I think that is shafting Bezos short. His company has built a vast logistics empire. Imagine maintaining millions of product categories, keeping their price up to date, sycing all of that through vendors, suppliers, and finally delivering it to the customer. Not to mention, this happens across multiple countries. That isn't a small feat.

I am not even touching on the foresight of AWS or his stewardship of the company in general. I think he deserves far more credit than you are giving him.

Its childish to compare rich and successful people like that. There had been and will be in future more rich and successful people measured by revenue, profit, employees, product reach etc.

This sort of comparison is a silly thing, a hero worship kind of behaviour un-characteristic of HN. However people still want something to compare. How about instead of just being capital etc add some other measures like business risk, turning around from absolute failure, fighting david and goliath in same industry, building something that was just given up by all etc . Again these measures are subjective and there could be somebody else who may like building a steady growth or being more charitable and equitable etc.

We like to see the world and measure it up in the way its important to us. When somebody says X is the greatest person, then realise that he is measuring with the qualities he finds important.

My gut instinct was to agree with you, but with consideration pbreit is correct in my opinion.

Musk is more innovative in areas that matter for meaningful human progress (SpaceX as opposed to Wal-Mart 2.0), but I believe as far as "business" is concerned Bezos is on top right now.

They have different priorities. Personally I'm a Musk fanboy.

Musk made money on Paypal before he started Tesla and SpaceX.

Bezos made money on Amazon before he started Blue Origin.

Plus Bezos doesn't have an obsessive internet cult worshipping him.

Bezos is a much more accomplished business man -

Tesla has ~3,000 employees

SpaceX has ~5,000

Solar City has ~13,000

PayPal has ~13,000

Total: 34,000 as they stand today which is a very generous measure since it's years after Musk left PayPal and he doesn't even work at Solar City afaik.

Amazon has ~222,000 employees, roughly 8x larger than all of those companies combined, not even counting Blue Origin, WaPo, or w/e else Bezos owns, and they did $107,000,000,000 revenue last year, slightly more than all of Musk's companies' combined value.

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...

Employee count should get some heavy value since the real benefit to society from most companies comes from payouts to the rest of the economy via payroll and stock.

Unless we're enabling larger ecosystems around what they've done that creates even more. So far I'm seeing very little in terms of ecosystem around Musk's companies. On the contrary, he seems more focussed on doing exactly the opposite (like Tesla's focus on going around local car dealers).

That's kind of a 0-sum outlook on the role of businesses in society (gather wealth to distribute to employees). Most of the businesses we're talking about are benefiting society not through job creation but through technology creation. Google is not important because they employ tens of thousands of engineers, they're important because Search benefits general knowledge and decision making of everyone with an internet connection. Likewise Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX are pushing humanity forward through invention.

Much technology creation results in a surrounding ecosystem.

Google search enables the people and ideas that are found on the other end of it. People pay for ads to help their businesses to be found which provides value for them and helps those other business to create jobs as well as profits to investors.

Amazon also enables the people selling good through it. AWS enables a lot of people via technology and resulted in an entire ecosystem around what it does.

Tesla is making electric cars, which is great. They're employing fewer people and doing very little in the way of surrounding ecosystem. The closest thing happening there is the Powerwall home batteries that create some opportunities for electricians. They did open up the specs for batteries though and that definitely could create some type of ecosystem, but that remains to be seen.

SpaceX won't be creating an ecosystem anytime soon. Maybe one day and it's certainly worthwhile R&D but the value to society is harder to find.

I'm sure it will happen eventually, but where things stand now Bezos stands as much more accomplished.

This is one of the things that Henry Ford got right. If nobody can afford to buy anything, you don't need any engineers.

Multiple mistakes in your comment:

It is not possible to be making things that nobody can afford to buy. This is because consuming or otherwise using something that already exists has no real cost. This is Say's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law ).

And Henry Ford paid his workers a high wage because he tried a low wage and had massive, business-crippling problems with employee turnover. Working on an assembly line is hell. One minute of analysis will show that it can never be more profitable to a company to sell product to its own paid workers than to just not make the product in the first place.

I note the following from the reference you provide:

Today, most mainstream economists reject Say's law.

...and it would be hard to accuse mainstream economists today of all being Keynesians.

edit: <i> to asterisk

Most of Amazon's employees are firmly in the race-to-the-bottom category, stock pickers barely making minimum wage on zero hours contracts. It's not something to be especially proud of

IDK, employee count seems like a red herring. To me it's much more impressive to do a lot with a small number of employees (like WhatsApp's 18M users/engineer [0]). Amazon incredibly impressive, I just mark the high employee count as a point against them rather than in their favor.

[0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...

There's some notes about how Whatsapp achieved that here [1], they attribute their capacity in part to Erlang's concurrency and in part to cloud hosting with SoftLayer. Amazon is the origin of SoftLayer's cloud services and single biggest reason one engineer can manage arbitrary numbers of servers/users:

    The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when 
    Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud. [2]

[1] http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_clo...

Except most of those are fulfillment center employees anyway. Plus they are working on the robots.

> PayPal has ~13,000

What do these people do? I mean, for the other companies you quoted, there are physical products to be designed, manufactured, mounted or moved, I get it. But Paypal?

Customer complaints don't just ignore themselves!

Most of those are employees of Integrity staffing, not Amazon. The company that makes Wal-mart look like the paragon of worker empowerment.

Yeah but he's not as cool as Elon Musk (AKA LITERALLY TONY STARK).

People want a Tesla. SpaceX (and I do like this) is really open compared to Jeff SECRECY! Bezos' Blue Origin.

Why? Buffet and not Bezos are both profit-turners. Musk is not. I like that he's going after the bigger and riskier things, but he's small-scale right now.

Who, then, would you say is in Mr. Musk's league?

Musk is in a league of his own. This is based on my own research and comparison. I believe I've watched every interview he's given, read his biography, read the in-depth profile on waitbutwhy.com, and followed his companies fairly closely. I've done the same with Bezos, since the day Amazon went public. While I highly respect Bezos, I believe if you did the same, you would come to the same conclusion.

I guess we just have a fundamental disagreement over the definition of the term "league".

No one is in the same league as HNs God King Musk.

Jeff is only worth about 50 billion dollars (only what, 4x Musk?). Plus his rocket company is only landing suborbital flights. What scrub.

Care to elaborate on your opinion?