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Jeff Bezos Says He Liquidates a $1 Billion of Amazon Stock Every Year To Pay For His Rocket Company Blue Origin (businessinsider.com)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spends a tiny fraction of his net worth to fund Blue Origin, the aerospace company he started in 2000. From a report: For a man worth $127 billion, that tiny fraction amounts to $1 billion a year, which he gets by liquidating Amazon stock, Bezos said at an Axel Springer awards event in Berlin, Germany, hosted by Business Insider's US editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell. "The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel," he said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. "Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune." Bezos said he planned to continue funding the company through that annual tradition long into the future. Bezos famously has numerous projects. He runs Amazon, owns The Washington Post, and is working on turning a mansion in Washington, DC, into a single-family home, to name a few. None of these, he said, are as relevant or as worthy of his money as Blue Origin, which he called "the most important work I'm doing."
After the earnings beat announced after market close today, their stock should be flying high tomorrow.
If we really believe that as a society, then we should have stronger labor laws. Realistically, Amazon's workers would not be treated remotely as badly if they were allowed to form a union, for example. If you're against unions, we can talk about worker protection laws instead for things like requiring breaks and forbidding employers from penalizing employees from taking them.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't also shame employers for doing less than the socially acceptable minimum even if it's above the legal minimum. Otherwise how would such laws ever be proposed?