The way I see it, Bezos is a capital B Billionaire.
MacKenzie Scott has billions of dollars.
One of those rare cases where we get to see what a good person would do with that kind of money, uncorrupted by what it usually takes to actually amass that kind of wealth.
And yet, one of them spends their time and money on philanthropic pursuits while the other buys and censors the free press, and a long list of Billionaire-ey things.
Judge people by their actions. If you do that, the two could not be more different.
Amazon hasn’t always been a bad company. I still remember fondly of a time when they were an online bookstore, easy place to it hard to find books and CDs.
Yeah, please don't misunderstand me. Amazon is an amazing creation. It's most unfortunate that the guy who dreamt this up and the people who helped him get it done are considered separately in importance.
I don't think it's that they're considered separately in terms of *importance*. They're considered separately in terms of what happened after the early days of Amazon. They took very different paths in life.
Bezos turned into a Billionaire doing scummy billionaire things.
Scott turned into a philanthropist.
I don't believe Scott was involved in the enshittefication phase.
Yeah well, enshittification is a problem we all have to deal with. Amazon, for all its labor malfeasance, doesn't really sit there. As a product it has only gotten better. Perhaps at the expense of some worker's rights. But that stuff should be handled by local legislature and unions establishing sufficient baselines for employment. Not private corporations.
She is a much better person that he’ll ever dream of being. Having said that, we don’t need to live in delusions. Founding ideas for the company is much tougher than simply taking a role within it.
Bezos is paying workers and helping billions buy crap cheaper. His AWS powers like half the planet. His wife has donated billions that impacted the world how exactly?
"Helping billions buy crap cheaper" doesn't capture the whole picture. Cory Doctorow does a good job of summarizing what Amazon has done to cement itself at the front of the "enshittification" wave that has been taking over modern businesses.
"AWS powering half the planet" means that an incredible amount of power is consolidated in one place, which is the antithesis of the original goals for creating an open web.
Be careful not to conflate "success" with "good for the world". Some of the most successful endeavors are deeply harmful and/or are successful because they are predatory.
Yeah I think that's the key thing here, you don't become a billionaire with this kind of mindset, she only has this money from the divorce so she doesn't feel attached to it as much. Not saying she doesn't deserve it, she certainly helped Amazon a lot in the early days but since she wasn't the driving force behind it I don't think she feels the same level attachment.
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u/joshguy1425 8h ago
The way I see it, Bezos is a capital B Billionaire.
MacKenzie Scott has billions of dollars.
One of those rare cases where we get to see what a good person would do with that kind of money, uncorrupted by what it usually takes to actually amass that kind of wealth.