Everyone hears the news (that Jeff Bezos added $35B to his net worth during a record recession) in a different way.
I think most people struggle to understand the scale
To me, the idea that he *earns* 2.2 million times as much as his employees seems to be the extremist position.

I always hear defenders of this inequality talk from a paradigm of "not everyone works as hard or as smart as others" and that's true.

But the burden of proof lies on them, defending that he works 2,240,000x harder and smarter than his employees...
Here's my suspicion:

People rabidly defending this extremist position (his value being that much greater than his workers) is habitual & comes from a refusal to contemplate the MASSIVE scale. They hear *big number* and shut off their brains, resorting to talking points without active consideration...

Every working hour of this year through June, some Amazon worker made $15 dollars. Every working hour of this year through June, Jeff Bezos made 33,600,000 dollars.

That's per hour.

So 1 hr as Bezos is worth more than 1K years under his employ? Is that not an extreme position?

"well maybe you should get a skill or start a business"
Massive start up costs?
65% failure rate in the first ten yrs?
Amazon was started after Jeff got multiple $50,000 loans from family members?
Amazon engaged in shady practices and got away with it all?

"work smarter not harder, grow yourself"
Ok let's give a conservative estimate, you start at $15 an hour and get a 25% raise EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
For TWENTY FIVE consecutive years.
Year 25 you are making $6.6 million a year! Good job! Bootstraps! Totally possible! Anyone can do it!

But wait, hopefully you haven't spent a single dime nickel or penny on rent, food, gas, utilities... Because your 25 year income is a total of $32,900,000

Which again, is less than what Jeff made, in ONE HOUR ($33,600,000) in 2020, during a historical recession.

I'm sure people will say "well he is delivering a service, he deserves it." Sure, he "built" a company and bought himself a $400,000,000 luxury boat, no probs, but "he earned $33M/hr" is dumb, he didn't provide us that service, his workers did. And the company itself engages in..

some super sketchy practices, like operating at a loss to force other companies to bleed dry so they can monopolize industries, so don't even bother saying "shop elsewhere" like I can just go to diapers dot com anymore... (look it up)

I'll end with this, *seconds*

A million seconds ago was mid August, COVID still going strong as schools are reopening

A billion seconds ago I wasn't born yet but my parents were thinking about it

A trillion seconds ago, there were neanderthals. no cave paintings, no pottery.

We're about to have the world's first trillionaire while these dumb af millionaires & millionaire-hopefuls keep telling me "there's no difference, million billion or trillion, just hard work, don't be jealous"

Full stop. You're an extremist.

And there's no way to defend it.