You’re brought up to admire the top 1%. Those who make more money than you could ever even imagine. Do you ever wonder how they make their name though? How their first millions turned into their first billions? If your first thought was “hard work and determination,” you are wrong. The answer is actually an affluent upbringing and exploitation. 

Yes, there are exceptions. Bill Gates grew up in Seattle with an upper middle class family cheering on his work. However, when you look at the demographic of the world’s billionaires, it is monochrome. Out of the top 10 richest people in the world as of 2020, all 10 are white, and there is one woman. Four of them even hail from the same family, all being the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. The demographic of these people is not the issue though; they shouldn’t exist in the first place. Their demographic is only proof that no person can accumulate that much money based on their effort and charm. 

Billionaires earn their fortune either from taking the reins of their parents’ generational business, or exploiting workers at minimum wage, while they make more money in a minute, a literal minute, than their workers will see in a year. These statistics can be applied to a multitude of billionaires. I can’t say all because I don’t know all of the world’s billionaires. However, they are true when it comes to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon Incorporated. Also known as the fuel to Bernie Sander’s fire. I personally hate Jeff Bezos more than any other non-politician. I think that he is immoral and selfish and the literal embodiment of the disregard that rich people have for others. Let me explain more. 

Bezos began his story the same as virtually every other tech start up, he liked computers, went to school for a long time, quit his job, started a company, you know the story. What the motivational videos about Jeff Bezos don’t tell you, is that early on in his company his own parents invested roughly $250,000 in his start-up. That’s more than just believing in your kid; that’s a major leg up in the business world. 

     Now, if Jeff Bezos was born into his privilege and decided to use his wealth and advantages to benefit others, I would have written a different article. Bezos has notably been accused of unfit worker conditions and paying his employees a low salary. If you’re worth $181 billion and are grossing more than $321 million a day, your highest paid warehouse workers should make more than more than $32,000 a year. The CEO of the most prominent company of the 21st century has a moral responsibility to benefit their workers instead of amassing a gross amount of wealth over a pandemic has a moral obligation to treat workers with more than mediocre care. While it may be impossible to accurately imagine how much Jeff Bezos is worth, it is more than enough to majorly benefit his employees.  

That was Bezos before coronavirus. Since COVID-19 became relevant in late 2019, Bezos has inexplicably profited off of the tragedy, his net worth increasing $48 billion in three months. That’s a lot, and I understand how it is easy to misunderstand the value of it. To differentiate between a million and a billion, a simple way to remember is that 1 million seconds ago would be about 11.5 days ago. One billion seconds ago was 1987. One million seconds ago the NFL hadn’t started back again. 1 billion seconds ago, Uncrustables hadn’t been invented yet. To add to that, Bezos is expected to become the world’s first trillionaire by the end of the pandemic. Not only is this a gross example of profiting off of the death of thousands, but a trillion is… excessive. Even more so than a billion; 1 trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC.

Not only am I disgusted by Bezos’ amassed wealth, he didn’t even pay taxes on it for three years! Amazon did not pay income taxes from the years 2017-2019, and if you remember, Amazon was still popular at that time. If minimum wage workers need to pay taxes, it should go without saying that billionaires do too. Even when that “billionaire” is the President of the United States. 

In conclusion, I hate Jeff Bezos. 

If you want to check my facts

• https://www.forbes.com/stories/ten-richest-people-in-the-world-2020/
• https://marketrealist.com/p/how-much-does-jeff-bezos-make-a-second/#:~:text=The%20largest%20single%2Dday%20increase,%24150%2C463%20per%20second%20that%20day.
• https://www.biography.com/business-figure/jeff-bezos#:~:text=Born%20in%201964%20in%20New,electrical%20engineering%20at%20Princeton%20University.&text=Four%20years%20later%2C%20Bezos%20quit,the%20Internet’s%20biggest%20success%20stories.
• https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-parents-to-invest-in-amazon–turning-them-into.html#:~:text=Leadership-,Jeff%20Bezos%20got%20his%20parents%20to%20invest%20nearly%20%24250%2C000%20in,be%20worth%20%2430%20billion%20today&text=And%2C%20thanks%20to%20him%2C%20his,%24245%2C573%20in%20Amazon%20in%201995.
• https://www.vox.com/2018/8/30/17797786/amazon-warehouse-conditions-bernie-sanders
• https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/#64bf1c5b1b23
• https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Amazon.com/salaries
• https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-net-worth-increases-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-7
• https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-the-first-time-since-2016.html