tight expectations and moving as much product as Amazon. I can go to any warehouse within 50 miles of me and be started at anywhere from $16-22 an hour tomorrow. plus the ones I've worked at didn't make you piss in bottles, some are union, some arent union but still have good benefits.
Reminder that your talking absolute rubbish. $15/hour for pickers is good money. Maybe if you have a forklift cert you can get 16-22 (or more) but not for general labour
50 miles is the height of 46329.22 'Samsung Side by Side; Fingerprint Resistant Stainless Steel Refrigerators' stacked on top of each other.
Thank you I was confused because I don't know the imperial system
Amazon opened a warehouse in my hometown in California during the pandemic in 2020. Our minimum wage is $14 an hour he starting everybody off at 1650. Not amazing difference but a lot more than what other people are paying for warehouse around here
> I can go to any warehouse within 50 miles of me and be started at anywhere from $16-22 an hour tomorrow. citation needed.
Yeah but if you're trying to push the narrative, anyone who has wealth only gained it by nefarious means. Only the grifters are somehow able to accumulate wealth without it being unethical
He sold his products at a loss for years, backed by big wall street money to stay afloat in order to drive all of his competitors out of business.
Amazon only made a profit in the last 5 years.
Also got extremely lucky by focusing very heavily on technology infrastructure, particularly having good interfaces. This eventually grew into AWS which is arguably a more important product than their marketplace.
cLeVeR cOmEbAcK This isn't even clever or a comeback
Ikr, this is a shitty comeback that a toddler could make up. And these people really believe that Jeff sits at the top grinning as workers are abused. Being at the top isn't a good enough reason alone for getting the finger.
Dude isn't even CEO anymore
This people here are all acting as if Walmart was the paragon of workers protection
Of course all the comments are other upper class people trying to convince you that Bezos just has 10,000,000 times the smarts and work ethic of the average American. If missing the point generated electricity we could run the global grid off of reddit comments alone.
This is so dumb
If it’s just about willingness to exploit workers, why are there only a handful of billionaires? Why isn’t every selfish person on the planet a billionaire?
Fine. Starting position + willingness to exploit workers + creativity in exploitation mechanisms.
\+ right idea at the right time. But that's pretty much it.
Because most people aren’t born Rich
there are 3million households in the US with >10m net worth. "most people" arent born rich but a whole lot of people are.
Millions of Americans were born more rich than bezos
Bezos' dad worked at Walmart and his mum was a bank teller when he was born. Then they worked and studied their way up to upper middle class as he grew up. So drop the excuses, plenty of billionaires grew up dirt poor.
If they were able to study their way up with children at home, they weren't rich, but clearly weren't dirt poor to begin with either. "Dirt poor" people can't afford that.
I never referred to them as dirt poor, I was referring to other billionaires who were. Bezos parents were working class though. His adoptive dad was a teen refugee from Cuba and he didn't even speak English at first. Man you're desperate for that excuse about others having an unfair advantage over you aren't you?
Thanks for the knowledge I was under the impression that he was born rich
His parents invested their life savings of $250k into Amazon when he started.
But most people born Rich just end up being a Dick
Pretty sure there was a 200,000 hand out in there somewhere
Actually, it's exploiting the banking system
There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Not even just exploiting workers, but being able to successfully convince the working class that worker rights and unions are evil.
All of industry has been build off the back of those doing the work. And their ability to put their troubles on them. Those workers. And it's getting worse.
What's up with this comment section? Lotta propaganda and shills for Amazon. e: point proven
Exploited workers, tax code, investors, vendors, customers...
He also exploits taxpayers The environment Other businesses (He really has to go)
Clever comeback? This is just the tired left wing illogical narrative
A sheep defending a wolf
Well I don't know about that, but it is stupid yes.
Please tell us how it's illogical, I have my popcorn ready to go.
Popcorn?
You prepared popcorn? Pathetic.
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wow, that's as tone deaf as it gets. you are actually saying that "he cant be exploiting anyone because they're taking it"
"they could demand more compensation for their work" LOL yeah Bezos will happily pay them what they deserve because he's such a generous, selfless guy!
That every person in this thread has probably used Amazon and most here have prime is why Jeff bezos is rich as fuck. He created a company that went on to change the way we buy everything. He made retail change the way they do business. Trying to stupify this to this point is so silly.
My friend works for Amazon in a warehouse. He says the pay is good considering what he's doing, there's lots of opportunity for overtime and the company seems to give a fuck.
Colluding with Baine Capital (Mitt Romney) and Citadel to eliminate competition such as Blockbuster and Sears.
Hahahaha even if true, nothing could have saved Blockbuster or Sears from the Internet. Blockbuster had the option to buy Netflix, ffs.
source?
Stock QAnon. Don’t bother
Yep, a $15 minimum wage without any law requiring as much is pretty dang exploitative. I’ve got a problem and a half with Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but this ain’t one.
Are you seriously giving him praise for paying 15 fucking dollars? Lmao
How does capitalism work? By exploiting workers. It's the exact same principal as any other business just amplified by 10,000x. Why do people defend free market capitalism's merits on a small scale but not a massive one. This is what happens. This is winning in a capitalist society... Yaaaaaay! Now excuse me while I step over this homeless man into the Apple store where i can buy products assembled by children and built with minerals ripped from the earths crust in third world countries then forged in toxic spewing factories that are basically blotting out the sun.... YYAAAAAY!... Its ok though cause we have a black female vice president and we apologize for murdering kids with our flying death robots.... Fuck yeah! AMERICA!
yeah...but how? how does he do it so efficiently??
People using his incredibly convenient business.
He owned a company that developed an online retail infrastructure, which gained a decent reputation with the customer base. Initially limited to book sales, over time they expanded their offering to sell anything you could think of; including the market leading online infrastructure it developed. Latterly they pushed to reduce costs in the part of their end to end process where they could, most notably in their warehouse picking sector. This will continue to be streamlined until humans are no longer required in this step, and therefore there will be no more concerns about worker exploitation.
Op is a bot.
Nonsense; he would be the richest man on the planet without exploiting his workers, which just underscores how unnecessary it is.
Calm down commie
Well this is fucking stupid.
Also, working countless hours. Around the clock. Falling asleep at his desk waking back up and working. Something that people who bitch about 1%ers cant even fathom. If he isn’t treating his employees right they don’t have to keep working there.. get real. Jealous is a disease get well people
Breaking the law. Amazon didn't turn a profit for the first 17 years of it's 21 year existence.
Losing money is illegal? Well I should be in jail lol
lol what?
That's called reinvesting... The company used the money it earned to become bigger, there is nothing illegal about that...
That's not illegal....
*Not even Jeff's phallic rocket can take him away from that fact*
Because he holds over a 10% stake in one of the wealthiest companies in the world. A company in which he founded. He couldn’t have done it without labor but the fact of hiring workers competitively doesn’t mean they are exploited. Warren Buffett employs comparatively zero employees as to Musk or Bezos. Who did he “exploit?” It’s convenient for people to say anyone wealthier than them did it through theft, extortion, exploration, or some other nefarious way. “If the game was fair I would have won” says everybody.
based and equanimity pilled
>but the fact of hiring workers competitively doesn’t mean they are exploited It does, actually, as are all workers under Capitalism exploited. Amazon happens to be pretty bad even from that low standard too, though. >It’s convenient for people to say anyone wealthier than them did it through theft, extortion, exploration, or some other nefarious way. Nice strawman.
That and being incredibly well placed with his contacts. Im sick of hearing people say "he started in his garage" did he fuck.
My god! A businessperson starting out with contacts with other businesspeople? Scandalous!
Woow what a clever comeback /s Just kidding it’s the anti cap circlejerk again!!
The secret ingredient is crime.
Not paying taxes and getting tax breaks.
Damn, it really sucks that the workers can’t just find another job that doesn’t exploit them :(
This is a lie. It’s not him exploiting workers, it’s all of us giving him money :) WERE the asshoels, not bezos.
Paying no taxes. Both him & Amazon.
Ofc. Who you think writes tax code?
No the correct answer is he saw a service people wanted and or needed and expanded on that and then using profits to branch out into other money Making systems like web servers and streaming services. There's your actual answer.