There’s a difference between admiring Amazon’s success and attributing that success to Bezos. Amazon’s success from that elephant in the room that you pretty quickly glossed over, the employees. Did Bezos come up with AWS? No. Do you think he directly contributed to its success? No. But who takes credit and profits from that? Bezos and the board. This is what people mean when they say there’s no such thing as a “deserving billionaire”. The only reason Bezos is a billionaire is because he owns the company. His actual labor contributions definitely haven’t been even close to being worth a billion, but because of the work of others he has a worth of a hundred billion. If you took the entire worth of Bezos and distributed it evenly between all Amazon employees then every employee of Amazon would be a millionaire. And there’s an entire board just profiting from the actual work people in Amazon are doing. But what do those workers get for that work? Having to piss in bottles to not lose their job.

You can admire Amazon for what it was able to achieve, but let’s not act like Bezos or the board are the reason Amazon is successful. Bezos and the board are the reason Amazon is so shitty and the company would be better off without them.