Obviously the above pie chart is a put-on. It is well-documented that working conditions for most employees of Amazon are abysmal, dehumanizing, bordering on abuse we normally associate with slavery.
Moreover, the median employee's salary under Jeff Bezos' imperial lordship is $28,446. No one working a regular job there has paid off their credit cards and is driving to work in a Mercedes.
Jeff Bezos is referred to as The Richest Man in the World and his personal fortune, while growing by $191,000 each minute, is currently estimated at $168 billion.
So "
$28,446 vs. $168,000,000,000? While I can acknowledge the simple math, I find the contrast of such numbers on a gut level difficult to grasp.
To get a handle on such inequality, let's try approaching it from different angles.
One way to put the disparity into perspective is to recognize it takes Bezos just under 9 seconds to earn what Amazon's median worker does in an entire year.
Another is to recognize that for a worker to go through Jeff Bezos' current personal fortune -- and of course, it continues mounting at accelerating levels as I write this -- at his/her current median annual income of $28,446 per year, WOULD TAKE 5,905,927 YEARS! That's close to 6 million years!
For Jeff Bezos himself to go through his current $168 billion, assuming his earnings stopped dead this very moment -- which as you and I know they won't -- SPENDING $1,000,000 A DAY, would take NEARLY 460 years. Yes, even spending $1 million a day, in the year 2475 he'd still have plenty of cash, tens of million of dollars mad money. We can feel confident that he wouldn't be foraging through the dumpster behind 7-11.
Now, further consider that while the $28,446 median salary is above the national poverty line for a single individual if that person is the sole breadwinner for a family of four, it is marginally above it, which is why many Amazon employees must rely on government assistance to keep from starving.
As well as calculation, I did some speculation -- a simple exercise in imagination.
Apparently Bezos' wealth generating machine is raking it in so fast, he's currently making $11.5 million per hour ... every hour ... 24 hours a day ... seven days a week. $11,500,000 per hour!
So here's what I was picturing in my mind's eye ...
If for 40 hours of the 168 hours in a week, Bezos were willing to scrape by on a mere $5,840,000 per hour, he could give every one of his 566,000 Amazon employees a $10 per hour raise. Of course, the remaining 128 hours in each week, Bezos could continue earning his normal $11.5 million per hour, not having to share any of it with the pathetic slobs who work for him.
Rhetorical question: Does Jeff Bezos have any concept of what that $10 per hour increase would mean to his employees?
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