I was curious, so I pulled some quick numbers about Jeff Bezos.
Bezos has what I think is the biggest yacht in the world. It cost $500 million, according to the NYT. I am not intimately familiar with yacht ownership, but from 20 seconds of Googling I found a rule of thumb saying the yearly costs can be expected to be about 10% of the purchase price.
Currently, Amazon has over 1.5 million employees. That means Bezos’ yacht money could have given every employee a bonus of about $333, and the maintenance cost could give everyone a permanent raise of about $33 per year.
It’s a drop in the bucket.
Of course there are other ways you could slice this. According to Amazon’s own PR piece from 2018, they had about 250K employees earning their minimum wage of $15/hour. That money would go a lot further if concentrated toward the lowest-earning employees.
I hate this bullshit logic of “But this one person’s salary would not give everyone else very much!” Bezos is not the only one that should be making less. All of the chief officers should make less. All of the regional presidents should be making less. That money would absolutely be more than simply a drop in the bucket. I do agree that it should be concentrated to the lowest paid workers.
I was curious, so I pulled some quick numbers about Jeff Bezos.
Bezos has what I think is the biggest yacht in the world. It cost $500 million, according to the NYT. I am not intimately familiar with yacht ownership, but from 20 seconds of Googling I found a rule of thumb saying the yearly costs can be expected to be about 10% of the purchase price.
Currently, Amazon has over 1.5 million employees. That means Bezos’ yacht money could have given every employee a bonus of about $333, and the maintenance cost could give everyone a permanent raise of about $33 per year.
It’s a drop in the bucket.
Of course there are other ways you could slice this. According to Amazon’s own PR piece from 2018, they had about 250K employees earning their minimum wage of $15/hour. That money would go a lot further if concentrated toward the lowest-earning employees.
That yacht isn’t the only unnecessary thing he owns and Amazon has plenty of other overpaid executives as well.
I hate this bullshit logic of “But this one person’s salary would not give everyone else very much!” Bezos is not the only one that should be making less. All of the chief officers should make less. All of the regional presidents should be making less. That money would absolutely be more than simply a drop in the bucket. I do agree that it should be concentrated to the lowest paid workers.