Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the most successful entrepreneur of all time if you use the market value of his holdings as a benchmark. This emerges from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which documents the net assets of the 500 richest people on a daily basis, taking stock market developments into account. As of August 27, Bezos’ net worth had reached the barely comprehensible $ 200 billion.
The news has not left the public without a trace: A group of data freaks who call themselves Research Maniacs made the following simple calculation: If you save $ 100,000 a year, it takes two million years to reach the entrepreneur’s wealth. If you put back $ 10,000 every day instead, you only need 54,795 years to get there.
Left-wing politician Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Democratic President Bill Clinton, said wealth growth shows that capitalism is out of joint. He urged Bezos to do more for his workers. In the pandemic in particular, rich and poor would be in the same boat. Despite the enormous fortune, Bezos apparently does not see himself in a position to grant sick pay, complained Reich.
The first billionaire?
The news provoked protests in front of Bezos’ house in Washington’s upscale Kalorama district. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for example, live there and the Obamas. Bezos had a former textile museum converted into a huge house there for his private purposes. Work on the $ 40 million project was completed in late summer.
On Thursday demonstrators set up a guillotine in front of the apartment building. This is the instrument of execution that enjoyed some popularity during the French Revolution when members of the old elite were to be executed.
The puller of this action, which was supported by less than a hundred demonstrators, is Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who wants to denounce the poor social and health conditions in Amazon’s warehouses. According to a video of the protest distributed on social media, he called for a minimum wage of $ 30 an hour because Bezos earned $ 4,000 a second. According to his own statements, Smalls had been fired this year for publicly criticizing Amazon’s lack of measures against the risk of infection by Covid-19.
This was not the first time the guillotine had appeared in front of Bezos’ mansion. As early as the end of June, the same core of protesters carted the execution instrument into the noble district in order to symbolically castigate Bezos’ business policy. A guillotine found its way outside the White House later on Thursday. A Donald Trump rag doll was symbolically executed with her. However, it is not clear whether it was the same device.
The wonderful increase in wealth of Jeff Bezos is due to the great boom in Amazon shares. The price of the security climbed by 80 percent this year alone. It was thus one of the driving forces behind the development of the S&P index. Despite the recession and pandemic, this recently climbed to an all-time high. The newspaper “USA Today” quotes from a report by the market research company Comparisun. According to this, Bezos’ path to becoming the first billionaire in history is mapped out. The company predicts that Bezos will have reached trillionaire status in 2026. For the calculation, the market researchers simply extrapolated the average percentage growth rates of Bezos’ wealth over the past five years.
It can turn out quite differently, however: One of the few topics on which there is agreement in both major parties is the view that the Silicon Valley giants, including Amazon, have become too powerful. Smashing fantasies are circulating. On the other hand, the realization is maturing that without Amazon’s delivery service, the time of the prescribed curfews would have been even more gloomy.
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