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.