alt Hacker News> That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.
That's not Bezos' doing alone, that's Bezos plus over a million workers that did that. If Bezos never existed in history, someone else would have filled in that market. We need to stop this myth that a few men alone create all this value and that without them we'd still be dragging plows through the mud for our farms.
This is a two-edged discussion. On one extreme, there’s an interesting Marxist idea that value creation is largely the product of historical and social forces, not just individual effort. However, I don’t think it’s fair to single out AI, or any billionaire to fit that narrative while ignoring other factors, such as the idea that nations should not exist since they can be thought in the same terms.
On the other side, Jeff Bezos is clearly an outlier. Even if we agree that ecommerce would have existed without him, we don’t know whether someone else would have created the same scale of value.