The ideas rolled in, but the money came in faster. As Amazon’s stock price sailed ever higher, Bezos’ fortune eclipsed Gates’ — and then kept climbing.
“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos told an interviewer in April.
In July, Bezos’ wealth surpassed $150 billion, a record; even if inflation is accounted for, he is almost certainly the wealthiest human in modern history. Only John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune once exceeded 2 percent of the total U.S. economy, might plausibly have been richer. (Bezos would need to double his wealth again to beat that standard.)
Most of Bezos’ wealth is tied up in Amazon’s stock, so he could well lose billions if Amazon flails. But if he does, there will probably be someone else just as megarich to take his place, because extreme concentrations of wealth are baked into the dynamics of the modern tech economy.
Tech-powered businesses are often driven by an economic concept known as network effects, in which the very popularity of a service sparks even greater popularity. Amazon, for instance, keeps attracting more third-party businesses to sell goods in its store — which in turn makes it a better store for customers, which attracts more suppliers, improving the customer experience, and so on in an endless virtuous cycle. Digital businesses are also characterized by tremendous economies of scale — Amazon can create a robotic assistant once and deploy it to everyone — that further entrench concentration.
“We have technology that has allowed us to create vastly more wealth for society,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. “But there’s no economic law that says that these benefits will be distributed evenly — and it’s worked out that some people have gotten most of the benefits and a lot of other people have been left behind.”
But economics isn’t destiny, he said.
“Technology has led to some of this concentration, but since it makes the pie bigger, you could make everyone better off simultaneously — you could make the poor better off and the rich better off — and whether we do that is a matter of policy,” he said.
As Annie Lowrey pointed out in The Atlantic last month, economic policy is currently tilted toward benefiting people like Bezos far more than the hundreds of thousands of people who work in his warehouses. Among other policies, Amazon has capitalized on a weakened union movement and a low minimum wage, which has allowed it to expand by hiring an army of workers for its warehouses.
Amazon said that on average, its full-time warehouse workers made $15 an hour, including wages and other compensation; the company also said it provided full benefits, including tuition for career skills, to those workers. A $15 wage is higher than at some other retailers, but it is lower than estimates for what a family in the United States needs to meet its basic needs, known as a living wage.
“They’re not providing the sort of high-wage, middle-class jobs to a broad swath of individuals that we used to associate with corporate success,” Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, said of Amazon and other high-flying tech firms. “What we’re seeing is not the sharing of the productivity benefits that we used to see in the past. And that may be even more galling than the concentration of wealth.”
How could Bezos address these issues through philanthropy?
Giridharadas suggested several liberal economic policy ideas, among them efforts to strengthen unions, equalize how we pay for education, increase minimum-wage laws and push for a more progressive tax system. Both Gates and Warren Buffett — the second- and third-wealthiest people in the world — have said they should pay higher taxes.
Those ideas strike me as unlikely; Bezos is a far-thinking innovator, but he has expressed little interest in near-term political questions.
On the other hand, Bezos’ most attractive quality, as a businessman, is his capacity for patience and surprise.
“This is guy who was willing to buck what everyone else thought for so long,” Giridharadas said. “If he brings that same irreverence to the question of how to give, he has the potential to interrogate himself about why it is that we need so many billionaires to save us in the first place — and what we could do to build a society that would not require Jeff Bezos to help us so muc