Amazon's Jeff Bezos - He's Worth a Lot of Zeros

 Returning from Lawrence this morning after getting my first COVID vaccination, I tuned in to Meghna Chakrabarti’s “On Point” program on NPR.  She was discussing Pres. Biden’s pro-labor stance with her guests, Stephen Greenhouse (a reporter for the New York Times), and a labor leader from an Alabaman poultry factory.  Consider this claim, made by Greenhouse:  if Jeff Bezos gave every employee $60,000, he would still be making the same income that he was making pre-COVID.  Bezos’ business, Amazon, was one of the “winners” this past year, a year that saw tens of millions of Americans losing their jobs, and the majority of small business owners predicting - nearly a year after enforced closings - that they’ll never fully recover to pre-COVID levels.  But, get this - Bezos’ net worth at the end of 2020 stood at 184.3 billion dollars, putting him at the very peak of Forbes’ list of most wealthy.  Notwithstanding my tendency to get all topsy-turvy with big numbers, Bezos’ income and overall wealth doesn’t fail to impress.  Several hundreds of billions of dollars.  That’s a shit-ton lot of benjamins.  How many storage units would that fill?  How long would it take a person to count out those bills, even in the highest currency denomination of $100?  And how many times would that person  have to start over because he lost count in the middle?  (Did you know that we used to have bills of $500, $1,000, $5,000, and even $10,000 until discontinued in 1969?)

And get this, too - Bezos bought a $165 million house in Beverly Hills right before our country shut down and the economy hit the skids.  I did the math on that.  While the accepted wisdom on mortgages for the average person is that you should stay comfortably within 28% of your income, if Jeffrey chose to take out a mortgage, based on his 2020 income of $74 billion, the mortgage amount that he could be approved for by a regular loan institution would be $20,720,000,000, or - in simpler language - nearly $21 billion.  That’s just the mortgage; given the customary 20% down payment, Jeff could have written a check for a little over $5 billion and bought his dream home for $25,900,000,000, or - again in simpler language - nearly $26 billion.  By the time I’ve entered in all those zeros, my calculator - in order to fit the number on the screen - has reduced the font size so much, that I have to squint to see the answer.  The obvious questions then begin their assault.   Do houses exist at that price point?  Where would they be?  Isn’t that more than the cost of a small-to-mid size island?  What features would they boast?  How does Jeffrey fit that five billion number in that tiny space on his check? My powers of imagination fail me in this line of questioning.  So, while at first blush a $165 million house seems excessive - you’re getting much, much more house than you can ever need, that’s pocket change to Jeff Bezos.

 

The real issue, which deserves dedicated space on my blog, is the drive by Amazon’s operational staff in this country to unionize.  (One is much more apt to see unionized warehouses in Europe). Needless to say, the company is opposed; they see it as an obstacle that will, among other misleading claims, harm the “healthy” communication that exists between management and labor.  How this plays out for Amazon is of great interest to other commerce giants, like Walmart and Target, as well as established unions here in the U.S., but, like I said, the topic merits exclusive attention.  I’ll come back to it. . . unless something else intercepts my attention.