Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are the richest people in the world. Each are worth about a half a trillion dollars. Bezos is currently the third-wealthiest person in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.

Following Musk and Bezos, the next richest people in the world are paupers by comparison: as of December 2021: Bernard Arnault and family ($190 billion), Bill Gates ($136 billion), and Larry Ellison ($129 billion). At this level who’s first between Bezos and Musk probably only matters to the latter for bragging rights.

Supposedly at present Musk is number one.

Musk has become a manifestation of being a high IQ malevolent maniac. He’s currently facing labor struggles. Read: Elon Musk whines about ‘insane’ Swedish strikes against Tesla.

Bezos, who like Musk also owns a space company, Blue Origin, and a media outlet, The Washington Post, has made and continues to make most of his money through his ownership of e-commerce giant Amazon.

I know people who avoid Amazon like the plague and go to great effort to take their business elsewhere. Now it turns out that what they suspected we know know for a fact. Like Musk, Bezos is now facing labor troubles.

This is that the man I’d like to be able to admire has his hands decidely dirty when it comes to how his Amazon employees are treated (article).

Excerpt:

A first-of-its-kind international survey of Amazon workers released by UNI Global Union earlier this year found that the company’s intrusive productivity monitoring systems are harming many employees’ physical and mental health, compounding the stress caused by low pay and other mistreatment.

Another article:

Does Bezos really want his employees and others wearing buttons like the one shown in this Business Insider article.

I hope that Jeff Bezos does what is right not because of bottom line, but simply because it is the right thing to do. He might feel the sting of having his image tarnished by the bad publicity (see Google News search here). He should. He’s unlike Musk, a malignant narcissist, who relishes being cast as a villian.

Bezo could easily be a hero. He’d have to lose what is to us an imcomprehensible amount of money but to him this wouldn’t even come close to “demoting” him to being “only” the fourth richest person in the world.

I really don’t want to have to post this image as the lead illustration for a blog story:

Addendum (full disclosure):

I use Amazon a lot and doubt I will stop doing so. It is just too convenient. I also use X and by doing so enable Musk to add one more user the number he uses to tout his ads to potential advertisers. However, I’m sure like others who use it the way I do, I never even see ads there. Musk probably doesn’t let potential adviertiser know how many of us there are.

I just passed 200 followers on X (I hit 201 this morning) so I post links to these blogs there. I also use it to post occassional messages which I hope will be read by “name” media figures. So far four or five of them have seen these messages and reponded with a “like” reply. One of them, a well-known columnist on a popular liberal website knows me well enough to repond to every message that I send their way.

Jeff Bezos has an X account. I posted a link to this blog to his account here.

Archive of blogs here.