You're right. Jeff Bezos could give >$100k to every Amazon employee and only be giving away the money he's gained during the pandemic[0]. How can he not allocate at least 100k for each employee and change a lot of lives? He could easily give everyone this and have zero impact on this life. What can he do with $200B that he could not do with $100B?

I could easily give away $10k to charity and save multiple lives[1] without impacting my quality of life, and given that you are on HN, you likely have $10k you could live without as well. We are literally choosing to have money in some retirement account over saving lives - why would you expect founders to give away money just to make rich tech workers more rich?

[0]: https://the.ink/p/billionaire-wealth-just-got-wealthier [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-...

You're unironically right and thank you for giving a powerful argument in favor of philanthropy using simple arithmetic.

There's a big difference between I will be just fine giving away $10K and I don't need the money. Any money that helps me retire early is money I'm not going to give away. With some exceptions of course. I might give money away to help a family member or friend. Above a certain amount of money I will be happy to give some money away. That's what most wealthy people do, including Besoz.

Amazon's tech employees are awarded shares. They are getting life changing money already. But it's not that relevant because here we're talking about a one time event that happened and the employees who were part of that success story should be compensated. It's the right thing to do.

The only argument you can make that I may partially agree with is that why giving the money to the employees. They can donate it for better causes than helping tech employees being more rich. I think in this particular case there's plenty of money to do both and the founders still be left with billions. Allocating $2B to the employees and the rest $10B to be split by the two founders and whatever donations they would like to make sounds like a win-win for everyone and a pretty rational thing to do. I'm not expecting them to give most of the money to the employees. Someone mentioned they have allocated $500M; that's really great but I still think it's too low given the amount of money. I think 10 - 15% is more reasonable.

The employees were fairly compensated. If the founders were going to randomly choose to share their windfall, why not with the customers? Just refund every dollar their customers paid over the past 12 months. Or, find all customers who have been continually active for 5+ years and refund all their fees. I mean, it's the customers who grew the company, who stayed loyal, they are the ones who chose MailChimp over a variety of alternatives, etc. Kind of weird that you think employees are somehow sacrosanct and should just get all this money.

sounds like they allocated 500 million between RSUs and cash bonuses, which is about 400k per employee.

RSUs are *never* distributed equally. That’s not their point because they are entirely separate from the purchase of the acquired companies equity.

The point of RSUs is to retain talent that is deemed critical to making the acquisition successful. Your VP of finance isn’t getting any RSUs. The acquiring company probably doesn’t need her, and she possesses no critical knowledge that any other senior financial person doesn’t also possess.

Individual developers often get higher RSUs than managers. Why? More experience with the code and domain knowledge, especially if the engineering manager wasn’t an IC who grew into the role.

That's great! I still think it's too low.