What's the argument here. Salary is a salary precisely because of this reason. You get a small something, or you in a non salary scenario get either zero or something way bigger than a salary.

The deal is: you either get a salary or you carry a risk.

The problem: there is no risk.

Even if you go completely bankrupt, you still can get a simple job like everybody else.

The only way this would be fair if the risk was losing $171.6B in case of failure.

This "they took a risk!" stuff is just success worship crap grilled into people in our culture to justify someone amassing more wealth than most of us can even mentally comprehend.

Bezos came from a privileged background. What was the big risk involved that makes his current level of success so sacrosanct? It's not like he'd be thrown in jail (or worse) if the company had failed. He would have moved on and started a different company or gotten another 6+ figure job.

They received a salary in compensation. I salary they chose to accept. Bezos took all the risk. If Amazon failed he would have failed while employees would have gotten a salary. Risk taking is rewarded.

I'm pretty sure that if Amazon had failed at any point, all of its employees would have been out of a job (and not just the engineers, also the thousands of minimum wage employees), and it's not like Bezos would personally be billions in dollars in debt to the investors of the company -- companies don't work like this, at least in the US. What was exactly the risk taken here by himself, personally?

Amazon was founded in 1994, more than 25 years ago. You are talking about Amazon in 2020. There were many points throughout those 26 years were it could have gone down. The risk he took was building the company from zero, hiring people and paying them a salary. Amazon now employs over 800000 people. If you think that has no merit and Bezos took no risk, then you really don't understand how things work.

They were compensated for their labor. That’s how employment works.

In an ideal world, it would be.

He doesn’t seem to like unions, which in principle would ensure his big powerful corporation was being fair to the labour force.

You said "people not owning what they create" as though it was an unthinkable option. It's literally what most people do for a living, you said it yourself. What makes Bezos special? Why does he deserve to own ALL the creation of all of these people? I guess it can't be because he came up with the idea of Amazon, right? It is usually pointed out in SV that "ideas are worthless" after all

So why wasn't Mr Bezos merely compensated for his labor?

Maybe those people need a union to increase their bargaining power to obtain a greater share of the means of production!