Shopkeeper to the world
He may not yet be richer than Croesus but a net worth of $150b is not to be sneezed at. The CEO and founder of Amazon, the world's most convenient store, is unimaginably wealthy and getting more so by the day. It's a popular past-time on the internet to try and attribute his success to one or more of his unusual practices (e.g., scheduling as few meetings as possible), and with good reason.
Bezos's salary was just over $80,000 in 2017, a symbolic figure that is significantly less than that of the average Amazon employee in Seattle. So where does the wealth come from? Amazon's stock has soared 57.7% since the start of the year and presently hovers above the $1,800 mark after another strong Amazon Prime sale day. For its CEO (with his 16% stake) that means a boon of $45b. Bezos's wealth - like that of his fellow billionaires - is a representative function of his company's share price rather than his wages. Fortunately for Bezos (and unfortunately for the tax man) the windfall is considered 'unrealised appreciation'; meaning that he does not (and with good enough tax lawyers, will not) have to pay an eye-watering income tax bill.
The money-printing factory
Amazon is set to overtake Apple as the most valuable corporation in the world. After that it's a small hop to becoming the world's first trillion-dollar business. The global demand for products in its marketplace is insatiable, but this hunger has also created problems throughout Amazon's world-leading distribution network. Aggressive contracts and poor working conditions have led workers in Spain, Poland and Germany to go on strike on its all-important 'Prime' day. Meanwhile the median Amazon wage in 2017 was just shy of $30,000, and there have been numerous reports over the years of the challenge of working within such a hard-charging culture.
Yet none of these issues - or even the technical glitches on the day - have had much impact on investors' appetite: AMZN was up a full percentage point on Tuesday alone. This is because retailers and consumers alike continue to pile into the marketplace at a staggering pace. As a result, Bezos is bearing down on two of the great American monopolists, Andrew Carnegie and J. D. Rockerfeller ($372b and $341b respectively, in today's terms).
So what should we expect of Bezos beyond the corporate sphere? A foundation like that of Bill & Melinda Gates? Anonymous philanthropy like Mark Cuban? The answer is: not much (as yet anyway). Unlike Buffett, Zuckerberg, and others, the world's richest person has not yet committed to giving a substantial portion of his wealth away. He did farm Twitter for suggestions (with all the chaos and self-interest that one might expect from such an approach) and landed on tackling 'transient homelessness' and supporting those without family networks.
Public profile
Speaking of Zuckerberg, if there were a definitive list of phrases that Facebook's board would not like associated with their CEO, 'holocaust denial' would be at the top. During an interview with Recode, Mark Zuckerberg leaned into this particularly difficult topic with a degree of aplomb that has since evaporated. Pressed on the circulation of distressing and abusive conspiracy theories (pertaining to the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre), Zuckerberg answered at length:
"I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened... I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think... It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent..."
What followed was a predictable chorus of criticism from the usual suspects: the Anti-Defamation League, the Wiesenthal Centre, et al.
Recent challenges facing the company have drawn little more than anodyne responses from its chief executive. But this time may be different: the assumptions underpinning Zuckerberg's statement touch on a firmly-held moral position that impacts all of us. The debate between hate-speech and free-speech is one that is moving from the courts (the jury continues to deliberate) to the Facebook timeline. At the centre of all of this is the word "intent". Zuckerberg's subsequent clarifications and equivocations have underscored the fact that he believes intent to be the primary value by which any action or belief should be judged. That sounds noble, but what of the true-believing Islamophobe? Or the self-aggrieved 'incel'? Or the self-assured defender of female genital mutilation? Regardless of your personal philosophy the real concern here is that one person's (somewhat arbitrary) views are now being used to adjudicate freedom of speech for more than 2 billion people.
Notice of intent
By tackling the moral quandary of intent Facebook is transforming itself from a gate-keeper of information (already struggling with a deluge of fake news, hate speech and propaganda) to an arbiter of truth, truthfulness and even righteousness. This should be deeply uncomfortable territory for any ethicist, let alone for technologists at Menlo Park who have little accountability to anyone beyond themselves.
At the end of the day Zuckerberg is only human, and despite his enviable success, his own moral beliefs are as fallible as the next person's. It's also doubly true that he'll be castigated for not talking to the media enough and then piled on when he does. This public profile is undeniably a burden for him (and, one can surmise, for a very well-paid team of public relations experts). Zuckerberg never set out to become one of the most powerful people in the world: but we are where we are. And if Spiderman has taught us anything, it is that 'with great power, comes great responsibility'. And that brings us to Elon Musk.
Murky Musk
While on the one hand Zuckerberg struggles with responsibilities he seems unable to avoid, on the other Elon Musk seeks out new and quite unnecessary controversies to become mired in - and all the while his own company Tesla is reported to be teetering on the edge of oblivion. In dollar terms Musk may not be in the same echelon as Bezos (his wealth is comparable to Trinidad and Tobago's annual GDP; that of Bezos equals Hungary's), but let it not be said that Musk was second to anyone in terms of ambition.
The rescue of the Wild Boars Thai soccer team from a flooded cave this week captured the world's attention and provided cause for celebration. But Musk couldn't help inserting himself into the middle of it, only to emerge with nothing but ridicule and ire. Musk decided to build a "mini-submarine" (unsolicited and unused) for getting the boys out. It garnered a fair bit of media attention until, pressed on the subject, one rescuer brusquely dismissed the idea as untenable. In response, Musk took to Twitter to call the rescuer (a British expatriate living in Thailand) a pedophile. Twice.
A hammering on social media (and presumably from the boards and investors in Tesla and SpaceX) eventually resulted in a public apology. But it was a powerful reminder that success breeds hubris. And that just because someone has been successful in business, it does not mean that they should expect (or be expected) to solve the world's problems.
The concentration of wealth and power in modern society seems set to continue ad infinitum. And as that happens, we will increasingly find the titans of business taking on (and being asked to take on) roles as the benefactors, arbiters, and saviours of the world. Given their limited experience, their aptitude, and sometimes even their appetite to do so, the results of such a shift are far from assured. Some, such as Bill Gates, will undeniably be as successful in this second career as in their first. Others will not.
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