Fine, so what's stopping you from starting a business that does exactly the same thing Amazon does, except you make less money and you pay your employees more, and then you go ahead and poach Amazon's entire workforce? If that's actually possible, you should do that, because if you only end up half as rich as Jeff Bezos, you'll still be rich and all of your employees will be better off. What's stopping you?

I can see you are angry - this is not about me.

If Amazon had had a competitor back in the day that had done just that - everything Amazon did, only shared more, then probably we would all be buying from ... err ... Mississippi.com. But this competitor would have had to pull all the right moves - as well as sharing differently.

And one day, yes there will be some innovative new company that will do to Amazon what they have done to Walmart. And maybe that company will have a competitor that will be a co-op and maybe they will have the edge. It has worked ok in the UK for John Lewis. But the lesson from John Lewis is they have to be good at all the basic stuff - and only then do they get to pick staff based on the nicer governance / culture / slight pay gap.

Building a company is hard. Building something like Amazon is freakishly hard. Which is why this "treat employees well" is basically never left up to the market and just tacked on afterwards in regulations.

And finally - yeah would Bezos exactly be hurting if he was half as wealthy. Neither of us think so - which kind of is my point. If there was some (weird) regulation that meant no-one can become richer than 10 billion dollars, and would need to improve share grants when they go over, guess what, Bezos would still have started Amazon, still done it all, and still have a yacht and a second wife.

The phase space available to us is larger than we think.

> I can see you are angry

I'm not angry. I'm just making a point.

> Building a company is hard. Building something like Amazon is freakishly hard.

And that's the point.

> If there was some (weird) regulation that meant no-one can become richer than 10 billion dollars, and would need to improve share grants when they go over, guess what, Bezos would still have started Amazon, still done it all, and still have a yacht and a second wife.

I don't want to fixate on Bezos in particular, but there are probably a lot of founders who would be hesitant to start a company if, once that company became valuable enough, they would be forcibly divested from it by law and therefore be at risk of losing control. Even if you're a vision-focused founder who is intrinsically motivated by wanting the company you are founding to exist in the way that you want it to exist, with no regard to your own personal wealth, you're going to be hesitant with that sort of confiscatory regime. And that's setting aside the fact that building a large company is not only "freakishly hard" but also tremendously risky. If you have a wealth cap of 10 billion dollars thinking "10 billion dollars is enough motivation for anyone", sure, but there's a risk premium involved and the expected value is nowhere close to that number.

That's the easy part. Though I doubt investors will ever again allow 90s era Microsoft level of profit sharing

Amazon's secret sauce was cheap capital. Both tax holiday/avoidance and persuading Wall St to forego profits. A combo that's unlikely to be repeated any time soon.

There were hundreds of other e-commerce companies that were started around the same time, all of which had those exact same benefits. Most of them died in the dotcom crash.

Do you genuinely believe that dividing net wealth by total employees gives a meaningful figure?

If Amazon employed me tomorrow, would their revenue immediately and automatically increase by $100k?

That depends on what the figure is used for. That's almost like "do you really believe in statistics"

It is always useful for fish to ask what is water.

Otherwise people accept knee-jerk political phases like "free market" or "business friendly policies", without considering if it is optimal

There is a continuum of ways to arrange government, labour and private ownership. The particular point labelled "USA early 2000s" is not the only one.

That is what I genuinely believe - and I want to look around to see what the rest of the continuum looks like - the good and the bad parts