Bezos didn't take on $100 billion of risk from the start. He took on the risk of not having a job like any other startup founder. It just so happens that this risk created over $100 billion of value. If there were an artificial cap placed on wealth, Bezos would have extracted profits from Amazon earlier rather than reinvest money back into the company. Every other rich person would do the same, including his competitors and investors, so in the end, we'd all have less wealth.
This narrow argument depends on a total lack of opportunity cost and alternatives. The assumption is that it is somehow optimal for Bezos personally to extract maximal
personal wealth constructing a pseudo-monopoly before exiting. A secondary assumption is that Bezos personally is globally unique in his ability to do what he did.
Plenty of investors exit early, and the benefits accruing to a monopoly could theoretically just as easily be distributed to a collective as opposed to an individual, circumventing the billionaire issue.
It’s SV’s whole game to construct a NPV of a future monopoly, cash in, and move on, before the regulators come
in. This has nothing to do with wealth generation.
>The assumption is that it is somehow optimal for Bezos personally to extract maximal personal wealth constructing a pseudo-monopoly before exiting
I don't understand what you're saying. It's undeniable that Amazon revolutionized e-commerce and cloud computing. Otherwise nobody would be giving them money.
>the benefits accruing to a monopoly could theoretically just as easily be distributed to a collective as opposed to an individual, circumventing the billionaire issue
It does get distributed amongst a collective, and it's called equity. Theoretically, Amazon's first warehouse workers could have agreed to be paid in equity instead of cash, and then Bezos wouldn't have to take as much outside investment. If they had held on to this stock, they would easily be worth tens, if not hundreds of millions today. Obviously, this isn't practical in real life, so instead, this wealth got went to the investors that took on the risk.
