No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by busterarm on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:27PM (#19111526)

Jeff's parents supported him when he left his hedge fund job at D.E. Shaw. He was a quant and he had been there 4 years. He left his bonus on the table when he left but he was extremely well paid. He wasn't exactly hurting for cash.

It's already well established fact that Jeff's/Amazon's costs in the early days were paid for with his parents' life savings.

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Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by toomuchtodo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:30PM (#19111546)

You interpreted "support" differently than I:

"The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Brad Stone, the author of the 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. “They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”

"In a 2010 commencement speech he gave at Princeton, Jeff himself acknowledged the gamble his wife had taken. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,” he said. “MacKenzie … told me I should go for it.” (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)"

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Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by busterarm on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:39PM (#19111571)

And yet spousal support after a divorce isn't in the form of "yes, you should take the extremely risky move of living without my billions of dollars. I support your doing this."

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Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by toomuchtodo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:40PM (#19111578)

Such are the perils of a billionaire's marriage dissolving in a community property state. Marriage and living in Washington state are voluntary actions. My argument was for more value of a partner's contributions to business success, regardless of statute.

EDIT: @busterarm: We're not going to agree on what defines "earned", good chat.

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Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by busterarm on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:42PM (#19111590)

Yes, but then regulatory hazard isn't the same thing as earning the money. It's just being entitled to it.

Edit: I'm pretty sure Amazon shareholders won't agree with you about the definition of "earned" either. It's not just cash at stake here, it's voting power. Is that spousal support worth 8.5% control of the company? Up from 0%.

I'm not saying she isn't entitled to it, just that there's a difference between value through entitlement and value through work.

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Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by rtx on Friday February 08, 2019 @01:00AM (#19111920)

It's not 8.5% from 0%. Its 8.5% from 16%.

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Re:No Thank You, Mr. Pecker by Rapzid on Friday February 08, 2019 @01:39AM (#19112051)

Says Stone.

Honestly, I find that this stuff is as romanticized as the Old South.

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