People have paid Beyonce > 125,000x the musician down the street. Why should tell people who want to pay her money that they're wrong and we should steal from Beyonce to give to a musician no one wants to pay? Are you saying millions of people are wrong to prefer her music over a musician? That you're smarter than all those people how they should spend their money?

Life is Pareto, theft amplifies pareto-ness (see Russian oligarchs during and after USSR)

No, this is a winner-takes-all situation. Basically, Bezos has convinced a bunch of VCs to make a pile of money so big, that they could be the winner in this market. Your Beyonce analogy makes little sense here.

What do VCs have to do with this? Amazon has been a public company for quite a while (since 1997, in fact).

Do you think Amazon "won" this market just by having more cash in the beginning?

I think his work with Amazon though has done well more than 400,000 times for society what the average person has done.

His work, personally? Not his executive team, not his engineers, not the warehouse workers making $15/hour, the work of Jeff Bezos and only Jeff Bezos?

if it was only Jeff Bezos he would be worth more than a Trillion.

Jeff started it, and did efficiently, so that he didn't had to sell out to too much VC. He manages one of the most efficient companies in the world. and plenty of employees have equity, I wish companies here did the same.

His work personally started everything else. Without him, there wouldn't be an Amazon, and none of those other jobs would exist, and trillions less value would exist in the world.

Though to be fair, a good counterargument to what I just said is that likely something else would've existed, so it's not true that trillions wouldn't exist, just the difference between Amazon and the next best thing. And there are still plenty of good reason to tax Jeff Bezos heavily enough to make sure there is less disparity, or organize society differently to not allow such a large difference in wealth. I mostly don't agree with those arguments, but obviously there are some good ones.

According to levels.fyi, an "Amazon Distinguished Engineer" (L10) is making $960,000/year. The GDP per capita in Central African Republic is $681/year. Should someone that is basically a typist, earn 10,000 as much as another human being?

Yes, if that person's work is 10,000 times more influential? Which it probably is?

Also “someone that is basically a typist“ is so... dismissive. If I were paid for my typing I’d be broke, my most productive days are often days I type the least. I am paid for my reasoning and deduction, not my ability to type.

You’re confusing the work for the medium.

Does Stephen King deserve more per word than a courtroom stenographer?

I completely agree with the point you are making but calling an Amazon L10 "basically a typist" weakens your argument and is absurdly dismissive.

> The GDP per capita in Central African Republic is $681/year.

No doubt you factored in that 40% of the CAR is under 14. (And fully 60% is under 25).

The denominator also counts. And that's ENTIRELY controlled by the good folk of the CAR.

Honest question: What has it done for society? If Amazon dies today, there is nothing I'd miss. Nothing that makes it irreplaceable.

What has he done that's good for society?

For example, He's built his business to be bigger while reducing the number of small businesses. Is that better for society? Why?

What is “normal”? Can you define normal?

Productivity in many fields certainly seems deeply exponential, so why shouldn’t compensation be?